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The trauma of systematic racism is killing Black women. A first step toward change... | {0: 'T. Morgan Dixon is the cofounder and CEO of GirlTrek, inspiring more than 100,000 neighborhood walkers.', 1: 'As COO of GirlTrek, Vanessa Garrison mobilizes African-American women and girls to reclaim their health and communities through walking.'} | TED2017 | Vanessa Garrison: I am Vanessa, daughter of Annette, daughter of Olympia, daughter of Melvina, daughter of Katie, born 1878, Parish County, Louisiana. T. Morgan Dixon: And my name is Morgan, daughter of Carol, daughter of Letha, daughter of Willie, daughter of Sarah, born 1849 in Bardstown, Kentucky. VG: And in the tradition of our families, the great oral tradition of almost every Black church we know honoring the culture from which we draw so much power, we're gonna start the way our mommas and grandmas would want us to start. TMD: In prayer. Let the words of my mouth, the meditation of our hearts, be acceptable in thy sight, oh Lord, my strength and my redeemer. VG: We call the names and rituals of our ancestors into this room today because from them we received a powerful blueprint for survival, strategies and tactics for healing carried across oceans by African women, passed down to generations of Black women in America who used those skills to navigate institutions of slavery and state-sponsored discrimination in order that we might stand on this stage. We walk in the footsteps of those women, our foremothers, legends like Ella Baker, Septima Clark, Fannie Lou Hamer, from whom we learned the power of organizing after she would had single-handedly registered 60,000 voters in Jim Crow Mississippi. TMD: 60,000 is a lot of people, so if you can imagine me and Vanessa inspiring 60,000 women to walk with us last year, we were fired up. But today, 100,000 Black women and girls stand on this stage with us. We are committed to healing ourselves, to lacing up our sneakers, to walking out of our front door every single day for total healing and transformation in our communities, because we understand that we are in the footsteps of a civil rights legacy like no other time before, and that we are facing a health crisis like never ever before. And so we've had a lot of moments, great moments, including the time we had on our pajamas, we were working on our computer and Michelle Obama emailed us and invited us to the White House, and we thought it was spam. But this moment here is an opportunity. It is an opportunity that we don't take for granted, and so we thought long and hard about how we would use it. Would we talk to the women we hope to inspire, a million in the next year, or would we talk to you? We decided to talk to you, and to talk to you about a question that we get all the time, so that the millions of women who hopefully will watch this will never have to answer it again. It is: Why are Black women dying faster and at higher rates than any other group of people in America from preventable, obesity-related diseases? The question hurts me. I'm shaking a little bit. It feels value-laden. It hurts my body because the weight represents so much. But we're going to talk about it and invite you into an inside conversation today because it is necessary, and because we need you. VG: Each night, before the first day of school, my grandmother would sit me next to the stove and with expert precision use a hot comb to press my hair. My grandmother was legendary, big, loud. She filled up a room with laughter and oftentimes curse words. She cooked a mean peach cobbler, had 11 children, a house full of grandchildren, and like every Black woman I know, like most all women I know, she had prioritized the care of others over caring for herself. We measured her strength by her capacity to endure pain and suffering. We celebrated her for it, and our choice would prove to be deadly. One night after pressing my hair before the first day of eighth grade, my grandmother went to bed and never woke up, dead at 66 years old from a heart attack. By the time I would graduate college, I would lose two more beloved family members to chronic disease: my aunt Diane, dead at 55, my aunt Tricia, dead at 63. After living with these losses, the hole that they left, I decided to calculate the life expectancy of the women in my family. Staring back at me, the number 65. I knew I could not sit by and watch another woman I loved die an early death. TMD: So we don't usually put our business in the streets. Let's just put that out there. But I have to tell you the statistics. Black women are dying at alarming rates, and I used to be a classroom teacher, and I was at South Atlanta High School, and I remember standing in front of my classroom, and I remember a statistic that half of Black girls will get diabetes unless diet and levels of activity change. Half of the girls in my classroom. So I couldn't teach anymore. So I started taking girls hiking, which is why we're called GirlTrek, but Vanessa was like, that is not going to move the dial on the health crisis; it's cute. She was like, it's a cute hiking club. So what we thought is if we could rally a million of their mothers ... 82 percent of Black women are over a healthy weight right now. 53 percent of us are obese. But the number that I cannot, that I cannot get out of my head is that every single day in America, 137 Black women die from a preventable disease, heart disease. That's every 11 minutes. 137 is more than gun violence, cigarette smoking and HIV combined, every day. It is roughly the amount of people that were on my plane from New Jersey to Vancouver. Can you imagine that? A plane filled with Black women crashing to the ground every day, and no one is talking about it. VG: So the question that you're all asking yourselves right now is why? Why are Black women dying? We asked ourselves that same question. Why is what's out there not working for them? Private weight loss companies, government interventions, public health campaigns. I'm going to tell you why: because they focus on weight loss or looking good in skinny jeans without acknowledging the trauma that Black women hold in our bellies and bones, that has been embedded in our very DNA. The best advice from hospitals and doctors, the best medications from pharmaceutical companies to treat the congestive heart failure of my grandmother didn't work because they didn't acknowledge the systemic racism that she had dealt with since birth. (Applause) A divestment in schools, discriminatory housing practices, predatory lending, a crack cocaine epidemic, mass incarceration putting more Black bodies behind bars than were owned at the height of slavery. But GirlTrek does. For Black women whose bodies are buckling under the weight of systems never designed to support them, GirlTrek is a lifeline. August 16, 2015, Danita Kimball, a member of GirlTrek in Detroit, received the news that too many Black mothers have received. Her son Norman, 23 years old, a father of two, was gunned down while on an afternoon drive. Imagine the grief that overcomes your body in that moment, the immobilizing fear. Now, know this, that just days after laying her son to rest, Danita Kimball posted online, "I don't know what to do or how to move forward, but my sisters keep telling me I need to walk, so I will." And then just days after that, "I got my steps in today for my baby Norm. It felt good to be out there, to walk." TMD: Walking through pain is what we have always done. My mom, she's in the middle right there, my mom desegregated her high school in 1955. Her mom walked down the steps of an abandoned school bus where she raised 11 kids as a sharecropper. And her mom stepped onto Indian territory fleeing the terrors of the Jim Crow South. And her mom walked her man to the door as he went off to fight in the Kentucky Colored Regiment, the Civil War. They were born slaves but they wouldn't die slaves. Change-making, it's in my blood. It's what I do, and this health crisis ain't nothing compared to the road we have traveled. (Applause) So it's like James Cleveland. I don't feel no ways tired, so we got to work. We started looking at models of change. We looked all over the world. We needed something not only that was a part of our cultural inheritance like walking, but something that was scalable, something that was high-impact, something that we could replicate across this country. So we studied models like Wangari Maathai, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for inspiring women to plant 50 million trees in Kenya. She brought Kenya back from the brink of environmental devastation. We studied these systems of change, and we looked at walking scientifically. And what we learned is that walking just 30 minutes a day can single-handedly decrease 50 percent of your risk of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, even Alzheimer's and dementia. We know that walking is the single most powerful thing that a woman can do for her health, so we knew we were on to something, because from Harriet Tubman to the women in Montgomery, when Black women walk, things change. (Applause) VG: So how did we take this simple idea of walking and start a revolution that would catch a fire in neighborhoods across America? We used the best practices of the Civil Rights Movement. We huddled up in church basements. We did grapevine information sharing through beauty salons. We empowered and trained mothers to stand on the front lines. We took our message directly to the streets, and women responded. Women like LaKeisha in Chattanooga, Chrysantha in Detroit, Onika in New Orleans, women with difficult names and difficult stories join GirlTrek every day and commit to walking as a practice of self-care. Once walking, those women get to organizing, first their families, then their communities, to walk and talk and solve problems together. They walk and notice the abandoned building. They walk and notice the lack of sidewalks, the lack of green space, and they say, "No more." Women like Susie Paige in Philadelphia, who after walking daily past an abandoned building in her neighborhood, decided, "I'm not waiting. Let me rally my team. Let me grab some supplies. Let me do what no one else has done for me and my community." TMD: We know one woman can make a difference, because one woman has already changed the world, and her name is Harriet Tubman. And trust me, I love Harriet Tubman. I'm obsessed with her, and I used to be a history teacher. I will not tell you the whole history. I will tell you four things. So I used to have an old Saab — the kind of canvas top that drips on your head when it rains — and I drove all the way down to the eastern shore of Maryland, and when I stepped on the dirt that Harriet Tubman made her first escape, I knew she was a woman just like we are and that we could do what she had done, and we learned four things from Harriet Tubman. The first one: do not wait. Walk right now in the direction of your healthiest, most fulfilled life, because self-care is a revolutionary act. Number two: when you learn the way forward, come back and get a sister. So in our case, start a team with your friends — your friends, your family, your church. Number three: rally your allies. Every single person in this room is complicit in a Tubman-inspired takeover. And number four: find joy. The most underreported fact of Harriet Tubman is that she lived to be 93 years old, and she didn't live just an ordinary life; uh-uh. She was standing up for the good guys. She married a younger man. She adopted a child. I'm not kidding. She lived. And I drove up to her house of freedom in upstate New York, and she had planted apple trees, and when I was there on a Sunday, they were blooming. Do you call it — do they bloom? The apples were in season, and I was thinking, she left fruit for us, the legacy of Harriet Tubman, every single year. And we know that we are Harriet, and we know that there is a Harriet in every community in America. VG: We also know that there's a Harriet in every community across the globe, and that they could learn from our Tubman Doctrine, as we call it, the four steps. Imagine the possibilities beyond the neighborhoods of Oakland and Newark, to the women working rice fields in Vietnam, tea fields in Sri Lanka, the women on the mountainsides in Guatemala, the indigenous reservations throughout the vast plains of the Dakotas. We believe that women walking and talking together to solve their problems is a global solution. TMD: And I'll leave you with this, because we also believe it can become the center of social justice again. Vanessa and I were in Fort Lauderdale. We had an organizer training, and I was leaving and I got on the airplane, and I saw someone I knew, so I waved, and as I'm waiting in that long line that you guys know, waiting for people to put their stuff away, I looked back and I realized I didn't know the woman but I recognized her. And so I blew her a kiss because it was Sybrina Fulton, Trayvon Martin's mom, and she whispered "thank you" back to me. And I can't help but wonder what would happen if there were groups of women walking on Trayvon's block that day, or what would happen in the South Side of Chicago every day if there were groups of women and mothers and aunts and cousins walking, or along the polluted rivers of Flint, Michigan. I believe that walking can transform our communities, because it's already starting to. VG: We believe that the personal is political. Our walking is for healing, for joy, for fresh air, quiet time, to connect and disconnect, to worship. But it's also walking so we can be healthy enough to stand on the front lines for change in our communities, and it is our call to action to every Black woman listening, every Black woman in earshot of our voice, every Black woman who you know. Think about it: the woman working front desk reception at your job, the woman who delivers your mail, your neighbor — our call to action to them, to join us on the front lines for change in your community. TMD: And I'll bring us back to this moment and why it's so important for my dear, dear friend Vanessa and I. It's because it's not always easy for us, and in fact, we have both seen really, really dark days, from the hate speech to the summer of police brutality and violence that we saw last year, to even losing one of our walkers, Sandy Bland, who died in police custody. But the most courageous thing we do every day is we practice faith that goes beyond the facts, and we put feet to our prayers every single day, and when we get overwhelmed, we think of the words of people like Sonia Sanchez, a poet laureate, who says, "Morgan, where is your fire? Where is the fire that burned holes through slave ships to make us breathe? Where is the fire that turned guts into chitlins, that took rhythms and make jazz, that took sit-ins and marches and made us jump boundaries and barriers? You've got to find it and pass it on." So this is us finding our fire and passing it on to you. So please, stand with us, walk with us as we rally a million women to reclaim the streets of the 50 highest need communities in this country. We thank you so much for this opportunity. (Applause) |
Poverty isn't a lack of character; it's a lack of cash | {0: 'Rutger Bregman is the author of "Utopia for Realists."'} | TED2017 | I'd like to start with a simple question: Why do the poor make so many poor decisions? I know it's a harsh question, but take a look at the data. The poor borrow more, save less, smoke more, exercise less, drink more and eat less healthfully. Why? Well, the standard explanation was once summed up by the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. And she called poverty "a personality defect." (Laughter) A lack of character, basically. Now, I'm sure not many of you would be so blunt. But the idea that there's something wrong with the poor themselves is not restricted to Mrs. Thatcher. Some of you may believe that the poor should be held responsible for their own mistakes. And others may argue that we should help them to make better decisions. But the underlying assumption is the same: there's something wrong with them. If we could just change them, if we could just teach them how to live their lives, if they would only listen. And to be honest, this was what I thought for a long time. It was only a few years ago that I discovered that everything I thought I knew about poverty was wrong. It all started when I accidentally stumbled upon a paper by a few American psychologists. They had traveled 8,000 miles, all the way to India, for a fascinating study. And it was an experiment with sugarcane farmers. You should know that these farmers collect about 60 percent of their annual income all at once, right after the harvest. This means that they're relatively poor one part of the year and rich the other. The researchers asked them to do an IQ test before and after the harvest. What they subsequently discovered completely blew my mind. The farmers scored much worse on the test before the harvest. The effects of living in poverty, it turns out, correspond to losing 14 points of IQ. Now, to give you an idea, that's comparable to losing a night's sleep or the effects of alcoholism. A few months later, I heard that Eldar Shafir, a professor at Princeton University and one of the authors of this study, was coming over to Holland, where I live. So we met up in Amsterdam to talk about his revolutionary new theory of poverty. And I can sum it up in just two words: scarcity mentality. It turns out that people behave differently when they perceive a thing to be scarce. And what that thing is doesn't much matter — whether it's not enough time, money or food. You all know this feeling, when you've got too much to do, or when you've put off breaking for lunch and your blood sugar takes a dive. This narrows your focus to your immediate lack — to the sandwich you've got to have now, the meeting that's starting in five minutes or the bills that have to be paid tomorrow. So the long-term perspective goes out the window. You could compare it to a new computer that's running 10 heavy programs at once. It gets slower and slower, making errors. Eventually, it freezes — not because it's a bad computer, but because it has too much to do at once. The poor have the same problem. They're not making dumb decisions because they are dumb, but because they're living in a context in which anyone would make dumb decisions. So suddenly I understood why so many of our anti-poverty programs don't work. Investments in education, for example, are often completely ineffective. Poverty is not a lack of knowledge. A recent analysis of 201 studies on the effectiveness of money-management training came to the conclusion that it has almost no effect at all. Now, don't get me wrong — this is not to say the poor don't learn anything — they can come out wiser for sure. But it's not enough. Or as Professor Shafir told me, "It's like teaching someone to swim and then throwing them in a stormy sea." I still remember sitting there, perplexed. And it struck me that we could have figured this all out decades ago. I mean, these psychologists didn't need any complicated brain scans; they only had to measure the farmer's IQ, and IQ tests were invented more than 100 years ago. Actually, I realized I had read about the psychology of poverty before. George Orwell, one of the greatest writers who ever lived, experienced poverty firsthand in the 1920s. "The essence of poverty," he wrote back then, is that it "annihilates the future." And he marveled at, quote, "How people take it for granted they have the right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level." Now, those words are every bit as resonant today. The big question is, of course: What can be done? Modern economists have a few solutions up their sleeves. We could help the poor with their paperwork or send them a text message to remind them to pay their bills. This type of solution is hugely popular with modern politicians, mostly because, well, they cost next to nothing. These solutions are, I think, a symbol of this era in which we so often treat the symptoms, but ignore the underlying cause. So I wonder: Why don't we just change the context in which the poor live? Or, going back to our computer analogy: Why keep tinkering around with the software when we can easily solve the problem by installing some extra memory instead? At that point, Professor Shafir responded with a blank look. And after a few seconds, he said, "Oh, I get it. You mean you want to just hand out more money to the poor to eradicate poverty. Uh, sure, that'd be great. But I'm afraid that brand of left-wing politics you've got in Amsterdam — it doesn't exist in the States." But is this really an old-fashioned, leftist idea? I remembered reading about an old plan — something that has been proposed by some of history's leading thinkers. The philosopher Thomas More first hinted at it in his book, "Utopia," more than 500 years ago. And its proponents have spanned the spectrum from the left to the right, from the civil rights campaigner, Martin Luther King, to the economist Milton Friedman. And it's an incredibly simple idea: basic income guarantee. What it is? Well, that's easy. It's a monthly grant, enough to pay for your basic needs: food, shelter, education. It's completely unconditional, so no one's going to tell you what you have to do for it, and no one's going to tell you what you have to do with it. The basic income is not a favor, but a right. There's absolutely no stigma attached. So as I learned about the true nature of poverty, I couldn't stop wondering: Is this the idea we've all been waiting for? Could it really be that simple? And in the three years that followed, I read everything I could find about basic income. I researched the dozens of experiments that have been conducted all over the globe, and it didn't take long before I stumbled upon a story of a town that had done it — had actually eradicated poverty. But then ... nearly everyone forgot about it. This story starts in Dauphin, Canada. In 1974, everybody in this small town was guaranteed a basic income, ensuring that no one fell below the poverty line. At the start of the experiment, an army of researchers descended on the town. For four years, all went well. But then a new government was voted into power, and the new Canadian cabinet saw little point to the expensive experiment. So when it became clear there was no money left to analyze the results, the researchers decided to pack their files away in some 2,000 boxes. Twenty-five years went by, and then Evelyn Forget, a Canadian professor, found the records. For three years, she subjected the data to all manner of statistical analysis, and no matter what she tried, the results were the same every time: the experiment had been a resounding success. Evelyn Forget discovered that the people in Dauphin had not only become richer but also smarter and healthier. The school performance of kids improved substantially. The hospitalization rate decreased by as much as 8.5 percent. Domestic violence incidents were down, as were mental health complaints. And people didn't quit their jobs. The only ones who worked a little less were new mothers and students — who stayed in school longer. Similar results have since been found in countless other experiments around the globe, from the US to India. So ... here's what I've learned. When it comes to poverty, we, the rich, should stop pretending we know best. We should stop sending shoes and teddy bears to the poor, to people we have never met. And we should get rid of the vast industry of paternalistic bureaucrats when we could simply hand over their salaries to the poor they're supposed to help. (Applause) Because, I mean, the great thing about money is that people can use it to buy things they need instead of things that self-appointed experts think they need. Just imagine how many brilliant scientists and entrepreneurs and writers, like George Orwell, are now withering away in scarcity. Imagine how much energy and talent we would unleash if we got rid of poverty once and for all. I believe that a basic income would work like venture capital for the people. And we can't afford not to do it, because poverty is hugely expensive. Just look at the cost of child poverty in the US, for example. It's estimated at 500 billion dollars each year, in terms of higher health care spending, higher dropout rates, and more crime. Now, this is an incredible waste of human potential. But let's talk about the elephant in the room. How could we ever afford a basic income guarantee? Well, it's actually a lot cheaper than you may think. What they did in Dauphin is finance it with a negative income tax. This means that your income is topped up as soon as you fall below the poverty line. And in that scenario, according to our economists' best estimates, for a net cost of 175 billion — a quarter of US military spending, one percent of GDP — you could lift all impoverished Americans above the poverty line. You could actually eradicate poverty. Now, that should be our goal. (Applause) The time for small thoughts and little nudges is past. I really believe that the time has come for radical new ideas, and basic income is so much more than just another policy. It is also a complete rethink of what work actually is. And in that sense, it will not only free the poor, but also the rest of us. Nowadays, millions of people feel that their jobs have little meaning or significance. A recent poll among 230,000 employees in 142 countries found that only 13 percent of workers actually like their job. And another poll found that as much as 37 percent of British workers have a job that they think doesn't even need to exist. It's like Brad Pitt says in "Fight Club," "Too often we're working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need." (Laughter) Now, don't get me wrong — I'm not talking about the teachers and the garbagemen and the care workers here. If they stopped working, we'd be in trouble. I'm talking about all those well-paid professionals with excellent résumés who earn their money doing ... strategic transactor peer-to-peer meetings while brainstorming the value add-on of disruptive co-creation in the network society. (Laughter) (Applause) Or something like that. Just imagine again how much talent we're wasting, simply because we tell our kids they'll have to "earn a living." Or think of what a math whiz working at Facebook lamented a few years ago: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." I'm a historian. And if history teaches us anything, it is that things could be different. There is nothing inevitable about the way we structured our society and economy right now. Ideas can and do change the world. And I think that especially in the past few years, it has become abundantly clear that we cannot stick to the status quo — that we need new ideas. I know that many of you may feel pessimistic about a future of rising inequality, xenophobia and climate change. But it's not enough to know what we're against. We also need to be for something. Martin Luther King didn't say, "I have a nightmare." (Laughter) He had a dream. (Applause) So ... here's my dream: I believe in a future where the value of your work is not determined by the size of your paycheck, but by the amount of happiness you spread and the amount of meaning you give. I believe in a future where the point of education is not to prepare you for another useless job but for a life well-lived. I believe in a future where an existence without poverty is not a privilege but a right we all deserve. So here we are. Here we are. We've got the research, we've got the evidence and we've got the means. Now, more than 500 years after Thomas More first wrote about a basic income, and 100 years after George Orwell discovered the true nature of poverty, we all need to change our worldview, because poverty is not a lack of character. Poverty is a lack of cash. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why I speak up about living with epilepsy | {0: "Sitawa Wafula started Kenya's first free mental health and epilepsy support line."} | TEDNairobi Ideas Search | I have a confession. I have been in an affair since I was 17 years old. I wish I could talk about butterflies in my stomach or maps I drew on the ground when I think about this affair, but I cannot. I wish I could talk about sweet words spoken or gifts that I received from this affair, but I cannot. All I can tell you about is the aftermath, about days I spent constantly asking: Why, why, why me? I remember how it all began. I was in my final year of high school, and my class had just won in sports, so we were singing and dancing and hugging each other. I went and took a shower. Then I went for dinner. And when I sat down to eat, my teeth started chattering, and so I couldn't put the spoon in my mouth. I rushed to the nurse's office, and because I couldn't talk, I just pointed at my mouth. She didn't know what was happening, so she told me to lie down, and it worked — after a few minutes, the chattering stopped. I was about to dash out, and she told me — no, she insisted — that I go up to the dormitories to sleep. Here I was in my final year of high school, just a few months from doing my end of high school exams and a few days from doing a set of exams we call here in Kenya "mocks," which are somehow meant to gauge how prepared one is for the final exams. There is no way I was going to sleep and let a set of exams mock me. I went to class, sat down, took my Kenyan history notes, and there I was, down Kenyan coastal town, with the great Mekatilili wa Menza, the Giriama woman who led her people against British colonial rule. Then, without any notice, my left hand started jerking, and it was as if I was marking imaginary papers. In and out it went, and with every stroke, one by one, my classmates stopped concentrating on their reading and started looking at me. And I tried really hard to stop it, but I couldn't, because it had a life of its own. And then, when it was sure everybody was looking at us, in its final show and official introduction, I had my first full-blown seizure, which was the beginning of what has been a 15-year-long affair. Seizures are the trademark characteristic for most types of epilepsy, and every first-ever seizure needs to be assessed by a doctor to determine if one has epilepsy or if it's a symptom of something else. In my case, it was confirmed that I had epilepsy. I spent a large chunk of my time in hospital and at home, and only went back to do my final exams. I had seizures in between papers, but managed to get good enough grades to be admitted for an actuarial science degree at the University of Nairobi. (Applause) Unfortunately, I had to drop out in my second year. I didn't have good enough coping skills and a support community around me. I was lucky enough to get a job, but I was fired from that job when I had a seizure in the workplace. So I found myself in a space where I was constantly asking myself why this had to happen to me. I lived in denial for a long time, and the denial was maybe because of the things that had happened, dropping out of school and being fired from my job. Or maybe it was because of the things I had heard about epilepsy and about people living with epilepsy: that they would never live on their own; that they would never travel on their own or even get work; that they were outcasts, with a spirit in them that they needed to be delivered from. And so the more I thought about these things, the more my seizures became, and I spent days with my legs locked, my speech became blurred and on days on end, this is how I'd be. Two or three days after a seizure, my head and my hand would still be twitching. I felt lost, like I'd lost everything, and sometimes, even the will to live. (Sigh) I had so much frustration in me. And so I started writing, because the people around me didn't have answers to the questions that I had. And so I wrote my fears and my doubts. I wrote about my good days and my bad days and my really ugly days, and I shared them on a blog. And before long, I began to be seen and heard by people who had epilepsy and their families, and even those who did not have the diagnosis. And I moved from that girl who constantly asked why me to one who not only self-advocates, but does it for those who are yet to find their voices. (Applause) My seizures are greatly reduced, from two to three times a day, to sometimes two to three times in one year. I went on — (Applause) I went on to employ five people, when I began what was Kenya's first free mental health and epilepsy support line. And I travel — (Applause) And I travel to speak about my affair, all these things that I had been told people like me living with epilepsy could never be able to do. Every year, a population as big as 80 percent of Nairobi gets diagnosed with epilepsy across the globe. And they, like me, go through the emotions of stigma and exclusion. And so I have made it my life journey to keep these conversations going, and I keep confessing about my affair so that those people who do not have the diagnosis might know and might have a constant reminder that it is alright to engage with people like us, that as long as they pull down the walls of stigma and exclusion, that we, just like them, can be able to take anything life throws at us. Thank you. (Applause) |
This is what democracy looks like | {0: 'Anthony D. Romero is the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).'} | TED2017 | Silicon Valley is obsessed with disruption, but these days, the biggest disruptor didn't come out of Silicon Valley. It came out of steel towns in Ohio, rural communities in Pennsylvania, the Panhandle in Florida. And this last US presidential election was the mother of all disruptions. Once again, politics is personal. Millions of Americans became activists overnight, pouring into the streets in record numbers in record time. (Laughter) The election has done to family holiday dinners what Uber has done to New York City's taxi system. Couples have broken up and marriages disrupted. And the election is doing to my private life what Amazon is doing to shopping malls. These days, the ACLU is on the front lines 24/7, and even if I manage to sneak away for a couple of miles on the treadmill, any cardio benefit I get is instantly obliterated when I read another presidential tweet on the headline scroll. Even my secret pleasure of studying the Italian painters have been infected by politics. Now, I study, even stalk, the old masters. This is my desk, with a postcard exhibition of some famous and obscure paintings mostly from the Italian Renaissance. Now, art used to provide me with a necessary break from the hurly-burly of politics in my daily work at the ACLU, but not anymore. I was at the Women's March in San Francisco the day after inauguration, and the crowd was chanting, "This is what democracy looks like." "This is what democracy looks like." And there I was holding my sign and my umbrella in the rain, and I flashed on an old painting that first captivated me many years ago. I struggled to remember the different pieces of an actual painting of good and bad government. It was almost like the old master was taunting me. You want to know what democracy looks like? Go back and look at my frescoes. And so I did. In 1339, Ambrogio Lorenzetti finished a monumental commission in the governing council chamber of Siena's Palazzo Pubblico. It's a painting that speaks to us, even screams to us, today. "Art is a lie that makes us realize truth," Pablo Picasso once said. And as we search for the truth about government, we should keep Ambrogio's work, not a lie but an allegory, in our collective mind's eye. During Lorenzetti's time, the political legitimacy of Italian city-states was often on very shaky ground. Siena was a republic, but there had been enormous unrest in the two decades leading up to the commission. Siena's political leaders, who would literally govern under the eyes of these allegorical figures, were Lorenzetti's intended audience. He was cataloging the obligations of the governing to the governed. Now, you can spend years studying these frescoes. Some scholars have. I'm hardly an art historian, but I am passionate about art, and a work this massive can overwhelm me. So first, I focus on the big stuff. This is the allegory of good government. The majestic figure here in the middle is dressed in Siena's colors and he personifies the republic itself. Lorenzetti labels him "Commune," and he's basically telling the Sienese that they, and not a king or a tyrant, must rule themselves. Now, surrounding Commune are his advisors. Justice is enthroned. She's looking up at the figure of wisdom, who actually supports her scales of justice. Concord, or Harmony, holds a string that comes off the scales of justice that binds her to the citizens, making them all compatriots in the republic. And finally we see Peace. She looks chilled out, like she's listening to Bob Marley. When good government rules, Peace doesn't break a sweat. Now, these are big images and big ideas, but I really love the small stuff. Along another wall, Lorenzetti illustrates the effects of good government on the real and everyday lives of ordinary people with a series of delicious little details. In the countryside, the hills are landscaped and farmed. Crops are being sown, hoed, reaped, milled, plowed, all in one picture. Crops and livestock are being brought to market. In the city, builders raise a tower. People attend a law lecture, a TED Talk of the 14th century. (Laughter) Schoolchildren play. Tradesmen thrive. Dancers larger than life dance with joy. And watching over the republic is the winged figure Security, whose banner reads, "Everyone shall go forth freely without fear." Now, what's amazing about these images from 800 years ago is that they're familiar to us today. We see what democracy looks like. We experience the effects of good government in our lives, just as Lorenzetti did in his life. But it is the allegory of bad government that has been haunting me since November 9. It's badly damaged, but it reads like today's newspapers. And ruling over bad government is not the Commune but the Tyrant. He has horns, tusks, crossed eyes, braided hair. He obviously spends a lot of time on that hair. (Laughter) Justice now lies helpless at his feet, shackled. Her scales have been severed. Justice is the key antagonist to the Tyrant, and she's been taken out. Now, surrounding the Tyrant, Lorenzetti illustrates the vices that animate bad government. Avarice is the old woman clutching the strongbox and a fisherman's hook to pull in her fortune. Vainglory carries a mirror, and Lorenzetti warns us against narcissistic leaders who are guided by their own ego and vanity. On the Tyrant's right is Cruelty. Treason, half lamb, half scorpion, lulls us into a false sense of security and then poisons a republic. Fraud, with the flighty wings of a bat. On the Tyrant's left, you see Division. She's dressed in Siena's colors. "Si" and "No" are painted on her body. She uses a carpenter's saw to chop her body in half. And Fury wields the weapons of the mob, the stone and knife. In the remainder of the fresco, Lorenzetti shows us the inevitable effects of bad government. The civic ideals celebrated elsewhere in this room have failed us, and we see it. The once beautiful city has fallen to pieces, the countryside barren, the farms abandoned. Many are in flames. And in the sky above is not the winged figure Security, but that of Fear, whose banner reads: "None shall pass along this road without fear of death." Now, the final image, the most important one, really, is one that Lorenzetti did not paint. It is of the viewer. Today, the audience for Lorenzetti's frescoes is not the governing but the governed, the individual who stands in front of his allegories and walks away with insight, who heeds a call to action. Lorenzetti warns us that we must recognize the shadows of Avarice, Fraud, Division, even Tyranny when they float across our political landscape, especially when those shadows are cast by political leaders loudly claiming to be the voice of good government and promising to make America great again. And we must act. Democracy must not be a spectator sport. The right to protest, the right to assemble freely, the right to petition one's government, these are not just rights. In the face of Avarice, Fraud and Division, these are obligations. We have to disrupt — (Applause) We have to disrupt our lives so that we can disrupt the amoral accretion of power by those who would betray our values. We and we the people must raise justice up and must bring peace to our nation and must come together in concord, and we have a choice. We could either paint ourselves into the worst nightmare of Lorenzetti's bad government, or we can stay in the streets, disruptive, messy, loud. That is what democracy looks like. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: First of all, wow. Obviously, many people passionately — you spoke to many people passionately here. I'm sure there are other people here who'd say, look, Trump was elected by 63 million people. He's far from perfect, but he's trying to do what he was elected to do. Shouldn't you give him a chance? Anthony Romero: I think we have to recognize the legitimacy of him as president versus the legitimacy of his policies. And when so many of the policies are contrary to fundamental values, that we're all equal under the law, that we're not judged by the color of our skin or the religion we worship, we have to contest those values even as we recognize and honor the fact that our democracy rendered us a president who is championing those values. CA: And the ACLU isn't just this force on the left, right? You're making other arguments as well. AR: Well, you know, very often we piss everyone off at one point. That's what we do. And we recently were taking stands for why Ann Coulter needs to be able to speak at Berkeley, and why Milo has free speech rights. And we even wrote a blog that almost burnt the house down among some of our members, unfortunately, when we talked about the fact that even Donald Trump has free speech rights as president, and an effort to hold him accountable for incitement of violence at his marches or his rallies is unconstitutional and un-American. And when you put that statement out there to a very frothy base that always is very excited for you to fight Donald Trump, and then you have a new one saying, "Wait, these rights are for everybody, even the president that we don't like." And that's our job. (Applause) CA: Anthony, you spoke to so many of us so powerfully. Thank you so much. Thank you. (Applause) |
A secret weapon against Zika and other mosquito-borne diseases | {0: 'Nina Fedoroff writes and lectures about the history and science of genetically modified organisms.'} | TEDxMidAtlantic | Zika fever: our newest dread disease. What is it? Where'd it come from? What do we do about it? Well for most adults, it's a relatively mild disease — a little fever, a little headache, joint pain, maybe a rash. In fact, most people who get it don't even know they've had it. But the more we find out about the Zika virus the more terrifying it becomes. For example, doctors have noticed an uptick of something called Guillain-Barré syndrome in recent outbreaks. In Guillain-Barré, your immune system attacks your nerve cells it can partially or even totally paralyze you. Fortunately, that's quite rare, and most people recover. But if you're pregnant when you're infected you're at risk of something terrible. Indeed, a child with a deformed head. Here's a normal baby. Here's that infant with what's called microcephaly. a brain in a head that's too small. And there's no known cure. It was actually doctors in northeastern Brazil who first noticed, just a year ago, after a Zika outbreak, that there was a peak in the incidence of microcephaly. It took medical doctors another year to be sure that it was caused by the Zika virus, but they're now sure. And if you're a "bring on the evidence" type, check out this publication. So where did it come from, and how did it get here? And it is here. Like many of our viruses, it came out of Africa, specifically the Zika forest in Uganda. Researchers at the nearby Yellow Fever Research Institute identified an unknown virus in a monkey in the Zika forest which is how it got its name. The first human cases of Zika fever surfaced a few years later in Uganda-Tanzania. The virus then spread through West Africa and east through equatorial Asia — Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Indonesia. But it was still mostly in monkeys and, of course, mosquitoes. In fact in the 60 years between the time it was first identified in 1947 and 2007 there were only 13 reported cases of human Zika fever. And then something extraordinary happened on the tiny Micronesian Yap islands. There was an outbreak that affected fully 75 percent of the population. How did it get there? By air. Today we have two billion commercial airline passengers. An infected passenger can board a plane, fly halfway around the world before developing symptoms — if they develop symptoms at all. Then when they land, the local mosquitoes begin to bite them and spread the fever. Zika fever then next surfaced in 2013 in French Polynesia. By December of that year, it was being transmitted locally by the mosquitoes. That led to an explosive outbreak in which almost 30,000 people were affected. From there it radiated around the Pacific. There were outbreaks in the Cook Islands, in New Caledonia, in Vanuatu, in the Solomon Islands and almost all the way around to the coast of South America and Easter Island. And then, in early 2015, there was an upsurge of cases of a dengue-like syndrome in the city of Natal in northeastern Brazil. The virus wasn't dengue, it was Zika, and it spread rapidly — Recife down the coast, a big metropolitan center, soon became the epicenter. Well people have speculated that it was 2014 World Cup soccer fans that brought the virus into the country. But others have speculated that perhaps it was Pacific Islanders participating in championship canoe races that were held in Rio that year that brought it in. Well today, this is only a year later. The virus is being locally transmitted by mosquitoes virtually throughout South America, Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean Islands Until this year, the many thousands of cases that have been diagnosed in the US were contracted elsewhere. But as of this summer, it's being transmitted locally in Miami. It's here. So what do we do about it? Well, preventing infection is either about protecting people or about eliminating the mosquitoes. Let's focus on people first. You can get vaccinated. You can not travel to Zika areas. Or you can cover up and apply insect repellent. Getting vaccinated is not an option, because there isn't a vaccine yet and there probably won't be for a couple of years. Staying home isn't a foolproof protection either because we now know that it can be sexually transmitted. Covering up and applying insect repellent does work ... until you forget. (Laughter) So that leaves the mosquitoes, and here's how we control them now: spraying insecticides. The protective gear is necessary because these are toxic chemicals that kill people as well as bugs. Although it does take quite a lot more to kill a person than to kill a bug. These are pictures from Brazil and Nicaragua. But it looks the same in Miami, Florida. And we of course can spray insecticides from planes. Last summer, mosquito control officials in Dorchester County, South Carolina, authorized spraying of Naled, an insecticide, early one morning, as recommended by the manufacturer. Later that day, a beekeeper told reporters that her bee yard looked like it had been nuked. Oops. Bees are the good guys. The citizens of Florida protested, but spraying continued. Unfortunately, so did the increase in the number of Zika fever cases. That's because insecticides aren't very effective. So are there any approaches that are perhaps more effective than spraying but with less downsides than toxic chemicals? I'm a huge fan of biological controls, and I share that view with Rachel Carson, author of "Silent Spring," the book that is credited with starting the environmental movement. In this book she tells the story, as an example, of how a very nasty insect pest of livestock was eliminated in the last century. No one knows that extraordinary story today. So Jack Block and I, when we were writing an editorial about the mosquito problem today, retold that story. And in capsule form, it's that pupae — that's the immature form of the insect — were irradiated until they were sterile, grown to adulthood and then released from planes all over the Southwest, the Southeast and down into Mexico and into Central America literally by the hundreds of millions from little airplanes, eventually eliminating that terrible insect pest for most of the Western Hemisphere. Our real purpose in writing this editorial was to introduce readers to how we can do that today — not with radiation but with our knowledge of genetics. Let me explain. This is the bad guy: Aedes aegypti. It's the most common insect vector of diseases, not just Zika but dengue, Chikungunya, West Nile virus and that ancient plague, yellow fever. It's an urban mosquito, and it's the female that does the dirty work. She bites to get a blood meal to feed her offspring. Males don't bite; they don't even have the mouth parts to bite. A little British company called Oxitec genetically modified that mosquito so that when it mates with a wild female, its eggs don't develop to adulthood. Let me show you. This is the normal reproductive cycle. Oxitec designed the mosquito so that when the male mates with the wild female the eggs don't develop. Sounds impossible? Well let me show you just diagrammatically how they do it. Now this represents the nucleus of a mosquito cell, and that tangle in the middle represents its genome, the sum total of its genes. Scientists added a single gene that codes for a protein represented by this orange ball that feeds back on itself to keep cranking out more of that protein. The extra copies, however, go and gum up the mosquitoes' genes, killing the organism. To keep it alive in the laboratory they use a compound called tetracycline. Tetracycline shuts off that gene and allows normal development. They added another little wrinkle so that they could study what happens. And that is they added a gene that makes the insect glow under UV light so that when they released it they could follow exactly how far it went how long it lived and all of the kinds of data for a good scientific study. Now this is the pupal stage, and at this stage the females are larger than the males. That allows them to sort them into the males and the females and they allow only the males to grow to adulthood. And let me remind you that males don't bite. From there it's pretty simple. They take beakers full of male mosquitoes, load them into milk cartons, and drive around the city, releasing them guided by GPS. Here's the mayor of a city releasing the first batch of what they call the "friendly Aedes." Now I wish I could tell you this is an American city, but it's not. It's Piracicaba, Brazil. The amazing thing is that in just a year it brought down the cases of dengue by 91 percent. That's better than any insecticide spraying can do. So why aren't we using this remarkable biological control in the US? That's because it's a GMO: a genetically modified organism. Notice the subtitle here says if the FDA would let them they could do the same thing here, when Zika arrives. And of course it has arrived. So now I have to tell you the short form of the long, torturous story of GM regulation in the US In the US, there are three agencies that regulate genetically modified organisms: the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the USDA, US Department of Agriculture. Took these folks two years to decide that it would be the FDA that would regulate the genetically modified mosquito. And they would do it as a new animal drug, if that makes any sense. Took them another five years going back and forth and back and forth to convince the FDA that this would not harm people, and it would not harm the environment. They finally gave them, this summer, permission to run a little test in the Florida Keys, where they had been invited years earlier when they Keys had an outbreak of dengue. Would that it were that easy. When the local residents heard that there would be genetically modified mosquitoes tested in their community some of them began to organize protests. They even organized a petition on the internet with this cuddly logo, which eventually accumulated some 160,000 signatures And they demanded a referendum which will be conducted in just a couple of weeks about whether the trials would be permitted at all. Well it's Miami that really needs these better ways of controlling insects. And there the attitudes are changing. In fact, very recently a bipartisan group of more than 60 legislators wrote to HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell asking that she, at the Federal level, expedite access for Florida to this new technology. So the bottom line is this: biological control of harmful insects can be both more effective and very much more environmentally friendly than using insecticides, which are toxic chemicals. That was true in Rachel Carson's time; it's true today. What's different is that we have enormously more information about genetics than we had then, and therefore more ability to use that information to affect these biological controls. And I hope that what I've done is aroused your curiosity enough to start your own inquiry — not into just GM mosquitoes but to the other genetically modified organisms that are so controversial today. I think if you do that, and you dig down through all of the misinformation, and the marketing on the part of the organic food industry and the Greenpeaces and find the science, the accurate science, you'll be surprised and pleased. Thank you. (Applause) |
How to find a wonderful idea | {0: 'OK Go fearlessly dream and build new worlds in a time when creative boundaries have all but dissolved.'} | TED2017 | (Dominoes fall) (Toy car) (Ball rolls) (Music: "This Too Shall Pass") (Singing) You know you can't keep letting it get you down, and you can't keep dragging that dead weight around. If there ain't all that much to lug around better run like hell when you hit the ground When the morning comes When the morning comes You can't stop these kids from dancing, but why would you want to, especially when you're already getting yours? (Xylophone) (Singing) 'Cause if your mind don't move and your knees don't bend, well don't go blaming the kids again. (Xylophone) (Singing) When the morning comes When the morning comes When the morning comes When the morning comes When the morning comes When the morning comes (Xylophone) (Singing) Let it go, this too shall pass Let it go, this too shall pass You know you can't keep letting it get you down, you can't keep letting it get you down — this too shall pass If there ain't all that much to lug around, you can't keep letting it get you down — this too shall pass When the morning comes — you can't keep letting it get you down, no you can't keep letting it When the morning comes — you can't keep letting it get you down, no you can't keep letting it When the morning comes — you can't keep letting it get you down, no you can't keep letting it When the morning comes — you can't keep letting it get you down, no you can't keep letting it When the morning comes (Paint guns fire) (Applause) Damian Kulash: Thank you, thanks very much. We are OK Go, and we've been together as a band since 1998. But in the last decade, we've become known as much for the elaborate music videos, like the one we just saw, as for the songs they accompany. So we will play along with another one of those in a few minutes, but in the meantime, we want to address this question that we get asked all the time but we've really never come up with an adequate answer for it, and that is, how do we think of those ideas? The videos are not all Rube Goldberg machines, by the way. Last year we did a dance in zero gravity, and once we set up an obstacle course out of thousands of musical instruments in the desert, and then played them by stunt driving a car through them. (Laughter) For one of the videos, we choreographed hundreds of people with umbrellas in an abandoned parking lot outside Tokyo, and then filmed them from a drone a half a mile in the air. So it's all of these ideas that people are curious about, and the reason we've had so much trouble describing how we think of these ideas is that it doesn't really feel like we think of them at all. It feels like we find them. And by way of explanation — well, I have a compulsive habit. I play parallax and perspective games with my eyes pretty much all the time, and it's something I've been doing since I was a teenager. And I think the big contributing factor may have been that this is how I decorated my high school bedroom. (Laughter) And being a teenager, what I did in there, of course, was just talk on the phone for staggering amounts of time. So I was in this visual maelstrom just pretty much usually sitting in one place, and I guess just the overload in general — my brain kind of tried to make sense of it, and I would — If I could move my head off to one side a little bit, the edge of the desk would line up just perfectly with that poster on the opposite wall; or if I put my thumb out, I could close first my left eye and then my right, and my thumb would bounce back and forth between Jimi Hendrix's left eye and his right. (Laughter) It was not a conscious thing, of course, this is just kind of the equivalent of doodling while you're talking, and it's still something I do all the time. This is my wife, Kristin — (Applause) Yeah! Woo! And it's not uncommon that we are out at dinner, and in the middle of a great conversation she'll just stop mid-sentence, and when she stops is when I realize that I'm the one who's acting weird because I'm like bobbing and weaving. And what I'm trying to do is get that ficus back there to stick out of her head like a ponytail. (Laughter) The point of telling you all this is that — for me this is what it feels like to have an idea. It's like they're made of these disparate parts, these disparate chunks sort of floating out there. And if you're receptive and you're observant, and crucially, if you're in exactly the right place, you can get them to just line up. So if you get used to — if it's your job to think of ideas this way, they'll start beckoning to you the way that Jimi's eyes beckoned from that poster, or the ficus beckons from behind Kristin's head. Writing music feels like that process just over and over again, like you've got a bunch of sounds or a groove or a chord progression and you're just looking for that thing on the other side, that little chunk over there, that puzzle piece that clicks right in. And when it does click, it doesn't feel like you thought up that puzzle piece, it feels like you found it — like it was a set of relationships that you unlocked. But with the videos in particular, we're usually looking for this specific feeling which is wonder. And there's always a component of surprise to wonder, so we're not just looking for good ideas, we're looking for good ideas that surprise us in some way. And this causes something of a problem, because ... the process that we all use to make stuff, it actually has a very strong bias against surprising ideas. The process I'm talking about is the one you all know — we all do it all the time. You think of an idea. You just sit and think of your brilliant idea and then you come up with a plan for how you're going to make that idea happen. And then with that plan in mind, you go back and double-check your original idea and maybe revise it, and then bouncing back and forth between the idea and the plan, the plan and the idea, eventually you come up with a truly great plan. And then once you have that, and only then, do you go out and you execute. And this is like — this is sort of a flawless system in terms of maximizing your resources, because this — super cheap. Thinking usually costs very little, but this is really expensive most of the time, so by the time you get there, you want to make sure you're super prepared and you can squeeze every last drop out of what you've got. But there are problems with this, and math will help us reveal the biggest one. Go back to that video that we just showed you. That Rube Goldberg machine, it had about 130 interactions in it. That was 130 things that we had to have go according to our plan. So let's assume that we want to make a new video now, similarly complex — 130 moving parts. If we're really good planners in that system, it seems like maybe we could be good enough to get every part of that system to be 90 percent reliable. 90 percent sounds good, right? Well, it's not. It's terrible actually. The numbers say so. The chance of getting all 130 things to not fail at the same time is .9 for 90 percent to the 130th power. So calculate that out and you get ... (Ding) .000001, which is one ten-thousandth of one percent, so your chance for success is literally one in a million. (Whistle) (Laughter) I mean that's not a gamble I want to take, so let's ratchet up that reliability to 99 percent. .99 to the 130th power is ... (Ding) .27 — 27 percent. Significantly less daunting — like this might even be usable. But really think about that. How many parts of your lives are 99 percent reliable? And could you really get 130 of them all in one place at once? And if you really could, doesn't it seem like you deserve to succeed? Like that is — that thing is going to work, right? But no, it actually fails three times more often than it succeeds. So the upshot of all this is that if your project is pretty complex — like, you know, every ambitious project is — if you've got a lot of moving parts, you're basically constrained to just reshuffling ideas that have already demonstrably proven that they're 100 percent reliable. So now go back to me sitting with my thumb in the air trying to line up something surprising. If the only things I'm allowed to consider in the first place are ideas that have already been done over and over and over again, I am screwed. However, there are ways around this, because we all know that there are tons of untried ideas still out there, and plenty of them will turn out to be every bit as reliable as we need, it's just that we don't yet know they are reliable when we are at this planning phase. So what we do is we try to identify some place where there might just be a ton of those untried ideas. We try to find a sandbox and then we gamble a whole bunch of our resources on getting in that sandbox and playing. (Laughter) Because we have to trust that it's the process in the sandbox that will reveal to us which ideas are not only surprising, but surprisingly reliable. So some of the sandboxes that we've started videos with. Let's play with optical illusions. Let's try to dance on moving surfaces. Let's try to make toast with a laser cutter. Or let's do something in one of those zero-gravity airplanes. But then instead of actually trying to sit there and think out what that something is, we spent a full third of our budget getting in an actual Vomit Comet and bouncing off the walls for a week. So this may seem to you like testing, but it really isn't, because at this point we don't yet know what our idea is, we don't have a plan to be testing. So we're just — we're just playing, we're just trying everything we can think of, because we need to get this idea space filled up with a chaos like the one in my high school bedroom. Because then, if we can do the bob and weave thing, if we can put our thumbs up and get just a few things to line up — (Ding) chances are no one else has ever made those same things line up before. And when we're done with that project, people will ask us again how we thought of that idea, and we'll be stumped, because from our perspective, it doesn't feel like we thought of it at all, it just feels like we found it. So we'll play another video for you now and the song along with it. This is for the song "The One Moment," and for this one, the sandbox was ballistics and math. So I spent a full month putting together a giant spreadsheet for this. It was like my playspace was 400 lines long and 25 columns wide — which I presume that if anybody is going to understand that, it's this crowd. (Laughter) Nothing is better than a giant spreadsheet, right? (Laughter) Well, thank you everyone, very much. We are OK Go, and this is called "The One Moment." (Applause) [The One Moment] (Explosions) [What you just saw was real and it took 4.2 seconds] (Video) Let me know when it's safe. (Percussion) [Here's the same moment ... slowed down.] (Music) (Guitar) (Singing) You're right, there's nothing more lovely, there's nothing more profound than the certainty, than the certainty that all of this will end That all of this will end So open your arms to me, open your arms to me And this will be the one moment that matters, and this will be the one thing we remember, and this will be the reason to have been here, and this will be the one moment that matters — Oh ... (Guitar) (Singing) So while the mud reclaims our footprints, and while our bones keep looking back at the overgrowth that's swallowing the path — but for the grace of God go we, but for the grace of God go we But for the grace of time and chance and entropy's cruel hands — So open your arms to me, open your arms to me And this will be the one moment that matters, and this will be the one thing we remember, and this will be the reason to have been here, and this will be the one moment that matters Oh ... So won't you stay here with me and we'll build 'til we've blistered our hands So won't you stay here with me and we'll build us some temples, build us some castles, build us some monuments and burn them all right down (Music) (Singing) So open your arms to me And this will be the one moment that matters, and this will be the reason to have been here, and this will be the one thing we remember, and this will be the one moment that matters So won't you stay here with me, we'll build 'til we blister our hands And this will be the one moment that matters — So won't you stay here with me and build us some temples — This will be the one moment that matters — Build us some temples — The one moment that matters — Build us some monuments — The one moment that matters Build us some temples — The one moment that matters. Build us some monuments — The one moment that matters, oh (Guitar) (Applause) |
How pollution is changing the ocean's chemistry | {0: 'Triona McGrath researches how the oceans are changing due to human activities.'} | TEDxFulbrightDublin | Do you ever think about how important the oceans are in our daily lives? The oceans cover two-thirds of our planet. They provide half the oxygen we breathe. They moderate our climate. And they provide jobs and medicine and food including 20 percent of protein to feed the entire world population. People used to think that the oceans were so vast that they wouldn't be affected by human activities. Well today I'm going to tell you about a serious reality that is changing our oceans called ocean acidification, or the evil twin of climate change. Did you know that the oceans have absorbed 25 percent of all of the carbon dioxide that we have emitted to the atmosphere? Now this is just another great service provided by the oceans since carbon dioxide is one of the greenhouse gases that's causing climate change. But as we keep pumping more and more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere more is dissolving into the oceans. And this is what's changing our ocean chemistry. When carbon dioxide dissolves in seawater, it undergoes a number of chemical reactions. Now lucky for you, I don't have time to get into the details of the chemistry for today. But I'll tell you as more carbon dioxide enters the ocean, the seawater pH goes down. And this basically means that there is an increase in ocean acidity. And this whole process is called ocean acidification. And it's happening alongside climate change. Scientists have been monitoring ocean acidification for over two decades. This figure is an important time series in Hawaii, and the top line shows steadily increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide, or CO2 gas, in the atmosphere. And this is directly as a result of human activities. The line underneath shows the increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide that is dissolved in the surface of the ocean which you can see is increasing at the same rate as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since measurements began. The line on the bottom shows then shows the change in chemistry. As more carbon dioxide has entered the ocean, the seawater pH has gone down, which basically means there has been an increase in ocean acidity. Now in Ireland, scientists are also monitoring ocean acidification — scientists at the Marine Institute and NUI Galway. And we, too, are seeing acidification at the same rate as these main ocean time-series sites around the world. So it's happening right at our doorstep. Now I'd like to give you an example of just how we collect our data to monitor a changing ocean. Firstly we collect a lot of our samples in the middle of winter. So as you can imagine, in the North Atlantic we get hit with some seriously stormy conditions — so not for any of you who get a little motion sickness, but we are collecting some very valuable data. So we lower this instrument over the side of the ship, and there are sensors that are mounted on the bottom that can tell us information about the surrounding water, such as temperature or dissolved oxygen. And then we can collect our seawater samples in these large bottles. So we start at the bottom, which can be over four kilometers deep just off our continental shelf, and we take samples at regular intervals right up to the surface. We take the seawater back on the deck, and then we can either analyze them on the ship or back in the laboratory for the different chemicals parameters. But why should we care? How is ocean acidification going to affect all of us? Well, here are the worrying facts. There has already been an increase in ocean acidity of 26 percent since pre-industrial times, which is directly due to human activities. Unless we can start slowing down our carbon dioxide emissions, we're expecting an increase in ocean acidity of 170 percent by the end of this century. I mean this is within our children's lifetime. This rate of acidification is 10 times faster than any acidification in our oceans for over 55 million years. So our marine life have never, ever experienced such a fast rate of change before. So we literally could not know how they're going to cope. Now there was a natural acidification event millions of years ago, which was much slower than what we're seeing today. And this coincided with a mass extinction of many marine species. So is that what we're headed for? Well, maybe. Studies are showing some species are actually doing quite well but many are showing a negative response. One of the big concerns is as ocean acidity increases, the concentration of carbonate ions in seawater decrease. Now these ions are basically the building blocks for many marine species to make their shells, for example crabs or mussels, oysters. Another example are corals. They also need these carbonate ions in seawater to make their coral structure in order to build coral reefs. As ocean acidity increases and the concentration of carbonate ions decrease, these species first find it more difficult to make their shells. And at even even lower levels, they can actually begin to dissolve. This here is a pteropod, it's called a sea butterfly. And it's an important food source in the ocean for many species, from krill to salmon right up to whales. The shell of the pteropod was placed into seawater at a pH that we're expecting by the end of this century. After only 45 days at this very realistic pH, you can see the shell has almost completely dissolved. So ocean acidification could affect right up through the food chain — and right onto our dinner plates. I mean who here likes shellfish? Or salmon? Or many other fish species whose food source in the ocean could be affected? These are cold-water corals. And did you know we actually have cold-water corals in Irish waters, just off our continental shelf? And they support rich biodiversity, including some very important fisheries. It's projected that by the end of this century, 70 percent of all known cold-water corals in the entire ocean will be surrounded by seawater that is dissolving their coral structure. The last example I have are these healthy tropical corals. They were placed in seawater at a pH we're expecting by the year 2100. After six months, the coral has almost completely dissolved. Now coral reefs support 25 percent of all marine life in the entire ocean. All marine life. So you can see: ocean acidification is a global threat. I have an eight-month-old baby boy. Unless we start now to slow this down, I dread to think what our oceans will look like when he's a grown man. We will see acidification. We have already put too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But we can slow this down. We can prevent the worst-case scenario. The only way of doing that is by reducing our carbon dioxide emissions. This is important for both you and I, for industry, for governments. We need to work together, slow down global warming slow down ocean acidification and help to maintain a healthy ocean and a healthy planet for our generation and for generations to come. (Applause) |
Don't fear intelligent machines. Work with them | {0: 'Garry Kasparov is esteemed by many as the greatest chess player of all time. Now he’s engaged in a game with far higher stakes: the preservation of democracy.'} | TED2017 | This story begins in 1985, when at age 22, I became the World Chess Champion after beating Anatoly Karpov. Earlier that year, I played what is called simultaneous exhibition against 32 of the world's best chess-playing machines in Hamburg, Germany. I won all the games, and then it was not considered much of a surprise that I could beat 32 computers at the same time. To me, that was the golden age. (Laughter) Machines were weak, and my hair was strong. (Laughter) Just 12 years later, I was fighting for my life against just one computer in a match called by the cover of "Newsweek" "The Brain's Last Stand." No pressure. (Laughter) From mythology to science fiction, human versus machine has been often portrayed as a matter of life and death. John Henry, called the steel-driving man in the 19th century African American folk legend, was pitted in a race against a steam-powered hammer bashing a tunnel through mountain rock. John Henry's legend is a part of a long historical narrative pitting humanity versus technology. And this competitive rhetoric is standard now. We are in a race against the machines, in a fight or even in a war. Jobs are being killed off. People are being replaced as if they had vanished from the Earth. It's enough to think that the movies like "The Terminator" or "The Matrix" are nonfiction. There are very few instances of an arena where the human body and mind can compete on equal terms with a computer or a robot. Actually, I wish there were a few more. Instead, it was my blessing and my curse to literally become the proverbial man in the man versus machine competition that everybody is still talking about. In the most famous human-machine competition since John Henry, I played two matches against the IBM supercomputer, Deep Blue. Nobody remembers that I won the first match — (Laughter) (Applause) In Philadelphia, before losing the rematch the following year in New York. But I guess that's fair. There is no day in history, special calendar entry for all the people who failed to climb Mt. Everest before Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay made it to the top. And in 1997, I was still the world champion when chess computers finally came of age. I was Mt. Everest, and Deep Blue reached the summit. I should say of course, not that Deep Blue did it, but its human creators — Anantharaman, Campbell, Hoane, Hsu. Hats off to them. As always, machine's triumph was a human triumph, something we tend to forget when humans are surpassed by our own creations. Deep Blue was victorious, but was it intelligent? No, no it wasn't, at least not in the way Alan Turing and other founders of computer science had hoped. It turned out that chess could be crunched by brute force, once hardware got fast enough and algorithms got smart enough. Although by the definition of the output, grandmaster-level chess, Deep Blue was intelligent. But even at the incredible speed, 200 million positions per second, Deep Blue's method provided little of the dreamed-of insight into the mysteries of human intelligence. Soon, machines will be taxi drivers and doctors and professors, but will they be "intelligent?" I would rather leave these definitions to the philosophers and to the dictionary. What really matters is how we humans feel about living and working with these machines. When I first met Deep Blue in 1996 in February, I had been the world champion for more than 10 years, and I had played 182 world championship games and hundreds of games against other top players in other competitions. I knew what to expect from my opponents and what to expect from myself. I was used to measure their moves and to gauge their emotional state by watching their body language and looking into their eyes. And then I sat across the chessboard from Deep Blue. I immediately sensed something new, something unsettling. You might experience a similar feeling the first time you ride in a driverless car or the first time your new computer manager issues an order at work. But when I sat at that first game, I couldn't be sure what is this thing capable of. Technology can advance in leaps, and IBM had invested heavily. I lost that game. And I couldn't help wondering, might it be invincible? Was my beloved game of chess over? These were human doubts, human fears, and the only thing I knew for sure was that my opponent Deep Blue had no such worries at all. (Laughter) I fought back after this devastating blow to win the first match, but the writing was on the wall. I eventually lost to the machine but I didn't suffer the fate of John Henry who won but died with his hammer in his hand. [John Henry Died with a Hammer in His Hand Palmer C. Hayden] [The Museum of African American Art, Los Angeles] It turned out that the world of chess still wanted to have a human chess champion. And even today, when a free chess app on the latest mobile phone is stronger than Deep Blue, people are still playing chess, even more than ever before. Doomsayers predicted that nobody would touch the game that could be conquered by the machine, and they were wrong, proven wrong, but doomsaying has always been a popular pastime when it comes to technology. What I learned from my own experience is that we must face our fears if we want to get the most out of our technology, and we must conquer those fears if we want to get the best out of our humanity. While licking my wounds, I got a lot of inspiration from my battles against Deep Blue. As the old Russian saying goes, if you can't beat them, join them. Then I thought, what if I could play with a computer — together with a computer at my side, combining our strengths, human intuition plus machine's calculation, human strategy, machine tactics, human experience, machine's memory. Could it be the perfect game ever played? My idea came to life in 1998 under the name of Advanced Chess when I played this human-plus-machine competition against another elite player. But in this first experiment, we both failed to combine human and machine skills effectively. Advanced Chess found its home on the internet, and in 2005, a so-called freestyle chess tournament produced a revelation. A team of grandmasters and top machines participated, but the winners were not grandmasters, not a supercomputer. The winners were a pair of amateur American chess players operating three ordinary PCs at the same time. Their skill of coaching their machines effectively counteracted the superior chess knowledge of their grandmaster opponents and much greater computational power of others. And I reached this formulation. A weak human player plus a machine plus a better process is superior to a very powerful machine alone, but more remarkably, is superior to a strong human player plus machine and an inferior process. This convinced me that we would need better interfaces to help us coach our machines towards more useful intelligence. Human plus machine isn't the future, it's the present. Everybody that's used online translation to get the gist of a news article from a foreign newspaper, knowing its far from perfect. Then we use our human experience to make sense out of that, and then the machine learns from our corrections. This model is spreading and investing in medical diagnosis, security analysis. The machine crunches data, calculates probabilities, gets 80 percent of the way, 90 percent, making it easier for analysis and decision-making of the human party. But you are not going to send your kids to school in a self-driving car with 90 percent accuracy, even with 99 percent. So we need a leap forward to add a few more crucial decimal places. Twenty years after my match with Deep Blue, second match, this sensational "The Brain's Last Stand" headline has become commonplace as intelligent machines move in every sector, seemingly every day. But unlike in the past, when machines replaced farm animals, manual labor, now they are coming after people with college degrees and political influence. And as someone who fought machines and lost, I am here to tell you this is excellent, excellent news. Eventually, every profession will have to feel these pressures or else it will mean humanity has ceased to make progress. We don't get to choose when and where technological progress stops. We cannot slow down. In fact, we have to speed up. Our technology excels at removing difficulties and uncertainties from our lives, and so we must seek out ever more difficult, ever more uncertain challenges. Machines have calculations. We have understanding. Machines have instructions. We have purpose. Machines have objectivity. We have passion. We should not worry about what our machines can do today. Instead, we should worry about what they still cannot do today, because we will need the help of the new, intelligent machines to turn our grandest dreams into reality. And if we fail, if we fail, it's not because our machines are too intelligent, or not intelligent enough. If we fail, it's because we grew complacent and limited our ambitions. Our humanity is not defined by any skill, like swinging a hammer or even playing chess. There's one thing only a human can do. That's dream. So let us dream big. Thank you. (Applause) |
Am I not human? A call for criminal justice reform | {0: 'Marlon Peterson is a writer, youth development expert and human justice advocate.'} | TED Residency | She wrote: "When I become famous, I will tell everyone that I know a hero named Marlon Peterson." Heroes rarely look like me. In fact, I'm what garbage looks like. No, not the most appealing way to open a talk or start a conversation, and perhaps you have some questions going through your head about that. Why would this man say such a thing about himself? What does he mean? How can someone view him as a hero when he sees himself as garbage? I believe we learn more from questions than we do from answers. Because when we're questioning something, we're invested in taking in some sort of new information, or grappling with some sort of ignorance that makes us feel uncomfortable. And that's why I'm here: to push us to question, even when it makes us uncomfortable. My parents are from Trinidad and Tobago, the southernmost island in the Caribbean. Trinidad is also home to the only acoustic instrument invented in the 20th century: the steel pan. Deriving from the African drums and evolving from the genius of one of the ghettos in Trinidad, a city called Laventille, and the disregard of the American military ... Well, I should tell you, America, during WWII, had military bases set up in Trinidad, and when the war ended, they left the island littered with empty oil drums — their trash. So people from Laventille repurposed the old drums left behind into the full chromatic scale: the steel pan. Playing music now from Beethoven to Bob Marley to 50 Cent, those people literally made music out of garbage. Twelve days before my 20th birthday, I was arrested for my role in a violent robbery attempt in lower Manhattan. While people were sitting in a coffee shop, four people were shot. Two were killed. Five of us were arrested. We were all the products of Trinidad and Tobago. We were the "bad immigrants," or the "anchor babies" that Trump and millions of Americans easily malign. I was discarded, like waste material — and justifiably so to many. I eventually served 10 years, two months and seven days of a prison sentence. I was sentenced to a decade of punishment in a correctional institution. I was sentenced to irrelevance — the opposite of humanity. Interestingly, it was during those years in prison that a series of letters redeemed me, helped me move beyond the darkness and the guilt associated with the worst moment of my young life. It gave me a sense that I was useful. She was 13 years old. She had wrote that she saw me as a hero. I remember reading that, and I remember crying when I read those words. She was one of over 50 students and 150 letters that I wrote during a mentoring correspondence program that I co-designed with a friend who was a teacher at a middle school in Brooklyn, my hometown. We called it the Young Scholars Program. Every time those young people shared their stories with me, their struggles, every time they drew a picture of their favorite cartoon character and sent it to me, every time they said they depended on my letters or my words of advice, it boosted my sense of worthiness. It gave me a sense of what I could contribute to this planet. It transformed my life. Because of those letters and what they shared with me, their stories of teen life, they gave me the permission, they gave me the courage to admit to myself that there were reasons — not excuses — but that there were reasons for that fateful day in October of 1999; that the trauma associated with living in a community where guns are easier to get than sneakers; that the trauma associated with being raped at gunpoint at the age of 14; that those are reasons for me why making that decision, that fatal decision, was not an unlikely proposition. Because those letters mattered so much to me, because writing and receiving and having that communication with those folks so hugely impacted my life, I decided to share the opportunity with some friends of mine who were also inside with me. My friends Bill and Cory and Arocks, all in prison for violent crimes also, shared their words of wisdom with the young people as well, and received the sense of relevancy in return. We are now published writers and youth program innovators and trauma experts and gun violence prevention advocates, and TED talkers and — (Laughter) and good daddies. That's what I call a positive return of investment. Above all else, what building that program taught me was that when we sow, when we invest in the humanity of people no matter where they're at, we can reap amazing rewards. In this latest era of criminal justice reform, I often question and wonder why — why is it that so many believe that only those who have been convicted of nonviolent drug offenses merit empathy and recognized humanity? Criminal justice reform is human justice. Am I not human? When we invest in resources that amplify the relevancy of people in communities like Laventille or parts of Brooklyn or a ghetto near you, we can literally create the communities that we want. We can do better. We can do better than investing solely in law enforcement as a resource, because they don't give us a sense of relevancy that is at the core of why so many of us do so many harmful things in the pursuit of mattering. See, gun violence is just a visible display of a lot of underlying traumas. When we invest in the redemptive value of relevancy, we can render a return of both personal responsibility and healing. That's the people work I care about, because people work. Family, I'm asking you to do the hard work, the difficult work, the churning work of bestowing undeserved kindness upon those who we can relegate as garbage, who we can disregard and discard easily. I'm asking myself. Over the past two months, I've lost two friends to gun violence, both innocent bystanders. One was caught in a drive-by while walking home. The other was sitting in a café while eating breakfast, while on vacation in Miami. I'm asking myself to see the redemptive value of relevancy in the people that murdered them, because of the hard work of seeing the value in me. I'm pushing us to challenge our own capacity to fully experience our humanity, by understanding the full biography of people who we can easily choose not to see, because heroes are waiting to be recognized, and music is waiting to be made. Thank you. (Applause) |
No one should die because they live too far from a doctor | {0: 'A billion people around the world lack access to health care because they live too far from a clinic. 2017 TED Prize winner Raj Panjabi aims to extend health services to the last mile.'} | TED2017 | I want to share with you something my father taught me: no condition is permanent. It's a lesson he shared with me again and again, and I learned it to be true the hard way. Here I am in my fourth-grade class. This is my yearbook picture taken in my class in school in Monrovia, Liberia. My parents migrated from India to West Africa in the 1970s, and I had the privilege of growing up there. I was nine years old, I loved kicking around a soccer ball, and I was a total math and science geek. I was living the kind of life that, really, any child would dream of. But no condition is permanent. On Christmas Eve in 1989, civil war erupted in Liberia. The war started in the rural countryside, and within months, rebel armies had marched towards our hometown. My school shut down, and when the rebel armies captured the only international airport, people started panicking and fleeing. My mom came knocking one morning and said, "Raj, pack your things — we have to go." We were rushed to the center of town, and there on a tarmac, we were split into two lines. I stood with my family in one line, and we were stuffed into the cargo hatch of a rescue plane. And there on a bench, I was sitting with my heart racing. As I looked out the open hatch, I saw hundreds of Liberians in another line, children strapped to their backs. When they tried to jump in with us, I watched soldiers restrain them. They were not allowed to flee. We were the lucky ones. We lost what we had, but we resettled in America, and as immigrants, we benefitted from the community of supporters that rallied around us. They took my family into their home, they mentored me. And they helped my dad start a clothing shop. I'd visit my father on weekends as a teenager to help him sell sneakers and jeans. And every time business would get bad, he'd remind me of that mantra: no condition is permanent. That mantra and my parents' persistence and that community of supporters made it possible for me to go through college and eventually to medical school. I'd once had my hopes crushed in a war, but because of them, I had a chance to pursue my dream to become a doctor. My condition had changed. It had been 15 years since I escaped that airfield, but the memory of those two lines had not escaped my mind. I was a medical student in my mid-20s, and I wanted to go back to see if I could serve the people we'd left behind. But when I got back, what I found was utter destruction. The war had left us with just 51 doctors to serve a country of four million people. It would be like the city of San Francisco having just 10 doctors. So if you got sick in the city where those few doctors remain, you might stand a chance. But if you got sick in the remote, rural rainforest communities, where you could be days from the nearest clinic — I was seeing my patients die from conditions no one should die from, all because they were getting to me too late. Imagine you have a two-year-old who wakes up one morning with a fever, and you realize she could have malaria, and you know the only way to get her the medicine she needs would be to take her to the riverbed, get in a canoe, paddle to the other side and then walk for up to two days through the forest just to reach the nearest clinic. One billion people live in the world's most remote communities, and despite the advances we've made in modern medicine and technology, our innovations are not reaching the last mile. These communities have been left behind, because they've been thought too hard to reach and too difficult to serve. Illness is universal; access to care is not. And realizing this lit a fire in my soul. No one should die because they live too far from a doctor or clinic. No condition should be permanent. And help in this case didn't come from the outside, it actually came from within. It came from the communities themselves. Meet Musu. Way out in rural Liberia, where most girls have not had a chance to finish primary school, Musu had been persistent. At the age of 18, she completed high school, and she came back to her community. She saw that none of the children were getting treatment for the diseases they needed treatment for — deadly diseases, like malaria and pneumonia. So she signed up to be a volunteer. There are millions of volunteers like Musu in rural parts around our world, and we got to thinking — community members like Musu could actually help us solve a puzzle. Our health care system is structured in such a way that the work of diagnosing disease and prescribing medicines is limited to a team of nurses and doctors like me. But nurses and doctors are concentrated in cities, so rural communities like Musu's have been left behind. So we started asking some questions: What if we could reorganize the medical care system? What if we could have community members like Musu be a part or even be the center of our medical team? What if Musu could help us bring health care from clinics in cities to the doorsteps of her neighbors? Musu was 48 when I met her. And despite her amazing talent and grit, she hadn't had a paying job in 30 years. So what if technology could support her? What if we could invest in her with real training, equip her with real medicines, and have her have a real job? Well, in 2007, I was trying to answer these questions, and my wife and I were getting married that year. We asked our relatives to forgo the wedding registry gifts and instead donate some money so we could have some start-up money to launch a nonprofit. I promise you, I'm a lot more romantic than that. (Laughter) We ended up raising $6,000, teamed up with some Liberians and Americans and launched a nonprofit called Last Mile Health. Our goal is to bring a health worker within reach of everyone, everywhere. We designed a three-step process — train, equip and pay — to invest more deeply in volunteers like Musu to become paraprofessionals, to become community health workers. First we trained Musu to prevent, diagnose and treat the top 10 diseases afflicting families in her village. A nurse supervisor visited her every month to coach her. We equipped her with modern medical technology, like this $1 malaria rapid test, and put it in a backpack full of medicines like this to treat infections like pneumonia, and crucially, a smartphone, to help her track and report on epidemics. Last, we recognized the dignity in Musu's work. With the Liberian government, we created a contract, paid her and gave her the chance to have a real job. And she's amazing. Musu has learned over 30 medical skills, from screening children for malnutrition, to assessing the cause of a child's cough with a smartphone, to supporting people with HIV and providing follow-up care to patients who've lost their limbs. Working as part of our team, working as paraprofessionals, community health workers can help ensure that a lot of what your family doctor would do reaches the places that most family doctors could never go. One of my favorite things to do is to care for patients with community health workers. So last year I was visiting A.B., and like Musu, A.B. had had a chance to go to school. He was in middle school, in the eighth grade, when his parents died. He became an orphan and had to drop out. Last year, we hired and trained A.B. as a community health worker. And while he was making door to door house calls, he met this young boy named Prince, whose mother had had trouble breastfeeding him, and by the age of six months, Prince had started to waste away. A.B. had just been taught how to use this color-coded measuring tape that wraps around the upper arm of a child to diagnose malnutrition. A.B. noticed that Prince was in the red zone, which meant he had to be hospitalized. So A.B. took Prince and his mother to the river, got in a canoe and paddled for four hours to get to the hospital. Later, after Prince was discharged, A.B. taught mom how to feed baby a food supplement. A few months ago, A.B. took me to visit Prince, and he's a chubby little guy. (Laughter) He's meeting his milestones, he's pulled himself up to a stand, and is even starting to say a few words. I'm so inspired by these community health workers. I often ask them why they do what they do, and when I asked A.B., he said, "Doc, since I dropped out of school, this is the first time I'm having a chance to hold a pen to write. My brain is getting fresh." The stories of A.B. and Musu have taught me something fundamental about being human. Our will to serve others can actually help us transform our own conditions. I was so moved by how powerful the will to serve our neighbors can be a few years ago, when we faced a global catastrophe. In December 2013, something happened in the rainforests across the border from us in Guinea. A toddler named Emile fell sick with vomiting, fever and diarrhea. He lived in an area where the roads were sparse and there had been massive shortages of health workers. Emile died, and a few weeks later his sister died, and a few weeks later his mother died. And this disease would spread from one community to another. And it wasn't until three months later that the world recognized this as Ebola. When every minute counted, we had already lost months, and by then the virus had spread like wildfire all across West Africa, and eventually to other parts of the world. Businesses shut down, airlines started canceling routes. At the height of the crisis, when we were told that 1.4 million people could be infected, when we were told that most of them would die, when we had nearly lost all hope, I remember standing with a group of health workers in the rainforest where an outbreak had just happened. We were helping train and equip them to put on the masks, the gloves and the gowns that they needed to keep themselves safe from the virus while they were serving their patients. I remember the fear in their eyes. And I remember staying up at night, terrified if I'd made the right call to keep them in the field. When Ebola threatened to bring humanity to its knees, Liberia's community health workers didn't surrender to fear. They did what they had always done: they answered the call to serve their neighbors. Community members across Liberia learned the symptoms of Ebola, teamed up with nurses and doctors to go door-to-door to find the sick and get them into care. They tracked thousands of people who had been exposed to the virus and helped break the chain of transmission. Some ten thousand community health workers risked their own lives to help hunt down this virus and stop it in its tracks. (Applause) Today, Ebola has come under control in West Africa, and we've learned a few things. We've learned that blind spots in rural health care can lead to hot spots of disease, and that places all of us at greater risk. We've learned that the most efficient emergency system is actually an everyday system, and that system has to reach all communities, including rural communities like Emile's. And most of all, we've learned from the courage of Liberia's community health workers that we as people are not defined by the conditions we face, no matter how hopeless they seem. We're defined by how we respond to them. For the past 15 years, I've seen the power of this idea to transform everyday citizens into community health workers — into everyday heroes. And I've seen it play out everywhere, from the forest communities of West Africa, to the rural fishing villages of Alaska. It's true, these community health workers aren't doing neurosurgery, but they're making it possible to bring health care within reach of everyone everywhere. So now what? Well, we know that there are still millions of people dying from preventable causes in rural communities around the world. And we know that the great majority of these deaths are happening in these 75 blue-shaded countries. What we also know is that if we trained an army of community health workers to learn even just 30 lifesaving skills, we could save the lives of nearly 30 million people by 2030. Thirty services could save 30 million lives by 2030. That's not just a blueprint — we're proving this can be done. In Liberia, the Liberian government is training thousands of workers like A.B. and Musu after Ebola, to bring health care to every child and family in the country. And we've been honored to work with them, and are now teaming up with a number of organizations that are working across other countries to try to help them do the same thing. If we could help these countries scale, we could save millions of lives, and at the same time, we could create millions of jobs. We simply can't do that, though, without technology. People are worried that technology is going to steal our jobs, but when it comes to community health workers, technology has actually been vital for creating jobs. Without technology — without this smartphone, without this rapid test — it would have been impossible for us to be able to employ A.B. and Musu. And I think it's time for technology to help us train, to help us train people faster and better than ever before. As a doctor, I use technology to stay up-to-date and keep certified. I use smartphones, I use apps, I use online courses. But when A.B. wants to learn, he's got to jump back in that canoe and get to the training center. And when Musu shows up for training, her instructors are stuck using flip charts and markers. Why shouldn't they have the same access to learn as I do? If we truly want community health workers to master those lifesaving skills and even more, we've got to change this old-school model of education. Tech can truly be a game changer here. I've been in awe of the digital education revolution that the likes of Khan Academy and edX have been leading. And I've been thinking that it's time; it's time for a collision between the digital education revolution and the community health revolution. And so, this brings me to my TED Prize wish. I wish — I wish that you would help us recruit the largest army of community health workers the world has ever known by creating the Community Health Academy, a global platform to train, connect and empower. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Here's the idea: we'll create and curate the best in digital education resources. We will bring those to community health workers around the world, including A.B. and Musu. They'll get video lessons on giving kids vaccines and have online courses on spotting the next outbreak, so they're not stuck using flip charts. We'll help these countries accredit these workers, so that they're not stuck remaining an under-recognized, undervalued group, but become a renowned, empowered profession, just like nurses and doctors. And we'll create a network of companies and entrepreneurs who've created innovations that can save lives and help them connect to workers like Musu, so she can help better serve her community. And we'll work tirelessly to persuade governments to make community health workers a cornerstone of their health care plans. We plan to test and prototype the academy in Liberia and a few other partner countries, and then we plan to take it global, including to rural North America. With the power of this platform, we believe countries can be more persuaded that a health care revolution really is possible. My dream is that this academy will contribute to the training of hundreds of thousands of community members to help bring health care to their neighbors — the hundreds of millions of them that live in the world's most remote communities, from the forest communities of West Africa, to the fishing villages of rural Alaska; from the hilltops of Appalachia, to the mountains of Afghanistan. If this vision is aligned with yours, head to communityhealthacademy.org, and join this revolution. Let us know if you or your organization or someone you know could help us as we try to build this academy over the next year. Now, as I look out into this room, I realize that our journeys are not self-made; they're shaped by others. And there have been so many here that have been part of this cause. We're so honored to be part of this community, and a community that's willing to take on a cause as audacious as this one, so I wanted to offer, as I end, a reflection. I think a lot more about what my father taught me. These days, I too have become a dad. I have two sons, and my wife and I just learned that she's pregnant with our third child. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) I was recently caring for a woman in Liberia who, like my wife, was in her third pregnancy. But unlike my wife, had had no prenatal care with her first two babies. She lived in an isolated community in the forest that had gone for 100 years without any health care until ... until last year when a nurse trained her neighbors to become community health workers. So here I was, seeing this patient who was in her second trimester, and I pulled out the ultrasound to check on the baby, and she started telling us stories about her first two kids, and I had the ultrasound probe on her belly, and she just stopped mid-sentence. She turned to me and she said, "Doc, what's that sound?" It was the first time she'd ever heard her baby's heartbeat. And her eyes lit up in the same way my wife's eyes and my own eyes lit up when we heard our baby's heartbeat. For all of human history, illness has been universal and access to care has not. But as a wise man once told me: no condition is permanent. It's time. It's time for us to go as far as it takes to change this condition together. Thank you. (Applause) |
Songs that bring history to life | {0: 'With a rich voice and an equally rich sense of history, Rhiannon Giddens animates American folk tradition with her electrifying song interpretations.'} | TED2016 | (Sings) Water Boy (Guitar strum) where are you hidin'? (Guitar strum) If you don't come right here, I'm gonna tell your pa on you. (Guitar strum) There ain't no hammer — (Guitar strum) that's on this mountain (Guitar strum) That ring like mine, boy — (Guitar strum) that ring like mine. (Guitar strum) I'm gonna bust this rock, boy — (Guitar strum) from here to Macon. (Guitar strum) All the way to the jail, boy — (Guitar strum) all the way to the jail. (Guitar strum) You jack of diamonds — (Music) you jack of diamonds I know you of old boy, I know you of old. You done robbed my pocket, you done robbed my pocket of silver and gold, boy, of silver and gold. Water Boy, where are you hidin'? If you don't come right here, I'm gonna tell your pa on you. There ain't no hammer that's on this mountain that ring like mine, boy, that ring like mine. I'm gonna bust this rock, boy, from here to Macon. All the way to the jail, boy, all the way to the jail. Water Boy (Guitar strum) where are you hidin'? (Guitar strum) If you don't come right here, if you don't come right here, if you don't come right here, I'm gonna tell your pa on you. (Guitar strum) (Applause) Thank you. That was a song based on numerous work songs, and it was arranged by Odetta, a hero of mine. And this next song, well, I do a lot of historical music, starting with the Carolina Chocolate Drops and continuing on in my solo endeavors. And I believe that knowing your history as a musician is super important — it's important as a person, it's important as a country, it's important as a people. So I read a lot about where the music comes from and where this country comes from. I've been reading a lot about the Civil War and about slavery. And it's really tough. You know? It's really tough reading. And so as an artist, what I do with all that emotion, reading these people's stories, not just, "Oh, slavery was terrible." Yes, it was. But it's reading individual narratives of how it was for these people. You know? Then it's like, "Yeah, that could've been me." And it is people now. You know? So what you do with all that emotion is you've got to do something with it. As an artist, I write. So I wrote a song based on some of those narratives that I read, and it's called, "Come Love Come." We're going to do it for you now. (Claps) (Sings) Come love come, the road lies low, the way is long and hard, I know. Come love come, the road lies free, I'll wait for you in Tennessee. (Music) (Sings) When I was four, my loving mam was cornered by the boss's man. She turned her head and got struck down, they buried her in the cold, cold ground. Come love come, the road lies low, the way is long and hard, I know. Come love come, the road lies free, I'll wait for you in Tennessee. (Music) When I was 12, my father dear was strong of arm and free of fear until the day he raised his hand, then he was sold to Alabama. Come love come, the road lies low, the way is long and hard, I know. Come love come, the road lies free, I'll wait for you in Tennessee. (Music) When I was 16, found my bloom and found my man, we jumped the broom. We pledged each other the rest of our lives and on Saturday nights we were man and wife. Come love come, the road lies low, the way is long and hard, I know. Come love come, the road lies free, I'll wait for you in Tennessee. (Music) When I was 18, bugles called and boys in blue came o'er the wall. I took my chance and followed free, they led the way to Tennessee. Come love come, the road lies low, the way is long and hard, I know. Come love come, the road lies free, I'll wait for you in Tennessee. (Music) Now here I sit in a tiny shack with 13 others at my back. I've sent you word, so all I can do is wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait for you. Come love come, the road lies low, the way is long and hard, I know. Come love come, the road lies free, I'll wait for you in Tennessee. Come love come, the road lies low, the way is long and hard, I know. Come love come, the road lies free, I'll wait for you in Tennessee. Oh, oh, oh. Whoa ... oh I'll wait for you. I'll wait for you. I'll wait for you I'll wait for you. (Applause) Thank you. So, with the dark you have to have the light. And in the African-American community, it's been the work of many hundreds of years to find a way to lift ourselves up. So I'm going to end with a couple of tunes from Sister Rosetta Tharpe, one of the more influential American music figures that most of you probably never heard of. If you have, I'm so happy. She's one of the innovators of rock 'n' roll guitar, and one of the first crossover artists from gospel to secular. She's an incredibly important figure, and I'm going to talk about her whenever I can. So these are a couple of her tunes. And don't worry — you're going to get your chance to sing. (Music) (Sings) Look down, look down that lonesome road before you travel on. Look up, look up and greet your maker, for Gabriel blows his horn. Weary totin' such a load, goin' down that lonesome road. Look down that lonesome road, before you travel on. Look down, look down that lonesome road before you travel on. Look up, look up and greet your maker, for Gabriel blows his horn. Weary totin' such a load, goin' down that lonesome road. Look down, look down, look down, look down that lonesome road before you travel on. Up above my head up above my head I hear music in the air music in the air. Up above my head up above my head I hear music in the air I hear music in the air. Up above my head up above my head I hear music in the air music in the air and I really do believe I really do believe there's a Heaven somewhere. Up above my head up above my head I hear singin' in the air singin' in the air. Up above my head up above my head I hear singin' in the air I hear singin' in the air. Up above my head up above my head I hear singin' in the air singin' in the air and I really do believe I really do believe there's a Heaven somewhere. (Speaks) All right now, guitar man! (Guitar music) That's Hubby Jenkins, y'all. (Sings) Up above my head up above my head I hear shoutin' in the air shoutin' in the air. Up above my head up above my head I hear shoutin' in the air I hear shoutin' in the air. Up above my head up above my head I hear shoutin' in the air, that's right, and I really do believe I really do believe there's a heaven somewhere. (Speaks) All right now, give me some of that bass. (Bass solo) Yeah! Woo! Jason Sypher on the bass. Jamie Dick on those drums. All right now, I'm running out of time. So it's time for y'all to sing. This is the call-and-response. I call, you respond. There are so many songs like this, y'all know how it goes, don't you? You're going to sing along? I said, are you going to sing along? Audience members: Yes! Rhiannon Giddens: Here we go! (Sings) Up above my head AM: up above my head RG: music in the air AM: music in the air. RG: up above my head AM: up above my head RG: music in the air AM: music in the air RG: up above my head AM: up above my head RG: music in the air AM: music in the air RG: and I really do believe I really do believe there's a heaven somewhere. One more time! Up above my head AM: up above my head RG: I hear music in the air AM: music in the air. RG: Up above my head AM: up above my head RG: I hear music in the air AM: music in the air. RG: Up above my head AM: up above my head RG: I hear music in the air AM: music in the air RG: and I really do believe I really do believe there's a heaven somewhere. I said I really do believe I really do believe there's a heaven somewhere. Heaven somewhere. (Holds note) (Applause and cheers) (Music ends) (Applause) |
How to design a library that makes kids want to read | {0: 'Michael Bierut is a partner in the New York office of Pentagram, a founder of Design Observer and a teacher at Yale School of Art and Yale School of Management.'} | TEDNYC | So there's this thing called the law of unintended consequences. I thought it was just like a saying, but it actually exists, I guess. There's, like, academic papers about it. And I'm a designer. I don't like unintended consequences. People hire me because they have consequences that they really intend, and what they intend is for me to help them achieve those consequences. So I live in fear of unintended consequences. And so this is a story about consequences intended and unintended. I got called by an organization called Robin Hood to do a favor for them. Robin Hood is based in New York, a wonderful philanthropic organization that does what it says in the name. They take from rich people, give it to poor people. In this case, what they wanted to benefit was the New York City school system, a huge enterprise that educates more than a million students at a time, and in buildings that are like this one, old buildings, big buildings, drafty buildings, sometimes buildings that are in disrepair, certainly buildings that could use a renovation. Robin Hood had this ambition to improve these buildings in some way, but what they realized was to fix the buildings would be too expensive and impractical. So instead they tried to figure out what one room they could go into in each of these buildings, in as many buildings that they could, and fix that one room so that they could improve the lives of the children inside as they were studying. And what they came up with was the school library, and they came up with this idea called the Library Initiative. All the students have to pass through the library. That's where the books are. That's where the heart and soul of the school is. So let's fix these libraries. So they did this wonderful thing where they brought in first 10, then 20, then more architects, each one of whom was assigned a library to rethink what a library was. They trained special librarians. So they started this mighty enterprise to reform public schools by improving these libraries. Then they called me up and they said, "Could you make a little contribution?" I said, "Sure, what do you want me to do?" And they said, "Well, we want you to be the graphic designer in charge of the whole thing." And so I thought, I know what that means. That means I get to design a logo. I know how to design that. I design logos. That's what people come to me for. So OK, let's design a logo for this thing. Easy to do, actually, compared with architecture and being a librarian. Just do a logo, make a contribution, and then you're out, and you feel really good about yourself. And I'm a great guy and I like to feel good about myself when I do these favors. So I thought, let's overdeliver. I'm going to give you three logos, all based on this one idea. So you have three options, pick any of the three. They're all great, I said. So the basic idea was these would be new school libraries for New York schools, and so the idea is that it's a new thing, a new idea that needs a new name. What I wanted to do was dispel the idea that these were musty old libraries, the kind of places that everyone is bored with, you know, not your grandparents' library. Don't worry about that at all. This is going to this new, exciting thing, not a boring library. So option number one: so instead of thinking of it as a library, think of it as a place where it is like: do talk, do make loud noises. Right? So no shushing, it's like a shush-free zone. We're going to call it the Reading Room. That was option number one. OK, option number two. Option number two was, wait for it, OWL. I'll meet you at OWL. I'm getting my book from the OWL. Meet you after school down at OWL. I like that, right? Now, what does OWL stand for? Well, it could be One World Library, or it could be Open. Wonder. Learn. Or it could be — and I figure librarians could figure out other things it could be because they know about words. So other things, right? And then look at this. It's like the eye of the owl. This is irresistible in my opinion. But there's even another idea. Option number three. Option number three was based actually on language. It's the idea that "read" is the past tense of "read," and they're both spelled the same way. So why don't we call this place The Red Zone? I'll meet you at the Red Zone. Are you Red? Get Red. I'm well Red. (Laughter) I really loved this idea, and I somehow was not focused on the idea that librarians as a class are sort of interested in spelling and I don't know. (Laughter) But sometimes cleverness is more important than spelling, and I thought this would be one of those instances. So usually when I make these presentations I say there's just one question and the question should be, "How can I thank you, Mike?" But in this case, the question was more like, "Um, are you kidding?" Because, they said, the premise of all this work was that kids were bored with old libraries, musty old libraries. They were tired of them. And instead, they said, these kids have never really seen a library. The school libraries in these schools are really so dilapidated, if they're there at all, that they haven't bored anyone. They haven't even been there to bore anyone at all. So the idea was, just forget about giving it a new name. Just call it, one last try, a library. Right? OK. So I thought, OK, give it a little oomph? Exclamation point? Then — this is because I'm clever — move that into the "i," make it red, and there you have it, the Library Initiative. So I thought, mission accomplished, there's your logo. So what's interesting about this logo, an unintended consequence, was that it turned out that they didn't really even need my design because you could type it any font, you could write it by hand, and when they started sending emails around, they just would use Shift and 1, they'd get their own logo just right out of the thing. And I thought, well, that's fine. Feel free to use that logo. And then I embarked on the real rollout of this thing — working with every one of the architects to put this logo on the front door of their own library. Right? So here's the big rollout. Basically I'd work with different architects. First Robin Hood was my client. Now these architects were my client. I'd say, "Here's your logo. Put it on the door." "Here's your logo. Put it on both doors." "Here's your logo. Put it off to the side." "Here's your logo repeated all over to the top." So everything was going swimmingly. I just was saying, "Here's your logo. Here's your logo." Then I got a call from one of the architects, a guy named Richard Lewis, and he says, "I've got a problem. You're the graphics guy. Can you solve it?" And I said, OK, sure." And he said, "The problem is that there's a space between the shelf and the ceiling." So that sounds like an architectural issue to me, not a graphic design issue, so I'm, "Go on." And Richard says, "Well, the top shelf has to be low enough for the kid to reach it, but I'm in a big old building, and the ceilings are really high, so actually I've got all this space up there and I need something like a mural." And I'm like, "Whoa, you know, I'm a logo designer. I'm not Diego Rivera or something. I'm not a muralist." And so he said, "But can't you think of anything?" So I said, "OK, what if we just took pictures of the kids in the school and just put them around the top of the thing, and maybe that could work." And my wife is a photographer, and I said, "Dorothy, there's no budget, can you come to this school in east New York, take these pictures?" And she did, and if you go in Richard's library, which is one of the first that opened, it has this glorious frieze of, like, the heroes of the school, oversized, looking down into the little dollhouse of the real library, right? And the kids were great, hand-selected by the principals and the librarian. It just kind of created this heroic atmosphere in this library, this very dignified setting below and the joy of the children above. So naturally all the other librarians in the other schools see this and they said, well, we want murals too. And I'm like, OK. So then I think, well, it can't be the same mural every time, so Dorothy did another one, and then she did another one, but then we needed more help, so I called an illustrator I knew named Lynn Pauley, and Lynn did these beautiful paintings of the kids. Then I called a guy named Charles Wilkin at a place called Automatic Design. He did these amazing collages. We had Rafael Esquer do these great silhouettes. He would work with the kids, asking for words, and then based on those prompts, come up with this little, delirious kind of constellation of silhouettes of things that are in books. Peter Arkle interviewed the kids and had them talk about their favorite books and he put their testimony as a frieze up there. Stefan Sagmeister worked with Yuko Shimizu and they did this amazing manga-style statement, "Everyone who is honest is interesting," that goes all the way around. Christoph Niemann, brilliant illustrator, did a whole series of things where he embedded books into the faces and characters and images and places that you find in the books. And then even Maira Kalman did this amazing cryptic installation of objects and words that kind of go all around and will fascinate students for as long as it's up there. So this was really satisfying, and basically my role here was reading a series of dimensions to these artists, and I would say, "Three feet by 15 feet, whatever you want. Let me know if you have any problem with that." And they would go and install these. It just was the greatest thing. But the greatest thing, actually, was — Every once in a while, I'd get, like, an invitation in the mail made of construction paper, and it would say, "You are invited to the opening of our new library." So you'd go to the library, say, you'd go to PS10, and you'd go inside. There'd be balloons, there'd be a student ambassador, there'd be speeches that were read, poetry that was written specifically for the opening, dignitaries would present people with certificates, and the whole thing was just a delirious, fun party. So I loved going to these things. I would stand there dressed like this, obviously not belonging, and someone would say, "What are you doing here, mister?" And I'd say, "Well, I'm part of the team that designed this place." And they'd said, "You do these shelves?" And I said, "No." "You took the pictures up above." "No." "Well, what did you do?" "You know when you came in? The sign over the door?" "The sign that says library?" (Laughter) "Yeah, I did that!" And then they'd sort of go, "OK. Nice work if you can get it." So it was so satisfying going to these little openings despite the fact that I was kind of largely ignored or humiliated, but it was actually fun going to the openings, so I decided that I wanted to get the people in my office who had worked on these projects, get the illustrators and photographers, and I said, why don't we rent a van and drive around the five boroughs of New York and see how many we could hit at one time. And eventually there were going to be 60 of these libraries, so we probably got to see maybe half a dozen in one long day. And the best thing of all was meeting these librarians who kind of were running these, took possession of these places like their private stage upon which they were invited to mesmerize their students and bring the books to life, and it was just this really exciting experience for all of us to actually see these things in action. So we spent a long day doing this and we were in the very last library. It was still winter, because it got dark early, and the librarian says, "I'm about to close down. So really nice having you here. Hey, wait a second, do you want to see how I turn off the lights?" I'm like, "OK." And she said, "I have this special way that I do it." And then she showed me. What she did was she turned out every light one by one by one by one, and the last light she left on was the light that illuminated the kids' faces, and she said, "That's the last light I turn off every night, because I like to remind myself why I come to work." So when I started this whole thing, remember, it was just about designing that logo and being clever, come up with a new name? The unintended consequence here, which I would like to take credit for and like to think I can think through the experience to that extent, but I can't. I was just focused on a foot ahead of me, as far as I could reach with my own hands. Instead, way off in the distance was a librarian who was going to find the chain of consequences that we had set in motion, a source of inspiration so that she in this case could do her work really well. 40,000 kids a year are affected by these libraries. They've been happening for more than 10 years now, so those librarians have kind of turned on a generation of children to books and so it's been a thrill to find out that sometimes unintended consequences are the best consequences. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How to see past your own perspective and find truth | {0: 'Michael Patrick Lynch examines truth, democracy, public discourse and the ethics of technology in the age of big data. '} | TED2017 | So, imagine that you had your smartphone miniaturized and hooked up directly to your brain. If you had this sort of brain chip, you'd be able to upload and download to the internet at the speed of thought. Accessing social media or Wikipedia would be a lot like — well, from the inside at least — like consulting your own memory. It would be as easy and as intimate as thinking. But would it make it easier for you to know what's true? Just because a way of accessing information is faster it doesn't mean it's more reliable, of course, and it doesn't mean that we would all interpret it the same way. And it doesn't mean that you would be any better at evaluating it. In fact, you might even be worse, because, you know, more data, less time for evaluation. Something like this is already happening to us right now. We already carry a world of information around in our pockets, but it seems as if the more information we share and access online, the more difficult it can be for us to tell the difference between what's real and what's fake. It's as if we know more but understand less. Now, it's a feature of modern life, I suppose, that large swaths of the public live in isolated information bubbles. We're polarized: not just over values, but over the facts. One reason for that is, the data analytics that drive the internet get us not just more information, but more of the information that we want. Our online life is personalized; everything from the ads we read to the news that comes down our Facebook feed is tailored to satisfy our preferences. And so while we get more information, a lot of that information ends up reflecting ourselves as much as it does reality. It ends up, I suppose, inflating our bubbles rather than bursting them. And so maybe it's no surprise that we're in a situation, a paradoxical situation, of thinking that we know so much more, and yet not agreeing on what it is we know. So how are we going to solve this problem of knowledge polarization? One obvious tactic is to try to fix our technology, to redesign our digital platforms, so as to make them less susceptible to polarization. And I'm happy to report that many smart people at Google and Facebook are working on just that. And these projects are vital. I think that fixing technology is obviously really important, but I don't think technology alone, fixing it, is going to solve the problem of knowledge polarization. I don't think that because I don't think, at the end of the day, it is a technological problem. I think it's a human problem, having to do with how we think and what we value. In order to solve it, I think we're going to need help. We're going to need help from psychology and political science. But we're also going to need help, I think, from philosophy. Because to solve the problem of knowledge polarization, we're going to need to reconnect with one fundamental, philosophical idea: that we live in a common reality. The idea of a common reality is like, I suppose, a lot of philosophical concepts: easy to state but mysteriously difficult to put into practice. To really accept it, I think we need to do three things, each of which is a challenge right now. First, we need to believe in truth. You might have noticed that our culture is having something of a troubled relationship with that concept right now. It seems as if we disagree so much that, as one political commentator put it not long ago, it's as if there are no facts anymore. But that thought is actually an expression of a sort of seductive line of argument that's in the air. It goes like this: we just can't step outside of our own perspectives; we can't step outside of our biases. Every time we try, we just get more information from our perspective. So, this line of thought goes, we might as well admit that objective truth is an illusion, or it doesn't matter, because either we'll never know what it is, or it doesn't exist in the first place. That's not a new philosophical thought — skepticism about truth. During the end of the last century, as some of you know, it was very popular in certain academic circles. But it really goes back all the way to the Greek philosopher Protagoras, if not farther back. Protagoras said that objective truth was an illusion because "man is the measure of all things." Man is the measure of all things. That can seem like a bracing bit of realpolitik to people, or liberating, because it allows each of us to discover or make our own truth. But actually, I think it's a bit of self-serving rationalization disguised as philosophy. It confuses the difficulty of being certain with the impossibility of truth. Look — of course it's difficult to be certain about anything; we might all be living in "The Matrix." You might have a brain chip in your head feeding you all the wrong information. But in practice, we do agree on all sorts of facts. We agree that bullets can kill people. We agree that you can't flap your arms and fly. We agree — or we should — that there is an external reality and ignoring it can get you hurt. Nonetheless, skepticism about truth can be tempting, because it allows us to rationalize away our own biases. When we do that, we're sort of like the guy in the movie who knew he was living in "The Matrix" but decided he liked it there, anyway. After all, getting what you want feels good. Being right all the time feels good. So, often it's easier for us to wrap ourselves in our cozy information bubbles, live in bad faith, and take those bubbles as the measure of reality. An example, I think, of how this bad faith gets into our action is our reaction to the phenomenon of fake news. The fake news that spread on the internet during the American presidential election of 2016 was designed to feed into our biases, designed to inflate our bubbles. But what was really striking about it was not just that it fooled so many people. What was really striking to me about fake news, the phenomenon, is how quickly it itself became the subject of knowledge polarization; so much so, that the very term — the very term — "fake news" now just means: "news story I don't like." That's an example of the bad faith towards the truth that I'm talking about. But the really, I think, dangerous thing about skepticism with regard to truth is that it leads to despotism. "Man is the measure of all things" inevitably becomes "The Man is the measure of all things." Just as "every man for himself" always seems to turn out to be "only the strong survive." At the end of Orwell's "1984," the thought policeman O'Brien is torturing the protagonist Winston Smith into believing two plus two equals five. What O'Brien says is the point, is that he wants to convince Smith that whatever the party says is the truth, and the truth is whatever the party says. And what O'Brien knows is that once this thought is accepted, critical dissent is impossible. You can't speak truth to power if the power speaks truth by definition. I said that in order to accept that we really live in a common reality, we have to do three things. The first thing is to believe in truth. The second thing can be summed up by the Latin phrase that Kant took as the motto for the Enlightenment: "Sapere aude," or "dare to know." Or as Kant wants, "to dare to know for yourself." I think in the early days of the internet, a lot of us thought that information technology was always going to make it easier for us to know for ourselves, and of course in many ways, it has. But as the internet has become more and more a part of our lives, our reliance on it, our use of it, has become often more passive. Much of what we know today we Google-know. We download prepackaged sets of facts and sort of shuffle them along the assembly line of social media. Now, Google-knowing is useful precisely because it involves a sort of intellectual outsourcing. We offload our effort onto a network of others and algorithms. And that allows us, of course, to not clutter our minds with all sorts of facts. We can just download them when we need them. And that's awesome. But there's a difference between downloading a set of facts and really understanding how or why those facts are as they are. Understanding why a particular disease spreads, or how a mathematical proof works, or why your friend is depressed, involves more than just downloading. It's going to require, most likely, doing some work for yourself: having a little creative insight; using your imagination; getting out into the field; doing the experiment; working through the proof; talking to someone. Now, I'm not saying, of course, that we should stop Google-knowing. I'm just saying we shouldn't overvalue it, either. We need to find ways of encouraging forms of knowing that are more active, and don't always involve passing off our effort into our bubble. Because the thing about Google-knowing is that too often it ends up being bubble-knowing. And bubble-knowing means always being right. But daring to know, daring to understand, means risking the possibility that you could be wrong. It means risking the possibility that what you want and what's true are different things. Which brings me to the third thing that I think we need to do if we want to accept that we live in a common reality. That third thing is: have a little humility. By humility here, I mean epistemic humility, which means, in a sense, knowing that you don't know it all. But it also means something more than that. It means seeing your worldview as open to improvement by the evidence and experience of others. Seeing your worldview as open to improvement by the evidence and experience of others. That's more than just being open to change. It's more than just being open to self-improvement. It means seeing your knowledge as capable of enhancing or being enriched by what others contribute. That's part of what is involved in recognizing there's a common reality that you, too, are responsible to. I don't think it's much of a stretch to say that our society is not particularly great at enhancing or encouraging that sort of humility. That's partly because, well, we tend to confuse arrogance and confidence. And it's partly because, well, you know, arrogance is just easier. It's just easier to think of yourself as knowing it all. It's just easier to think of yourself as having it all figured out. But that's another example of the bad faith towards the truth that I've been talking about. So the concept of a common reality, like a lot of philosophical concepts, can seem so obvious, that we can look right past it and forget why it's important. Democracies can't function if their citizens don't strive, at least some of the time, to inhabit a common space, a space where they can pass ideas back and forth when — and especially when — they disagree. But you can't strive to inhabit that space if you don't already accept that you live in the same reality. To accept that, we've got to believe in truth, we've got to encourage more active ways of knowing. And we've got to have the humility to realize that we're not the measure of all things. We may yet one day realize the vision of having the internet in our brains. But if we want that to be liberating and not terrifying, if we want it to expand our understanding and not just our passive knowing, we need to remember that our perspectives, as wondrous, as beautiful as they are, are just that — perspectives on one reality. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why glass towers are bad for city life -- and what we need instead | {0: 'Justin Davidson writes about a broad range of urban, civic, design and arts issues.'} | TEDNYC | Imagine that when you walked in here this evening, you discovered that everybody in the room looked almost exactly the same: ageless, raceless, generically good-looking. That person sitting right next to you might have the most idiosyncratic inner life, but you don't have a clue because we're all wearing the same blank expression all the time. That is the kind of creepy transformation that is taking over cities, only it applies to buildings, not people. Cities are full of roughness and shadow, texture and color. You can still find architectural surfaces of great individuality and character in apartment buildings in Riga and Yemen, social housing in Vienna, Hopi villages in Arizona, brownstones in New York, wooden houses in San Francisco. These aren't palaces or cathedrals. These are just ordinary residences expressing the ordinary splendor of cities. And the reason they're like that is that the need for shelter is so bound up with the human desire for beauty. Their rough surfaces give us a touchable city. Right? Streets that you can read by running your fingers over brick and stone. But that's getting harder to do, because cities are becoming smooth. New downtowns sprout towers that are almost always made of concrete and steel and covered in glass. You can look at skylines all over the world — Houston, Guangzhou, Frankfurt — and you see the same army of high-gloss robots marching over the horizon. Now, just think of everything we lose when architects stop using the full range of available materials. When we reject granite and limestone and sandstone and wood and copper and terra-cotta and brick and wattle and plaster, we simplify architecture and we impoverish cities. It's as if you reduced all of the world's cuisines down to airline food. (Laughter) Chicken or pasta? But worse still, assemblies of glass towers like this one in Moscow suggest a disdain for the civic and communal aspects of urban living. Right? Buildings like these are intended to enrich their owners and tenants, but not necessarily the lives of the rest of us, those of us who navigate the spaces between the buildings. And we expect to do so for free. Shiny towers are an invasive species and they are choking our cities and killing off public space. We tend to think of a facade as being like makeup, a decorative layer applied at the end to a building that's effectively complete. But just because a facade is superficial doesn't mean it's not also deep. Let me give you an example of how a city's surfaces affect the way we live in it. When I visited Salamanca in Spain, I gravitated to the Plaza Mayor at all hours of the day. Early in the morning, sunlight rakes the facades, sharpening shadows, and at night, lamplight segments the buildings into hundreds of distinct areas, balconies and windows and arcades, each one a separate pocket of visual activity. That detail and depth, that glamour gives the plaza a theatrical quality. It becomes a stage where the generations can meet. You have teenagers sprawling on the pavers, seniors monopolizing the benches, and real life starts to look like an opera set. The curtain goes up on Salamanca. So just because I'm talking about the exteriors of buildings, not form, not function, not structure, even so those surfaces give texture to our lives, because buildings create the spaces around them, and those spaces can draw people in or push them away. And the difference often has to do with the quality of those exteriors. So one contemporary equivalent of the Plaza Mayor in Salamanca is the Place de la Défense in Paris, a windswept, glass-walled open space that office workers hurry through on the way from the metro to their cubicles but otherwise spend as little time in as possible. In the early 1980s, the architect Philip Johnson tried to recreate a gracious European plaza in Pittsburgh. This is PPG Place, a half acre of open space encircled by commercial buildings made of mirrored glass. And he ornamented those buildings with metal trim and bays and Gothic turrets which really pop on the skyline. But at ground level, the plaza feels like a black glass cage. I mean, sure, in summertime kids are running back and forth through the fountain and there's ice-skating in the winter, but it lacks the informality of a leisurely hangout. It's just not the sort of place you really want to just hang out and chat. Public spaces thrive or fail for many different reasons. Architecture is only one, but it's an important one. Some recent plazas like Federation Square in Melbourne or Superkilen in Copenhagen succeed because they combine old and new, rough and smooth, neutral and bright colors, and because they don't rely excessively on glass. Now, I'm not against glass. It's an ancient and versatile material. It's easy to manufacture and transport and install and replace and clean. It comes in everything from enormous, ultraclear sheets to translucent bricks. New coatings make it change mood in the shifting light. In expensive cities like New York, it has the magical power of being able to multiply real estate values by allowing views, which is really the only commodity that developers have to offer to justify those surreal prices. In the middle of the 19th century, with the construction of the Crystal Palace in London, glass leapt to the top of the list of quintessentially modern substances. By the mid-20th century, it had come to dominate the downtowns of some American cities, largely through some really spectacular office buildings like Lever House in midtown Manhattan, designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Eventually, the technology advanced to the point where architects could design structures so transparent they practically disappear. And along the way, glass became the default material of the high-rise city, and there's a very powerful reason for that. Because as the world's populations converge on cities, the least fortunate pack into jerry-built shantytowns. But hundreds of millions of people need apartments and places to work in ever-larger buildings, so it makes economic sense to put up towers and wrap them in cheap and practical curtain walls. But glass has a limited ability to be expressive. This is a section of wall framing a plaza in the pre-Hispanic city of Mitla, in southern Mexico. Those 2,000-year-old carvings make it clear that this was a place of high ritual significance. Today we look at those and we can see a historical and textural continuity between those carvings, the mountains all around and that church which is built on top of the ruins using stone plundered from the site. In nearby Oaxaca, even ordinary plaster buildings become canvasses for bright colors, political murals and sophisticated graphic arts. It's an intricate, communicative language that an epidemic of glass would simply wipe out. The good news is that architects and developers have begun to rediscover the joys of texture without backing away from modernity. Some find innovative uses for old materials like brick and terra-cotta. Others invent new products like the molded panels that Snøhetta used to give the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art that crinkly, sculptural quality. The architect Stefano Boeri even created living facades. This is his Vertical Forest, a pair of apartment towers in Milan, whose most visible feature is greenery. And Boeri is designing a version of this for Nanjing in China. And imagine if green facades were as ubiquitous as glass ones how much cleaner the air in Chinese cities would become. But the truth is that these are mostly one-offs, boutique projects, not easily reproduced at a global scale. And that is the point. When you use materials that have a local significance, you prevent cities from all looking the same. Copper has a long history in New York — the Statue of Liberty, the crown of the Woolworth Building — but it fell out of fashion for a long time until SHoP Architects used it to cover the American Copper Building, a pair of twisting towers on the East River. It's not even finished and you can see the way sunset lights up that metallic facade, which will weather to green as it ages. Buildings can be like people. Their faces broadcast their experience. And that's an important point, because when glass ages, you just replace it, and the building looks pretty much the same way it did before until eventually it's demolished. Almost all other materials have the ability to absorb infusions of history and memory, and project it into the present. The firm Ennead clad the Utah Natural History Museum in Salt Lake City in copper and zinc, ores that have been mined in the area for 150 years and that also camouflage the building against the ochre hills so that you have a natural history museum that reflects the region's natural history. And when the Chinese Pritzker Prize winner Wang Shu was building a history museum in Ningbo, he didn't just create a wrapper for the past, he built memory right into the walls by using brick and stones and shingles salvaged from villages that had been demolished. Now, architects can use glass in equally lyrical and inventive ways. Here in New York, two buildings, one by Jean Nouvel and this one by Frank Gehry face off across West 19th Street, and the play of reflections that they toss back and forth is like a symphony in light. But when a city defaults to glass as it grows, it becomes a hall of mirrors, disquieting and cold. After all, cities are places of concentrated variety where the world's cultures and languages and lifestyles come together and mingle. So rather than encase all that variety and diversity in buildings of crushing sameness, we should have an architecture that honors the full range of the urban experience. Thank you. (Applause) |
To understand autism, don't look away | {0: 'Carina Morillo is an advocate for the social inclusion of people with autism.'} | TEDxRiodelaPlata | "Look at me!" That phrase turned me into an eye-contact coach. I'm the mother of Ivan; he's 15 years old. Ivan has autism, he doesn't speak, and he communicates through an iPad, where his whole universe of words exists in images. He was diagnosed when he was two and a half. I still remember that day painfully. My husband and I felt really lost; we didn't know where to begin. There was no internet, you couldn't Google information, so we made those first steps out of sheer intuition. Ivan would not maintain eye contact, he had lost the words that he did know, and he didn't respond to his name or to anything we asked him, as if words were noise. The only way I could know what was going on with him, what he felt, was looking him in the eye. But that bridge was broken. How could I teach him about life? When I did things he liked, he would look at me, and we were connected. So I dedicated myself to working with him on those things, so we would have more and more eye-contact moments. We would spend hours and hours playing tag with his older sister, Alexia, and when we said: "I caught you!" he would look around for us, and at that moment, I could feel he was alive. We also hold a record for hours spent in a swimming pool. Ivan always had a passion for water. I remember when he was two and a half, on a rainy winter day, I was taking him to an indoor pool, because even on rainy days we'd go swimming. We were on the highway, and I took the wrong exit. He burst into tears and cried inconsolably, nonstop, until I turned back. Only then did he calm down. How was it possible that a two and a half year old didn't respond to his own name, yet in the middle of the rain and fog, where I couldn't see anything, he knew the exact route? That's when I realized that Ivan had an exceptional visual memory, and that that would be my way in. So I started taking pictures of everything, and teaching him what life was like, showing it to him, picture by picture. Even now, it's the way Ivan communicates what he wants, what he needs and also what he feels. But it wasn't just Ivan's eye contact that mattered. Everyone else's did, too. How could I make people see not only his autism, but see him the person and everything he can give; everything he can do; the things he likes and doesn't like, just like any one of us? But for that, I also had to give of myself. I had to have the strength to let him go, which was extremely difficult. Ivan was 11 years old, and he went for treatment in a neighborhood near our house. One afternoon, while I was waiting for him, I went into a greengrocer, a typical neighborhood store with a little bit of everything. While doing the shopping, I started talking to Jose, the owner. I told him about Ivan, that he had autism, and that I wanted him to learn to walk down the street by himself, without anyone holding his hand. So I decided to ask Jose if Thursdays around 2pm, Ivan could come and help him arrange the water bottles on the shelves, because he loved to organize things. And as a reward, he could buy some chocolate cookies, which were his favorite. He said "yes" right away. So that's how it went for a year: Ivan would go to Jose's greengrocer, help him arrange the shelves of water bottles with the labels perfectly lined up on the same side, and he would leave happy with his chocolate cookies. Jose is not an expert in autism. There is no need to be an expert nor do anything heroic to include someone. We just need to be there — (Applause) (Applause ends) Really, no heroic deed — we simply need to be close. And if we are afraid of something or we don't understand something, we need to ask. Let's be curious but never indifferent. Let's have the courage to look each other in the eye, because by looking, we can open a whole world to someone else. (Applause) (Cheers) |
What happens in your brain when you pay attention? | {0: 'Mehdi Ordikhani-Seyedlar is a machine learning engineer using data mining techniques on large-scale data.'} | TED2017 | Paying close attention to something: Not that easy, is it? It's because our attention is pulled in so many different directions at a time, and it's in fact pretty impressive if you can stay focused. Many people think that attention is all about what we are focusing on, but it's also about what information our brain is trying to filter out. There are two ways you direct your attention. First, there's overt attention. In overt attention, you move your eyes towards something in order to pay attention to it. Then there's covert attention. In covert attention, you pay attention to something, but without moving your eyes. Think of driving for a second. Your overt attention, your direction of the eyes, are in front, but that's your covert attention which is constantly scanning the surrounding area, where you don't actually look at them. I'm a computational neuroscientist, and I work on cognitive brain-machine interfaces, or bringing together the brain and the computer. I love brain patterns. Brain patterns are important for us because based on them we can build models for the computers, and based on these models computers can recognize how well our brain functions. And if it doesn't function well, then these computers themselves can be used as assistive devices for therapies. But that also means something, because choosing the wrong patterns will give us the wrong models and therefore the wrong therapies. Right? In case of attention, the fact that we can shift our attention not only by our eyes but also by thinking — that makes covert attention an interesting model for computers. So I wanted to know what are the brainwave patterns when you look overtly or when you look covertly. I set up an experiment for that. In this experiment there are two flickering squares, one of them flickering at a slower rate than the other one. Depending on which of these flickers you are paying attention to, certain parts of your brain will start resonating in the same rate as that flickering rate. So by analyzing your brain signals, we can track where exactly you are watching or you are paying attention to. So to see what happens in your brain when you pay overt attention, I asked people to look directly in one of the squares and pay attention to it. In this case, not surprisingly, we saw that these flickering squares appeared in their brain signals which was coming from the back of their head, which is responsible for the processing of your visual information. But I was really interested to see what happens in your brain when you pay covert attention. So this time I asked people to look in the middle of the screen and without moving their eyes, to pay attention to either of these squares. When we did that, we saw that both of these flickering rates appeared in their brain signals, but interestingly, only one of them, which was paid attention to, had stronger signals, so there was something in the brain which was handling this information so that thing in the brain was basically the activation of the frontal area. The front part of your brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions as a human. The frontal part, it seems that it works as a filter trying to let information come in only from the right flicker that you are paying attention to and trying to inhibit the information coming from the ignored one. The filtering ability of the brain is indeed a key for attention, which is missing in some people, for example in people with ADHD. So a person with ADHD cannot inhibit these distractors, and that's why they can't focus for a long time on a single task. But what if this person could play a specific computer game with his brain connected to the computer, and then train his own brain to inhibit these distractors? Well, ADHD is just one example. We can use these cognitive brain-machine interfaces for many other cognitive fields. It was just a few years ago that my grandfather had a stroke, and he lost complete ability to speak. He could understand everybody, but there was no way to respond, even not writing because he was illiterate. So he passed away in silence. I remember thinking at that time: What if we could have a computer which could speak for him? Now, after years that I am in this field, I can see that this might be possible. Imagine if we can find brainwave patterns when people think about images or even letters, like the letter A generates a different brainwave pattern than the letter B, and so on. Could a computer one day communicate for people who can't speak? What if a computer can help us understand the thoughts of a person in a coma? We are not there yet, but pay close attention. We will be there soon. Thank you. (Applause) |
12 truths I learned from life and writing | {0: 'With disarming familiarity, Anne Lamott tackles what most don’t like to consider. Her honest writing helps us make sense of life’s chaos.'} | TED2017 | My seven-year-old grandson sleeps just down the hall from me, and he wakes up a lot of mornings and he says, "You know, this could be the best day ever." And other times, in the middle of the night, he calls out in a tremulous voice, "Nana, will you ever get sick and die?" I think this pretty much says it for me and most of the people I know, that we're a mixed grill of happy anticipation and dread. So I sat down a few days before my 61st birthday, and I decided to compile a list of everything I know for sure. There's so little truth in the popular culture, and it's good to be sure of a few things. For instance, I am no longer 47, although this is the age I feel, and the age I like to think of myself as being. My friend Paul used to say in his late 70s that he felt like a young man with something really wrong with him. (Laughter) Our true person is outside of time and space, but looking at the paperwork, I can, in fact, see that I was born in 1954. My inside self is outside of time and space. It doesn't have an age. I'm every age I've ever been, and so are you, although I can't help mentioning as an aside that it might have been helpful if I hadn't followed the skin care rules of the '60s, which involved getting as much sun as possible while slathered in baby oil and basking in the glow of a tinfoil reflector shield. (Laughter) It was so liberating, though, to face the truth that I was no longer in the last throes of middle age, that I decided to write down every single true thing I know. People feel really doomed and overwhelmed these days, and they keep asking me what's true. So I hope that my list of things I'm almost positive about might offer some basic operating instructions to anyone who is feeling really overwhelmed or beleaguered. Number one: the first and truest thing is that all truth is a paradox. Life is both a precious, unfathomably beautiful gift, and it's impossible here, on the incarnational side of things. It's been a very bad match for those of us who were born extremely sensitive. It's so hard and weird that we sometimes wonder if we're being punked. It's filled simultaneously with heartbreaking sweetness and beauty, desperate poverty, floods and babies and acne and Mozart, all swirled together. I don't think it's an ideal system. (Laughter) Number two: almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes — (Laughter) (Applause) including you. Three: there is almost nothing outside of you that will help in any kind of lasting way, unless you're waiting for an organ. You can't buy, achieve or date serenity and peace of mind. This is the most horrible truth, and I so resent it. But it's an inside job, and we can't arrange peace or lasting improvement for the people we love most in the world. They have to find their own ways, their own answers. You can't run alongside your grown children with sunscreen and ChapStick on their hero's journey. You have to release them. It's disrespectful not to. And if it's someone else's problem, you probably don't have the answer, anyway. (Laughter) Our help is usually not very helpful. Our help is often toxic. And help is the sunny side of control. Stop helping so much. Don't get your help and goodness all over everybody. (Laughter) (Applause) This brings us to number four: everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy and scared, even the people who seem to have it most together. They are much more like you than you would believe, so try not to compare your insides to other people's outsides. It will only make you worse than you already are. (Laughter) Also, you can't save, fix or rescue any of them or get anyone sober. What helped me get clean and sober 30 years ago was the catastrophe of my behavior and thinking. So I asked some sober friends for help, and I turned to a higher power. One acronym for God is the "gift of desperation," G-O-D, or as a sober friend put it, by the end I was deteriorating faster than I could lower my standards. (Laughter) So God might mean, in this case, "me running out of any more good ideas." While fixing and saving and trying to rescue is futile, radical self-care is quantum, and it radiates out from you into the atmosphere like a little fresh air. It's a huge gift to the world. When people respond by saying, "Well, isn't she full of herself," just smile obliquely like Mona Lisa and make both of you a nice cup of tea. Being full of affection for one's goofy, self-centered, cranky, annoying self is home. It's where world peace begins. Number five: chocolate with 75 percent cacao is not actually a food. (Laughter) Its best use is as a bait in snake traps or to balance the legs of wobbly chairs. It was never meant to be considered an edible. Number six — (Laughter) writing. Every writer you know writes really terrible first drafts, but they keep their butt in the chair. That's the secret of life. That's probably the main difference between you and them. They just do it. They do it by prearrangement with themselves. They do it as a debt of honor. They tell stories that come through them one day at a time, little by little. When my older brother was in fourth grade, he had a term paper on birds due the next day, and he hadn't started. So my dad sat down with him with an Audubon book, paper, pencils and brads — for those of you who have gotten a little less young and remember brads — and he said to my brother, "Just take it bird by bird, buddy. Just read about pelicans and then write about pelicans in your own voice. And then find out about chickadees, and tell us about them in your own voice. And then geese." So the two most important things about writing are: bird by bird and really god-awful first drafts. If you don't know where to start, remember that every single thing that happened to you is yours, and you get to tell it. If people wanted you to write more warmly about them, they should've behaved better. (Laughter) (Applause) You're going to feel like hell if you wake up someday and you never wrote the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart: your stories, memories, visions and songs — your truth, your version of things — in your own voice. That's really all you have to offer us, and that's also why you were born. Seven: publication and temporary creative successes are something you have to recover from. They kill as many people as not. They will hurt, damage and change you in ways you cannot imagine. The most degraded and evil people I've ever known are male writers who've had huge best sellers. And yet, returning to number one, that all truth is paradox, it's also a miracle to get your work published, to get your stories read and heard. Just try to bust yourself gently of the fantasy that publication will heal you, that it will fill the Swiss-cheesy holes inside of you. It can't. It won't. But writing can. So can singing in a choir or a bluegrass band. So can painting community murals or birding or fostering old dogs that no one else will. Number eight: families. Families are hard, hard, hard, no matter how cherished and astonishing they may also be. Again, see number one. (Laughter) At family gatherings where you suddenly feel homicidal or suicidal — (Laughter) remember that in all cases, it's a miracle that any of us, specifically, were conceived and born. Earth is forgiveness school. It begins with forgiving yourself, and then you might as well start at the dinner table. That way, you can do this work in comfortable pants. (Laughter) When William Blake said that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love, he knew that your family would be an intimate part of this, even as you want to run screaming for your cute little life. But I promise you are up to it. You can do it, Cinderella, you can do it, and you will be amazed. Nine: food. Try to do a little better. I think you know what I mean. (Laughter) Number 10 — (Laughter) grace. Grace is spiritual WD-40, or water wings. The mystery of grace is that God loves Henry Kissinger and Vladimir Putin and me exactly as much as He or She loves your new grandchild. Go figure. (Laughter) The movement of grace is what changes us, heals us and heals our world. To summon grace, say, "Help," and then buckle up. Grace finds you exactly where you are, but it doesn't leave you where it found you. And grace won't look like Casper the Friendly Ghost, regrettably. But the phone will ring or the mail will come and then against all odds, you'll get your sense of humor about yourself back. Laughter really is carbonated holiness. It helps us breathe again and again and gives us back to ourselves, and this gives us faith in life and each other. And remember — grace always bats last. Eleven: God just means goodness. It's really not all that scary. It means the divine or a loving, animating intelligence, or, as we learned from the great "Deteriorata," "the cosmic muffin." A good name for God is: "Not me." Emerson said that the happiest person on Earth is the one who learns from nature the lessons of worship. So go outside a lot and look up. My pastor said you can trap bees on the bottom of mason jars without lids because they don't look up, so they just walk around bitterly bumping into the glass walls. Go outside. Look up. Secret of life. And finally: death. Number 12. Wow and yikes. It's so hard to bear when the few people you cannot live without die. You'll never get over these losses, and no matter what the culture says, you're not supposed to. We Christians like to think of death as a major change of address, but in any case, the person will live again fully in your heart if you don't seal it off. Like Leonard Cohen said, "There are cracks in everything, and that's how the light gets in." And that's how we feel our people again fully alive. Also, the people will make you laugh out loud at the most inconvenient times, and that's the great good news. But their absence will also be a lifelong nightmare of homesickness for you. Grief and friends, time and tears will heal you to some extent. Tears will bathe and baptize and hydrate and moisturize you and the ground on which you walk. Do you know the first thing that God says to Moses? He says, "Take off your shoes." Because this is holy ground, all evidence to the contrary. It's hard to believe, but it's the truest thing I know. When you're a little bit older, like my tiny personal self, you realize that death is as sacred as birth. And don't worry — get on with your life. Almost every single death is easy and gentle with the very best people surrounding you for as long as you need. You won't be alone. They'll help you cross over to whatever awaits us. As Ram Dass said, "When all is said and done, we're really just all walking each other home." I think that's it, but if I think of anything else, I'll let you know. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) I was very surprised to be asked to come, because it is not my realm, technology or design or entertainment. I mean, my realm is sort of faith and writing and kind of lurching along together. And I was surprised, but they said I could give a talk, and I said I'd love to. (Video) If you don't know where to start, remember that every single thing that happened to you is yours and you get to tell it. Anne Lamott: People are very frightened and feel really doomed in America these days, and I just wanted to help people get their sense of humor about it and to realize how much isn't a problem. If you take an action, take a really healthy or loving or friendly action, you'll have loving and friendly feelings. |
Why you should define your fears instead of your goals | {0: 'Tim Ferriss is an early-stage tech investor, best-selling author and podcaster.'} | TED2017 | So, this happy pic of me was taken in 1999. I was a senior in college, and it was right after a dance practice. I was really, really happy. And I remember exactly where I was about a week and a half later. I was sitting in the back of my used minivan in a campus parking lot, when I decided I was going to commit suicide. I went from deciding to full-blown planning very quickly. And I came this close to the edge of the precipice. It's the closest I've ever come. And the only reason I took my finger off the trigger was thanks to a few lucky coincidences. And after the fact, that's what scared me the most: the element of chance. So I became very methodical about testing different ways that I could manage my ups and downs, which has proven to be a good investment. (Laughs) Many normal people might have, say, six to 10 major depressive episodes in their lives. I have bipolar depression. It runs in my family. I've had 50-plus at this point, and I've learned a lot. I've had a lot of at-bats, many rounds in the ring with darkness, taking good notes. So I thought rather than get up and give any type of recipe for success or highlight reel, I would share my recipe for avoiding self-destruction, and certainly self-paralysis. And the tool I've found which has proven to be the most reliable safety net for emotional free fall is actually the same tool that has helped me to make my best business decisions. But that is secondary. And it is ... stoicism. That sounds boring. (Laughter) You might think of Spock, or it might conjure and image like this — (Laughter) a cow standing in the rain. It's not sad. It's not particularly happy. It's just an impassive creature taking whatever life sends its way. You might not think of the ultimate competitor, say, Bill Belichick, head coach of the New England Patriots, who has the all-time NFL record for Super Bowl titles. And stoicism has spread like wildfire in the top of the NFL ranks as a means of mental toughness training in the last few years. You might not think of the Founding Fathers — Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington to name but three students of stoicism. George Washington actually had a play about a Stoic — this was "Cato, a Tragedy" — performed for his troops at Valley Forge to keep them motivated. So why would people of action focus so much on an ancient philosophy? This seems very academic. I would encourage you to think about stoicism a little bit differently, as an operating system for thriving in high-stress environments, for making better decisions. And it all started here, kind of, on a porch. So around 300 BC in Athens, someone named Zeno of Citium taught many lectures walking around a painted porch, a "stoa." That later became "stoicism." And in the Greco-Roman world, people used stoicism as a comprehensive system for doing many, many things. But for our purposes, chief among them was training yourself to separate what you can control from what you cannot control, and then doing exercises to focus exclusively on the former. This decreases emotional reactivity, which can be a superpower. Conversely, let's say you're a quarterback. You miss a pass. You get furious with yourself. That could cost you a game. If you're a CEO, and you fly off the handle at a very valued employee because of a minor infraction, that could cost you the employee. If you're a college student who, say, is in a downward spiral, and you feel helpless and hopeless, unabated, that could cost you your life. So the stakes are very, very high. And there are many tools in the toolkit to get you there. I'm going to focus on one that completely changed my life in 2004. It found me then because of two things: a very close friend, young guy, my age, died of pancreatic cancer unexpectedly, and then my girlfriend, who I thought I was going to marry, walked out. She'd had enough, and she didn't give me a Dear John letter, but she did give me this, a Dear John plaque. (Laughter) I'm not making this up. I've kept it. "Business hours are over at five o'clock." She gave this to me to put on my desk for personal health, because at the time, I was working on my first real business. I had no idea what I was doing. I was working 14-plus hour days, seven days a week. I was using stimulants to get going. I was using depressants to wind down and go to sleep. It was a disaster. I felt completely trapped. I bought a book on simplicity to try to find answers. And I did find a quote that made a big difference in my life, which was, "We suffer more often in imagination than in reality," by Seneca the Younger, who was a famous Stoic writer. That took me to his letters, which took me to the exercise, "premeditatio malorum," which means the pre-meditation of evils. In simple terms, this is visualizing the worst-case scenarios, in detail, that you fear, preventing you from taking action, so that you can take action to overcome that paralysis. My problem was monkey mind — super loud, very incessant. Just thinking my way through problems doesn't work. I needed to capture my thoughts on paper. So I created a written exercise that I called "fear-setting," like goal-setting, for myself. It consists of three pages. Super simple. The first page is right here. "What if I ...?" This is whatever you fear, whatever is causing you anxiety, whatever you're putting off. It could be asking someone out, ending a relationship, asking for a promotion, quitting a job, starting a company. It could be anything. For me, it was taking my first vacation in four years and stepping away from my business for a month to go to London, where I could stay in a friend's room for free, to either remove myself as a bottleneck in the business or shut it down. In the first column, "Define," you're writing down all of the worst things you can imagine happening if you take that step. You want 10 to 20. I won't go through all of them, but I'll give you two examples. One was, I'll go to London, it'll be rainy, I'll get depressed, the whole thing will be a huge waste of time. Number two, I'll miss a letter from the IRS, and I'll get audited or raided or shut down or some such. And then you go to the "Prevent" column. In that column, you write down the answer to: What could I do to prevent each of these bullets from happening, or, at the very least, decrease the likelihood even a little bit? So for getting depressed in London, I could take a portable blue light with me and use it for 15 minutes in the morning. I knew that helped stave off depressive episodes. For the IRS bit, I could change the mailing address on file with the IRS so the paperwork would go to my accountant instead of to my UPS address. Easy-peasy. Then we go to "Repair." So if the worst-case scenarios happen, what could you do to repair the damage even a little bit, or who could you ask for help? So in the first case, London, well, I could fork over some money, fly to Spain, get some sun — undo the damage, if I got into a funk. In the case of missing a letter from the IRS, I could call a friend who is a lawyer or ask, say, a professor of law what they would recommend, who I should talk to, how had people handled this in the past. So one question to keep in mind as you're doing this first page is: Has anyone else in the history of time less intelligent or less driven figured this out? Chances are, the answer is "Yes." (Laughter) The second page is simple: What might be the benefits of an attempt or a partial success? You can see we're playing up the fears and really taking a conservative look at the upside. So if you attempted whatever you're considering, might you build confidence, develop skills, emotionally, financially, otherwise? What might be the benefits of, say, a base hit? Spend 10 to 15 minutes on this. Page three. This might be the most important, so don't skip it: "The Cost of Inaction." Humans are very good at considering what might go wrong if we try something new, say, ask for a raise. What we don't often consider is the atrocious cost of the status quo — not changing anything. So you should ask yourself, if I avoid this action or decision and actions and decisions like it, what might my life look like in, say, six months, 12 months, three years? Any further out, it starts to seem intangible. And really get detailed — again, emotionally, financially, physically, whatever. And when I did this, it painted a terrifying picture. I was self-medicating, my business was going to implode at any moment at all times, if I didn't step away. My relationships were fraying or failing. And I realized that inaction was no longer an option for me. Those are the three pages. That's it. That's fear-setting. And after this, I realized that on a scale of one to 10, one being minimal impact, 10 being maximal impact, if I took the trip, I was risking a one to three of temporary and reversible pain for an eight to 10 of positive, life-changing impact that could be a semi-permanent. So I took the trip. None of the disasters came to pass. There were some hiccups, sure. I was able to extricate myself from the business. I ended up extending that trip for a year and a half around the world, and that became the basis for my first book, that leads me here today. And I can trace all of my biggest wins and all of my biggest disasters averted back to doing fear-setting at least once a quarter. It's not a panacea. You'll find that some of your fears are very well-founded. (Laughter) But you shouldn't conclude that without first putting them under a microscope. And it doesn't make all the hard times, the hard choices, easy, but it can make a lot of them easier. I'd like to close with a profile of one of my favorite modern-day Stoics. This is Jerzy Gregorek. He is a four-time world champion in Olympic weightlifting, political refugee, published poet, 62 years old. He can still kick my ass and probably most asses in this room. He's an impressive guy. I spent a lot of time on his stoa, his porch, asking life and training advice. He was part of the Solidarity in Poland, which was a nonviolent movement for social change that was violently suppressed by the government. He lost his career as a firefighter. Then his mentor, a priest, was kidnapped, tortured, killed and thrown into a river. He was then threatened. He and his wife had to flee Poland, bounce from country to country until they landed in the US with next to nothing, sleeping on floors. He now lives in Woodside, California, in a very nice place, and of the 10,000-plus people I've met in my life, I would put him in the top 10, in terms of success and happiness. And there's a punchline coming, so pay attention. I sent him a text a few weeks ago, asking him: Had he ever read any Stoic philosophy? And he replied with two pages of text. This is very unlike him. He is a terse dude. (Laughter) And not only was he familiar with stoicism, but he pointed out, for all of his most important decisions, his inflection points, when he stood up for his principles and ethics, how he had used stoicism and something akin to fear-setting, which blew my mind. And he closed with two things. Number one: he couldn't imagine any life more beautiful than that of a Stoic. And the last was his mantra, which he applies to everything, and you can apply to everything: "Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life." The hard choices — what we most fear doing, asking, saying — these are very often exactly what we most need to do. And the biggest challenges and problems we face will never be solved with comfortable conversations, whether it's in your own head or with other people. So I encourage you to ask yourselves: Where in your lives right now might defining your fears be more important than defining your goals? Keeping in mind all the while, the words of Seneca: "We suffer more often in imagination than in reality." Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How I built a jet suit | {0: 'Richard Browning is the founder of human propulsion technology startup Gravity, which has invented, built and patented a personal flight system. '} | TED2017 | Michael Browning: engineer, innovator — inventor, really — and inspiring father. He had a passion for flight, as you can kind of sense from that rather dubious 1970s office-leaving present. And some 40 years after that was created, a small group of us got together to have a go, a run at the whole challenge of flight that inspired people for years, and do it in a very different kind of way. And that's the journey I'd like to share with you now. The starting hypothesis was one of the human mind and body, which, as you've seen for the last few days here, is an amazing construct. What if you augmented that wonderful machine with just the right technology? If you approach flight in that kind of real way, where could you get to? So my training partner here back in London, Denton, is doing a much better job of that kind of stuff than me. Guess what? It's London. The idea was that you augment that. And so, how do you augment that? Well, we bought one of these. This is a micro gas turbine. This was ground zero, so that little piece of kit proved really quite impressive, so we got two in a field. The real hero here, by the way, is, right in the background, there's a lady tending some vegetables, who does a brilliant job of trying to ignore us for a while — (Laughter) I think the only thing less happy is the grass, that we did probably damage quite badly. You get an idea of the thrust here, when I try to hold them horizontally and somewhat fail. That's around 50 kilos of thrust there. We were quite impressed with that. We thought we were getting somewhere. So there's only one sensible way to go from there: you get four. (Laughter) I have to say, I still like watching these back. So then we thought well, let's try and spread the load a bit. The legs are designed to take the load, so why don't we spread it out a bit? That bit was good. The harness — a nice idea but it didn't really work, as you'll see now. This whole journey was very much about trying things — (Laughter) Yeah, it really didn't work, did it? Trying things and learning by failing at them most of the time. And that included failing by falling over. If you notice, we've got five engines here — not to be put off by the fact one was in maintenance, still had a go. (Laughter) And then I pinched a fuel line. So again, good learning. We learned not to do that again. This was a blind alley. (Laughter) This was three on each arm — that was ridiculous. That was 70 kilos on each arm. Again, struck that one off. (Laughter) But we were starting to make some really quite convincing progress, just enough to make you believe that maybe — maybe we could get there. You can see, look — tantalizing. The model of one on each leg and two on each arm, on paper, that was enough thrust. And then we did what I'm about to show you now, and I still love watching this one. This was our first six-second, reasonably coherent flight. (Applause) That was the point where this endeavor went from: "I'm really not sure this is going to work," to: "Oh my god, it does work!" From there on we then refined it, but we carried on falling over a lot. Falling over, like I say, is definitely the best way to learn. After a while, we starting really refining the layout of all of this. And you'll see, that's stability and control — there's no wires there or anything — that's a combination of us refining the technology, including with a Tupperware box on the back for the electronics and actually learning the balance and control. I'm now going to save your ears for the next short piece and talk over it. After a while, the jet engine noise is a bit annoying. This is only a few weeks ago. You can see the stability and control is really quite nice, and I'd like to think this somewhat validates that starting hypothesis, that the human mind and body, if properly augmented in that way, can achieve some pretty cool stuff. I mean, like I said: I'm not thinking about where I'm moving my arms at that stage. I'm looking at the objective of where I want to get to, and a bit like riding a bike, my arms are just doing their thing. It's a very strange experience. So where is all this headed? I'll talk over this landing — I think I land in this one. Well, I don't think anybody's going to go down to Walmart or take the kids to school in any of this stuff for a while, but the team at Gravity are building some awesome technology that's going to make this look like child's play. We're working on some things that will seek to bring this unusual experience of flight to a wider audience, beyond the events and displays we're doing. We're even starting to look for pilots two and three, if there's any volunteers. I've got this vision. It sounds audacious, but let's just stick it out there, that one day maybe we can rise up above a beach, fly up and down the coastline of it, rise up a bit higher, with some of the safety kit we're working on to make this achievable. Then over the horizon comes a Hercules with the ramp down. As it comes past, you start picking up speed and see if we can intercept — from the rear, not the front, that would be a mistake — and then try and land in the back. And as I say, that's a little way off at the moment. But this is also, if I take a big step back from this, this is also a very personal journey for me. Back to that lovely photo, or photo in a picture. Sadly, my father took his own life when I was 15, and left an awful lot of unfulfilled ambition. He was a wonderful inventor, a maverick creator. And I'd just like to think, if it was possible, if he was looking down, he would be — he'd certainly be smiling at some of the things we've done here, I think. So, it's a tribute to him. Thank you very much. (Applause) (Voice-over) Richard Browning: I'm probably more nervous about doing the demo after this. I've got a lot of things to get done today. Worst-case scenario, we don't get a clean start. Or we get an unplanned failure while I'm actually flying around. This is why we keep it very low, so the worst is I just look like an idiot and fall on my rear, as I said. So you can all enjoy that if that happens. (Music) (Jet engine accelerates) (Cheers) |
When I die, recompose me | {0: 'Katrina Spade created a system called "recomposition" that transforms human bodies into soil, so that we can return to the earth after we die.'} | TEDxOrcasIsland | My name is Katrina Spade, and I grew up in a medical family where it was fairly normal to talk about death and dying at the dinner table. But I didn't go into medicine like so many of my family members. Instead, I went to architecture school to learn how to design. And while I was there, I began to be curious about what would happen to my physical body after I died. What would my nearest and dearest do with me? So if the existence and the fact of your own mortality doesn't get you down, the state of our current funerary practices will. Today, almost 50 percent of Americans choose conventional burial. Conventional burial begins with embalming, where funeral staff drain bodily fluid and replace it with a mixture designed to preserve the corpse and give it a lifelike glow. Then, as you know, bodies are buried in a casket in a concrete-lined grave in a cemetery. All told, in US cemeteries, we bury enough metal to build a Golden Gate Bridge, enough wood to build 1,800 single family homes, and enough formaldehyde-laden embalming fluid to fill eight Olympic-size swimming pools. In addition, cemeteries all over the world are reaching capacity. Turns out, it doesn't really make good business sense to sell someone a piece of land for eternity. (Laughter) Whose idea was that? In some places, you can't buy a plot no matter how much money you have. As a result, cremation rates have risen fast. In 1950, if you suggested your grandmother be incinerated after she died, you'd probably be kicked from the family deathbed. But today, almost half of Americans choose cremation, citing simpler, cheaper and more ecological as reasons. I used to think that cremation was a sustainable form of disposition, but just think about it for a second. Cremation destroys the potential we have to give back to the earth after we've died. It uses an energy-intensive process to turn bodies into ash, polluting the air and contributing to climate change. All told, cremations in the US emit a staggering 600 million pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually. The truly awful truth is that the very last thing that most of us will do on this earth is poison it. It's like we've created, accepted and death-denied our way into a status quo that puts as much distance between ourselves and nature as is humanly possible. Our modern funerary practices are designed to stave off the natural processes that happen to a body after death. In other words, they're meant to prevent us from decomposing. But the truth is that nature is really, really good at death. We've all seen it. When organic material dies in nature, microbes and bacteria break it down into nutrient-rich soil, completing the life cycle. In nature, death creates life. Back in architecture school, I was thinking about all this, and I set out on a plan to redesign death care. Could I create a system that was beneficial to the earth and that used nature as a guide rather than something to be feared? Something that was gentle to the planet? That planet, after all, supports our living bodies our whole lives. And while I was mulling this all over over the drawing board, the phone rang. It was my friend Kate. She was like, "Hey, have you heard about the farmers who are composting whole cows?" And I was like, "Mmmm." (Laughter) Turns out that farmers in agricultural institutions have been practicing something called livestock mortality composting for decades. Mortality composting is where you take an animal high in nitrogen and cover it with co-composting materials that are high in carbon. It's an aerobic process, so it requires oxygen, and it requires plenty of moisture as well. In the most basic setup, a cow is covered with a few feet of wood chips, which are high in carbon, and left outside for nature, for breezes to provide oxygen and rain to provide moisture. In about nine months, all that remains is a nutrient-rich compost. The flesh has been decomposed entirely, as have the bones. I know. (Laughter) So I would definitely call myself a decomposition nerd, but I am far, far from a scientist, and one way you can tell this is true is that I have often called the process of composting "magic." (Laughter) So basically, all we humans need to do is create the right environment for nature to do its job. It's like the opposite of antibacterial soap. Instead of fighting them, we welcome microbes and bacteria in with open arms. These tiny, amazing creatures break down molecules into smaller molecules and atoms, which are then incorporated into new molecules. In other words, that cow is transformed. It's no longer a cow. It's been cycled back into nature. See? Magic. You can probably imagine the light bulb that went off in my head after I received that phone call. I began designing a system based on the principles of livestock mortality composting that would take human beings and transform them into soil. Fast-forward five years and the project has grown in ways I truly never could have imagined. We've created a scalable, replicable non-profit urban model based on the science of livestock mortality composting that turns human beings into soil. We've partnered and collaborated with experts in soil science, decomposition, alternative death care, law and architecture. We've raised funds from foundations and individuals in order to design a prototype of this system, and we've heard from tens of thousands of people all over the world who want this option to be available. OK. In the next few years, it's our goal to build the first full-scale human composting facility right in the city of Seattle. (Applause) Imagine it, part public park, part funeral home, part memorial to the people we love, a place where we can reconnect with the cycles of nature and treat bodies with gentleness and respect. The infrastructure is simple. Inside a vertical core, bodies and wood chips undergo accelerated natural decomposition, or composting, and are transformed into soil. When someone dies, their body is taken to a human composting facility. After wrapping the deceased in a simple shroud, friends and family carry the body to the top of the core, which contains the natural decomposition system. During a laying in ceremony, they gently place the body into the core and cover it with wood chips. This begins the gentle transformation from human to soil. Over the next few weeks, the body decomposes naturally. Microbes and bacteria break down carbon, then protein, to create a new substance, a rich, earthy soil. This soil can then be used to grow new life. Eventually, you could be a lemon tree. (Applause) Yeah, thank you. (Applause) Who's thinking about lemon meringue pie right now? (Laughter) A lemon drop? Something stronger? So in addition to housing the core, these buildings will function to support the grieving by providing space for memorial services and end-of-life planning. The potential for repurposing is huge. Old churches and industrial warehouses can be converted into places where we create soil and honor life. We want to bring back the aspect of ritual that's been diluted over the past hundred years as cremation rates have risen and religious affiliation has declined. Our Seattle facility will function as a model for these places all over the world. We've heard from communities in South Africa, Australia, the UK, Canada and beyond. We're creating a design toolkit that will help others design and build facilities that will contain technical specifications and regulatory best practices. We want to help individuals, organizations, and down the road, municipalities design and build facilities in their own cities. The idea is that every one of these places should look and feel completely different with the same system inside. They're really meant to be designed for the neighborhood in which they reside and the community which they serve. The other idea is for supportive staff to be on hand to help families with the care and preparation of loved ones' bodies. We're banishing practices that bewilder and disempower and creating a system that is beautiful and meaningful and transparent. We believe that access to ecological death care is a human right. OK, so you know the old saying, if you can compost a cow, you can compost a human? (Laughter) Turns out, it's true. Since 2014, we've been running a pilot project in the hills of North Carolina with the Forensic Anthropology Department at Western Carolina University. Six donor bodies have been covered in wood chips, oxygen provided by breezes, microbes and bacteria doing their jobs. This pilot program has allowed us to demonstrate that it's possible to harness the incredible power of natural decomposition to turn human bodies into soil, and we're working with other universities as well. Soil scientists at Washington State University, the grad students, anyway, are working to compost teeth with amalgam fillings so that we can understand what happens to the mercury therein. Next up, we'll be beginning experiments to determine what happens to chemo drugs and pharmaceuticals during the composting process, and whether additional remediation will be needed. By the way, composting creates a great deal of heat, especially this particular type of composting. One week after we began composting our fifth donor body, the temperature inside that mound of wood chips reached 158 degrees Fahrenheit. Imagine harnessing that heat to create energy or comfort the grieving on a cold day. The death care revolution has begun. It's an exciting time to be alive. Thank you. (Applause) |
Science didn't understand my kids' rare disease until I decided to study it | {0: 'Sharon Terry is developing ways for ordinary people to transform biomedical research and healthcare.'} | TEDMED 2016 | The best Christmas my children ever had was also the worst Christmas my husband and I ever had. Elizabeth, age seven, and her brother, Ian, age five, couldn't imagine why they were getting everything they wanted for Christmas. The reason Santa was so generous was because of something my husband Pat and I knew and the kids couldn't comprehend. Something that we had just learned, and it terrified us. This was 1994 and the story actually starts a few years earlier. For a couple of years I had noticed a rash on the sides of Elizabeth's neck that looked like prickly heat. For those same years, my father and brother both died of cancer, and I was probably overanxious about illness. The doctors assured us there was nothing wrong and I shouldn't worry, but I wasn't so sure. And so without a referral, and paying out-of-pocket, I took Elizabeth to a dermatologist. She was probably just allergic to something, but why did it appear just on the sides of her neck, this rash? So it's two days before Christmas, 1994, and the dermatologist takes a quick look at her neck and says, "She has pseudoxanthoma elasticum." And then he shuts off the lights and looks in her eyes. It turns out, by chance, this dermatologist also trained in ophthalmology. Our lucky day. I am sick to my stomach. "Oma?" Oma's like melanoma, lymphoma — cancer. "Why are you looking in her eyes for a skin rash?" I scream and make no sound. So there it is. Elizabeth has pseudoxanthoma elasticum, PXE for short. Questions mix with fear and erupt like bile in my throat. Why are you looking in her eyes? What do you know about this? How do you know for sure? What is the prognosis? My training in pastoral counseling did not prepare me for this. Dr. Bercovitch tells us everything he knows about PXE. It's a rare genetic disorder, it's systemic, it's a slowly progressing, premature aging disease. It causes loose wrinkly skin in the flexor areas. It causes legal blindness, like macular degeneration, and a host of cardiovascular problems. Little is known about this disease, and some people die in their 30s, say some of the reports at the time. He then just glances at our son and says, "He has it, too." We want to flee back to the land of normal. Two days after Christmas, researchers come from a university in Boston, and they take blood from us and our children for a research project focused on finding the gene. A few days later, researchers come from a medical center in New York and say they want blood, too. "These are children. They're five and seven years old. Don't make them face the needle twice. Go and get your share from the other researchers." They laugh, incredulous. "Share?" It is then that we learn that there is little sharing in biomedical research. This moment, more than any other, lit a fire beneath my husband Pat and me. Pat and I went to a medical school library and we copied every article we could find on PXE. We didn't understand a thing. We bought medical dictionaries and scientific textbooks and read everything we could get our hands on. And though we still didn't understand, we could see patterns, and it became quickly apparent within a month that there was no systematic effort to understand PXE. In addition, the lack of sharing that we experienced was pervasive. Researchers competed with each other because the ecosystem was designed to reward competition rather than to alleviate suffering. We realized that we would have to do work on this condition ourselves to find solutions for ourselves and others like us. But we faced two major barriers. The first one: Pat and I have no science background. At the time, he's the manager of a construction company, and I'm a former college chaplain stay-at-home mom — hardly the backgrounds to take the research world by storm. The second barrier: researchers don't share. People told us you can't herd cats. Well, yes you can if you move their food. (Laughter) (Applause) DNA and clinical data is the food. So we would collect blood and medical histories, and require that all scientists using these resources would share results with each other and with the people who donated. Well before the internet was in common use, Pat and I established PXE International, a nonprofit dedicated to initiating research and conducting it on PXE and also supporting individuals with the disease. Using traditional media, we garnered around 100-150 people around the world who we asked, would you give us your blood, your tissue, your medical histories, your medical records? And we brought all of that together. We quickly learned that this shared resource was not going to be enough. And so we decided we had to do hardcore bench science — hardcore research. So we borrowed bench space at a lab at Harvard. A wonderful neighbor came a couple times a week and sat with the kids from 8pm to 2am while Pat and I extracted DNA, ran and scored gels and searched for the gene. Generous postdocs tutored us as we went along. Within a few years, we found the gene. We patented it so that it would be freely available. We created a diagnostic test. We put together a research consortium. We held research meetings and opened a center of excellence. We found more than 4,000 people around the world who had PXE, and held patient meetings and did clinical trials and studies. Through all this, we lived with fear. Fear of the disease breathing down our neck while the clock ticked. Fear of researchers, so well credentialed and positioned in a world made for them. Fear that we were making the wrong choices. Fear that the naysayers were right and the cats would simply find a new food. But greater than all these fears was our drive to make a difference for our kids and for all those we had met along the way. And very quickly, we also realized what we were doing for one disease, we should do for all diseases. We joined with, and I eventually led, Genetic Alliance — a network of health advocacy, patient advocacy, research and health organizations. We built scalable and extensible resources, like biobanks and registries and directories of support for all diseases. And as I learned about all those diseases and all those disease communities, I realized that there were two secrets in health care that were impacting me greatly. The first: there are no ready answers for people like my kids or all the people I was working with, whether common or rare conditions. And the second secret: the answers lie in all of us together, donating our data, our biological samples and ultimately ourselves. There is a small groundswell of individuals who are working to change this. Citizen scientists, activists, hacks who are using crowdsourcing, do-it-yourself science are changing the game. Even President Obama and Vice President Biden are evangelists for the idea that people should be partners in research. This is a founding principle of our organization. Sure, it's really hard to discover and develop interventions and therapies. The science is hard, the regulatory regime is difficult. There are a lot of stakeholders with lots of interests and misaligned incentives like publishing, promotion and tenure. I don't fault scientists for following this path, but I challenge them and us to do this differently. To recognize that people are at the center. Genetic Alliance has experimented in what it will take to transform these crusty systems. Our goal is to work without boundaries. That sounds abstract, but for us it's quite practical. When we're frustrated that entities won't share data — data that comes from people who gave their energy, their time, their blood and even their tears — we need to stop and ask, "How is it true that we could share, but we aren't?" We're part of this system, too. How do we make it so that people can share ideas freely? So that people can take risks and move closer to one another? This leads to a dissolving of us versus them, not only for organizations but also for individuals. If I'm going to ask organizations or individuals to strive for these standards, then I too need to explore my own being and my practices. If I'm going to ask clinicians and researchers and administrators to take risks, then I, Sharon, need to take risks as well. I need to face my personal fears. My fear of not having enough impact. My fear of not leading well. My fear of not being enough. Just before they entered their teens, our kids stopped us in our tracks and said, "You have to stop worrying about making a difference, making an impact, and instead, like us, learn to live with disease rather than fight it." I have to ask, where does all my fear come from? The kids' declaration shines a spotlight on that fear. It arises from a bedrock of love. I love Elizabeth and Ian. I love people with PXE. I love people with any disease. I love people. Some of my colleagues have discovered that it is not death we fear, it is the enormity of our loving. This expansive love opens me to great pain as I face loss. As I discover my fear, I discover that I and all those around me have boundless capacity for love. And I also discover as I move into this fear, that I can learn many new things and find paths to things like practical solutions as well as the core of healing and health. I don't fear fear the way I used to. In fact lately, with enormous support from all my fellow journeyers, I notice that it's not a warning the way it used to be. I notice that instead, it's an invitation to go forward because in it lies love and the path to greater love. If I turn with gentle curiosity toward that fear, I find enormous wealth within myself and others and the ability to step into challenges that I never thought I could. My kids are ahead of me on that path still. At ages 29 and 27, they declare they are happy and healthy despite having manifestations of PXE in their skin and eyes and arteries. And so I invite you, us, we, to turn toward our fear; to embrace the things that scare us and find the love at the center. We'll not only find ourselves there but we'll also be able to step into the shoes of those we fear and those who fear us. If we breathe into that fear and are vulnerable with the systems and people who challenge us, our power as changemakers grows exponentially. And when we realize that working on our inner life is working on our outer life and outer work is inner work, we get down to what is real and shit gets done. (Laughter) There is no limit to what we can accomplish together. Thank you. (Applause) |
"Awoo" | null | TEDNYC | (Music) Sophie Hawley-Weld: OK, you don't have to stand up, but ... we can see you really clearly — (Laughter) So you have to dance with us. And we have this, like, choreographed dance thing that we're about to do — Betta Lemme: Really easy. SHW: And we're going to flick our wrists like this, and you're going to do it with us. And you can also stand up. (Music) (Sings) I know I did not raise a wrist (Both sing) I know I did not capture it It came, it came, it went, it went It conquered quick I was there and then I quit Awoo! I know I did not raise a wrist I know I did not capture it It came, it came, it went, it went It conquered quick I was there and then I quit Awoo! BL: (Speaks) There you go! (Music) SHW: We have another one coming up. It's a little finger-pointing dance. (Music) The people sitting down, I want to see your fingers pointing. Yeah! (Sings) I know I did not raise a wrist (Both sing) I know I did not capture it It came, it came, it went, it went It conquered quick I was there and then I quit Aaaa ... (Applause) Awoo! (Music) (Clapping to the beat) (Music) Aaaa ... SHW: (Speaks) Alright, hand flick. (Both sing) I know I did not raise a wrist I know I did not capture it It came, it came, it went, it went It conquered quick I was there and then I quit I know I did not raise a wrist I know I did not capture it It came, it came, it went, it went It conquered quick I was there and then I quit (Music) Tucker Halpern: You guys are way more fun than I thought you'd be. (Laughter) (Music) Awoo! (Applause) SHW: Thank you so much. (Applause) |
Doesn't everyone deserve a chance at a good life? | {0: 'Jim Yong Kim is leading a global effort to end extreme poverty and promote shared prosperity.'} | TED2017 | I just want to share with you what I have been experiencing over the last five years in having the great privilege of traveling to many of the poorest countries in the world. This scene is one I see all the time everywhere, and these young children are looking at a smartphone, and the smartphone is having a huge impact in even the poorest countries. I said to my team, you know, what I see is a rise in aspirations all over the world. In fact, it seems to me that there's a convergence of aspirations. And I asked a team of economists to actually look into this. Is this true? Are aspirations converging all around the world? So they looked at things like Gallup polls about satisfaction in life and what they learned was that if you have access to the internet, your satisfaction goes up. But another thing happens that's very important: your reference income, the income to which you compare your own, also goes up. Now, if the reference income of a nation, for example, goes up 10 percent by comparing themselves to the outside, then on average, people's own incomes have to go up at least five percent to maintain the same level of satisfaction. But when you get down into the lower percentiles of income, your income has to go up much more if the reference income goes up 10 percent, something like 20 percent. And so with this rise of aspirations, the fundamental question is: Are we going to have a situation where aspirations are linked to opportunity and you get dynamism and economic growth, like that which happened in the country I was born in, in Korea? Or are aspirations going to meet frustration? This is a real concern, because between 2012 and 2015, terrorism incidents increased by 74 percent. The number of deaths from terrorism went up 150 percent. Right now, two billion people live in conditions of fragility, conflict, violence, and by 2030, more than 60 percent of the world's poor will live in these situations of fragility, conflict and violence. And so what do we do about meeting these aspirations? Are there new ways of thinking about how we can rise to meet these aspirations? Because if we don't, I'm extremely worried. Aspirations are rising as never before because of access to the internet. Everyone knows how everyone else lives. Has our ability to meet those aspirations risen as well? And just to get at the details of this, I want to share with you my own personal story. This is not my mother, but during the Korean War, my mother literally took her own sister, her younger sister, on her back, and walked at least part of the way to escape Seoul during the Korean War. Now, through a series of miracles, my mother and father both got scholarships to go to New York City. They actually met in New York City and got married in New York City. My father, too, was a refugee. At the age of 19, he left his family in the northern part of the country, escaped through the border and never saw his family again. Now, when they were married and living in New York, my father was a waiter at Patricia Murphy's restaurant. Their aspirations went up. They understood what it was like to live in a place like New York City in the 1950s. Well, my brother was born and they came back to Korea, and we had what I remember as kind of an idyllic life, but what was happening in Korea at that time was the country was one of the poorest in the world and there was political upheaval. There were demonstrations just down the street from our house all the time, students protesting against the military government. And at the time, the aspirations of the World Bank Group, the organization I lead now, were extremely low for Korea. Their idea was that Korea would find it difficult without foreign aid to provide its people with more than the bare necessities of life. So the situation is Korea is in a tough position, my parents have seen what life is like in the United States. They got married there. My brother was born there. And they felt that in order to give us an opportunity to reach their aspirations for us, we had to go and come back to the United States. Now, we came back. First we went to Dallas. My father did his dental degree all over again. And then we ended up moving to Iowa, of all places. We grew up in Iowa. And in Iowa, we went through the whole course. I went to high school, I went to college. And then one day, something that I'll never forget, my father picked me up after my sophomore year in college, and he was driving me home, and he said, "Jim, what are your aspirations? What do you want to study? What do you want to do?" And I said, "Dad," — My mother actually was a philosopher, and had filled us with ideas about protest and social justice, and I said, "Dad, I'm going to study political science and philosophy, and I'm going to become part of a political movement." My father, the Korean dentist, slowly pulled the car over to the side of the road — (Laughter) He looked back at me, and he said, "Jim, you finish your medical residency, you can study anything you want." (Laughter) Now, I've told this story to a mostly Asian audience before. Nobody laughs. They just shake their head. Of course. (Laughter) (Applause) So, tragically, my father died at a young age, 30 years ago at the age of 57, what happens to be how old I am right now, and when he died in the middle of my medical and graduate studies — You see, I actually got around it by doing medicine and anthropology. I studied both of them in graduate school. But then right about that time, I met these two people, Ophelia Dahl and Paul Farmer. And Paul and I were in the same program. We were studying medicine and at the same time getting our PhD's in anthropology. And we began to ask some pretty fundamental questions. For people who have the great privilege of studying medicine and anthropology — I had come from parents who were refugees. Paul grew up literally in a bus in a swamp in Florida. He liked to call himself "white trash." And so we had this opportunity and we said, what is it that we need to do? Given our ridiculously elaborate educations, what is the nature of our responsibility to the world? And we decided that we needed to start an organization. It's called Partners in Health. And by the way, there's a movie made about that. (Applause) There's a movie that was just a brilliant movie they made about it called "Bending the Arc." It launched at Sundance this past January. Jeff Skoll is here. Jeff is one of the ones who made it happen. And we began to think about what it would take for us to actually have our aspirations reach the level of some of the poorest communities in the world. This is my very first visit to Haiti in 1988, and in 1988, we elaborated a sort of mission statement, which is we are going to make a preferential option for the poor in health. Now, it took us a long time, and we were graduate students in anthropology. We were reading up one side of Marx and down the other. Habermas. Fernand Braudel. We were reading everything and we had to come to a conclusion of how are we going to structure our work? So "O for the P," we called it, a preferential option for the poor. The most important thing about a preferential option for the poor is what it's not. It's not a preferential option for your own sense of heroism. It's not a preferential option for your own idea about how to lift the poor out of poverty. It's not a preferential option for your own organization. And the hardest of all, it's not a preferential option for your poor. It's a preferential option for the poor. So what do you do? Well, Haiti, we started building — Everyone told us, the cost-effective thing is just focus on vaccination and maybe a feeding program. But what the Haitians wanted was a hospital. They wanted schools. They wanted to provide their children with the opportunities that they'd been hearing about from others, relatives, for example, who had gone to the United States. They wanted the same kinds of opportunities as my parents did. I recognized them. And so that's what we did. We built hospitals. We provided education. And we did everything we could to try to give them opportunities. Now, my experience really became intense at Partners in Health in this community, Carabayllo, in the northern slums of Lima, Peru. And in this community, we started out by really just going to people's homes and talking to people, and we discovered an outbreak, an epidemic of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. This is Melquiades. Melquiades was a patient at that time, he was about 18 years old, and he had a very difficult form of drug-resistant tuberculosis. All of the gurus in the world, the global health gurus, said it is not cost-effective to treat drug-resistant tuberculosis. It's too complicated. It's too expensive. You just can't do it. It can't be done. And in addition, they were getting angry at us, because the implication was if it could be done, we would have done it. Who do you think you are? And the people that we fought with were the World Health Organization and probably the organization we fought with most was the World Bank Group. Now, we did everything we could to convince Melquiades to take his medicines, because it's really hard, and not once during the time of treatment did Melquiades's family ever say, "Hey, you know, Melquiades is just not cost-effective. Why don't you go on and treat somebody else?" (Laughter) I hadn't seen Melquiades for about 10 years and when we had our annual meetings in Lima, Peru a couple of years ago, the filmmakers found him and here is us getting together. (Applause) He has become a bit of a media star because he goes to the film openings, and he knows how to work an audience now. (Laughter) But as soon as we won — We did win. We won the argument. You should treat multidrug-resistant tuberculosis — we heard the same arguments in the early 2000s about HIV. All of the leading global health people in the world said it is impossible to treat HIV in poor countries. Too expensive, too complicated, you can't do it. Compared to drug-resistant TB treatment, it's actually easier. And we were seeing patients like this. Joseph Jeune. Joseph Jeune also never mentioned that he was not cost-effective. A few months of medicines, and this is what he looked like. (Applause) We call that the Lazarus Effect of HIV treatment. Joseline came to us looking like this. This is what she looked like a few months later. (Applause) Now, our argument, our battle, we thought, was with the organizations that kept saying it's not cost-effective. We were saying, no, preferential option for the poor requires us to raise our aspirations to meet those of the poor for themselves. And they said, well, that's a nice thought but it's just not cost-effective. So in the nerdy way that we have operated Partners in Health, we wrote a book against, basically, the World Bank. It says that because the World Bank has focused so much on just economic growth and said that governments have to shrink their budgets and reduce expenditures in health, education and social welfare — we thought that was fundamentally wrong. And we argued with the World Bank. And then a crazy thing happened. President Obama nominated me to be President of the World Bank. (Applause) Now, when I went to do the vetting process with President Obama's team, they had a copy of "Dying For Growth," and they had read every page. And I said, "OK, that's it, right? You guys are going to drop me?" He goes, "Oh, no, no, it's OK." And I was nominated, and I walked through the door of the World Bank Group in July of 2012, and that statement on the wall, "Our dream is a world free of poverty." A few months after that, we actually turned it into a goal: end extreme poverty by 2030, boost shared prosperity. That's what we do now at the World Bank Group. I feel like I have brought the preferential option for the poor to the World Bank Group. (Applause) But this is TED, and so I want to share with you some concerns, and then make a proposal. The Fourth Industrial Revolution, now, you guys know so much better than I do, but here's the thing that concerns me. What we hear about is job loss. You've all heard that. Our own data suggest to us that two thirds of all jobs, currently existing jobs in developing countries, will be lost because of automation. Now, you've got to make up for those jobs. Now, one of the ways to make up for those jobs is to turn community health workers into a formal labor force. That's what we want to do. (Applause) We think the numbers will work out, that as health outcomes get better and as people have formal work, we're going to be able to train them with the soft-skills training that you add to it to become workers that will have a huge impact, and that may be the one area that grows the most. But here's the other thing that bothers me: right now it seems pretty clear to me that the jobs of the future will be more digitally demanding, and there is a crisis in childhood stunting. So these are photos from Charles Nelson, who shared these with us from Harvard Medical School. And what these photos show on the one side, on the left side, is a three-month-old who has been stunted: not adequate nutrition, not adequate stimulation. And on the other side, of course, is a normal child, and the normal child has all of these neuronal connections. Now, the neuronal connections are important, because that is the definition of human capital. Now, we know that we can reduce these rates. We can reduce these rates of childhood stunting quickly, but if we don't, India, for example, with 38 percent childhood stunting, how are they going to compete in the economy of the future if 40 percent of their future workers cannot achieve educationally and certainly we worry about achieving economically in a way that will help the country as a whole grow. Now, what are we going to do? 78 trillion dollars is the size of the global economy. 8.55 trillion dollars are sitting in negative interest rate bonds. That means that you give the German central bank your money and then you pay them to keep your money. That's a negative interest rate bond. 24.4 trillion dollars in very low-earning government bonds. And 8 trillion literally sitting in the hands of rich people under their very large mattresses. What we are trying to do is now use our own tools — and just to get nerdy for a second, we're talking about first-loss risk debt instruments, we're talking about derisking, blended finance, we're talking about political risk insurance, credit enhancement — all these things that I've now learned at the World Bank Group that rich people use every single day to make themselves richer, but we haven't used aggressively enough on behalf of the poor to bring this capital in. (Applause) So does this work? Can you actually bring private-sector players into a country and really make things work? Well, we've done it a couple of times. This is Zambia, Scaling Solar. It's a box-set solution from the World Bank where we come in and we do all the things you need to attract private-sector investors. And in this case, Zambia went from having a cost of electricity at 25 cents a kilowatt-hour, and by just doing simple things, doing the auction, changing some policies, we were able to bring the cost down. Lowest bid, 25 cents a kilowatt-hour for Zambia? The lowest bid was 4.7 cents a kilowatt-hour. It's possible. (Applause) But here's my proposal for you. This is from a group called Zipline, a cool company, and they literally are rocket scientists. They figured out how to use drones in Rwanda. This is me launching a drone in Rwanda that delivers blood anywhere in the country in less than an hour. So we save lives, this program saved lives — (Applause) This program made money for Zipline and this program saved huge amounts of money for Rwanda. That's what we need, and we need that from all of you. I'm asking you, carve out a little bit of time in your brains to think about the technology that you work on, the companies that you start, the design that you do. Think a little bit and work with us to see if we can come up with these kinds of extraordinary win-win solutions. I'm going to leave you with one final story. I was in Tanzania, and I was in a classroom. This is me with a classroom of 11-year-olds. And I asked them, as I always do, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" Two raised their hands and said, "I want to be President of the World Bank." (Laughter) And just like you, my own team and their teachers laughed. But then I stopped them. I said, "Look, I want to tell you a story. When I was born in South Korea, this is what it looked like. This is where I came from. And when I was three years old, in preschool, I don't think that George David Woods, the President of the World Bank, if he had visited Korea on that day and come to my classroom, that he would have thought that the future President of the World Bank was sitting in that classroom. Don't let anyone ever tell you that you cannot be President of the World Bank." Now — thank you. (Applause) Let me leave you with one thought. I came from a country that was the poorest in the world. I'm President of the World Bank. I cannot and I will not pull up the ladder behind me. This is urgent. Aspirations are going up. Everywhere aspirations are going up. You folks in this room, work with us. We know that we can find those Zipline-type solutions and help the poor leapfrog into a better world, but it won't happen until we work together. The future "you" — and especially for your children — the future you will depend on how much care and compassion we bring to ensuring that the future "us" provides equality of opportunity for every child in the world. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: You'd almost think people are surprised to hear a talk like this from the President of the World Bank. It's kind of cool. I'd encourage you to even be a little more specific on your proposal. There's many investors, entrepreneurs in this room. How will you partner with them? What's your proposal? Jim Yong Kim: Can I get nerdy for just a second. CA: Get nerdy. Absolutely. JYK: So here's what we did. Insurance companies never invest in developing country infrastructure, for example, because they can't take the risk. They're holding money for people who pay for insurance. So what we did was a Swedish International Development Association gave us a little bit of money, we went out and raised a little bit more money, a hundred million, and we took first loss, meaning if this thing goes bad, 10 percent of the loss we'll just eat, and the rest of you will be safe. And that created a 90-percent chunk, tranche that was triple B, investment-grade, so the insurance companies invested. So for us, what we're doing is taking our public money and using it to derisk specific instruments to bring people in from the outside. So all of you who are sitting on trillions of dollars of cash, come to us. Right? (Laughter) CA: And what you're specifically looking for are investment proposals that create employment in the developing world. JYK: Absolutely. Absolutely. So these will be, for example, in infrastructure that brings energy, builds roads, bridges, ports. These kinds of things are necessary to create jobs, but also what we're saying is you may think that the technology you're working on or the business that you're working on may not have applications in the developing world, but look at Zipline. And that Zipline thing didn't happen just because of the quality of the technology. It was because they engaged with the Rwandans early and used artificial intelligence — one thing, Rwanda has great broadband — but these things fly completely on their own. So we will help you do that. We will make the introductions. We will even provide financing. We will help you do that. CA: How much capital is the World Bank willing to deploy to back those kinds of efforts? JYK: Chris, you're always getting me to try to do something like this. CA: I'm trying to get you in trouble. JYK: So here's what we're going to do. We have 25 billion a year that we're investing in poor countries, the poorest countries. And as we invest over the next three years, 25 billion a year, we have got to think with you about how to use that money more effectively. So I can't give you a specific number. It depends on the quality of the ideas. So bring us your ideas, and I don't think that financing is going to be the problem. CA: All right, you heard it from the man himself. Jim, thanks so much. JYK: Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why we need to imagine different futures | {0: 'TED Fellow Anab Jain imagines and builds future worlds we can experience in the present moment. By creating new ways of seeing, being and acting, she inspires and challenges us to look critically at the decisions and choices we make today.'} | TED2017 | I visit the future for a living. Not just one future, but many possible futures, bringing back evidences from those futures for you to experience today. Like an archaeologist of the future. Over the years, my many journeys have brought back things like a new species of synthetically engineered bees; a book named, "Pets as Protein;" a machine that makes you rich by trading your genetic data; a lamp powered by sugar; a computer for growing food. OK, so I don't actually travel to different futures — yet. But my husband Jon and I spend a lot of time thinking and creating visions of different futures in our studio. We are constantly looking out for weak signals, those murmurs of future potential. Then we trace those threads of potential out into the future, asking: What might it feel like to live in this future? What might we see, hear and even breathe? Then we run experiments, build prototypes, make objects, bringing aspects of these futures to life, making them concrete and tangible so you can really feel the impact of those future possibilities here and now. But this work is not about predictions. It's about creating tools — tools that can help connect our present and our future selves so we become active participants in creating a future we want — a future that works for all. So how do we go about doing this? For a recent project called Drone Aviary, we were interested in exploring what it would mean to live with drones in our cities. Drones that have the power to see things we can't, to go places we can't and to do so with increasing autonomy. But to understand the technology, getting our hands dirty was crucial. So we built several different drones in our studio. We gave them names, functions and then flew them — but not without difficulty. Things came loose, GPS signals glitched and drones crashed. But it was through such experimentation that we could construct a very concrete and very experiential slice of one possible future. So now, let's go to that future. Let's imagine we are living in a city with drones like this one. We call it The Nightwatchman. It patrols the streets, often spotted in the evenings and at night. Initially, many of us were annoyed by its low, dull hum. But then, like everything else, we got used to it. Now, what if you could see the world through its eyes? See how it constantly logs every resident of our neighborhood; logging the kids who play football in the no-ballgame area and marking them as statutory nuisances. (Laughter) And then see how it disperses this other group, who are teenagers, with the threat of an autonomously issued injunction. And then there's this giant floating disc called Madison. Its glaring presence is so overpowering, I can't help but stare at it. But if feels like each time I look at it, it knows a little more about me — like it keeps flashing all these Brianair adverts at me, as if it knows about the holiday I'm planning. I'm not sure if I find this mildly entertaining or just entirely invasive. Back to the present. In creating this future, we learned a lot. Not just about how these machines work, but what it would feel like to live alongside them. Whilst drones like Madison and Nightwatchman, in these particular forms, are not real yet, most elements of a drone future are in fact very real today. For instance, facial recognition systems are everywhere — in our phones, even in our thermostats and in cameras around our cities — keeping a record of everything we do, whether it's an advertisement we glanced at or a protest we attended. These things are here, and we often don't understand how they work, and what their consequences could be. And we see this all around us. This difficulty in even imagining how the consequences of our actions today will affect our future. Last year, where I live, in the UK, there was a referendum where the people could vote for the UK to leave the EU or stay in the EU, popularly known as "Brexit." And soon after the results came out, a word began to surface called "Bregret" — (Laughter) describing people who chose to vote for Brexit as a protest, but without thinking through its potential consequences. And this disconnect is evident in some of the simplest things. Say you go out for a quick drink. Then you decide you wouldn't mind a few more. You know you'll wake up in the morning feeling awful, but you justify it by saying, "The other me in the future will deal with that." But as we find out in the morning, that future "you" is you. When I was growing up in India in the late '70s and early '80s, there was a feeling that the future both needed to and could actually be planned. I remember my parents had to plan for some of the simplest things. When they wanted a telephone in our house, they needed to order it and then wait — wait for nearly five years before it got installed in our house. (Laughter) And then if they wanted to call my grandparents who lived in another city, they needed to book something called a "trunk call," and then wait again, for hours or even days. And then abruptly, the phone would ring at two in the morning, and all of us would jump out of our beds and gather round the phone, shrieking into it, discussing general well-being at two in the morning. Today it can feel like things are happening too fast — so fast, that it can become really difficult for us to form an understanding of our place in history. It creates an overwhelming sense of uncertainty and anxiety, and so, we let the future just happen to us. We don't connect with that future "us." We treat our future selves as a stranger, and the future as a foreign land. It's not a foreign land; it's unfolding right in front of us, continually being shaped by our actions today. We are that future, and so I believe fighting for a future we want is more urgent and necessary than ever before. We have learned in our work that one of the most powerful means of effecting change is when people can directly, tangibly and emotionally experience some of the future consequences of their actions today. Earlier this year, the government of the United Arab Emirates invited us to help them shape their country's energy strategy all the way up to 2050. Based on the government's econometric data, we created this large city model, and visualized many possible futures on it. As I was excitably taking a group of government officials and members of energy companies through one sustainable future on our model, one of the participants told me, "I cannot imagine that in the future people will stop driving cars and start using public transport." And then he said, "There's no way I can tell my own son to stop driving his car." But we were prepared for this reaction. Working with scientists in a chemistry lab in my home city in India, we had created approximate samples of what the air would be like in 2030 if our behavior stays the same. And so, I walked the group over to this object that emits vapor from those air samples. Just one whiff of the noxious polluted air from 2030 brought home the point that no amount of data can. This is not the future you would want your children to inherit. The next day, the government made a big announcement. They would be investing billions of dollars in renewables. We don't know what part our future experiences played in this decision, but we know that they've changed their energy policy to mitigate such a scenario. While something like air from the future is very effective and tangible, the trajectory from our present to a future consequence is not always so linear. Even when a technology is developed with utopian ideals, the moment it leaves the laboratory and enters the world, it is subject to forces outside of the creators' control. For one particular project, we investigated medical genomics: the technology of gathering and using people's genetic data to create personalized medicine. We were asking: What are some of the unintended consequences of linking our genetics to health care? To explore this question further, we created a fictional lawsuit, and brought it to life through 31 pieces of carefully crafted evidence. So we built an illegal genetic clinic, a DIY carbon dioxide incubator, and even bought frozen mice on eBay. So now let's go to that future where this lawsuit is unfolding, and meet the defendant, Arnold Mann. Arnold is being prosecuted by this global giant biotech company called Dynamic Genetics, because they have evidence that Arnold has illegally inserted the company's patented genetic material into his body. How on earth did Arnold manage to do that? Well, it all started when Arnold was asked to submit a saliva sample in this spit kit to the NHI — the UK's National Health Insurance service. When Arnold received his health insurance bill, he was shocked and scared to see that his premiums had gone through the roof, beyond anything he or his family could ever afford. The state's algorithm had scanned his genetic data and found the risk of a chronic health condition lurking in his DNA. And so Arnold had to start paying toward the potential costs of that future disease — potential future disease from today. In that moment of fear and panic, Arnold slipped through the city into the dark shadows of this illegal clinic for treatment — a treatment that would modify his DNA so that the state's algorithm would no longer see him as a risk, and his insurance premiums would become affordable again. But Arnold was caught. And the legal proceedings in the case Dynamic Genetics v. Mann began. In bringing such a future to life, what was important to us was that people could actually touch, see and feel its potential, because such an immediate and close encounter provokes people to ask the right questions, questions like: What are the implications of living in a world where I'm judged on my genetics? Or: Who might claim ownership to my genetic data, and what might they do with it? If this feels even slightly out-there or farfetched, today there's a little-known bill being passed through the American congress known as HR 1313, Preserving Employee Wellness Programs Act. This bill proposes to amend the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, popularly known as GINA, and would allow employers to ask about family medical history and genetic data to all employees for the first time. Those who refuse would face large penalties. In the work I've shown so far, whether it was drones or genetic crimes, these stories describe troubling futures with the intention of helping us avoid those futures. But what about what we can't avoid? Today, especially with climate change, it looks like we are heading for trouble. And so what we want to do now is to prepare for that future by developing tools and attitudes that can help us find hope — hope that can inspire action. Currently, we are running an experiment in our studio. It's a work in progress. Based on climate data projections, we are exploring a future where the Western world has moved from abundance to scarcity. We imagine living in a future city with repeated flooding, periods with almost no food in supermarkets, economic instabilities, broken supply chains. What can we do to not just survive, but prosper in such a world? What food can we eat? To really step inside these questions, we are building this room in a flat in London from 2050. It's like a little time capsule that we reclaimed from the future. We stripped it down to the bare minimum. Everything we lovingly put in our homes, like flat-panel TVs, internet-connected fridges and artisanal furnishings all had to go. And in its place, we're building food computers from abandoned, salvaged and repurposed materials, turning today's waste into tomorrow's dinner. For instance, we've just finished building our first fully automated fogponics machine. It uses the technique of fogponics — so just fog as a nutrient, not even water or soil — to grow things quickly. At the moment, we have successfully grown tomatoes. But we'll need more food than what we can grow in this small room. So what else could we forage from the city? Insects? Pigeons? Foxes? Earlier, we brought back air from the future. This time we are bringing an entire room from the future, a room full of hope, tools and tactics to create positive action in hostile conditions. Spending time in this room, a room that could be our own future home, makes the consequences of climate change and food insecurity much more immediate and tangible. What we're learning through such experiments and our practice and the people we engage with is that creating concrete experiences can bridge the disconnect between today and tomorrow. By putting ourselves into different possible futures, by becoming open and willing to embrace the uncertainty and discomfort that such an act can bring, we have the opportunity to imagine new possibilities. We can find optimistic futures; we can find paths forward; we can move beyond hope into action. It means we have the chance to change direction, a chance to have our voices heard, a chance to write ourselves into a future we want. Other worlds are possible. Thank you. (Applause) |
The refugee crisis is a test of our character | {0: 'As president of the International Rescue Committee, David Miliband enlists his expert statesmanship in the fight against the greatest global refugee crisis since World War II.'} | TED2017 | I'm going to speak to you about the global refugee crisis and my aim is to show you that this crisis is manageable, not unsolvable, but also show you that this is as much about us and who we are as it is a trial of the refugees on the front line. For me, this is not just a professional obligation, because I run an NGO supporting refugees and displaced people around the world. It's personal. I love this picture. That really handsome guy on the right, that's not me. That's my dad, Ralph, in London, in 1940 with his father Samuel. They were Jewish refugees from Belgium. They fled the day the Nazis invaded. And I love this picture, too. It's a group of refugee children arriving in England in 1946 from Poland. And in the middle is my mother, Marion. She was sent to start a new life in a new country on her own at the age of 12. I know this: if Britain had not admitted refugees in the 1940s, I certainly would not be here today. Yet 70 years on, the wheel has come full circle. The sound is of walls being built, vengeful political rhetoric, humanitarian values and principles on fire in the very countries that 70 years ago said never again to statelessness and hopelessness for the victims of war. Last year, every minute, 24 more people were displaced from their homes by conflict, violence and persecution: another chemical weapon attack in Syria, the Taliban on the rampage in Afghanistan, girls driven from their school in northeast Nigeria by Boko Haram. These are not people moving to another country to get a better life. They're fleeing for their lives. It's a real tragedy that the world's most famous refugee can't come to speak to you here today. Many of you will know this picture. It shows the lifeless body of five-year-old Alan Kurdi, a Syrian refugee who died in the Mediterranean in 2015. He died alongside 3,700 others trying to get to Europe. The next year, 2016, 5,000 people died. It's too late for them, but it's not too late for millions of others. It's not too late for people like Frederick. I met him in the Nyarugusu refugee camp in Tanzania. He's from Burundi. He wanted to know where could he complete his studies. He'd done 11 years of schooling. He wanted a 12th year. He said to me, "I pray that my days do not end here in this refugee camp." And it's not too late for Halud. Her parents were Palestinian refugees living in the Yarmouk refugee camp outside Damascus. She was born to refugee parents, and now she's a refugee herself in Lebanon. She's working for the International Rescue Committee to help other refugees, but she has no certainty at all about her future, where it is or what it holds. This talk is about Frederick, about Halud and about millions like them: why they're displaced, how they survive, what help they need and what our responsibilities are. I truly believe this, that the biggest question in the 21st century concerns our duty to strangers. The future "you" is about your duties to strangers. You know better than anyone, the world is more connected than ever before, yet the great danger is that we're consumed by our divisions. And there is no better test of that than how we treat refugees. Here are the facts: 65 million people displaced from their homes by violence and persecution last year. If it was a country, that would be the 21st largest country in the world. Most of those people, about 40 million, stay within their own home country, but 25 million are refugees. That means they cross a border into a neighboring state. Most of them are living in poor countries, relatively poor or lower-middle-income countries, like Lebanon, where Halud is living. In Lebanon, one in four people is a refugee, a quarter of the whole population. And refugees stay for a long time. The average length of displacement is 10 years. I went to what was the world's largest refugee camp, in eastern Kenya. It's called Dadaab. It was built in 1991-92 as a "temporary camp" for Somalis fleeing the civil war. I met Silo. And naïvely I said to Silo, "Do you think you'll ever go home to Somalia?" And she said, "What do you mean, go home? I was born here." And then when I asked the camp management how many of the 330,000 people in that camp were born there, they gave me the answer: 100,000. That's what long-term displacement means. Now, the causes of this are deep: weak states that can't support their own people, an international political system weaker than at any time since 1945 and differences over theology, governance, engagement with the outside world in significant parts of the Muslim world. Now, those are long-term, generational challenges. That's why I say that this refugee crisis is a trend and not a blip. And it's complex, and when you have big, large, long-term, complex problems, people think nothing can be done. When Pope Francis went to Lampedusa, off the coast of Italy, in 2014, he accused all of us and the global population of what he called "the globalization of indifference." It's a haunting phrase. It means that our hearts have turned to stone. Now, I don't know, you tell me. Are you allowed to argue with the Pope, even at a TED conference? But I think it's not right. I think people do want to make a difference, but they just don't know whether there are any solutions to this crisis. And what I want to tell you today is that though the problems are real, the solutions are real, too. Solution one: these refugees need to get into work in the countries where they're living, and the countries where they're living need massive economic support. In Uganda in 2014, they did a study: 80 percent of refugees in the capital city Kampala needed no humanitarian aid because they were working. They were supported into work. Solution number two: education for kids is a lifeline, not a luxury, when you're displaced for so long. Kids can bounce back when they're given the proper social, emotional support alongside literacy and numeracy. I've seen it for myself. But half of the world's refugee children of primary school age get no education at all, and three-quarters of secondary school age get no education at all. That's crazy. Solution number three: most refugees are in urban areas, in cities, not in camps. What would you or I want if we were a refugee in a city? We would want money to pay rent or buy clothes. That is the future of the humanitarian system, or a significant part of it: give people cash so that you boost the power of refugees and you'll help the local economy. And there's a fourth solution, too, that's controversial but needs to be talked about. The most vulnerable refugees need to be given a new start and a new life in a new country, including in the West. The numbers are relatively small, hundreds of thousands, not millions, but the symbolism is huge. Now is not the time to be banning refugees, as the Trump administration proposes. It's a time to be embracing people who are victims of terror. And remember — (Applause) Remember, anyone who asks you, "Are they properly vetted?" that's a really sensible and good question to ask. The truth is, refugees arriving for resettlement are more vetted than any other population arriving in our countries. So while it's reasonable to ask the question, it's not reasonable to say that refugee is another word for terrorist. Now, what happens — (Applause) What happens when refugees can't get work, they can't get their kids into school, they can't get cash, they can't get a legal route to hope? What happens is they take risky journeys. I went to Lesbos, this beautiful Greek island, two years ago. It's a home to 90,000 people. In one year, 500,000 refugees went across the island. And I want to show you what I saw when I drove across to the north of the island: a pile of life jackets of those who had made it to shore. And when I looked closer, there were small life jackets for children, yellow ones. And I took this picture. You probably can't see the writing, but I want to read it for you. "Warning: will not protect against drowning." So in the 21st century, children are being given life jackets to reach safety in Europe even though those jackets will not save their lives if they fall out of the boat that is taking them there. This is not just a crisis, it's a test. It's a test that civilizations have faced down the ages. It's a test of our humanity. It's a test of us in the Western world of who we are and what we stand for. It's a test of our character, not just our policies. And refugees are a hard case. They do come from faraway parts of the world. They have been through trauma. They're often of a different religion. Those are precisely the reasons we should be helping refugees, not a reason not to help them. And it's a reason to help them because of what it says about us. It's revealing of our values. Empathy and altruism are two of the foundations of civilization. Turn that empathy and altruism into action and we live out a basic moral credo. And in the modern world, we have no excuse. We can't say we don't know what's happening in Juba, South Sudan, or Aleppo, Syria. It's there, in our smartphone in our hand. Ignorance is no excuse at all. Fail to help, and we show we have no moral compass at all. It's also revealing about whether we know our own history. The reason that refugees have rights around the world is because of extraordinary Western leadership by statesmen and women after the Second World War that became universal rights. Trash the protections of refugees, and we trash our own history. This is — (Applause) This is also revealing about the power of democracy as a refuge from dictatorship. How many politicians have you heard say, "We believe in the power of our example, not the example of our power." What they mean is what we stand for is more important than the bombs we drop. Refugees seeking sanctuary have seen the West as a source of hope and a place of haven. Russians, Iranians, Chinese, Eritreans, Cubans, they've come to the West for safety. We throw that away at our peril. And there's one other thing it reveals about us: whether we have any humility for our own mistakes. I'm not one of these people who believes that all the problems in the world are caused by the West. They're not. But when we make mistakes, we should recognize it. It's not an accident that the country which has taken more refugees than any other, the United States, has taken more refugees from Vietnam than any other country. It speaks to the history. But there's more recent history, in Iraq and Afghanistan. You can't make up for foreign policy errors by humanitarian action, but when you break something, you have a duty to try to help repair it, and that's our duty now. Do you remember at the beginning of the talk, I said I wanted to explain that the refugee crisis was manageable, not insoluble? That's true. I want you to think in a new way, but I also want you to do things. If you're an employer, hire refugees. If you're persuaded by the arguments, take on the myths when family or friends or workmates repeat them. If you've got money, give it to charities that make a difference for refugees around the world. If you're a citizen, vote for politicians who will put into practice the solutions that I've talked about. (Applause) The duty to strangers shows itself in small ways and big, prosaic and heroic. In 1942, my aunt and my grandmother were living in Brussels under German occupation. They received a summons from the Nazi authorities to go to Brussels Railway Station. My grandmother immediately thought something was amiss. She pleaded with her relatives not to go to Brussels Railway Station. Her relatives said to her, "If we don't go, if we don't do what we're told, then we're going to be in trouble." You can guess what happened to the relatives who went to Brussels Railway Station. They were never seen again. But my grandmother and my aunt, they went to a small village south of Brussels where they'd been on holiday in the decade before, and they presented themselves at the house of the local farmer, a Catholic farmer called Monsieur Maurice, and they asked him to take them in. And he did, and by the end of the war, 17 Jews, I was told, were living in that village. And when I was teenager, I asked my aunt, "Can you take me to meet Monsieur Maurice?" And she said, "Yeah, I can. He's still alive. Let's go and see him." And so, it must have been '83, '84, we went to see him. And I suppose, like only a teenager could, when I met him, he was this white-haired gentleman, I said to him, "Why did you do it? Why did you take that risk?" And he looked at me and he shrugged, and he said, in French, "On doit." "One must." It was innate in him. It was natural. And my point to you is it should be natural and innate in us, too. Tell yourself, this refugee crisis is manageable, not unsolvable, and each one of us has a personal responsibility to help make it so. Because this is about the rescue of us and our values as well as the rescue of refugees and their lives. Thank you very much indeed. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: David, thank you. David Miliband: Thank you. BG: Those are strong suggestions and your call for individual responsibility is very strong as well, but I'm troubled by one thought, and it's this: you mentioned, and these are your words, "extraordinary Western leadership" which led 60-something years ago to the whole discussion about human rights, to the conventions on refugees, etc. etc. That leadership happened after a big trauma and happened in a consensual political space, and now we are in a divisive political space. Actually, refugees have become one of the divisive issues. So where will leadership come from today? DM: Well, I think that you're right to say that the leadership forged in war has a different temper and a different tempo and a different outlook than leadership forged in peace. And so my answer would be the leadership has got to come from below, not from above. I mean, a recurring theme of the conference this week has been about the democratization of power. And we've got to preserve our own democracies, but we've got to also activate our own democracies. And when people say to me, "There's a backlash against refugees," what I say to them is, "No, there's a polarization, and at the moment, those who are fearful are making more noise than those who are proud." And so my answer to your question is that we will sponsor and encourage and give confidence to leadership when we mobilize ourselves. And I think that when you are in a position of looking for leadership, you have to look inside and mobilize in your own community to try to create conditions for a different kind of settlement. BG: Thank you, David. Thanks for coming to TED. (Applause) |
Why design should include everyone | {0: 'Sinéad Burke amplifies voices and instigates curious conversations.'} | TEDNYC | I want to give you a new perspective. That sounds grandiose, and it is. I left Ireland yesterday morning. I traveled from Dublin to New York independently. But the design of an airport, plane and terminal offers little independence when you're 105 and a half centimeters tall. For Americans, that's 3' 5". I was whisked through the airport by airline assistants in a wheelchair. Now, I don't need to use a wheelchair, but the design of an airport and its lack of accessibility means that it's my only way to get through. With my carry-on bag between my feet, I was wheeled through security, preclearance and I arrived at my boarding gate. I use the accessibility services in the airport because most of the terminal is just not designed with me in mind. Take security, for example. I'm not strong enough to lift my carry-on bag from the ground to the carousel. I stand at eye level with it. And those who work in that space for safety purposes cannot help me and cannot do it for me. Design inhibits my autonomy and my independence. But traveling at this size, it isn't all bad. The leg room in economy is like business class. (Laughter) I often forget that I'm a little person. It's the physical environment and society that remind me. Using a public bathroom is an excruciating experience. I walk into the cubicle but I can't reach the lock on the door. I'm creative and resilient. I look around and see if there's a bin that I can turn upside down. Is it safe? Not really. Is it hygienic and sanitary? Definitely not. But the alternative is much worse. If that doesn't work, I use my phone. It gives me an additional four- to six-inch reach, and I try to jam the lock closed with my iPhone. Now, I imagine that's not what Jony Ive had in mind when he designed the iPhone, but it works. The alternative is that I approach a stranger. I apologize profusely and I ask them to stand guard outside my cubicle door. They do and I emerge grateful but absolutely mortified, and hope that they didn't notice that I left the bathroom without washing my hands. I carry hand sanitizer with me every single day because the sink, soap dispenser, hand dryer and mirror are all out of my reach. Now, the accessible bathroom is somewhat of an option. In this space, I can reach the lock on the door, the sink, the soap dispenser, the hand dryer and the mirror. Yet, I cannot use the toilet. It is deliberately designed higher so that wheelchair users can transfer across with ease. This is a wonderful and necessary innovation, but in the design world, when we describe a new project or idea as accessible, what does that mean? Who is it accessible to? And whose needs are not being accommodated for? Now, the bathroom is an example of where design impinges upon my dignity, but the physical environment impacts upon me in much more casual ways too, something as simple as ordering a cup of coffee. Now, I'll admit it. I drink far too much coffee. My order is a skinny vanilla latte, but I'm trying to wean myself off the syrup. But the coffee shop, it's not designed well, at least not for me. Queuing, I'm standing beside the pastry cabinet and the barista calls for the next order. "Next, please!" they shout. They can't see me. The person next to me in the queue points to my existence and everyone is embarrassed. I order as quick as I can and I move along to collect my coffee. Now, think just for a second. Where do they put it? Up high and without a lid. Reaching up to collect a coffee that I have paid for is an incredibly dangerous experience. But design also impinges on the clothes that I want to wear. I want garments that reflect my personality. It's difficult to find in the childrenswear department. And often womenswear requires far too many alterations. I want shoes that affect my maturity, professionalism and sophistication. Instead, I'm offered sneakers with Velcro straps and light-up shoes. Now, I'm not totally opposed to light-up shoes. (Laughter) But design also impacts on such simple things, like sitting on a chair. I cannot go from a standing to a seating position with grace. Due to the standards of design heights of chairs, I have to crawl on my hands and knees just to get on top of it, whilst also being conscious that it might tip over at any stage. But whilst design impacts on me whether it's a chair, a bathroom, a coffee shop, or clothes, I rely on and benefit from the kindness of strangers. But not everybody is so nice. I'm reminded that I'm a little person when a stranger points, stares, laughs, calls me a name, or takes a photograph of me. This happens almost every day. With the rise of social media, it has given me an opportunity and a platform to have a voice as a blogger and as an activist, but it has also made me nervous that I might become a meme or a viral sensation, all without my consent. So let's take a moment right now to make something very clear. The word "midget" is a slur. It evolved from PT Barnum's era of circuses and freak shows. Society has evolved. So should our vocabulary. Language is a powerful tool. It does not just name our society. It shapes it. I am incredibly proud to be a little person, to have inherited the condition of achondroplasia. But I am most proud to be Sinead. Achondroplasia is the most common form of dwarfism. Achondroplasia translates as "without cartilage formation." I have short limbs and achondroplastic facial features, my forehead and my nose. My arms do not straighten fully, but I can lick my elbow. I'm not showing you that one. Achondroplasia occurs in approximately one in every 20,000 births. 80 percent of little people are born to two average-height parents. That means that anybody in this room could have a child with achondroplasia. Yet, I inherited my condition from my dad. I'd like to show you a photo of my family. My mother is average height, my father is a little person and I am the eldest of five children. I have three sisters and one brother. They are all average height. I am incredibly fortunate to have been born into a family that cultivated my curiosity and my tenacity, that protected me from the unkindness and ignorance of strangers and that armed me with the resilience, creativity and confidence that I needed to survive and manipulate the physical environment and society. If I was to pinpoint any reason why I am successful, it is because I was and I am a loved child, now, a loved child with a lot of sass and sarcasm, but a loved child nonetheless. In giving you an insight into who I am today I wanted to offer you a new perspective. I wanted to challenge the idea that design is but a tool to create function and beauty. Design greatly impacts upon people's lives, all lives. Design is a way in which we can feel included in the world, but it is also a way in which we can uphold a person's dignity and their human rights. Design can also inflict vulnerability on a group whose needs aren't considered. So today, I want your perceptions challenged. Who are we not designing for? How can we amplify their voices and their experiences? What is the next step? Design is an enormous privilege, but it is a bigger responsibility. I want you to open your eyes. Thank you so much. (Applause) |
A celebration of natural hair | {0: 'Cheyenne Cochrane is an ambassador for the natural hair movement.'} | TEDxBeaconStreet | I am from the South Side of Chicago, and in seventh grade, I had a best friend named Jenny who lived on the Southwest Side of Chicago. Jenny was white, and if you know anything about the segregated demographics of Chicago, you know that there are not too many black people who live on the Southwest Side of Chicago. But Jenny was my girl and so we would hang out every so often after school and on the weekends. And so one day we were hanging out in her living room, talking about 13-year-old things, and Jenny's little sister Rosie was in the room with us, and she was sitting behind me just kind of playing in my hair, and I wasn't thinking too much about what she was doing. But at a pause in the conversation, Rosie tapped me on the shoulder. She said, "Can I ask you a question?" I said, "Yeah, Rosie. Sure." "Are you black?" (Laughter) The room froze. Silence. Jenny and Rosie's mom was not too far away. She was in the kitchen and she overheard the conversation, and she was mortified. She said, "Rosie! You can't ask people questions like that." And Jenny was my friend, and I know she was really embarrassed. I felt kind of bad for her, but actually I was not offended. I figured it wasn't Rosie's fault that in her 10 short years on this earth, living on the Southwest Side of Chicago, she wasn't 100 percent sure what a black person looked like. That's fair. But what was more surprising to me was, in all of this time I had spent with Jenny and Rosie's family — hanging out with them, playing with them, even physically interacting with them — it was not until Rosie put her hands in my hair that she thought to ask me if I was black. That was the first time I would realize how big of a role the texture of my hair played in confirming my ethnicity, but also that it would play a key role in how I'm viewed by others in society. Garrett A. Morgan and Madame CJ Walker were pioneers of the black hair-care and beauty industry in the early 1900s. They're best known as the inventors of chemically-based hair creams and heat straightening tools designed to permanently, or semipermanently, alter the texture of black hair. Oftentimes when we think about the history of blacks in America, we think about the heinous acts and numerous injustices that we experienced as people of color because of the color of our skin, when in fact, in post-Civil War America, it was the hair of an African-American male or female that was known as the most "telling feature" of Negro status, more so than the color of the skin. And so before they were staples of the multibillion-dollar hair-care industry, our dependency on tools and products, like the hair relaxer and the pressing comb, were more about our survival and advancement as a race in postslavery America. Over the years, we grew accustomed to this idea that straighter and longer hair meant better and more beautiful. We became culturally obsessed with this idea of having what we like to call ... "good hair." This essentially means: the looser the curl pattern, the better the hair. And we let these institutionalized ideas form a false sense of hierarchy that would determine what was considered a good grade of hair and what was not. What's worse is that we let these false ideologies invade our perception of ourselves, and they still continue to infect our cultural identity as African-American women today. So what did we do? We went to the hair salon every six to eight weeks, without fail, to subject our scalps to harsh straightening chemicals beginning at a very young age — sometimes eight, 10 — that would result in hair loss, bald spots, sometimes even burns on the scalp. We fry our hair at temperatures of 450 degrees Fahrenheit or higher almost daily, to maintain the straight look. Or we simply cover our hair up with wigs and weaves, only to let our roots breathe in private where no one knows what's really going on under there. We adopted these practices in our own communities, and so it's no wonder why today the typical ideal vision of a professional black woman, especially in corporate America, tends to look like this, rather than like this. And she certainly doesn't look like this. In September of this year, a federal court ruled it lawful for a company to discriminate against hiring an employee based on if she or he wears dreadlocks. In the case, the hiring manager in Mobile, Alabama is on record as saying, "I'm not saying yours are messy, but ... you know what I'm talking about." Well, what was she talking about? Did she think that they were ugly? Or maybe they were just a little too Afrocentric and pro-black-looking for her taste. Or maybe it's not about Afrocentricity, and it's more just about it being a little too "urban" for the professional setting. Perhaps she had a genuine concern in that they looked "scary" and that they would intimidate the clients and their customer base. All of these words are ones that are too often associated with the stigma attached to natural hairstyles. And this ... this has got to change. In 2013, a white paper published by the Deloitte Leadership Center for Inclusion, studied 3,000 individuals in executive leadership roles on the concept of covering in the workplace based on appearance, advocacy, affiliation and association. When thinking about appearance-based covering, the study showed that 67 percent of women of color cover in the workplace based on their appearance. Of the total respondents who admitted to appearance-based covering, 82 percent said that it was somewhat to extremely important for them to do so for their professional advancement. Now, this is Ursula Burns. She is the first African-American female CEO of a Fortune 500 company — of Xerox. She's known by her signature look, the one that you see here. A short, nicely trimmed, well-manicured Afro. Ms. Burns is what we like to call a "natural girl." And she is paving the way and showing what's possible for African-American women seeking to climb the corporate ladder, but still wishing to wear natural hairstyles. But today the majority of African-American women who we still look to as leaders, icons and role models, still opt for a straight-hair look. Now, maybe it's because they want to — this is authentically how they feel best — but maybe — and I bet — a part of them felt like they had to in order to reach the level of success that they have attained today. There is a natural hair movement that is sweeping the country and also in some places in Europe. Millions of women are exploring what it means to transition to natural hair, and they're cutting off years and years of dry, damaged ends in order to restore their natural curl pattern. I know because I have been an advocate and an ambassador for this movement for roughly the last three years. After 27 years of excessive heat and harsh chemicals, my hair was beginning to show extreme signs of wear and tear. It was breaking off, it was thinning, looking just extremely dry and brittle. All those years of chasing that conventional image of beauty that we saw earlier was finally beginning to take its toll. I wanted to do something about it, and so I started what I called the "No Heat Challenge," where I would refrain from using heat styling tools on my hair for six months. And like a good millennial, I documented it on social media. (Laughter) I documented as I reluctantly cut off three to four inches of my beloved hair. I documented as I struggled to master these natural hairstyles, and also as I struggled to embrace them and think that they actually looked good. And I documented as my hair texture slowly began to change. By sharing this journey openly, I learned that I was not the only woman going through this and that in fact there were thousands and thousands of other women who were longing to do the same. So they would reach out to me and they would say, "Cheyenne, how did you do that natural hairstyle that I saw you with the other day? What new products have you started using that might be a little better for my hair texture as it begins to change?" Or, "What are some of the natural hair routines that I should begin to adopt to slowly restore the health of my hair?" But I also found that there were a large number of women who were extremely hesitant to take that first step because they were paralyzed by fear. Fear of the unknown — what would they now look like? How would they feel about themselves with these natural hairstyles? And most importantly to them, how would others view them? Over the last three years of having numerous conversations with friends of mine and also complete strangers from around the world, I learned some really important things about how African-American women identify with their hair. And so when I think back to that hiring manager in Mobile, Alabama, I'd say, "Actually, no. We don't know what you're talking about." But here are some things that we do know. We know that when black women embrace their love for their natural hair, it helps to undo generations of teaching that black in its natural state is not beautiful, or something to be hidden or covered up. We know that black women express their individuality and experience feelings of empowerment by experimenting with different hairstyles regularly. And we also know that when we're invited to wear our natural hair in the workplace, it reinforces that we are uniquely valued and thus helps us to flourish and advance professionally. I leave you with this. In a time of racial and social tension, embracing this movement and others like this help us to rise above the confines of the status quo. So when you see a woman with braids or locks draping down her back, or you notice your colleague who has stopped straightening her hair to work, do not simply approach her and admire and ask her if you can touch it — (Laughter) Really appreciate her. Applaud her. Heck, even high-five her if that's what you feel so inclined to do. Because this — this is more than about a hairstyle. It's about self-love and self-worth. It's about being brave enough not to fold under the pressure of others' expectations. And about knowing that making the decision to stray from the norm does not define who we are, but it simply reveals who we are. And finally, being brave is easier when we can count on the compassion of others. So after today, I certainly hope that we can count on you. Thank you. (Applause) |
Don't feel sorry for refugees -- believe in them | {0: 'Luma Mufleh does something revolutionary: she coaches soccer. A Jordanian immigrant and Muslim of Syrian descent, Mufleh is determined to empower refugee children everywhere.'} | TED2017 | I remember when I first found out I was going to speak at a TED conference. I ran across the hall to one of my classrooms to inform my students. "Guess what, guys? I've been asked to give a TED Talk." The reaction wasn't one I quite expected. The whole room went silent. "A TED Talk? You mean, like the one you made us watch on grit? Or the one with the scientist that did this really awesome thing with robots?" Muhammad asked. "Yes, just like that." "But Coach, those people are really important and smart." (Laughter) "I know that." "But Coach, why are you speaking? You hate public speaking." "I do," I admitted, "But it's important that I speak about us, that I speak about your journeys, about my journey. People need to know." The students at the all-refugee school that I founded decided to end with some words of encouragement. "Cool! It better be good, Coach." (Laughter) There are 65.3 million people who have been forcibly displaced from their homes because of war or persecution. The largest number, 11 million, are from Syria. 33,952 people flee their homes daily. The vast majority remain in refugee camps, whose conditions cannot be defined as humane under anyone's definition. We are participating in the degradation of humans. Never have we had numbers this high. This is the highest number of refugees since World War II. Now, let me tell you why this issue is so important to me. I am an Arab. I am an immigrant. I am a Muslim. I've also spent the last 12 years of my life working with refugees. Oh — and I'm also gay. It makes me really popular these days. (Laughter) But I am the daughter of a refugee. My grandmother fled Syria in 1964 during the first Assad regime. She was three months pregnant when she packed up a suitcase, piled in her five children and drove to neighboring Jordan, not knowing what the future held for her and her family. My grandfather decided to stay, not believing it was that bad. He followed her a month later, after his brothers were tortured and his factory was taken over by the government. They rebuilt their lives starting from scratch and eventually became independently wealthy Jordanian citizens. I was born in Jordan 11 years later. It was really important to my grandmother for us to know our history and our journey. I was eight years old when she took me to visit my first refugee camp. I didn't understand why. I didn't know why it was so important to her for us to go. I remember walking into the camp holding her hand, and her saying, "Go play with the kids," while she visited with the women in the camp. I didn't want to. These kids weren't like me. They were poor. They lived in a camp. I refused. She knelt down beside me and firmly said, "Go. And don't come back until you've played. Don't ever think people are beneath you or that you have nothing to learn from others." I reluctantly went. I never wanted to disappoint my grandmother. I returned a few hours later, having spent some time playing soccer with the kids in the camp. We walked out of the camp, and I was excitedly telling her what a great time I had and how fantastic the kids were. "Haram!" I said in Arabic. "Poor them." "Haram on us," she said, using the word's different meaning, that we were sinning. "Don't feel sorry for them; believe in them." It wasn't until I left my country of origin for the United States that I realized the impact of her words. After my college graduation, I applied for and was granted political asylum, based on being a member of a social group. Some people may not realize this, but you can still get the death penalty in some countries for being gay. I had to give up my Jordanian citizenship. That was the hardest decision I've ever had to make, but I had no other choice. The point is, when you find yourself choosing between home and survival, the question "Where are you from?" becomes very loaded. A Syrian woman who I recently met at a refugee camp in Greece articulated it best, when she recalled the exact moment she realized she had to flee Aleppo. "I looked out the window and there was nothing. It was all rubble. There were no stores, no streets, no schools. Everything was gone. I had been in my apartment for months, listening to bombs drop and watching people die. But I always thought it would get better, that no one could force me to leave, no one could take my home away from me. And I don't know why it was that morning, but when I looked outside, I realized if I didn't leave, my three young children would die. And so we left. We left because we had to, not because we wanted to. There was no choice," she said. It's kind of hard to believe that you belong when you don't have a home, when your country of origin rejects you because of fear or persecution, or the city that you grew up in is completely destroyed. I didn't feel like I had a home. I was no longer a Jordanian citizen, but I wasn't American, either. I felt a kind of loneliness that is still hard to put into words today. After college, I desperately needed to find a place to call home. I bounced around from state to state and eventually ended up in North Carolina. Kindhearted people who felt sorry for me offered to pay rent or buy me a meal or a suit for my new interview. It just made me feel more isolated and incapable. It wasn't until I met Miss Sarah, a Southern Baptist who took me in at my lowest and gave me a job, that I started to believe in myself. Miss Sarah owned a diner in the mountains of North Carolina. I assumed, because of my privileged upbringing and my Seven Sister education, that she would ask me to manage the restaurant. I was wrong. I started off washing dishes, cleaning toilets and working the grill. I was humbled; I was shown the value of hard work. But most importantly, I felt valued and embraced. I celebrated Christmas with her family, and she attempted to observe Ramadan with me. I remember being very nervous about coming out to her — after all, she was a Southern Baptist. I sat on the couch next to her and I said, "Miss Sarah, you know that I'm gay." Her response is one that I will never forget. "That's fine, honey. Just don't be a slut." (Laughter) (Applause) I eventually moved to Atlanta, still trying to find my home. My journey took a strange turn three years later, after I met a group of refugee kids playing soccer outside. I'd made a wrong turn into this apartment complex, and I saw these kids outside playing soccer. They were playing barefoot with a raggedy soccer ball and rocks set up as goals. I watched them for about an hour, and after that I was smiling. The boys reminded me of home. They reminded me of the way I grew up playing soccer in the streets of Jordan, with my brothers and cousins. I eventually joined their game. They were a little skeptical about letting me join it, because according to them, girls don't know how to play. But obviously I did. I asked them if they had ever played on a team. They said they hadn't, but that they would love to. I gradually won them over, and we formed our first team. This group of kids would give me a crash course in refugees, poverty and humanity. Three brothers from Afghanistan — Roohullah, Noorullah and Zabiullah — played a major role in that. I showed up late to practice one day to find the field completely deserted. I was really worried. My team loved to practice. It wasn't like them to miss practice. I got out of my car, and two kids ran out from behind a dumpster, waving their hands frantically. "Coach, Rooh got beat up. He got jumped. There was blood everywhere." "What do you mean? What do you mean he got beat up?" "These bad kids came and beat him up, Coach. Everybody left. They were all scared." We hopped into my car and drove over to Rooh's apartment. I knocked on the door, and Noor opened it. "Where's Rooh? I need to talk to him, see if he's OK." "He's in his room, Coach. He's refusing to come out." I knocked on the door. "Rooh, come on out. I need to talk to you. I need to see if you're OK or if we need to go to the hospital." He came out. He had a big gash on his head, a split lip, and he was physically shaken. I was looking at him, and I asked the boys to call for their mom, because I needed to go to the hospital with him. They called for their mom. She came out. I had my back turned to her, and she started screaming in Farsi. The boys fell to the ground laughing. I was very confused, because there was nothing funny about this. They explained to me that she said, "You told me your coach was a Muslim and a woman." From behind, I didn't appear to be either to her. (Laughter) "I am Muslim," I said, turning to her. "Ašhadu ʾan lā ʾilāha ʾilla (A)llāh," reciting the Muslim declaration of faith. Confused, and perhaps maybe a little bit reassured, she realized that yes, I, this American-acting, shorts-wearing, non-veiled woman, was indeed a Muslim. Their family had fled the Taliban. Hundreds of people in their village were murdered. Their father was taken in by the Taliban, only to return a few months later, a shell of the man he once was. The family escaped to Pakistan, and the two older boys, age eight and 10 at the time, wove rugs for 10 hours a day to provide for their family. They were so excited when they found out that they had been approved to resettle in the United States, making them the lucky 0.1 percent who get to do that. They had hit the jackpot. Their story is not unique. Every refugee family I have worked with has had some version of this. I work with kids who have seen their mothers raped, their fathers' fingers sliced off. One kid saw a bullet put in his grandmother's head, because she refused to let the rebels take him to be a child soldier. Their journeys are haunting. But what I get to see every day is hope, resilience, determination, a love of life and appreciation for being able to rebuild their lives. I was at the boys' apartment one night, when the mom came home after cleaning 18 hotel rooms in one day. She sat down, and Noor rubbed her feet, saying that he was going to take care of her once he graduated. She smiled from exhaustion. "God is good. Life is good. We are lucky to be here." In the last two years, we have seen an escalating anti-refugee sentiment. It's global. The numbers continue to grow because we do nothing to prevent it and nothing to stop it. The issue shouldn't be stopping refugees from coming into our countries. The issue should be not forcing them to leave their own. (Applause) Sorry. (Applause) How much more suffering, how much more suffering must we take? How many more people need to be forced out of their homes before we say, "Enough!"? A hundred million? Not only do we shame, blame and reject them for atrocities that they had absolutely nothing to do with, we re-traumatize them, when we're supposed to be welcoming them into our countries. We strip them of their dignity and treat them like criminals. I had a student in my office a couple of weeks ago. She's originally from Iraq. She broke down crying. "Why do they hate us?" "Who hates you?" "Everyone; everyone hates us because we are refugees, because we are Muslim." In the past, I was able to reassure my students that the majority of the world does not hate refugees. But this time I couldn't. I couldn't explain to her why someone tried to rip off her mother's hijab when they were grocery shopping, or why a player on an opposing team called her a terrorist and told her to go back where she came from. I couldn't reassure her that her father's ultimate life sacrifice by serving in the United States military as an interpreter would make her more valued as an American citizen. We take in so few refugees worldwide. We resettle less than 0.1 percent. That 0.1 percent benefits us more than them. It dumbfounds me how the word "refugee" is considered something to be dirty, something to be ashamed of. They have nothing to be ashamed of. We have seen advances in every aspect of our lives — except our humanity. There are 65.3 million people who have been forced out of their homes because of war — the largest number in history. We are the ones who should be ashamed. Thank you. (Applause) |
Lifesaving scientific tools made of paper | {0: 'TED Fellow Manu Prakash is on a mission to bring radical new technology to global health.'} | TED2017 | So, I love making tools and sharing them with people. I remember as a child, my first tool I built was actually a microscope that I built by stealing lenses from my brother's eyeglasses. He wasn't that thrilled. But, you know, maybe because of that moment, 30 years later, I'm still making microscopes. And the reason I built these tools is for moments like this. (Video) Girl: I have black things in my hair — Manu Prakash: This is a school in the Bay Area. (Video) MP: The living world far supersedes our imagination of how things actually work. (Video) Boy: Oh my God! MP: Right — oh my God! I hadn't realized this would be such a universal phrase. Over the last two years, in my lab, we built 50,000 Foldscopes and shipped them to 130 countries in the world, at no cost to the kids we sent them to. This year alone, with the support of our community, we are planning to ship a million microscopes to kids around the world. What does that do? It creates an inspiring community of people around the world, learning and teaching each other, from Kenya to Kampala to Kathmandu to Kansas. And one of the phenomenal things that I love about this is the sense of community. There's a kid in Nicaragua teaching others how to identify mosquito species that carry dengue by looking at the larva under a microscope. There's a pharmacologist who came up with a new way to detect fake drugs anywhere. There is a girl who wondered: "How does glitter actually work?" and discovered the physics of crystalline formation in glitter. There is an Argentinian doctor who's trying to do field cervical cancer screening with this tool. And yours very truly found a species of flea that was dug inside my heel in my foot one centimeter deep. Now, you might think of these as anomalies. But there is a method to this madness. I call this "frugal science" — the idea of sharing the experience of science, and not just the information. To remind you: there are a billion people on this planet who live with absolutely no infrastructure: no roads, no electricity and thus, no health care. Also, there a billion kids on this planet that live in poverty. How are we supposed to inspire them for the next generation of solution makers? There are health care workers that we put on the line to fight infectious diseases, to protect us with absolutely bare-minimum tools and resources. So as a lab at Stanford, I think of this from a context of frugal science and building solutions for these communities. Often we think about being able to do diagnosis under a tree, off-grid. I'll tell you two examples today of new tools. One of them starts in Uganda. In 2013, on a field trip to detect schistosomiasis with Foldscopes, I made a minor observation. In a clinic, in a far, remote area, I saw a centrifuge being used as a doorstop. I mean — quite literally, the doorstop. And I asked them and they said, "Oh, we don't actually have electricity, so this piece of junk is good as a doorstop." Centrifuges, for some of you who don't know, are the pinnacle tool to be able to do sample processing. You separate components of blood or body fluids to be able to detect and identify pathogens. But centrifuges are bulky, expensive — cost around 1,000 dollars — and really hard to carry out in the field. And of course, they don't work without power. Sound familiar? So we started thinking about solving this problem, and I came back — kept thinking about toys. Now ... I have a few with me here. I first started with yo-yos ... and I'm a terrible yo-yo thrower. Because these objects spin, we wondered, could we actually use the physics of these objects to be able to build centrifuges? This was possibly the worst throw I could make. But you might start realizing, if you start exploring the space of toys — we tried these spinning tops, and then in the lab, we stumbled upon this wonder. It's the whirligig, or a buzzer, or a rundle. A couple of strings and a little disk, and if I push, it spins. How many of you have played with this as a kid? This is called a button-on-a-string. OK, maybe 50 percent of you. What you didn't realize — that this little object is the oldest toy in the history of mankind ... 5,000 years ago. We have found relics of this object hidden around on our planet. Now the irony is, we actually don't understand how this little thing works. That's when I get excited. So we got back to work, wrote down a couple of equations. If you take the input torque that you put in, you take the drag on this disc, and the twist drag on these strings, you should be able to mathematically solve this. This is not the only equation in my talk. Ten pages of math later, we could actually write down the complete analytical solution for this dynamic system. And out comes what we call "Paperfuge." That's my postdoc Saad Bhamla, who's the co-inventor of Paperfuge. And to the left, you see all the centrifuges that we're trying to replace. This little object that you see right here is a disc, a couple of strings and a handle. And when I spin and I push, it starts to spin. Now, when you realize, when you do the math, when we calculate the rpm for this object, mathematically, we should be able to go all the way to a million rpm. Now, there is a little twist in human anatomy, because the resonant frequency of this object is about 10 hertz, and if you've ever played the piano, you can't go higher than two or three hertz. The maximum speed we've been able to achieve with this object is not 10,000 rpm, not 50,000 rpm — 120,000 rpm. That's equal to 30,000 g-forces. If I was to stick you right here and have it spin, you would think about the types of forces you would experience. One of the factors of a tool like this is to be able to do diagnosis with this. So, I'm going to do a quick demo here, where — this is a moment where I'm going to make a little finger prick, and a tiny drop of blood is going to come out. If you don't like blood, you don't have to look at it. Here is a little lancet. These lancets are available everywhere, completely passive. And if I've had breakfast today ... That didn't hurt at all. OK, I take a little capillary with a drop of blood — now this drop of blood has answers, that's why I'm interested in it. It might actually tell me whether I have malaria right now or not. I take a little capillary, and you see it starts wicking in. I'm going to draw a little more blood. And that's good enough for right now. Now, I just seal this capillary by putting it in clay. And now that's sealed the sample. We're going to take the sample, mount it on Paperfuge. A little piece of tape to make a sealed cavity. So now the sample is completely enclosed. And we are ready for a spin. I'm pushing and pulling with this object. I'm going to load this up ... And you see the object starts spinning. Unlike a regular centrifuge, this is a counter-rotating centrifuge. It goes back and forth, back and forth ... And now I'm charging it up, and you see it builds momentum. And now — I don't know if you can hear this — 30 seconds of this, and I should be able to separate all the blood cells with the plasma. And the ratio of those blood cells to plasma — (Applause) Already, if you see right here, if you focus on this, you should be able to see a separated volume of blood and plasma. And the ratio of that actually tells me whether I might be anemic. One of the aspects of this is, we build many types of Paperfuges. This one allows us to identify malaria parasites by running them for a little longer, and we can identify malaria parasites that are in the blood that we can separate out and detect with something like a centrifuge. Another version of this allows me to separate nucleic acids to be able to do nucleic acid tests out in the field itself. Here is another version that allows me to separate bulk samples, and then, finally, something new that we've been working on to be able to implement the entire multiplex test on an object like this. So where you do the sample preparation and the chemistry in the same object. Now ... this is all good, but when you start thinking about this, you have to share these tools with people. And one of the things we did is — we just got back from Madagascar; this is what clinical trials for malaria look like — (Laughter) You can do this while having coffee. But most importantly, this is a village six hours from any road. We are in a room with one of the senior members of the community and a health care worker. It really is this portion of the work that excites me the most — that smile, to be able to share simple but powerful tools with people around the world. Now, I forgot to tell you this, that all of that cost me 20 cents to make. OK, in the negative time I have left, I'll tell you about the most recent — (Laughter) invention from our lab. It's called Abuzz — the idea that all of you could help us fight mosquitoes; you could all help us track our enemies. These are enemies because they cause malaria, Zika, chikungunya, dengue. But the challenge is that we actually don't know where our enemies are. The world map for where mosquitoes are is missing. So we started thinking about this. There are 3,500 species of mosquitoes, and they're all very similar. Some of them are so identical that even an entomologist cannot identify them under a microscope. But they have an Achilles' heel. This is what mosquitoes flirting with each other looks like. That's a male chasing a female. They're actually talking to each other with their wingbeat frequencies. (Buzzing sound) And thus, they have a signature. We realized that using a regular phone, a $5-10 flip phone — how many remember what this object is? (Laughter) We can record these acoustic signatures from mosquitoes. I'll tell you exactly how to do this. I caught some mosquitoes outside. Unlike Bill [Gates], I'm not going to release them. (Laughter) But I will tell you how to record from this. All you do is tap them and they fly. You can first test — I can actually hear that. And you bring your phone, which has microphones — it turns out the mics are so damn good already, even on regular phones, that you can pick up this near-field signature. And since I'm out of time, let me just play the recording that I made a day ago. (Mosquitoes buzz) This is all the charming sound that you heard before that you all love. One of the contexts of this is that being able to do this with a regular cell phone allows us to map mosquito species. Using a flip phone, we mapped one of the largest acoustic databases with 25 to 20 species of mosquitoes that carry human pathogens. And from this and machine learning, anybody who uploads this data, we can identify and tell the probability of what species of mosquitoes you're actually working with. We call this Abuzz, and if any of you want to sign up, just go to the website. Let me close with something that's very important and dear to my heart. One of the challenges of today is we have terrible problems. We have a billion people with absolutely no health care, climate change, biodiversity loss, on and on and on. And we hope that science is going to provide the answer. But before you leave this theatre today, I want you to promise one thing. We're going to make science accessible — not just to the people who can afford it, but a billion others who can't. Let's make science and scientific literacy a human right. The moment that you pass the tingling feeling of making a discovery to another child, you're enabling them to be the next group of people who will actually solve these problems. Thank you. (Applause) |
How we can face the future without fear, together | {0: 'Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks is one of Judaism\'s spiritual leaders, and he exercises a primary influence on the thought and philosophy of Jews and people of all faiths worldwide. He is an award-winning author whose latest bestselling book is "Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times."'} | TED2017 | "These are the times," said Thomas Paine, "that try men's souls." And they're trying ours now. This is a fateful moment in the history of the West. We've seen divisive elections and divided societies. We've seen a growth of extremism in politics and religion, all of it fueled by anxiety, uncertainty and fear, of a world that's changing almost faster than we can bear, and the sure knowledge that it's going to change faster still. I have a friend in Washington. I asked him, what was it like being in America during the recent presidential election? He said to me, "Well, it was like the man sitting on the deck of the Titanic with a glass of whiskey in his hand and he's saying, 'I know I asked for ice — (Laughter) but this is ridiculous.'" So is there something we can do, each of us, to be able to face the future without fear? I think there is. And one way into it is to see that perhaps the most simple way into a culture and into an age is to ask: What do people worship? People have worshipped so many different things — the sun, the stars, the storm. Some people worship many gods, some one, some none. In the 19th and 20th centuries, people worshipped the nation, the Aryan race, the communist state. What do we worship? I think future anthropologists will take a look at the books we read on self-help, self-realization, self-esteem. They'll look at the way we talk about morality as being true to oneself, the way we talk about politics as a matter of individual rights, and they'll look at this wonderful new religious ritual we have created. You know the one? Called the "selfie." And I think they'll conclude that what we worship in our time is the self, the me, the I. And this is great. It's liberating. It's empowering. It's wonderful. But don't forget that biologically, we're social animals. We've spent most of our evolutionary history in small groups. We need those face-to-face interactions where we learn the choreography of altruism and where we create those spiritual goods like friendship and trust and loyalty and love that redeem our solitude. When we have too much of the "I" and too little of the "we," we can find ourselves vulnerable, fearful and alone. It was no accident that Sherry Turkle of MIT called the book she wrote on the impact of social media "Alone Together." So I think the simplest way of safeguarding the future "you" is to strengthen the future "us" in three dimensions: the us of relationship, the us of identity and the us of responsibility. So let me first take the us of relationship. And here, forgive me if I get personal. Once upon a time, a very long time ago, I was a 20-year-old undergraduate studying philosophy. I was into Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and Sartre and Camus. I was full of ontological uncertainty and existential angst. It was terrific. (Laughter) I was self-obsessed and thoroughly unpleasant to know, until one day I saw across the courtyard a girl who was everything that I wasn't. She radiated sunshine. She emanated joy. I found out her name was Elaine. We met. We talked. We married. And 47 years, three children and eight grandchildren later, I can safely say it was the best decision I ever took in my life, because it's the people not like us that make us grow. And that is why I think we have to do just that. The trouble with Google filters, Facebook friends and reading the news by narrowcasting rather than broadcasting means that we're surrounded almost entirely by people like us whose views, whose opinions, whose prejudices, even, are just like ours. And Cass Sunstein of Harvard has shown that if we surround ourselves with people with the same views as us, we get more extreme. I think we need to renew those face-to-face encounters with the people not like us. I think we need to do that in order to realize that we can disagree strongly and yet still stay friends. It's in those face-to-face encounters that we discover that the people not like us are just people, like us. And actually, every time we hold out the hand of friendship to somebody not like us, whose class or creed or color are different from ours, we heal one of the fractures of our wounded world. That is the us of relationship. Second is the us of identity. Let me give you a thought experiment. Have you been to Washington? Have you seen the memorials? Absolutely fascinating. There's the Lincoln Memorial: Gettysburg Address on one side, Second Inaugural on the other. You go to the Jefferson Memorial, screeds of text. Martin Luther King Memorial, more than a dozen quotes from his speeches. I didn't realize, in America you read memorials. Now go to the equivalent in London in Parliament Square and you will see that the monument to David Lloyd George contains three words: David Lloyd George. (Laughter) Nelson Mandela gets two. Churchill gets just one: Churchill. (Laughter) Why the difference? I'll tell you why the difference. Because America was from the outset a nation of wave after wave of immigrants, so it had to create an identity which it did by telling a story which you learned at school, you read on memorials and you heard repeated in presidential inaugural addresses. Britain until recently wasn't a nation of immigrants, so it could take identity for granted. The trouble is now that two things have happened which shouldn't have happened together. The first thing is in the West we've stopped telling this story of who we are and why, even in America. And at the same time, immigration is higher than it's ever been before. So when you tell a story and your identity is strong, you can welcome the stranger, but when you stop telling the story, your identity gets weak and you feel threatened by the stranger. And that's bad. I tell you, Jews have been scattered and dispersed and exiled for 2,000 years. We never lost our identity. Why? Because at least once a year, on the festival of Passover, we told our story and we taught it to our children and we ate the unleavened bread of affliction and tasted the bitter herbs of slavery. So we never lost our identity. I think collectively we've got to get back to telling our story, who we are, where we came from, what ideals by which we live. And if that happens, we will become strong enough to welcome the stranger and say, "Come and share our lives, share our stories, share our aspirations and dreams." That is the us of identity. And finally, the us of responsibility. Do you know something? My favorite phrase in all of politics, very American phrase, is: "We the people." Why "we the people?" Because it says that we all share collective responsibility for our collective future. And that's how things really are and should be. Have you noticed how magical thinking has taken over our politics? So we say, all you've got to do is elect this strong leader and he or she will solve all our problems for us. Believe me, that is magical thinking. And then we get the extremes: the far right, the far left, the extreme religious and the extreme anti-religious, the far right dreaming of a golden age that never was, the far left dreaming of a utopia that never will be and the religious and anti-religious equally convinced that all it takes is God or the absence of God to save us from ourselves. That, too, is magical thinking, because the only people who will save us from ourselves is we the people, all of us together. And when we do that, and when we move from the politics of me to the politics of all of us together, we rediscover those beautiful, counterintuitive truths: that a nation is strong when it cares for the weak, that it becomes rich when it cares for the poor, it becomes invulnerable when it cares about the vulnerable. That is what makes great nations. (Applause) So here is my simple suggestion. It might just change your life, and it might just help to begin to change the world. Do a search and replace operation on the text of your mind, and wherever you encounter the word "self," substitute the word "other." So instead of self-help, other-help; instead of self-esteem, other-esteem. And if you do that, you will begin to feel the power of what for me is one of the most moving sentences in all of religious literature. "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me." We can face any future without fear so long as we know we will not face it alone. So for the sake of the future "you," together let us strengthen the future "us." Thank you. (Applause) |
Why journalists have an obligation to challenge power | {0: "Jorge Ramos's work covers the issues that affect the 55 million Latinos in the United States and immigrants all over the world."} | TED2017 | I'm a journalist, and I'm an immigrant. And these two conditions define me. I was born in Mexico, but I've spent more than half my life reporting in the United States, a country which was itself created by immigrants. As a reporter and as a foreigner, I've learned that neutrality, silence and fear aren't the best options — not in journalism, nor in life. Neutrality is often an excuse that we journalists use to hide from our true responsibility. What is that responsibility? It is to question and to challenge those in positions of power. That's what journalism is for. That's the beauty of journalism: to question and challenge the powerful. Of course, we have the obligation to report reality as it is, not how we would like it to be. In that sense, I agree with the principle of objectivity: if a house is blue, I say that it's blue. If there are a million unemployed people, I say there are a million. But neutrality won't necessarily lead me to the truth. Even if I'm unequivocally scrupulous, and I present both sides of a news item — the Democratic and the Republican, the liberal and the conservative, the government's and the opposition's — in the end, I have no guarantee, nor are any of us guaranteed that we'll know what's true and what's not true. Life is much more complicated, and I believe journalism should reflect that very complexity. To be clear: I refuse to be a tape recorder. I didn't become a journalist to be a tape recorder. I know what you're going to say: no one uses tape recorders nowadays. (Laughter) In that case, I refuse to take out my cell phone and hit the record button and point it in front of me as if I were at a concert, like a fan at a concert. That is not true journalism. Contrary to what many people think, journalists are making value judgments all the time, ethical and moral judgments. And we're always making decisions that are exceedingly personal and extraordinarily subjective. For example: What happens if you're called to cover a dictatorship, like Augusto Pinochet's regime in Chile or Fidel Castro's in Cuba? Are you going to report only what the general and commander want, or will you confront them? What happens if you find out that in your country or in the country next door, students are disappearing and hidden graves are appearing, or that millions of dollars are disappearing from the budget and that ex-presidents are magically now multimillionaires? Will you report only the official version? Or what happens if you're assigned to cover the presidential elections of the primary superpower, and one of the candidates makes comments that are racist, sexist and xenophobic? That happened to me. And I want to tell you what I did, but first, let me explain where I'm coming from, so you can understand my reaction. I grew up in Mexico City, the oldest of five brothers, and our family simply couldn't afford to pay for all of our college tuition. So I studied in the morning, and worked in the afternoon. Eventually, I got the job I had always wanted: television reporter. It was a big opportunity. But as I was working on my third story, I ended up criticizing the president, and questioning the lack of democracy in Mexico. In Mexico, from 1929 to 2000, elections were always rigged; the incumbent president would hand-pick his successor. That's not true democracy. To me it seemed like a brilliant idea to expose the president, but to my boss — (Laughter) My boss didn't think it was such a great idea. At that time, the presidential office, Los Pinos, had issued a direct censor against the media. My boss, who, aside from being in charge of the show I worked for, was also in charge of a soccer team. I always suspected that he was more interested in goals than in the news. He censored my report. He asked me to change it, I said no, so he put another journalist on the story to write what I was supposed to say. I did not want to be a censored journalist. I don't know where I found the strength, but I wrote my letter of resignation. And so at 24 years of age — just 24 — I made the most difficult and most transcendental decision of my life. Not only did I resign from television, but I had also decided to leave my country. I sold my car, a beat-up little red Volkswagen, came up with some money and said goodbye to my family, to my friends, to my streets, to my favorite haunts — to my tacos — (Laughter) and I bought a one-way ticket to Los Angeles, California. And so I became one of the 250 million immigrants that exist in the world. Ask any immigrant about the first day they arrived in their new country, and you'll find that they remember absolutely everything, like it was a movie with background music. In my case, I arrived in Los Angeles, the sun was setting, and everything I owned — a guitar, a suitcase and some documents — I could carry all of it with my two hands. That feeling of absolute freedom, I haven't experienced since. And I survived with what little I had. I obtained a student visa; I was studying. I ate a lot of lettuce and bread, because that's all I had. Finally, in 1984, I landed my first job as a TV reporter in the United States. And the first thing I noticed was that in the US, my colleagues criticized — and mercilessly — then president Ronald Reagan, and absolutely nothing happened; no one censored them. And I thought: I love this country. (Laughter) (Applause) And that's how it's been for more than 30 years: reporting with total freedom, and being treated as an equal despite being an immigrant — until, without warning, I was assigned to cover the recent US presidential election. On June 16, 2015, a candidate who would eventually become the president of the United States said that Mexican immigrants were criminals, drug traffickers and rapists. And I knew that he was lying. I knew he was wrong for one very simple reason: I'm a Mexican immigrant. And we're not like that. So I did what any other reporter would have done: I wrote him a letter by hand requesting an interview, and I sent it to his Tower in New York. The next day I was at work, and I suddenly began to receive hundreds of calls and texts on my cell phone, some more insulting than others. I didn't know what was happening until my friend came into my office and said, "They published your cell number online." They actually did that. Here's the letter they sent where they gave out my number. Don't bother writing it down, OK? I already changed it. (Laughter) But I learned two things. The first one is that you should never, never, ever give your cell number to Donald Trump. (Laughter) (Applause) The second lesson was that I needed to stop being neutral at that point. From then on, my mission as a journalist changed. I would confront the candidate and show that he was wrong, that what he said about immigrants in the US was not true. Let me give you some figures. Ninety-seven percent of all undocumented people in the United States are good people. Less than three percent have committed a serious crime, or "felony," as they say in English. In comparison, six percent of US citizens have committed a serious crime. The conclusion is that undocumented immigrants behave much better than US citizens. Based on that data, I made a plan. Eight weeks after they published my cell number, I obtained a press pass for a press conference for the candidate gaining momentum in the polls. I decided to confront him in person. But ... things didn't turn out exactly as I had planned; watch: [Donald Trump Press Conference Dubuque, Iowa] (Video) Jorge Ramos: Mr. Trump, I have a question about immigration. Donald Trump: Who's next? Yes, please. JR: Your immigration plan is full of empty promises. DT: Excuse me, you weren't called. Sit down. Sit down! JR: I'm a reporter; as an immigrant and as a US citizen, I have the right to ask a question. DT: No you don't. JR: I have the right to ask — DT: Go back to Univision. JR: This is the question: You cannot deport 11 million people. You cannot build a 1900-mile wall. You cannot deny citizenship to children in this country. DT: Sit down. JR: And with those ideas — DT: You weren't called. JR: I'm a reporter and I have — Don't touch me, sir. Guard 1: Please don't disrupt. You're being disruptive. JR: I have the right to ask a question. G1: Yes, in order. In turn, sir. Guard 2: Do you have your media credential? JR: I have the right — G2: Where? Let me see. JR: It's over there. Man: Whoever's coming out, stay out. G2: You've just got to wait your turn. Man: You're very rude. It's not about you. JR: It's not about you — Man: Get out of my country! Man: It's not about you. JR: I'm a US citizen, too. Man: Well ...whatever. No, Univision. It's not about you. JR: It's not about you. It's about the United States. (Applause) (Applause ends) Whenever I see that video, the first thing I always think is that hate is contagious. If you notice, after the candidate says, "Go back to Univision" — that's code; what he's telling me is, "Get out of here." One member of his entourage, as if he had been given permission, said, "Get out of my country," not knowing that I'm also a US citizen. After watching this video many times, I also think that in order to break free from neutrality — and for it to be a true break — one has to lose their fear, and then learn how to say, "No; I'm not going to be quiet. I'm not going to sit down. And I'm not going to leave." The word "no" — (Applause) "no" is the most powerful word that exists in any language, and it always precedes any important change in our lives. And I think there's enormous dignity and it generates a great deal of respect to be able to step back and to push back and say, "No." Elie Wiesel — Holocaust survivor, Nobel Peace Prize recipient and who, unfortunately, we lost very recently — said some very wise words: "We must take a side. Neutrality helps only the oppressor, never the victim." And he's completely right. We journalists are obligated to take sides in certain circumstances; in cases of racism, discrimination, corruption, lying to the public, dictatorships and human rights, we need to set aside neutrality and indifference. Spanish has a great word to describe the stance that journalists should take. The word is "contrapoder [anti-establishment]." Basically, we journalists should be on the opposite side from those in power. But if you're in bed with politicians, if you go to the baptism or wedding of the governor's son or if you want to be the president's buddy, how are you going to criticize them? When I'm assigned to interview a powerful or influential person, I always keep two things in mind: if I don't ask this difficult and uncomfortable question, no one else is going to; and that I'm never going to see this person again. So I'm not looking to make a good impression or to forge a connection. In the end, if I have to choose between being the president's friend or enemy, I always prefer to be their enemy. In closing: I know this is a difficult time to be an immigrant and a journalist, but now more than ever, we need journalists who are prepared, at any given moment, to set neutrality aside. Personally, I feel like I've been preparing for this moment my whole life. When they censored me when I was 24, I learned that neutrality, fear and silence often make you an accomplice in crime, abuse and injustice. And being an accomplice to power is never good journalism. Now, at 59 years old, I only hope to have a tiny bit of the courage and mental clarity I had at 24, and that way, never again remain quiet. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
What rivers can tell us about the earth's history | {0: 'Liz Hajek studies sedimentary rocks to understand how landscapes change and evolve.'} | TEDxPSU | All right, let's get up our picture of the earth. The earth is pretty awesome. I'm a geologist, so I get pretty psyched about this, but the earth is great. It's powerful, it's dynamic, it's constantly changing. It's a pretty exciting place to live. But I want to share with you guys today my perspective as a geologist in how understanding earth's past can help inform and guide decisions that we make today about how to sustainably live on earth's surface. So there's a lot of exciting things that go on on the surface of the earth. If we zoom in here a little bit, I want to talk to you guys a little bit about one of the things that happens. Material get shuffled around earth's surface all the time, and one of the big thing that happens is material from high mountains gets eroded and transported and deposited in the sea. And this process is ongoing all the time, and it has huge effects on how the landscape works. So this example here in south India — we have some of the biggest mountains in the world, and you can see in this satellite photo rivers transporting material from those mountains out to the sea. You can think of these rivers like bulldozers. They're basically taking these mountains and pushing them down towards the sea. We'll give you guys an example here. So we zoom in a little bit. I want to talk to you guys specifically about a river. We can see these beautiful patterns that the rivers make as they're pushing material down to the sea, but these patterns aren't static. These rivers are wiggling and jumping around quite a bit, and it can have big impacts on our lives. So an example of this is this is the Kosi River. So the Kosi River has this nice c-shaped pathway, and it exits the big mountains of Nepal carrying with it a ton of material, a lot of sediments that's being eroded from the high mountains, and it spreads out across India and moves this material. So we're going to zoom in to this area and I'm going to tell you a little bit about what happened with the Kosi. It's an example of how dynamic these systems can be. So this is a satellite image from August of 2008, and this satellite image is colored so that vegetations or plants show up as green and water shows up as blue. So here again you can see that c-shaped pathway that this river takes as it exits Nepal. And now this is monsoon season. August is monsoon season in this region of the world, and anyone that lives near a river is no stranger to flooding and the hazards and inconveniences at minimum that are associated with that. But something interesting happened in 2008, and this river moved in a way that's very different. It flooded in a way that's very different than it normally does. So the Kosi River is flowing down here, but sometimes as these rivers are bulldozing sediment, they kind of get clogged, and these clogs can actually cause the rivers to shift their course dramatically. So this satellite image is from just two weeks later. Here's the previous pathway, that c-shaped pathway, and you notice it's not blue anymore. But now what we have is this blue pathway that cuts down the middle of the field of view here. What happened is the Kosi River jumped its banks, and for reference, the scale bar here is 40 miles. This river moved over 30 miles very abruptly. So this river got clogged and it jumped its banks. Here's an image from about a week later, and you can see these are the previous pathways, and you can see this process of river-jumping continues as this river moves farther away from its major course. So you can imagine in landscapes like this, where rivers move around frequently, it's really important to understand when, where and how they're going to jump. But these kinds of processes also happen a lot closer to home as well. So in the United States, we have the Mississippi River that drains most of the continental US. It pushes material from the Rocky Mountains and from the Great Plains. It drains it and moves it all the way across America and dumps it out in the Gulf of Mexico. So this is the course of the Mississippi that we're familiar with today, but it didn't always flow in this direction. If we use the geologic record, we can reconstruct where it went in the past. So for example, this red area here is where we know the Mississippi River flowed and deposited material about 4,600 years ago. Then about 3,500 years ago it moved to follow the course outlined here in orange. And it kept moving and it keeps moving. So here's about 2,000 years ago, a thousand years ago, 700 years ago. And it was only as recently as 500 years ago that it occupied the pathway that we're familiar with today. So these processes are really important, and especially here, this delta area, where these river-jumping events in the Mississippi are building land at the interface of the land and the sea. This is really valuable real estate, and deltas like this are some of the most densely populated areas on our planet. So understanding the dynamics of these landscapes, how they formed and how they will continue to change in the future is really important for the people that live there. So rivers also wiggle. These are sort of bigger jumps that we've been talking about. I want to show you guys some river wiggles here. So we're going to fly down to the Amazon River basin, and here again we have a big river system that is draining and moving and plowing material from the Andean Mountains, transporting it across South America and dumping it out into the Atlantic Ocean. So if we zoom in here, you guys can see these nice, curvy river pathways. Again, they're really beautiful, but again, they're not static. These rivers wiggle around. We can use satellite imagery over the last 30 or so years to actually monitor how these change. So take a minute and just watch any bend or curve in this river, and you'll see it doesn't stay in the same place for very long. It changes and evolves and warps its pattern. If you look in this area in particular, I want you guys to notice there's a sort of a loop in the river that gets completely cut off. It's almost like a whip cracking and snaps off the pathway of the river at a certain spot. So just for reference, again, in this location, that river changed its course over four miles over the course of a season or two. So the landscapes that we live in on earth, as this material is being eroded from the mountains and transported to the sea, are wiggling around all the time. They're changing all the time, and we need to be able to understand these processes so we can manage and live sustainably on these landscapes. But it's hard to do if the only information we have is what's going on today at earth's surface. Right? We don't have a lot of observations. We only have 30 years' worth of satellite photos, for example. We need more observations to understand these processes more. And additionally, we need to know how these landscapes are going to respond to changing climate and to changing land use as we continue to occupy and modify earth's surface. So this is where the rocks come in. So as rivers flow, as they're bulldozing material from the mountains to the sea, sometimes bits of sand and clay and rock get stuck in the ground. And that stuff that gets stuck in the ground gets buried, and through time, we get big, thick accumulations of sediments that eventually turn into rocks. What this means is that we can go to places like this, where we see big, thick stacks of sedimentary rocks, and go back in time and see what the landscapes looked like in the past. We can do this to help reconstruct and understand how earth landscapes evolve. This is pretty convenient, too, because the earth has had sort of an epic history. Right? So this video here is a reconstruction of paleogeography for just the first 600 million years of earth's history. So just a little bit of time here. So as the plates move around, we know climate has changed, sea level has changed, we have a lot of different types of landscapes and different types of environments that we can go back — if we have a time machine — we can go back and look at, and we do indeed have a time machine because we can look at the rocks that were deposited at these times. So I'm going to give you an example of this and take you to a special time in earth's past. About 55 million years ago, there was a really abrupt warming event, and what happened was a whole bunch of carbon dioxide was released into earth's atmosphere, and it caused a rapid and pretty extreme global warming event. And when I say warm, I mean pretty warm, that there were things like crocodiles and palm trees as far north as Canada and as far south as Patagonia. So this was a pretty warm time and it happened really abruptly. So what we can do is we can go back and find rocks that were deposited at this time and reconstruct how the landscape changed in response to this warming event. So here, yay, rocks. (Laughter) Here's a pile of rocks. This yellow blob here, this is actually a fossil river, so just like this cartoon I showed, these are deposits that were laid down 55 million years ago. As geologists, we can go and look at these up close and reconstruct the landscape. So here's another example. The yellow blob here is a fossil river. Here's another one above it. We can go and look in detail and make measurements and observations, and we can measure features. For example, the features I just highlighted there tell us that this particular river was probably about three feet deep. You could wade across this cute little stream if you were walking around 55 million years ago. The reddish stuff that's above and below those channels, those are ancient soil deposits. So we can look at those to tell us what lived and grew on the landscape and to understand how these rivers were interacting with their floodplains. So we can look in detail and reconstruct with some specificity how these rivers flowed and what the landscapes looked like. So when we do this for this particular place at this time, if we look what happened before this abrupt warming event, the rivers kind of carved their way down from the mountains to the sea, and they looked maybe similar to what I showed you in the Amazon River basin. But right at the onset of this climate change event, the rivers change dramatically. All of a sudden they got much broader, and they started to slide back and forth across the landscape more readily. Eventually, the rivers reverted back to a state that was more similar to what they would have looked like before this climate event, but it took a long, long time. So we can go back in earth's time and do these kinds of reconstructions and understand how earth's landscape has changed in response to a climate event like this or a land use event. So some of the ways that rivers change or the reasons that rivers change their pattern and their movements is because of things like with extra water falling on the land's surface when climate is hotter, we can move more sediment and erode more sediment, and that changes how rivers behave. So ultimately, as long as earth's surface is our home, we need to carefully manage the resources and risks associated with living in dynamic environments. And I think the only way we can really do that sustainably is if we include information about how landscapes evolved and behaved in earth's past. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why our screens make us less happy | {0: 'What makes us incessantly check our phones? Adam Alter dives into the fascinating psychology that drives our tech addictions.'} | TED2017 | So, a few years ago I heard an interesting rumor. Apparently, the head of a large pet food company would go into the annual shareholder's meeting with can of dog food. And he would eat the can of dog food. And this was his way of convincing them that if it was good enough for him, it was good enough for their pets. This strategy is now known as "dogfooding," and it's a common strategy in the business world. It doesn't mean everyone goes in and eats dog food, but businesspeople will use their own products to demonstrate that they feel — that they're confident in them. Now, this is a widespread practice, but I think what's really interesting is when you find exceptions to this rule, when you find cases of businesses or people in businesses who don't use their own products. Turns out there's one industry where this happens in a common way, in a pretty regular way, and that is the screen-based tech industry. So, in 2010, Steve Jobs, when he was releasing the iPad, described the iPad as a device that was "extraordinary." "The best browsing experience you've ever had; way better than a laptop, way better than a smartphone. It's an incredible experience." A couple of months later, he was approached by a journalist from the New York Times, and they had a long phone call. At the end of the call, the journalist threw in a question that seemed like a sort of softball. He said to him, "Your kids must love the iPad." There's an obvious answer to this, but what Jobs said really staggered the journalist. He was very surprised, because he said, "They haven't used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home." This is a very common thing in the tech world. In fact, there's a school quite near Silicon Valley called the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, and they don't introduce screens until the eighth grade. What's really interesting about the school is that 75 percent of the kids who go there have parents who are high-level Silicon Valley tech execs. So when I heard about this, I thought it was interesting and surprising, and it pushed me to consider what screens were doing to me and to my family and the people I loved, and to people at large. So for the last five years, as a professor of business and psychology, I've been studying the effect of screens on our lives. And I want to start by just focusing on how much time they take from us, and then we can talk about what that time looks like. What I'm showing you here is the average 24-hour workday at three different points in history: 2007 — 10 years ago — 2015 and then data that I collected, actually, only last week. And a lot of things haven't changed all that much. We sleep roughly seven-and-a-half to eight hours a day; some people say that's declined slightly, but it hasn't changed much. We work eight-and-a-half to nine hours a day. We engage in survival activities — these are things like eating and bathing and looking after kids — about three hours a day. That leaves this white space. That's our personal time. That space is incredibly important to us. That's the space where we do things that make us individuals. That's where hobbies happen, where we have close relationships, where we really think about our lives, where we get creative, where we zoom back and try to work out whether our lives have been meaningful. We get some of that from work as well, but when people look back on their lives and wonder what their lives have been like at the end of their lives, you look at the last things they say — they are talking about those moments that happen in that white personal space. So it's sacred; it's important to us. Now, what I'm going to do is show you how much of that space is taken up by screens across time. In 2007, this much. That was the year that Apple introduced the first iPhone. Eight years later, this much. Now, this much. That's how much time we spend of that free time in front of our screens. This yellow area, this thin sliver, is where the magic happens. That's where your humanity lives. And right now, it's in a very small box. So what do we do about this? Well, the first question is: What does that red space look like? Now, of course, screens are miraculous in a lot of ways. I live in New York, a lot of my family lives in Australia, and I have a one-year-old son. The way I've been able to introduce them to him is with screens. I couldn't have done that 15 or 20 years ago in quite the same way. So there's a lot of good that comes from them. One thing you can do is ask yourself: What goes on during that time? How enriching are the apps that we're using? And some are enriching. If you stop people while they're using them and say, "Tell us how you feel right now," they say they feel pretty good about these apps — those that focus on relaxation, exercise, weather, reading, education and health. They spend an average of nine minutes a day on each of these. These apps make them much less happy. About half the people, when you interrupt them and say, "How do you feel?" say they don't feel good about using them. What's interesting about these — dating, social networking, gaming, entertainment, news, web browsing — people spend 27 minutes a day on each of these. We're spending three times longer on the apps that don't make us happy. That doesn't seem very wise. One of the reasons we spend so much time on these apps that make us unhappy is they rob us of stopping cues. Stopping cues were everywhere in the 20th century. They were baked into everything we did. A stopping cue is basically a signal that it's time to move on, to do something new, to do something different. And — think about newspapers; eventually you get to the end, you fold the newspaper away, you put it aside. The same with magazines, books — you get to the end of a chapter, prompts you to consider whether you want to continue. You watched a show on TV, eventually the show would end, and then you'd have a week until the next one came. There were stopping cues everywhere. But the way we consume media today is such that there are no stopping cues. The news feed just rolls on, and everything's bottomless: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, email, text messaging, the news. And when you do check all sorts of other sources, you can just keep going on and on and on. So, we can get a cue about what to do from Western Europe, where they seem to have a number of pretty good ideas in the workplace. Here's one example. This is a Dutch design firm. And what they've done is rigged the desks to the ceiling. And at 6pm every day, it doesn't matter who you're emailing or what you're doing, the desks rise to the ceiling. (Laughter) (Applause) Four days a week, the space turns into a yoga studio, one day a week, into a dance club. It's really up to you which ones you stick around for. But this is a great stopping rule, because it means at the end of the day, everything stops, there's no way to work. At Daimler, the German car company, they've got another great strategy. When you go on vacation, instead of saying, "This person's on vacation, they'll get back to you eventually," they say, "This person's on vacation, so we've deleted your email. This person will never see the email you just sent." (Laughter) "You can email back in a couple of weeks, or you can email someone else." (Laughter) And so — (Applause) You can imagine what that's like. You go on vacation, and you're actually on vacation. The people who work at this company feel that they actually get a break from work. But of course, that doesn't tell us much about what we should do at home in our own lives, so I want to make some suggestions. It's easy to say, between 5 and 6pm, I'm going to not use my phone. The problem is, 5 and 6pm looks different on different days. I think a far better strategy is to say, I do certain things every day, there are certain occasions that happen every day, like eating dinner. Sometimes I'll be alone, sometimes with other people, sometimes in a restaurant, sometimes at home, but the rule that I've adopted is: I will never use my phone at the table. It's far away, as far away as possible. Because we're really bad at resisting temptation. But when you have a stopping cue that, every time dinner begins, my phone goes far away, you avoid temptation all together. At first, it hurts. I had massive FOMO. (Laughter) I struggled. But what happens is, you get used to it. You overcome the withdrawal the same way you would from a drug, and what happens is, life becomes more colorful, richer, more interesting — you have better conversations. You really connect with the people who are there with you. I think it's a fantastic strategy, and we know it works, because when people do this — and I've tracked a lot of people who have tried this — it expands. They feel so good about it, they start doing it for the first hour of the day in the morning. They start putting their phones on airplane mode on the weekend. That way, your phone remains a camera, but it's no longer a phone. It's a really powerful idea, and we know people feel much better about their lives when they do this. So what's the take home here? Screens are miraculous; I've already said that, and I feel that it's true. But the way we use them is a lot like driving down a really fast, long road, and you're in a car where the accelerator is mashed to the floor, it's kind of hard to reach the brake pedal. You've got a choice. You can either glide by, past, say, the beautiful ocean scenes and take snaps out the window — that's the easy thing to do — or you can go out of your way to move the car to the side of the road, to push that brake pedal, to get out, take off your shoes and socks, take a couple of steps onto the sand, feel what the sand feels like under your feet, walk to the ocean, and let the ocean lap at your ankles. Your life will be richer and more meaningful because you breathe in that experience, and because you've left your phone in the car. Thank you. (Applause) |
Can clouds buy us more time to solve climate change? | {0: 'Climate scientist Kate Marvel looks at the big picture of environmental change.'} | TED2017 | I am a climate scientist, and I hate weather. I have spent too much time in California, and I strongly feel that weather should be optional. (Laughter) So I don't want to experience clouds, let alone study them. But clouds seem to follow me wherever I go. The thing is, clouds are a real challenge for climate science. We don't know how they're going to react as the planet heats up, and hidden in that uncertainty might be hope. Maybe, just maybe, clouds could slow down global warming, and buy us a little bit more time to get our act together, which would be very convenient right now. I mean, even I could put up with a few more cloudy days if clouds saved the planet. Now, we are sure about some things. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, we're emitting a lot of it, and the planet is heating up. Case closed. But I still go to work every day. It turns out that there is a lot that we don't understand about climate change. In particular, we haven't answered what seems to be a very fundamental question. We know it's going to get hot, but we don't know exactly how hot it's going to get. Now, this is a really easy question to answer if one of you would like to give me a time machine. But I'm going to be honest with you: if I had a time machine, I would not be hanging out at this particular point in history. So in order to see the future, we have to rely on the output of computer simulations — climate models, like this one. Now, in my line of work, I encounter many very charming people on the internet who like to tell me that climate models are all wrong. And I would just like to say: no kidding! Seriously? I get paid to complain about climate models. But we don't want models to be perfect. We want them to be useful. I mean, think about it: a computer simulation that's able to exactly reproduce all of reality. That's not a climate model; That's "The Matrix." So, models are not crystal balls. They're research tools, and the ways in which they're wrong can actually teach us a lot. For example: different climate models are largely able to capture the warming that we've seen so far. But fast-forward to the end of the century under a business-as-usual scenario, and climate models don't really agree anymore. Yeah, they're all warming; that's just basic physics. But some of them project catastrophe — more than five times the warming we've seen already. And others are literally more chill. So why don't climate models agree on how warm it's going to get? Well, to a large extent, it's because they don't agree on what clouds will do in the future. And that is because, just like me, computers hate clouds. Computers hate clouds because they're simultaneously very large and very small. Clouds are formed when microscopic water droplets or ice crystals coalesce around tiny particles. But at the same time, they cover two-thirds of the earth's surface. In order to really accurately model clouds, we'd need to track the behavior of every water droplet and dust grain in the entire atmosphere, and there's no computer powerful enough to do that. So instead, we have to make a trade-off: we can zoom in and get the details right, but have no idea what's going on worldwide; or, we could sacrifice realism at small scales in order to see the bigger picture. Now, there's no one right answer, no perfect way to do this, and different climate models make different choices. Now, it is unfortunate that computers struggle with clouds, because clouds are crucially important in regulating the temperature of the planet. In fact, if all the clouds went away, we would experience profound climate changes. But without clouds, would it be warmer or colder? The answer is both. So I'm going to be honest with you, I am not a cloud spotter. My favorite type of cloud is none. But even I know that clouds come in all shapes and sizes. Low, thick clouds like these are really good at blocking out the sun and ruining your barbecue, and high, wispy clouds like these cirrus largely let that sunlight stream through. Every sunny day is the same, but every cloudy day is cloudy in its own way. And it's this diversity that can make the global impact of clouds very hard to understand. So to see this global effect of clouds, it really helps to take a selfie. It will never cease to blow my mind that we can see our planet from outer space, but we can't see all of it. Clouds are blocking the view. That's what they do. These low, thick clouds are extremely effective sunshades. They turn back about 20 percent of everything the sun sends us. That is a lot of wasted solar power. So, low clouds are powerful sunshades, making the planet cooler. But that's not the only effect of clouds. Our planet has a temperature, and like anything with a temperature, it's giving off heat. We are radiating thermal energy away into space, and we can see this in the infrared. Once again, clouds are blocking the view. That's because high clouds live in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, where it's very cold. And this means that they lose very little heat to space themselves. But at the same time, they block the heat coming up from the planet below. The earth is trying to cool itself off, and high clouds are getting in the way. The result is a very powerful greenhouse effect. So, clouds play this very large and dual role in the climate system. We've got low clouds that act like a sunshade, cooling the planet, and high clouds which act like a greenhouse, warming the planet. Right now, these two effects — they don't cancel out. That sunshade — it's a little bit more powerful. So if we got rid of all the clouds tomorrow, which, for the record, I am not advocating, our planet would get warmer. So clearly, all of the clouds are not going away. But climate change is change. So we can ask: How will global warming change clouds? But remember, clouds are so important in regulating the earth's temperature, and they both warm and cool the planet. So even small changes to cloud cover could have profound consequences. So we might also ask: How will clouds change global warming? And that is where there might be space for hope. If global warming triggers cloud changes that make for a less powerful greenhouse or a more effective sunshade, then that would enhance the cooling power of clouds. It would act in opposition to global warming, and that's what's happening in those climate models that project relatively muted warming. But climate models struggle with clouds, and this uncertainty — it goes both ways. Clouds could help us out with global warming. They could also make it worse. Now, we know that climate change is happening because we can see it: rising temperatures, melting icecaps, shifts in rainfall patterns. And you might think that we could also see it in the clouds. But here's something else unfortunate: clouds are really hard to see. I see everybody from the Pacific Northwest is like, "I have some suggestions for you." (Laughter) And you guys, we have tried looking up. (Laughter) But in order to do climate science, we need to see all of the clouds, everywhere, for a very long time. And that's what makes it hard. Now, nothing sees more clouds than a satellite — not even a British person. (Laughter) And fortunately, we do have satellite observations of clouds that, like me, date back to the 1980s. But these satellites were designed for weather, not climate. They weren't in it for the long haul. So to get that long-term trend information, we need to do climate science. We have to stitch together the output of multiple satellites with different viewing angles and orbits and carrying different camera equipment. And as a result, there are gaps in our knowledge. But even from this very cloudy picture, we're starting to get hints of a possible future. When we looked at the observations, one thing jumped out at us: the clouds are moving. As the planet's temperature increases, high clouds rise up. They move to the colder upper reaches of the atmosphere, and this means that even as the planet heats up, high clouds don't. They remain at roughly the same temperature. So they are not losing more heat to space. But at the same time, they're trapping more heat from the warming planet below. This intensifies the greenhouse effect. High clouds are making global warming worse. Clouds are moving in other dimensions, too. The atmospheric circulation, that large-scale motion of air and water in the atmosphere, is changing, and clouds are going with it. On large scales, clouds seem to be moving from the tropics toward the poles. It's kind of like your grandparents in reverse. And this matters, because if your job is to block incoming sunlight, you are going to be much more effective in the tropics under that intense tropical sun than you are in higher latitudes. So if this keeps up, this will also make global warming worse. And what we have not found, despite years of looking, is any indication of the opposite. There is no observational evidence that clouds will substantially slow down global warming. The earth is not going to break its own fever. Now, there are still uncertainties here. We don't know for sure what the future holds. But we are sending our kids there, and they are never coming back. I want them to be prepared for what they'll face, and that is why it is so important to keep our earth-observing satellites up there and to hire diverse and smart and talented people who do not hate clouds to improve the climate models. But uncertainty is not ignorance. We don't know everything, but we don't know nothing, and we know what carbon dioxide does. I started my career as an astrophysicist, so you can believe me when I say that this is the greatest place in the universe. Other planets might have liquid water. On earth, we have whiskey. (Laughter) (Applause) We are so lucky to live here, but let's not push our luck. I don't think that clouds will save the planet. I think that's probably up to us. Thank you. (Applause) |
Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality | {0: 'How can the "inner universe" of consciousness be explained in terms of mere biology and physics? Anil Seth explores the brain basis of consciousness and self.'} | TED2017 | Just over a year ago, for the third time in my life, I ceased to exist. I was having a small operation, and my brain was filling with anesthetic. I remember a sense of detachment and falling apart and a coldness. And then I was back, drowsy and disoriented, but definitely there. Now, when you wake from a deep sleep, you might feel confused about the time or anxious about oversleeping, but there's always a basic sense of time having passed, of a continuity between then and now. Coming round from anesthesia is very different. I could have been under for five minutes, five hours, five years or even 50 years. I simply wasn't there. It was total oblivion. Anesthesia — it's a modern kind of magic. It turns people into objects, and then, we hope, back again into people. And in this process is one of the greatest remaining mysteries in science and philosophy. How does consciousness happen? Somehow, within each of our brains, the combined activity of many billions of neurons, each one a tiny biological machine, is generating a conscious experience. And not just any conscious experience — your conscious experience right here and right now. How does this happen? Answering this question is so important because consciousness for each of us is all there is. Without it there's no world, there's no self, there's nothing at all. And when we suffer, we suffer consciously whether it's through mental illness or pain. And if we can experience joy and suffering, what about other animals? Might they be conscious, too? Do they also have a sense of self? And as computers get faster and smarter, maybe there will come a point, maybe not too far away, when my iPhone develops a sense of its own existence. I actually think the prospects for a conscious AI are pretty remote. And I think this because my research is telling me that consciousness has less to do with pure intelligence and more to do with our nature as living and breathing organisms. Consciousness and intelligence are very different things. You don't have to be smart to suffer, but you probably do have to be alive. In the story I'm going to tell you, our conscious experiences of the world around us, and of ourselves within it, are kinds of controlled hallucinations that happen with, through and because of our living bodies. Now, you might have heard that we know nothing about how the brain and body give rise to consciousness. Some people even say it's beyond the reach of science altogether. But in fact, the last 25 years have seen an explosion of scientific work in this area. If you come to my lab at the University of Sussex, you'll find scientists from all different disciplines and sometimes even philosophers. All of us together trying to understand how consciousness happens and what happens when it goes wrong. And the strategy is very simple. I'd like you to think about consciousness in the way that we've come to think about life. At one time, people thought the property of being alive could not be explained by physics and chemistry — that life had to be more than just mechanism. But people no longer think that. As biologists got on with the job of explaining the properties of living systems in terms of physics and chemistry — things like metabolism, reproduction, homeostasis — the basic mystery of what life is started to fade away, and people didn't propose any more magical solutions, like a force of life or an élan vital. So as with life, so with consciousness. Once we start explaining its properties in terms of things happening inside brains and bodies, the apparently insoluble mystery of what consciousness is should start to fade away. At least that's the plan. So let's get started. What are the properties of consciousness? What should a science of consciousness try to explain? Well, for today I'd just like to think of consciousness in two different ways. There are experiences of the world around us, full of sights, sounds and smells, there's multisensory, panoramic, 3D, fully immersive inner movie. And then there's conscious self. The specific experience of being you or being me. The lead character in this inner movie, and probably the aspect of consciousness we all cling to most tightly. Let's start with experiences of the world around us, and with the important idea of the brain as a prediction engine. Imagine being a brain. You're locked inside a bony skull, trying to figure what's out there in the world. There's no lights inside the skull. There's no sound either. All you've got to go on is streams of electrical impulses which are only indirectly related to things in the world, whatever they may be. So perception — figuring out what's there — has to be a process of informed guesswork in which the brain combines these sensory signals with its prior expectations or beliefs about the way the world is to form its best guess of what caused those signals. The brain doesn't hear sound or see light. What we perceive is its best guess of what's out there in the world. Let me give you a couple of examples of all this. You might have seen this illusion before, but I'd like you to think about it in a new way. If you look at those two patches, A and B, they should look to you to be very different shades of gray, right? But they are in fact exactly the same shade. And I can illustrate this. If I put up a second version of the image here and join the two patches with a gray-colored bar, you can see there's no difference. It's exactly the same shade of gray. And if you still don't believe me, I'll bring the bar across and join them up. It's a single colored block of gray, there's no difference at all. This isn't any kind of magic trick. It's the same shade of gray, but take it away again, and it looks different. So what's happening here is that the brain is using its prior expectations built deeply into the circuits of the visual cortex that a cast shadow dims the appearance of a surface, so that we see B as lighter than it really is. Here's one more example, which shows just how quickly the brain can use new predictions to change what we consciously experience. Have a listen to this. (Distorted voice) Sounded strange, right? Have a listen again and see if you can get anything. (Distorted voice) Still strange. Now listen to this. (Recording) Anil Seth: I think Brexit is a really terrible idea. (Laughter) Which I do. So you heard some words there, right? Now listen to the first sound again. I'm just going to replay it. (Distorted voice) Yeah? So you can now hear words there. Once more for luck. (Distorted voice) OK, so what's going on here? The remarkable thing is the sensory information coming into the brain hasn't changed at all. All that's changed is your brain's best guess of the causes of that sensory information. And that changes what you consciously hear. All this puts the brain basis of perception in a bit of a different light. Instead of perception depending largely on signals coming into the brain from the outside world, it depends as much, if not more, on perceptual predictions flowing in the opposite direction. We don't just passively perceive the world, we actively generate it. The world we experience comes as much, if not more, from the inside out as from the outside in. Let me give you one more example of perception as this active, constructive process. Here we've combined immersive virtual reality with image processing to simulate the effects of overly strong perceptual predictions on experience. In this panoramic video, we've transformed the world — which is in this case Sussex campus — into a psychedelic playground. We've processed the footage using an algorithm based on Google's Deep Dream to simulate the effects of overly strong perceptual predictions. In this case, to see dogs. And you can see this is a very strange thing. When perceptual predictions are too strong, as they are here, the result looks very much like the kinds of hallucinations people might report in altered states, or perhaps even in psychosis. Now, think about this for a minute. If hallucination is a kind of uncontrolled perception, then perception right here and right now is also a kind of hallucination, but a controlled hallucination in which the brain's predictions are being reined in by sensory information from the world. In fact, we're all hallucinating all the time, including right now. It's just that when we agree about our hallucinations, we call that reality. (Laughter) Now I'm going to tell you that your experience of being a self, the specific experience of being you, is also a controlled hallucination generated by the brain. This seems a very strange idea, right? Yes, visual illusions might deceive my eyes, but how could I be deceived about what it means to be me? For most of us, the experience of being a person is so familiar, so unified and so continuous that it's difficult not to take it for granted. But we shouldn't take it for granted. There are in fact many different ways we experience being a self. There's the experience of having a body and of being a body. There are experiences of perceiving the world from a first person point of view. There are experiences of intending to do things and of being the cause of things that happen in the world. And there are experiences of being a continuous and distinctive person over time, built from a rich set of memories and social interactions. Many experiments show, and psychiatrists and neurologists know very well, that these different ways in which we experience being a self can all come apart. What this means is the basic background experience of being a unified self is a rather fragile construction of the brain. Another experience, which just like all others, requires explanation. So let's return to the bodily self. How does the brain generate the experience of being a body and of having a body? Well, just the same principles apply. The brain makes its best guess about what is and what is not part of its body. And there's a beautiful experiment in neuroscience to illustrate this. And unlike most neuroscience experiments, this is one you can do at home. All you need is one of these. (Laughter) And a couple of paintbrushes. In the rubber hand illusion, a person's real hand is hidden from view, and that fake rubber hand is placed in front of them. Then both hands are simultaneously stroked with a paintbrush while the person stares at the fake hand. Now, for most people, after a while, this leads to the very uncanny sensation that the fake hand is in fact part of their body. And the idea is that the congruence between seeing touch and feeling touch on an object that looks like hand and is roughly where a hand should be, is enough evidence for the brain to make its best guess that the fake hand is in fact part of the body. (Laughter) So you can measure all kinds of clever things. You can measure skin conductance and startle responses, but there's no need. It's clear the guy in blue has assimilated the fake hand. This means that even experiences of what our body is is a kind of best guessing — a kind of controlled hallucination by the brain. There's one more thing. We don't just experience our bodies as objects in the world from the outside, we also experience them from within. We all experience the sense of being a body from the inside. And sensory signals coming from the inside of the body are continually telling the brain about the state of the internal organs, how the heart is doing, what the blood pressure is like, lots of things. This kind of perception, which we call interoception, is rather overlooked. But it's critically important because perception and regulation of the internal state of the body — well, that's what keeps us alive. Here's another version of the rubber hand illusion. This is from our lab at Sussex. And here, people see a virtual reality version of their hand, which flashes red and back either in time or out of time with their heartbeat. And when it's flashing in time with their heartbeat, people have a stronger sense that it's in fact part of their body. So experiences of having a body are deeply grounded in perceiving our bodies from within. There's one last thing I want to draw your attention to, which is that experiences of the body from the inside are very different from experiences of the world around us. When I look around me, the world seems full of objects — tables, chairs, rubber hands, people, you lot — even my own body in the world, I can perceive it as an object from the outside. But my experiences of the body from within, they're not like that at all. I don't perceive my kidneys here, my liver here, my spleen ... I don't know where my spleen is, but it's somewhere. I don't perceive my insides as objects. In fact, I don't experience them much at all unless they go wrong. And this is important, I think. Perception of the internal state of the body isn't about figuring out what's there, it's about control and regulation — keeping the physiological variables within the tight bounds that are compatible with survival. When the brain uses predictions to figure out what's there, we perceive objects as the causes of sensations. When the brain uses predictions to control and regulate things, we experience how well or how badly that control is going. So our most basic experiences of being a self, of being an embodied organism, are deeply grounded in the biological mechanisms that keep us alive. And when we follow this idea all the way through, we can start to see that all of our conscious experiences, since they all depend on the same mechanisms of predictive perception, all stem from this basic drive to stay alive. We experience the world and ourselves with, through and because of our living bodies. Let me bring things together step-by-step. What we consciously see depends on the brain's best guess of what's out there. Our experienced world comes from the inside out, not just the outside in. The rubber hand illusion shows that this applies to our experiences of what is and what is not our body. And these self-related predictions depend critically on sensory signals coming from deep inside the body. And finally, experiences of being an embodied self are more about control and regulation than figuring out what's there. So our experiences of the world around us and ourselves within it — well, they're kinds of controlled hallucinations that have been shaped over millions of years of evolution to keep us alive in worlds full of danger and opportunity. We predict ourselves into existence. Now, I leave you with three implications of all this. First, just as we can misperceive the world, we can misperceive ourselves when the mechanisms of prediction go wrong. Understanding this opens many new opportunities in psychiatry and neurology, because we can finally get at the mechanisms rather than just treating the symptoms in conditions like depression and schizophrenia. Second: what it means to be me cannot be reduced to or uploaded to a software program running on a robot, however smart or sophisticated. We are biological, flesh-and-blood animals whose conscious experiences are shaped at all levels by the biological mechanisms that keep us alive. Just making computers smarter is not going to make them sentient. Finally, our own individual inner universe, our way of being conscious, is just one possible way of being conscious. And even human consciousness generally — it's just a tiny region in a vast space of possible consciousnesses. Our individual self and worlds are unique to each of us, but they're all grounded in biological mechanisms shared with many other living creatures. Now, these are fundamental changes in how we understand ourselves, but I think they should be celebrated, because as so often in science, from Copernicus — we're not at the center of the universe — to Darwin — we're related to all other creatures — to the present day. With a greater sense of understanding comes a greater sense of wonder, and a greater realization that we are part of and not apart from the rest of nature. And ... when the end of consciousness comes, there's nothing to be afraid of. Nothing at all. Thank you. (Applause) |
The human insights missing from big data | {0: 'With astronaut eyes and ethnographer curiosity, Tricia Wang helps corporations grow by discovering the unknown about their customers.'} | TEDxCambridge | In ancient Greece, when anyone from slaves to soldiers, poets and politicians, needed to make a big decision on life's most important questions, like, "Should I get married?" or "Should we embark on this voyage?" or "Should our army advance into this territory?" they all consulted the oracle. So this is how it worked: you would bring her a question and you would get on your knees, and then she would go into this trance. It would take a couple of days, and then eventually she would come out of it, giving you her predictions as your answer. From the oracle bones of ancient China to ancient Greece to Mayan calendars, people have craved for prophecy in order to find out what's going to happen next. And that's because we all want to make the right decision. We don't want to miss something. The future is scary, so it's much nicer knowing that we can make a decision with some assurance of the outcome. Well, we have a new oracle, and it's name is big data, or we call it "Watson" or "deep learning" or "neural net." And these are the kinds of questions we ask of our oracle now, like, "What's the most efficient way to ship these phones from China to Sweden?" Or, "What are the odds of my child being born with a genetic disorder?" Or, "What are the sales volume we can predict for this product?" I have a dog. Her name is Elle, and she hates the rain. And I have tried everything to untrain her. But because I have failed at this, I also have to consult an oracle, called Dark Sky, every time before we go on a walk, for very accurate weather predictions in the next 10 minutes. She's so sweet. So because of all of this, our oracle is a $122 billion industry. Now, despite the size of this industry, the returns are surprisingly low. Investing in big data is easy, but using it is hard. Over 73 percent of big data projects aren't even profitable, and I have executives coming up to me saying, "We're experiencing the same thing. We invested in some big data system, and our employees aren't making better decisions. And they're certainly not coming up with more breakthrough ideas." So this is all really interesting to me, because I'm a technology ethnographer. I study and I advise companies on the patterns of how people use technology, and one of my interest areas is data. So why is having more data not helping us make better decisions, especially for companies who have all these resources to invest in these big data systems? Why isn't it getting any easier for them? So, I've witnessed the struggle firsthand. In 2009, I started a research position with Nokia. And at the time, Nokia was one of the largest cell phone companies in the world, dominating emerging markets like China, Mexico and India — all places where I had done a lot of research on how low-income people use technology. And I spent a lot of extra time in China getting to know the informal economy. So I did things like working as a street vendor selling dumplings to construction workers. Or I did fieldwork, spending nights and days in internet cafés, hanging out with Chinese youth, so I could understand how they were using games and mobile phones and using it between moving from the rural areas to the cities. Through all of this qualitative evidence that I was gathering, I was starting to see so clearly that a big change was about to happen among low-income Chinese people. Even though they were surrounded by advertisements for luxury products like fancy toilets — who wouldn't want one? — and apartments and cars, through my conversations with them, I found out that the ads the actually enticed them the most were the ones for iPhones, promising them this entry into this high-tech life. And even when I was living with them in urban slums like this one, I saw people investing over half of their monthly income into buying a phone, and increasingly, they were "shanzhai," which are affordable knock-offs of iPhones and other brands. They're very usable. Does the job. And after years of living with migrants and working with them and just really doing everything that they were doing, I started piecing all these data points together — from the things that seem random, like me selling dumplings, to the things that were more obvious, like tracking how much they were spending on their cell phone bills. And I was able to create this much more holistic picture of what was happening. And that's when I started to realize that even the poorest in China would want a smartphone, and that they would do almost anything to get their hands on one. You have to keep in mind, iPhones had just come out, it was 2009, so this was, like, eight years ago, and Androids had just started looking like iPhones. And a lot of very smart and realistic people said, "Those smartphones — that's just a fad. Who wants to carry around these heavy things where batteries drain quickly and they break every time you drop them?" But I had a lot of data, and I was very confident about my insights, so I was very excited to share them with Nokia. But Nokia was not convinced, because it wasn't big data. They said, "We have millions of data points, and we don't see any indicators of anyone wanting to buy a smartphone, and your data set of 100, as diverse as it is, is too weak for us to even take seriously." And I said, "Nokia, you're right. Of course you wouldn't see this, because you're sending out surveys assuming that people don't know what a smartphone is, so of course you're not going to get any data back about people wanting to buy a smartphone in two years. Your surveys, your methods have been designed to optimize an existing business model, and I'm looking at these emergent human dynamics that haven't happened yet. We're looking outside of market dynamics so that we can get ahead of it." Well, you know what happened to Nokia? Their business fell off a cliff. This — this is the cost of missing something. It was unfathomable. But Nokia's not alone. I see organizations throwing out data all the time because it didn't come from a quant model or it doesn't fit in one. But it's not big data's fault. It's the way we use big data; it's our responsibility. Big data's reputation for success comes from quantifying very specific environments, like electricity power grids or delivery logistics or genetic code, when we're quantifying in systems that are more or less contained. But not all systems are as neatly contained. When you're quantifying and systems are more dynamic, especially systems that involve human beings, forces are complex and unpredictable, and these are things that we don't know how to model so well. Once you predict something about human behavior, new factors emerge, because conditions are constantly changing. That's why it's a never-ending cycle. You think you know something, and then something unknown enters the picture. And that's why just relying on big data alone increases the chance that we'll miss something, while giving us this illusion that we already know everything. And what makes it really hard to see this paradox and even wrap our brains around it is that we have this thing that I call the quantification bias, which is the unconscious belief of valuing the measurable over the immeasurable. And we often experience this at our work. Maybe we work alongside colleagues who are like this, or even our whole entire company may be like this, where people become so fixated on that number, that they can't see anything outside of it, even when you present them evidence right in front of their face. And this is a very appealing message, because there's nothing wrong with quantifying; it's actually very satisfying. I get a great sense of comfort from looking at an Excel spreadsheet, even very simple ones. (Laughter) It's just kind of like, "Yes! The formula worked. It's all OK. Everything is under control." But the problem is that quantifying is addictive. And when we forget that and when we don't have something to kind of keep that in check, it's very easy to just throw out data because it can't be expressed as a numerical value. It's very easy just to slip into silver-bullet thinking, as if some simple solution existed. Because this is a great moment of danger for any organization, because oftentimes, the future we need to predict — it isn't in that haystack, but it's that tornado that's bearing down on us outside of the barn. There is no greater risk than being blind to the unknown. It can cause you to make the wrong decisions. It can cause you to miss something big. But we don't have to go down this path. It turns out that the oracle of ancient Greece holds the secret key that shows us the path forward. Now, recent geological research has shown that the Temple of Apollo, where the most famous oracle sat, was actually built over two earthquake faults. And these faults would release these petrochemical fumes from underneath the Earth's crust, and the oracle literally sat right above these faults, inhaling enormous amounts of ethylene gas, these fissures. (Laughter) It's true. (Laughter) It's all true, and that's what made her babble and hallucinate and go into this trance-like state. She was high as a kite! (Laughter) So how did anyone — How did anyone get any useful advice out of her in this state? Well, you see those people surrounding the oracle? You see those people holding her up, because she's, like, a little woozy? And you see that guy on your left-hand side holding the orange notebook? Well, those were the temple guides, and they worked hand in hand with the oracle. When inquisitors would come and get on their knees, that's when the temple guides would get to work, because after they asked her questions, they would observe their emotional state, and then they would ask them follow-up questions, like, "Why do you want to know this prophecy? Who are you? What are you going to do with this information?" And then the temple guides would take this more ethnographic, this more qualitative information, and interpret the oracle's babblings. So the oracle didn't stand alone, and neither should our big data systems. Now to be clear, I'm not saying that big data systems are huffing ethylene gas, or that they're even giving invalid predictions. The total opposite. But what I am saying is that in the same way that the oracle needed her temple guides, our big data systems need them, too. They need people like ethnographers and user researchers who can gather what I call thick data. This is precious data from humans, like stories, emotions and interactions that cannot be quantified. It's the kind of data that I collected for Nokia that comes in in the form of a very small sample size, but delivers incredible depth of meaning. And what makes it so thick and meaty is the experience of understanding the human narrative. And that's what helps to see what's missing in our models. Thick data grounds our business questions in human questions, and that's why integrating big and thick data forms a more complete picture. Big data is able to offer insights at scale and leverage the best of machine intelligence, whereas thick data can help us rescue the context loss that comes from making big data usable, and leverage the best of human intelligence. And when you actually integrate the two, that's when things get really fun, because then you're no longer just working with data you've already collected. You get to also work with data that hasn't been collected. You get to ask questions about why: Why is this happening? Now, when Netflix did this, they unlocked a whole new way to transform their business. Netflix is known for their really great recommendation algorithm, and they had this $1 million prize for anyone who could improve it. And there were winners. But Netflix discovered the improvements were only incremental. So to really find out what was going on, they hired an ethnographer, Grant McCracken, to gather thick data insights. And what he discovered was something that they hadn't seen initially in the quantitative data. He discovered that people loved to binge-watch. In fact, people didn't even feel guilty about it. They enjoyed it. (Laughter) So Netflix was like, "Oh. This is a new insight." So they went to their data science team, and they were able to scale this big data insight in with their quantitative data. And once they verified it and validated it, Netflix decided to do something very simple but impactful. They said, instead of offering the same show from different genres or more of the different shows from similar users, we'll just offer more of the same show. We'll make it easier for you to binge-watch. And they didn't stop there. They did all these things to redesign their entire viewer experience, to really encourage binge-watching. It's why people and friends disappear for whole weekends at a time, catching up on shows like "Master of None." By integrating big data and thick data, they not only improved their business, but they transformed how we consume media. And now their stocks are projected to double in the next few years. But this isn't just about watching more videos or selling more smartphones. For some, integrating thick data insights into the algorithm could mean life or death, especially for the marginalized. All around the country, police departments are using big data for predictive policing, to set bond amounts and sentencing recommendations in ways that reinforce existing biases. NSA's Skynet machine learning algorithm has possibly aided in the deaths of thousands of civilians in Pakistan from misreading cellular device metadata. As all of our lives become more automated, from automobiles to health insurance or to employment, it is likely that all of us will be impacted by the quantification bias. Now, the good news is that we've come a long way from huffing ethylene gas to make predictions. We have better tools, so let's just use them better. Let's integrate the big data with the thick data. Let's bring our temple guides with the oracles, and whether this work happens in companies or nonprofits or government or even in the software, all of it matters, because that means we're collectively committed to making better data, better algorithms, better outputs and better decisions. This is how we'll avoid missing that something. (Applause) |
Hamilton vs. Madison and the birth of American partisanship | {0: 'Noah Feldman studies the intersection of religion, politics and law.'} | TED2017 | If you've been thinking about US politics and trying to make sense of it for the last year or so, you might have hit on something like the following three propositions: one, US partisanship has never been so bad before; two, for the first time, it's geographically spatialized — we're divided between the coasts, which want to look outwards, and the center of the country, which wants to look inwards; and third, there's nothing we can do about it. I'm here to today to say that all three of these propositions, all of which sound reasonable, are not true. In fact, our US partisanship goes all the way back to the very beginning of the republic. It was geographically spatialized in almost eerily the same way that it is today, and it often has been throughout US history. And last, and by far most importantly, we actually have an extraordinary mechanism that's designed to help us manage factional disagreement and partisanship. That technology is the Constitution. And this is an evolving, subtly, supplely designed entity that has the specific purpose of teaching us how to manage factional disagreement where it's possible to do that, and giving us techniques for overcoming that disagreement when that's possible. Now, in order to tell you the story, I want to go back to a pivotal moment in US history, and that is the moment when factional disagreement and partisanship was born. There actually was a birth moment — a moment in US history when partisanship snapped into place. The person who's at the core of that story is James Madison. And at the moment that this began, James Madison was riding high. He himself was the Einstein of not only the US Constitution, but of constitutional thought more globally, and, to give him his due, he knew it. In a period of time of just three years, from 1785 to 1788, he had conceived, theorized, designed, passed and gotten ratified the US Constitution. And just to give you some sense of the enormity of what that accomplishment actually was, although Madison couldn't have known it at the time, today that same constitutional technology that he invented is still in use not only in the US, but, 230 years later, in places like Canada, India, South Africa, Brazil. So in an extraordinary range of contexts all over the world, this technology is still the dominant, most used, most effective technology to manage governance. In that moment, Madison believed that, having solved this problem, the country would run smoothly, and that he had designed a technology that would minimize the results of factions so there would be no political parties. Remarkably, he thought he had designed a constitution that was against political parties and would make them unnecessary. He had gotten an enormous degree of help in the final marketing phase of his constitutional project from a man you may have heard of, called Alexander Hamilton. Now, Hamilton was everything Madison was not. He was passionate, where Madison was restrained. He was pansexual, where Madison didn't speak to a woman except for once until he was 42 years old, and then married Dolley and lived happily ever after for 40 years. (Laughter) To put it bluntly, Hamilton's the kind of person about whom you would write a hip-hop musical — (Laughter) and Madison is the kind of person about whom you would not write a hip-hop musical. (Laughter) Or indeed, a musical of any kind at all. But together, they had become a rather unlikely pairing, and they had produced the Federalist Papers, which offered a justification and, as I mentioned, a marketing plan for the Constitution, which had been wildly effective and wildly successful. Once the new government was in place, Hamilton became Secretary of the Treasury, and he had a very specific idea in mind. And that was to do for financial institutions and infrastructure exactly what Madison had done for constitutions. Again, his contemporaries all knew it. One of them told Madison, who can't have liked it very much, that Hamilton was the Newton of infrastructure. The idea was pretty straightforward. Hamilton would give the United States a national bank, a permanent national debt — he said it would be "immortal," his phrase — and a manufacturing policy that would enable trade and manufacturing rather than agriculture, which was where the country's primary wealth had historically been. Madison went utterly ballistic. And in this pivotal, critical decision, instead of just telling the world that his old friend Hamilton was wrong and was adopting the wrong policies, he actually began to argue that Hamilton's ideas were unconstitutional — that they violated the very nature of the Constitution that the two of them had drafted together. Hamilton responded the way you would expect. He declared Madison to be his "personal and political enemy" — these are his words. So these two founders who had been such close friends and such close allies and such partners, then began to produce enmity. And they did it in the good, old-fashioned way. First, they founded political parties. Madison created a party originally called the Democratic Republican Party — "Republican" for short — and Hamilton created a party called the Federalist Party. Those two parties adopted positions on national politics that were extreme and exaggerated. To give you a clear example: Madison, who had always believed that the country would have some manufacturing and some trade and some agriculture, began attacking Hamilton as a kind of tool of the financial markets whom Hamilton himself intended to put in charge of the country. That was an overstatement, but it was something Madison came to believe. He also attacked city life, and he said that the coasts were corrupt, and what people needed to do was to look inwards to the center of the country, to farmers, who were the essence of Republican virtue, and they should go back to the values that had made American great, specifically the values of the Revolution, and those were the values of low taxes, agriculture and less trade. Hamilton responded to this by saying that Madison was naïve, that he was childish, and that his goal was to turn the United States into a primitive autarchy, self-reliant and completely ineffectual on the global scale. (Laughter) They both meant it, and there was some truth to each of their claims, because each side was grossly exaggerating the views of the other in order to fight their war. They founded newspapers, and so for the first time in US history, the news that people received came entirely through the lens of either the Republican or the Federalist party. How does this end? Well, as it turned out, the Constitution did its work. But it did its work in surprising ways that Madison himself had not fully anticipated. First, there was a series of elections. And the first two times out of the box, the Federalists destroyed the Republicans. Madison was astonished. Of course, he blamed the press. (Laughter) And in a rather innovative view — Madison never failed to innovate when he thought about anything — he said the reason that the press was so pro-Federalist is that the advertisers were all Federalists, because they were traders on the coasts who got their capital from Britain, which Federalism was in bed with. That was his initial explanation. But despite the fact that the Federalists, once in power, actually enacted laws that criminalized criticism of the government — that happened in the United States — nevertheless, the Republicans fought back, and Madison began to emphasize the freedom of speech, which he had built into the Bill of Rights, and the capacity of civil society to organize. And sure enough, nationally, small local groups — they were called Democratic-Republican Societies — began to form and protest against Federalist-dominated hegemony. Eventually, the Republicans managed to win a national election — that was in 1800. Madison became the Secretary of State, his friend and mentor Jefferson became president, and they actually, over time, managed to put the Federalists completely out of business. That was their goal. Now, why did that happen? It happened because in the structure of the Constitution were several features that actually managed faction the way there were supposed to do in the first place. What were those? One — most important of all — the freedom of speech. This was an innovative idea at the time. Namely, that if you were out of power, you could still say that the government was terrible. Two, civil society organization. The capacity to put together private groups, individuals, political parties and others who would organize to try to bring about fundamental change. Perhaps most significantly was the separation of powers — an extraordinary component of the Constitution. The thing about the separation of powers is that it did then and it does now, drive governance to the center. You can get elected to office in the United States with help from the periphery, right or left. It turns out, you actually can't govern unless you bring on board the center. There are midterm elections that come incredibly fast after a presidency begins. Those drive presidents towards the center. There's a structure in which the president, in fact, does not rule or even govern, but can only propose laws which other people have to agree with — another feature that tends to drive presidents who actually want to get things done to the center. And a glance at the newspapers today will reveal to you that these principles are still completely in operation. No matter how a president gets elected, the president cannot get anything done unless the president first of all follows the rules of the Constitution, because if not, the courts will stand up, as indeed has sometimes occurred, not only recently, but in the past, in US history. And furthermore, the president needs people, elected officials who know they need to win election from centrist voters, also to back his or her policies in order to pass laws. Without it, nothing much happens. The takeaway of this brief excursus into the history of partisanship, then, is the following: partisanship is real; it's profound; it's extraordinarily powerful, and it's terribly upsetting. But the design of the Constitution is greater than partisanship. It enables us to manage partisanship when that's possible, and it enables us actually to overcome partisan division and produce compromise, when and only when that is possible. A technology like that is a technology that worked for the founders, it worked for their grandchildren, it didn't work at the moment of the Civil War, but then it started working again. And it worked for our grandparents, our parents, and it's going to work for us. (Applause) So what you should do is really simple. Stand up for what you believe in, support the organizations that you care about, speak out on the issues that matter to you, get involved, make change, express you opinion, and do it with respect and knowledge and confidence that it's only by working together that the constitutional technology can do the job that it is designed to do. Stand up for what you believe, but take a deep breath while you do it. It's going to be OK. Thanks. (Applause) |
How I fail at being disabled | {0: 'Susan Robinson is a business leader, inspirational speaker, blogger, entrepreneur and TED Resident. And she is legally blind.'} | TED Residency | I'd like to introduce you to my mom. (Laughter) I'm guessing that's not what you expected, and it's not what I expected either, and thank goodness I realized that an Asian man was not my mom before I hugged him, because that would have been so awkward. Recognizing people isn't one of my strengths due to a genetic visual impairment that has no correction or cure. As a result, I am legally blind, though I prefer "partially sighted" because it's more optimistic. (Laughter) And I'm entitled to the label "disabled." I hate the word disabled when it's used to describe people. It detonates a mindset of less than that utterly disregards capacity, ability, potential, instead prioritizing brokenness and lack. The perspective can be overt. What can't he do for himself that I'm going to have to do for him? She'll probably need some accommodation that no other employee at this business needs. Sometimes, the hidden bias is so sweetly conveyed. "Wow, Susan, look at everything you've done in your career and your life. How did you do all of that and be visually impaired?" (Laughter) I fail at being disabled. (Laughter) So in the spirit of incentivizing the rampant failure of people all over the world and enticing the so-called normal to just give it a rest already, here are five tips to fail at being disabled. Tip one: know your superpowers. The best team I ever led in my career was based on superpowers, and we even gave ourselves fancy-pantsy titles like "the Pillar of Masterly Acumen." "The Biscuit Butterer." (Laughter) "The Voice of Reason." Because we relied on our strengths, our best strengths, we achieved tremendous outcomes. The trait that prevents me from recognizing my mom allows me to smoothly adapt, to quickly absorb and accurately process an exhausting volume of cues, tease out what's important, determine multiple processes or potentials for any situation that I'm in, and then select the one that makes the most sense, all in a matter of seconds. I see what other people do not. Some people think that's a superpower, but my real superpowers are ricocheting off of glass walls — (Laughter) and letting my friends walk around with kale in their teeth. (Laughter) It's true. Don't have lunch with me, or dinner. Tip two: be supremely skilled, supremely skilled at getting it wrong. It is important to be as equally confident in your superpowers as you are in you FUBARs. That's "effed up beyond all recognition" for you millennials. (Laughter) Here's a good example. It is not a great idea to say, "Don't worry, everything in here is too small for me to see" when you accidentally walk into the men's room — (Laughter) at one of the world's largest sporting arenas — (Laughter) or anywhere. I really wish that one wasn't true. I'm serious. It is better to just walk out and let them think you're drunk. (Laughter) Tip three: know that everyone is disabled in some way, like when you have a cold and you can't smell and you realize that the milk that you splashed in your coffee was sour only after you've tasted it. Very recently, a woman walked up to me frantic. She could not find the bakery she was looking for. As I motioned in the direction I thought she should go, saying, "There are no stores on this side of the street so your best bet is to cross —" "Oh my goodness," she interrupted. "There it is. All I needed was another set of eyes." (Laughter) I just let her have it. I would have said that, you know, being logical and paying attention and staying calm would have done the trick, but who am I? Tip four: point out the disability in others. This one is best reserved — very important note — this one is best reserved for people you know well, because random strangers typically don't appreciate teachable moments. A few years ago, my parents and I went to see the Rockettes, Radio City's high-kicking dancers. I leaned over to my dad. "The two Rockettes on the left aren't kicking in a straight line." "Yes, they are." "No, they're not." "Yes, they are, and how do you know? You can't see." But I know what a straight line looks like. I had snapped a picture during our back and forth and presented him the evidence that proved I was right. He looked at the picture. I leaned in further. "Who's disabled now?" Tip five: pursue audacious goals. Flip expectation upside down and shove limitation off a cliff to meet its demise. There is a college football linebacker who blitzes, tackles, recovers fumbles while having one hand. There is a teacher who successfully transfers knowledge and inspires countless students while living with Down syndrome. And for me, on my long list, to cycle from Kathmandu, Nepal, to Darjeeling, India on the backseat of a bicycle built for two. It will be an exciting 620-mile adventure, and I'm sure I will have the blurry photos to show for it. (Laughter) Oh, before we go on, I forgot to introduce you to my mom. I need to do that. And here she is, as she would appear to me if I were looking through a crowd of people looking for her. Or is that an Asian man? Thank you. (Applause) |
How cohousing can make us happier (and live longer) | {0: 'Grace H. Kim is an internationally recognized expert in cohousing -- the art and craft of creating communities.'} | TED2017 | Loneliness. All of us in this room will experience loneliness at some point in our lives. Loneliness is not a function of being alone, but rather, a function of how socially connected you are to those around you. There could be somebody in this room right now surrounded by a thousand people experiencing loneliness. And while loneliness can be attributed to many things, as an architect, I'm going to tell you today how loneliness can be the result of our built environments — the very homes we choose to live in. Let's take a look at this house. It's a nice house. There's a big yard, picket fence, two-car garage. And the home might be in a neighborhood like this. And for many people around the globe, this home, this neighborhood — it's a dream. And yet the danger of achieving this dream is a false sense of connection and an increase in social isolation. I know, I can hear you now, there's somebody in the room screaming at me inside their head, "That's my house, and that's my neighborhood, and I know everyone on my block!" To which I would answer, "Terrific!" And I wish there were more people like you, because I'd wager to guess there's more people in the room living in a similar situation that might not know their neighbors. They might recognize them and say hello, but under their breath, they're asking their spouse, "What was their name again?" so they can ask a question by name to signify they know them. Social media also contributes to this false sense of connection. This image is probably all too familiar. You're standing in the elevator, sitting in a cafe, and you look around, and everyone's on their phone. You're not texting or checking Facebook, but everyone else is, and maybe, like me, you've been in a situation where you've made eye contact, smiled and said hello, and have that person yank out their earbuds and say, "I'm sorry, what did you say?" I find this incredibly isolating. The concept I'd like to share with you today is an antidote to isolation. It's not a new concept. In fact, it's an age-old way of living, and it still exists in many non-European cultures around the world. And about 50 years ago, the Danes decided to make up a new name, and since then, tens of thousands of Danish people have been living in this connected way. And it's being pursued more widely around the globe as people are seeking community. This concept is cohousing. Cohousing is an intentional neighborhood where people know each other and look after one another. In cohousing, you have your own home, but you also share significant spaces, both indoors and out. Before I show you some pictures of cohousing, I'd like to first introduce you to my friends Sheila and Spencer. When I first met Sheila and Spencer, they were just entering their 60s, and Spencer was looking ahead at the end of a long career in elementary education. And he really disliked the idea that he might not have children in his life upon retirement. They're now my neighbors. We live in a cohousing community that I not only designed, but developed and have my architecture practice in. This community is very intentional about our social interactions. So let me take you on a tour. From the outside, we look like any other small apartment building. In fact, we look identical to the one next door, except that we're bright yellow. Inside, the homes are fairly conventional. We all have living rooms and kitchens, bedrooms and baths, and there are nine of these homes around a central courtyard. This one's mine, and this one is Spencer and Sheila's. The thing that makes this building uniquely cohousing are not the homes, but rather, what happens here — the social interactions that happen in and around that central courtyard. When I look across the courtyard, I look forward to see Spencer and Sheila. In fact, every morning, this is what I see, Spencer waving at me furiously as we're making our breakfasts. From our homes, we look down into the courtyard, and depending on the time of year, we see this: kids and grownups in various combinations playing and hanging out with each other. There's a lot of giggling and chatter. There's a lot of hula-hooping. And every now and then, "Hey, quit hitting me!" or a cry from one of the kids. These are the sounds of our daily lives, and the sounds of social connectedness. At the bottom of the courtyard, there are a set of double doors, and those lead into the common house. I consider the common house the secret sauce of cohousing. It's the secret sauce because it's the place where the social interactions and community life begin, and from there, it radiates out through the rest of the community. Inside our common house, we have a large dining room to seat all 28 of us and our guests, and we dine together three times a week. In support of those meals, we have a large kitchen so that we can take turns cooking for each other in teams of three. So that means, with 17 adults, I lead cook once every six weeks. Two other times, I show up and help my team with the preparation and cleanup. And all those other nights, I just show up. I have dinner, talk with my neighbors, and I go home, having been fed a delicious meal by someone who cares about my vegetarian preferences. Our nine families have intentionally chosen an alternative way of living. Instead of pursuing the American dream, where we might have been isolated in our single-family homes, we instead chose cohousing, so that we can increase our social connections. And that's how cohousing starts: with a shared intention to live collaboratively. And intention is the single most important characteristic that differentiates cohousing from any other housing model. And while intention is difficult to see or even show, I'm an architect, and I can't help but show you more pictures. So here are a few examples to illustrate how intention has been expressed in some of the communities I've visited. Through the careful selection of furniture, lighting and acoustic materials to support eating together; in the careful visual location and visual access to kids' play areas around and inside the common house; in the consideration of scale and distribution of social gathering nodes in and around the community to support our daily lives, all of these spaces help contribute to and elevate the sense of communitas in each community. What was that word? "Communitas." Communitas is a fancy social science way of saying "spirit of community." And in visiting over 80 different communities, my measure of communitas became: How frequently did residents eat together? While it's completely up to each group how frequently they have common meals, I know some that have eaten together every single night for the past 40 years. I know others that have an occasional potluck once or twice a month. And from my observations, I can tell you, those that eat together more frequently, exhibit higher levels of communitas. It turns out, when you eat together, you start planning more activities together. When you eat together, you share more things. You start to watch each other's kids. You lend our your power tools. You borrow each other's cars. And despite all this, as my daughter loves to say, everything is not rainbows and unicorns in cohousing, and I'm not best friends with every single person in my community. We even have differences and conflicts. But living in cohousing, we're intentional about our relationships. We're motivated to resolve our differences. We follow up, we check in, we speak our personal truths and, when appropriate, we apologize. Skeptics will say that cohousing is only interesting or attractive to a very small group of people. And I'll agree with that. If you look at Western cultures around the globe, those living in cohousing are just a fractional percent. But that needs to change, because our very lives depend upon it. In 2015, Brigham Young University completed a study that showed a significant increase risk of premature death in those who were living in isolation. The US Surgeon General has declared isolation to be a public health epidemic. And this epidemic is not restricted to the US alone. So when I said earlier that cohousing is an antidote to isolation, what I should have said is that cohousing can save your life. If I was a doctor, I would tell you to take two aspirin, and call me in the morning. But as an architect, I'm going to suggest that you take a walk with your neighbor, share a meal together, and call me in 20 years. Thank you. (Applause) |
A simple new blood test that can catch cancer early | {0: 'TED Fellow Jimmy Lin is developing technologies to catch cancer early.'} | TED2017 | Cancer. Many of us have lost family, friends or loved ones to this horrible disease. I know there are some of you in the audience who are cancer survivors, or who are fighting cancer at this moment. My heart goes out to you. While this word often conjures up emotions of sadness and anger and fear, I bring you good news from the front lines of cancer research. The fact is, we are starting to win the war on cancer. In fact, we lie at the intersection of the three of the most exciting developments within cancer research. The first is cancer genomics. The genome is a composition of all the genetic information encoded by DNA in an organism. In cancers, changes in the DNA called mutations are what drive these cancers to go out of control. Around 10 years ago, I was part of the team at Johns Hopkins that first mapped the mutations of cancers. We did this first for colorectal, breast, pancreatic and brain cancers. And since then, there have been over 90 projects in 70 countries all over the world, working to understand the genetic basis of these diseases. Today, tens of thousands of cancers are understood down to exquisite molecular detail. The second revolution is precision medicine, also known as "personalized medicine." Instead of one-size-fits-all methods to be able to treat cancers, there is a whole new class of drugs that are able to target cancers based on their unique genetic profile. Today, there are a host of these tailor-made drugs, called targeted therapies, available to physicians even today to be able to personalize their therapy for their patients, and many others are in development. The third exciting revolution is immunotherapy, and this is really exciting. Scientists have been able to leverage the immune system in the fight against cancer. For example, there have been ways where we find the off switches of cancer, and new drugs have been able to turn the immune system back on, to be able to fight cancer. In addition, there are ways where you can take away immune cells from the body, train them, engineer them and put them back into the body to fight cancer. Almost sounds like science fiction, doesn't it? While I was a researcher at the National Cancer Institute, I had the privilege of working with some of the pioneers of this field and watched the development firsthand. It's been pretty amazing. Today, over 600 clinical trials are open, actively recruiting patients to explore all aspects in immunotherapy. While these three exciting revolutions are ongoing, unfortunately, this is only the beginning, and there are still many, many challenges. Let me illustrate with a patient. Here is a patient with a skin cancer called melanoma. It's horrible; the cancer has gone everywhere. However, scientists were able to map the mutations of this cancer and give a specific treatment that targets one of the mutations. And the result is almost miraculous. Tumors almost seem to melt away. Unfortunately, this is not the end of the story. A few months later, this picture is taken. The tumor has come back. The question is: Why? The answer is tumor heterogeneity. Let me explain. Even a cancer as small as one centimeter in diameter harbors over a hundred million different cells. While genetically similar, there are small differences in these different cancers that make them differently prone to different drugs. So even if you have a drug that's highly effective, that kills almost all the cells, there is a chance that there's a small population that's resistant to the drug. This ultimately is the population that comes back, and takes over the patient. So then the question is: What do we do with this information? Well, the key, then, is to apply all these exciting advancements in cancer therapy earlier, as soon as we can, before these resistance clones emerge. The key to cancer and curing cancer is early detection. And we intuitively know this. Finding cancer early results in better outcomes, and the numbers show this as well. For example, in ovarian cancer, if you detect cancer in stage four, only 17 percent of the women survive at five years. However, if you are able to detect this cancer as early as stage one, over 92 percent of women will survive. But the sad fact is, only 15 percent of women are detected at stage one, whereas the vast majority, 70 percent, are detected in stages three and four. We desperately need better detection mechanisms for cancers. The current best ways to screen cancer fall into one of three categories. First is medical procedures, which is like colonoscopy for colon cancer. Second is protein biomarkers, like PSA for prostate cancer. Or third, imaging techniques, such as mammography for breast cancer. Medical procedures are the gold standard; however, they are highly invasive and require a large infrastructure to implement. Protein markers, while effective in some populations, are not very specific in some circumstances, resulting in high numbers of false positives, which then results in unnecessary work-ups and unnecessary procedures. Imaging methods, while useful in some populations, expose patients to harmful radiation. In addition, it is not applicable to all patients. For example, mammography has problems in women with dense breasts. So what we need is a method that is noninvasive, that is light in infrastructure, that is highly specific, that also does not have false positives, does not use any radiation and is applicable to large populations. Even more importantly, we need a method to be able to detect cancers before they're 100 million cells in size. Does such a technology exist? Well, I wouldn't be up here giving a talk if it didn't. I'm excited to tell you about this latest technology we've developed. Central to our technology is a simple blood test. The blood circulatory system, while seemingly mundane, is essential for you to survive, providing oxygen and nutrients to your cells, and removing waste and carbon dioxide. Here's a key biological insight: Cancer cells grow and die faster than normal cells, and when they die, DNA is shed into the blood system. Since we know the signatures of these cancer cells from all the different cancer genome sequencing projects, we can look for those signals in the blood to be able to detect these cancers early. So instead of waiting for cancers to be large enough to cause symptoms, or for them to be dense enough to show up on imaging, or for them to be prominent enough for you to be able to visualize on medical procedures, we can start looking for cancers while they are relatively pretty small, by looking for these small amounts of DNA in the blood. So let me tell you how we do this. First, like I said, we start off with a simple blood test — no radiation, no complicated equipment — a simple blood test. Then the blood is shipped to us, and what we do is extract the DNA out of it. While your body is mostly healthy cells, most of the DNA that's detected will be from healthy cells. However, there will be a small amount, less than one percent, that comes from the cancer cells. Then we use molecular biology methods to be able to enrich this DNA for areas of the genome which are known to be associated with cancer, based on the information from the cancer genomics projects. We're able to then put this DNA into DNA-sequencing machines and are able to digitize the DNA into A's, C's, T's and G's and have this final readout. Ultimately, we have information of billions of letters that output from this run. We then apply statistical and computational methods to be able to find the small signal that's present, indicative of the small amount of cancer DNA in the blood. So does this actually work in patients? Well, because there's no way of really predicting right now which patients will get cancer, we use the next best population: cancers in remission; specifically, lung cancer. The sad fact is, even with the best drugs that we have today, most lung cancers come back. The key, then, is to see whether we're able to detect these recurrences of cancers earlier than with standard methods. We just finished a major trial with Professor Charles Swanton at University College London, examining this. Let me walk you through an example of one patient. Here's an example of one patient who undergoes surgery at time point zero, and then undergoes chemotherapy. Then the patient is under remission. He is monitored using clinical exams and imaging methods. Around day 450, unfortunately, the cancer comes back. The question is: Are we able to catch this earlier? During this whole time, we've been collecting blood serially to be able to measure the amount of ctDNA in the blood. So at the initial time point, as expected, there's a high level of cancer DNA in the blood. However, this goes away to zero in subsequent time points and remains negligible after subsequent points. However, around day 340, we see the rise of cancer DNA in the blood, and eventually, it goes up higher for days 400 and 450. Here's the key, if you've missed it: At day 340, we see the rise in the cancer DNA in the blood. That means we are catching this cancer over a hundred days earlier than traditional methods. This is a hundred days earlier where we can give therapies, a hundred days earlier where we can do surgical interventions, or even a hundred days less for the cancer to grow or a hundred days less for resistance to occur. For some patients, this hundred days means the matter of life and death. We're really excited about this information. Because of this assignment, we've done additional studies now in other cancers, including breast cancer, lung cancer and ovarian cancer, and I can't wait to see how much earlier we can find these cancers. Ultimately, I have a dream, a dream of two vials of blood, and that, in the future, as part of all of our standard physical exams, we'll have two vials of blood drawn. And from these two vials of blood we will be able to compare the DNA from all known signatures of cancer, and hopefully then detect cancers months to even years earlier. Even with the therapies we have currently, this could mean that millions of lives could be saved. And if you add on to that recent advancements in immunotherapy and targeted therapies, the end of cancer is in sight. The next time you hear the word "cancer," I want you to add to the emotions: hope. Hold on. Cancer researchers all around the world are working feverishly to beat this disease, and tremendous progress is being made. This is the beginning of the end. We will win the war on cancer. And to me, this is amazing news. Thank you. (Applause) |
How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day | {0: 'Tristan Harris helps the technology industry more consciously and ethically shape the human spirit and human potential.'} | TED2017 | I want you to imagine walking into a room, a control room with a bunch of people, a hundred people, hunched over a desk with little dials, and that that control room will shape the thoughts and feelings of a billion people. This might sound like science fiction, but this actually exists right now, today. I know because I used to be in one of those control rooms. I was a design ethicist at Google, where I studied how do you ethically steer people's thoughts? Because what we don't talk about is how the handful of people working at a handful of technology companies through their choices will steer what a billion people are thinking today. Because when you pull out your phone and they design how this works or what's on the feed, it's scheduling little blocks of time in our minds. If you see a notification, it schedules you to have thoughts that maybe you didn't intend to have. If you swipe over that notification, it schedules you into spending a little bit of time getting sucked into something that maybe you didn't intend to get sucked into. When we talk about technology, we tend to talk about it as this blue sky opportunity. It could go any direction. And I want to get serious for a moment and tell you why it's going in a very specific direction. Because it's not evolving randomly. There's a hidden goal driving the direction of all of the technology we make, and that goal is the race for our attention. Because every news site, TED, elections, politicians, games, even meditation apps have to compete for one thing, which is our attention, and there's only so much of it. And the best way to get people's attention is to know how someone's mind works. And there's a whole bunch of persuasive techniques that I learned in college at a lab called the Persuasive Technology Lab to get people's attention. A simple example is YouTube. YouTube wants to maximize how much time you spend. And so what do they do? They autoplay the next video. And let's say that works really well. They're getting a little bit more of people's time. Well, if you're Netflix, you look at that and say, well, that's shrinking my market share, so I'm going to autoplay the next episode. But then if you're Facebook, you say, that's shrinking all of my market share, so now I have to autoplay all the videos in the newsfeed before waiting for you to click play. So the internet is not evolving at random. The reason it feels like it's sucking us in the way it is is because of this race for attention. We know where this is going. Technology is not neutral, and it becomes this race to the bottom of the brain stem of who can go lower to get it. Let me give you an example of Snapchat. If you didn't know, Snapchat is the number one way that teenagers in the United States communicate. So if you're like me, and you use text messages to communicate, Snapchat is that for teenagers, and there's, like, a hundred million of them that use it. And they invented a feature called Snapstreaks, which shows the number of days in a row that two people have communicated with each other. In other words, what they just did is they gave two people something they don't want to lose. Because if you're a teenager, and you have 150 days in a row, you don't want that to go away. And so think of the little blocks of time that that schedules in kids' minds. This isn't theoretical: when kids go on vacation, it's been shown they give their passwords to up to five other friends to keep their Snapstreaks going, even when they can't do it. And they have, like, 30 of these things, and so they have to get through taking photos of just pictures or walls or ceilings just to get through their day. So it's not even like they're having real conversations. We have a temptation to think about this as, oh, they're just using Snapchat the way we used to gossip on the telephone. It's probably OK. Well, what this misses is that in the 1970s, when you were just gossiping on the telephone, there wasn't a hundred engineers on the other side of the screen who knew exactly how your psychology worked and orchestrated you into a double bind with each other. Now, if this is making you feel a little bit of outrage, notice that that thought just comes over you. Outrage is a really good way also of getting your attention, because we don't choose outrage. It happens to us. And if you're the Facebook newsfeed, whether you'd want to or not, you actually benefit when there's outrage. Because outrage doesn't just schedule a reaction in emotional time, space, for you. We want to share that outrage with other people. So we want to hit share and say, "Can you believe the thing that they said?" And so outrage works really well at getting attention, such that if Facebook had a choice between showing you the outrage feed and a calm newsfeed, they would want to show you the outrage feed, not because someone consciously chose that, but because that worked better at getting your attention. And the newsfeed control room is not accountable to us. It's only accountable to maximizing attention. It's also accountable, because of the business model of advertising, for anybody who can pay the most to actually walk into the control room and say, "That group over there, I want to schedule these thoughts into their minds." So you can target, you can precisely target a lie directly to the people who are most susceptible. And because this is profitable, it's only going to get worse. So I'm here today because the costs are so obvious. I don't know a more urgent problem than this, because this problem is underneath all other problems. It's not just taking away our agency to spend our attention and live the lives that we want, it's changing the way that we have our conversations, it's changing our democracy, and it's changing our ability to have the conversations and relationships we want with each other. And it affects everyone, because a billion people have one of these in their pocket. So how do we fix this? We need to make three radical changes to technology and to our society. The first is we need to acknowledge that we are persuadable. Once you start understanding that your mind can be scheduled into having little thoughts or little blocks of time that you didn't choose, wouldn't we want to use that understanding and protect against the way that that happens? I think we need to see ourselves fundamentally in a new way. It's almost like a new period of human history, like the Enlightenment, but almost a kind of self-aware Enlightenment, that we can be persuaded, and there might be something we want to protect. The second is we need new models and accountability systems so that as the world gets better and more and more persuasive over time — because it's only going to get more persuasive — that the people in those control rooms are accountable and transparent to what we want. The only form of ethical persuasion that exists is when the goals of the persuader are aligned with the goals of the persuadee. And that involves questioning big things, like the business model of advertising. Lastly, we need a design renaissance, because once you have this view of human nature, that you can steer the timelines of a billion people — just imagine, there's people who have some desire about what they want to do and what they want to be thinking and what they want to be feeling and how they want to be informed, and we're all just tugged into these other directions. And you have a billion people just tugged into all these different directions. Well, imagine an entire design renaissance that tried to orchestrate the exact and most empowering time-well-spent way for those timelines to happen. And that would involve two things: one would be protecting against the timelines that we don't want to be experiencing, the thoughts that we wouldn't want to be happening, so that when that ding happens, not having the ding that sends us away; and the second would be empowering us to live out the timeline that we want. So let me give you a concrete example. Today, let's say your friend cancels dinner on you, and you are feeling a little bit lonely. And so what do you do in that moment? You open up Facebook. And in that moment, the designers in the control room want to schedule exactly one thing, which is to maximize how much time you spend on the screen. Now, instead, imagine if those designers created a different timeline that was the easiest way, using all of their data, to actually help you get out with the people that you care about? Just think, alleviating all loneliness in society, if that was the timeline that Facebook wanted to make possible for people. Or imagine a different conversation. Let's say you wanted to post something supercontroversial on Facebook, which is a really important thing to be able to do, to talk about controversial topics. And right now, when there's that big comment box, it's almost asking you, what key do you want to type? In other words, it's scheduling a little timeline of things you're going to continue to do on the screen. And imagine instead that there was another button there saying, what would be most time well spent for you? And you click "host a dinner." And right there underneath the item it said, "Who wants to RSVP for the dinner?" And so you'd still have a conversation about something controversial, but you'd be having it in the most empowering place on your timeline, which would be at home that night with a bunch of a friends over to talk about it. So imagine we're running, like, a find and replace on all of the timelines that are currently steering us towards more and more screen time persuasively and replacing all of those timelines with what do we want in our lives. It doesn't have to be this way. Instead of handicapping our attention, imagine if we used all of this data and all of this power and this new view of human nature to give us a superhuman ability to focus and a superhuman ability to put our attention to what we cared about and a superhuman ability to have the conversations that we need to have for democracy. The most complex challenges in the world require not just us to use our attention individually. They require us to use our attention and coordinate it together. Climate change is going to require that a lot of people are being able to coordinate their attention in the most empowering way together. And imagine creating a superhuman ability to do that. Sometimes the world's most pressing and important problems are not these hypothetical future things that we could create in the future. Sometimes the most pressing problems are the ones that are right underneath our noses, the things that are already directing a billion people's thoughts. And maybe instead of getting excited about the new augmented reality and virtual reality and these cool things that could happen, which are going to be susceptible to the same race for attention, if we could fix the race for attention on the thing that's already in a billion people's pockets. Maybe instead of getting excited about the most exciting new cool fancy education apps, we could fix the way kids' minds are getting manipulated into sending empty messages back and forth. (Applause) Maybe instead of worrying about hypothetical future runaway artificial intelligences that are maximizing for one goal, we could solve the runaway artificial intelligence that already exists right now, which are these newsfeeds maximizing for one thing. It's almost like instead of running away to colonize new planets, we could fix the one that we're already on. (Applause) Solving this problem is critical infrastructure for solving every other problem. There's nothing in your life or in our collective problems that does not require our ability to put our attention where we care about. At the end of our lives, all we have is our attention and our time. What will be time well spent for ours? Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Tristan, thank you. Hey, stay up here a sec. First of all, thank you. I know we asked you to do this talk on pretty short notice, and you've had quite a stressful week getting this thing together, so thank you. Some people listening might say, what you complain about is addiction, and all these people doing this stuff, for them it's actually interesting. All these design decisions have built user content that is fantastically interesting. The world's more interesting than it ever has been. What's wrong with that? Tristan Harris: I think it's really interesting. One way to see this is if you're just YouTube, for example, you want to always show the more interesting next video. You want to get better and better at suggesting that next video, but even if you could propose the perfect next video that everyone would want to watch, it would just be better and better at keeping you hooked on the screen. So what's missing in that equation is figuring out what our boundaries would be. You would want YouTube to know something about, say, falling asleep. The CEO of Netflix recently said, "our biggest competitors are Facebook, YouTube and sleep." And so what we need to recognize is that the human architecture is limited and that we have certain boundaries or dimensions of our lives that we want to be honored and respected, and technology could help do that. (Applause) CA: I mean, could you make the case that part of the problem here is that we've got a naïve model of human nature? So much of this is justified in terms of human preference, where we've got these algorithms that do an amazing job of optimizing for human preference, but which preference? There's the preferences of things that we really care about when we think about them versus the preferences of what we just instinctively click on. If we could implant that more nuanced view of human nature in every design, would that be a step forward? TH: Absolutely. I mean, I think right now it's as if all of our technology is basically only asking our lizard brain what's the best way to just impulsively get you to do the next tiniest thing with your time, instead of asking you in your life what we would be most time well spent for you? What would be the perfect timeline that might include something later, would be time well spent for you here at TED in your last day here? CA: So if Facebook and Google and everyone said to us first up, "Hey, would you like us to optimize for your reflective brain or your lizard brain? You choose." TH: Right. That would be one way. Yes. CA: You said persuadability, that's an interesting word to me because to me there's two different types of persuadability. There's the persuadability that we're trying right now of reason and thinking and making an argument, but I think you're almost talking about a different kind, a more visceral type of persuadability, of being persuaded without even knowing that you're thinking. TH: Exactly. The reason I care about this problem so much is I studied at a lab called the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford that taught [students how to recognize] exactly these techniques. There's conferences and workshops that teach people all these covert ways of getting people's attention and orchestrating people's lives. And it's because most people don't know that that exists that this conversation is so important. CA: Tristan, you and I, we both know so many people from all these companies. There are actually many here in the room, and I don't know about you, but my experience of them is that there is no shortage of good intent. People want a better world. They are actually — they really want it. And I don't think anything you're saying is that these are evil people. It's a system where there's these unintended consequences that have really got out of control — TH: Of this race for attention. It's the classic race to the bottom when you have to get attention, and it's so tense. The only way to get more is to go lower on the brain stem, to go lower into outrage, to go lower into emotion, to go lower into the lizard brain. CA: Well, thank you so much for helping us all get a little bit wiser about this. Tristan Harris, thank you. TH: Thank you very much. (Applause) |
You smell with your body, not just your nose | {0: 'Jennifer Pluznick is on a mission to find out more about olfactory and other sensory receptors.'} | TEDMED 2016 | Here's a question for you: how many different scents do you think you can smell, and maybe even identify with accuracy? 100? 300? 1,000? One study estimates that humans can detect up to one trillion different odors. A trillion. It's hard to imagine, but your nose has the molecular machinery to make it happen. Olfactory receptors — tiny scent detectors — are packed into your nose, each one patiently waiting to be activated by the odor, or ligand, that it's been assigned to detect. It turns out we humans, like all vertebrates, have lots of olfactory receptors. In fact, more of our DNA is devoted to genes for different olfactory receptors than for any other type of protein. Why is that? Could olfactory receptors be doing something else in addition to allowing us to smell? In 1991, Linda Buck and Richard Axel uncovered the molecular identity of olfactory receptors — work which ultimately led to a Nobel Prize. At the time, we all assumed that these receptors were only found in the nose. However, about a year or so later, a report emerged of an olfactory receptor expressed in a tissue other than the nose. And then another such report emerged, and another. We now know that these receptors are found all over the body, including in some pretty unexpected places — in muscle, in kidneys, lungs and blood vessels. But what are they doing there? Well, we know that olfactory receptors act as sensitive chemical sensors in the nose — that's how they mediate our sense of smell. It turns out they also act as sensitive chemical sensors in many other parts of the body. Now, I'm not saying that your liver can detect the aroma of your morning coffee as you walk into the kitchen. Rather, after you drink your morning coffee, your liver might use an olfactory receptor to chemically detect the change in concentration of a chemical floating through your bloodstream. Many cell types and tissues in the body use chemical sensors, or chemosensors, to keep track of the concentration of hormones, metabolites and other molecules, and some of these chemosensors are olfactory receptors. If you are a pancreas or a kidney and you need a specialized chemical sensor that will allow you to keep track of a specific molecule, why reinvent the wheel? One of the first examples of an olfactory receptor found outside the nose showed that human sperm express an olfactory receptor, and that sperm with this receptor will seek out the chemical that the receptor responds to — the receptor's ligand. That is, the sperm will swim toward the ligand. This has intriguing implications. Are sperm aided in finding the egg by sniffing out the area with the highest ligand concentration? I like this example because it clearly demonstrates that an olfactory receptor's primary job is to be a chemical sensor, but depending on the context, it can influence how you perceive a smell, or in which direction sperm will swim, and as it turns out, a huge variety of other processes. Olfactory receptors have been implicated in muscle cell migration, in helping the lung to sense and respond to inhaled chemicals, and in wound healing. Similarly, taste receptors once thought to be found only in the tongue, are now known to be expressed in cells and tissues throughout the body. Even more surprisingly, a recent study found that the light receptors in our eyes also play a role in our blood vessels. In my lab, we work on trying to understand the roles of olfactory receptors and taste receptors in the context of the kidney. The kidney is a central control center for homeostasis. And to us, it makes sense that a homeostatic control center would be a logical place to employ chemical sensors. We've identified a number of different olfactory and taste receptors in the kidney, one of which, olfactory receptor 78, is known to be expressed in cells and tissues that are important in the regulation of blood pressure. When this receptor is deleted in mice, their blood pressure is low. Surprisingly, this receptor was found to respond to chemicals called short-chain fatty acids that are produced by the bacteria that reside in your gut — your gut microbiota. After being produced by your gut microbiota, these chemicals are absorbed into your bloodstream where they can then interact with receptors like olfactory receptor 78, meaning that the changes in metabolism of your gut microbiota may influence your blood pressure. Although we've identified a number of different olfactory and taste receptors in the kidney, we've only just begun to tease out their different functions and to figure out which chemicals each of them responds to. Similar investigations lie ahead for many other organs and tissues — only a small minority of receptors has been studied to date. This is exciting stuff. It's revolutionizing our understanding of the scope of influence for one of the five senses. And it has the potential to change our understanding of some aspects of human physiology. It's still early, but I think we've picked up on the scent of something we're following. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) |
Why I still have hope for coral reefs | {0: 'TED Senior Fellow Kristen Marhaver is a marine biologist studying the ecology, behavior and reproduction of reef corals. '} | TED2017 | The first time I cried underwater was in 2008, the island of Curaçao, way down in the southern Caribbean. It's beautiful there. I was studying these corals for my PhD, and after days and days of diving on the same reef, I had gotten to know them as individuals. I had made friends with coral colonies — totally a normal thing to do. Then, Hurricane Omar smashed them apart and ripped off their skin, leaving little bits of wounded tissue that would have a hard time healing, and big patches of dead skeleton that would get overgrown by algae. When I saw this damage for the first time, stretching all the way down the reef, I sunk onto the sand in my scuba gear and I cried. If a coral could die that fast, how could a reef ever survive? And why was I making it my job to try to fight for them? I never heard another scientist tell that kind of story until last year. A scientist in Guam wrote, "I cried right into my mask," seeing the damage on the reefs. Then a scientist in Australia wrote, "I showed my students the results of our coral surveys, and we wept." Crying about corals is having a moment, guys. (Laughter) And that's because reefs in the Pacific are losing corals faster than we've ever seen before. Because of climate change, the water is so hot for so long in the summers, that these animals can't function normally. They're spitting out the colored algae that lives in their skin, and the clear bleached tissue that's left usually starves to death and then rots away. Then the skeletons are overgrown by algae. This is happening over an unbelievable scale. The Northern Great Barrier Reef lost two-thirds of its corals last year over a distance of hundreds of miles, then bleached again this year, and the bleaching stretched further south. Reefs in the Pacific are in a nosedive right now, and no one knows how bad it's going to get, except ... over in the Caribbean where I work, we've already been through the nosedive. Reefs there have suffered through centuries of intense human abuse. We kind of already know how the story goes. And we might be able to help predict what happens next. Let's consult a graph. Since the invention of scuba, scientists have measured the amount of coral on the seafloor, and how it's changed through time. And after centuries of ratcheting human pressure, Caribbean reefs met one of three fates. Some reefs lost their corals very quickly. Some reefs lost their corals more slowly, but kind of ended up in the same place. OK, so far this is not going very well. But some reefs in the Caribbean — the ones best protected and the ones a little further from humans — they managed to hold onto their corals. Give us a challenge. And, we almost never saw a reef hit zero. The second time I cried underwater was on the north shore of Curaçao, 2011. It was the calmest day of the year, but it's always pretty sketchy diving there. My boyfriend and I swam against the waves. I watched my compass so we could find our way back out, and he watched for sharks, and after 20 minutes of swimming that felt like an hour, we finally dropped down to the reef, and I was so shocked, and I was so happy that my eyes filled with tears. There were corals 1,000 years old lined up one after another. They had survived the entire history of European colonialism in the Caribbean, and for centuries before that. I never knew what a coral could do when it was given a chance to thrive. The truth is that even as we lose so many corals, even as we go through this massive coral die-off, some reefs will survive. Some will be ragged on the edge, some will be beautiful. And by protecting shorelines and giving us food to eat and supporting tourism, they will still be worth billions and billions of dollars a year. The best time to protect a reef was 50 years ago, but the second-best time is right now. Even as we go through bleaching events, more frequent and in more places, some corals will be able to recover. We had a bleaching event in 2010 in the Caribbean that took off big patches of skin on boulder corals like these. This coral lost half of its skin. But if you look at the side of this coral a few years later, this coral is actually healthy again. It's doing what a healthy coral does. It's making copies of its polyps, it's fighting back the algae and it's reclaiming its territory. If a few polyps survive, a coral can regrow; it just needs time and protection and a reasonable temperature. Some corals can regrow in 10 years — others take a lot longer. But the more stresses we take off them locally — things like overfishing, sewage pollution, fertilizer pollution, dredging, coastal construction — the better they can hang on as we stabilize the climate, and the faster they can regrow. And as we go through the long, tough and necessary process of stabilizing the climate of planet Earth, some new corals will still be born. This is what I study in my research. We try to understand how corals make babies, and how those babies find their way to the reef, and we invent new methods to help them survive those early, fragile life stages. One of my favorite coral babies of all time showed up right after Hurricane Omar. It's the same species I was studying before the storm, but you almost never see babies of this species — it's really rare. This is actually an endangered species. In this photo, this little baby coral, this little circle of polyps, is a few years old. Like its cousins that bleach, it's fighting back the algae. And like its cousins on the north shore, it's aiming to live for 1,000 years. What's happening in the world and in the ocean has changed our time horizon. We can be incredibly pessimistic on the short term, and mourn what we lost and what we really took for granted. But we can still be optimistic on the long term, and we can still be ambitious about what we fight for and what we expect from our governments, from our planet. Corals have been living on planet Earth for hundreds of millions of years. They survived the extinction of the dinosaurs. They're badasses. (Laughter) An individual coral can go through tremendous trauma and fully recover if it's given a chance and it's given protection. Corals have always been playing the long game, and now so are we. Thanks very much. (Applause) |
Meet Spot, the robot dog that can run, hop and open doors | {0: 'Marc Raibert is the founder and CEO of robot maker Boston Dynamics.'} | TED2017 | (Laughter) (Laughter) That's SpotMini. He'll be back in a little while. I — (Applause) I love building robots. And my long-term goal is to build robots that can do what people and animals do. And there's three things in particular that we're interested in. One is balance and dynamic mobility, the second one is mobile manipulation, and the third one is mobile perception. So, dynamic mobility and balance — I'm going to do a demo for you. I'm standing here, balancing. I can see you're not very impressed. OK, how about now? (Laughter) How about now? (Applause) Those simple capabilities mean that people can go almost anywhere on earth, on any kind of terrain. We want to capture that for robots. What about manipulation? I'm holding this clicker in my hand; I'm not even looking at it, and I can manipulate it without any problem. But even more important, I can move my body while I hold the manipulator, the clicker, and stabilize and coordinate my body, and I can even walk around. And that means I can move around in the world and expand the range of my arms and my hands and really be able to handle almost anything. So that's mobile manipulation. And all of you can do this. Third is perception. I'm looking at a room with over 1,000 people in it, and my amazing visual system can see every one of you — you're all stable in space, even when I move my head, even when I move around. That kind of mobile perception is really important for robots that are going to move and act out in the world. I'm going to give you a little status report on where we are in developing robots toward these ends. The first three robots are all dynamically stabilized robots. This one goes back a little over 10 years ago — "BigDog." It's got a gyroscope that helps stabilize it. It's got sensors and a control computer. Here's a Cheetah robot that's running with a galloping gait, where it recycles its energy, it bounces on the ground, and it's computing all the time in order to keep itself stabilized and propelled. And here's a bigger robot that's got such good locomotion using its legs, that it can go in deep snow. This is about 10 inches deep, and it doesn't really have any trouble. This is Spot, a new generation of robot — just slightly older than the one that came out onstage. And we've been asking the question — you've all heard about drone delivery: Can we deliver packages to your houses with drones? Well, what about plain old legged-robot delivery? (Laughter) So we've been taking our robot to our employees' homes to see whether we could get in — (Laughter) the various access ways. And believe me, in the Boston area, there's every manner of stairway twists and turns. So it's a real challenge. But we're doing very well, about 70 percent of the way. And here's mobile manipulation, where we've put an arm on the robot, and it's finding its way through the door. Now, one of the important things about making autonomous robots is to make them not do just exactly what you say, but make them deal with the uncertainty of what happens in the real world. So we have Steve there, one of the engineers, giving the robot a hard time. (Laughter) And the fact that the programming still tolerates all that disturbance — it does what it's supposed to. Here's another example, where Eric is tugging on the robot as it goes up the stairs. And believe me, getting it to do what it's supposed to do in those circumstances is a real challenge, but the result is something that's going to generalize and make robots much more autonomous than they would be otherwise. This is Atlas, a humanoid robot. It's a third-generation humanoid that we've been building. I'll tell you a little bit about the hardware design later. And we've been saying: How close to human levels of performance and speed could we get in an ordinary task, like moving boxes around on a conveyor? We're getting up to about two-thirds of the speed that a human operates on average. And this robot is using both hands, it's using its body, it's stepping, so it's really an example of dynamic stability, mobile manipulation and mobile perception. Here — (Laughter) We actually have two Atlases. (Laughter) Now, everything doesn't go exactly the way it's supposed to. (Laughter) (Laughter) (Laughter) And here's our latest robot, called "Handle." Handle is interesting, because it's sort of half like an animal, and it's half something else with these leg-like things and wheels. It's got its arms on in kind of a funny way, but it really does some remarkable things. It can carry 100 pounds. It's probably going to lift more than that, but so far we've done 100. It's got some pretty good rough-terrain capability, even though it has wheels. And Handle loves to put on a show. (Laughter) (Applause) I'm going to give you a little bit of robot religion. A lot of people think that a robot is a machine where there's a computer that's telling it what to do, and the computer is listening through its sensors. But that's really only half of the story. The real story is that the computer is on one side, making suggestions to the robot, and on the other side are the physics of the world. And that physics involves gravity, friction, bouncing into things. In order to have a successful robot, my religion is that you have to do a holistic design, where you're designing the software, the hardware and the behavior all at one time, and all these parts really intermesh and cooperate with each other. And when you get the perfect design, you get a real harmony between all those parts interacting with each other. So it's half software and half hardware, plus the behavior. We've done some work lately on the hardware, where we tried to go — the picture on the left is a conventional design, where you have parts that are all bolted together, conductors, tubes, connectors. And on the right is a more integrated thing; it's supposed to look like an anatomy drawing. Using the miracle of 3-D printing, we're starting to build parts of robots that look a lot more like the anatomy of an animal. So that's an upper-leg part that has hydraulic pathways — actuators, filters — all embedded, all printed as one piece, and the whole structure is developed with a knowledge of what the loads and behavior are going to be, which is available from data recorded from robots and simulations and things like that. So it's a data-driven hardware design. And using processes like that, not only the upper leg but some other things, we've gotten our robots to go from big, behemoth, bulky, slow, bad robots — that one on the right, weighing almost 400 pounds — down to the one in the middle which was just in the video, weighs about 190 pounds, just a little bit more than me, and we have a new one, which is working but I'm not going to show it to you yet, on the left, which weighs just 165 pounds, with all the same strength and capabilities. So these things are really getting better very quickly. So it's time for Spot to come back out, and we're going to demonstrate a little bit of mobility, dexterity and perception. This is Seth Davis, who's my robot wrangler today, and he's giving Spot some general direction by steering it around, but all the coordination of the legs and the sensors is done by the robot's computers on board. The robot can walk with a number of different gaits; it's got a gyro, or a solid-state gyro, an IMU on board. Obviously, it's got a battery, and things like that. One of the cool things about a legged robot is, it's omnidirectional. In addition to going forward, it can go sideways, it can turn in place. And this robot is a little bit of a show-off. It loves to use its dynamic gaits, like running — (Laughter) And it's got one more. (Laughter) Now if it were really a show-off, it would be hopping on one foot, but, you know. Now, Spot has a set of cameras here, stereo cameras, and we have a feed up in the center. It's kind of dark out in the audience, but it's going to use those cameras in order to look at the terrain right in front of it, while it goes over these obstacles back here. For this demo, Seth is steering, but the robot's doing all its own terrain planning. This is a terrain map, where the data from the cameras is being developed in real time, showing the red spots, which are where it doesn't want to step, and the green spots are the good places. And here it's treating them like stepping-stones. So it's trying to stay up on the blocks, and it adjusts its stride, and there's a ton of planning that has to go into an operation like that, and it does all that planning in real time, where it adjusts the steps a little bit longer or a little bit shorter. Now we're going to change it into a different mode, where it's just going to treat the blocks like terrain and decide whether to step up or down as it goes. So this is using dynamic balance and mobile perception, because it has to coordinate what it sees along with how it's moving. The other thing Spot has is a robot arm. Some of you may see that as a head and a neck, but believe me, it's an arm. Seth is driving it around. He's actually driving the hand and the body is following. So the two are coordinated in the way I was talking about before — in the way people can do that. In fact, one of the cool things Spot can do we call, "chicken-head mode," and it keeps its head in one place in space, and it moves its body all around. There's a variation of this that's called "twerking" — (Laughter) but we're not going to use that today. (Laughter) So, Spot: I'm feeling a little thirsty. Could you get me a soda? For this demo, Seth is not doing any driving. We have a LIDAR on the back of the robot, and it's using these props we've put on the stage to localize itself. It's gone over to that location. Now it's using a camera that's in its hand to find the cup, picks it up — and again, Seth's not driving. We've planned out a path for it to go — it looked like it was going off the path — and now Seth's going to take over control again, because I'm a little bit chicken about having it do this by itself. Thank you, Spot. (Applause) So, Spot: How do you feel about having just finished your TED performance? (Laughter) Me, too! (Laughter) Thank you all, and thanks to the team at Boston Dynamics, who did all the hard work behind this. (Applause) Helen Walters: Marc, come back in the middle. Thank you so much. Come over here, I have questions. So, you mentioned the UPS and the package delivery. What are the other applications that you see for your robots? Marc Raibert: You know, I think that robots that have the capabilities I've been talking about are going to be incredibly useful. About a year ago, I went to Fukushima to see what the situation was there, and there's just a huge need for machines that can go into some of the dirty places and help remediate that. I think it won't be too long until we have robots like this in our homes, and one of the big needs is to take care of the aging and invalids. I think that it won't be too long till we're using robots to help take care of our parents, or probably more likely, have our children help take care of us. And there's a bunch of other things. I think the sky's the limit. Many of the ideas we haven't thought of yet, and people like you will help us think of new applications. HW: So what about the dark side? What about the military? Are they interested? MR: Sure, the military has been a big funder of robotics. I don't think the military is the dark side myself, but I think, as with all advanced technology, it can be used for all kinds of things. HW: Awesome. Thank you so much. MR: OK, you're welcome. Thank you. (Applause) |
Can art amend history? | {0: "Titus Kaphar's artworks interact with the history of art by appropriating its styles and mediums."} | TED2017 | I love museums. Have you guys ever been to the Natural History Museum? In New York City? (Applause) So one of the things that I do is I take my kids to the museum. Recently I took them to the Natural History Museum. I had my two sons with me, Sabian and Dabith. And we go into the front entrance of the museum, and there's that amazing sculpture of Teddy Roosevelt out there. You guys know which one I'm talking about. Teddy Roosevelt is sitting there with one hand on the horse, bold, strong, sleeves rolled up. I don't know if he's bare-chested, but it kind of feels like it. (Laughter) And on the left-hand side of him is a Native American walking. And on the right-hand side of him is an African-American walking. And as we're moving up the stairs, getting closer to the sculpture, my oldest son, who's nine, says, "Dad, how come he gets to ride, and they have to walk?" It stopped me in my tracks. It stopped me in my tracks. There was so much history that we would have to go through to try to explain that, and that's something I try to do with them anyways. It's a question that I probably would have never really asked. But fundamentally what he was saying was, "That doesn't look fair. Dad, that doesn't look fair. And why is this thing that's so not fair sitting outside of such an amazing institution." And his question got me wondering, is there a way for us to amend our public sculptures, our national monuments? Not erase them, but is there a way to amend them? Now, I didn't grow up going to museums. That's not my history. My mother was 15 years old when I was born. She is amazing. My father was struggling with his own things for most of my life. If you really want to know the truth, the only reason I got into art is because of a woman. There was this amazing, amazing, fantastic, beautiful, smart woman, four years older than me, and I wanted to go out with her. But she said, "You're too young and you're not thinking about your future." So I ran on down to the junior college, registered for some classes, ran on back, and basically was like, "I'm thinking about my future now." (Laughter) "Can we go out?" For the record, she's even more amazing. I married her. (Applause) So when I randomly ran down to the junior college and registered for classes, I really wasn't paying attention to what I was registering to. (Laughter) So I ended up with an art history class, and I didn't know a thing about art history. But something amazing happened when I went into that class. For the first time in my academic career, my visual intelligence was required of me. For the first time. The professor would put up an image, bold strokes of blues and yellows, and say, "Who's that?" And I'd go, "That's Van Gogh. Clearly that is Van Gogh. I got this." (Laughter) I got a B in that class. For me, that was amazing. In high school, let's just say I wasn't a great student. OK? In high school, my GPA was .65. (Laughter) Decimal point first, six five. So me getting a B was huge, huge, absolutely huge. And because of the fact that I realized that I was able to learn things visually that I couldn't learn in other ways, this became my strategy, this became my tactic for understanding everything else. I wanted to stay in this relationship. Things were going well. I decided, let me keep taking these art history classes. One of the last art history classes, I will not forget, I will never forget. It was one of those survey art history classes. Anybody ever have one of those survey art history classes, where they try to teach you the entire history of art in a single semester? I'm talking about cave paintings and Jackson Pollock just crunched together all in the same — It doesn't really work, but they try anyway. Well, at the beginning of the semester, I looked at the book, and in this 400-page book was about a 14-page section that was on black people in painting. Now, this was a crammed in section that had representations of black people in painting and black people who painted. It was poorly curated, let's just put it that way. (Laughter) Nonetheless I was really excited about it, because in all the other classes that I had, we didn't even have that conversation. We didn't talk about it at all. So imagine my surprise when I get to class and on the day that we're supposed to go over that particular chapter, my professor announces, "We're going to skip this chapter today because we do not have time to go through it." "Whoa, I'm sorry, hold on, professor, professor. I'm sorry. This is a really important chapter to me. Are we going to go over it at any point?" "Titus, we don't have time for this." "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, please, I really need to understand. Clearly the author thinks that this is significant. Why are we skipping over this?" "Titus, I do not have time for this." "OK, last question, I'm really sorry here. When can we talk, because we need to talk." (Laughter) I went to her office hours. I ended up getting kicked out of her office. I went to the dean. The dean finally told me, "I can't force her to teach anything." And I knew in that moment if I wanted to understand this history, if I wanted to understand the roles of those folks who had to walk, I was probably going to have to figure that out myself. So ... above you right here on the slide is a painting by Frans Hals. This is one of the kinds of images that was in that chapter. I taught myself how to paint by going to museums and looking at images like this. I want to show you something. I made this. I — (Applause) I made some alterations. You'll see there are some slight differences in the painting. All this art history that I had been absorbing helped me to realize that painting is a language. There is a reason why he is the highest in the composition here. There is a reason why the painter is showing us this gold necklace here. He's trying to tell us something about the economic status of these people in these paintings. Painting is a visual language where everything in the painting is meaningful, is important. It's coded. But sometimes, because of the compositional structure, because of compositional hierarchy, it's hard to see other things. This silk is supposed to tell us also that they have quite a bit of money. There's more written about dogs in art history than there are about this other character here. Historically speaking, in research on these kinds of paintings, I can find out more about the lace that the woman is wearing in this painting — the manufacturer of the lace — than I can about this character here, about his dreams, about his hopes, about what he wanted out of life. I want to show you something. I don't want you to think that this is about eradication. It's not. The oil that you saw me just put inside of this paint is linseed oil. It becomes transparent over time, so eventually what's going to happen is these faces will emerge a little bit. What I'm trying to do, what I'm trying to show you, is how to shift your gaze just slightly, just momentarily, just momentarily, to ask yourself the question, why do some have to walk? What is the impact of these kinds of sculptures at museums? What is the impact of these kinds of paintings on some of our most vulnerable in society, seeing these kinds of depictions of themselves all the time? I'm not saying erase it. We can't erase this history. It's real. We have to know it. I think of it in the same way we think of — Let me step back a second. You remember old-school cameras, where when you took a picture, you actually had to focus. Right? You'd put the camera up, and if I wanted you in focus, I would move the lens a little to the left and you would come forward. I could move the lens a little to the right, and you would go back and the folks in the background would come out. I'm just trying to do that here. I'm trying to give you that opportunity. I'm trying to answer that question that my son had. I want to make paintings, I want to make sculptures that are honest, that wrestle with the struggles of our past but speak to the diversity and the advances of our present. And we can't do that by taking an eraser and getting rid of stuff. That's just not going to work. I think that we should do it in the same way the American Constitution works. When we have a situation where we want to change a law in the American Constitution, we don't erase the other one. Alongside that is an amendment, something that says, "This is where we were, but this is where we are right now." I figure if we can do that, then that will help us understand a little bit about where we're going. Thank you. (Applause) |
What six years in captivity taught me about fear and faith | {0: 'Ingrid Betancourt was a presidential candidate in Colombia in 2002 when she was kidnapped by guerilla rebels. After six years in captivity and a high-profile rescue, she now writes about what she learned about fear, forgiveness and the divine.'} | TED2017 | The first time I felt fear I was 41 years old. People have always said I was brave. When I was little, I'd climb the highest tree, and I'd approach any animal fearlessly. I liked challenges. My father used to say, "Good steel can withstand any temperature." And when I entered into Colombian politics, I thought I'd be able to withstand any temperature. I wanted to end corruption; I wanted to cut ties between politicians and drug traffickers. The first time I was elected, it was because I called out, by name, corrupt and untouchable politicians. I also called out the president for his ties to the cartels. That's when the threats started. I had to send my very young children out of the country one morning, hidden, all the way to the airport, in the French ambassador's armored car. Days later, I was the victim of an attack, but emerged unharmed. The following year, the Colombian people elected me with the highest number of votes. I thought people applauded me because I was brave. I, too, thought I was brave. But I wasn't. I had simply never before experienced true fear. That changed on February 23, 2002. At the time, I was a presidential candidate in Colombia promoting my campaign agenda, when I was detained by a group of armed men. They were wearing uniforms with military garments. I looked at their boots; they were rubber. And I knew that the Colombian army wore leather boots. I knew that these were FARC guerrillas. From that point on, everything happened very quickly. The commando leader ordered us to stop the vehicle. Meanwhile, one of his men stepped on an antipersonnel mine and flew through the air. He landed, sitting upright, right in front of me. We made eye contact and it was then that the young man understood: his rubber boot with his leg still in it had landed far away. (Sighs) He started screaming like crazy. And the truth is, I felt — as I feel right now, because I'm reliving these emotions — I felt at that moment that something inside of me was breaking and that I was being infected with his fear. My mind went blank and couldn't think; it was paralyzed. When I finally reacted, I said to myself, "They're going to kill me, and I didn't say goodbye to my children." As they took me into the deepest depths of the jungle, the FARC soldiers announced that if the government didn't negotiate, they'd kill me. And I knew that the government wouldn't negotiate. From that point on, I went to sleep in fear every night — cold sweats, shaking, stomach ache, insomnia. But worse than that was what was happening to my mind, because my memory was being erased: all the phone numbers, addresses, names of very dear people, even significant life events. And so, I began to doubt myself, to doubt my mental health. And with doubt came desperation, and with desperation came depression. I was suffering notorious behavioral changes and it wasn't just paranoia in moments of panic. It was distrust, it was hatred, and it was also the urge to kill. This, I realized when they had me chained by the neck to a tree. They kept me outside that day, during a tropical downpour. I remember feeling an urgent need to use the bathroom. "Whatever you have to do, you'll do in front of me, bitch," the guard screamed at me. And I decided at that moment to kill him. And for days, I was planning, trying to find the right moment, the right way to do it, filled with hatred, filled with fear. Then suddenly, I rose up, snapped out of it and thought: "I'm not going to become one of them. I'm not going to become an assassin. I still have enough freedom to decide who I want to be." That's when I learned that fear brought me face to face with myself. It forced me to align my energies, to align my meridians. I learned that facing fear could become a pathway to growth. A lot of emotions arise when I talk about all of this, but when I think back, I'm able to identify the steps I took to do it. I want to share three of them with you. The first was to be guided by principles. Because I realized that in the midst of panic and mental block, if I followed my principles, I acted correctly. I remember the first night in a concentration camp that the guerrillas had built in the middle of the jungle, with 12-foot-high bars, barbed wire, lookouts in the four corners and armed men pointing guns at us 24 hours a day. That morning, the first morning, some men arrived, yelling: "Count off! Count off!" My fellow hostages woke up, startled, and began to identify themselves in numbered sequence. But when it was my turn, I said, "Ingrid Betancourt. If you want to know if I'm here, call me by my name." The guards' fury was nothing compared to that of the other hostages, because, obviously they were scared — we were all scared — and they were afraid that, because of me, they would be punished. But for me, beyond fear was the need to defend my identity, to not let them turn me into a thing or a number. That was one of the principles: to defend what I considered to be human dignity. But make no mistake: the guerrillas had it all very well analyzed — they had been kidnapping for years, and they had developed a technique to break us, to defeat us, to divide us. And so, the second step was to learn how to build supportive trust, to learn how to unite. The jungle is like a different planet. It's a world of shadows, of rain, with the hum of millions of bugs — majiña ants, bullet ants. I didn't stop scratching a single day while I was in the jungle. And of course, there were tarantulas, scorpions, anacondas ... I once came face to face with a 24-foot long anaconda that could have swallowed me in one bite. Jaguars ... But I want to tell you that none of these animals did us as much harm as the human beings. The guerrillas terrorized us. They spread rumors. Among the hostages, they sparked betrayals, jealousy, resentment, mistrust. The first time I escaped for a long time was with Lucho. Lucho had been a hostage for two years longer than I had. We decided to tie ourselves up with ropes to have the strength to lower ourselves into that dark water full of piranhas and alligators. What we did was, during the day, we would hide in the mangroves. And at night, we would leave, get in the water, and we would swim and let the current carry us. That went on for several days. But Lucho became sick. He was diabetic, and he fell into a diabetic coma. So the guerrillas captured us. But after having lived through that with Lucho, after having faced fear together, united, not punishment, not violence — nothing — could ever again divide us. What's certain is, all the guerrillas' manipulation was so damaging to us that even today, among some of the hostages from back then, tensions linger, passed down from all that poison that the guerrillas created. The third step is very important to me, and it's a gift that I want to give to you. The third step is to learn how to develop faith. I want to explain it like this: Jhon Frank Pinchao was a police officer who had been a hostage for more than eight years. He was famous for being the biggest scaredy-cat of us all. But Pincho — I called him "Pincho" — Pincho decided that he wanted to escape. And he asked me to help him. By that point, I basically had a master's degree in escape attempts. (Laughter) So we got started but we had a delay, because first, Pincho had to learn how to swim. And we had to carry out all these preparations in total secrecy. Anyway, when we finally had everything ready, Pincho came up to me one afternoon and said, "Ingrid, suppose I'm in the jungle, and I go around and around in circles, and I can't find the way out. What do I do?" "Pincho, you grab a phone, and you call the man upstairs." "Ingrid, you know I don't believe in God." "God doesn't care. He'll still help you." (Applause) It rained all night that night. The following morning, the camp woke up to a big commotion, because Pincho had fled. They made us dismantle the camp, and we started marching. During the march, the head guerrillas told us that Pincho had died, and that they had found his remains eaten by an anaconda. Seventeen days passed — and believe me, I counted them, because they were torture for me. But on the seventeenth day, the news exploded from the radio: Pincho was free and obviously alive. And this was the first thing he said: "I know my fellow hostages are listening. Ingrid, I did what you told me. I called the man upstairs, and he sent me the patrol that rescued me from the jungle." That was an extraordinary moment, because ... obviously fear is contagious. But faith is, too. Faith isn't rational or emotional. Faith is an exercise of the will. It's the discipline of the will. It's what allows us to transform everything that we are — our weaknesses, our frailties, into strength, into power. It's truly a transformation. It's what gives us the strength to stand up in the face of fear look above it, and see beyond it. I hope you remember that, because I know we all need to connect with that strength we have inside of us for the times when there's a storm raging around our boat. Many, many, many, many years passed before I could return to my house. But when they took us, handcuffed, into the helicopter that finally took us out of the jungle, everything happened as quickly as when they kidnapped me. In an instant, I saw the guerrilla commander at my feet, gagged, and the rescue leader, yelling: "We're the Colombian army! You are free!" The shriek that came out of all of us when we regained our freedom, continues to vibrate in me to this day. Now, I know they can divide all of us, they can manipulate us all with fear. The "No" vote on the peace referendum in Colombia; Brexit; the idea of a wall between Mexico and the United States; Islamic terrorism — they're all examples of using fear politically to divide and recruit us. We all feel fear. But we can all avoid being recruited using the resources we have — our principles, unity, faith. Yes, fear is part of the human condition, as well as being necessary for survival. But above all, it's the guide by which each of us builds our identity, our personality. It's true, I was 41 years old the first time I felt fear, and feeling fear was not my decision. But it was my decision what to do with that fear. You can survive crawling along, fearful. But you can also rise above the fear, rise up, spread your wings, and soar, fly high, high, high, high, until you reach the stars, where all of us want to go. Thank you. (Applause) |
The stories behind The New Yorker's iconic covers | {0: "Françoise Mouly is The New Yorker's longtime art editor."} | TEDNYC | So 24 years ago, I was brought to The New Yorker as art editor to rejuvenate what had by then become a somewhat staid institution and to bring in new artists and to try to bring the magazine from its ivory tower into engaging with its time. And it was just the right thing for me to do because I've always been captivated by how an image can — a simple drawing — can cut through the torrent of images that we see every single day. How it can capture a moment, how it can crystallize a social trend or a complex event in a way that a lot of words wouldn't be able to do — and reduce it to its essence and turn it into a cartoon. So I went to the library and I looked at the first cover drawn by Rea Irvin in 1925 — a dandy looking at a butterfly through his monocle, and we call it Eustace Tilley. And I realized that as the magazine had become known for its in-depth research and long reports, some of the humor had gotten lost along the way, because now often Eustace Tilley was seen as a haughty dandy, but in fact, in 1925, when Rea Irvin first drew this image, he did it as part of a humor magazine to amuse the youth of the era, which was the flappers of the roaring twenties. And in the library, I found the images that really captured the zeitgeist of the Great Depression. And it showed us not just how people dressed or what their cars looked like, but also what made them laugh, what their prejudices were. And you really got a sense of what it felt like to be alive in the '30s. So I called on contemporary artists, such as Adrian Tomine here. I often call on narrative artists — cartoonists, children's book authors — and I give them themes such as, you know, what it's like to be in the subway, or Valentine's Day, and they send me sketches. And once the sketches are approved by the editor, David Remnick, it's a go. And I love the way those images are actually not telling you what to think. But they do make you think, because the artist is actually — it's almost a puzzle; the artist is drawing the dots, and you, the reader, have to complete the picture. So to get this image on the left by Anita Kunz, or the one on right by Tomer Hanuka, you have to play spot the differences. And it is something that ... It's really exciting to see how the engagement with the reader ... how those images really capture — play with the stereotypes. But when you get it, it rearranges the stereotypes that are in your head. But the images don't just have to show people, sometimes it can be a feeling. Right after September 11, I was at a point, like everybody else, where I really didn't know how to deal with what we were going through, and I felt that no image could capture this moment, and I wanted to just do a black cover, like no cover. And I talked to my husband, cartoonist Art Spiegelman, and mentioned to him that I was going to propose that, and he said, "Oh, if you're going to do a black cover, then why don't you do the silhouette of the Twin Towers, black on black?" And I sat down to draw this, and as soon as I saw it, a shiver ran down my spine and I realized that in this refusal to make an image, we had found a way to capture loss and mourning and absence. And it's been a profound thing that I learned in the process — that sometimes some of the images that say the most do it with the most spare means. And a simple image can speak volumes. So this is the image that we published by Bob Staake right after the election of Barack Obama, and captured a historic moment. But we can't really plan for this, because in order to do this, we have to let the artist experience the emotions that we all feel when that is happening. So back in November 2016, during the election last year, the only image that we could publish was this, which was on the stand on the week that everybody voted. (Laughter) Because we knew somebody would feel this — (Laughter) when the result of the election was announced. And when we found out the result, we really were at a loss, and this is the image that was sent by Bob Staake again, and that really hit a chord. And again, we can't really figure out what's going to come next, but here it felt like we didn't know how to move forward, but we did move forward, and this is the image that we published after Donald Trump's election and at the time of the Women's March all over the US. So over those 24 years, I have seen over 1,000 images come to life week after week, and I'm often asked which one is my favorite, but I can't pick one because what I'm most proud of is how different every image is, one from the other. And that's due to the talent and the diversity of all of the artists that contribute. And now, well, now, we're owned by Russia, so — (Laughter) In a rendering by Barry Blitt here, Eustace has become Eustace Vladimirovich Tilley. And the butterfly is none other than a flabbergasted Donald Trump flapping his wings, trying to figure out how to control the butterfly effect, and the famed logo that was drawn by Rae Irvin in 1925 is now in Cyrillic. So, what makes me really excited about this moment is the way that ... You know, free press is essential to our democracy. And we can see from the sublime to the ridiculous that artists can capture what is going on in a way that an artist armed with just India ink and watercolor can capture and enter into the cultural dialogue. It puts those artists at the center of that culture, and that's exactly where I think they should be. Because the main thing we need right now is a good cartoon. Thank you. (Applause) |
How computers learn to recognize objects instantly | {0: 'Joseph Redmon works on the YOLO algorithm, which combines the simple face detection of your phone camera with a cloud-based AI -- in real time.'} | TED2017 | Ten years ago, computer vision researchers thought that getting a computer to tell the difference between a cat and a dog would be almost impossible, even with the significant advance in the state of artificial intelligence. Now we can do it at a level greater than 99 percent accuracy. This is called image classification — give it an image, put a label to that image — and computers know thousands of other categories as well. I'm a graduate student at the University of Washington, and I work on a project called Darknet, which is a neural network framework for training and testing computer vision models. So let's just see what Darknet thinks of this image that we have. When we run our classifier on this image, we see we don't just get a prediction of dog or cat, we actually get specific breed predictions. That's the level of granularity we have now. And it's correct. My dog is in fact a malamute. So we've made amazing strides in image classification, but what happens when we run our classifier on an image that looks like this? Well ... We see that the classifier comes back with a pretty similar prediction. And it's correct, there is a malamute in the image, but just given this label, we don't actually know that much about what's going on in the image. We need something more powerful. I work on a problem called object detection, where we look at an image and try to find all of the objects, put bounding boxes around them and say what those objects are. So here's what happens when we run a detector on this image. Now, with this kind of result, we can do a lot more with our computer vision algorithms. We see that it knows that there's a cat and a dog. It knows their relative locations, their size. It may even know some extra information. There's a book sitting in the background. And if you want to build a system on top of computer vision, say a self-driving vehicle or a robotic system, this is the kind of information that you want. You want something so that you can interact with the physical world. Now, when I started working on object detection, it took 20 seconds to process a single image. And to get a feel for why speed is so important in this domain, here's an example of an object detector that takes two seconds to process an image. So this is 10 times faster than the 20-seconds-per-image detector, and you can see that by the time it makes predictions, the entire state of the world has changed, and this wouldn't be very useful for an application. If we speed this up by another factor of 10, this is a detector running at five frames per second. This is a lot better, but for example, if there's any significant movement, I wouldn't want a system like this driving my car. This is our detection system running in real time on my laptop. So it smoothly tracks me as I move around the frame, and it's robust to a wide variety of changes in size, pose, forward, backward. This is great. This is what we really need if we're going to build systems on top of computer vision. (Applause) So in just a few years, we've gone from 20 seconds per image to 20 milliseconds per image, a thousand times faster. How did we get there? Well, in the past, object detection systems would take an image like this and split it into a bunch of regions and then run a classifier on each of these regions, and high scores for that classifier would be considered detections in the image. But this involved running a classifier thousands of times over an image, thousands of neural network evaluations to produce detection. Instead, we trained a single network to do all of detection for us. It produces all of the bounding boxes and class probabilities simultaneously. With our system, instead of looking at an image thousands of times to produce detection, you only look once, and that's why we call it the YOLO method of object detection. So with this speed, we're not just limited to images; we can process video in real time. And now, instead of just seeing that cat and dog, we can see them move around and interact with each other. This is a detector that we trained on 80 different classes in Microsoft's COCO dataset. It has all sorts of things like spoon and fork, bowl, common objects like that. It has a variety of more exotic things: animals, cars, zebras, giraffes. And now we're going to do something fun. We're just going to go out into the audience and see what kind of things we can detect. Does anyone want a stuffed animal? There are some teddy bears out there. And we can turn down our threshold for detection a little bit, so we can find more of you guys out in the audience. Let's see if we can get these stop signs. We find some backpacks. Let's just zoom in a little bit. And this is great. And all of the processing is happening in real time on the laptop. And it's important to remember that this is a general purpose object detection system, so we can train this for any image domain. The same code that we use to find stop signs or pedestrians, bicycles in a self-driving vehicle, can be used to find cancer cells in a tissue biopsy. And there are researchers around the globe already using this technology for advances in things like medicine, robotics. This morning, I read a paper where they were taking a census of animals in Nairobi National Park with YOLO as part of this detection system. And that's because Darknet is open source and in the public domain, free for anyone to use. (Applause) But we wanted to make detection even more accessible and usable, so through a combination of model optimization, network binarization and approximation, we actually have object detection running on a phone. (Applause) And I'm really excited because now we have a pretty powerful solution to this low-level computer vision problem, and anyone can take it and build something with it. So now the rest is up to all of you and people around the world with access to this software, and I can't wait to see what people will build with this technology. Thank you. (Applause) |
How AI can enhance our memory, work and social lives | {0: 'As co-creator of Siri, Tom Gruber helped redefine the role of machine intelligence in our lives and transformed the way we interact with our devices.'} | TED2017 | I'm here to offer you a new way to think about my field, artificial intelligence. I think the purpose of AI is to empower humans with machine intelligence. And as machines get smarter, we get smarter. I call this "humanistic AI" — artificial intelligence designed to meet human needs by collaborating and augmenting people. Now, today I'm happy to see that the idea of an intelligent assistant is mainstream. It's the well-accepted metaphor for the interface between humans and AI. And the one I helped create is called Siri. You know Siri. Siri is the thing that knows your intent and helps you do it for you, helps you get things done. But what you might not know is that we designed Siri as humanistic AI, to augment people with a conversational interface that made it possible for them to use mobile computing, regardless of who they were and their abilities. Now for most of us, the impact of this technology is to make things a little bit easier to use. But for my friend Daniel, the impact of the AI in these systems is a life changer. You see, Daniel is a really social guy, and he's blind and quadriplegic, which makes it hard to use those devices that we all take for granted. The last time I was at his house, his brother said, "Hang on a second, Daniel's not ready. He's on the phone with a woman he met online." I'm like, "That's cool, how'd he do it?" Well, Daniel uses Siri to manage his own social life — his email, text and phone — without depending on his caregivers. This is kind of interesting, right? The irony here is great. Here's the man whose relationship with AI helps him have relationships with genuine human beings. And this is humanistic AI. Another example with life-changing consequences is diagnosing cancer. When a doctor suspects cancer, they take a sample and send it to a pathologist, who looks at it under a microscope. Now, pathologists look at hundreds of slides and millions of cells every day. So to support this task, some researchers made an AI classifier. Now, the classifier says, "Is this cancer or is this not cancer?" looking at the pictures. The classifier was pretty good, but not as good as the person, who got it right most of the time. But when they combine the ability of the machine and the human together, accuracy went to 99.5 percent. Adding that AI to a partnership eliminated 85 percent of the errors that the human pathologist would have made working alone. That's a lot of cancer that would have otherwise gone untreated. Now, for the curious, it turns out that the human was better at rejecting false positives, and the machine was better at recognizing those hard-to-spot cases. But the lesson here isn't about which agent is better at this image-classification task. Those things are changing every day. The lesson here is that by combining the abilities of the human and machine, it created a partnership that had superhuman performance. And that is humanistic AI. Now let's look at another example with turbocharging performance. This is design. Now, let's say you're an engineer. You want to design a new frame for a drone. You get out your favorite software tools, CAD tools, and you enter the form and the materials, and then you analyze performance. That gives you one design. If you give those same tools to an AI, it can generate thousands of designs. This video by Autodesk is amazing. This is real stuff. So this transforms how we do design. The human engineer now says what the design should achieve, and the machine says, "Here's the possibilities." Now in her job, the engineer's job is to pick the one that best meets the goals of the design, which she knows as a human better than anyone else, using human judgment and expertise. In this case, the winning form looks kind of like something nature would have designed, minus a few million years of evolution and all that unnecessary fur. Now let's see where this idea of humanistic AI might lead us if we follow it into the speculative beyond. What's a kind of augmentation that we would all like to have? Well, how about cognitive enhancement? Instead of asking, "How smart can we make our machines?" let's ask "How smart can our machines make us?" I mean, take memory for example. Memory is the foundation of human intelligence. But human memory is famously flawed. We're great at telling stories, but not getting the details right. And our memories — they decay over time. I mean, like, where did the '60s go, and can I go there, too? (Laughter) But what if you could have a memory that was as good as computer memory, and was about your life? What if you could remember every person you ever met, how to pronounce their name, their family details, their favorite sports, the last conversation you had with them? If you had this memory all your life, you could have the AI look at all the interactions you had with people over time and help you reflect on the long arc of your relationships. What if you could have the AI read everything you've ever read and listen to every song you've ever heard? From the tiniest clue, it could help you retrieve anything you've ever seen or heard before. Imagine what that would do for the ability to make new connections and form new ideas. And what about our bodies? What if we could remember the consequences of every food we eat, every pill we take, every all-nighter we pull? We could do our own science on our own data about what makes us feel good and stay healthy. And imagine how this could revolutionize the way we manage allergies and chronic disease. I believe that AI will make personal memory enhancement a reality. I can't say when or what form factors are involved, but I think it's inevitable, because the very things that make AI successful today — the availability of comprehensive data and the ability for machines to make sense of that data — can be applied to the data of our lives. And those data are here today, available for all of us, because we lead digitally mediated lives, in mobile and online. In my view, a personal memory is a private memory. We get to choose what is and is not recalled and retained. It's absolutely essential that this be kept very secure. Now for most of us, the impact of augmented personal memory will be a more improved mental gain, maybe, hopefully, a bit more social grace. But for the millions who suffer from Alzheimer's and dementia, the difference that augmented memory could make is a difference between a life of isolation and a life of dignity and connection. We are in the middle of a renaissance in artificial intelligence right now. I mean, in just the past few years, we're beginning to see solutions to AI problems that we have struggled with literally for decades: speech understanding, text understanding, image understanding. We have a choice in how we use this powerful technology. We can choose to use AI to automate and compete with us, or we can use AI to augment and collaborate with us, to overcome our cognitive limitations and to help us do what we want to do, only better. And as we discover new ways to give machines intelligence, we can distribute that intelligence to all of the AI assistants in the world, and therefore to every person, regardless of circumstance. And that is why, every time a machine gets smarter, we get smarter. That is an AI worth spreading. Thank you. (Applause) |
How your brain decides what is beautiful | {0: 'Anjan Chatterjee seeks to answer a tantalizing question: Why is beauty so gripping?'} | TEDMED 2016 | It's 1878. Sir Francis Galton gives a remarkable talk. He's speaking to the anthropologic institute of Great Britain and Ireland. Known for his pioneering work in human intelligence, Galton is a brilliant polymath. He's an explorer, an anthropologist, a sociologist, a psychologist and a statistician. He's also a eugenist. In this talk, he presents a new technique by which he can combine photographs and produce composite portraits. This technique could be used to characterize different types of people. Galton thinks that if he combines photographs of violent criminals, he will discover the face of criminality. But to his surprise, the composite portrait that he produces is beautiful. Galton's surprising finding raises deep questions: What is beauty? Why do certain configurations of line and color and form excite us so? For most of human history, these questions have been approached using logic and speculation. But in the last few decades, scientists have addressed the question of beauty using ideas from evolutionary psychology and tools of neuroscience. We're beginning to glimpse the why and the how of beauty, at least in terms of what it means for the human face and form. And in the process, we're stumbling upon some surprises. When it comes to seeing beauty in each other, while this decision is certainly subjective for the individual, it's sculpted by factors that contribute to the survival of the group. Many experiments have shown that a few basic parameters contribute to what makes a face attractive. These include averaging, symmetry and the effects of hormones. Let's take each one of these in turn. Galton's finding that composite or average faces are typically more attractive than each individual face that contributes to the average has been replicated many times. This laboratory finding fits with many people's intuitions. Average faces represent the central tendencies of a group. People with mixed features represent different populations, and presumably harbor greater genetic diversity and adaptability to the environment. Many people find mixed-race individuals attractive and inbred families less so. The second factor that contributes to beauty is symmetry. People generally find symmetric faces more attractive than asymmetric ones. Developmental abnormalities are often associated with asymmetries. And in plants, animals and humans, asymmetries often arise from parasitic infections. Symmetry, it turns out, is also an indicator of health. In the 1930s, a man named Maksymilian Faktorowicz recognized the importance of symmetry for beauty when he designed the beauty micrometer. With this device, he could measure minor asymmetric flaws which he could then make up for with products he sold from his company, named brilliantly after himself, Max Factor, which, as you know, is one of the world's most famous brands for "make up." The third factor that contributes to facial attractiveness is the effect of hormones. And here, I need to apologize for confining my comments to heterosexual norms. But estrogen and testosterone play important roles in shaping features that we find attractive. Estrogen produces features that signal fertility. Men typically find women attractive who have elements of both youth and maturity. A face that's too baby-like might mean that the girl is not yet fertile, so men find women attractive who have large eyes, full lips and narrow chins as indicators of youth, and high cheekbones as an indicator of maturity. Testosterone produces features that we regard as typically masculine. These include heavier brows, thinner cheeks and bigger, squared-off jaws. But here's a fascinating irony. In many species, if anything, testosterone suppresses the immune system. So the idea that testosterone-infused features are a fitness indicator doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. Here, the logic is turned on its head. Instead of a fitness indicator, scientists invoke a handicap principle. The most commonly cited example of a handicap is the peacock's tail. This beautiful but cumbersome tail doesn't exactly help the peacock avoid predators and approach peahens. Why should such an extravagant appendage evolve? Even Charles Darwin, in an 1860 letter to Asa Gray wrote that the sight of the peacock's tail made him physically ill. He couldn't explain it with his theory of natural selection, and out of this frustration, he developed the theory of sexual selection. On this account, the display of the peacock's tail is about sexual enticement, and this enticement means it's more likely the peacock will mate and have offspring. Now, the modern twist on this display argument is that the peacock is also advertising its health to the peahen. Only especially fit organisms can afford to divert resources to maintaining such an extravagant appendage. Only especially fit men can afford the price that testosterone levies on their immune system. And by analogy, think of the fact that only very rich men can afford to pay more than $10,000 for a watch as a display of their financial fitness. Now, many people hear these kinds of evolutionary claims and think they mean that we somehow are unconsciously seeking mates who are healthy. And I think this idea is probably not right. Teenagers and young adults are not exactly known for making decisions that are predicated on health concerns. But they don't have to be, and let me explain why. Imagine a population in which people have three different kinds of preferences: for green, for orange and for red. From their point of view, these preferences have nothing to do with health; they just like what they like. But if it were also the case that these preferences are associated with the different likelihood of producing offspring — let's say in a ratio of 3:2:1 — then in the first generation, there would be 3 greens to 2 oranges to 1 red, and in each subsequent generation, the proportion of greens increase, so that in 10 generations, 98 percent of this population has a green preference. Now, a scientist coming in and sampling this population discovers that green preferences are universal. So the point about this little abstract example is that while preferences for specific physical features can be arbitrary for the individual, if those features are heritable and they are associated with a reproductive advantage, over time, they become universal for the group. So what happens in the brain when we see beautiful people? Attractive faces activate parts of our visual cortex in the back of the brain, an area called the fusiform gyrus, that is especially tuned to processing faces, and an adjacent area called the lateral occipital complex, that is especially attuned to processing objects. In addition, attractive faces activate parts of our reward and pleasure centers in the front and deep in the brain, and these include areas that have complicated names, like the ventral striatum, the orbitofrontal cortex and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Our visual brain that is tuned to processing faces interacts with our pleasure centers to underpin the experience of beauty. Amazingly, while we all engage with beauty, without our knowledge, beauty also engages us. Our brains respond to attractive faces even when we're not thinking about beauty. We conducted an experiment in which people saw a series of faces, and in one condition, they had to decide if a pair of faces were the same or a different person. Even in this condition, attractive faces drove neural activity robustly in their visual cortex, despite the fact that they were thinking about a person's identity and not their beauty. Another group similarly found automatic responses to beauty within our pleasure centers. Taken together, these studies suggest that our brain automatically responds to beauty by linking vision and pleasure. These beauty detectors, it seems, ping every time we see beauty, regardless of whatever else we might be thinking. We also have a "beauty is good" stereotype embedded in the brain. Within the orbitofrontal cortex, there's overlapping neural activity in response to beauty and to goodness, and this happens even when people aren't explicitly thinking about beauty or goodness. Our brains seem to reflexively associate beauty and good. And this reflexive association may be the biologic trigger for the many social effects of beauty. Attractive people receive all kinds of advantages in life. They're regarded as more intelligent, more trustworthy, they're given higher pay and lesser punishments, even when such judgments are not warranted. These kinds of observations reveal beauty's ugly side. In my lab, we recently found that people with minor facial anomalies and disfigurements are regarded as less good, less kind, less intelligent, less competent and less hardworking. Unfortunately, we also have a "disfigured is bad" stereotype. This stereotype is probably exploited and magnified by images in popular media, in which facial disfigurement is often used as a shorthand to depict someone of villainous character. We need to understand these kinds of implicit biases if we are to overcome them and aim for a society in which we treat people fairly, based on their behavior and not on the happenstance of their looks. Let me leave you with one final thought. Beauty is a work in progress. The so-called universal attributes of beauty were selected for during the almost two million years of the Pleistocene. Life was nasty, brutish and a very long time ago. The selection criteria for reproductive success from that time doesn't really apply today. For example, death by parasite is not one of the top ways that people die, at least not in the technologically developed world. From antibiotics to surgery, birth control to in vitro fertilization, the filters for reproductive success are being relaxed. And under these relaxed conditions, preference and trait combinations are free to drift and become more variable. Even as we are profoundly affecting our environment, modern medicine and technological innovation is profoundly affecting the very essence of what it means to look beautiful. The universal nature of beauty is changing even as we're changing the universe. Thank you. (Applause) |
Let's end ageism | {0: 'Ashton Applewhite asks us to look at ageism -- the assumption that older people are alike and that aging impoverishes us.'} | TED2017 | What's one thing that every person in this room is going to become? Older. And most of us are scared stiff at the prospect. How does that word make you feel? I used to feel the same way. What was I most worried about? Ending up drooling in some grim institutional hallway. And then I learned that only four percent of older Americans are living in nursing homes, and the percentage is dropping. What else was I worried about? Dementia. Turns out that most of us can think just fine to the end. Dementia rates are dropping, too. The real epidemic is anxiety over memory loss. (Laughter) I also figured that old people were depressed because they were old and they were going to die soon. (Laughter) It turns out that the longer people live, the less they fear dying, and that people are happiest at the beginnings and the end of their lives. It's called the U-curve of happiness, and it's been borne out by dozens of studies around the world. You don't have to be a Buddhist or a billionaire. The curve is a function of the way aging itself affects the brain. So I started feeling a lot better about getting older, and I started obsessing about why so few people know these things. The reason is ageism: discrimination and stereotyping on the basis of age. We experience it anytime someone assumes we're too old for something, instead of finding out who we are and what we're capable of, or too young. Ageism cuts both ways. All -isms are socially constructed ideas — racism, sexism, homophobia — and that means we make them up, and they can change over time. All these prejudices pit us against each other to maintain the status quo, like auto workers in the US competing against auto workers in Mexico instead of organizing for better wages. (Applause) We know it's not OK to allocate resources by race or by sex. Why should it be OK to weigh the needs of the young against the old? All prejudice relies on "othering" — seeing a group of people as other than ourselves: other race, other religion, other nationality. The strange thing about ageism: that other is us. Ageism feeds on denial — our reluctance to acknowledge that we are going to become that older person. It's denial when we try to pass for younger or when we believe in anti-aging products, or when we feel like our bodies are betraying us, simply because they are changing. Why on earth do we stop celebrating the ability to adapt and grow as we move through life? Why should aging well mean struggling to look and move like younger versions of ourselves? It's embarrassing to be called out as older until we quit being embarrassed about it, and it's not healthy to go through life dreading our futures. The sooner we get off this hamster wheel of age denial, the better off we are. Stereotypes are always a mistake, of course, but especially when it comes to age, because the longer we live, the more different from one another we become. Right? Think about it. And yet, we tend to think of everyone in a retirement home as the same age: old — (Laughter) when they can span four decades. Can you imagine thinking that way about a group of people between the ages of 20 and 60? When you get to a party, do you head for people your own age? Have you ever grumbled about entitled millennials? Have you ever rejected a haircut or a relationship or an outing because it's not age-appropriate? For adults, there's no such thing. All these behaviors are ageist. We all do them, and we can't challenge bias unless we're aware of it. Nobody's born ageist, but it starts at early childhood, around the same time attitudes towards race and gender start to form, because negative messages about late life bombard us from the media and popular culture at every turn. Right? Wrinkles are ugly. Old people are pathetic. It's sad to be old. Look at Hollywood. A survey of recent Best Picture nominations found that only 12 percent of speaking or named characters were age 60 and up, and many of them were portrayed as impaired. Older people can be the most ageist of all, because we've had a lifetime to internalize these messages and we've never thought to challenge them. I had to acknowledge it and stop colluding. "Senior moment" quips, for example: I stopped making them when it dawned on me that when I lost the car keys in high school, I didn't call it a "junior moment." (Laughter) I stopped blaming my sore knee on being 64. My other knee doesn't hurt, and it's just as old. (Laughter) (Applause) We are all worried about some aspect of getting older, whether running out of money, getting sick, ending up alone, and those fears are legitimate and real. But what never dawns on most of us is that the experience of reaching old age can be better or worse depending on the culture in which it takes place. It is not having a vagina that makes life harder for women. It's sexism. (Applause) It's not loving a man that makes life harder for gay guys. It's homophobia. And it is not the passage of time that makes getting older so much harder than it has to be. It is ageism. When labels are hard to read or there's no handrail or we can't open the damn jar, we blame ourselves, our failure to age successfully, instead of the ageism that makes those natural transitions shameful and the discrimination that makes those barriers acceptable. You can't make money off satisfaction, but shame and fear create markets, and capitalism always needs new markets. Who says wrinkles are ugly? The multi-billion-dollar skin care industry. Who says perimenopause and low T and mild cognitive impairment are medical conditions? The trillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry. (Cheers) The more clearly we see these forces at work, the easier it is to come up with alternative, more positive and more accurate narratives. Aging is not a problem to be fixed or a disease to be cured. It is a natural, powerful, lifelong process that unites us all. Changing the culture is a tall order, I know that, but culture is fluid. Look at how much the position of women has changed in my lifetime or the incredible strides that the gay rights movement has made in just a few decades, right? (Applause) Look at gender. We used to think of it as a binary, male or female, and now we understand it's a spectrum. It is high time to ditch the old-young binary, too. There is no line in the sand between old and young, after which it's all downhill. And the longer we wait to challenge that idea, the more damage it does to ourselves and our place in the world, like in the workforce, where age discrimination is rampant. In Silicon Valley, engineers are getting Botoxed and hair-plugged before key interviews — and these are skilled white men in their 30s, so imagine the effects further down the food chain. (Laughter) The personal and economic consequences are devastating. Not one stereotype about older workers holds up under scrutiny. Companies aren't adaptable and creative because their employees are young; they're adaptable and creative despite it. Companies — (Laughter) (Applause) We know that diverse companies aren't just better places to work; they work better. And just like race and sex, age is a criterion for diversity. A growing body of fascinating research shows that attitudes towards aging affect how our minds and bodies function at the cellular level. When we talk to older people like this (Speaks more loudly) or call them "sweetie" or "young lady" — it's called elderspeak — they appear to instantly age, walking and talking less competently. People with more positive feelings towards aging walk faster, they do better on memory tests, they heal quicker, and they live longer. Even with brains full of plaques and tangles, some people stayed sharp to the end. What did they have in common? A sense of purpose. And what's the biggest obstacle to having a sense of purpose in late life? A culture that tells us that getting older means shuffling offstage. That's why the World Health Organization is developing a global anti-ageism initiative to extend not just life span but health span. Women experience the double whammy of ageism and sexism, so we experience aging differently. There's a double standard at work here — shocker — (Laughter) the notion that aging enhances men and devalues women. Women reinforce this double standard when we compete to stay young, another punishing and losing proposition. Does any woman in this room really believe that she is a lesser version — less interesting, less fun in bed, less valuable — than the woman she once was? This discrimination affects our health, our well-being and our income, and the effects add up over time. They are further compounded by race and by class, which is why, everywhere in the world, the poorest of the poor are old women of color. What's the takeaway from that map? By 2050, one out of five of us, almost two billion people, will be age 60 and up. Longevity is a fundamental hallmark of human progress. All these older people represent a vast unprecedented and untapped market. And yet, capitalism and urbanization have propelled age bias into every corner of the globe, from Switzerland, where elders fare the best, to Afghanistan, which sits at the bottom of the Global AgeWatch Index. Half of the world's countries aren't mentioned on that list because we don't bother to collect data on millions of people because they're no longer young. Almost two-thirds of people over 60 around the world say they have trouble accessing healthcare. Almost three-quarters say their income doesn't cover basic services like food, water, electricity, and decent housing. Is this the world we want our children, who may well live to be a hundred, to inherit? Everyone — all ages, all genders, all nationalities — is old or future-old, and unless we put an end to it, ageism will oppress us all. And that makes it a perfect target for collective advocacy. Why add another -ism to the list when so many, racism in particular, call out for action? Here's the thing: we don't have to choose. When we make the world a better place to grow old in, we make it a better place in which to be from somewhere else, to have a disability, to be queer, to be non-rich, to be non-white. And when we show up at all ages for whatever cause matters most to us — save the whales, save the democracy — we not only make that effort more effective, we dismantle ageism in the process. Longevity is here to stay. A movement to end ageism is underway. I'm in it, and I hope you will join me. (Applause and cheers) Thank you. Let's do it! Let's do it! (Applause) |
You owe it to yourself to experience a total solar eclipse | {0: 'David Baron writes about science in books, magazines, newspapers and for public radio. He formerly served as science correspondent for NPR and science editor for PRI’s The World. '} | TEDxMileHigh | Before I get to bulk of what I have to say, I feel compelled just to mention a couple of things about myself. I am not some mystical, spiritual sort of person. I'm a science writer. I studied physics in college. I used to be a science correspondent for NPR. OK, that said: in the course of working on a story for NPR, I got some advice from an astronomer that challenged my outlook, and frankly, changed my life. You see, the story was about an eclipse, a partial solar eclipse that was set to cross the country in May of 1994. And the astronomer — I interviewed him, and he explained what was going to happen and how to view it, but he emphasized that, as interesting as a partial solar eclipse is, a much rarer total solar eclipse is completely different. In a total eclipse, for all of two or three minutes, the moon completely blocks the face of the sun, creating what he described as the most awe-inspiring spectacle in all of nature. And so the advice he gave me was this: "Before you die," he said, "you owe it to yourself to experience a total solar eclipse." Well honestly, I felt a little uncomfortable hearing that from someone I didn't know very well; it felt sort of intimate. But it got my attention, and so I did some research. Now the thing about total eclipses is, if you wait for one to come to you, you're going to be waiting a long time. Any given point on earth experiences a total eclipse about once every 400 years. But if you're willing to travel, you don't have to wait that long. And so I learned that a few years later, in 1998, a total eclipse was going to cross the Caribbean. Now, a total eclipse is visible only along a narrow path, about a hundred miles wide, and that's where the moon's shadow falls. It's called the "path of totality." And in February 1998, the path of totality was going to cross Aruba. So I talked to my husband, and we thought: February? Aruba? Sounded like a good idea anyway. (Laughter) So we headed south, to enjoy the sun and to see what would happen when the sun briefly went away. Well, the day of the eclipse found us and many other people out behind the Hyatt Regency, on the beach, waiting for the show to begin. And we wore eclipse glasses with cardboard frames and really dark lenses that enabled us to look at the sun safely. A total eclipse begins as a partial eclipse, as the moon very slowly makes its way in front of the sun. So first it looked the sun had a little notch in its edge, and then that notch grew larger and larger, turning the sun into a crescent. And it was all very interesting, but I wouldn't say it was spectacular. I mean, the day remained bright. If I hadn't known what was going on overhead, I wouldn't have noticed anything unusual. Well, about 10 minutes before the total solar eclipse was set to begin, weird things started to happen. A cool wind kicked up. Daylight looked odd, and shadows became very strange; they looked bizarrely sharp, as if someone had turned up the contrast knob on the TV. Then I looked offshore, and I noticed running lights on boats, so clearly it was getting dark, although I hadn't realized it. Well soon, it was obvious it was getting dark. It felt like my eyesight was failing. And then all of a sudden, the lights went out. Well, at that, a cheer erupted from the beach, and I took off my eclipse glasses, because at this point during the total eclipse, it was safe to look at the sun with the naked eye. And I glanced upward, and I was just dumbstruck. Now, consider that, at this point, I was in my mid-30s. I had lived on earth long enough to know what the sky looks like. I mean — (Laughter) I'd seen blue skies and grey skies and starry skies and angry skies and pink skies at sunrise. But here was a sky I had never seen. First, there were the colors. Up above, it was a deep purple-grey, like twilight. But on the horizon it was orange, like sunset, 360 degrees. And up above, in the twilight, bright stars and planets had come out. So there was Jupiter and there was Mercury and there was Venus. They were all in a line. And there, along this line, was this thing, this glorious, bewildering thing. It looked like a wreath woven from silvery thread, and it just hung out there in space, shimmering. That was the sun's outer atmosphere, the solar corona. And pictures just don't do it justice. It's not just a ring or halo around the sun; it's finely textured, like it's made out of strands of silk. And although it looked nothing like our sun, of course, I knew that's what it was. So there was the sun, and there were the planets, and I could see how the planets revolve around the sun. It's like I had left our solar system and was standing on some alien world, looking back at creation. And for the first time in my life, I just felt viscerally connected to the universe in all of its immensity. Time stopped, or it just kind of felt nonexistent, and what I beheld with my eyes — I didn't just see it, it felt like a vision. And I stood there in this nirvana for all of 174 seconds — less than three minutes — when all of a sudden, it was over. The sun burst out, the blue sky returned, the stars and the planets and the corona were gone. The world returned to normal. But I had changed. And that's how I became an umbraphile — an eclipse chaser. (Laughter) So, this is how I spend my time and hard-earned money. Every couple of years, I head off to wherever the moon's shadow will fall to experience another couple minutes of cosmic bliss, and to share the experience with others: with friends in Australia, with an entire city in Germany. In 1999, in Munich, I joined hundreds of thousands who filled the streets and the rooftops and cheered in unison as the solar corona emerged. And over time, I've become something else: an eclipse evangelist. I see it as my job to pay forward the advice that I received all those years ago. And so let me tell you: before you die, you owe it to yourself to experience a total solar eclipse. It is the ultimate experience of awe. Now, that word, "awesome," has grown so overused that it's lost its original meaning. True awe, a sense of wonder and insignificance in the face of something enormous and grand, is rare in our lives. But when you experience it, it's powerful. Awe dissolves the ego. It makes us feel connected. Indeed, it promotes empathy and generosity. Well, there is nothing truly more awesome than a total solar eclipse. Unfortunately, few Americans have seen one, because it's been 38 years since one last touched the continental United States and 99 years since one last crossed the breadth of the nation. But that is about to change. Over the next 35 years, five total solar eclipses will visit the continental United States, and three of them will be especially grand. Six weeks from now, on August 21, 2017 — (Applause) the moon's shadow will race from Oregon to South Carolina. April 8, 2024, the moon's shadow heads north from Texas to Maine. In 2045, on August 12, the path cuts from California to Florida. I say: What if we made these holidays? What if we — (Laughter) (Applause) What if we all stood together, as many people as possible, in the shadow of the moon? Just maybe, this shared experience of awe would help heal our divisions, get us to treat each other just a bit more humanely. Now, admittedly, some folks consider my evangelizing a little out there; my obsession, eccentric. I mean, why focus so much attention on something so brief? Why cross the globe — or state lines, for that matter — for something that lasts three minutes? As I said: I am not a spiritual person. I don't believe in God. I wish I did. But when I think of my own mortality — and I do, a lot — when I think of everyone I have lost, my mother in particular, what soothes me is that moment of awe I had in Aruba. I picture myself on that beach, looking at that sky, and I remember how I felt. My existence may be temporary, but that's OK because, my gosh, look at what I'm a part of. And so this is a lesson I've learned, and it's one that applies to life in general: duration of experience does not equal impact. One weekend, one conversation — hell, one glance — can change everything. Cherish those moments of deep connection with other people, with the natural world, and make them a priority. Yes, I chase eclipses. You might chase something else. But it's not about the 174 seconds. It's about how they change the years that come after. Thank you. (Applause) |
Meet the microscopic life in your home -- and on your face | {0: 'Whether brewing better beer, discovering novel antibiotics or chronicling the lives of the microscopic creatures living in the dust under the couch, Anne Madden seeks to understand and utilize the microbial world around us.'} | TED2017 | I want you to touch your face. Go on. What do you feel? Soft? Squishy? It's you, right? You're feeling you? Well, it's not quite true. You're actually feeling thousands of microscopic creatures that live on our face and fingers. You're feeling some of the fungi that drifted down from the air ducts today. They set off our allergies and smell of mildew. You're feeling some of the 100 billion bacterial cells that live on our skin. They've been munching away at your skin oils and replicating, producing the smells of body odor. You're likely even touching the fecal bacteria that sprayed onto you the last time you flushed a toilet, or those bacteria that live in our water pipes and sprayed onto you with your last shower. Sorry. (Laughter) You're probably even giving a microscopic high five to the two species of mites that live on our faces, on all of our faces. They've spent the night squirming across your face and having sex on the bridge of your nose. (Laughter) Many of them are now leaking their gut contents onto your pores. (Laughter) Now look at your finger. How's it feel? Gross? In desperate need of soap or bleach? That's how you feel now, but it's not going to be how you feel in the future. For the last 100 years, we've had an adversarial relationship with the microscopic life nearest us. If I told you there was a bug in your house or bacteria in your sink, there was a human-devised solution for that, a product to eradicate, exterminate, disinfect. We strive to remove most of the microscopic life in our world now. But in doing so, we're ignoring the best source of new technology on this planet. The last 100 years have featured human solutions to microbial problems, but the next 100 years will feature microbial solutions to human problems. I'm a scientist, and I work with researchers at North Carolina State University and the University of Colorado to uncover the microscopic life that is nearest us, and that's often in our most intimate and boring environments, be it under our couches, in our backyards, or in our belly buttons. I do this work because it turns out that we know very little about the microscopic life that's nearest us. As of a few years ago, no scientist could tell you what bugs or microorganisms live in your home — your home, the place you know better than anywhere else. And so I and teams of others are armed with Q-tips and tweezers and advanced DNA techniques to uncover the microscopic life nearest us. In doing so, we found over 600 species of bugs that live in USA homes, everything from spiders and cockroaches to tiny mites that cling to feathers. And we found over 100,000 species of bacteria and fungi that live in our dust bunnies, thousands more that live on our clothes or in our showers. We've gone further still, and we looked at the microorganisms that live inside the bodies of each of those bugs in our home. In each bug, for example, a wasp, we see a microscopic jungle unfold in a petri plate, a world of hundreds of vibrant species. Behold the biological cosmos! So many of the species you're looking at right now don't yet have names. Most of the life around us remains unknown. I remember the first time I discovered and got to name a new species. It was a fungus that lives in the nest of a paper wasp. It's white and fluffy, and I named it "mucor nidicola," meaning in Latin that it lives in the nest of another. This is a picture of it growing on a dinosaur, because everyone thinks dinosaurs are cool. At the time, I was in graduate school, and I was so excited that I had found this new life form. I called up my dad, and I go, "Dad! I just discovered a new microorganism species." And he laughed and he goes, "That's great. I hope you also discovered a cure for it." (Laughter) "Cure it." Now, my dad is my biggest fan, so in that crushing moment where he wanted to kill my new little life form, I realized that actually I had failed him, both as a daughter and a scientist. In my years toiling away in labs and in people's backyards, investigating and cataloging the microscopic life around us, I'd never made clear my true mission to him. My goal is not to find technology to kill the new microscopic life around us. My goal is to find new technology from this life, that will help save us. The diversity of life in our homes is more than a list of 100,000 new species. It is 100,000 new sources of solutions to human problems. I know it's hard to believe that anything that's so small or only has one cell can do anything powerful, but they can. These creatures are microscopic alchemists, with the ability to transform their environment with an arsenal of chemical tools. This means that they can live anywhere on this planet, and they can eat whatever food is around them. This means they can eat everything from toxic waste to plastic, and they can produce waste products like oil and battery power and even tiny nuggets of real gold. They can transform the inedible into nutritive. They can make sugar into alcohol. They give chocolate its flavor, and soil the power to grow. I'm here to tell you that the next 100 years will feature these microscopic creatures solving more of our problems. And we have a lot of problems to choose from. We've got the mundane: bad-smelling clothes or bland food. And we've got the monumental: disease, pollution, war. And so this is my mission: to not just catalog the microscopic life around us, but to find out what it's uniquely well-suited to help us with. Here's an example. We started with a pest, a wasp that lives on many of our homes. Inside that wasp, we plucked out a little-known microorganism species with a unique ability: it could make beer. This is a trait that only a few species on this planet have. In fact, all commercially produced beer you've ever had likely came from one of only three microorganism species. Yet our species, it could make a beer that tasted like honey, and it could also make a delightfully tart beer. In fact, this microorganism species that lives in the belly of a wasp, it could make a valuable sour beer better than any other species on this planet. There are now four species that produce commercial beer. Where you used to see a pest, now think of tasting your future favorite beer. As a second example, I worked with researchers to dig in the dirt in people's backyards. There, we uncovered a microorganism that could make novel antibiotics, antibiotics that can kill the world's worst superbugs. This was an awesome thing to find, but here's the secret: for the last 60 years, most of the antibiotics on the market have come from similar soil bacteria. Every day, you and I and everyone in this room and on this planet, are saved by similar soil bacteria that produce most of our antibiotics. Where you used to see dirt, now think of medication. Perhaps my favorite example comes from colleagues who are studying a pond scum microorganism, which is tragically named after the cow dung it was first found in. It's pretty unremarkable and would be unworthy of discussion, except that the researchers found that if you feed it to mice, it vaccinates against PTSD. It vaccinates against fear. Where you used to see pond scum, now think of hope. There are so many more microbial examples that I don't have time to talk about today. I gave you examples of solutions that came from just three species, but imagine what those other 100,000 species in your dust bunnies might be able to do. In the future, they might be able to make you sexier or smarter or perhaps live longer. So I want you to look at your finger again. Think about all those microscopic creatures that are unknown. Think about in the future what they might be able to do or make or whose life they might be able to save. How does your finger feel right now? A little bit powerful? That's because you're feeling the future. Thank you. (Applause) |
A dance to honor Mother Earth | {0: 'Jon Boogz is a movement artist, choreographer and director who seeks to push the evolution of dance.', 1: 'A viral video star known for his gravity-defying, elegant street dance moves, Lil Buck is a fertile collaborator across disciplines and media. ', 2: "Robin Sanders's eclectic style includes both audible imagery making and kinetic storytelling.", 3: 'Jason Yang is recognized for his versatility on multiple instruments as well as his abilities in composing and producing.', 4: 'Canku One Star promotes living a healthier lifestyle via song and dance.'} | TED2017 | Mother Earth: Our end was imminent yet finality relented. Wind, water and fire gently revived; you and I reconciled, rhythms realigned, the blues gone green. Your care in conserving in exchange for my fruit and replenishing this picturous restoring of painted skies, mountains rolling, forest covering — no more warming. The purity and simplicity of how we used to be. You remember me? All I give to humanity? Housing, land, seas, birds, beast and all of mankind, exclusively the interface where you and the elements meet and vibrate harmoniously. (Piano plays) (Violin plays) (Music) (Music tempo quickens) (Violin plays) (Music) (Violin plays) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) My beauty altered, muddied waters, fields stripped bare, interior scarred beyond repair, our memories eroding. You once obsessed over my frame and how I came to be; my nature, its polarity — how my sweet winds whisper softly, yet assault seas. You remember me? All I give to humanity? Housing, land, seas, birds, beast and all of mankind — exclusively the interface where you and the elements meet and vibrate harmoniously. The unseen traveler forever passing, carrying life, moving, awning of earth felt and heard, strong and stirring, blowing. Breathe you in, cleansing wind, gentle and still, quieter. The source eternally here, ascent and descending: air. Rhythmic flow, fluid and graceful, waves of serenity, smooth strings of purity, rains replenishing rapidly, rivers of dreams, raging springs covering earth in abundance, universal solvent dissolving, drink, liquid, life and power: water. Born when the universe was formed, warmed mankind, gave him light, colored rays illuminate ember flickers incandescent, powerful and brilliant. Sacred son of air, father of fury, heat dancing vigorously between perfection and beauty. Unconfined agility, fast and fancy, sparks of ingenuity rise: fire. (Canku One Star dances) (Choir chants) (Drums) (Drumming and chanting) (Drumming and chanting) (Drumming and chanting) (Music ends) (Applause) (Violin plays) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) |
Courage is contagious | {0: 'TED Fellow Damon Davis makes art to empower the disenfranchised and combat oppression.'} | TED2017 | So, I'm afraid. Right now, on this stage, I feel fear. In my life, I ain't met many people that will readily admit when they are afraid. And I think that's because deep down, they know how easy it spreads. See, fear is like a disease. When it moves, it moves like wildfire. But what happens when, even in the face of that fear, you do what you've got to do? That's called courage. And just like fear, courage is contagious. See, I'm from East St. Louis, Illinois. That's a small city across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri. I have lived in and around St. Louis my entire life. When Michael Brown, Jr., an ordinary teenager, was gunned down by police in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri — another suburb, but north of St. Louis — I remember thinking, he ain't the first, and he won't be the last young kid to lose his life to law enforcement. But see, his death was different. When Mike was killed, I remember the powers that be trying to use fear as a weapon. The police response to a community in mourning was to use force to impose fear: fear of militarized police, imprisonment, fines. The media even tried to make us afraid of each other by the way they spun the story. And all of these things have worked in the past. But like I said, this time it was different. Michael Brown's death and the subsequent treatment of the community led to a string of protests in and around Ferguson and St. Louis. When I got out to those protests about the fourth or fifth day, it was not out of courage; it was out of guilt. See, I'm black. I don't know if y'all noticed that. (Laughter) But I couldn't sit in St. Louis, minutes away from Ferguson, and not go see. So I got off my ass to go check it out. When I got out there, I found something surprising. I found anger; there was a lot of that. But what I found more of was love. People with love for themselves. Love for their community. And it was beautiful — until the police showed up. Then a new emotion was interjected into the conversation: fear. Now, I'm not going to lie; when I saw those armored vehicles, and all that gear and all those guns and all those police I was terrified — personally. And when I looked around that crowd, I saw a lot of people that had the same thing going on. But I also saw people with something else inside of them. That was courage. See, those people yelled, and they screamed, and they were not about to back down from the police. They were past that point. And then I could feel something in me changing, so I yelled and I screamed, and I noticed that everybody around me was doing the same thing. And there was nothing like that feeling. So I decided I wanted to do something more. I went home, I thought: I'm an artist. I make shit. So I started making things specific to the protest, things that would be weapons in a spiritual war, things that would give people voice and things that would fortify them for the road ahead. I did a project where I took pictures of the hands of protesters and put them up and down the boarded-up buildings and community shops. My goal was to raise awareness and to raise the morale. And I think, for a minute at least, it did just that. Then I thought, I want to uplift the stories of these people I was watching being courageous in the moment. And myself and my friend, and filmmaker and partner Sabaah Folayan did just that with our documentary, "Whose Streets?" I kind of became a conduit for all of this courage that was given to me. And I think that's part of our job as artists. I think we should be conveyors of courage in the work that we do. And I think that we are the wall between the normal folks and the people that use their power to spread fear and hate, especially in times like these. So I'm going to ask you. Y'all the movers and the shakers, you know, the thought leaders: What are you gonna do with the gifts that you've been given to break us from the fear the binds us every day? Because, see, I'm afraid every day. I can't remember a time when I wasn't. But once I figured out that fear was not put in me to cripple me, it was there to protect me, and once I figured out how to use that fear, I found my power. Thank you. (Applause) |
How I help free innocent people from prison | {0: 'Ronald Sullivan is a leading theorist in the areas of criminal law, criminal procedure, trial practice and techniques, legal ethics and race theory. '} | TEDxMidAtlantic | So, imagine that you take a 19-hour, very long drive to Disney World, with two kids in the back seat. And 15 minutes into this 19-hour trip, the immutable laws of nature dictate that you get the question: "Are we there yet?" (Laughter) So you answer this question a hundred more times, easily, in the negative, but you finally arrive. You have a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful trip. You drive 19 long hours back home. And when you get there, the police are waiting on you. They accuse you of committing a crime that occurred while you were away in Florida. You tell anybody and everybody who will listen, "I didn't do it! I couldn't have done it! I was hanging out with Mickey and Minnie and my kids!" But no one believes you. Ultimately, you're arrested, you're tried, you're convicted and you are sentenced. And you spend 25 years in jail, until someone comes along and proves — has the evidence to prove — that you actually were in Florida when this crime was committed. So. So, I'm a Harvard Law professor, and the last several years, I have worked on winning the release of innocent people who've been wrongfully convicted — people like Jonathan Fleming, who spent 24 years, eight months in jail for a murder that was committed in Brooklyn, New York, while he was in Disney World with his kids. How do we know this? Because when he was arrested, among his property in his back pocket was a receipt — time-stamped receipt that showed that he was in Disney World. That receipt was put in the police file, a copy of it was put in the prosecutor's file, and they never gave it to his public defender. In fact, nobody even knew it was there. It just sat there for 20-some-odd years. My team looked through the file, and we found it, did the rest of the investigation, and figured out someone else committed the crime. Mr. Fleming was in Disney World, and he is now released. Let me give you a little bit of context. So about three years ago, I got a call from the Brooklyn District Attorney. He asked whether I'd be interested in designing a program called a "conviction review unit." So I said yes. A conviction review unit is essentially a unit in a prosecutor's office where prosecutors look at their past cases to determine whether or not they made mistakes. Over the course of the first year, we found about 13 wrongful convictions, people having been in jail for decades, and we released all of them. It was the most in New York history. The program is still going on, and they're up to 21 releases now — 21 people who spent significant time behind bars. So let me tell you about a couple other of the men and women that I interacted with in the course of this program. One name is Roger Logan. Mr. Logan had been in jail 17 years and wrote me a letter. It was a simple letter; it basically said, "Professor Sullivan, I'm innocent. I've been framed. Can you look at my case?" At first blush, the case seemed like it was open and shut, but my research had shown that single-witness identification cases are prone to error. It doesn't mean he was innocent, it just means we ought to look a little bit closer at those cases. So we did. And the facts were relatively simple. The eyewitness said she heard a shot, and she ran to the next building and turned around and looked, and there was Mr. Logan. And he was tried and convicted and in jail for 17-some-odd years. But it was a single-witness case, so we took a look at it. I sent some people to the scene, and there was an inconsistency. And to put it politely: Usain Bolt couldn't have run from where she said she was to the other spot. Right? So we knew that wasn't true. So it still didn't mean that he didn't do it, but we knew something was maybe fishy about this witness. So we looked through the file, a piece of paper in the file had a number on it. The number indicated that this witness had a record. We went back through 20 years of non-digitized papers to figure out what this record was about, and it turned out — it turned out — the eyewitness was in jail when she said she saw what she saw. The man spent 17 years behind bars. The last one is a case about two boys, Willie Stuckey, David McCallum. They were arrested at 15, and their conviction was vacated 29 years later. Now this was a case, once again — first blush, it looked open and shut. They had confessed. But my research showed that juvenile confessions without a parent present are prone to error. The DNA cases proved this several times. So we took a close look. We looked at the confession, and it turned out, there was something in the confession that those boys could not have known. The only people who knew it were police and prosecutors. We knew what really happened; someone told them to say this. We don't exactly know who, which person did, but any rate, the confession was coerced, we determined. We then went back and did forensics and did a fulsome investigation and found that two other, much older, different heights, different hairstyle, two other people committed the crime, not these two boys. I actually went to court that day, for what's called a "vacatur hearing," where the conviction is thrown out. I went to court; I wanted to see Mr. McCallum walk out of there. So I went to court, and the judge said something that judges say all the time, but this took on a really special meaning. He looked up after the arguments and said, "Mr. McCallum," he said five beautiful words: "You are free to go." Can you imagine? After just about 30 years: "You are free to go." And he walked out of that courtroom. Unfortunately, his codefendant, Mr. Stuckey, didn't get the benefit of that. You see, Mr. Stuckey died in prison at 34 years old, and his mother sat at counsel table in his place. I'll never forget this the rest of my life. She just rocked at the table, saying, "I knew my baby didn't do this. I knew my baby didn't do this." And her baby didn't do this. Two other guys did it. If there's anything that we've learned, anything that I've learned, with this conviction integrity work, it's that justice doesn't happen. People make justice happen. Justice is not a thing that just descends from above and makes everything right. If it did, Mr. Stuckey wouldn't have died in prison. Justice is something that people of goodwill make happen. Justice is a decision. Justice is a decision. We make justice happen. You know, the scary thing is, in each of these three cases I described, it would have only taken just an extra minute — an extra minute — for someone to look through the file and find this receipt. Just one — to look through the file, find the receipt, give it to the public defender. It would have taken someone just a minute to look at the video confession and say, "That cannot be." Just a minute. And perhaps Mr. Stuckey would be alive today. It reminds me of one of my favorite poems. It's a poem that Benjamin Elijah Mays would always recite, and he called it "God's Minute." And it goes something like this: "I have only just a minute, only 60 seconds in it, forced upon me, can't refuse it, didn't seek it, didn't choose it. But it's up to me to use it. I must suffer if I lose it, give account if I abuse it. Just a tiny little minute, but eternity is in it." If I were to charge each and every one of us, I would want to say something like, "Every day, every day, take just one extra minute and do some justice. You don't have to — I mean, some people spend their careers and their lives, like public defenders, doing justice every day. But in your professional lives, whatever you do, take time out to just do some justice. Make a colleague feel better. If you hear something that's sexist, don't laugh, speak up. If someone is down, lift them up, one extra minute each day, and it'll be a great, great place. I want to show you something. Now, above me is a picture of David McCallum. This is the day he was released from prison. After 30 years, he got to hug a niece he had never been able to touch before. And I asked him then, I said, "What's the first thing you want to do?" And he said, "I just want to walk on the sidewalk without anybody telling me where to go." Wasn't bitter, just wanted to walk on the sidewalk. I spoke to Mr. McCallum about two weeks ago. I went to New York. It was on the two-year anniversary of his release. And we talked, we laughed, we hugged, we cried. And he's doing quite well. And one of the things he said when we met with him is that he now has dedicated his life and his career to ensuring that nobody else is locked up unjustly. Justice, my friends, is a decision. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How boredom can lead to your most brilliant ideas | {0: 'As the new host of the "TED Radio Hour," Manoush Zomorodi explores fascinating ideas, astonishing inventions and new ways to think and create with the world\'s most remarkable minds.'} | TED2017 | My son and the iPhone were born three weeks apart in June 2007. So while those early adopters were lined up outside, waiting to get their hands on this amazing new gadget, I was stuck at home with my hands full of something else that was sending out constant notifications — (Laughter) a miserable, colicky baby who would only sleep in a moving stroller with complete silence. I literally was walking 10 to 15 miles a day, and the baby weight came off. That part was great. But man, was I bored. Before motherhood, I had been a journalist who rushed off when the Concorde crashed. I was one of the first people into Belgrade when there was a revolution in Serbia. Now, I was exhausted. This walking went on for weeks. It was only until about three months in that something shifted, though. As I pounded the pavement, my mind started to wander, too. I began imagining what I would do when I finally did sleep again. So the colic did fade, and I finally got an iPhone and I put all those hours of wandering into action. I created my dream job hosting a public radio show. So there was no more rushing off to war zones, but thanks to my new smartphone, I could be a mother and a journalist. I could be on the playground and on Twitter at the same time. Yeah, well, when I thought that, when the technology came in and took over, that is when I hit a wall. So, I want you to picture this: you host a podcast, and you have to prove that the investment of precious public radio dollars in you is worth it. My goal was to increase my audience size tenfold. So one day, I sat down to brainstorm, as you do, and I came up barren. This was different than writer's block, right? It wasn't like there was something there waiting to be unearthed. There was just nothing. And so I started to think back: When was the last time I actually had a good idea? Yeah, it was when I was pushing that damn stroller. Now all the cracks in my day were filled with phone time. I checked the headlines while I waited for my latte. I updated my calendar while I was sitting on the couch. Texting turned every spare moment into a chance to show to my coworkers and my dear husband what a responsive person I was, or at least it was a chance to find another perfect couch for my page on Pinterest. I realized that I was never bored. And anyway, don't only boring people get bored? But then I started to wonder: What actually happens to us when we get bored? Or, more importantly: What happens to us if we never get bored? And what could happen if we got rid of this human emotion entirely? I started talking to neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists, and what they told me was fascinating. It turns out that when you get bored, you ignite a network in your brain called the "default mode." So our body, it goes on autopilot while we're folding the laundry or we're walking to work, but actually that is when our brain gets really busy. Here's boredom researcher Dr. Sandi Mann. (Audio) Dr. Sandi Mann: Once you start daydreaming and allow your mind to really wander, you start thinking a little bit beyond the conscious, a little bit into the subconscious, which allows sort of different connections to take place. It's really awesome, actually. Manoush Zomorodi: Totally awesome, right? So this is my brain in an fMRI, and I learned that in the default mode is when we connect disparate ideas, we solve some of our most nagging problems, and we do something called "autobiographical planning." This is when we look back at our lives, we take note of the big moments, we create a personal narrative, and then we set goals and we figure out what steps we need to take to reach them. But now we chill out on the couch also while updating a Google Doc or replying to email. We call it "getting shit done," but here's what neuroscientist Dr. Daniel Levitin says we're actually doing. (Audio) Dr. Daniel Levitin: Every time you shift your attention from one thing to another, the brain has to engage a neurochemical switch that uses up nutrients in the brain to accomplish that. So if you're attempting to multitask, you know, doing four or five things at once, you're not actually doing four or five things at once, because the brain doesn't work that way. Instead, you're rapidly shifting from one thing to the next, depleting neural resources as you go. (Audio) MZ: So switch, switch, switch, you're using glucose, glucose, glucose. (Audio) DL: Exactly right, and we have a limited supply of that stuff. MZ: A decade ago, we shifted our attention at work every three minutes. Now we do it every 45 seconds, and we do it all day long. The average person checks email 74 times a day, and switches tasks on their computer 566 times a day. I discovered all this talking to professor of informatics, Dr. Gloria Mark. (Audio) Dr. Gloria Mark: So we find that when people are stressed, they tend to shift their attention more rapidly. We also found, strangely enough, that the shorter the amount of sleep that a person gets, the more likely they are to check Facebook. So we're in this vicious, habitual cycle. MZ: But could this cycle be broken? What would happen if we broke this vicious cycle? Maybe my listeners could help me find out. What if we reclaimed those cracks in our day? Could it help us jump-start our creativity? We called the project "Bored and Brilliant." And I expected, you know, a couple hundred people to play along, but thousands of people started signing up. And they told me the reason they were doing it was because they were worried that their relationship with their phone had grown kind of ... "codependent," shall we say. (Audio) Man: The relationship between a baby and its teddy bear or a baby and its binky or a baby that wants its mother's cradle when it's done with being held by a stranger — (Laughs) that's the relationship between me and my phone. (Audio) Woman: I think of my phone like a power tool: extremely useful, but dangerous if I'm not handling it properly. (Audio) Woman 2: If I don't pay close attention, I'll suddenly realize that I've lost an hour of time doing something totally mindless. MZ: OK, but to really measure any improvement, we needed data, right? Because that's what we do these days. So we partnered with some apps that would measure how much time we were spending every day on our phone. If you're thinking it's ironic that I asked people to download another app so that they would spend less time on their phones: yeah, but you gotta meet people where they are. (Laughter) So before challenge week, we were averaging two hours a day on our phones and 60 pickups, you know, like, a quick check, did I get a new email? Here's what Tina, a student at Bard College, discovered about herself. (Audio) Tina: So far, I've been spending between 150 and 200 minutes on my phone per day, and I've been picking up my phone 70 to 100 times per day. And it's really concerning, because that's so much time that I could have spent doing something more productive, more creative, more towards myself, because when I'm on my phone, I'm not doing anything important. MZ: Like Tina, people were starting to observe their own behavior. They were getting ready for challenge week. And that Monday, they started to wake up to instructions in their inbox, an experiment to try. Day one: "Put it in your pocket." Take that phone out of your hand. See if you can eliminate the reflex to check it all day long, just for a day. And if this sounds easy, you haven't tried it. Here's listener Amanda Itzko. (Audio) Amanda Itzko: I am absolutely itching. I feel a little bit crazy, because I have noticed that I pick up my phone when I'm just walking from one room to another, getting on the elevator, and even — and this is the part that I am really embarrassed to actually say out loud — in the car. MZ: Yikes. Yeah, well, but as Amanda learned, this itching feeling is not actually her fault. That is exactly the behavior that the technology is built to trigger. (Laughter) I mean, right? Here's former Google designer, Tristan Harris. (Audio) Tristan Harris: If I'm Facebook or I'm Netflix or I'm Snapchat, I have literally a thousand engineers whose job is to get more attention from you. I'm very good at this, and I don't want you to ever stop. And you know, the CEO of Netflix recently said, "Our biggest competitors are Facebook, YouTube and sleep." I mean, so there's a million places to spend your attention, but there's a war going on to get it. MZ: I mean, you know the feeling: that amazing episode of "Transparent" ends, and then the next one starts playing so you're like, eh, OK fine, I'll just stay up and watch it. Or the LinkedIn progress bar says you are this close to having the perfect profile, so you add a little more personal information. As one UX designer told me, the only people who refer to their customers as "users" are drug dealers and technologists. (Laughter) (Applause) And users, as we know, are worth a lot of money. Here's former Facebook product manager and author, Antonio García Martínez. (Audio) Antonio García Martínez: The saying is, if any product is free then you're the product; your attention is the product. But what is your attention worth? That's why literally every time you load a page, not just on Facebook or any app, there's an auction being held instantly, billions of times a day, for exactly how much that one ad impression cost. MZ: By the way, the average person will spend two years of their life on Facebook. So, back to challenge week. Immediately, we saw some creativity kick in. Here's New Yorker Lisa Alpert. (Audio) Lisa Alpert: I was bored, I guess. So I suddenly looked at the stairway that went up to the top of the station, and I thought, you know, I had just come down that stairway, but I could go back up and then come back down and get a little cardio. So I did, and then I had a little more time, so I did it again and I did it again, and I did it 10 times. And I had a complete cardio workout. I got on that R train feeling kind of exhausted, but, like, wow, that had never occurred to me. How is that possible? (Laughter) MZ: So creativity, I learned, means different things to different people. (Laughter) But everyone found day three's challenge the hardest. It was called "Delete that app." Take that app — you know the one; that one that always gets you, it sucks you in — take it off your phone, even if just for the day. I deleted the game Two Dots and nearly cried. (Laughter) Yeah, Two Dots players know what I'm talking about. But my misery had good company. (Audio) Man 2: This is Liam in Los Angeles, and I deleted Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Snapchat and Vine from my phone in one fell swoop. And it was kind of an embarrassingly emotional experience at first. It felt weirdly lonely to look at that lock screen with no new notifications on it. But I really liked deciding for myself when to think about or access my social networks, not giving my phone the power to decide that for me. So thank you. (Audio) Woman 3: Deleting the Twitter app was very sad, and I feel I maybe, over the last year when I've been on Twitter, have developed an addiction to it, and this "Bored and Brilliant" challenge has really made me realize it. After a brief period of really horrible withdrawal feeling, like lack-of-caffeine headache, I now feel lovely. I had a lovely dinner with my family, and I hope to continue this structured use of these powerful tools. (Audio) Woman 4: I don't have that guilty gut feeling I have when I know I'm wasting time on my phone. Maybe I'll have to start giving myself challenges and reminders like this every morning. MZ: I mean, yes, this was progress. I could not wait to see what the numbers said at the end of that week. But when the data came in, it turned out that we had cut down, on average, just six minutes — from 120 minutes a day on our phones to 114. Yeah. Whoop-de-do. So I went back to the scientists feeling kind of low, and they just laughed at me, and they said, you know, changing people's behavior in such a short time period was ridiculously ambitious, and actually what you've achieved is far beyond what we thought possible. Because more important than the numbers, were the people's stories. They felt empowered. Their phones had been transformed from taskmasters back into tools. And actually, I found what the young people said most intriguing. Some of them told me that they didn't recognize some of the emotions that they felt during challenge week, because, if you think about it, if you have never known life without connectivity, you may never have experienced boredom. And there could be consequences. Researchers at USC have found — they're studying teenagers who are on social media while they're talking to their friends or they're doing homework, and two years down the road, they are less creative and imaginative about their own personal futures and about solving societal problems, like violence in their neighborhoods. And we really need this next generation to be able to focus on some big problems: climate change, economic disparity, massive cultural differences. No wonder CEOs in an IBM survey identified creativity as the number one leadership competency. OK, here's the good news, though: In the end, 20,000 people did "Bored and Brilliant" that week. Ninety percent cut down on their minutes. Seventy percent got more time to think. People told me that they slept better. They felt happier. My favorite note was from a guy who said he felt like he was waking up from a mental hibernation. Some personal data and some neuroscience gave us permission to be offline a little bit more, and a little bit of boredom gave us some clarity and helped some of us set some goals. I mean, maybe constant connectivity won't be cool in a couple of years. But meanwhile, teaching people, especially kids, how to use technology to improve their lives and to self-regulate needs to be part of digital literacy. So the next time you go to check your phone, remember that if you don't decide how you're going to use the technology, the platforms will decide for you. And ask yourself: What am I really looking for? Because if it's to check email, that's fine — do it and be done. But if it's to distract yourself from doing the hard work that comes with deeper thinking, take a break, stare out the window and know that by doing nothing you are actually being your most productive and creative self. It might feel weird and uncomfortable at first, but boredom truly can lead to brilliance. Thank you. (Applause) |
How artists can (finally) get paid in the digital age | {0: 'With his membership platform Patreon, YouTube star Jack Conte may have solved a perennial problem of content creators -- getting paid for digital media.'} | TED2017 | Hi everyone. So, I'm going to take us back to 2007. I'd just spent about six months working on album that I'd poured my heart and my soul into, and it was getting about three plays per day on Myspace at the time, and I was getting more and more depressed when I started noticing these other people who were playing guitar and singing and putting videos on this new site called YouTube, and they were getting 300,000 views. So I decided I'm going to start making some Youtube videos. And one day they featured a video of my band on the homepage, which was amazing — we got a bunch of new fans. We also got a bunch of people who, I guess, just didn't really like the music or something — (Laughter) It's OK because people started coming to our shows, and we started touring, and we came out with a record. And when I checked our bank account balance after our first monthly iTunes payout, we had 22,000 bucks in it, which was amazing because at the time I was living at my dad's house, trying to make a living as a musician by uploading videos to the internet which literally zero people respected in 2009 — even the people who were uploading videos to the internet. And so for the next four years, I uploaded more and more videos to the Internet, and they got better and better, and we made enough money through brand deals and commercials and iTunes sales to buy a house. And we built a recording studio. But there was one big problem: making money as a creative person in 2013 was super weird. First of all, the business models were changing all the time. So our 58,000 dollars of annual iTunes download income was about to be replaced by about 6,000 dollars of streaming income. Steams paid less than downloads. And then as more and more creators started popping up online, there was just more competition for these five-figure brand deals that had kept the band afloat for years. And to top it all off, our videos themselves — the creative stuff that we made that our fans loved and appreciated — that were actually contributing value to the world, those videos were generating almost zero dollars of income for us. This is an actual snapshot of my YouTube dashboard from a 28-day period that shows one million views and 166 dollars of ad earnings for those views. The whole machine in 2013 that took art online and outputted money was totally nonfunctional. It doesn't matter if you're a newspaper, or an institution, or an independent creator. A monthly web comic with 20,000 monthly readers — 20,000 monthly readers — gets paid a couple hundred bucks in ad revenue. This is 20,000 people. Like, in what world is this not enough? I don't understand. What systems have we built where this is insufficient for a person to make a living? So, I actually have a theory about this. I think it's been a weird 100 years. (Laughter) (Applause) About 100 years ago, humans figured out how to record sound onto a wax cylinder. That was the beginning of the phonograph. Right around the same time, we figured out how to record light onto a piece of photographic paper, celluloid — the beginning of film and television. For the first time, you could store art on a thing, which was amazing. Art used to be completely ephemeral, so if you missed the symphony, you just didn't get to hear the orchestra. But now, for the first time, you could store the orchestra's performance on a physical object, and like, listen to it later, which was amazing. It was so amazing in fact, that for the next 100 years, between 1900 and 2000, humans built just billions and billions of dollars of infrastructure to essentially help artists do two things. First, put their art on a thing, and second, get that thing around the world to the people who wanted the art. So, so much industry is devoted to these two problems. Oh my gosh, there are trucking companies, and brick-and-mortar and marketing firms, and CD jewel case manufacturers, all devoted to these two problems. And then we all know what happened. 10 years ago, the internet matures and we get Spotify and Facebook and YouTube and iTunes and Google search, and a hundred years of infrastructure and supply chains and distribution systems and monetization schemes are completely bypassed — in a decade. After 100 years of designing these things, it's no wonder that it's just totally broken for creative people right now. It's no wonder that the monetization part of the chain doesn't work given this new context. But what gets me super excited to be a creator right now, to be alive today and be a creative person right now, is realizing that we're only 10 years into figuring out this new machine — to figuring out the next 100 years of infrastructure for our creators. And you can tell we're only 10 years in. There's a lot of trial and error, some really good ideas forming, a lot of experimentation. We're figuring out what works and what doesn't. Like Twitch streamers. Who's heard of Twitch? Twitch streamers are making three to five thousand bucks a month streaming gaming content. The big ones are making over 100,000 dollars a year. There's a site called YouNow, it's an app. It allows musicians and vloggers to get paid in digital goods from fans. So, I'm also working on the problem. Four years ago I started a company called Patreon with a friend of mine. We're 80 people now working on this problem. It's basically a membership platform that makes it really easy for creators to get paid — every month from their fans to earn a living. For a creator, it's like having a salary for being a creative person. And this is one of our creators. They're called "Kinda Funny." They have about 220,000 subscribers on YouTube. And when they upload a video, it gets somewhere around 15,000 views to 100,000 views. I want you to check yourselves right now. I think when we hear numbers like that, when we hear "15,000 views," and we see content like this, we just snap categorize it as being not as legitimate as a morning show that you'd hear on the radio or a talk show that you'd see on NBC or something But when "Kinda Funny" launched on Patreon, within a few weeks, they were making 31,000 dollars per month for this show. It took off so fast that they decided to expand their programming and add new shows, and now they launched a second Patreon page — they're making an additional 21,000 dollars per month. And they're scaling what's essentially becoming a media company, financing the whole thing through membership. OK, here's another example. This is Derek Bodner, a sports journalist who used to write for Philadelphia Magazine until a few months ago when the magazine cut out all sports coverage. Now he writes articles and publishes them on his own website — he's still covering sports, but for himself. And he's making 4,800 bucks a month from 1,700 patrons, financing it through membership. This is Crash Course — free educational content for the world. This show is actually on the PBS digital network — 29,000 dollars per month. This is a duo sailing around the world, getting paid every month for documenting their travels from 1,400 patrons. This is a podcast, "Chapo Trap House", making — actually, since I screenshotted this, they're making an additional 2,000 dollars per month, so they're now making 56,000 dollars per month for their podcast. And Patreon's not the only one working on the problem. Even Google's starting to work on this. A couple years ago, they launched Fan Funding; more recently, they launched Super Chat as a way for creators to monetize live streaming. Newspapers are starting to experiment with membership. New York Times has a membership program; The Guardian has over 200,000 paying subscribers to its membership program. There's this bubbling soup of ideas and experiments and progress right now, and it's pointing in the direction of getting creators paid. And it's working. It's not, like, perfect yet, but it's really working. So, Patreon has over 50,000 creators on the platform making salaries — getting paid every month for putting art online, for being a creative person. The next hundred years of infrastructure is on the way and it's going to be different this time because of this — because of the direct connection between the person who makes the thing and the person who likes the thing. About seven or eight years ago, I went to a cocktail party. This is when the band had hit our first machine, so things were really cranking. We had just made about 400,000 dollars in one year through iTunes sales and brand deals and stuff like that. And this guy comes up to me and says, "Hey, Jack, what do you do?" I said, "I'm a musician." And he just sobered up immediately, and he stuck out his hand, put a hand on my shoulder, and in a real earnest, very nice voice he was like, "I hope you make it someday." (Laughter) And ... I have so many moments like that logged in my memory. I just cringe thinking of that. It's so embarrassing to just not feel valued as a creative person. But as a species, we are leaving that cocktail party behind. We're leaving that culture, we're out of there. We're going to get so good at paying creators, within 10 years, kids graduating high school and college are going to think of being a creator as just being an option — I could be a doctor, I could be a lawyer, I could be a podcaster, I could have a web comic. It's just going to be something you can do. We're figuring it out. It's going to be a viable and sustainable and respected profession. Creators are going to come out the other end of this weird 100 years, this century-long journey, with an awesome new machine. And they're going to be paid, and they're going to be valued. Thanks, everybody. (Applause) I think it went pretty well. I want artists who saw that to not give up — to know that we're getting there. It's not there yet, but in a couple years, there will be so many systems and tools for them to just make a living online, and if they've got a podcast that's starting to take off, but they're not able to make money on it yet, that's happening and they're going to be paid. It's happening. |
A practical way to help the homeless find work and safety | {0: 'Richard J. Berry is the mayor of Albuquerque -- the 32nd largest city in America and the largest city in New Mexico.'} | TEDxPennsylvaniaAvenue | So, raise your hand if you've seen somebody in your city standing on a corner, holding a sign like this. I think we all have. If you're being honest, at least one time, have you wondered if they mean it? If we offered them a job, would they really take it? And what would that job mean to them in their lives? Well, this is a story about what happened in my city when we decided to find out, when we decided to think differently about panhandling, and lift people up through the dignity of work. We call it, "There's a Better Way." We call it There's a Better Way because I believe there's a better way to get the money you need than panhandling on the corner. I believe there's a better way to help your brothers and sisters in need than handing a few dollars out the car window. We know there's dignity in work. We also know that people are much more likely to invest in themselves if they believe that their community is willing to invest in them first. And because we're all wired to be kind and compassionate, it always feels good to hand a couple of dollars to someone that is in need. But if you talk to panhandlers, many of them will tell you that your few dollars don't necessarily go towards feeding the body, they go towards feeding an addiction. There's a better way. My name is Richard Berry, and I have one of the best jobs in the world. I get to be the mayor of a great American city, Albuquerque, New Mexico. I was at lunch on July 17, 2015, in my great American city, and on my way back to city hall, I saw this gentleman standing on a corner. As you can see, he's holding a sign, and his sign says he wants a job. But if you look closer at the picture, you'll see he's standing underneath a blue sign, and that sign says, if you need help, if you need food or shelter or you'd like to donate, please call 311, our community service number. So why is this guy standing underneath my sign with his sign? Well, we wondered if anybody would call that 311 sign, and as it turns out, they did — 11,000 times people called. I put those up in about 30 intersections. And we did connect them with food and shelter and services. But yet he's still standing under my sign with a sign that says he wants a job. It's simple: he wants a job. So I decided to do something rare in government. I decided to make the solution simpler rather than more complicated. I went back to my office, I gathered my staff around and I said, "We're going to take this man at his word, and others like him. The man says he wants a job, we're going to give him a job, and we're going to make our city an even better place in the meantime." You see, Albuquerque is a beautiful place. We're a mile high, the Sandia Mountains on the east, the Rio Grande runs through the center of the city; we're the home of the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta. On a day like today, you could literally ski this morning and golf this afternoon. But there's always something to do — always weeds to pull, litter to pick up. If you're going to have an initiative like this in your city, you have to ask yourself two questions. First one is: Is there anything left to do in your city? And if the answer is no, would you please give me your mayor's phone number, because I need some advice. (Laughter) But the second question you have to ask is this: Are your solutions to panhandling working? If you're like Albuquerque, and you're taking the punitive approach like we used to, handing out tickets to panhandlers or those who give them money, I'm going to suggest that your solutions aren't working, and I know you're not getting to the root of your problem in your city. So if you have something to do and you need people that need something to do, there's a better way. And the good news is, it's not that complicated. This a 2006 Dodge van. It was in my motor pool not doing anything. We put some new tires on it, wrapped it with a logo. This van now goes out to street corners where our panhandlers are — we go to them. We stop the van, we get out, we ask them if they would like a day's work rather than panhandling for the day. And if you wondered if they really mean it — it takes us about an hour to fill this van up in the morning, because almost everybody we ask takes a job for the day. But you need more than just a van. You need a super-fantastic human being to drive that van. And my super-fantastic human being, his name is Will. This is him in the yellow vest. Will works at our local nonprofit partner. He works with the homeless every day. The panhandlers trust him, he believes in them, he hustles. I like to say, "Where there's a Will, there's a way." So if you're going to do the Better Way campaign in your city, you need to find yourself a Will, because he's really one of the keys to making this successful in the city of Albuquerque. You also need a great nonprofit partner. Ours is St. Martin's Hospitality Center. They've been in our community for over 30 years. They provide counseling, food, shelter, and if they don't provide it, they know somebody in our city that does. But they do something much more for me as the mayor. They provide agility. You see, it takes me two weeks, maybe two months sometimes, to onboard an employee with the city of Albuquerque. So you could imagine — my old Dodge van, my super-fantastic human being, Will, a great local nonprofit partner — they drive to the corner, there's a panhandler, they say, "Would you like to work for the day?" The panhandler says, "Yes," and Will says, "Great! I'll be back in six weeks to pick you up." (Laughter) It wouldn't work. It's really important that we have that agility in our program. And they do the paperwork, they do the insurance, they do all of the other forms that I can't do quickly. We pay our panhandlers nine dollars an hour. We feed them once at the jobsite. At the end of the day, our old Dodge van takes them right back to St. Martin's, and they get connected with counseling services. So far, with the pilot program and a couple days a week, and a fantastic human being and a Dodge van, we've cleaned up 400 city blocks in the city of Albuquerque. We've picked up over 117,000 pounds of trash, weeds and litter. I don't know if you've ever weighed a tumbleweed, but they don't weigh much, so you can imagine the volume of material that we've picked up. My city has 6,000 employees, and none better than my solid waste department. We send our trucks out at the end of the day, they help the panhandlers put into the truck the material they've picked up during the day, and we take it to the landfill. I'm lucky that I have city employees that are willing to work side by side with our panhandlers. They're lifting up our city while lifting up their lives. And like anything else — listen, it takes resources. But the good news is it doesn't take much. We started with an old van, a super-fantastic human being, a great local nonprofit and $50,000. But we also had to have community trust. And fortunately, we had built that up in years prior to Better Way. We have a program called "Albuquerque Heading Home," a Housing First model where we house the chronically homeless, and when I told my community we wanted to do that differently, I said there's a smart way to do the right thing. We have now housed 650 chronically homeless, medically vulnerable — frankly, most likely to die on the streets in our city. We commissioned our university, they studied it. We could tell the taxpayers, we can save you 31.6 percent over the cost of leaving someone to struggle for survival on the streets. We've now saved over five million dollars while housing 650 people. So we had that community trust, but we had to have a little bit more of an honest conversation also as a community, because we had to get people to understand that when they hand those five dollars out the window, they might actually be minimizing their opportunity to help the person in need, and here's why: that five dollars might go to buying some fast food today — a lot of times it goes to buying drugs and alcohol. That same five dollars, if you gave it to one of our shelters, could feed seven people today. And if you gave it to one of our local food banks or food pantries, we could actually feed 20 people with that money. People ask,"Well, Albuquerque is 600,000 people — million, metro — this wouldn't work in our city, we're too big, we're too small." I disagree; if you have one panhandler on one city block, you can do this. If you live in a city of eight-and-half million people, you can do this. It doesn't matter what you do. It's not the work that you do, it's the dignity of the work. You could do anything. So I think any city could do this. And people say to me, "Mayor, that's just a little too simple. It can't work that way." But I tell you what, friends: when you go to a street corner and you engage with a panhandler with dignity and respect, maybe for the first time in years, maybe in their life, and you tell them that you believe in them and that this is their city as much as it's your city, and that you actually need their help to make our place better, and you understand that this isn't the answer to all their problems, but at least it's a start, an amazing thing happens. When they get out on the jobsite and they start working together, you start seeing amazing things happen. They see teamwork; they see the fact that they can make a difference. And at the end of the day, when they get back to St. Martin's in that old Dodge van, they're much more likely to sign up for whatever services they need — substance abuse, mental health counseling, you name it. So far with our pilot program, we've offered about 1,700 days of day work. We've connected 216 people to permanent employment opportunities. Twenty people actually qualified for our Housing First model, Heading Home, and they've been housed. And over 150 people have been connected to mental health substance abuse services through There's a Better Way. This is me just two weeks ago, at St. Martin's, doing our point-in-time survey that we do every two years. I'm interviewing a gentleman who's homeless, like we do, getting his information, figuring out where he's from, how he got there, what we can do to help him. And you notice he's holding the same sign that the guy was holding in 2015, same sign I walked out with here today. So you have to ask yourself: Is it really making a difference? Absolutely it's making a difference. Albuquerque is now one of the national leaders in combating some of the most stubborn and persistent social issues that we have. Combined with Albuquerque Heading Home, the Better Way program, Albuquerque has reduced unsheltered homelessness in our city by 80 percent last year. Since I took over as mayor, we've been able to reduce the chronic homeless population in our city by 40 percent. And by HUD's definition, we've gotten to functional zero, which means we've literally ended veteran homelessness in the city of Albuquerque, by being intentional. (Applause) So I'm happy to report that other cities are hearing about this, other mayors are calling us — Chicago, Seattle, Denver, Dallas — and are now starting to implement programs where they bring the dignity of work to the equation. And I can't wait to learn from them. I can't wait to see what their experiment looks like, what their pilot project looks like, so we can start taking a collective approach nationally through the dignity of work. And I want to commend them — the mayors, their communities, their nonprofits — for the work that they're doing. So who's next? Are you and your city ready to step up? Are you ready to think differently about these persistent social issues? Are you ready to lift people up in your community through the dignity of work, and make your city profoundly better in many ways? Well, if you are, my friends, I promise you there is a better way. Thank you. (Applause) |
7 principles for building better cities | {0: 'Through his writing and his realized projects, Peter Calthorpe has spread the vision of New Urbanism, a framework for creating sustainable, human-scaled places.'} | TED2017 | So, let me add to the complexity of the situation we find ourselves in. At the same time that we're solving for climate change, we're going to be building cities for three billion people. That's a doubling of the urban environment. If we don't get that right, I'm not sure all the climate solutions in the world will save mankind, because so much depends on how we shape our cities: not just environmental impacts, but our social well-being, our economic vitality, our sense of community and connectedness. Fundamentally, the way we shape cities is a manifestation of the kind of humanity we bring to bear. And so getting it right is, I think, the order of the day. And to a certain degree, getting it right can help us solve climate change, because in the end, it's our behavior that seems to be driving the problem. The problem isn't free-floating, and it isn't just ExxonMobil and oil companies. It's us; how we live. How we live. There's a villain in this story. It's called sprawl, and I'll be upfront about that. But it's not just the kind of sprawl you think of, or many people think of, as low-density development out at the periphery of the metropolitan area. Actually, I think sprawl can happen anywhere, at any density. The key attribute is that it isolates people. It segregates people into economic enclaves and land-use enclaves. It separates them from nature. It doesn't allow the cross-fertilization, the interaction, that make cities great places and that make society thrive. So the antidote to sprawl is really what we all need to be thinking about, especially when we're taking on this massive construction project. So let me take you through one exercise. We developed the model for the state of California so they could get on with reducing carbon emissions. We did a whole series of scenarios for how the state could grow, and this is just one overly simplified one. We mixed different development prototypes and said they're going to carry us through the year 2050, 10 million new crew in our state of California. And one was sprawl. It's just more of the same: shopping malls, subdivisions, office parks. The other one was dominated by, not everybody moving to the city, but just compact development, what we used to think of as streetcar suburbs, walkable neighborhoods, low-rise, but integrated, mixed-used environments. And the results are astounding. They're astounding not just for the scale of the difference of this one shift in our city-making habit but also because each one represents a special interest group, a special interest group that used to advocate for their concerns one at a time. They did not see the, what I call, "co-benefits" of urban form that allows them to join with others. So, land consumption: environmentalists are really concerned about this, so are farmers; there's a whole range of people, and, of course, neighborhood groups that want open space nearby. The sprawl version of California almost doubles the urban physical footprint. Greenhouse gas: tremendous savings, because in California, our biggest carbon emission comes from cars, and cities that don't depend on cars as much obviously create huge savings. Vehicle miles traveled: that's what I was just talking about. Just reducing the average 10,000 miles per household per year, from somewhere in the mid-26,000 per household, has a huge impact not just on air quality and carbon but also on the household pocketbook. It's very expensive to drive that much, and as we've seen, the middle class is struggling to hold on. Health care: we were talking about how do you fix it once we broke it — clean the air. Why not just stop polluting? Why not just use our feet and bikes more? And that's a function of the kinds of cities that we shape. Household costs: 2008 was a mark in time, not of just the financial industry running amok. It was that we were trying to sell too many of the wrong kind of housing: large lot, single family, distant, too expensive for the average middle-class family to afford and, quite frankly, not a good fit to their lifestyle anymore. But in order to move inventory, you can discount the financing and get it sold. I think that's a lot of what happened. Reducing cost by 10,000 dollars — remember, in California the median is 50,000 — this is a big element. That's just cars and utility costs. So the affordable housing advocates, who often sit off in their silos separate from the environmentalists, separate from the politicians, everybody fighting with everyone, now begin to see common cause, and I think the common cause is what really brings about the change. Los Angeles, as a result of these efforts, has now decided to transform itself into a more transit-oriented environment. As a matter of fact, since '08, they've voted in 400 billion dollars of bonds for transit and zero dollars for new highways. What a transformation: LA becomes a city of walkers and transit, not a city of cars. (Applause) How does it happen? You take the least desirable land, the strip, you add where there's space, transit and then you infill mixed-use development, you satisfy new housing demands and you make the existing neighborhoods all around it more complex, more interesting, more walkable. Here's another kind of sprawl: China, high-density sprawl, what you think of as an oxymoron, but the same problems, everything isolated in superblocks, and of course this amazing smog that was just spoken to. Twelve percent of GDP in China now is spent on the health impacts of that. The history, of course, of Chinese cities is robust. It's like any other place. Community was all about small, local shops and local services and walking, interacting with your neighbors. It may sound utopian, but it's not. It's actually what people really want. The new superblocks — these are blocks that would have 5,000 units in them, and they're gated as well, because nobody knows anybody else. And of course, there isn't even a sidewalk, no ground floor shops — a very sterile environment. I found this one case here in one of the superblocks where people had illicitly set up shops in their garages so that they could have that kind of local service economy. The desire of people to get it right is there. We just have to get the planners on board and the politicians. All right. Some technical planning stuff. Chongqing is a city of 30 million people. It's almost as big as California. This is a small growth area. They wanted us to test the alternative to sprawl in several cities across China. This is for four-and-a-half million people. What the takeaway from this image is, every one of those circles is a walking radius around a transit station — massive investment in metro and BRT, and a distribution that allows everybody to work within walking distance of that. The red area, this is a blow-up. All of a sudden, our principles called for green space preserving the important ecological features. And then those other streets in there are auto-free streets. So instead of bulldozing, leveling the site and building right up to the river, this green edge was something that really wasn't normative in China until these set of practices began experimentation there. The urban fabric, small blocks, maybe 500 families per block. They know each other. The street perimeter has shops so there's local destinations. And the streets themselves become smaller, because there are more of them. Very simple, straightforward urban design. Now, here you have something I dearly love. Think of the logic. If only a third of the people have cars, why do we give 100 percent of our streets to cars? What if we gave 70 percent of the streets to car-free, to everybody else, so that the transit could move well for them, so that they could walk, so they could bike? Why not have — (Applause) geographic equity in our circulation system? And quite frankly, cities would function better. No matter what they do, no matter how many ring roads they build in Beijing, they just can't overcome complete gridlock. So this is an auto-free street, mixed use along the edge. It has transit running down the middle. I'm happy to make that transit autonomous vehicles, but maybe I'll have a chance to talk about that later. So there are seven principles that have now been adopted by the highest levels in the Chinese government, and they're moving to implement them. And they're simple, and they are globally, I think, universal principles. One is to preserve the natural environment, the history and the critical agriculture. Second is mix. Mixed use is popular, but when I say mixed, I mean mixed incomes, mixed age groups as well as mixed-land use. Walk. There's no great city that you don't enjoy walking in. You don't go there. The places you go on vacation are places you can walk. Why not make it everywhere? Bike is the most efficient means of transportation we know. China has now adopted policies that put six meters of bike lane on every street. They're serious about getting back to their biking history. (Applause) Complicated planner-ese here: connect. It's a street network that allows many routes instead of singular routes and provides many kinds of streets instead of just one. Ride. We have to invest more in transit. There's no silver bullet. Autonomous vehicles are not going to solve this for us. As a matter of fact, they're going to generate more traffic, more VMT, than the alternative. And focus. We have a hierarchy of the city based on transit rather than the old armature of freeways. It's a big paradigm shift, but those two things have to get reconnected in ways that really shape the structure of the city. So I'm very hopeful. In California, the United States, China — these changes are well accepted. I'm hopeful for two reasons. One is, most people get it. They understand intrinsically what a great city can and should be. The second is that the kind of analysis we can bring to bear now allows people to connect the dots, allows people to shape political coalitions that didn't exist in the past. That allows them to bring into being the kinds of communities we all need. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: So, OK: autonomous driving, self-driving cars. A lot of people here are very excited about them. What are your concerns or issues about them? Peter Calthorpe: Well, I think there's almost too much hype here. First is, everybody says we're going to get rid of a lot of cars. What they don't say is you're going to get a lot more vehicle miles. You're going to get a lot more cars moving on streets. There will be more congestion. CA: Because they're so appealing — you can drive while reading or sleeping. PC: Well, a couple of reasons. One is, if they're privately owned, people will travel greater distances. It'll be a new lease on life to sprawl. If you can work on your way to work, you can live in more remote locations. It'll revitalize sprawl in a way that I'm deeply frightened. Taxis: about 50 percent of the surveys say that people won't share them. If they don't share them, you can end up with a 90 percent increase in vehicle miles traveled. If you share them, you're still at around a 30 percent increase in VMT. CA: Sharing them, meaning having multiple people riding at once in some sort of intelligent ride-sharing? PC: Yeah, so the Uber share without a steering wheel. The reality is, the efficiency of vehicles — you can do it with or without a steering wheel, it doesn't matter. They claim they're the only ones that are going to be efficient electric, but that's not true. But the real bottom line is that walking, biking and transit are the way cities and communities thrive. And putting people in their private bubbles, whether they have a steering wheel or not, is the wrong direction. And quite frankly, the image of an AV on its way to McDonald's to pick up a pack without its owner, just being sent off on these kind of random errands is really frightening to me. CA: Well, thank you for that, and I have to say, the images you showed of those mixed-use streets were really inspiring, really beautiful. PC: Thank you. CA: Thank you for your work. (Applause) |
The secret to living longer may be your social life | {0: 'Susan Pinker reveals how in-person social interactions are not only necessary for human happiness but also could be a key to health and longevity.'} | TED2017 | Here's an intriguing fact. In the developed world, everywhere, women live an average of six to eight years longer than men do. Six to eight years longer. That's, like, a huge gap. In 2015, the "Lancet" published an article showing that men in rich countries are twice as likely to die as women are at any age. But there is one place in the world where men live as long as women. It's a remote, mountainous zone, a blue zone, where super longevity is common to both sexes. This is the blue zone in Sardinia, an Italian island in the Mediterranean, between Corsica and Tunisia, where there are six times as many centenarians as on the Italian mainland, less than 200 miles away. There are 10 times as many centenarians as there are in North America. It's the only place where men live as long as women. But why? My curiosity was piqued. I decided to research the science and the habits of the place, and I started with the genetic profile. I discovered soon enough that genes account for just 25 percent of their longevity. The other 75 percent is lifestyle. So what does it take to live to 100 or beyond? What are they doing right? What you're looking at is an aerial view of Villagrande. It's a village at the epicenter of the blue zone where I went to investigate this, and as you can see, architectural beauty is not its main virtue, density is: tightly spaced houses, interwoven alleys and streets. It means that the villagers' lives constantly intersect. And as I walked through the village, I could feel hundreds of pairs of eyes watching me from behind doorways and curtains, from behind shutters. Because like all ancient villages, Villagrande couldn't have survived without this structure, without its walls, without its cathedral, without its village square, because defense and social cohesion defined its design. Urban priorities changed as we moved towards the industrial revolution because infectious disease became the risk of the day. But what about now? Now, social isolation is the public health risk of our time. Now, a third of the population says they have two or fewer people to lean on. But let's go to Villagrande now as a contrast to meet some centenarians. Meet Giuseppe Murinu. He's 102, a supercentenarian and a lifelong resident of the village of Villagrande. He was a gregarious man. He loved to recount stories such as how he lived like a bird from what he could find on the forest floor during not one but two world wars, how he and his wife, who also lived past 100, raised six children in a small, homey kitchen where I interviewed him. Here he is with his sons Angelo and Domenico, both in their 70s and looking after their father, and who were quite frankly very suspicious of me and my daughter who came along with me on this research trip, because the flip side of social cohesion is a wariness of strangers and outsiders. But Giuseppe, he wasn't suspicious at all. He was a happy-go-lucky guy, very outgoing with a positive outlook. And I wondered: so is that what it takes to live to be 100 or beyond, thinking positively? Actually, no. (Laughter) Meet Giovanni Corrias. He's 101, the grumpiest person I have ever met. (Laughter) And he put a lie to the notion that you have to be positive to live a long life. And there is evidence for this. When I asked him why he lived so long, he kind of looked at me under hooded eyelids and he growled, "Nobody has to know my secrets." (Laughter) But despite being a sourpuss, the niece who lived with him and looked after him called him "Il Tesoro," "my treasure." And she respected him and loved him, and she told me, when I questioned this obvious loss of her freedom, "You just don't understand, do you? Looking after this man is a pleasure. It's a huge privilege for me. This is my heritage." And indeed, wherever I went to interview these centenarians, I found a kitchen party. Here's Giovanni with his two nieces, Maria above him and beside him his great-niece Sara, who came when I was there to bring fresh fruits and vegetables. And I quickly discovered by being there that in the blue zone, as people age, and indeed across their lifespans, they're always surrounded by extended family, by friends, by neighbors, the priest, the barkeeper, the grocer. People are always there or dropping by. They are never left to live solitary lives. This is unlike the rest of the developed world, where as George Burns quipped, "Happiness is having a large, loving, caring family in another city." (Laughter) Now, so far we've only met men, long-living men, but I met women too, and here you see Zia Teresa. She, at over 100, taught me how to make the local specialty, which is called culurgiones, which are these large pasta pockets like ravioli about this size, this size, and they're filled with high-fat ricotta and mint and drenched in tomato sauce. And she showed me how to make just the right crimp so they wouldn't open, and she makes them with her daughters every Sunday and distributes them by the dozens to neighbors and friends. And that's when I discovered a low-fat, gluten-free diet is not what it takes to live to 100 in the blue zone. (Applause) Now, these centenarians' stories along with the science that underpins them prompted me to ask myself some questions too, such as, when am I going to die and how can I put that day off? And as you will see, the answer is not what we expect. Julianne Holt-Lunstad is a researcher at Brigham Young University and she addressed this very question in a series of studies of tens of thousands of middle aged people much like this audience here. And she looked at every aspect of their lifestyle: their diet, their exercise, their marital status, how often they went to the doctor, whether they smoked or drank, etc. She recorded all of this and then she and her colleagues sat tight and waited for seven years to see who would still be breathing. And of the people left standing, what reduced their chances of dying the most? That was her question. So let's now look at her data in summary, going from the least powerful predictor to the strongest. OK? So clean air, which is great, it doesn't predict how long you will live. Whether you have your hypertension treated is good. Still not a strong predictor. Whether you're lean or overweight, you can stop feeling guilty about this, because it's only in third place. How much exercise you get is next, still only a moderate predictor. Whether you've had a cardiac event and you're in rehab and exercising, getting higher now. Whether you've had a flu vaccine. Did anybody here know that having a flu vaccine protects you more than doing exercise? Whether you were drinking and quit, or whether you're a moderate drinker, whether you don't smoke, or if you did, whether you quit, and getting towards the top predictors are two features of your social life. First, your close relationships. These are the people that you can call on for a loan if you need money suddenly, who will call the doctor if you're not feeling well or who will take you to the hospital, or who will sit with you if you're having an existential crisis, if you're in despair. Those people, that little clutch of people are a strong predictor, if you have them, of how long you'll live. And then something that surprised me, something that's called social integration. This means how much you interact with people as you move through your day. How many people do you talk to? And these mean both your weak and your strong bonds, so not just the people you're really close to, who mean a lot to you, but, like, do you talk to the guy who every day makes you your coffee? Do you talk to the postman? Do you talk to the woman who walks by your house every day with her dog? Do you play bridge or poker, have a book club? Those interactions are one of the strongest predictors of how long you'll live. Now, this leads me to the next question: if we now spend more time online than on any other activity, including sleeping, we're now up to 11 hours a day, one hour more than last year, by the way, does it make a difference? Why distinguish between interacting in person and interacting via social media? Is it the same thing as being there if you're in contact constantly with your kids through text, for example? Well, the short answer to the question is no, it's not the same thing. Face-to-face contact releases a whole cascade of neurotransmitters, and like a vaccine, they protect you now in the present and well into the future. So simply making eye contact with somebody, shaking hands, giving somebody a high-five is enough to release oxytocin, which increases your level of trust and it lowers your cortisol levels. So it lowers your stress. And dopamine is generated, which gives us a little high and it kills pain. It's like a naturally produced morphine. Now, all of this passes under our conscious radar, which is why we conflate online activity with the real thing. But we do have evidence now, fresh evidence, that there is a difference. So let's look at some of the neuroscience. Elizabeth Redcay, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland, tried to map the difference between what goes on in our brains when we interact in person versus when we're watching something that's static. And what she did was she compared the brain function of two groups of people, those interacting live with her or with one of her research associates in a dynamic conversation, and she compared that to the brain activity of people who were watching her talk about the same subject but in a canned video, like on YouTube. And by the way, if you want to know how she fit two people in an MRI scanner at the same time, talk to me later. So what's the difference? This is your brain on real social interaction. What you're seeing is the difference in brain activity between interacting in person and taking in static content. In orange, you see the brain areas that are associated with attention, social intelligence — that means anticipating what somebody else is thinking and feeling and planning — and emotional reward. And these areas become much more engaged when we're interacting with a live partner. Now, these richer brain signatures might be why recruiters from Fortune 500 companies evaluating candidates thought that the candidates were smarter when they heard their voices compared to when they just read their pitches in a text, for example, or an email or a letter. Now, our voices and body language convey a rich signal. It shows that we're thinking, feeling, sentient human beings who are much more than an algorithm. Now, this research by Nicholas Epley at the University of Chicago Business School is quite amazing because it tells us a simple thing. If somebody hears your voice, they think you're smarter. I mean, that's quite a simple thing. Now, to return to the beginning, why do women live longer than men? And one major reason is that women are more likely to prioritize and groom their face-to-face relationships over their lifespans. Fresh evidence shows that these in-person friendships create a biological force field against disease and decline. And it's not just true of humans but their primate relations, our primate relations as well. Anthropologist Joan Silk's work shows that female baboons who have a core of female friends show lower levels of stress via their cortisol levels, they live longer and they have more surviving offspring. At least three stable relationships. That was the magic number. Think about it. I hope you guys have three. The power of such face-to-face contact is really why there are the lowest rates of dementia among people who are socially engaged. It's why women who have breast cancer are four times more likely to survive their disease than loners are. Why men who've had a stroke who meet regularly to play poker or to have coffee or to play old-timer's hockey — I'm Canadian, after all — (Laughter) are better protected by that social contact than they are by medication. Why men who've had a stroke who meet regularly — this is something very powerful they can do. This face-to-face contact provides stunning benefits, yet now almost a quarter of the population says they have no one to talk to. We can do something about this. Like Sardinian villagers, it's a biological imperative to know we belong, and not just the women among us. Building in-person interaction into our cities, into our workplaces, into our agendas bolsters the immune system, sends feel-good hormones surging through the bloodstream and brain and helps us live longer. I call this building your village, and building it and sustaining it is a matter of life and death. Thank you. (Applause) Helen Walters: Susan, come back. I have a question for you. I'm wondering if there's a middle path. So you talk about the neurotransmitters connecting when in face-to-face, but what about digital technology? We've seen enormous improvements in digital technology like FaceTime, things like that. Does that work too? I mean, I see my nephew. He plays Minecraft and he's yelling at his friends. It seems like he's connecting pretty well. Is that useful? Is that helpful? Susan Pinker: Some of the data are just emerging. The data are so fresh that the digital revolution happened and the health data trailed behind. So we're just learning, but I would say there are some improvements that we could make in the technology. For example, the camera on your laptop is at the top of the screen, so for example, when you're looking into the screen, you're not actually making eye contact. So something as simple as even just looking into the camera can increase those neurotransmitters, or maybe changing the position of the camera. So it's not identical, but I think we are getting closer with the technology. HW: Great. Thank you so much. SP: Thank you. (Applause) |
How I found myself through music | {0: 'Anika Paulson’s love for music permeates her understanding of herself, her surroundings and the mysteries that make up the smallest and biggest parts of life.'} | TED2017 | The philosopher Plato once said, "Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything." Music has always been a big part of my life. To create and to perform music connects you to people countries and lifetimes away. It connects you to the people you're playing with, to your audience and to yourself. When I'm happy, when I'm sad, when I'm bored, when I'm stressed, I listen to and I create music. When I was younger, I played piano; later, I took up guitar. And as I started high school, music became a part of my identity. I was in every band, I was involved with every musical fine arts event. Music surrounded me. It made me who I was, and it gave me a place to belong. Now, I've always had this thing with rhythms. I remember being young, I would walk down the hallways of my school and I would tap rhythms to myself on my leg with my hands, or tapping my teeth. It was a nervous habit, and I was always nervous. I think I liked the repetition of the rhythm — it was calming. Then in high school, I started music theory, and it was the best class I've ever taken. We were learning about music — things I didn't know, like theory and history. It was a class where we basically just listened to a song, talked about what it meant to us and analyzed it, and figured out what made it tick. Every Wednesday, we did something called "rhythmic dictation," and I was pretty good at it. Our teacher would give us an amount of measures and a time signature, and then he would speak a rhythm to us and we would have to write it down with the proper rests and notes. Like this: ta ta tuck-a tuck-a ta, ta tuck-a-tuck-a-tuck-a, tuck-a. And I loved it. The simplicity of the rhythm — a basic two- to four- measure line — and yet each of them almost told a story, like they had so much potential, and all you had to do was add a melody. (Guitar) Rhythms set a foundation for melodies and harmonies to play on top of. It gives structure and stability. Now, music has these parts — rhythm, melody and harmony — just like our lives. Where music has rhythm, we have routines and habits — things that help us to remember what to do and to stay on track, and to just keep going. And you may not notice it, but it's always there. (Guitar) And it may seem simple, it may seem dull by itself, but it gives tempo and heartbeat. And then things in your life add on to it, giving texture — that's your friends and your family, and anything that creates a harmonic structure in your life and in your song, like harmonies, cadences and anything that makes it polyphonic. And they create beautiful chords and patterns. (Guitar) And then there's you. You play on top of everything else, on top of the rhythms and the beat because you're the melody. And things may change and develop, but no matter what we do, we're still the same people. Throughout a song melodies develop, but it's still the same song. No matter what you do, the rhythms are still there: the tempo and the heartbeat ... until I left, and I went to college and everything disappeared. When I first arrived at university, I felt lost. And don't get me wrong — sometimes I loved it and it was great, but other times, I felt like I had been left alone to fend for myself. It's like I had been taken out of my natural environment, and put somewhere new, where the rhythms and the harmonies and the form had gone away, and it was just me — (Guitar) silence and my melody. And even that began to waver, because I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't have any chords to structure myself, or a rhythm or a beat to know the tempo. (Guitar) And then I began to hear all these other sounds. (Guitar) And they were off-time and off-key. And the more I was around them, the more my melody started to sound like theirs. And slowly I began to lose myself, like I was being washed away. But then the next moment — (Guitar) I could hear it. And I could feel it. And it was me. And I was here. And it was different, but not worse off. Just changed a little. Music is my way of coping with the changes in my life. There's a beautiful connection between music and life. It can bind us to reality at the same time it allows us to escape it. Music is something that lives inside of you. You create it and you're created by it. Our lives are not only conducted by music, they're also composed of it. So this may seem like a bit of a stretch, but hear me out: music is a fundamental part of what we are and of everything around us. Now, music is my passion, but physics also used to be an interest of mine. And the more I learned, the more I saw connections between the two — especially regarding string theory. I know this is only one of many theories, but it spoke to me. So, one aspect of string theory, at its simplest form, is this: matter is made up of atoms, which are made up of protons and neutrons and electrons, which are made up of quark. And here's where the string part comes in. This quark is supposedly made up of little coiled strings, and it's the vibrations of these strings that make everything what it is. Michio Kaku once explained this in a lecture called, "The Universe in a Nutshell," where he says, "String theory is the simple idea that the four forces of the universe — gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the two strong forces — can be viewed as music. The music of tiny little rubber bands." In this lecture, he goes on to explain physics as the laws of harmony between these strings; chemistry, as the melodies you can play on these strings; and he states that the universe is a "symphony of strings." These strings dictate the universe; they make up everything we see and everything we know. They're musical notes, but they make us what we are and they hold us together. So you see, everything is music. (Guitar) When I look at the world, I see music all around us. When I look at myself, I see music. And my life has been defined by music. I found myself through music. Music is everywhere, and it is in everything. And it changes and it builds and it diminishes. But it's always there, supporting us, connecting us to each other and showing us the beauty of the universe. So if you ever feel lost, stop and listen for your song. Thank you. (Applause) |
What moral decisions should driverless cars make? | {0: "Iyad Rahwan's work lies at the intersection of the computer and social sciences, with a focus on collective intelligence, large-scale cooperation and the social aspects of artificial intelligence."} | TEDxCambridge | Today I'm going to talk about technology and society. The Department of Transport estimated that last year 35,000 people died from traffic crashes in the US alone. Worldwide, 1.2 million people die every year in traffic accidents. If there was a way we could eliminate 90 percent of those accidents, would you support it? Of course you would. This is what driverless car technology promises to achieve by eliminating the main source of accidents — human error. Now picture yourself in a driverless car in the year 2030, sitting back and watching this vintage TEDxCambridge video. (Laughter) All of a sudden, the car experiences mechanical failure and is unable to stop. If the car continues, it will crash into a bunch of pedestrians crossing the street, but the car may swerve, hitting one bystander, killing them to save the pedestrians. What should the car do, and who should decide? What if instead the car could swerve into a wall, crashing and killing you, the passenger, in order to save those pedestrians? This scenario is inspired by the trolley problem, which was invented by philosophers a few decades ago to think about ethics. Now, the way we think about this problem matters. We may for example not think about it at all. We may say this scenario is unrealistic, incredibly unlikely, or just silly. But I think this criticism misses the point because it takes the scenario too literally. Of course no accident is going to look like this; no accident has two or three options where everybody dies somehow. Instead, the car is going to calculate something like the probability of hitting a certain group of people, if you swerve one direction versus another direction, you might slightly increase the risk to passengers or other drivers versus pedestrians. It's going to be a more complex calculation, but it's still going to involve trade-offs, and trade-offs often require ethics. We might say then, "Well, let's not worry about this. Let's wait until technology is fully ready and 100 percent safe." Suppose that we can indeed eliminate 90 percent of those accidents, or even 99 percent in the next 10 years. What if eliminating the last one percent of accidents requires 50 more years of research? Should we not adopt the technology? That's 60 million people dead in car accidents if we maintain the current rate. So the point is, waiting for full safety is also a choice, and it also involves trade-offs. People online on social media have been coming up with all sorts of ways to not think about this problem. One person suggested the car should just swerve somehow in between the passengers — (Laughter) and the bystander. Of course if that's what the car can do, that's what the car should do. We're interested in scenarios in which this is not possible. And my personal favorite was a suggestion by a blogger to have an eject button in the car that you press — (Laughter) just before the car self-destructs. (Laughter) So if we acknowledge that cars will have to make trade-offs on the road, how do we think about those trade-offs, and how do we decide? Well, maybe we should run a survey to find out what society wants, because ultimately, regulations and the law are a reflection of societal values. So this is what we did. With my collaborators, Jean-François Bonnefon and Azim Shariff, we ran a survey in which we presented people with these types of scenarios. We gave them two options inspired by two philosophers: Jeremy Bentham and Immanuel Kant. Bentham says the car should follow utilitarian ethics: it should take the action that will minimize total harm — even if that action will kill a bystander and even if that action will kill the passenger. Immanuel Kant says the car should follow duty-bound principles, like "Thou shalt not kill." So you should not take an action that explicitly harms a human being, and you should let the car take its course even if that's going to harm more people. What do you think? Bentham or Kant? Here's what we found. Most people sided with Bentham. So it seems that people want cars to be utilitarian, minimize total harm, and that's what we should all do. Problem solved. But there is a little catch. When we asked people whether they would purchase such cars, they said, "Absolutely not." (Laughter) They would like to buy cars that protect them at all costs, but they want everybody else to buy cars that minimize harm. (Laughter) We've seen this problem before. It's called a social dilemma. And to understand the social dilemma, we have to go a little bit back in history. In the 1800s, English economist William Forster Lloyd published a pamphlet which describes the following scenario. You have a group of farmers — English farmers — who are sharing a common land for their sheep to graze. Now, if each farmer brings a certain number of sheep — let's say three sheep — the land will be rejuvenated, the farmers are happy, the sheep are happy, everything is good. Now, if one farmer brings one extra sheep, that farmer will do slightly better, and no one else will be harmed. But if every farmer made that individually rational decision, the land will be overrun, and it will be depleted to the detriment of all the farmers, and of course, to the detriment of the sheep. We see this problem in many places: in the difficulty of managing overfishing, or in reducing carbon emissions to mitigate climate change. When it comes to the regulation of driverless cars, the common land now is basically public safety — that's the common good — and the farmers are the passengers or the car owners who are choosing to ride in those cars. And by making the individually rational choice of prioritizing their own safety, they may collectively be diminishing the common good, which is minimizing total harm. It's called the tragedy of the commons, traditionally, but I think in the case of driverless cars, the problem may be a little bit more insidious because there is not necessarily an individual human being making those decisions. So car manufacturers may simply program cars that will maximize safety for their clients, and those cars may learn automatically on their own that doing so requires slightly increasing risk for pedestrians. So to use the sheep metaphor, it's like we now have electric sheep that have a mind of their own. (Laughter) And they may go and graze even if the farmer doesn't know it. So this is what we may call the tragedy of the algorithmic commons, and if offers new types of challenges. Typically, traditionally, we solve these types of social dilemmas using regulation, so either governments or communities get together, and they decide collectively what kind of outcome they want and what sort of constraints on individual behavior they need to implement. And then using monitoring and enforcement, they can make sure that the public good is preserved. So why don't we just, as regulators, require that all cars minimize harm? After all, this is what people say they want. And more importantly, I can be sure that as an individual, if I buy a car that may sacrifice me in a very rare case, I'm not the only sucker doing that while everybody else enjoys unconditional protection. In our survey, we did ask people whether they would support regulation and here's what we found. First of all, people said no to regulation; and second, they said, "Well if you regulate cars to do this and to minimize total harm, I will not buy those cars." So ironically, by regulating cars to minimize harm, we may actually end up with more harm because people may not opt into the safer technology even if it's much safer than human drivers. I don't have the final answer to this riddle, but I think as a starting point, we need society to come together to decide what trade-offs we are comfortable with and to come up with ways in which we can enforce those trade-offs. As a starting point, my brilliant students, Edmond Awad and Sohan Dsouza, built the Moral Machine website, which generates random scenarios at you — basically a bunch of random dilemmas in a sequence where you have to choose what the car should do in a given scenario. And we vary the ages and even the species of the different victims. So far we've collected over five million decisions by over one million people worldwide from the website. And this is helping us form an early picture of what trade-offs people are comfortable with and what matters to them — even across cultures. But more importantly, doing this exercise is helping people recognize the difficulty of making those choices and that the regulators are tasked with impossible choices. And maybe this will help us as a society understand the kinds of trade-offs that will be implemented ultimately in regulation. And indeed, I was very happy to hear that the first set of regulations that came from the Department of Transport — announced last week — included a 15-point checklist for all carmakers to provide, and number 14 was ethical consideration — how are you going to deal with that. We also have people reflect on their own decisions by giving them summaries of what they chose. I'll give you one example — I'm just going to warn you that this is not your typical example, your typical user. This is the most sacrificed and the most saved character for this person. (Laughter) Some of you may agree with him, or her, we don't know. But this person also seems to slightly prefer passengers over pedestrians in their choices and is very happy to punish jaywalking. (Laughter) So let's wrap up. We started with the question — let's call it the ethical dilemma — of what the car should do in a specific scenario: swerve or stay? But then we realized that the problem was a different one. It was the problem of how to get society to agree on and enforce the trade-offs they're comfortable with. It's a social dilemma. In the 1940s, Isaac Asimov wrote his famous laws of robotics — the three laws of robotics. A robot may not harm a human being, a robot may not disobey a human being, and a robot may not allow itself to come to harm — in this order of importance. But after 40 years or so and after so many stories pushing these laws to the limit, Asimov introduced the zeroth law which takes precedence above all, and it's that a robot may not harm humanity as a whole. I don't know what this means in the context of driverless cars or any specific situation, and I don't know how we can implement it, but I think that by recognizing that the regulation of driverless cars is not only a technological problem but also a societal cooperation problem, I hope that we can at least begin to ask the right questions. Thank you. (Applause) |
The era of blind faith in big data must end | {0: 'Data skeptic Cathy O’Neil uncovers the dark secrets of big data, showing how our "objective" algorithms could in fact reinforce human bias.'} | TED2017 | Algorithms are everywhere. They sort and separate the winners from the losers. The winners get the job or a good credit card offer. The losers don't even get an interview or they pay more for insurance. We're being scored with secret formulas that we don't understand that often don't have systems of appeal. That begs the question: What if the algorithms are wrong? To build an algorithm you need two things: you need data, what happened in the past, and a definition of success, the thing you're looking for and often hoping for. You train an algorithm by looking, figuring out. The algorithm figures out what is associated with success. What situation leads to success? Actually, everyone uses algorithms. They just don't formalize them in written code. Let me give you an example. I use an algorithm every day to make a meal for my family. The data I use is the ingredients in my kitchen, the time I have, the ambition I have, and I curate that data. I don't count those little packages of ramen noodles as food. (Laughter) My definition of success is: a meal is successful if my kids eat vegetables. It's very different from if my youngest son were in charge. He'd say success is if he gets to eat lots of Nutella. But I get to choose success. I am in charge. My opinion matters. That's the first rule of algorithms. Algorithms are opinions embedded in code. It's really different from what you think most people think of algorithms. They think algorithms are objective and true and scientific. That's a marketing trick. It's also a marketing trick to intimidate you with algorithms, to make you trust and fear algorithms because you trust and fear mathematics. A lot can go wrong when we put blind faith in big data. This is Kiri Soares. She's a high school principal in Brooklyn. In 2011, she told me her teachers were being scored with a complex, secret algorithm called the "value-added model." I told her, "Well, figure out what the formula is, show it to me. I'm going to explain it to you." She said, "Well, I tried to get the formula, but my Department of Education contact told me it was math and I wouldn't understand it." It gets worse. The New York Post filed a Freedom of Information Act request, got all the teachers' names and all their scores and they published them as an act of teacher-shaming. When I tried to get the formulas, the source code, through the same means, I was told I couldn't. I was denied. I later found out that nobody in New York City had access to that formula. No one understood it. Then someone really smart got involved, Gary Rubinstein. He found 665 teachers from that New York Post data that actually had two scores. That could happen if they were teaching seventh grade math and eighth grade math. He decided to plot them. Each dot represents a teacher. (Laughter) What is that? (Laughter) That should never have been used for individual assessment. It's almost a random number generator. (Applause) But it was. This is Sarah Wysocki. She got fired, along with 205 other teachers, from the Washington, DC school district, even though she had great recommendations from her principal and the parents of her kids. I know what a lot of you guys are thinking, especially the data scientists, the AI experts here. You're thinking, "Well, I would never make an algorithm that inconsistent." But algorithms can go wrong, even have deeply destructive effects with good intentions. And whereas an airplane that's designed badly crashes to the earth and everyone sees it, an algorithm designed badly can go on for a long time, silently wreaking havoc. This is Roger Ailes. (Laughter) He founded Fox News in 1996. More than 20 women complained about sexual harassment. They said they weren't allowed to succeed at Fox News. He was ousted last year, but we've seen recently that the problems have persisted. That begs the question: What should Fox News do to turn over another leaf? Well, what if they replaced their hiring process with a machine-learning algorithm? That sounds good, right? Think about it. The data, what would the data be? A reasonable choice would be the last 21 years of applications to Fox News. Reasonable. What about the definition of success? Reasonable choice would be, well, who is successful at Fox News? I guess someone who, say, stayed there for four years and was promoted at least once. Sounds reasonable. And then the algorithm would be trained. It would be trained to look for people to learn what led to success, what kind of applications historically led to success by that definition. Now think about what would happen if we applied that to a current pool of applicants. It would filter out women because they do not look like people who were successful in the past. Algorithms don't make things fair if you just blithely, blindly apply algorithms. They don't make things fair. They repeat our past practices, our patterns. They automate the status quo. That would be great if we had a perfect world, but we don't. And I'll add that most companies don't have embarrassing lawsuits, but the data scientists in those companies are told to follow the data, to focus on accuracy. Think about what that means. Because we all have bias, it means they could be codifying sexism or any other kind of bigotry. Thought experiment, because I like them: an entirely segregated society — racially segregated, all towns, all neighborhoods and where we send the police only to the minority neighborhoods to look for crime. The arrest data would be very biased. What if, on top of that, we found the data scientists and paid the data scientists to predict where the next crime would occur? Minority neighborhood. Or to predict who the next criminal would be? A minority. The data scientists would brag about how great and how accurate their model would be, and they'd be right. Now, reality isn't that drastic, but we do have severe segregations in many cities and towns, and we have plenty of evidence of biased policing and justice system data. And we actually do predict hotspots, places where crimes will occur. And we do predict, in fact, the individual criminality, the criminality of individuals. The news organization ProPublica recently looked into one of those "recidivism risk" algorithms, as they're called, being used in Florida during sentencing by judges. Bernard, on the left, the black man, was scored a 10 out of 10. Dylan, on the right, 3 out of 10. 10 out of 10, high risk. 3 out of 10, low risk. They were both brought in for drug possession. They both had records, but Dylan had a felony but Bernard didn't. This matters, because the higher score you are, the more likely you're being given a longer sentence. What's going on? Data laundering. It's a process by which technologists hide ugly truths inside black box algorithms and call them objective; call them meritocratic. When they're secret, important and destructive, I've coined a term for these algorithms: "weapons of math destruction." (Laughter) (Applause) They're everywhere, and it's not a mistake. These are private companies building private algorithms for private ends. Even the ones I talked about for teachers and the public police, those were built by private companies and sold to the government institutions. They call it their "secret sauce" — that's why they can't tell us about it. It's also private power. They are profiting for wielding the authority of the inscrutable. Now you might think, since all this stuff is private and there's competition, maybe the free market will solve this problem. It won't. There's a lot of money to be made in unfairness. Also, we're not economic rational agents. We all are biased. We're all racist and bigoted in ways that we wish we weren't, in ways that we don't even know. We know this, though, in aggregate, because sociologists have consistently demonstrated this with these experiments they build, where they send a bunch of applications to jobs out, equally qualified but some have white-sounding names and some have black-sounding names, and it's always disappointing, the results — always. So we are the ones that are biased, and we are injecting those biases into the algorithms by choosing what data to collect, like I chose not to think about ramen noodles — I decided it was irrelevant. But by trusting the data that's actually picking up on past practices and by choosing the definition of success, how can we expect the algorithms to emerge unscathed? We can't. We have to check them. We have to check them for fairness. The good news is, we can check them for fairness. Algorithms can be interrogated, and they will tell us the truth every time. And we can fix them. We can make them better. I call this an algorithmic audit, and I'll walk you through it. First, data integrity check. For the recidivism risk algorithm I talked about, a data integrity check would mean we'd have to come to terms with the fact that in the US, whites and blacks smoke pot at the same rate but blacks are far more likely to be arrested — four or five times more likely, depending on the area. What is that bias looking like in other crime categories, and how do we account for it? Second, we should think about the definition of success, audit that. Remember — with the hiring algorithm? We talked about it. Someone who stays for four years and is promoted once? Well, that is a successful employee, but it's also an employee that is supported by their culture. That said, also it can be quite biased. We need to separate those two things. We should look to the blind orchestra audition as an example. That's where the people auditioning are behind a sheet. What I want to think about there is the people who are listening have decided what's important and they've decided what's not important, and they're not getting distracted by that. When the blind orchestra auditions started, the number of women in orchestras went up by a factor of five. Next, we have to consider accuracy. This is where the value-added model for teachers would fail immediately. No algorithm is perfect, of course, so we have to consider the errors of every algorithm. How often are there errors, and for whom does this model fail? What is the cost of that failure? And finally, we have to consider the long-term effects of algorithms, the feedback loops that are engendering. That sounds abstract, but imagine if Facebook engineers had considered that before they decided to show us only things that our friends had posted. I have two more messages, one for the data scientists out there. Data scientists: we should not be the arbiters of truth. We should be translators of ethical discussions that happen in larger society. (Applause) And the rest of you, the non-data scientists: this is not a math test. This is a political fight. We need to demand accountability for our algorithmic overlords. (Applause) The era of blind faith in big data must end. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
A lyrical bridge between past, present and future | {0: 'David Whyte writes at the intersection of interior and exterior worlds, what he calls the conversational nature of reality, bringing new territory into view with his distinctly personal style.'} | TED2017 | The youthful perspective on the future, the present perspective on the future and the future, mature perspective on the future — I'd like to try and bring all those three tenses together in one identity tonight. And you could say that the poet, in many ways, looks at what I call "the conversational nature of reality." And you ask yourself: What is the conversational nature of reality? The conversational nature of reality is the fact that whatever you desire of the world — whatever you desire of your partner in a marriage or a love relationship, whatever you desire of your children, whatever you desire of the people who work for you or with you, or your world — will not happen exactly as you would like it to happen. But equally, whatever the world desires of us — whatever our partner, our child, our colleague, our industry, our future demands of us, will also not happen. And what actually happens is this frontier between what you think is you and what you think is not you. And this frontier of actual meeting between what we call a self and what we call the world is the only place, actually, where things are real. But it's quite astonishing, how little time we spend at this conversational frontier, and not abstracted away from it in one strategy or another. I was coming through immigration, which is quite a dramatic border at the moment, into the US last year, and, you know, you get off an international flight across the Atlantic, and you're not in the best place; you're not at your most spiritually mature. You're quite impatient with the rest of humanity, in fact. So when you get up to immigration with your shirt collar out and a day's growth of beard, and you have very little patience, and the immigration officer looked at my passport and said, "What do you do, Mr. Whyte?" I said, "I work with the conversational nature of reality." (Laughter) And he leaned forward over his podium and he said, "I needed you last night." (Laughter) (Applause) And I said, "I'm sorry, my powers as a poet and philosopher only go so far. I'm not sure I can —" But before we knew it, we were into a conversation about his marriage. Here he was in his uniform, and the interesting thing was, he was looking up and down the row of officers to make sure his supervisor didn't see that we was having a real conversation. But all of us live at this conversational frontier with the future. I'd like to put you in the shoes of my Irish niece, Marlene McCormack, standing on a cliff edge on the western coast of Spain, overlooking the broad Atlantic. Twenty-three years old, she's just walked 500 miles from Saint Jean Pied de Port on the French side of the Pyrenees, all the way across Northern Spain, on this very famous, old and contemporary pilgrimage called the Camino de Santiago de Compostela — the Path to Santiago of Compostela. And when you get to Santiago, actually, it can be something of an anticlimax, because there are 100,000 people living there who are not necessarily applauding you as you're coming into town. (Laughter) And 10,000 of them are trying to sell you a memento of your journey. But you do have the possibility of going on for three more days to this place where Marlene stood, called, in Spanish, Finisterre, in English, Finisterre, from the Latin, meaning "the ends of the earth," the place where ground turns to ocean; the place where your present turns into the future. And Marlene had walked this way — she just graduated as a 23-year-old from the University of Sligo with a degree in Irish drama. And she said to me, "I don't think the major corporations of the world will be knocking on my door." I said, "Listen, I've worked in corporations all over the world for decades; a degree in drama is what would most prepare you for the adult — (Laughter) corporate world." (Applause) But she said, "I'm not interested in that, anyway. I don't want to teach drama, I want to become a dramatist. I want to write plays. So I walked the Camino in order to give myself some courage, in order to walk into my future." And I said, "What was the most powerful moment you had on the whole Camino, the very most powerful moment?" She said, "I had many powerful moments, but you know, the most powerful moment was post-Camino, was the three days you go on from Santiago and come to this cliff edge. And you go through three rituals. The first ritual is to eat a tapas plate of scallops" — or if you're vegetarian, to contemplate the scallop shell. (Laughter) Because the scallop shell has been the icon and badge of your walk, and every arrow that you have seen along that way has been pointing underneath a scallop shell. So really, this first ritual is saying: How did you get to this place? How did you follow the path to get here? How do you hold the conversation of life when you feel unbesieged, when you're unbullied, when you're left to yourself? How do you hold the conversation of life that brings you to this place? And the second ritual is that you burn something that you've brought. I said, "What did you burn, Marlene?" She said, "I burned a letter and two postcards." I said, "Astonishing. Twenty-three years old and you have paper. I can't believe it." (Laughter) I'm sure there's a Camino app where you can just delete a traumatic text, you know? (Laughter) It will engage the flashlight, imbue it with color and disappear in a firework of flames. But you either bring a letter or you write one there, and you burn it. And of course we know intuitively what is on those letters and postcards. It's a form of affection and love that is now no longer extant, yeah? And then the third ritual: between all these fires are large piles of clothes. And you leave an item of clothing that has helped you to get to this place. And I said to Marlene, "What did you leave at the cliff edge?" She said, "I left my boots — the very things that I walked in, actually. They were beautiful boots, I loved those boots, but they were finished after seven weeks of walking. So I walked away in my trainers, but I left my boots there." She said, "It was really incredible. The most powerful moment was, the sun was going down, but the full moon was coming up behind me. And the full moon was illuminated by the dying sun in such a powerful way that even after the sun had dropped below the horizon, the moon could still see that sun. And I had a moon shadow, and I was looking at my moon shadow walking across the Atlantic, across this ocean. And I thought, 'Oh! That's my new self going into the future.' But suddenly I realized the sun was falling further. The moon was losing its reflection, and my shadow was disappearing. The most powerful moment I had on the whole Camino was when I realized I myself had to walk across that unknown sea into my future." Well, I was so taken by this story, I wrote this piece for her. We were driving at the time; we got home, I sat on the couch, I wrote until two in the morning — everyone had gone to bed — and I gave it to Marlene at breakfast time. It's called, "Finisterre," for Marlene McCormack. "The road in the end the road in the end taking the path the sun had taken the road in the end taking the path the sun had taken into the western sea the road in the end taking the path the sun had taken into the western sea and the moon the moon rising behind you as you stood where ground turned to ocean: no way to your future now no way to your future now except the way your shadow could take, walking before you across water, going where shadows go, no way to make sense of a world that wouldn't let you pass except to call an end to the way you had come, to take out each letter you had brought and light their illumined corners; and to read them as they drifted on the late western light; to empty your bags to empty your bags; to sort this and to leave that to sort this and to leave that; to promise what you needed to promise all along to promise what you needed to promise all along, and to abandon the shoes that brought you here right at the water's edge, not because you had given up not because you had given up but because now, you would find a different way to tread, and because, through it all, part of you would still walk on, no matter how, over the waves." "Finisterre." For Marlene McCormack — (Applause) who has already had her third play performed in off-off-off-off-Broadway — in Dublin. (Laughter) But she's on her way. This is the last piece. This is about the supposed arrival at the sum of all of our endeavors. In Santiago itself — it could be Santiago, it could be Mecca, it could be Varanasi, it could be Kyoto, it could be that threshold you've set for yourself, the disturbing approach to the consummation of all your goals. And one of the difficulties about walking into your life, about coming into this body, into this world fully, is you start to realize that you have manufactured three abiding illusions that the rest of humanity has shared with you since the beginning of time. And the first illusion is that you can somehow construct a life in which you are not vulnerable. You can somehow be immune to all of the difficulties and ill health and losses that humanity has been subject to since the beginning of time. If we look out at the natural world, there's no part of that world that doesn't go through cycles of, first, incipience, or hiddenness, but then growth, fullness, but then a beautiful, to begin with, disappearance, and then a very austere, full disappearance. We look at that, we say, "That's beautiful, but can I just have the first half of the equation, please? And when the disappearance is happening, I'll close my eyes and wait for the new cycle to come around." Which means most human beings are at war with reality 50 percent of the time. The mature identity is able to live in the full cycle. The second illusion is, I can construct a life in which I will not have my heart broken. Romance is the first place we start to do it. When you're at the beginning of a new romance or a new marriage, you say, "I have found the person who will not break my heart." I'm sorry; you have chosen them out unconsciously for that exact core competency. (Laughter) They will break your heart. Why? Because you care about them. You look at parenting, yeah? Parenting: "I will be the perfect mother and father." Your children will break your heart. And they don't even have to do anything spectacular or dramatic. But usually, they do do something spectacular or dramatic — (Laughter) to break your heart. And then they live with you as spies and saboteurs for years, watching your every psychological move, and spotting your every weakness. And one day, when they're about 14 years old, with your back turned to them, in the kitchen, while you're making something for them — (Laughter) the psychological stiletto goes in. (Laughter) (Applause) And you say, "How did you know exactly where to place it?" (Laughter) And they say, "I've been watching you for — (Laughter) a good few years." And then we hope that our armored, professional personalities will prevent us from having our heart broken in work. But if you're sincere about your work, it should break your heart. You should get to thresholds where you do not know how to proceed. You do not know how to get from here to there. What does that do? It puts you into a proper relationship with reality. Why? Because you have to ask for help. Heartbreak. We don't have a choice about heartbreak, we only have a choice of having our hearts broken over people and things and projects that we deeply care about. And the last illusion is, I can somehow plan enough and arrange things that I will be able to see the path to the end right from where I'm standing, right to the horizon. But when you think about it, the only environment in which that would be true would be a flat desert, empty of any other life. But even in a flat desert, the curvature of the earth would take the path away from you. So, no; you see the path, and then you don't and then you see it again. So this is "Santiago," the supposed arrival, which is a kind of return to the beginning all at the same time. We have this experience of the journey, which is in all of our great spiritual traditions, of pilgrimage. But just by actually standing in the ground of your life fully, not trying to abstract yourself into a strategic future that's actually just an escape from present heartbreak; the ability to stand in the ground of your life and to look at the horizon that is pulling you — in that moment, you are the whole journey. You are the whole conversation. "Santiago." "The road seen, then not seen the road seen, then not seen the hillside hiding then revealing the way you should take the road seen, then not seen the hillside hiding then revealing the way you should take, the road dropping away from you as if leaving you to walk on thin air, then catching you, catching you, holding you up, when you thought you would fall, catching you, holding you up, when you thought you would fall, and the way forward the way forward always in the end the way that you came, the way forward always in the end the way that you came, the way that you followed, the way that carried you into your future, that brought you to this place, that brought you to this place, no matter that it sometimes had to take your promise from you, no matter that it always had to break your heart along the way: the sense the sense of having walked from deep inside yourself out into the revelation, to have risked yourself for something that seemed to stand both inside you and far beyond you, and that called you back in the end to the only road you could follow, walking as you did, in your rags of love walking as you did, in your rags of love and speaking in the voice that by night became a prayer for safe arrival, so that one day one day you realized that what you wanted had actually already happened one day you realized that what you wanted had actually already happened and long ago and in the dwelling place in which you lived before you began, and that and that every step along the way, every step along the way, you had carried the heart and the mind and the promise that first set you off and then drew you on, and that and that you were more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way you were more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach you were more marvelous in that simple wish to find a way than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach: as if, all along, you had thought the end point might be a city with golden domes, and cheering crowds, and turning the corner at what you thought was the end of the road, you found just a simple reflection, and a clear revelation beneath the face looking back and beneath it another invitation, all in one glimpse all in one glimpse: like a person like a person or a place you had sought forever like a person or a place you had sought forever, like a bold field of freedom that beckoned you beyond; like another life like another life, and the road the road still stretching on." (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you very much. Thank you. You're very kind. Thank you. (Applause) |
What would happen if we upload our brains to computers? | {0: 'Does humanity have a future as uploaded minds? In his work, Robin Hanson asks this and other extra-large questions.'} | TED2017 | Someday, we may have robots as smart as people, artificial intelligence, AI. How could that happen? One route is that we'll just keep accumulating better software, like we've been doing for 70 years. At past rates of progress, that may take centuries. Some say it'll happen a lot faster as we discover grand new powerful theories of intelligence. I'm skeptical. But a third scenario is what I'm going to talk about today. The idea is to port the software from the human brain. To do this, we're going to need three technologies to be good enough, and none of them are there yet. First, we're going to need lots of cheap, fast, parallel computers. Second, we're going to need to scan individual human brains in fine spatial and chemical detail, to see exactly what cells are where, connected to what, of what type. And third, we're going to need computer models of how each kind of brain cell works — taking input signals, changing interval state and sending output signals. If we have good enough models of all the kinds of brain cells and a good enough model of the brain, we can put it together to make a good enough model of an entire brain, and that model would have the same input-output behavior as the original. So if you talk to it, it might talk back. If you ask it to do things, it might do them. And if we could do that, everything would change. People have been talking about this idea for decades, under the name of "uploads." I'm going to call them "ems." When they talk about it, they say, "Is this even possible? If you made one, would it be conscious? Or is it just an empty machine? If you made one of me, is that me or someone else?" These are all fascinating questions that I'm going to ignore ... (Laughter) because I see a neglected question: What would actually happen? I became obsessed with this question. I spent four years trying to analyze it, using standard academic tools, to guess what would happen, and I'm here to tell you what I found. But be warned — I'm not offering inspiration, I'm offering analysis. I see my job as telling you what's most likely to happen if we did the least to avoid it. If you aren't at least a bit disturbed by something I tell you here, you're just not paying attention. (Laughter) OK, the first thing I can tell you is that ems spend most of their life in virtual reality. This is what you might look like if you were using virtual reality. And this is what you might see: sunlight glinting off of water, you might hear gulls flying above, you might even feel the wind on your cheeks or smell seawater, with advanced hardware. Now, if you were to spend a lot of time here, you might want a dashboard where you could do things like make a phone call, move to a new virtual world, check your bank account. Now, while this is what you would look like in virtual reality, this is what an em would look like in virtual reality. It's computer hardware sitting in a server rack somewhere. But still, it could see and experience the same thing. But some things are different for ems. First, while you'll probably always notice that virtual reality isn't entirely real, to an em, it can feel as real to them as this room feels to you now or as anything ever feels. And ems also have some more action possibilities. For example, your mind just always runs at the same speed, but an em can add more or less computer hardware to run faster or slower, and therefore, if the world around them seems to be going too fast, they can just speed up their mind, and the world around them would seem to slow down. In addition, an em can make a copy of itself at that moment. This copy would remember everything the same, and if it starts out with the same speed, looking at the same speed, it might even need to be told, "You are the copy." And em could make archive copies, and with enough archives, an em can be immortal — in principle, though not usually in practice. And an em can move its brain, the computer that represents its brain, from one physical location to another. Ems can actually move around the world at the speed of light, and by moving to a new location, they can interact more quickly with ems near that new location. So far, I've been talking about what ems can do. What do ems choose to do? To understand that, we'll need to understand three key facts. First, ems by definition do what the human they emulate would do in the same situation. So their lives and behavior are very human. They're mainly different because they're living in a different world. Second, ems need real resources to survive. You need food and shelter or you'll die. Also, ems need computer hardware, energy, cooling, or they can't exist. For every subjective minute that an em experiences, someone, usually that em, had to work to pay for it. Third, ems are poor. (Laughter) The em population can grow quicker than the em economy, so that means wages fall down to em subsistence levels. That means ems have to be working most of the time. So that means this is what ems usually see: beautiful and luxurious, but desks — they're working most of the time. Now, a subsistence wage scenario, you might think, is exotic and strange, but it's actually the usual case in human history, and it's how pretty much all wild animals have ever lived, so we know what humans do in this situation. Humans basically do what it takes to survive, and this is what lets me say so much about the em world. When creatures are rich, like you, you have to know a lot about what they want to figure out what they do. When creatures are poor, you know that they mostly do what it takes to survive. So we've been talking about the em world from the point of view of the ems — now, let's step back and look at their whole world. First, the em world grows much faster than ours, roughly a hundred times faster. So the amount of change we would experience in a century or two, they would experience in a year or two. And I'm not really willing to project this age much beyond that, because plausibly by then something else will happen, I don't know what. Second, the typical emulation runs even faster, roughly a thousand times human speed. So for them, they experience thousands of years in this year or two, and for them, the world around them is actually changing more slowly than your world seems to change for you. Third, ems are crammed together in a small number of very dense cities. This is not only how they see themselves in virtual reality, it's also how they actually are physically crammed together. So at em speeds, physical travel feels really painfully slow, so most em cities are self-sufficient, most war is cyber war, and most of the rest of the earth away from the em cities is left to the humans, because the ems really aren't that interested in it. Speaking of humans, you were wanting to hear about that. Humans must retire, at once, for good. They just can't compete. Now, humans start out owning all of the capital in this world. The economy grows very fast, their wealth grows very fast. Humans get rich, collectively. As you may know, most humans today don't actually own that much besides their ability to work, so between now and then, they need to acquire sufficient assets, insurance or sharing arrangements, or they may starve. I highly recommend avoiding this outcome. (Laughter) Now, you might wonder, why would ems let humans exist? Why not kill them, take their stuff? But notice we have many unproductive retirees around us today, and we don't kill them and take their stuff. (Laughter) In part, that's because it would disrupt the institutions we share with them. Other groups would wonder who's next, so plausibly, ems may well let humans retire in peace during the age of em. You should worry more that the age of em only lasts a year or two and you don't know what happens next. Ems are very much like humans, but they are not like the typical human. The typical em is a copy of the few hundred most productive humans. So in fact, they are as elite, compared to the typical human, as the typical billionaire, Nobel Prize winner, Olympic gold medalist, head of state. Ems look on humans perhaps with nostalgia and gratitude, but not so much respect, which is, if you think about it, how you think about your ancestors. We know many things about how humans differ in terms of productivity. We can just use those to predict features of ems — for example, they tend to be smart, conscientious, hard-working, married, religious, middle-aged. These are features of ems. Em world also contains enormous variety. Not only does it continue on with most of the kinds of variety that humans do, including variety of industry and profession, they also have many new kinds of variety, and one of the most important is mind speed. Ems can plausibly go from human speed up to a million times faster than human speed, and down to a billion times slower than human speed. Faster ems tend to have markers of high status. They embody more wealth. They win arguments. They sit at premium locations. Slower ems are mostly retirees, and they are like the ghosts of our literature. If you recall, ghosts are all around us — you can interact with them if you pay the price. But they don't know much, they can't influence much, and they're obsessed with the past, so what's the point? (Laughter) Ems also have more variety in the structure of their lives. This is your life: you start and you end, really simple. This is the life of an em, who every day splits off some short-term copies to do short-term tasks and then end. We'll talk more about those short term versions in a moment, but they are much more efficient because they don't have to rest for the next day. This em is more opportunistic. They make more copies of themselves when there's more demand for that. They don't know which way the future's going. This is an em designer, who conceives of a large system and then breaks recursively into copies who elaborate that, so ems can implement larger, more coherent designs. This an emulation plumber who remembers that every day, for the last 20 years, they only ever worked two hours a day, a life of leisure. But what really happened is, every day they had a thousand copies, each of whom did a two-hour plumbing job, and only one of them went on to the next day. Objectively, they're working well over 99 percent of the time. Subjectively, they remember a life of leisure. (Laughter) This, again, is you. You start and you end. This could be you if at the start of party, you took a drug that meant you would not remember that party ever after that day. Some people do this, I'm told. Toward the end of the party, will you say to yourself, "I'm about to die, this is terrible. That person tomorrow isn't me, because they won't remember what I do." Or you could say, "I will go on tomorrow. I just won't remember what I did." This is an em who splits off a short-term copy to do a short-term task and then end. They have the same two attitude possibilities. They can say, "I'm a new short-term creature with a short life. I hate this." Or "I'm a part of a larger creature who won't remember this part." I predict they'll have that second attitude, not because it's philosophically correct, but because it helps them get along. Today, if the president says we must invade Iraq, and you say, "Why?" and they say, "State secret," you're not sure if you can trust them, but for ems, a copy of the president and a copy of you can go inside a safe, explain all their secret reasons, and then one bit comes out from your copy to yourself, telling you if you were convinced. So now you can know there is a good reason. I know you guys are all eager to evaluate this world. You're eager to decide if you love it or hate it. But think: your ancestors from thousands of years ago would have loved or hated your world based on the first few things they heard about it, because your world is really just weird. So before judging a strange future world, you should really learn a lot about it, maybe read a whole book about it, and then, if you don't like it, work to change it. Thank you. (Applause) |
What the sugar coating on your cells is trying to tell you | {0: 'Professor Carolyn Bertozzi is a chemical biologist who invents technologies and medicines based on disease-causing sugar molecules.'} | TEDxStanford | This is a talk about sugar and cancer. I became interested in sugar when I was in college. Not this kind of sugar. It was the sugar that our biology professors taught us about in the context of the coating of your cells. Maybe you didn't know that your cells are coated with sugar. And I didn't know that, either, until I took these courses in college, but back then — and this was in, let's just call it the 1980s — people didn't know much about why our cells are coated with sugar. And when I dug through my notes, what I noticed I had written down is that the sugar coating on our cells is like the sugar coating on a peanut M and M. And people thought the sugar coating on our cells was like a protective coating that somehow made our cells stronger or tougher. But we now know, many decades later, that it's much more complicated than that, and that the sugars on our cells are actually very complex. And if you could shrink yourself down to a little miniature airplane and fly right along the surface of your cells, it might look something like this — with geographical features. And now, the complex sugars are these trees and bushes — weeping willows that are swaying in the wind and moving with the waves. And when I started thinking about all these complex sugars that are like this foliage on our cells, it became one of the most interesting problems that I encountered as a biologist and also as a chemist. And so now we tend to think about the sugars that are populating the surface of our cells as a language. They have a lot of information stored in their complex structures. But what are they trying to tell us? I can tell you that we do know some information that comes from these sugars, and it's turned out already to be incredibly important in the world of medicine. For example, one thing your sugars are telling us is your blood type. So your blood cells, your red blood cells, are coated with sugars, and the chemical structures of those sugars determine your blood type. So for example, I know that I am blood type O. How many people are also blood type O? Put your hands up. It's a pretty common one, so when so few hands go up, either you're not paying attention or you don't know your blood type, and both of those are bad. (Laughter) But for those of you who share the blood type O with me, what this means is that we have this chemical structure on the surface of our blood cells: three simple sugars linked together to make a more complex sugar. And that, by definition, is blood type O. Now, how many people are blood type A? Right here. That means you have an enzyme in your cells that adds one more building block, that red sugar, to build a more complex structure. And how many people are blood type B? Quite a few. You have a slightly different enzyme than the A people, so you build a slightly different structure, and those of you that are AB have the enzyme from your mother, the other enzyme from your father, and now you make both of these structures in roughly equal proportions. And when this was figured out, which is now back in the previous century, this enabled one of the most important medical procedures in the world, which, of course, is the blood transfusion. And by knowing what your blood type is, we can make sure, if you ever need a transfusion, that your donor has the same blood type, so that your body doesn't see foreign sugars, which it wouldn't like and would certainly reject. What else are the sugars on the surface of your cells trying to tell us? Well, those sugars might be telling us that you have cancer. So a few decades ago, correlations began to emerge from the analysis of tumor tissue. And the typical scenario is a patient would have a tumor detected, and the tissue would be removed in a biopsy procedure and then sent down to a pathology lab where that tissue would be analyzed to look for chemical changes that might inform the oncologist about the best course of treatment. And what was discovered from studies like that is that the sugars have changed when the cell transforms from being healthy to being sick. And those correlations have come up again and again and again. But a big question in the field has been: Why? Why do cancers have different sugars? What's the importance of that? Why does it happen, and what can we do about it if it does turn out to be related to the disease process? So, one of the changes that we study is an increase in the density of a particular sugar that's called sialic acid. And I think this is going to be one of the most important sugars of our times, so I would encourage everybody to get familiar with this word. Sialic acid is not the kind of sugar that we eat. Those are different sugars. This is a kind of sugar that is actually found at certain levels on all of the cells in your body. It's actually quite common on your cells. But for some reason, cancer cells, at least in a successful, progressive disease, tend to have more sialic acid than a normal, healthy cell would have. And why? What does that mean? Well, what we've learned is that it has to do with your immune system. So let me tell you a little bit about the importance of your immune system in cancer. And this is something that's, I think, in the news a lot these days. You know, people are starting to become familiar with the term "cancer immune therapy." And some of you might even know people who are benefiting from these very new ways of treating cancer. What we now know is that your immune cells, which are the white blood cells coursing through your bloodstream, protect you on a daily basis from things gone bad — including cancer. And so in this picture, those little green balls are your immune cells, and that big pink cell is a cancer cell. And these immune cells go around and taste all the cells in your body. That's their job. And most of the time, the cells taste OK. But once in a while, a cell might taste bad. Hopefully, that's the cancer cell, and when those immune cells get the bad taste, they launch an all-out strike and kill those cells. So we know that. We also know that if you can potentiate that tasting, if you can encourage those immune cells to actually take a big old bite out of a cancer cell, you get a better job protecting yourself from cancer every day and maybe even curing a cancer. And there are now a couple of drugs out there in the market that are used to treat cancer patients that act exactly by this process. They activate the immune system so that the immune system can be more vigorous in protecting us from cancer. In fact, one of those drugs may well have spared President Jimmy Carter's life. Do you remember, President Carter had malignant melanoma that had metastasized to his brain, and that diagnosis is one that is usually accompanied by numbers like "months to live." But he was treated with one of these new immune-stimulating drugs, and now his melanoma appears to be in remission, which is remarkable, considering the situation only a few years ago. In fact, it's so remarkable that provocative statements like this one: "Cancer is having a penicillin moment," people are saying, with these new immune therapy drugs. I mean, that's an incredibly bold thing to say about a disease which we've been fighting for a long time and mostly losing the battle with. So this is very exciting. Now what does this have to do with sugars? Well, I'll tell you what we've learned. When an immune cell snuggles up against a cancer cell to take a taste, it's looking for signs of disease, and if it finds those signs, the cell gets activated and it launches a missile strike and kills the cell. But if that cancer cell has a dense forest of that sugar, sialic acid, well, it starts to taste pretty good. And there's a protein on immune cells that grabs the sialic acid, and if that protein gets held at that synapse between the immune cell and the cancer cell, it puts that immune cell to sleep. The sialic acids are telling the immune cell, "Hey, this cell's all right. Nothing to see here, move along. Look somewhere else." So in other words, as long as our cells are wearing a thick coat of sialic acid, they look fabulous, right? It's amazing. And what if you could strip off that coat and take that sugar away? Well, your immune system might be able to see that cancer cell for what it really is: something that needs to be destroyed. And so this is what we're doing in my lab. We're developing new medicines that are basically cell-surface lawnmowers — molecules that go down to the surface of these cancer cells and just cut off those sialic acids, so that the immune system can reach its full potential in eliminating those cancer cells from our body. So in closing, let me just remind you again: your cells are coated with sugars. The sugars are telling cells around that cell whether the cell is good or bad. And that's important, because our immune system needs to leave the good cells alone. Otherwise, we'd have autoimmune diseases. But once in a while, cancers get the ability to express these new sugars. And now that we understand how those sugars mesmerize the immune system, we can come up with new medicines to wake up those immune cells, tell them, "Ignore the sugars, eat the cell and have a delicious snack, on cancer." Thank you. (Applause) |
"The Sacred Art of the Ori" | {0: "Laolu Senbanjo's motto is: “Everything is my canvas.”"} | TED2017 | [Yoruba: Freeborn Ijebu-Ode son,] [of true Ogbogbo Clan,] [whose wealth and resources surpass all that Europe ever had,] [whose altar is filled with gold.] This chant is called the oríkì. My grandmother used to sing it to me when I was a child in Nigeria. See, an oríkì is the song of praise of the Yoruba people, and this particularly speaks of treasures that the West does not have. Mama — that's what I call my grandmother — told me many stories about Yoruba mythology. You see, the Yorubas are an ethnic group from the southwestern part of Nigeria, and I was always fascinated by these stories. I was always intrigued. And Yoruba culture has inspired my art since I was a child. You see, African art is not just what you buy at Harlem markets in New York. Every artist has a name, and every artist has a story. This is my story. See, mama had tattoos on her arms and her legs. As a child, I thought she was born with them, with beautiful black lines and detailed symbols. And then she told me that they were actually symbols from the Yoruba mythology. I never knew how this was going to influence the artist that I am today. You see, as a young child, I saw art everywhere. I remember the house we lived in in Ilorin, in Stadium Road. We had marble floors, and you know, I would look at the marble floors, and I would see all sorts of patterns and designs in it, and I thought everybody could see them. So I would call my brother, and I would be like, "Ikeolu, come and see this marble design, see this pattern, see this mask." And he would tell me, "Laolu, I don't see anything." So I would use ink, and I would trace out what I saw on the floor. And then when my mom noticed, she got really upset. (Laughter) But that didn't stop me. I switched from ink to chalk, because I got in trouble a lot with my teachers and my parents. So I remember my mom said, "Laolu, we are Christians. Why don't you draw like other people? Why don't you draw landscapes or maybe you draw chairs or furniture, or maybe even draw Jesus?" You know, I could paint the whole house if I had a chance, but when I grew up, I knew being an artist was not an option, so I wanted to be the person my parents wanted me to be, so I went to law school. Of course, that's my dad there. He was so proud that day. And this was what my notebooks looked like in law school. (Laughter) Of course I would miss classes, and I would make up excuses why I wasn't going to class. But when I started working at the Human Rights Commission as a human rights attorney, my mind was elsewhere. I saw a very tough reality. I worked with children who had to choose between getting an education and actually being forced into marriage. I was so frustrated seeing all the injustice around me, and my only outlet was art, so I started painting. This piece is called "Dreamscape." So when you zoom into this piece, you're going to see a girl child and the accidental birth, the fact that our future is controlled by where we are born. Now, the next one you see a man and a man holding hands, a woman and a woman holding hands. You see, in Nigeria, same-sex relationship is criminalized. You can actually get 14 years for that. With my art, I like to tell stories. Through my art, I like to start a conversation. So in this one, you see the map of Africa, you see the questions, you see crying, and there you see syringes plugged into Africa and the natural resources being drained out. So I asked myself, where does it go? Who benefits from all of this? You see, with my art, the way I weave my art around the patterns, the masks, the stories, and the way I use my lines, it's all from the Yoruba culture. So in 2013, I made a big gamble. I quit my job and I moved to New York City to practice art full time. Of course, my parents were like, "Oh, [it's just a phase.] He'll come back." But life as an artist in New York was not easy, because I was broke, no money, no gallery agents, no representation, so no gallery would show my work. So I thought to myself, I need to survive. So I started painting on clothes to make a living. I started painting on shoes. I started customizing things for people. And then soon I realized the power, because people were so proud to wear their stories. So I started painting on everything. I painted on guitars, I started doing murals, anything I could find my hand on I painted, and everything became my canvas. So one day, I was just going on my Instagram feed, and I saw this picture. It was Reign. She took a picture standing in front my art, and the moment I saw that photo, something happened in that moment. I could actually see my artwork go into her and come out of her literally, and that's how I started painting on human bodies. As a child I saw art on the marble floors, I saw art on walls, but now I see art on people's faces and people's bodies. I remember my grandmother, and I realized that most of my creative instincts were actually based on my childhood memories and the art on my grandmother's skin. Now I look at all the people I painted, and I think to myself, like, what would it look like if we all walked around like gods and goddesses from Yoruba mythology? And boom, that's how The Sacred Art of the Ori was born. You see, Ori in Yoruba mythology means your soul, it means your essence, it means your instincts. And I realized that only when you tap into your Ori, then you can actually move mountains. So there's something so immediate about painting on human bodies. It's like art in motion. It's like a 3D experience. So one day, I was just doing my regular work in Brooklyn, and I got an email that said, "Hi, I'm a big fan of your work. Would you like to paint for my music video? Signed, Beyoncé." Like, Beyoncé emailed me. I was like, what? (Laughter) I was like, what, how did she even know me? I thought this can't be true. Of course I thought it was a scam. The Nigerian in me was like, nah. (Laughter) (Applause) But incredibly enough, it was real, it was true, and things happened really fast. You see, Beyoncé wanted to pay homage to New Orleans, and my art reminded her of her creole origins. So when "Lemonade" dropped, of course, boom, everything just went from zero to 100 real fast. People featured me in magazines, interviews. People stopped me in the street. People knew my name, like — And sometimes I had to step back and just chill, and, like, take everything in. You know, as artists, we work so hard all our lives for our art to be recognized, and for this I feel blessed. However, the attorney in me is still there, so I use my art to fight for what I believe in. My Yoruba heritage is always there. I'd like to share with you tonight some of my art in motion. Please, welcome with me on stage. (Music) (Applause) Now, this is Geli, and this is Reign. These are the first two people I ever painted in my life, and I spent the past day painting on them. Tonight, they represent my hopes and my fears. Now, I put my fears on the back. I put my hopes in front. What are my hopes? I hope that people know that Africa is not just one huge, nameless continent that is all the same. I also hope that people know that in Nigeria, we have over 350 ethnic groups and languages, and I am just one artist from one of them. (Applause) I also hope that you know that I hope I will be able to change the way people talk about African art on the continent and here, and I hope you know that African art is not just what you buy at Harlem markets in New York and that every piece of art you see has a story, and every artist has a name. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
When workers own companies, the economy is more resilient | {0: 'Niki Okuk is working to create social and economic justice and worker dignity.'} | TEDxCrenshaw | Are you tired of your boss? (Laughter) Are you tired of going to work and making money for other people? And who are those people anyways? Those people that make money from your work. Well, they're capitalists. They have capital, and they use your labor to make more capital. So if you're tired of going to work and making money for other people, then you're probably like me — just tired of capitalism. Which is ironic, because I'm a capitalist. (Laughter) I own a small business — Rco Tires in Compton. A few years ago, when I read Van Jones, and he wrote, "Let's make green collar jobs in the hood," I took him really seriously. So I cofounded, own and operate a tire recycling company, and I'm really proud of what we've done. So far, we've recycled a hundred million pounds of rubber. That's 21 million gallons of oil diverted from landfills into new products. (Cheers) We also employ about 15 guys — mostly people of color, most of whom are felons, and we pay above the minimum wage, and we are now proud members of the United Steelworkers Union. (Applause) Now, Rco is not a cooperative now. It's a privately held company with community-minded ownership, but I would like it to become one. I would like for them to fire the boss — that's me. (Laughter) And I'm going to tell you why, but first, let me tell you how we got started. So a lot of people ask, "How did Rco come to be?" And I have to be really honest. I leveraged my white privilege. So, here's how white privilege worked for me and Rco. My white grandmother was born on her family's plantation in Arkansas in 1918. She traveled with her white father west, following the oil boom. And he held various union oil jobs — jobs which would have never been given to my black great-grandfather, had he lived here at the time. Granny became a hairdresser and then got a loan with her husband who built their home in West Los Angeles — a loan which would never have been given to a black family at the time. And after my grandfather passed away, my granny was able to keep that house because she had his pension and his health care from a state job which he held, which again, would have never been given to a black man before the anti-discrimination act of the 1960s. So, you fast-forward 30 years, and I graduate, and I want to start my own business with a pile of debt and a credit card, and no experience in the tire industry. But I had what most people didn't have. I had a clean, safe, free place to live. I moved in with my grandmother, and I was able to rent our first warehouse, buy our first truck, pay our first employees, because I didn't have to worry about paying myself, because I didn't need to feed myself, because I am the direct beneficiary of generations of white privilege. Now, telling the story of white privilege is important because very often people say, "Oh, we want more companies like yours. We want more Rco's, we want more black-owned businesses, female-led, triple bottom line, Ban the Box, green manufacturing companies," right? But the question we have to ask is, where is the wealth? Where is the money? Where's the capital in our communities to build the types of businesses that we want? And in telling a story of the white side of my family, I needed a dozen ways where blacks were excluded from the economy, whereas the white side of my family was able to gain access and traction, and build wealth ... Primarily because racism and capitalism are best homies, but — (Laughter) but what that means is that when we ask ourselves, "Why are our communities broke?" — Like, we're not just broke because we're broke; we're broke for a reason. Historical context really does matter. But our history tells another story as well. There's this incredible book called "Collective Courage," which is the story of how thousands of African Americans have been able to build businesses and schools, hospitals, farming cooperatives, banks, financial institutions — entire communities and sovereign economies, without a lot of capital. And they did it by working together and leveraging their community assets and trusting each other and putting solidarity first — not just profits by any means necessary. And they didn't have to wait around for celebrities and athletes to bring their money back to the hood. However, if you are a celebrity or an athlete, and you're listening to this, please feel free to bring your money. (Laughter) But they did it through cooperative economics, because they knew that capitalism was never going to finance black liberation. So, there are so many great examples in this book, and I suggest that everybody just read it because it answers the question I asked earlier, which was where are we going to get the wealth to build the types of business that we want. And the answer is going to have to be cooperative economics. There's a lot of different versions of cooperativism. What I'm talking about today is worker ownership. You may not have heard of worker ownership, but it's been an incredible tool for black economic liberation for a century, and it's also working all over the world right now. You may have heard of Black Wall Street or maybe the Zapatistas, but I'll give you an example that's a little bit closer to home. Right now, today, in South Bronx, is the country's largest worker-owned company. It's called Cooperative Home Care Associates, and it was founded by black and Latinx home care workers who are now able to pay themselves living wages, they have full-time hours, they have benefits and a pension, through their membership as a unit of SEIU. And these women owners now receive a dividend back on their ownership every year that the company has been profitable, which has been most years. So they're able to really enjoy the fruits of their labor because they fired the boss. They don't have any big investors. They don't have fat-cat CEOs or absentee owners taking the profit out of the company. They each pay in about 1,000 dollars over time in order to gain ownership, and now they own their job. Now, there's hundreds of more examples of companies like this springing up all across the country. And I'm so inspired by what they're doing, because it really represents an alternative to the type of economy we have now, which exploits all of us. It also represents an alternative to waiting around for big investors to bring chain stores, or big-box stores to our communities, because honestly, those types of developments, they steal resources from our communities. They put our mom-and-pop shops out of business, they make our entrepreneurs into wage workers, and they take money out of our pocket and send it to their shareholders. So, I was so inspired by all these stories of resistance and resilience that I got together with a few people here in Los Angeles, and we created LUCI. LUCI stands for the Los Angeles Union Cooperative Initiative, and our objective is to create more worker-owned businesses here in Los Angeles. So far, in the last year, we've created two: Pacific Electric, an electrical company, and Vermont Gage Carwash, which is right here in South-Central, some of you guys might be familiar with it. This long-time carwash is now owned and operated by its 20 workers, all of whom are union members as well. (Applause) So you might be wondering why the focus on union-worker ownership, but there's a lot of good reasons why the labor movement is a natural ally to the worker-ownership movement. To build these companies that we want in our community, we need a few things. We're going to need money, people and training. Unions have all of those things. America's working class has been paying union dues for decades, and with it, our unions have been building dignified, decent, and democratic workplaces for us. However, union jobs are on the steep decline, and it's time for us to start calling on our unions to really bring all of their financial and political capital to bear in the creation of new, union, living-wage jobs in our communities. Also, union halls are full of union members who understand the importance of solidarity and the power of collective action. These are the types of folks that want more union businesses to exist, so let's build them with them. Learning from our unions, learning from our past, learning from our peers, are all going to be very important to our success, which is why I'd like to leave you with one last example and a vision for the future ... and that vision is Mondragon, Spain. Mondragon, Spain is a community built entirely around worker cooperatives. There's 260-plus businesses here, manufacturing everything from bicycles to washing machines to transformers. And this group of businesses now employs 80,000 people and earns more than 12 billion euros in revenue every year. And all of the companies there are owned by the people that work in them. They've also built universities and hospitals and financial institutions. I mean, imagine if we could build something like this in South-Central. The late mayor of Jackson had a similar idea. He wanted to turn his entire city into a Mondragon-like cooperative economy, calling his ambitious plan "Jackson Rising." And when I look at Mondragon, I see really what working-class people can do for ourselves when we work together and make decisions for ourselves and each other and our communities. And what's really incredible about Mondragon is that while we are dreaming about them, they are dreaming about us. This community in Spain has decided to launch an international initiative to create more communities like it all over the world, by linking up with unions, by supporting organizations like LUCI, and by educating folks about the worker-ownership model. Now, here's what you can do to be a part of it. If you're a union member, go to your union meetings, and make sure that your union has a worker-ownership initiative, and become a part of it. If you're an entrepreneur, if you have a small business, or you're interested in starting one, then link up with LUCI or another organization like us to help you get started on the cooperative model. If you're a politician, or you work for one, or you just like talking to them, please get the city, state, federal and county legislation passed that we need in order to fund and support worker-owned businesses. And for everybody else, learn about our history, learn about our models, and seek us out so can support us, you can buy from us, invest in us, lend to us and join us, because it's really going to take all of us in order to build the more just and sustainable and resilient economy that we want for ourselves and our children. And with that, I would like to leave you with a quote from Arundhati Roy, and she writes ... "Our strategy should not be only to confront Empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To mock it. To shame it. With our art, our literature, our music, our brilliance, our joy, our sheer relentlessness — and our ability to tell our own stories. Not the stories that we're being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they're selling — their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their sense of inevitability. Because know this: They be few and we be many. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she's on her way. And on a quiet day, I can hear her breathing." Thank you. (Applause) |
Why we need to end the era of orphanages | {0: 'Tara Winkler helps vulnerable children escape poverty and be cared for within their families.'} | TEDxSydney | These are some photos of me volunteering in a Cambodian orphanage in 2006. When these photos were taken, I thought I was doing a really good thing and that I was really helping those kids. I had a lot to learn. It all started for me when I was 19 years old and went backpacking through Southeast Asia. When I reached Cambodia, I felt uncomfortable being on holiday surrounded by so much poverty and wanted to do something to give back. So I visited some orphanages and donated some clothes and books and some money to help the kids that I met. But one of the orphanages I visited was desperately poor. I had never encountered poverty like that before in my life. They didn't have funds for enough food, clean water or medical treatment, and the sad little faces on those kids were heartbreaking. So I was compelled to do something more to help. I fund-raised in Australia and returned to Cambodia the following year to volunteer at the orphanage for a few months. I taught English and bought water filters and food and took all of the kids to the dentist for the first time in their lives. But over the course of the next year, I came to discover that this orphanage that I had been supporting was terribly corrupt. The director had been embezzling every cent donated to the orphanage, and in my absence, the children were suffering such gross neglect that they were forced to catch mice to feed themselves. I also found out later that the director had been physically and sexually abusing the kids. I couldn't bring myself to turn my back on children who I had come to know and care about and return to my life in Australia. So I worked with a local team and the local authorities to set up a new orphanage and rescue the kids to give them a safe new home. But this is where my story takes another unexpected turn. As I adjusted to my new life running an orphanage in Cambodia, (Khmer) I learned to speak Khmer fluently, which means that I learned to speak the Khmer language fluently. And when I could communicate properly with the kids, I began to uncover some strange things. Most of the children we had removed from the orphanage were not, in fact, orphans at all. They had parents, and the few that were orphaned had other living relatives, like grandparents and aunties and uncles and other siblings. So why were these children living in an orphanage when they weren't orphans? Since 2005, the number of orphanages in Cambodia has risen by 75 percent, and the number of children living in Cambodian orphanages has nearly doubled, despite the fact that the vast majority of children living in these orphanages are not orphans in the traditional sense. They're children from poor families. So if the vast majority of children living in orphanages are not orphans, then the term "orphanage" is really just a euphemistic name for a residential care institution. These institutions go by other names as well, like "shelters," "safe houses," "children's homes," "children's villages," even "boarding schools." And this problem is not just confined to Cambodia. This map shows some of the countries that have seen a dramatic increase in the numbers of residential care institutions and the numbers of children being institutionalized. In Uganda, for example, the number of children living in institutions has increased by more than 1,600 percent since 1992. And the problems posed by putting kids into institutions don't just pertain to the corrupt and abusive institutions like the one that I rescued the kids from. The problems are with all forms of residential care. Over 60 years of international research has shown us that children who grow up in institutions, even the very best institutions, are at serious risk of developing mental illnesses, attachment disorders, growth and speech delays, and many will struggle with an inability to reintegrate back into society later in life and form healthy relationships as adults. These kids grow up without any model of family or of what good parenting looks like, so they then can struggle to parent their own children. So if you institutionalize large numbers of children, it will affect not only this generation, but also the generations to come. We've learned these lessons before in Australia. It's what happened to our "Stolen Generations," the indigenous children who were removed from their families with the belief that we could do a better job of raising their children. Just imagine for a moment what residential care would be like for a child. Firstly, you have a constant rotation of caregivers, with somebody new coming on to the shift every eight hours. And then on top of that you have a steady stream of visitors and volunteers coming in, showering you in the love and affection you're craving and then leaving again, evoking all of those feelings of abandonment, and proving again and again that you are not worthy of being loved. We don't have orphanages in Australia, the USA, the UK anymore, and for a very good reason: one study has shown that young adults raised in institutions are 10 times more likely to fall into sex work than their peers, 40 times more likely to have a criminal record, and 500 times more likely to take their own lives. There are an estimated eight million children around the world living in institutions like orphanages, despite the fact that around 80 percent of them are not orphans. Most have families who could be caring for them if they had the right support. But for me, the most shocking thing of all to realize is what's contributing to this boom in the unnecessary institutionalization of so many children: it's us — the tourists, the volunteers and the donors. It's the well-meaning support from people like me back in 2006, who visit these children and volunteer and donate, who are unwittingly fueling an industry that exploits children and tears families apart. It's really no coincidence that these institutions are largely set up in areas where tourists can most easily be lured in to visit and volunteer in exchange for donations. Of the 600 so-called orphanages in Nepal, over 90 percent of them are located in the most popular tourist hotspots. The cold, hard truth is, the more money that floods in in support of these institutions, the more institutions open and the more children are removed from their families to fill their beds. It's just the laws of supply and demand. I had to learn all of these lessons the hard way, after I had already set up an orphanage in Cambodia. I had to eat a big piece of humble pie to admit that I had made a mistake and inadvertently become a part of the problem. I had been an orphanage tourist, a voluntourist. I then set up my own orphanage and facilitated orphanage tourism in order to generate funds for my orphanage, before I knew better. What I came to learn is that no matter how good my orphanage was, it was never going to give those kids what they really needed: their families. I know that it can feel incredibly depressing to learn that helping vulnerable children and overcoming poverty is not as simple as we've all been led to believe it should be. But thankfully, there is a solution. These problems are reversible and preventable, and when we know better, we can do better. The organization that I run today, the Cambodian Children's Trust, is no longer an orphanage. In 2012, we changed the model in favor of family-based care. I now lead an amazing team of Cambodian social workers, nurses and teachers. Together, we work within communities to untangle a complex web of social issues and help Cambodian families escape poverty. Our primary focus is on preventing some of the most vulnerable families in our community from being separated in the first place. But in cases where it's not possible for a child to live with its biological family, we support them in foster care. Family-based care is always better than placing a child in an institution. Do you remember that first photo that I showed you before? See that girl who is just about to catch the ball? Her name is Torn She's a strong, brave and fiercely intelligent girl. But in 2006, when I first met her living in that corrupt and abusive orphanage, she had never been to school. She was suffering terrible neglect, and she yearned desperately for the warmth and love of her mother. But this is a photo of Torn today with her family. Her mother now has a secure job, her siblings are doing well in high school and she is just about to finish her nursing degree at university. For Torn's family — (Applause) for Torn's family, the cycle of poverty has been broken. The family-based care model that we have developed at CCT has been so successful, that it's now being put forward by UNICEF Cambodia and the Cambodian government as a national solution to keep children in families. And one of the best — (Applause) And one of the best ways that you can help to solve this problem is by giving these eight million children a voice and become an advocate for family-based care. If we work together to raise awareness, we can make sure the world knows that we need to put an end to the unnecessary institutionalization of vulnerable children. How do we achieve that? By redirecting our support and our donations away from orphanages and residential care institutions towards organizations that are committed to keeping children in families. I believe we can make this happen in our lifetime, and as a result, we will see developing communities thrive and ensure that vulnerable children everywhere have what all children need and deserve: a family. Thank you. (Applause) |
Fun, fierce and fantastical African art | {0: 'Wanuri Kahiu wants to curate, commission and create art that celebrates fun, fierce and frivolous Africa.'} | TED2017 | So, my mother's a pediatrician, and when I was young, she'd tell the craziest stories that combined science with her overactive imagination. One of the stories she told was that if you eat a lot of salt, all of the blood rushes up your legs, through your body, and shoots out the top of your head, killing you instantly. (Laughter) She called it "high blood pressure." (Laughter) This was my first experience with science fiction, and I loved it. So when I started to write my own science fiction and fantasy, I was surprised that it was considered un-African. So naturally, I asked, what is African? And this is what I know so far: Africa is important. Africa is the future. It is, though. And Africa is a serious place where only serious things happen. So when I present my work somewhere, someone will always ask, "What's so important about it? How does it deal with real African issues like war, poverty, devastation or AIDS?" And it doesn't. My work is about Nairobi pop bands that want to go to space or about seven-foot-tall robots that fall in love. It's nothing incredibly important. It's just fun, fierce and frivolous, as frivolous as bubble gum — "AfroBubbleGum." So I'm not saying that agenda art isn't important; I'm the chairperson of a charity that deals with films and theaters that write about HIV and radicalization and female genital mutilation. It's vital and important art, but it cannot be the only art that comes out of the continent. We have to tell more stories that are vibrant. The danger of the single story is still being realized. And maybe it's because of the funding. A lot of art is still dependent on developmental aid. So art becomes a tool for agenda. Or maybe it's because we've only seen one image of ourselves for so long that that's all we know how to create. Whatever the reason, we need a new way, and AfroBubbleGum is one approach. It's the advocacy of art for art's sake. It's the advocacy of art that is not policy-driven or agenda-driven or based on education, just for the sake of imagination: AfroBubbleGum art. And we can't all be AfroBubbleGumists. We have to judge our work for its potential poverty porn pitfalls. We have to have tests that are similar to the Bechdel test, and ask questions like: Are two or more Africans in this piece of fiction healthy? Are those same Africans financially stable and not in need of saving? Are they having fun and enjoying life? And if we can answer yes to two or more of these questions, then surely we're AfroBubbleGumists. (Laughter) (Applause) And fun is political, because imagine if we have images of Africans who were vibrant and loving and thriving and living a beautiful, vibrant life. What would we think of ourselves then? Would we think that maybe we're worthy of more happiness? Would we think of our shared humanity through our shared joy? I think of these things when I create. I think of the people and the places that give me immeasurable joy, and I work to represent them. And that's why I write stories about futuristic girls that risk everything to save plants or to race camels or even just to dance, to honor fun, because my world is mostly happy. And I know happiness is a privilege in this current splintered world where remaining hopeful requires diligence. But maybe, if you join me in creating, curating and commissioning more AfroBubbleGum art, there might be hope for a different view of the world, a happy Africa view where children are strangely traumatized by their mother's dark sense of humor, (Laughter) but also they're claiming fun, fierce and frivolous art in the name of all things unseriously African. Because we're AfroBubbleGumists and there's so many more of us than you can imagine. Thank you so much. (Applause) |
Can a robot pass a university entrance exam? | {0: 'Could an AI pass the entrance exam for the University of Tokyo? Noriko Arai oversees a project that wants to find out.'} | TED2017 | Today, I'm going to talk about AI and us. AI researchers have always said that we humans do not need to worry, because only menial jobs will be taken over by machines. Is that really true? They have also said that AI will create new jobs, so those who lose their jobs will find a new one. Of course. But the real question is: How many of those who may lose their jobs to AI will be able to land a new one, especially when AI is smart enough to learn better than most of us? Let me ask you a question: How many of you think that AI will pass the entrance examination of a top university by 2020? Oh, so many. OK. So some of you may say, "Of course, yes!" Now singularity is the issue. And some others may say, "Maybe, because AI already won against a top Go player." And others may say, "No, never. Uh-uh." That means we do not know the answer yet, right? So that was the reason why I started Todai Robot Project, making an AI which passes the entrance examination of the University of Tokyo, the top university in Japan. This is our Todai Robot. And, of course, the brain of the robot is working in the remote server. It is now writing a 600-word essay on maritime trade in the 17th century. How does that sound? Why did I take the entrance exam as its benchmark? Because I thought we had to study the performance of AI in comparison to humans, especially on the skills and expertise which are believed to be acquired only by humans and only through education. To enter Todai, the University of Tokyo, you have to pass two different types of exams. The first one is a national standardized test in multiple-choice style. You have to take seven subjects and achieve a high score — I would say like an 85 percent or more accuracy rate — to be allowed to take the second stage written test prepared by Todai. So let me first explain how modern AI works, taking the "Jeopardy!" challenge as an example. Here is a typical "Jeopardy!" question: "Mozart's last symphony shares its name with this planet." Interestingly, a "Jeopardy!" question always asks, always ends with "this" something: "this" planet, "this" country, "this" rock musician, and so on. In other words, "Jeopardy!" doesn't ask many different types of questions, but a single type, which we call "factoid questions." By the way, do you know the answer? If you do not know the answer and if you want to know the answer, what would you do? You Google, right? Of course. Why not? But you have to pick appropriate keywords like "Mozart," "last" and "symphony" to search. The machine basically does the same. Then this Wikipedia page will be ranked top. Then the machine reads the page. No, uh-uh. Unfortunately, none of the modern AIs, including Watson, Siri and Todai Robot, is able to read. But they are very good at searching and optimizing. It will recognize that the keywords "Mozart," "last" and "symphony" are appearing heavily around here. So if it can find a word which is a planet and which is co-occurring with these keywords, that must be the answer. This is how Watson finds the answer "Jupiter," in this case. Our Todai Robot works similarly, but a bit smarter in answering history yes-no questions, like, "'Charlemagne repelled the Magyars.' Is this sentence true or false?" Our robot starts producing a factoid question, like: "Charlemagne repelled [this person type]" by itself. Then, "Avars" but not "Magyars" is ranked top. This sentence is likely to be false. Our robot does not read, does not understand, but it is statistically correct in many cases. For the second stage written test, it is required to write a 600-word essay like this one: [Discuss the rise and fall of the maritime trade in East and Southeast Asia in the 17th century ...] and as I have shown earlier, our robot took the sentences from the textbooks and Wikipedia, combined them together, and optimized it to produce an essay without understanding a thing. (Laughter) But surprisingly, it wrote a better essay than most of the students. (Laughter) How about mathematics? A fully automatic math-solving machine has been a dream since the birth of the word "artificial intelligence," but it has stayed at the level of arithmetic for a long, long time. Last year, we finally succeeded in developing a system which solved pre-university-level problems from end to end, like this one. This is the original problem written in Japanese, and we had to teach it 2,000 mathematical axioms and 8,000 Japanese words to make it accept the problems written in natural language. And it is now translating the original problems into machine-readable formulas. Weird, but it is now ready to solve it, I think. Go and solve it. Yes! It is now executing symbolic computation. Even more weird, but probably this is the most fun part for the machine. (Laughter) Now it outputs a perfect answer, though its proof is impossible to read, even for mathematicians. Anyway, last year our robot was among the top one percent in the second stage written exam in mathematics. (Applause) Thank you. So, did it enter Todai? No, not as I expected. Why? Because it doesn't understand any meaning. Let me show you a typical error it made in the English test. [Nate: We're almost at the bookstore. Just a few more minutes. Sunil: Wait. ______ . Nate: Thank you! That always happens ...] Two people are talking. For us, who can understand the situation — [1. "We walked for a long time." 2. "We're almost there." 3. "Your shoes look expensive." 4. "Your shoelace is untied."] it is obvious number four is the correct answer, right? But Todai Robot chose number two, even after learning 15 billion English sentences using deep learning technologies. OK, so now you might understand what I said: modern AIs do not read, do not understand. They only disguise as if they do. This is the distribution graph of half a million students who took the same exam as Todai Robot. Now our Todai Robot is among the top 20 percent, and it was capable to pass more than 60 percent of the universities in Japan — but not Todai. But see how it is beyond the volume zone of to-be white-collar workers. You might think I was delighted. After all, my robot was surpassing students everywhere. Instead, I was alarmed. How on earth could this unintelligent machine outperform students — our children? Right? I decided to investigate what was going on in the human world. I took hundreds of sentences from high school textbooks and made easy multiple-choice quizzes, and asked thousands of high school students to answer. Here is an example: [Buddhism spread to ... , Christianity to ... and Oceania, and Islam to ...] Of course, the original problems are written in Japanese, their mother tongue. [ ______ has spread to Oceania. 1. Hinduism 2. Christianity 3. Islam 4. Buddhism ] Obviously, Christianity is the answer, isn't it? It's written! And Todai Robot chose the correct answer, too. But one-third of junior high school students failed to answer this question. Do you think it is only the case in Japan? I do not think so, because Japan is always ranked among the top in OECD PISA tests, measuring 15-year-old students' performance in mathematics, science and reading every three years. We have been believing that everybody can learn and learn well, as long as we provide good learning materials free on the web so that they can access through the internet. But such wonderful materials may benefit only those who can read well, and the percentage of those who can read well may be much less than we expected. How we humans will coexist with AI is something we have to think about carefully, based on solid evidence. At the same time, we have to think in a hurry because time is running out. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Noriko, thank you. Noriko Arai: Thank you. CA: In your talk, you so beautifully give us a sense of how AIs think, what they can do amazingly and what they can't do. But — do I read you right, that you think we really need quite an urgent revolution in education to help kids do the things that humans can do better than AIs? NA: Yes, yes, yes. Because we humans can understand the meaning. That is something which is very, very lacking in AI. But most of the students just pack the knowledge without understanding the meaning of the knowledge, so that is not knowledge, that is just memorizing, and AI can do the same thing. So we have to think about a new type of education. CA: A shift from knowledge, rote knowledge, to meaning. NA: Mm-hmm. CA: Well, there's a challenge for the educators. Thank you so much. NA: Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause) |
How the US government spies on people who protest -- including you | {0: 'Jennifer Granick fights for civil liberties in the age of surveillance and powerful digital technology.'} | TEDxStanford | We are all activists now. (Applause) Thank you. I'll just stop here. (Laughter) From the families who are fighting to maintain funding for public schools, the tens of thousands of people who joined Occupy Wall Street or marched with Black Lives Matter to protest police brutality against African Americans, families that join rallies, pro-life and pro-choice, those of us who are afraid that our friends and neighbors are going to be deported or that they'll be added to lists because they are Muslim, people who advocate for gun rights and for gun control and the millions of people who joined the women's marches all across the country this last January. (Applause) We are all activists now, and that means that we all have something to worry about from surveillance. Surveillance means government collection and use of private and sensitive data about us. And surveillance is essential to law enforcement and to national security. But the history of surveillance is one that includes surveillance abuses where this sensitive information has been used against people because of their race, their national origin, their sexual orientation, and in particular, because of their activism, their political beliefs. About 53 years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I have a dream" speech on the Mall in Washington. And today the ideas behind this speech of racial equality and tolerance are so noncontroversial that my daughters study the speech in third grade. But at the time, Dr. King was extremely controversial. The legendary and notorious FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover believed, or wanted to believe, that the Civil Rights Movement was a Soviet communist plot intended to destabilize the American government. And so Hoover had his agents put bugs in Dr. King's hotel rooms, and those bugs picked up conversations between civil rights leaders talking about the strategies and tactics of the Civil Rights Movement. They also picked up sounds of Dr. King having sex with women who were not his wife, and J. Edgar Hoover saw the opportunity here to discredit and undermine the Civil Rights Movement. The FBI sent a package of these recordings along with a handwritten note to Dr. King, and a draft of this note was found in FBI archives years later, and the letter said, "You are no clergyman and you know it. King, like all frauds, your end is approaching." The letter even seemed to encourage Dr. King to commit suicide, saying, "King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation." But the important thing is, Dr. King was not abnormal. Every one of us has something that we want to hide from somebody. And even more important, J. Edgar Hoover wasn't abnormal either. The history of surveillance abuses is not the history of one bad, megalomaniacal man. Throughout his decades at the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover enjoyed the support of the presidents that he served, Democratic and Republican alike. After all, it was John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy who knew about and approved the surveillance of Dr. King. Hoover ran a program called COINTELPRO for 15 years which was designed to spy on and undermine civic groups that were devoted to things like civil rights, the Women's Rights Movement, and peace groups and anti-war movements. And the surveillance didn't stop there. Lyndon Baines Johnson, during the election campaign, had the campaign airplane of his rival Barry Goldwater bugged as part of his effort to win that election. And then, of course, there was Watergate. Burglars were caught breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel, the Nixon administration was involved in covering up the burglary, and eventually Nixon had to step down as president. COINTELPRO and Watergate were a wake-up call for Americans. Surveillance was out of control and it was being used to squelch political challengers. And so Americans rose to the occasion and what we did was we reformed surveillance law. And the primary tool we used to reform surveillance law was to require a search warrant for the government to be able to get access to our phone calls and our letters. Now, the reason why a search warrant is important is because it interposes a judge in the relationship between investigators and the citizens, and that judge's job is to make sure that there's good cause for the surveillance, that the surveillance is targeted at the right people, and that the information that's collected is going to be used for legitimate government purposes and not for discriminatory ones. This was our system, and what this means is that President Obama did not wiretap Trump Tower. The system is set up to prevent something like that from happening without a judge being involved. But what happens when we're not talking about phone calls or letters anymore? Today, we have technology that makes it cheap and easy for the government to collect information on ordinary everyday people. Your phone call records can reveal whether you have an addiction, what your religion is, what charities you donate to, what political candidate you support. And yet, our government collected, dragnet-style, Americans' calling records for years. In 2012, the Republican National Convention highlighted a new technology it was planning to use, facial recognition, to identify people who were going to be in the crowd who might be activists or troublemakers and to stop them ahead of time. Today, over 50 percent of American adults have their faceprint in a government database. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives concocted a plan to find out what Americans were going to gun shows by using license plate detectors to scan the license plates of cars that were in the parking lots of these events. Today, we believe that over 70 percent of police departments have automatic license plate detection technology that they're using to track people's cars as they drive through town. And all of this information, the license plates, the faceprints, the phone records, your address books, your buddy lists, the photos that you upload to Dropbox or Google Photos, and sometimes even your chats and your emails are not protected by a warrant requirement. So what that means is we have all of this information on regular people that's newly available at very low expense. It is the golden age for surveillance. Now, every parent is going to understand what this means. When you have a little baby and the baby's young, that child is not able to climb out of its crib. But eventually your little girl gets older and she's able to climb out of the crib, but you tell her, "Don't climb out of the crib. OK?" And every parent knows what's going to happen. Some of those babies are going to climb out of the crib. Right? That's the difference between ability and permission. Well, the same thing is true with the government today. It used to be that our government didn't have the ability to do widespread, massive surveillance on hundreds of millions of Americans and then abuse that information. But now our government has grown up, and we have that technology today. The government has the ability, and that means the law is more important than ever before. The law is supposed to say when the government has permission to do it, and it's supposed to ensure that there's some kind of ramification. We notice when those laws are broken and there's some of kind of ramification or punishment. The law is more important than ever because we are now living in a world where only rules are stopping the government from abusing this information. But the law has fallen down on the job. Particularly since September 11 the law has fallen down on the job, and we do not have the rules in place that we need. And we are seeing the ramifications of that. So fusion centers are these joint task forces between local, state and federal government that are meant to ferret out domestic terrorism. And what we've seen is fusion center reports that say that you might be dangerous if you voted for a third-party candidate, or you own a "Don't Tread On Me" flag, or you watched movies that are anti-tax. These same fusion centers have spied on Muslim community groups' reading lists and on Quakers who are resisting military recruiting in high schools. The Internal Revenue Service has disproportionately audited groups that have "Tea Party" or "Patriot" in their name. And now customs and border patrol is stopping people as they come into the country and demanding our social networking passwords which will allow them to see who our friends are, what we say and even to impersonate us online. Now, civil libertarians like myself have been trying to draw people's attention to these things and fighting against them for years. This was a huge problem during the Obama administration, but now the problem is worse. When the New York Police Department spies on Muslims or a police department uses license plate detectors to find out where the officers' spouses are or those sorts of things, that is extremely dangerous. But when a president repurposes the power of federal surveillance and the federal government to retaliate against political opposition, that is a tyranny. And so we are all activists now, and we all have something to fear from surveillance. But just like in the time of Dr. Martin Luther King, we can reform the way things are. First of all, use encryption. Encryption protects your information from being inexpensively and opportunistically collected. It rolls back the golden age for surveillance. Second, support surveillance reform. Did you know that if you have a friend who works for the French or German governments or for an international human rights group or for a global oil company that your friend is a valid foreign intelligence target? And what that means is that when you have conversations with that friend, the US government may be collecting that information. And when that information is collected, even though it's conversations with Americans, it can then be funneled to the FBI where the FBI is allowed to search through it without getting a warrant, without probable cause, looking for information about Americans and whatever crimes we may have committed with no need to document any kind of suspicion. The law that allows some of this to happen is called Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, and we have a great opportunity this year, because Section 702 is going to expire at the end of 2017, which means that Congress's inertia is on our side if we want reform. And we can pressure our representatives to actually implement important reforms to this law and protect our data from this redirection and misuse. And finally, one of the reasons why things have gotten so out of control is because so much of what happens with surveillance — the technology, the enabling rules and the policies that are either there or not there to protect us — are secret or classified. We need transparency, and we need to know as Americans what the government is doing in our name so that the surveillance that takes place and the use of that information is democratically accounted for. We are all activists now, which means that we all have something to worry about from surveillance. But like in the time of Dr. Martin Luther King, there is stuff that we can do about it. So please join me, and let's get to work. Thank you. (Applause) |
How your pictures can help reclaim lost history | {0: "Chance Coughenour is recreating heritage and culture that's been lost throughout the world."} | TEDxHamburg | Why do people deliberately destroy cultural heritage? By doing so, do they believe they're erasing our history? Our cultural memory? It's true that we are losing cultural heritage to erosion and natural disasters, but this is something that is simply difficult to avoid. I'm here to show you today how we can use pictures — your pictures — to reclaim the history that is being lost using innovative technology and the effort of volunteers. In the early 20th century, archaeologists discovered hundreds of statues and artifacts at the ancient city of Hatra, in northern Iraq. Statues like this one were found in fragments, some of them missing their heads or arms, yet the clothing that they are wearing and their pose can still tell us their story. For example, we believe that by wearing a knee-length tunic and open bare feet, this was representative of a priest. However, with a closer look at this particular piece, we can see that this tunic being worn was elaborately decorated, which has led many researchers to believe this was actually a statue of a king performing his religious functions. When the Mosul Cultural Museum opened in 1952 in northern Iraq, this statue, as well as others, were placed there to preserve them for future generations. Following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, a few statues and artifacts were relocated to Baghdad, but this statue remained. Then in February of last year, a video was released, and it instantly went viral. Maybe some of you remember seeing it. Here's a short clip. (Video) (Singing in Arabic) (Singing ends) Not a very pleasant sight, right? Did you notice anything familiar in the video? There it is. There is that very statue, as it was toppled over, breaking into pieces. When Matthew Vincent and I saw this video, we were shocked. Since we are archaeologists using innovative technology for digital preservation, an idea sprung to mind. Maybe we can crowdsource the images that were taken of these artifacts before they were destroyed, to create digital reconstructions. If we can do that, maybe we can put them into a virtual museum to tell that story. And so two weeks after we saw this video, we started the project called Project Mosul. Remember the pictures of the statue I showed you before? This is actually the crowdsourced reconstruction of it before it was destroyed. Now, many of you may be wondering, how exactly does this work? Well, the key to this technology is called photogrammetry, and it was invented here, in Germany. It is the technology that allows us to use two-dimensional images taken of the same object from different angles to create a 3D model. I know you may be thinking this sounds like magic — but it's not. Let me show you how it works. Here are two crowdsourced images of the same statue. What the computer can do is it can detect similar features between the photographs — similar features of the object. Then, by using multiple photos, in this case, it can begin to reconstruct the object in 3D. In this case, you have the position of the cameras when each image was taken, shown in blue. Now, this is a partial reconstruction, I admit, but why would I say partial? Well, simply because the statue was positioned against a wall. We don't have photographs taken of it from the back. If I wanted to complete a full digital reconstruction of this statue, I would need a proper camera, tripods, proper lighting, but we simply can't do that with crowdsourced images. Think about it: How many of you, when you visit a museum, take photographs of all parts of the statue, even the back side of it? Well, maybe if some of you find Michelangelo's David interesting, I guess — (Laughter) But the thing is, if we can find more images of this object, we can improve the 3D model. When we started the project, we started it with the Mosul Museum in mind. We figured we may get a few images, some people interested, make one or two virtual reconstructions, but we had no idea that we had sparked something that would grow so quickly. Before we knew it, we realized it was obvious: we could apply this same idea to lost heritage anywhere. And so, we decided to change the name of the project to Rekrei. Then, in the summer of last year, "The Economist" magazine's media lab reached out to us. They asked us, "Hey, would you like us to build a virtual museum to put the reconstructions back inside, to tell the story?" Can you imagine us saying no? Of course not. We said yes! We were so excited. This was exactly the initial dream of that project. And so now, any of you can experience RecoVR Mosul on your phone, using Google Cardboard or a tablet or even YouTube 360. Here is a screenshot from the virtual museum. And there it is ... the partial reconstruction of the statue, as well as the Lion of Mosul, the first reconstruction completed by our project. Although the video doesn't explicitly show the Lion of Mosul being destroyed, we have many other examples of large artifacts being destroyed that were simply too large to have been stolen. For example, the Gate of Nimrud in northern Iraq. This is a digital reconstruction from before, and this is actually during the destruction. Or the Lion of Al-Lāt, in Palmyra, Syria: before ... and after. Although virtual reconstructions are primarily the main focus of our project, some people have been asking the question: Can we print them in 3D? We believe 3D printing doesn't offer a straightforward solution to lost heritage. Once an object is destroyed, it's gone. But 3D printing does offer an addition to tell that story. For example, I can show you here ... There is the statue from Hatra and the Lion of Mosul. (Applause) Thank you. Now, if you look closely, you'll notice that there are some parts that have been printed in color, and some parts that are in white or gray. This part was added simply to hold the statues up. This works the same way if you visit a museum, and a statue is found in fragments; it's put together for the people to see it. This makes sense, right? However, we're much more interested in what virtual reality has to offer for lost heritage. Here is an example of one of the tower tombs that was destroyed in Palmyra. Using Sketchfab's online viewer, we can show that we have reconstructed three parts of the exterior of the tomb, but we also have photos of the inside, so we're beginning to create a reconstruction of the wall and the ceiling. Archaeologists worked there for many, many years, so we also have architectural drawing plans of this lost heritage. Unfortunately, we are not only losing cultural heritage to areas of conflict and at war — we're also losing it to natural disasters. This is a 3D model of Durbar Square in Kathmandu, before the earthquake that occurred last April ... and this is after. You may be thinking, you didn't create these 3D models with only tourist photographs, and that's true. But what this represents is the ability for large, public organizations and private industry to come together for initiatives like ours. And so one of the major challenges of our project, really, is to find photographs that were taken before something happens, right? Well, the internet is basically a database with millions of images, right? Exactly. So we have begun to develop a tool that allows us to extract images from websites like Flickr, based on their geotags, to complete reconstructions. Because we're not only losing cultural heritage to natural disasters and in war, but we're also losing it to something else. Any idea, just looking at these two pictures? Maybe it's a little difficult to remember, but only a few weeks ago, this was the example of human destruction by human stupidity. Because a tourist in Lisbon wanted to climb onto this statue and take a selfie with it — (Laughter) and pulled it down with him. So we're already finding photographs to complete a digital reconstruction of this. We need to remember that the destruction of cultural heritage isn't a recent phenomenon. In the 16th century, European priests and explorers burned thousands of Maya books in the Americas, of which we only have a handful left. Fast-forward to 2001, when the Taliban blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan. You see, cultural heritage is about our shared global history. It helps us connect with our ancestors and their stories, but we're losing pieces of it every day to natural disasters and in areas of conflict. Of course, the loss of human life is the most heartbreaking loss ... but cultural heritage offers us a way to preserve the memory of the people for future generations. We need your help to reclaim the history that is being lost. Will you join us? (Applause) |
Dare to refuse the origin myths that claim who you are | {0: 'Chetan Bhatt teaches and writes about the numerous dangers human rights face today from resurgent Far Right movements.'} | TEDxExeter | I'm Chetan Bhatt and when I give my name, I'm often asked, "Where are you from?" And I normally say London. (Laughter) But of course, I know what they're really asking, so I say something like, "Well, my grandparents and my mum were born in India, my dad and I were born in Kenya, and I was brought up in London. And then they've got me mapped. "Ah, you're a Kenyan Asian. I've worked with one of those." (Laughter) And from my name they probably assume that I'm a Hindu. And this sort of fixes me for them. But what about the Christians and the Muslims and the atheists that I grew up with? Or the socialists and the liberals, even the occasional Tory? (Laughter) Indeed, all kinds of women and men — vegetable sellers, factory workers, cooks, car mechanics — living in my working class area, in some profoundly important way, they are also a part of me and are here with me. Maybe that's why I find it hard to respond to questions about identity and about origin. And it's not just a sort of teenage refusal to be labeled. It's about our own most identities, the ones that we put our hands up to, the ones that we cheer for, the ones that we fight for, the ones that we love or hate. And it's about how we apprehend ourselves as well as others. And it's about identities we just assume that we have without thinking too much about them. But our responses to questions of identity and origin have substantial social and political importance. We see the wars, the rages of identity going on all around us. We see violent religious, national and ethnic disputes. And often the conflict is based on old stories of identity and belonging and origins. And these identities are based on myths, typically about ancient, primordial origins. And these could be about Adam and Eve or about the supremacy of a caste or gender or about the vitality of a supposed race or about the past glories of an empire or civilization or about a piece of land that some imagined deity has gifted. Now, people say that origin stories and identity myths make us feel secure. What's wrong with that? They give us a sense of belonging. Identity is your cultural clothing, and it can make you feel warm and fuzzy inside. But does it really? Do we really need identity myths to feel safe? Because I see religious, national, ethnic disputes as adding to human misery. Can I dare you to refuse every origin myth that claims you? What if we reject every single primordial origin myth and develop a deeper sense of personhood, one responsible to humanity as a whole rather than to a particular tribe, a radically different idea of humanity that exposes how origin myths mystify, disguise global power, rapacious exploitation, poverty, the worldwide oppression of women and girls, and of course massive, accelerating inequalities? Now, origin myths are closely linked to tradition, and the word tradition points to something old and permanent, almost natural, and people assume tradition is just history, simply the past condensed into a nice story. But let's not confuse tradition with history. The two are often in severe conflict. Origin stories are usually recently created fictions of ancient belonging, and they're absurd given the complexity of humanity and our vastly interconnected, even if very unequal world. And today we see claims to tradition that claim to be ancient changing rapidly in front of our eyes. I was brought up in the 1970s near Wembley with Asian, English, Caribbean, Irish families living in our street, and the neo-Nazi National Front was massive then with regular marches and attacks on us and a permanent threat and often a frequent reality of violence against us on the streets, in our homes, typically by neo-Nazis and other racists. And I remember during a general election a leaflet came through our letter box with a picture of the National Front candidate for our area. And the picture was of our next-door neighbor. He threatened to shoot me once when I played in the garden as a kid, and many weekends, shaven-headed National Front activists arrived at his house and emerged with scores of placards screaming that they wanted us to go back home. But today he's one of my mum's best mates. He's a very lovely, gentle and kind man, and at some point in his political journey out of fascism he embraced a broader idea of humanity. There was a Hindu family that we got to know well — and you have to understand that life in our street was a little bit like the setting for an Asian soap opera. Everyone knew everyone else's business, even if they didn't want it to be known by anyone at all. You really had no choice in this matter. But in this family, there was a quiet little boy who went to the same school as I did, and after I left school, I didn't hear much more about him, except that he'd gone off to India. Now around 2000, I remember seeing this short book. The book was unusual because it was written by a British supporter of Al Qaeda, and in it the author calls for attacks in Britain. This is in 1999, so 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq was still in the future, and he helped scout New York bombing targets. He taught others how to make a dirty bomb to use on the London Underground, and he plotted a massive bombing campaign in London's shopping areas. He's a very high-risk security prisoner in the UK and one of the most important Al Qaeda figures to be arrested in Britain. The author of that book was the very same quiet little boy who went to my school. So a Hindu boy from Britain became an Al Qaeda fighter and a most-wanted international terrorist, and he rejected what people would call his Hindu or Indian or British identity, and he became someone else. He refused to be who he was. He recreated himself, and this kind of journey is very common for young men and women who become involved in Al Qaeda or Islamic State or other transnational armed groups. Al Qaeda's media spokesman is a white American from a Jewish and Catholic mixed background, and neither he nor the boy from my school were from Muslim backgrounds. There's no point in asking them where are they from. A more important question is where they're going. And I would also put it to you that exactly the same journey occurs for those young men and women who were brought up in Muslim family backgrounds. Most of those who join Al Qaeda and other Salafi jihadi groups from Europe, Asia, North America, even in many cases the Middle East are those who have comprehensively rejected their backgrounds to become, in essence, new people. They spend an enormous amount of time attacking their parents' backgrounds as profane, impure, blasphemous, the wrong type of Islam, and their vision instead is a fantastical view of cosmic apocalypse. It's a born again vision. Discard your past, your society, your family and friends since they're all impure. Instead, become someone else, your true self, your authentic self. Now, this isn't about a return to the past. It's about using a forgery of the past to envision an appalling future which begins today at year zero. This is why over 80 percent of the victims of Al Qaeda and Islamic State are people from Muslim backgrounds. The first act by Salafi jihadi groups when they take over an area is to destroy existing Muslim institutions including mosques, shrines, preachers, practices. Their main purpose is to control and punish people internally, to dictate the spaces that women may go, their clothing, family relations, beliefs, even the minute detail of how one prays. And you get the impression in the news that they are after us in the West, but they are actually mainly after people from other Muslim backgrounds. In their view, no other Muslim can ever be pure enough, so ordinary beliefs and practices that have existed for centuries are attacked as impure by teenagers from Birmingham or London who know nothing about the histories that they so joyously obliterate. Now here, their claim to tradition is at war with history, but they're nevertheless very certain about their purity and about the impurity of others. Purity, certainty, the return to authentic tradition, the quest for these can lead to lethal visions of perfect societies and perfected people. This is what the main Hindu fundamentalist organization in India looks like today at its mass rally. Maybe it reminds you of the 1930s in Italy or Germany, and the movement's roots are indeed in fascism. It was a member of the same Hindu fundamentalist movement who shot dead Mahatma Gandhi. Hindu fundamentalists today view this murderer as a national hero, and they want to put up statues of him throughout India. They've been involved for decades in large-scale mass violence against minorities. They ban books, art, films. They attack romantic couples on Valentine's Day, Christians on Christmas Day. They don't like others talking critically about what they see as their ancient culture or using its images or caricaturing it or drawing cartoons about it. But the people making the strongest possible claims about ancient, timeless Hindu religion are dressed in brown shorts and white shirts while claiming, oddly, to be the original Aryan race, just like the violent Salafi jihadis who make their claims about their primordial religion while dressed in black military uniforms and wearing balaclavas. These people are manufacturing pure, pristine identities of conviction and of certainty. Fundamentalists see religion and culture as their sole property, a property. But religions and cultures are processes. They're not things. They're impermanent. They're messy. They're impure. Look at any religion and you'll see disputes and arguments going all the way down. Any criticism of religion in any form has to therefore be part of the expansive sense of humanity we should aspire to. I respect your right to have and to express your religion or your culture or your opinion, but I don't necessarily have to respect the content. I might like some of it. I might like how an old church looks, for example, but this isn't the same thing. Similarly, I have a human right to say something that you may find offensive, but you do not have a human right not to be offended. In a genuine democracy, we're constantly offended since people express different views all the time. They also change their views, so their views are impermanent. You cannot fix someone's political views based on their religious or national or cultural background. Now, these points about religious purity also apply to nationalism and to racism. I'm always puzzled to have pride in your national or ethnic identity, pride in the accident of birth from a warm and cozy womb, belief in your superiority because of the accident of birth. These people have very firm ideas about what belongs and what doesn't belong inside the cozy national cultures that they imagine. And I'm going to caricature a bit here, but only a little bit. I want you to imagine the supporter of some Little Englander or British nationalist political party, and he's sitting at home and he's screaming about foreigners invading his country while watching Fox News, an American cable channel owned by an Australian on his South Korean television set which was bought by his Spanish credit card which is paid off monthly by his high-street British bank which has its headquarters in Hong Kong. He supports a British football team owned by a Russian. His favorite brand of fish and chips is owned by a Swedish venture capitalist firm. The church he sometimes goes to has its creed decided in meetings in Ghana. His Union Jack underpants were made in India. (Laughter) And — (Applause) Thank you. And they're laundered regularly by a very nice Polish lady. (Laughter) There is no pure ethnicity, national culture, and the ethical choices we have today are far wider than being forced to choose between racist right and religious right visions, dismal visions of culture. Now, culture isn't just about language, food, clothing and music, but gender relations, ancient monuments, a heritage of sacred texts. But culture can also be what has been decided to be culture by those who have a political stake in pounding culture into the shape of a prison. Big political identity claims are elite bids for power. They're not answers to social or economic or political injustices. They often obscure them. And what about the large number of people across the globe who can't point to a monument from their past, who don't possess a sacred written text, who can't hark back to the past glories of a civilization or empire? Are these people less a part of humanity? What about you, now, listening to this? What about you and your identity, because you stitch your experiences and your thoughts into a continuous person moving forward in time. And this is what you are when you say, "I," "am," or "me." But this also includes all of your hopes and dreams, all of the you's that could have been, and it includes all the other people and the things that are in the biography of who you are. They, the others, are also a part of you, moving forward with you. Your authentic self, if such a thing exists, is a complex, messy and uncertain self, and that is a very good thing. Why not value those impurities and uncertainties? Maybe clinging to pure identities is a sign of immaturity, and ethnic, nationalist and religious traditions are bad for you. Why not be skeptical about every primordial origin claim made on your behalf? Why not reject the identity myths that call on you to belong, that politicians and community leaders, so-called community leaders, place on you? If we don't need origin stories and fixed identities, we can challenge ourselves to think creatively about each other and our future. And here culture always takes care of itself. I'm not worried about culture. Cultures are creative, dynamic processes, not imposed laws and boundaries. This is Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd, a very senior Muslim judge and thinker in Cordoba in the 12th century, and his writings were considered deeply blasphemous, heretical and evil. Long after he died, followers of his work were ruthlessly hunted down, banished and killed over several centuries by the most powerful religious institution of the medieval period. That institution was the Roman Catholic Church. Why? Because ibn Rushd said that something true in religion may conflict with something that your reason finds to be true on earth, but the latter is still true. There are two distinct worlds of truth, one based on our reason and evidence, and one that is divine, and the state, political power, social law are in the realm of reason. Religious life is a different realm. They should be kept separated. Social and political life should be governed by our reason, not by religion. And you can see why the church was upset by his writings, as indeed were some Muslims during his lifetime, because he gives us a strong statement of secularism of a kind which is normal in Europe today. Now, history plays many tricks on us. It undermines our fixed truths and what we believe to be our culture and their culture. Ibn Rushd, someone who happens to be a Muslim, is considered one of the key influences in the introduction and spread of secularism in Europe. So against religious, nationalist and racial purists of all kinds, can you make his story a part of your own, not because he happened to be a Muslim, not because he happened to be an Arab, but because he was a human being with some very good ideas that shook his world and ours. Thank you. (Applause) |
How young people join violent extremist groups -- and how to stop them | {0: "Dr. Erin Marie Saltman manages Facebook's counterterrorism and counter-extremism policy work for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. "} | TEDxGhent | So in 2011, I altered my name so that I could participate in Far Right youth camp in Hungary. I was doing a PhD looking at youth political socialization — why young people were developing political ideologies in a post-communist setting, and I saw that a lot of young people I was talking to were joining the Far Right, and this was astounding to me. So I wanted to enroll in this youth camp to get a better understanding of why people were joining. So a colleague enrolled me, and my last name sounds a little bit too Jewish. So Erin got turned into Iréna, and Saltman got turned into Sós, which means "salty" in Hungarian. And in Hungarian, your last name goes first, so my James Bond name turned into "Salty Irena," which is not something I would have naturally chosen for myself. But going to this camp, I was further shocked to realize that it was actually really fun. They talked very little about politics. It was mostly learning how to ride horses, shooting a bow and arrow, live music at night, free food and alcohol, also some air-gun target practice using mainstream politicians' faces as targets. And this seemed like a very, actually, friendly, inclusive group until you started talking or mentioning anything to do with the Roma population, Jewish people or immigrants, and then the discourse would become very hate-based very quickly. So it led me into my work now, where we pose the question, "Why do people join violent extremist movements, and how do we effectively counter these processes?" In the aftermath of horrible atrocities and attacks in places like Belgium, France, but all over the world, sometimes it's easier for us to think, "Well, these must be sociopaths, these must be naturally violent individuals. They must have something wrong with their upbringing." And what's really tragic is that oftentimes there's no one profile. Many people come from educated backgrounds, different socioeconomic backgrounds, men and women, different ages, some with families, some single. So why? What is this allure? And this is what I want to talk you through, as well as how do we challenge this in a modern era? We do know, through research, that there are quite a number of different things that affect somebody's process of radicalization, and we categorize these into push and pull factors. And these are pretty much similar for Far Right, neo-Nazi groups all the way to Islamist extremist and terrorist groups. And push factors are basically what makes you vulnerable to a process of radicalization, to joining a violent extremist group. And these can be a lot of different things, but roughly, a sense of alienation, a sense of isolation, questioning your own identity, but also feeling that your in-group is under attack, and your in group might be based on a nationality or an ethnicity or a religion, and feeling that larger powers around you are doing nothing to help. Now, push factors alone do not make you a violent extremist, because if that were the fact, those same factors would go towards a group like the Roma population, and they're not a violently mobilized group. So we have to look at the pull factors. What are these violent extremist organizations offering that other groups are not offering? And actually, this is usually very positive things, very seemingly empowering things, such as brotherhood and sisterhood and a sense of belonging, as well as giving somebody a spiritual purpose, a divine purpose to build a utopian society if their goals can be met, but also a sense of empowerment and adventure. When we look at foreign terrorist fighters, we see young men with the wind in their hair out in the desert and women going to join them to have nuptials out in the sunset. It's very romantic, and you become a hero. For both men and women, that's the propaganda being given. So what extremist groups are very good at is taking a very complicated, confusing, nuanced world and simplifying that world into black and white, good and evil. And you become what is good, challenging what is evil. So I want to talk a little bit about ISIS, Daesh, because they have been a game changer in how we look at these processes, and through a lot of the material and their tactics. They're very much a modern movement. One of the aspects is the internet and the usage of social media, as we've all seen in headlines tweeting and videos of beheadings. But the internet alone does not radicalize you. The internet is a tool. You don't go online shopping for shoes and accidentally become a jihadist. However, what the Internet does do is it is a catalyst. It provides tools and scale and rapidity that doesn't exist elsewhere. And with ISIS, all of a sudden, this idea of a cloaked, dark figure of a jihadist changed for us. All of a sudden, we were in their kitchens. We saw what they were eating for dinner. They were tweeting. We had foreign terrorist fighters tweeting in their own languages. We had women going out there talking about their wedding day, about the births of their children. We had gaming culture, all of a sudden, and references to Grand Theft Auto being made. So all of a sudden, they were homey. They became human. And the problem is that trying to counter it, lots of governments and social media companies just tried to censor. How do we get rid of terrorist content? And it became a cat-and-mouse game where we would see accounts taken down and they'd just come back up, and an arrogance around somebody having a 25th account and material that was disseminated everywhere. But we also saw a dangerous trend — violent extremists know the rules and regulations of social media, too. So we would see a banal conversation with a recruiter start on a mainstream platform, and at the point at which that conversation was going to become illegal, they would jump to a smaller, less regulated, more encrypted platform. So all of a sudden, we couldn't track where that conversation went. So this is a problem with censorship, which is why we need to develop alternatives to censorship. ISIS is also a game-changer because it's state-building. It's not just recruiting combatants; it's trying to build a state. And what that means is all of a sudden, your recruitment model is much more broad. You're not just trying to get fighters — now you need architects, engineers, accountants, hackers and women. We've actually seen a huge increase of women going in the last 24, but especially 12 months. Some countries, one in four of the people going over to join are now women. And so, this really changes who we're trying to counter this process with. Now, not all doom and gloom. So the rest I'd like to talk about some of the positive things and the new innovation in trying to prevent and counter violent extremism. Preventing is very different than countering, and actually, you can think of it in medical terms. So preventative medicine is, how do we make it so you are naturally resilient to this process of radicalization, whereas that is going to be different if somebody is already showing a symptom or a sign of belonging to a violent extremist ideology. And so in preventative measures, we're talking more about really broad groups of people and exposure to ideas to make them resilient. Whereas it's very different if somebody is starting to question and agree with certain things online, and it's also very different if somebody already has a swastika tattoo and is very much embedded within a group. How do you reach them? So I'd like to go through three examples of each one of those levels and talk you through what some of the new ways of engaging with people are becoming. One is "Extreme Dialogue," and it's an educational program that we helped develop. This one is from Canada, and it's meant to create dialogues within a classroom setting, using storytelling, because violent extremism can be very hard to try to explain, especially to younger individuals. So we have a network of former extremists and survivors of extremism that tell their stories through video and create question-giving to classrooms, to start a conversation about the topic. These two examples show Christianne, who lost her son, who radicalized and died fighting for ISIS, and Daniel is a former neo-Nazi who was an extremely violent neo-Nazi, and they pose questions about their lives and where they're at and regret, and force a classroom to have a dialogue around it. Now, looking at that middle range of individuals, actually, we need a lot of civil society voices. How do you interact with people that are looking for information online, that are starting to toy with an ideology, that are doing those searching identity questions? How do we provide alternatives for that? And that's when we combine large groups of civil society voices with creatives, techies, app developers, artists, comedians, and we can create really specified content and actually, online, disseminate it to very strategic audiences. So one example would be creating a satirical video which makes fun of Islamophobia, and targeting it to 15- to 20-year-olds online that have an interest in white power music and live specifically in Manchester. We can use these marketing tools to be very specific, so that we know when somebody's viewing, watching and engaging with that content, it's not just the average person, it's not me or you — it's a very specific audience that we are looking to engage with. Even more downstream, we developed a pilot program called "One to One," where we took former extremists and we had them reach out directly to a group of labeled neofascists as well as Islamist extremists, and put direct messages through Facebook Messenger into their inbox, saying, "Hey, I see where you're going. I've been there. If you want to talk, I'm here." Now, we kind of expected death threats from this sort of interaction. It's a little alarming to have a former neo-Nazi say, "Hey, how are you?" But actually, we found that around 60 percent of the people reached out to responded, and of that, around another 60 percent had sustained engagement, meaning that they were having conversations with the hardest people to reach about what they were going through, planting seeds of doubt and giving them alternatives for talking about these subjects, and that's really important. So what we're trying to do is actually bring unlikely sectors to the table. We have amazing activists all over the world, but oftentimes, their messages are not strategic or they don't actually reach the audiences they want to reach. So we work with networks of former extremists. We work with networks of young people in different parts of the world. And we work with them to bring the tech sector to the table with artists and creatives and marketing expertise so that we can actually have a more robust and challenging of extremism that works together. So I would say that if you are in the audience and you happen to be a graphic designer, a poet, a marketing expert, somebody that works in PR, a comedian — you might not think that this is your sector, but actually, the skills that you have right now might be exactly what is needed to help challenge extremism effectively. Thank you. (Applause) |
A smog vacuum cleaner and other magical city designs | {0: 'With his futuristic artworks, Daan Roosegaarde illuminates the intersection of technology, humanity and our urban environments.'} | TED2017 | Do you remember these glow-in-the-dark little stars which you had on the ceiling when you were a boy or a girl? Yes? It is light. It is pure light. I think I stared at them way too long when I was a five-year-old, you know? It's so beautiful: no energy bill, no maintenance. It is there. So two years ago, we went back to the lab, making it more durable, more light-emitting, with the experts. And at the same time, we got a request from this guy — Van Gogh, the famous Van Gogh Foundation — who wanted to celebrate his 125th anniversary in the Netherlands. And they came to me and asked, "Can you make a place where he feels more alive again in the Netherlands?" And I liked that question a lot, so in way, we sort of started to connect these two different worlds. This is how my brain works, by the way. (Laughter) I would love to keep on doing this for an hour, but OK — (Laughter) And this is the result that we made: a bicycle path which charges at daytime via the sun and glows at night, up to eight hours. (Applause) Thank you. ... hinting towards a future which should be energy friendly and linking up the local grounds as Van Gogh literally walked and lived there in 1883. And you can go there every night for free, no ticket needed. People experience the beauty of cycling through the starry night, thinking about green energy and safety. I want to create places where people feel connected again. And it was somehow great to make these projects happen with the industry, with the infrastructure companies. So when these sheikhs of Qatar started to call: "How much for 10 kilometers?" (Laughter) Yeah, really, that's a weird call you're going to get. But it's fascinating that this is not just a sort of one-off, nice-to-have special. I think this kind of creative thinking, these kinds of connections — it's the new economy. The World Economic Forum, the think tank in Geneva, did an interview with a lot of smart people all around the world, asking, "What are the top 10 skills you and I need to become successful?" And what is interesting, what you see here: it's not about money or being really good in C++, although these are great skills to have, I have to admit. But look at number three, creativity; number two, critical thinking; number one, complex problem-solving — all the things a robot or a computer is really bad at. And this makes me very optimistic, very hopeful for the new world, that as we will live in this hyper-technological world, our human skills — our desire for empathy, our desire for curiosity, our desire for beauty — will be more appreciated again, and we will live in a world where creativity is our true capital. And a creative process like that — I don't know how it works for you, but in my brain, it always starts with a question: Why? Why does a jellyfish emit light? Or a firefly? Or why do be accept pollution? This is from my room in Beijing three years ago. Left image is a good day — Saturday. I can see the cars and the people, the birds; life is OK in a dense urban city. And on the right image — holy moly. Pollution — complete layers. I couldn't even see the other side of the city. And this image made me really sad. This is not the bright future we envision here at TED — this is the horror. We live five to six years shorter; children have lung cancer when they're six years old. And so in a weird, beautiful way, I, at that moment, became inspired by Beijing smog. And the governments all around the world are fighting their war on smog, but I wanted to make something within the now. So we decided to build the largest smog vacuum cleaner in the world. It sucks up polluted air, cleans it and then releases it. And we built the first one. So it sucks up 30,000 cubic meters per hour, cleans it on the nano level — the PM2.5, PM10 particles — using very little electricity, and then releases the clean air, so we have parks, playgrounds, which are 55 to 75 percent more clean than the rest of the city. (Applause) Yes! (Applause) And every month or so, it opens like a spaceship — like a Marilyn Monroe with the — well, you know what. Anyway. (Laughter) So this ... this is the stuff we are capturing. This is Beijing smog. This is in our lungs right now. If you live next to a highway, it's the same as 17 cigarettes per day. Are we insane? When did we say yes to that? And we had buckets of this disgusting material in our studio, and on a Monday morning, we were discussing, we were like, "Shit, what should we do with it? Should we throw it away?" Like, "Help!" And then we realized: no, no, no, no, no — waste should not exist. Waste for the one should be food for the other. So, here, maybe show it around. Do not put this in your coffee. (Laughter) And we realized that 42 percent is made out of carbon, and carbon, of course, under high pressure, you get ... diamonds. So, inspired by that, we compress it for 30 minutes — (Cracking sound) and make smog-free rings. (Laughter) And so by sharing — yeah, really! And so by sharing a ring, you donate 1,000 cubic meters of clean air to the city the tower is in. (Applause) I have one here — (Applause) A little floating cube. I will give one to you. I'm not going to propose, don't worry. (Laughter) Are we good? You can show it around. And we put this online — Kickstarter campaign, crowdfunding. And people started to preorder it, but more importantly, they started to prepay it. So the finance we made with the jewelry helped us to realize, to build the first tower. And that's powerful. So the waste the activator, it was the enabler. Also, the feedback from the community — this is a wedding couple from India, where he proposed to her with the smog-free ring as a sign of true beauty, as a sign of hope. And she said yes. (Laughter) I love this image so much for a lot of different reasons. (Laughter) And right now, the project is touring through China, actually with the support of China's central government. So the first goal is to create local clean-air parks, and that works already quite well — 55, 75 percent more clean. And at the same time, we team up with the NGOs, with the governors, with the students, with the tech people, to say, "Hey, what do we need to do to make a whole city smog-free?" It's about the dream of clean air. We do workshops. New ideas pop up. These are smog-free bicycles which — I'm Dutch, yes? — I have this "bicycle DNA" inside of me somewhere. And so it sucks up polluted air, it cleans it and releases it, in the fight against the car, in the celebration of the bicycle. And so right now, we're working on a sort of "package deal," so to speak, where we say, "Smog-free towers, smog-free rings." We go to the mayors or the governors of this world, and say, "We can guarantee a short-term reduction of pollution between 20 and 40 percent. Please sign here right now." Yes? (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) So it's all about connecting new technology with creative thinking. And if you start thinking about that, there is so much you can imagine, so much more you can do. We worked on dance floors which produce electricity when you dance on them. We did the design for that — 2008. So it moves eight or nine millimeters, produces 25 watts. The electricity that we generate is used for the lighting or the DJ booth. So some of the sustainability is about doing more, not about doing less. But also on a larger scale, the Netherlands, where I'm from, we live below sea level. So because of these beauties — the Afsluitdijk: 32 kilometers, built by hand in 1932 — we live with the water, we fight with the water, we try to find harmony, but sometimes we forget. And therefore, we made "Waterlicht," a combination of LEDs and lenses, which show how high the water level would be — global change — if we stop. If, today, we all go home and we say, "Oh, whatever, somebody else will do it for us," or we'll wait for government or whomever. You know, we're not going to do that. It goes wrong. And we placed this in public spaces all around the world. Thousands of people showed up. (Applause) Thank you. You're too nice, you're too nice. That's not good for a designer. So thousands of people showed up, and some, actually, were scared. And they left; they experienced the floods in 1953. And others were mesmerized. Can we make floating cities? Can we generate electricity from the change in tides? So I think it's so important to make experiences — collective experiences — where people feel connected with a vision, with a future and trigger what is possible. At the same time, you know, these kinds of things — they're not easy, yes? It's a struggle. And what I experienced in my life is that a lot of people say they want innovation, and they want the next and the new, the future. But the moment you present a new idea, there's this weird tendency to reply to every new idea starting with two words. Which are? (Audience guesses) No, not "How much?" It's more annoying. (Laughter) What is it, guys? Or you're really blessed people? That's really good. "Yes, but." Very good. "Yes, but: it's too expensive, it's too cheap, it's too fast, it's too slow, it's too beautiful, it's too ugly, it cannot be done, it already exists." I heard everything about the same project in the same week. And I got really, really annoyed. I got a bit of gray hair, started to dress in black like a true architect. (Laughter) And one morning I woke up and I said, "Daan, stop. This is dragging you down. You have to do something with this. You have to use it as an ingredient, as a component." And so we decided to build, to realize the famous "Yes, but" chair. (Laughter) And this is an existing chair by Friso Kramer, a Dutch design. But we gave it a little "update," a little "hack," so to speak. We placed a little voice-recognition element right here. So the moment you sit on that chair, and you say those two horrible, creative-destructive, annoying little words — (Laughter) you get a short — (Laughter) but pretty intense little shock on the back side of your bottom. (Laughter) (Applause) And — (Applause) and that works; yeah, that works. Some clients have left us, they got really mad. Fortunately, the good ones have stayed. And, of course, we also apply it to ourselves. But ladies and gentlemen, let's not be afraid. Let's be curious, yes? And, you know, walking through TED in these days and hearing the other speakers and feeling the energy of the crowd, I was remembering this quote of the Canadian author, Marshall McLuhan, who once famously said, "On spacecraft earth, there are no passengers. We are all crew." And I think this so beautiful. This is so beautiful! We're not just consumers; we're makers: we make decisions, we make new inventions, we make new dreams. And I think if we start implementing that kind of thinking even more within today, there's still a whole new world to be explored. All right, thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
How to build a company where the best ideas win | {0: 'Ray Dalio is the founder, chair and co-chief investment officer of Bridgewater Associates, a global leader in institutional portfolio management and the largest hedge fund in the world.'} | TED2017 | Whether you like it or not, radical transparency and algorithmic decision-making is coming at you fast, and it's going to change your life. That's because it's now easy to take algorithms and embed them into computers and gather all that data that you're leaving on yourself all over the place, and know what you're like, and then direct the computers to interact with you in ways that are better than most people can. Well, that might sound scary. I've been doing this for a long time and I have found it to be wonderful. My objective has been to have meaningful work and meaningful relationships with the people I work with, and I've learned that I couldn't have that unless I had that radical transparency and that algorithmic decision-making. I want to show you why that is, I want to show you how it works. And I warn you that some of the things that I'm going to show you probably are a little bit shocking. Since I was a kid, I've had a terrible rote memory. And I didn't like following instructions, I was no good at following instructions. But I loved to figure out how things worked for myself. When I was 12, I hated school but I fell in love with trading the markets. I caddied at the time, earned about five dollars a bag. And I took my caddying money, and I put it in the stock market. And that was just because the stock market was hot at the time. And the first company I bought was a company by the name of Northeast Airlines. Northeast Airlines was the only company I heard of that was selling for less than five dollars a share. (Laughter) And I figured I could buy more shares, and if it went up, I'd make more money. So, it was a dumb strategy, right? But I tripled my money, and I tripled my money because I got lucky. The company was about to go bankrupt, but some other company acquired it, and I tripled my money. And I was hooked. And I thought, "This game is easy." With time, I learned this game is anything but easy. In order to be an effective investor, one has to bet against the consensus and be right. And it's not easy to bet against the consensus and be right. One has to bet against the consensus and be right because the consensus is built into the price. And in order to be an entrepreneur, a successful entrepreneur, one has to bet against the consensus and be right. I had to be an entrepreneur and an investor — and what goes along with that is making a lot of painful mistakes. So I made a lot of painful mistakes, and with time, my attitude about those mistakes began to change. I began to think of them as puzzles. That if I could solve the puzzles, they would give me gems. And the puzzles were: What would I do differently in the future so I wouldn't make that painful mistake? And the gems were principles that I would then write down so I would remember them that would help me in the future. And because I wrote them down so clearly, I could then — eventually discovered — I could then embed them into algorithms. And those algorithms would be embedded in computers, and the computers would make decisions along with me; and so in parallel, we would make these decisions. And I could see how those decisions then compared with my own decisions, and I could see that those decisions were a lot better. And that was because the computer could make decisions much faster, it could process a lot more information and it can process decisions much more — less emotionally. So it radically improved my decision-making. Eight years after I started Bridgewater, I had my greatest failure, my greatest mistake. It was late 1970s, I was 34 years old, and I had calculated that American banks had lent much more money to emerging countries than those countries were going to be able to pay back and that we would have the greatest debt crisis since the Great Depression. And with it, an economic crisis and a big bear market in stocks. It was a controversial view at the time. People thought it was kind of a crazy point of view. But in August 1982, Mexico defaulted on its debt, and a number of other countries followed. And we had the greatest debt crisis since the Great Depression. And because I had anticipated that, I was asked to testify to Congress and appear on "Wall Street Week," which was the show of the time. Just to give you a flavor of that, I've got a clip here, and you'll see me in there. (Video) Mr. Chairman, Mr. Mitchell, it's a great pleasure and a great honor to be able to appear before you in examination with what is going wrong with our economy. The economy is now flat — teetering on the brink of failure. Martin Zweig: You were recently quoted in an article. You said, "I can say this with absolute certainty because I know how markets work." Ray Dalio: I can say with absolute certainty that if you look at the liquidity base in the corporations and the world as a whole, that there's such reduced level of liquidity that you can't return to an era of stagflation." I look at that now, I think, "What an arrogant jerk!" (Laughter) I was so arrogant, and I was so wrong. I mean, while the debt crisis happened, the stock market and the economy went up rather than going down, and I lost so much money for myself and for my clients that I had to shut down my operation pretty much, I had to let almost everybody go. And these were like extended family, I was heartbroken. And I had lost so much money that I had to borrow 4,000 dollars from my dad to help to pay my family bills. It was one of the most painful experiences of my life ... but it turned out to be one of the greatest experiences of my life because it changed my attitude about decision-making. Rather than thinking, "I'm right," I started to ask myself, "How do I know I'm right?" I gained a humility that I needed in order to balance my audacity. I wanted to find the smartest people who would disagree with me to try to understand their perspective or to have them stress test my perspective. I wanted to make an idea meritocracy. In other words, not an autocracy in which I would lead and others would follow and not a democracy in which everybody's points of view were equally valued, but I wanted to have an idea meritocracy in which the best ideas would win out. And in order to do that, I realized that we would need radical truthfulness and radical transparency. What I mean by radical truthfulness and radical transparency is people needed to say what they really believed and to see everything. And we literally tape almost all conversations and let everybody see everything, because if we didn't do that, we couldn't really have an idea meritocracy. In order to have an idea meritocracy, we have let people speak and say what they want. Just to give you an example, this is an email from Jim Haskel — somebody who works for me — and this was available to everybody in the company. "Ray, you deserve a 'D-' for your performance today in the meeting ... you did not prepare at all well because there is no way you could have been that disorganized." Isn't that great? (Laughter) That's great. It's great because, first of all, I needed feedback like that. I need feedback like that. And it's great because if I don't let Jim, and people like Jim, to express their points of view, our relationship wouldn't be the same. And if I didn't make that public for everybody to see, we wouldn't have an idea meritocracy. So for that last 25 years that's how we've been operating. We've been operating with this radical transparency and then collecting these principles, largely from making mistakes, and then embedding those principles into algorithms. And then those algorithms provide — we're following the algorithms in parallel with our thinking. That has been how we've run the investment business, and it's how we also deal with the people management. In order to give you a glimmer into what this looks like, I'd like to take you into a meeting and introduce you to a tool of ours called the "Dot Collector" that helps us do this. A week after the US election, our research team held a meeting to discuss what a Trump presidency would mean for the US economy. Naturally, people had different opinions on the matter and how we were approaching the discussion. The "Dot Collector" collects these views. It has a list of a few dozen attributes, so whenever somebody thinks something about another person's thinking, it's easy for them to convey their assessment; they simply note the attribute and provide a rating from one to 10. For example, as the meeting began, a researcher named Jen rated me a three — in other words, badly — (Laughter) for not showing a good balance of open-mindedness and assertiveness. As the meeting transpired, Jen's assessments of people added up like this. Others in the room have different opinions. That's normal. Different people are always going to have different opinions. And who knows who's right? Let's look at just what people thought about how I was doing. Some people thought I did well, others, poorly. With each of these views, we can explore the thinking behind the numbers. Here's what Jen and Larry said. Note that everyone gets to express their thinking, including their critical thinking, regardless of their position in the company. Jen, who's 24 years old and right out of college, can tell me, the CEO, that I'm approaching things terribly. This tool helps people both express their opinions and then separate themselves from their opinions to see things from a higher level. When Jen and others shift their attentions from inputting their own opinions to looking down on the whole screen, their perspective changes. They see their own opinions as just one of many and naturally start asking themselves, "How do I know my opinion is right?" That shift in perspective is like going from seeing in one dimension to seeing in multiple dimensions. And it shifts the conversation from arguing over our opinions to figuring out objective criteria for determining which opinions are best. Behind the "Dot Collector" is a computer that is watching. It watches what all these people are thinking and it correlates that with how they think. And it communicates advice back to each of them based on that. Then it draws the data from all the meetings to create a pointilist painting of what people are like and how they think. And it does that guided by algorithms. Knowing what people are like helps to match them better with their jobs. For example, a creative thinker who is unreliable might be matched up with someone who's reliable but not creative. Knowing what people are like also allows us to decide what responsibilities to give them and to weigh our decisions based on people's merits. We call it their believability. Here's an example of a vote that we took where the majority of people felt one way ... but when we weighed the views based on people's merits, the answer was completely different. This process allows us to make decisions not based on democracy, not based on autocracy, but based on algorithms that take people's believability into consideration. Yup, we really do this. (Laughter) We do it because it eliminates what I believe to be one of the greatest tragedies of mankind, and that is people arrogantly, naïvely holding opinions in their minds that are wrong, and acting on them, and not putting them out there to stress test them. And that's a tragedy. And we do it because it elevates ourselves above our own opinions so that we start to see things through everybody's eyes, and we see things collectively. Collective decision-making is so much better than individual decision-making if it's done well. It's been the secret sauce behind our success. It's why we've made more money for our clients than any other hedge fund in existence and made money 23 out of the last 26 years. So what's the problem with being radically truthful and radically transparent with each other? People say it's emotionally difficult. Critics say it's a formula for a brutal work environment. Neuroscientists tell me it has to do with how are brains are prewired. There's a part of our brain that would like to know our mistakes and like to look at our weaknesses so we could do better. I'm told that that's the prefrontal cortex. And then there's a part of our brain which views all of this as attacks. I'm told that that's the amygdala. In other words, there are two you's inside you: there's an emotional you and there's an intellectual you, and often they're at odds, and often they work against you. It's been our experience that we can win this battle. We win it as a group. It takes about 18 months typically to find that most people prefer operating this way, with this radical transparency than to be operating in a more opaque environment. There's not politics, there's not the brutality of — you know, all of that hidden, behind-the-scenes — there's an idea meritocracy where people can speak up. And that's been great. It's given us more effective work, and it's given us more effective relationships. But it's not for everybody. We found something like 25 or 30 percent of the population it's just not for. And by the way, when I say radical transparency, I'm not saying transparency about everything. I mean, you don't have to tell somebody that their bald spot is growing or their baby's ugly. So, I'm just talking about — (Laughter) talking about the important things. So — (Laughter) So when you leave this room, I'd like you to observe yourself in conversations with others. Imagine if you knew what they were really thinking, and imagine if you knew what they were really like ... and imagine if they knew what you were really thinking and what were really like. It would certainly clear things up a lot and make your operations together more effective. I think it will improve your relationships. Now imagine that you can have algorithms that will help you gather all of that information and even help you make decisions in an idea-meritocratic way. This sort of radical transparency is coming at you and it is going to affect your life. And in my opinion, it's going to be wonderful. So I hope it is as wonderful for you as it is for me. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The unexpected math behind Van Gogh's "Starry Night" | null | TED-Ed | One of the most remarkable aspects of the human brain is its ability to recognize patterns and describe them. Among the hardest patterns we've tried to understand is the concept of turbulent flow in fluid dynamics. The German physicist Werner Heisenberg said, "When I meet God, I'm going to ask him two questions: why relativity and why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first." As difficult as turbulence is to understand mathematically, we can use art to depict the way it looks. In June 1889, Vincent van Gogh painted the view just before sunrise from the window of his room at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where he'd admitted himself after mutilating his own ear in a psychotic episode. In "The Starry Night," his circular brushstrokes create a night sky filled with swirling clouds and eddies of stars. Van Gogh and other Impressionists represented light in a different way than their predecessors, seeming to capture its motion, for instance, across sun-dappled waters, or here in star light that twinkles and melts through milky waves of blue night sky. The effect is caused by luminance, the intensity of the light in the colors on the canvas. The more primitive part of our visual cortex, which sees light contrast and motion, but not color, will blend two differently colored areas together if they have the same luminance. But our brains' primate subdivision will see the contrasting colors without blending. With these two interpretations happening at once, the light in many Impressionist works seems to pulse, flicker and radiate oddly. That's how this and other Impressionist works use quickly executed prominent brushstrokes to capture something strikingly real about how light moves. Sixty years later, Russian mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov furthered our mathematical understanding of turbulence when he proposed that energy in a turbulent fluid at length R varies in proportion to the 5/3rds power of R. Experimental measurements show Kolmogorov was remarkably close to the way turbulent flow works, although a complete description of turbulence remains one of the unsolved problems in physics. A turbulent flow is self-similar if there is an energy cascade. In other words, big eddies transfer their energy to smaller eddies, which do likewise at other scales. Examples of this include Jupiter's Great Red Spot, cloud formations and interstellar dust particles. In 2004, using the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists saw the eddies of a distant cloud of dust and gas around a star, and it reminded them of Van Gogh's "Starry Night." This motivated scientists from Mexico, Spain and England to study the luminance in Van Gogh's paintings in detail. They discovered that there is a distinct pattern of turbulent fluid structures close to Kolmogorov's equation hidden in many of Van Gogh's paintings. The researchers digitized the paintings, and measured how brightness varies between any two pixels. From the curves measured for pixel separations, they concluded that paintings from Van Gogh's period of psychotic agitation behave remarkably similar to fluid turbulence. His self-portrait with a pipe, from a calmer period in Van Gogh's life, showed no sign of this correspondence. And neither did other artists' work that seemed equally turbulent at first glance, like Munch's "The Scream." While it's too easy to say Van Gogh's turbulent genius enabled him to depict turbulence, it's also far too difficult to accurately express the rousing beauty of the fact that in a period of intense suffering, Van Gogh was somehow able to perceive and represent one of the most supremely difficult concepts nature has ever brought before mankind, and to unite his unique mind's eye with the deepest mysteries of movement, fluid and light. |
The physics of the "hardest move" in ballet | null | TED-Ed | In the third act of "Swan Lake," the Black Swan pulls off a seemingly endless series of turns, bobbing up and down on one pointed foot and spinning around, and around, and around 32 times. It's one of the toughest sequences in ballet, and for those thirty seconds or so, she's like a human top in perpetual motion. Those spectacular turns are called fouettés, which means "whipped" in French, describing the dancer's incredible ability to whip around without stopping. But while we're marveling at the fouetté, can we unravel its physics? The dancer starts the fouetté by pushing off with her foot to generate torque. But the hard part is maintaining the rotation. As she turns, friction between her pointe shoe and the floor, and somewhat between her body and the air, reduces her momentum. So how does she keep turning? Between each turn, the dancer pauses for a split second and faces the audience. Her supporting foot flattens, and then twists as it rises back onto pointe, pushing against the floor to generate a tiny amount of new torque. At the same time, her arms sweep open to help her keep her balance. The turns are most effective if her center of gravity stays constant, and a skilled dancer will be able to keep her turning axis vertical. The extended arms and torque-generating foot both help drive the fouetté. But the real secret and the reason you hardly notice the pause is that her other leg never stops moving. During her momentary pause, the dancer's elevated leg straightens and moves from the front to the side, before it folds back into her knee. By staying in motion, that leg is storing some of the momentum of the turn. When the leg comes back in towards the body, that stored momentum gets transferred back to the dancer's body, propelling her around as she rises back onto pointe. As the ballerina extends and retracts her leg with each turn, momentum travels back and forth between leg and body, keeping her in motion. A really good ballerina can get more than one turn out of every leg extension in one of two ways. First, she can extend her leg sooner. The longer the leg is extended, the more momentum it stores, and the more momentum it can return to the body when it's pulled back in. More angular momentum means she can make more turns before needing to replenish what was lost to friction. The other option is for the dancer to bring her arms or leg in closer to her body once she returns to pointe. Why does this work? Like every other turn in ballet, the fouetté is governed by angular momentum, which is equal to the dancer's angular velocity times her rotational inertia. And except for what's lost to friction, that angular momentum has to stay constant while the dancer is on pointe. That's called conservation of angular momentum. Now, rotational inertia can be thought of as a body's resistance to rotational motion. It increases when more mass is distributed further from the axis of rotation, and decreases when the mass is distributed closer to the axis of rotation. So as she brings her arms closer to her body, her rotational inertia shrinks. In order to conserve angular momentum, her angular velocity, the speed of her turn, has to increase, allowing the same amount of stored momentum to carry her through multiple turns. You've probably seen ice skaters do the same thing, spinning faster and faster by drawing in their arms and legs. In Tchaikovsky's ballet, the Black Swan is a sorceress, and her 32 captivating fouettés do seem almost supernatural. But it's not magic that makes them possible. It's physics. |
The ethical dilemma of self-driving cars | null | TED-Ed | This is a thought experiment. Let's say at some point in the not so distant future, you're barreling down the highway in your self-driving car, and you find yourself boxed in on all sides by other cars. Suddenly, a large, heavy object falls off the truck in front of you. Your car can't stop in time to avoid the collision, so it needs to make a decision: go straight and hit the object, swerve left into an SUV, or swerve right into a motorcycle. Should it prioritize your safety by hitting the motorcycle, minimize danger to others by not swerving, even if it means hitting the large object and sacrificing your life, or take the middle ground by hitting the SUV, which has a high passenger safety rating? So what should the self-driving car do? If we were driving that boxed in car in manual mode, whichever way we'd react would be understood as just that, a reaction, not a deliberate decision. It would be an instinctual panicked move with no forethought or malice. But if a programmer were to instruct the car to make the same move, given conditions it may sense in the future, well, that looks more like premeditated homicide. Now, to be fair, self-driving cars are are predicted to dramatically reduce traffic accidents and fatalities by removing human error from the driving equation. Plus, there may be all sorts of other benefits: eased road congestion, decreased harmful emissions, and minimized unproductive and stressful driving time. But accidents can and will still happen, and when they do, their outcomes may be determined months or years in advance by programmers or policy makers. And they'll have some difficult decisions to make. It's tempting to offer up general decision-making principles, like minimize harm, but even that quickly leads to morally murky decisions. For example, let's say we have the same initial set up, but now there's a motorcyclist wearing a helmet to your left and another one without a helmet to your right. Which one should your robot car crash into? If you say the biker with the helmet because she's more likely to survive, then aren't you penalizing the responsible motorist? If, instead, you save the biker without the helmet because he's acting irresponsibly, then you've gone way beyond the initial design principle about minimizing harm, and the robot car is now meting out street justice. The ethical considerations get more complicated here. In both of our scenarios, the underlying design is functioning as a targeting algorithm of sorts. In other words, it's systematically favoring or discriminating against a certain type of object to crash into. And the owners of the target vehicles will suffer the negative consequences of this algorithm through no fault of their own. Our new technologies are opening up many other novel ethical dilemmas. For instance, if you had to choose between a car that would always save as many lives as possible in an accident, or one that would save you at any cost, which would you buy? What happens if the cars start analyzing and factoring in the passengers of the cars and the particulars of their lives? Could it be the case that a random decision is still better than a predetermined one designed to minimize harm? And who should be making all of these decisions anyhow? Programmers? Companies? Governments? Reality may not play out exactly like our thought experiments, but that's not the point. They're designed to isolate and stress test our intuitions on ethics, just like science experiments do for the physical world. Spotting these moral hairpin turns now will help us maneuver the unfamiliar road of technology ethics, and allow us to cruise confidently and conscientiously into our brave new future. |
What would happen if you didn't sleep? | null | TED-Ed | In 1965, 17-year-old high school student, Randy Gardner stayed awake for 264 hours. That's 11 days to see how he'd cope without sleep. On the second day, his eyes stopped focusing. Next, he lost the ability to identify objects by touch. By day three, Gardner was moody and uncoordinated. At the end of the experiment, he was struggling to concentrate, had trouble with short-term memory, became paranoid, and started hallucinating. Although Gardner recovered without long-term psychological or physical damage, for others, losing shuteye can result in hormonal imbalance, illness, and, in extreme cases, death. We're only beginning to understand why we sleep to begin with, but we do know it's essential. Adults need seven to eight hours of sleep a night, and adolescents need about ten. We grow sleepy due to signals from our body telling our brain we are tired, and signals from the environment telling us it's dark outside. The rise in sleep-inducing chemicals, like adenosine and melatonin, send us into a light doze that grows deeper, making our breathing and heart rate slow down and our muscles relax. This non-REM sleep is when DNA is repaired and our bodies replenish themselves for the day ahead. In the United States, it's estimated that 30% of adults and 66% of adolescents are regularly sleep-deprived. This isn't just a minor inconvenience. Staying awake can cause serious bodily harm. When we lose sleep, learning, memory, mood, and reaction time are affected. Sleeplessness may also cause inflammation, halluciations, high blood pressure, and it's even been linked to diabetes and obesity. In 2014, a devoted soccer fan died after staying awake for 48 hours to watch the World Cup. While his untimely death was due to a stroke, studies show that chronically sleeping fewer than six hours a night increases stroke risk by four and half times compared to those getting a consistent seven to eight hours of shuteye. For a handful of people on the planet who carry a rare inherited genetic mutation, sleeplessness is a daily reality. This condition, known as Fatal Familial Insomnia, places the body in a nightmarish state of wakefulness, forbidding it from entering the sanctuary of sleep. Within months or years, this progressively worsening condition leads to dementia and death. How can sleep deprivation cause such immense suffering? Scientists think the answer lies with the accumulation of waste prducts in the brain. During our waking hours, our cells are busy using up our day's energy sources, which get broken down into various byproducts, including adenosine. As adenosine builds up, it increases the urge to sleep, also known as sleep pressure. In fact, caffeine works by blocking adenosine's receptor pathways. Other waste products also build up in the brain, and if they're not cleared away, they collectively overload the brain and are thought to lead to the many negative symptoms of sleep deprivation. So, what's happening in our brain when we sleep to prevent this? Scientists found something called the glymphatic system, a clean-up mechanism that removes this buildup and is much more active when we're asleep. It works by using cerebrospinal fluid to flush away toxic byproducts that accumulate between cells. Lymphatic vessels, which serve as pathways for immune cells, have recently been discovered in the brain, and they may also play a role in clearing out the brain's daily waste products. While scientists continue exploring the restorative mechanisms behind sleep, we can be sure that slipping into slumber is a necessity if we want to maintain our health and our sanity. |
What makes a hero? | null | TED-Ed | What do Harry Potter, Katniss Everdeen, and Frodo all have in common with the heroes of ancient myths? (Roar) What if I told you they are all variants of the same hero? Do you believe that? Joseph Campbell did. He studied myths from all over the world and published a book called "The Hero with a Thousand Faces," retelling dozens of stories and explaining how each represents the mono-myth, or Hero's Journey. So, what is the "hero's journey"? Think of it as a cycle. The journey begins and ends in a hero's ordinary world, but the quest passes through an unfamiliar, special world. Along the way, there are some key events. Think about your favorite book or movie. Does it follow this pattern? Status quo, that's where we start. 1:00: Call to Adventure. The hero receives a mysterious message. An invitation, a challenge? 2:00: Assistance The hero needs some help, probably from someone older, wiser. 3:00: Departure The hero crosses the threshold from his normal, safe home, and enters the special world and adventure. We're not in Kansas anymore. 4:00: Trials Being a hero is hard work: our hero solves a riddle, slays a monster, escapes from a trap. 5:00: Approach It's time to face the biggest ordeal, the hero's worst fear. (Roar) 6:00: Crisis This is the hero's darkest hour. He faces death and possibly even dies, only to be reborn. 7:00: Treasure (Roar) As a result, the hero claims some treasure, special recognition, or power. 8:00: Result This can vary between stories. Do the monsters bow down before the hero, or do they chase him as he flees from the special world? 9:00: Return After all that adventure, the hero returns to his ordinary world. 10:00: New Life This quest has changed the hero; he has outgrown his old life. 11:00: Resolution All the tangled plot lines get straightened out. 12:00: Status Quo, but upgraded to a new level. Nothing is quite the same once you are a hero. Many popular books and movies follow this ancient formula pretty closely. But let's see how well "The Hunger Games" fits the hero's journey template. When does Katniss Everdeen hear her call to adventure that gets the story moving? When her sister's name is called from the lottery. How about assistance? Is anyone going to help her on her adventure? Haymitch. What about departure? Does she leave her ordinary world? She gets on a train to the capital. OK, so you get the idea. What do you have in common with Harry Potter, Katniss Everdeen, and Frodo? Well, you're human, just like them. The Hero's Journey myth exists in all human cultures and keeps getting updated, because we humans reflect on our world through symbolic stories of our own lives. You leave your comfort zone, have an experience that transforms you, and then you recover and do it again. You don't literally slay dragons or fight Voldemort, but you face problems just as scary. Joseph Campbell said, "In the cave you fear to enter lies the treasure you seek." What is the symbolic cave you fear to enter? Auditions for the school play? Baseball tryouts? Love? Watch for this formula in books, movies, and TV shows you come across. You will certainly see it again. But also be sensitive to it in your own life. Listen for your call to adventure. Accept the challenge. Conquer your fear and claim the treasure you seek. And then, do it all over again. |
Would you sacrifice one person to save five? | null | TED-Ed | Imagine you're watching a runaway trolley barreling down the tracks straight towards five workers who can't escape. You happen to be standing next to a switch that will divert the trolley onto a second track. Here's the problem. That track has a worker on it, too, but just one. What do you do? Do you sacrifice one person to save five? This is the trolley problem, a version of an ethical dilemma that philosopher Philippa Foot devised in 1967. It's popular because it forces us to think about how to choose when there are no good choices. Do we pick the action with the best outcome or stick to a moral code that prohibits causing someone's death? In one survey, about 90% of respondents said that it's okay to flip the switch, letting one worker die to save five, and other studies, including a virtual reality simulation of the dilemma, have found similar results. These judgments are consistent with the philosophical principle of utilitarianism which argues that the morally correct decision is the one that maximizes well-being for the greatest number of people. The five lives outweigh one, even if achieving that outcome requires condemning someone to death. But people don't always take the utilitarian view, which we can see by changing the trolley problem a bit. This time, you're standing on a bridge over the track as the runaway trolley approaches. Now there's no second track, but there is a very large man on the bridge next to you. If you push him over, his body will stop the trolley, saving the five workers, but he'll die. To utilitarians, the decision is exactly the same, lose one life to save five. But in this case, only about 10% of people say that it's OK to throw the man onto the tracks. Our instincts tell us that deliberately causing someone's death is different than allowing them to die as collateral damage. It just feels wrong for reasons that are hard to explain. This intersection between ethics and psychology is what's so interesting about the trolley problem. The dilemma in its many variations reveal that what we think is right or wrong depends on factors other than a logical weighing of the pros and cons. For example, men are more likely than women to say it's okay to push the man over the bridge. So are people who watch a comedy clip before doing the thought experiment. And in one virtual reality study, people were more willing to sacrifice men than women. Researchers have studied the brain activity of people thinking through the classic and bridge versions. Both scenarios activate areas of the brain involved in conscious decision-making and emotional responses. But in the bridge version, the emotional response is much stronger. So is activity in an area of the brain associated with processing internal conflict. Why the difference? One explanation is that pushing someone to their death feels more personal, activating an emotional aversion to killing another person, but we feel conflicted because we know it's still the logical choice. "Trolleyology" has been criticized by some philosophers and psychologists. They argue that it doesn't reveal anything because its premise is so unrealistic that study participants don't take it seriously. But new technology is making this kind of ethical analysis more important than ever. For example, driver-less cars may have to handle choices like causing a small accident to prevent a larger one. Meanwhile, governments are researching autonomous military drones that could wind up making decisions of whether they'll risk civilian casualties to attack a high-value target. If we want these actions to be ethical, we have to decide in advance how to value human life and judge the greater good. So researchers who study autonomous systems are collaborating with philosophers to address the complex problem of programming ethics into machines, which goes to show that even hypothetical dilemmas can wind up on a collision course with the real world. |
What gives a dollar bill its value? | null | TED-Ed | If you tried to pay for something with a piece of paper, you might run into some trouble. Unless, of course, the piece of paper was a hundred dollar bill. But what is it that makes that bill so much more interesting and valuable than other pieces of paper? After all, there's not much you can do with it. You can't eat it. You can't build things with it. And burning it is actually illegal. So what's the big deal? Of course, you probably know the answer. A hundred dollar bill is printed by the government and designated as official currency, while other pieces of paper are not. But that's just what makes them legal. What makes a hundred dollar bill valuable, on the other hand, is how many or few of them are around. Throughout history, most currency, including the US dollar, was linked to valuable commodities and the amount of it in circulation depended on a government's gold or silver reserves. But after the US abolished this system in 1971, the dollar became what is known as fiat money, meaning not linked to any external resource but relying instead solely on government policy to decide how much currency to print. Which branch of our government sets this policy? The Executive, the Legislative, or the Judicial? The surprising answer is: none of the above! In fact, monetary policy is set by an independent Federal Reserve System, or the Fed, made up of 12 regional banks in major cities around the country. Its board of governors, which is appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, reports to Congress, and all the Fed's profit goes into the US Treasury. But to keep the Fed from being influenced by the day-to-day vicissitudes of politics, it is not under the direct control of any branch of government. Why doesn't the Fed just decide to print infinite hundred dollar bills to make everyone happy and rich? Well, because then the bills wouldn't be worth anything. Think about the purpose of currency, which is to be exchanged for goods and services. If the total amount of currency in circulation increases faster than the total value of goods and services in the economy, then each individual piece will be able to buy a smaller portion of those things than before. This is called inflation. On the other hand, if the money supply remains the same, while more goods and services are produced, each dollar's value would increase in a process known as deflation. So which is worse? Too much inflation means that the money in your wallet today will be worth less tomorrow, making you want to spend it right away. While this would stimulate business, it would also encourage overconsumption, or hoarding commodities, like food and fuel, raising their prices and leading to consumer shortages and even more inflation. But deflation would make people want to hold onto their money, and a decrease in consumer spending would reduce business profits, leading to more unemployment and a further decrease in spending, causing the economy to keep shrinking. So most economists believe that while too much of either is dangerous, a small, consistent amount of inflation is necessary to encourage economic growth. The Fed uses vast amounts of economic data to determine how much currency should be in circulation, including previous rates of inflation, international trends, and the unemployment rate. Like in the story of Goldilocks, they need to get the numbers just right in order to stimulate growth and keep people employed, without letting inflation reach disruptive levels. The Fed not only determines how much that paper in your wallet is worth but also your chances of getting or keeping the job where you earn it. |
Why elephants never forget | null | TED-Ed | It's a common saying that elephants never forget, but these magnificent animals are more than giant walking hard drives. The more we learn about elephants, the more it appears that their impressive memory is only one aspect of an incredible intelligence that makes them some of the most social, creative, and benevolent creatures on Earth. Unlike many proverbs, the one about elephant memory is scientifically accurate. Elephants know every member in their herd, able to recognize as many as 30 companions by sight or smell. This is a great help when migrating or encountering other potentially hostile elephants. They also remember and distinguish particular cues that signal danger and can recall important locations long after their last visit. But it's the memories unrelated to survival that are the most fascinating. Elephants remember not only their herd companions but other creatures who have made a strong impression on them. In one case, two circus elephants that had briefly performed together rejoiced when crossing paths 23 years later. This recognition isn't limited to others of their species. Elephants have also recognized humans they've bonded with after decades apart. All of this shows that elephant memory goes beyond responses to stimuli. Looking inside their heads, we can see why. The elephant boasts the largest brain of any land mammal, as well as an impressive encephalization quotient. This is the size of the brain relative to what we'd expect for an animal's body size, and the elephant's EQ is nearly as high as a chimpanzee's. And despite the distant relation, convergent evolution has made it remarkably similar to the human brain, with as many neurons and synapses and a highly developed hippocampus and cerebral cortex. It is the hippocampus, strongly associated with emotion, that aids recollection by encoding important experiences into long-term memories. The ability to distinguish this importance makes elephant memory a complex and adaptable faculty beyond rote memorization. It's what allows elephants who survived a drought in their youth to recognize its warning signs in adulthood, which is why clans with older matriarchs have higher survival rates. Unfortunately, it's also what makes elephants one of the few non-human animals to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. The cerebral cortex, on the other hand, enables problem solving, which elephants display in many creative ways. They also tackle problems cooperatively, sometimes even outwitting the researchers and manipulating their partners. And they've grasped basic arithmetic, keeping track of the relative amounts of fruit in two baskets after multiple changes. The rare combination of memory and problem solving can explain some of elephants' most clever behaviors, but it doesn't explain some of the things we're just beginning to learn about their mental lives. Elephants communicate using everything from body signals and vocalizations, to infrasound rumbles that can be heard kilometers away. And their understanding of syntax suggests that they have their own language and grammar. This sense of language may even go beyond simple communication. Elephants create art by carefully choosing and combining different colors and elements. They can also recognize twelve distinct tones of music and recreate melodies. And yes, there is an elephant band. But perhaps the most amazing thing about elephants is a capacity even more important than cleverness: their sense of empathy, altruism, and justice. Elephants are the only non-human animals to mourn their dead, performing burial rituals and returning to visit graves. They have shown concern for other species, as well. One working elephant refused to set a log down into a hole where a dog was sleeping, while elephants encountering injured humans have sometimes stood guard and gently comforted them with their trunk. On the other hand, elephant attacks on human villages have usually occurred right after massive poachings or cullings, suggesting deliberate revenge. When we consider all this evidence, along with the fact that elephants are one of the few species who can recognize themselves in a mirror, it's hard to escape the conclusion that they are conscious, intelligent, and emotional beings. Unfortunately, humanity's treatment of elephants does not reflect this, as they continue to suffer from habitat destruction in Asia, ivory poaching in Africa, and mistreatment in captivity worldwide. Given what we now know about elephants and what they continue to teach us about animal intelligence, it is more important than ever to ensure that what the English poet John Donne described as "nature's great masterpiece" does not vanish from the world's canvas. |
What is bipolar disorder? | null | TED-Ed | What is bipolar disorder? The word bipolar means two extremes. For the many millions experiencing bipolar disorder around the world, life is split between two different realities - elation and depression. Although there are many variations of bipolar disorder, let's consider a couple. Type 1 has extreme highs alongside the lows, while Type 2 involves briefer, less extreme periods of elation interspersed with long periods of depression. For someone seesawing between emotional states, it can feel impossible to find the balance necessary to lead a healthy life. Type 1's extreme highs are known as manic episodes, and they can make a person range from feeling irritable to invincible. But these euphoric episodes exceed ordinary feelings of joy, causing troubling symptoms like racing thoughts, sleeplessness, rapid speech, impuslive actions, and risky behaviors. Without treatment, these episodes become more frequent, intense, and take longer to subside. The depressed phase of bipolar disorder manifests in many ways - a low mood, dwindling interest in hobbies, changes in appetite, feeling worthless or excessively guilty, sleeping either too much or too little, restlessness or slowness, or persistent thoughts of suicide. Worldwide, about one to three percent of adults experience the broad range of symptoms that indicate bipolar disorder. Most of those people are functional, contributing members of society, and their lives, choices, and relationships aren't defined by the disorder, but still, for many, the consequences are serious. The illness can undermine educational and professional performance, relationships, financial security, and personal safety. So what causes bipolar disorder? Researchers think a key player is the brain's intricate wiring. Healthy brains maintain strong connections between neurons thanks to the brain's continuous efforts to prune itself and remove unused or faulty neural connections. This process is important because our neural pathways serve as a map for everything we do. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, scientists have discovered that the brain's pruning ability is disrupted in people with bipolar disorder. That means their neurons go haywire and create a network that's impossible to navigate. With only confusing signals as a guide, people with bipolar disorder develop abnormal thoughts and behaviors. Also, psychotic symptoms, like disorganized speech and behavior, delusional thoughts, paranoia, and hallucinations can emerge during extreme phases of bipolar disorder. This is attributed to the overabundance of a neurotransmitter called dopamine. But despite these insights, we can't pin bipolar disorder down to a single cause. In reality, it's a complex problem. For example, the brain's amygdala is involved in thinking, long-term memory, and emotional processing. In this brain region, factors as varied as genetics and social trauma may create abnormalities and trigger the symptoms of bipolar disorder. The condition tends to run in families, so we do know that genetics have a lot to do with it. But that doesn't mean there's a single bipolar gene. In fact, the likelihood of developing bipolar disorder is driven by the interactions between many genes in a complicated recipe we're still trying to understand. The causes are complex, and consequently, diagnosing and living with bipolar disorder is a challenge. Despite this, the disorder is controllable. Certain medications like lithium can help manage risky thoughts and behaviors by stabilizing moods. These mood stabilizing medications work by decreasing abnormal activity in the brain, thereby strengthening the viable neural connections. Other frequently used medications include antipsychotics, which alter the effects of dopamine, and electroconvulsive therapy, which works like a carefully controlled seizure in the brain, is sometimes used as an emergency treatment. Some bipolar patients reject treatment because they're afraid it will dim their emotions and destroy their creativity. But modern psychiatry is actively trying to avoid that. Today, doctors work with patients on a case-by-case basis to administer a combination of treatments and therapies that allows them to live to their fullest possible potential. And beyond treatment, people with bipolar disorder can benefit from even simpler changes. Those include regular exercise, good sleep habits, and sobriety from drugs and alcohol, not to mention the acceptance and empathy of family and friends. Remember, bipolar disorder is a medical condition, not a person's fault, or their whole identity, and it's something that can be controlled through a combination of medical treatments doing their work internally, friends and family fostering acceptance and understanding on the outside, and people with bipolar disorder empowering themselves to find balance in their lives. |
How in vitro fertilization (IVF) works | {0: 'Physician-novelist and activist writer Nassim Assefi confronts health and human rights challenges around the globe.', 1: 'Board-certified in both reproductive endocrinology and infertility and obstetrics and gynecology, Dr Levine is the founding partner and practice director of CCRM New York. He has lectured nationwide on how physicians and laboratory personnel can adopt common technologies to improve clinical efficiency.'} | TED-Ed | In 1978, Louise Brown became the world's first baby to be born by in vitro fertilization, or IVF. Her birth revolutionized the field of reproductive medicine. Given that approximately one in eight heterosexual couples has difficulty conceiving, and that homosexual couples and single parents often need clinical help to make a baby, the demand for IVF has been growing. IVF is so common, that more than 5 million babies have been born through this technology. IVF works by mimicking the brilliant design of sexual reproduction. In order to understand IVF, we first need to take a look at the natural process of baby making. Believe it or not, it all starts in the brain. Roughly fifteen days before fertilization can happen, the anterior pituitary gland secretes follicle stimulating hormone, FSH, which ripens a handful of follicles of the ovary that then release estrogen. Each follicle contains one egg, and on average, only one follicle becomes fully mature. As it grows and continues to release estrogen, this hormone not only helps coordinate growth and preparation of the uterus, it also communicates to the brain how well the follicle is developing. When the estrogen level is high enough, the anterior pituitary releases a surge of luteinizing hormone, LH, which triggers ovulation and causes the follicle to rupture and release the egg. Once the egg leaves the ovary, it is directed into the Fallopian tube by the finger-like fimbriae. If the egg is not fertilized by sperm within 24 hours, the unfertilized egg will die, and the entire system will reset itself, preparing to create a new egg and uterine lining the following month. The egg is the largest cell in the body and is protected by a thick, extracellular shell of sugar and protein called the zona pellucida. The zona thwarts the entry and fusion of more than one sperm, the smallest cell in the body. It takes a man two to three months to make sperm, and the process constantly renews. Each ejaculation during sexual intercourse releases more than 100 million sperm. But only 100 or so will ultimately make it to the proximity of the egg, and only one will successfully penetrate through the armor of the zona pellucida. Upon successful fertilization, the zygote immediately begins developing into an embryo, and takes about three days to reach the uterus. There, it requires another three or so days to implant firmly into the endometrium, the inner lining of the uterus. Once implanted, the cells that are to become the placenta secrete a hormone that signals to the ovulated follicle that there is a pregnancy in the uterus. This helps rescue that follicle, now called the corpus luteum, from degenerating as it normally would do in that stage of the menstrual cycle. The corpus luteum is responsible for producing the progesterone required to maintain the pregnancy until six to seven weeks of gestation, when the placenta develops and takes over, until the baby is born approximately 40 weeks later. Now, how do you make a baby in a lab? In patients undergoing IVF, FSH is administered at levels that are higher than naturally occuring to cause a controlled overstimulation of the ovaries so that they ultimately produce multiple eggs. The eggs are then retrieved just before ovulation would occur, while the woman is under anesthesia, through an aspirating needle that is guided by ultrasound. Most sperm samples are produced by masturbation. In the laboratory, the identified eggs are stripped of surrounding cells and prepared for fertilization in a petri dish. Fertilization can occur by one of two techniques. In the first, the eggs are incubated with thousands of sperm and fertilization occurs naturally over a few hours. The second technique maximizes certainty of fertilization by using a needle to place a single sperm inside the egg. This is particularly useful when there is a problem with the quality of the sperm. After fertilization, embryos can be further screened for genetic suitability, frozen for later attempted pregnancies, or delivered into the woman's uterus via catheter. Common convention is to transfer the embryo three days after fertilization, when the embryo has eight cells, or on day five, when the embryo is called a blastocyst, and has hundreds of cells. If the woman's eggs are of poor quality due to age or toxic exposures, or have been removed due to cancer, donor eggs may be used. In the case that the intended mother has a problematic uterus, or lacks one, another woman, called the gestational carrier or surrogate, can use her uterus to carry the pregnancy. To increase the odds of success, which are as high as 40% for a woman younger than 35, doctors sometimes transfer multiple embryos at once, which is why IVF results in twins and triplets more often than natural pregnancies. However, most clinics seek to minimize the chances of multiple pregnancies, as they are riskier for mothers and babies. Millions of babies, like Louise Brown, have been born from IVF and have had normal, healthy lives. The long-term health consequences of ovarian stimulation with IVF medicines are less clear, though so far, IVF seems safe for women. Because of better genetic testing, delayed childbearing, increased accessibility and diminishing cost, it's not inconceivable that artificial baby making via IVF and related techniques could outpace natural reproduction in years to come. |
What really happens to the plastic you throw away? | null | TED-Ed | This is the story of three plastic bottles, empty and discarded. Their journeys are about to diverge with outcomes that impact nothing less than the fate of the planet. But they weren't always this way. To understand where these bottles end up, we must first explore their origins. The heroes of our story were conceived in this oil refinery. The plastic in their bodies was formed by chemically bonding oil and gas molecules together to make monomers. In turn, these monomers were bonded into long polymer chains to make plastic in the form of millions of pellets. Those were melted at manufacturing plants and reformed in molds to create the resilient material that makes up the triplets' bodies. Machines filled the bottles with sweet bubbily liquid and they were then wrapped, shipped, bought, opened, consumed and unceremoniously discarded. And now here they lie, poised at the edge of the unknown. Bottle one, like hundreds of millions of tons of his plastic brethren, ends up in a landfill. This huge dump expands each day as more trash comes in and continues to take up space. As plastics sit there being compressed amongst layers of other junk, rainwater flows through the waste and absorbs the water-soluble compounds it contains, and some of those are highly toxic. Together, they create a harmful stew called leachate, which can move into groundwater, soil and streams, poisoning ecosystems and harming wildlife. It can take bottle one an agonizing 1,000 years to decompose. Bottle two's journey is stranger but, unfortunately, no happier. He floats on a trickle that reaches a stream, a stream that flows into a river, and a river that reaches the ocean. After months lost at sea, he's slowly drawn into a massive vortex, where trash accumulates, a place known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Here the ocean's currents have trapped millions of pieces of plastic debris. This is one of five plastic-filled gyres in the world's seas. Places where the pollutants turn the water into a cloudy plastic soup. Some animals, like seabirds, get entangled in the mess. They, and others, mistake the brightly colored plastic bits for food. Plastic makes them feel full when they're not, so they starve to death and pass the toxins from the plastic up the food chain. For example, it's eaten by lanternfish, the lanternfish are eaten by squid, the squid are eaten by tuna, and the tuna are eaten by us. And most plastics don't biodegrade, which means they're destined to break down into smaller and smaller pieces called micro plastics, which might rotate in the sea eternally. But bottle three is spared the cruel purgatories of his brothers. A truck brings him to a plant where he and his companions are squeezed flat and compressed into a block. Okay, this sounds pretty bad, too, but hang in there. It gets better. The blocks are shredded into tiny pieces, which are washed and melted, so they become the raw materials that can be used again. As if by magic, bottle three is now ready to be reborn as something completely new. For this bit of plastic with such humble origins, suddenly the sky is the limit. |
Would you live in a floating city in the sky? | {0: 'Tomás Saraceno invites us to consider the impossible, like spiders that play music or cities in the sky.'} | TED2017 | This is my favorite place on earth, Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia. And when it's covered in a thin layer of water, it reflects the clouds. There are days when you feel as if you're floating among the clouds. But there are days when the horizon disappears; there's no longer a top or a bottom. You feel immersed in something bigger. It was there that one night I woke up from a dream, and I saw that the stars were also reflected on the water. And that wasn't a dream. It was as if you could walk among the stars. With every step I took, the stars reverberated under my feet. It was like I was floating in the universe among clouds of galaxies. But what's floating there today are not just clouds of galaxies but also clouds of plastic. These are the footprints we're leaving on the planet. They're signs of an era in which the behavior of some humans is making a global impact on our ecosystems. This era is called the Anthropocene. There's also another type of toxic clouds that float in the air, like the ones that form from carbon dioxide emissions and from the burning of fossil fuels — oil, carbon, gas — clouds that, when we see them, pollute our dreams. I don't know about all of you, but I've always dreamed of floating among the clouds. Maybe today we can imagine together other types of clouds, clouds we can live with. If you're wondering about that photo, I'll explain: it looks like a collage or photomontage — something weird. No; it's reality. But sometimes I ask myself: What is reality? According to Alexander Kluge: "Human beings are not interested in reality. They can’t be; it’s part of the human essence. They have desires. These desires are totally opposed to any form of reality. They prefer to lie than to become divorced from their desires." But how can we learn to float among the clouds? As an artist, I thought we could start building a flying museum. You're probably wondering: With plastic bags? In 2007, with a community of people all over the world, we began to collect used plastic bags — not new ones. And we washed them, we cut them up, we glued them together, and we began to draw on them, creating a huge canvas. We made a collection of drawings, of personal stories and of friendships. And when you join them, bend them and fold them, it creates a space full of air. When the sun comes up from the horizon, the museum rises up to the sky. That's why we call it, "The Aero-Solar Museum." And from this simple idea, we learned how to float in the air in a radically new way, without using any type of fuel. The difference in temperature between the interior and the exterior is what makes us rise up. That way, we don't use fossil fuels or helium or hydrogen; we don't use solar panels or batteries or motors. We discovered a way that's simple, clean and accessible to the whole world to lift ourselves up. I remember when I was at NASA in 2009 with 120 engineers. You guys know, too, when you go up in a plane, the control panels are gigantic. And what we're doing is really complex, and when I started coming in with the plastic bags, saying, "But we have a different way ..." people had a hard time understanding the concept. Seeing the power of this idea, we started to initiate a new era; one that would leave behind the violence of the Anthropocene and give way to a new era, which we call the "Aerocene" — an era of ecological awareness, in which we learn to float together, live together in the air, and come to an ethical commitment with the atmosphere and with planet earth. That's why I've brought this backpack today. Let's see ... OK. This is a balloon that we also refer to as a sculpture. And if it's sunny out tomorrow, we can go out and fly — though, no, the weather in Vancouver isn't — (Laughter) it's not very ... very favorable. So, what other features does it have? It has sensors that, when it moves, make sort of drawings in the air. It also has other sensors. I always think that first you have to feel it, and then you can measure it; you need to hear the sounds of the atmosphere, of the climate, of the hot air, in order to then measure the ozone, the carbon dioxide. We're developing these sensors together with different communities all over the world in order to reconnect with the climate, the temperature and the environment, because there are other species in the air; in these excursions towards the atmosphere, we're not alone. The air is full of clouds of life. We live at the bottom of an ocean of air. And this same sculpture, this exact one in my hands, flew 375 miles — 12 hours — from Germany to Poland, on a fuel-free trip. But it wasn't free from crossing borders. The trip was much more complicated than what we imagined; air space is as regulated and militarized as land space. To fly using the winds, the heat of the sun and the radiant energy of the earth is complex and beautiful. But even more complex will be getting the permits to cross the air space of each of the different countries that we fly over using wind. At COP21, the Paris Climate Conference, we presented these spherical sculptures that could transport us all over the world. But how can we fly using the wind to arrive at our destination? Together with MIT, we developed a program that predicts how we can navigate the wind highways. For example, if I had to return to Berlin from Vancouver, the first thing I would need to do is choose an altitude. At different altitudes, there are different directions and different speeds. The red line is tomorrow and the orange, the day after tomorrow. And there it goes. You can see, the best day to fly back to Berlin — so now, traveling using only wind — is in six days. And we can get to 105 miles from the center of Berlin without burning a single drop of fuel, being transported only by wind currents. So we thought that these trajectories that we drew with the wind could become signatures, declaring "Independence from Fossil Fuels Day." More and more of us are experiencing the air in a different way. You're all familiar with Earth Day. We think we should also celebrate Air Day: it's a pact that we make with the earth, an ethical commitment to the atmosphere. But let's keep thinking and dreaming. We've learned that the bigger the sculptures are, the more weight they can lift. Remember, they rise up only with hot air that's been heated by the sun. Using this approach, we can learn to build gardens in the air. Could we one day live in a garden the size of the earth? Could we live in an ecosystem floating among the clouds? Answering these questions isn't just a technological challenge; it's a way to reexamine the freedom of movement between countries, and of overcoming the political, social, cultural and military restrictions of contemporary societies. Because in the end, the air belongs to everybody and doesn't answer to any government. (Applause) And like we said earlier, our imagination is the force that allows us to create these places. This is an installation I did at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It asks the question: What might these transnational spaces be like? And once we inhabit those spaces, we need to learn how to move within them, to walk among the clouds, where every movement affects everyone else's movements; the body weight and proximity between people will cause the space to expand ... or contract. There we are, suspended 72 feet in the air. When two or more people get too close together, even those farthest away are affected — everyone falls to the same spot. These are fragile ecosystems. And it's between these spheres that we build nets that connect us. There are moments when we have to face the void, and fear can paralyze us. One of the most beautiful things about this exhibit is the sense of solidarity generated when we face these new "aero-graphs." Finally, let me tell you one last story. On July 16, 1945, on the White Sands of New Mexico, an atomic bomb was detonated for the first time. As a result of this explosion, a cloud of radioactive particles disseminated all over the earth, marking the beginning of the Anthropocene era. Seventy years later, on November 8, 2015, in the same place, another event occurred. For the first time in history, we lifted a person into the air using only the sun, without burning any fossil fuels. As the sun rose up above the horizon, we rose up, too, silently, slowly, with no explosions. We felt as if gravity had been inverted; it wasn't pulling us toward the center of the earth, but toward the universe. If Neil Armstrong said, when he walked on the moon, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," perhaps what we ought to ask ourselves is: What steps do we need to take today? In the Aerocene era, our steps are much smaller, but radically different; they're steps that began with a bag full of air and wishes, but that can carry us to independence from fossil fuels and the opportunity to celebrate Air Day; steps that won't leave footprints on other planets until we've learned to walk in the atmosphere of this one. The landscapes are tiny and the steps are tiny, but I hope we can take them together. And I'm sure that these steps will lead us much further than the moon, so we can learn to float with our feet on the ground. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why it's so hard to cure HIV/AIDS | {0: "Janet Iwasa's colorful, action-packed 3D animations bring scientific hypotheses to life."} | TED-Ed | In 2008, something incredible happened: a man was cured of HIV. In over 70 million HIV cases, that was a first and, so far, a last. We don't yet understand exactly how he was cured. We can cure people of various diseases, such as malaria and hepatitis C, so why can't we cure HIV? Well, first let's examine how HIV infects people and progresses into AIDS. HIV spreads through exchanges of bodily fluids. Unprotected sex and contaminated needles are the leading cause of transmission. It, fortunately, cannot spread through air, water, or casual contact. Individuals of any age, sexual orientation, gender and race can contract HIV. Once inside the body, HIV infects cells that are part of the immune system. It particularly targets helper T cells, which help defend the body against bacterial and fungal infections. HIV is a retrovirus, which means it can write its genetic code into the genome of infected cells, co-opting them into making more copies of itself. During the first stage of HIV infection, the virus replicates within helper T cells, destroying many of them in the process. During this stage, patients often experience flu-like symptoms, but are typically not yet in mortal danger. However, for a period ranging from a few months to several years, during which time the patient may look and feel completely healthy, the virus continues to replicate and destroy T cells. When T cell counts drop too low, patients are in serious danger of contracting deadly infections that healthy immune systems can normally handle. This stage of HIV infection is known as AIDS. The good news is there are drugs that are highly effective at managing levels of HIV and preventing T cell counts from getting low enough for the disease to progress to AIDS. With antiretroviral therapy, most HIV-positive people can expect to live long and healthy lives, and are much less likely to infect others. However, there are two major catches. One is that HIV-positive patients must keep taking their drugs for the rest of their lives. Without them, the virus can make a deadly comeback. So, how do these drugs work? The most commonly prescribed ones prevent the viral genome from being copied and incorporated into a host cell's DNA. Other drugs prevent the virus from maturing or assembling, causing HIV to be unable to infect new cells in the body. But HIV hides out somewhere our current drugs cannot reach it: inside the DNA of healthy T cells. Most T cells die shortly after being infected with HIV. But in a tiny percentage, the instructions for building more HIV viruses lies dormant, sometimes for years. So even if we could wipe out every HIV virus from an infected person's body, one of those T cells could activate and start spreading the virus again. The other major catch is that not everyone in the world has access to the therapies that could save their lives. In Sub-Saharan Africa, which accounts for over 70% of HIV patients worldwide, antiretrovirals reached only about one in three HIV-positive patients in 2012. There is no easy answer to this problem. A mix of political, economic and cultural barriers makes effective prevention and treatment difficult. And even in the U.S., HIV still claims more than 10,000 lives per year. However, there is ample cause for hope. Researchers may be closer than ever to developing a true cure. One research approach involves using a drug to activate all cells harboring the HIV genetic information. This would both destroy those cells and flush the virus out into the open, where our current drugs are effective. Another is looking to use genetic tools to cut the HIV DNA out of cells genomes altogether. And while one cure out of 70 million cases may seem like terrible odds, one is immeasurably better than zero. We now know that a cure is possible, and that may give us what we need to beat HIV for good. |
How to understand power | {0: 'As CEO of Citizen University, Eric Liu is working to spark a civic revival in the US and beyond.'} | TED-Ed | Every day of your life, you move through systems of power that other people made. Do you sense them? Do you understand power? Do you realize why it matters? Power is something we are often uncomfortable talking about. That's especially true in civic life, how we live together in community. In a democracy, power is supposed to reside with the people, period. Any further talk about power and who really has it seems a little dirty, maybe even evil. But power is no more inherently good or evil than fire or physics. It just is. It governs how any form of government works. It determines who gets to determine the rules of the game. So learning how power operates is key to being effective, being taken seriously, and not being taken advantage of. In this lesson, we'll look at where power comes from, how it's exercised and what you can do to become more powerful in public life. Let's start with a basic definition. Power is the ability to make others do what you would have them do. Of course, this plays out in all arenas of life, from family to the workplace to our relationships. Our focus is on the civic arena, where power means getting a community to make the choices and to take the actions that you want. There are six main sources of civic power. First, there's physical force and a capacity for violence. Control of the means of force, whether in the police or a militia, is power at its most primal. A second core source of power is wealth. Money creates the ability to buy results and to buy almost any other kind of power. The third form of power is state action, government. This is the use of law and bureaucracy to compel people to do or not do certain things. In a democracy, for example, we the people, theoretically, give government its power through elections. In a dictatorship, state power emerges from the threat of force, not the consent of the governed. The fourth type of power is social norms or what other people think is okay. Norms don't have the centralized machinery of government. They operate in a softer way, peer to peer. They can certainly make people change behavior and even change laws. Think about how norms around marriage equality today are evolving. The fifth form of power is ideas. An idea, individual liberties, say, or racial equality, can generate boundless amounts of power if it motivates enough people to change their thinking and actions. And so the sixth source of power is numbers, lots of humans. A vocal mass of people creates power by expressing collective intensity of interest and by asserting legitimacy. Think of the Arab Spring or the rise of the Tea Party. Crowds count. These are the six main sources of power, what power is. So now, let's think about how power operates. There are three laws of power worth examining. Law number one: power is never static. It's always either accumulating or decaying in a civic arena. So if you aren't taking action, you're being acted upon. Law number two: power is like water. It flows like a current through everyday life. Politics is the work of harnessing that flow in a direction you prefer. Policymaking is an effort to freeze and perpetuate a particular flow of power. Policy is power frozen. Law number three: power compounds. Power begets more power, and so does powerlessness. The only thing that keeps law number three from leading to a situation where only one person has all the power is how we apply laws one and two. What rules do we set up so that a few people don't accumulate too much power, and so that they can't enshrine their privilege in policy? That's the question of democracy, and you can see each of these laws at work in any news story. Low wage workers organize to get higher pay. Oil companies push to get a big pipeline approved. Gay and lesbian couples seek the legal right to marry. Urban parents demand school vouchers. You may support these efforts or not. Whether you get what you want depends on how adept you are with power, which brings us finally to what you can do to become more powerful in public life. Here, it's useful to think in terms of literacy. Your challenge is to learn how to read power and write power. To read power means to pay attention to as many texts of power as you can. I don't mean books only. I mean seeing society as a set of texts. Don't like how things are in your campus or city or country? Map out who has what kind of power, arrayed in what systems. Understand why it turned out this way, who's made it so, and who wants to keep it so. Study the strategies others in such situations used: frontal attack or indirection, coalitions or charismatic authority. Read so you may write. To write power requires first that you believe you have the right to write, to be an author of change. You do. As with any kind of writing, you learn to express yourself, speak up in a voice that's authentic. Organize your ideas, then organize other people. Practice consensus building. Practice conflict. As with writing, it's all about practice. Every day you have a chance to practice, in your neighborhood and beyond. Set objectives, then bigger ones. Watch the patterns, see what works. Adapt, repeat. This is citizenship. In this short lesson, we've explored where civic power comes from, how it works and what you can do to exercise it. One big question remaining is the "why" of power. Do you want power to benefit everyone or only you? Are your purposes pro-social or anti-social? This question isn't about strategy. It's about character, and that's another set of lessons. But remember this: Power plus character equals a great citizen, and you have the power to be one. |
The science of skin color | null | TED-Ed | When ultraviolet sunlight hits our skin, it affects each of us a little differently. Depending on skin color, it will take only minutes of exposure to turn one person beetroot-pink, while another requires hours to experience the slightest change. So what's to account for that difference and how did our skin come to take on so many different hues to begin with? Whatever the color, our skin tells an epic tale of human intrepidness and adaptability, revealing its variance to be a function of biology. It all centers around melanin, the pigment that gives skin and hair its color. This ingredient comes from skin cells called melanocytes and takes two basic forms. There's eumelanin, which gives rise to a range of brown skin tones, as well as black, brown, and blond hair, and pheomelanin, which causes the reddish browns of freckles and red hair. But humans weren't always like this. Our varying skin tones were formed by an evolutionary process driven by the Sun. In began some 50,000 years ago when our ancestors migrated north from Africa and into Europe and Asia. These ancient humans lived between the Equator and the Tropic of Capricorn, a region saturated by the Sun's UV-carrying rays. When skin is exposed to UV for long periods of time, the UV light damages the DNA within our cells, and skin starts to burn. If that damage is severe enough, the cells mutations can lead to melanoma, a deadly cancer that forms in the skin's melanocytes. Sunscreen as we know it today didn't exist 50,000 years ago. So how did our ancestors cope with this onslaught of UV? The key to survival lay in their own personal sunscreen manufactured beneath the skin: melanin. The type and amount of melanin in your skin determines whether you'll be more or less protected from the sun. This comes down to the skin's response as sunlight strikes it. When it's exposed to UV light, that triggers special light-sensitive receptors called rhodopsin, which stimulate the production of melanin to shield cells from damage. For light-skin people, that extra melanin darkens their skin and produces a tan. Over the course of generations, humans living at the Sun-saturated latitudes in Africa adapted to have a higher melanin production threshold and more eumelanin, giving skin a darker tone. This built-in sun shield helped protect them from melanoma, likely making them evolutionarily fitter and capable of passing this useful trait on to new generations. But soon, some of our Sun-adapted ancestors migrated northward out of the tropical zone, spreading far and wide across the Earth. The further north they traveled, the less direct sunshine they saw. This was a problem because although UV light can damage skin, it also has an important parallel benefit. UV helps our bodies produce vitamin D, an ingredient that strengthens bones and lets us absorb vital minerals, like calcium, iron, magnesium, phosphate, and zinc. Without it, humans experience serious fatigue and weakened bones that can cause a condition known as rickets. For humans whose dark skin effectively blocked whatever sunlight there was, vitamin D deficiency would have posed a serious threat in the north. But some of them happened to produce less melanin. They were exposed to small enough amounts of light that melanoma was less likely, and their lighter skin better absorbed the UV light. So they benefited from vitamin D, developed strong bones, and survived well enough to produce healthy offspring. Over many generations of selection, skin color in those regions gradually lightened. As a result of our ancestor's adaptability, today the planet is full of people with a vast palette of skin colors, typically, darker eumelanin-rich skin in the hot, sunny band around the Equator, and increasingly lighter pheomelanin-rich skin shades fanning outwards as the sunshine dwindles. Therefore, skin color is little more than an adaptive trait for living on a rock that orbits the Sun. It may absorb light, but it certainly does not reflect character. |
What it feels like to see Earth from space | {0: 'Through his mesmerizing satellite photographs, Benjamin Grant offers us a new way of seeing of our planet and ourselves. '} | TEDxSkoll | It's Christmas Eve, 1968. The Apollo 8 spacecraft has successfully completed its first three orbits around the moon. Launched from Cape Canaveral three days before, this is the first time that humans have ever traveled beyond low Earth orbit. On the vessel's fourth pass, the Earth slowly comes into view and reveals itself above the Moon's horizon. Astronaut Bill Anders frantically asks his crewmates where their camera is, grabs the Hasselblad, points it towards the window, presses the shutter, and takes one of the most important photographs of all time: "Earthrise." When the crew was safely home a few days later, they were asked about the mission. Anders famously replied, "We went to the moon, but we actually discovered Earth." What did he and his fellow crewmates feel in this incredible moment? In a study released just this past year, a team of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania examined the testimonies of hundreds of astronauts who had the opportunity to view the Earth from space. Their analysis uncovered three common feelings: first, a greater appreciation for Earth's beauty; second, an increased sense of connection to all other living beings; and third, an unexpected, often overwhelming sense of emotion. The researchers believe that seeing the Earth from a great distance provokes someone to develop new cognitive frameworks to understand what they are seeing. They believe these astronauts were forever changed by this new view, this new perspective, this new visual truth. This feeling is commonly referred to as the "overview effect." Only 558 people have ever been to outer space. 558 people had the opportunity to gaze down in awe, to wonder at our planet floating in an infinite sea of darkness. But what if that number were bigger? Three years ago, I set off on my own mission: to see if I could bring this feeling of overwhelming scale and beauty to many more people just by using one small computer in my small New York City apartment. It was then, in 2013, that I launched "Daily Overview." Every day, I have used satellite imagery to create one expansive overhead view of our planet. More than 1,000 of these images have been created thus far, and more than 600,000 people tune in for this daily dose of perspectives. I create the imagery by curating photos from the massive archive of a satellite company called Digital Globe. They operate a constellation of five satellites, each roughly the size of an ambulance, that is constantly taking pictures of the Earth as they orbit at 28,000 kilometers per hour. Now, what does this mean? Each of these satellites is equipped with a camera that has a focal length of 16 meters, so that's roughly 290 times greater than a DSLR camera equipped with a standard 55 millimeter lens. So if were able to attach one of their satellites to the roof of this theater in Oxford, we could take a picture of a football, clearly, on the pitch at the stadium in Amsterdam. That's 450 kilometers away. That's incredibly powerful technology. And I decided at the beginning of this project that I would use that incredible technology to focus on the places where humans have impacted the planet. As a species, we dig and scrape the Earth for resources, we produce energy, we raise animals and cultivate crops for food, we build cities, we move around, we create waste. And in the process of doing all of these things, we shape landscapes and seascapes and cityscapes with increasing control and impunity. So with that in mind, I would like to share a few of my overviews with you now. Here we see cargo ships and oil tankers waiting outside the entry to the port of Singapore. This facility is the second-busiest in the world by terms of total tonnage, accounting for one-fifth of the world's shipping containers and one half of the annual supply of crude oil. If you look closely at this overview, you'll see a lot of little specks. Those are actually cows at a feedlot in Summerfield, Texas, in the United States. So once cows reach a particular weight, roughly 300 kilograms, they are moved here and placed on a specialized diet. Over the next three to four months, the cows gain an additional 180 kilograms before they are shipped off to slaughter. You're also probably wondering about this glowing pool at the top there. That gets its color from a unique combination of manure, chemicals and a particular type of algae that grows in the stagnant water. This is the Mount Whaleback iron ore mine in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, a beautiful yet scary scar on the face of the Earth. Of the world's mined iron ore, 98 percent is used to make steel and is therefore a major component in the construction of buildings, automobiles or appliances such as your dishwasher or refrigerator. This is a solar concentrator in Seville, Spain. So this facility contains 2,650 mirrors which are arrayed in concentric circles around an 140-meter-tall tower at its center. At the top of the tower, there is a capsule of molten salt that gets heated by the beams of light reflected upwards from the mirrors below. From there, the salt circulates to a storage tank underground, where it produces steam, which spins turbines and generates enough electricity to power 70,000 homes and offsets 30,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions every year. This overview shows deforestation in Santa Cruz, Bolivia immediately adjacent to untouched tracts of rainforest. Deforestation in the country has primarily been driven by the expansion of mechanized agriculture and cattle ranching, so as the country tries to meet the demand of its growing population and feed them, the sacrificial destruction of its rainforest has taken place to do so. It is estimated that the country lost 4.5 million acres of rainforest in one decade alone from 2000 until 2010. This is the Eixample district in Barcelona, Spain. So the overview perspective can be incredibly helpful to help us understand how cities function and how we can devise smarter solutions for urban planning, and this will become only more relevant as it is expected that 4.9 billion people will live in cities around the world by the year 2030. This area of Barcelona is characterized by its strict grid pattern, apartments with communal courtyards and these octagonal intersections which allow for more sunlight, better ventilation and additional parking at street level. And here we see that grid pattern but under much different circumstances. This is the Dadaab Refugee Camp in northern Kenya, the largest such facility of its kind in the world. To cope with the influx of refugees who are fleeing Somalia, where there is famine and conflict, the UN has built this area gridded out at left called the LFO extension to house more and more refugees who are arriving and occupying these white dots, which are actually tents which will slowly fill up the area over time. So if you have one of these overviews, you have a moment in time. If we have two overviews, however, we are able to tell stories about changes in time. I call that feature of the project "Juxtapose," and we'll share a few examples of it with you now. So the tulip fields in Netherlands bloom every year in April. So we take an image captured in March a few weeks before and contrast it to one taken a few weeks later. We're able to watch the flowers bloom in this magnificent cascade of color. It is estimated that the Dutch produce 4.3 billion tulip bulbs every year. In 2015, two dams collapsed at an iron ore mine in southeastern Brazil, causing one of the worst environmental disasters in the history of the country. It is estimated that 62 million cubic meters of waste were released when the dams broke, destroying numerous villages in the process, including Bento Rodrigues, seen here before ... and after the flood. Ultimately, 19 people were killed in this disaster. Half a million people did not have access to clean drinking water for an extended period of time, and the waste soon entered into the Doce River, extended for 650 kilometers all the way into the sea, killing unknowable amounts of plant and animal life along the way. And lastly, here is a story related to the crisis in Syria, a conflict which has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions. So this patch of desert is seen in Mafraq, Jordan in 2011, the year the conflict started, and when we compare it to an image captured just this year in 2017, we see the construction of the Zaatari refugee camp. So just as the astronauts of Apollo 8 watched the Earth rising above the lunar landscape for the first time, there is no way that you could have imagined what the places I just showed you look like from outer space. And while you may enjoy the aesthetics of an image, once you learn exactly what it is you're seeing, you may struggle with the fact that you still like it. And that's the tension I want to create with my work, because I believe it is that contemplation, that internal dialogue that will lead to greater interest in our planet and more awareness of what we're doing to it. I believe that viewing the Earth from the overview perspective is more important now than ever before. Through the incredible technology of these high-flying cameras, we can see, monitor and expose the unprecedented impact that we are having. And whether we are scientists or engineers or policymakers or investors or artists, if we can adopt a more expansive perspective, embrace the truth of what is going on and contemplate the long-term health of our planet, we will create a better and safer and smarter future for our one and only home. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why do whales sing? | null | TED-Ed | Communicating underwater is challenging. Light and odors don't travel well, so it's hard for animals to see or smell. But sound moves about four times faster in water than in air, so in this dark environment, marine mammals often rely on vocalization to communicate. That's why a chorus of sounds fills the ocean. Clicks, pulses, whistles, groans, boings, cries, and trills, to name a few. But the most famous parts of this underwater symphony are the evocative melodies, or songs, composed by the world's largest mammals, whales. Whale songs are one of the most sophisticated communication systems in the animal kingdom. Only a few species are known to sing. Blue, fin, bowhead minke whales, and of course humpback whales. These are all baleen whales which use hairy baleen plates instead of teeth to trap their prey. Meanwhile, toothed whales do use echolocation, and they and other species of baleen whales make social sounds, such as cries and whistles, to communicate. But those vocalizations lack the complexity of songs. So how do they do it? Land mammals like us generate sound by moving air over our vocal cords when we exhale, causing them to vibrate. Baleen whales have a U-shaped fold of tissue between their lungs and their large inflatable organs called laryngeal sacs. We don't know this for sure because it's essentially impossible to observe the internal organs of a living, singing whale, but we think that when a whale sings, muscular contractions in the throat and chest move air from the lungs across the U-fold and into the laryngeal sacs, causing the U-fold to vibrate. The resulting sound resonates in the sacs like a choir singing in a cathedral making songs loud enough to propagate up to thousands of kilometers away. Whales don't have to exhale to sing. Instead, the air is recycled back into the lungs, creating sound once more. One reason whale songs are so fascinating is their pattern. Units, like moans, cries, and chirps are arranged in phrases. Repeated phrases are assembled into themes. Multiple themes repeated in a predictable pattern create a song. This hierarchical structure is a kind of grammar. Whale songs are extremely variable in duration, and whales can repeat them over and over. In one recorded session, a humpback whale sang for 22 hours. And why do they do it? We don't yet know the exact purpose, but we can speculate. Given that the singers are males and they mostly sing during the mating season, songs might be used to attract females. Or perhaps they're territorial, used to deter other males. Whales return to the same feeding and breeding grounds annually, and each discrete population has a different song. Songs evolve over time as units or phrases are added, changed, or dropped. And when males from different populations are feeding within earshot, phrases are often exchanged, maybe because new songs make them more attractive to breeding females. This is one of the fastest examples of cultural transmission, where learned behaviors are passed between unrelated individuals of the same species. We can eavesdrop on these songs using underwater microphones called hydrophones. These help us track species when sightings or genetic samples are rare. For example, scientists have been able to differentiate the elusive blue whale's populations worldwide based on their songs. But the oceans are getting noisier as a result of human activity. Boating, military sonar, underwater construction, and seismic surveys for oil are occurring more often which may interfere with whale's communication. Some whales will avoid key feeding or breeding grounds if human noise is too loud. And humpback whales have been observed to reduce their singing in response to noise 200 kilometers away. Limiting human activity along migratory routes and in other critical habitats, and reducing noise pollution throughout the ocean would help ensure whales continued survival. If the whales can keep singing and we can keep listening, maybe one day we'll truly understand what they're saying. |
The psychology of narcissism | null | TED-Ed | Way before the first selfie, the ancient Greeks and Romans had a myth about someone a little too obsessed with his own image. In one telling, Narcissus was a handsome guy wandering the world in search of someone to love. After rejecting a nymph named Echo, he caught a glimpse of his own reflection in a river, and fell in love with it. Unable to tear himself away, Narcissus drowned. A flower marked the spot of where he died, and we call that flower the Narcissus. The myth captures the basic idea of narcissism, elevated and sometimes detrimental self-involvement. But it's not just a personality type that shows up in advice columns. It's actually a set of traits classified and studied by psychologists. The psychological definition of narcissism is an inflated, grandiose self-image. To varying degrees, narcissists think they're better looking, smarter, and more important than other people, and that they deserve special treatment. Psychologists recognize two forms of narcissism as a personality trait: grandiose and vulnerable narcissism. There's also narcissistic personality disorder, a more extreme form, which we'll return to shortly. Grandiose narcissism is the most familiar kind, characterized by extroversion, dominance, and attention seeking. Grandiose narcissists pursue attention and power, sometimes as politicians, celebrities, or cultural leaders. Of course, not everyone who pursues these positions of power is narcissistic. Many do it for very positive reasons, like reaching their full potential, or helping make people's lives better. But narcissistic individuals seek power for the status and attention that goes with it. Meanwhile, vulnerable narcissists can be quiet and reserved. They have a strong sense of entitlement, but are easily threatened or slighted. In either case, the dark side of narcissism shows up over the long term. Narcissists tend to act selfishly, so narcissistic leaders may make risky or unethical decisions, and narcissistic partners may be dishonest or unfaithful. When their rosy view of themselves is challenged, they can become resentful and aggressive. It's like a disease where the sufferers feel pretty good, but the people around them suffer. Taken to the extreme, this behavior is classified as a psychological disorder called narcissistic personality disorder. It affects one to two percent of the population, more commonly men. It is also a diagnosis reserved for adults. Young people, especially children, can be very self-centered, but this might just be a normal part of development. The fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual describes several traits associated with narcissistic personality disorder. They include a grandiose view of oneself, problems with empathy, a sense of entitlement, and a need for admiration or attention. What makes these trait a true personality disorder is that they take over people's lives and cause significant problems. Imagine that instead of caring for your spouse or children, you used them as a source of attention or admiration. Or imagine that instead of seeking constructive feedback about your performance, you instead told everyone who tried to help you that they were wrong. So what causes narcissism? Twin studies show a strong genetic component, although we don't know which genes are involved. But environment matters, too. Parents who put their child on a pedestal can foster grandiose narcissism. And cold, controlling parents can contribute to vulnerable narcissism. Narcissism also seems to be higher in cultures that value individuality and self-promotion. In the United States, for example, narcissism as a personality trait has been rising since the 1970s, when the communal focus of the 60s gave way to the self-esteem movement and a rise in materialism. More recently, social media has multiplied the possibilities for self-promotion, though it's worth noting that there's no clear evidence that social media causes narcissism. Rather, it provides narcissists a means to seek social status and attention. So can narcissists improve on those negative traits? Yes! Anything that promotes honest reflection on their own behavior and caring for others, like psychotherapy or practicing compassion towards others, can be helpful. The difficulty is it can be challenging for people with narcissistic personality disorder to keep working at self-betterment. For a narcissist, self-reflection is hard from an unflattering angle. |
How playing an instrument benefits your brain | {0: 'Dr. Anita Collins is an educator, researcher and writer in the field of brain development and music learning.'} | TED-Ed | Did you know that every time musicians pick up their instruments, there are fireworks going off all over their brain? On the outside, they may look calm and focused, reading the music and making the precise and practiced movements required. But inside their brains, there's a party going on. How do we know this? Well, in the last few decades, neuroscientists have made enormous breakthroughs in understanding how our brains work by monitoring them in real time with instruments like fMRI and PET scanners. When people are hooked up to these machines, tasks, such as reading or doing math problems, each have corresponding areas of the brain where activity can be observed. But when researchers got the participants to listen to music, they saw fireworks. Multiple areas of their brains were lighting up at once, as they processed the sound, took it apart to understand elements like melody and rhythm, and then put it all back together into unified musical experience. And our brains do all this work in the split second between when we first hear the music and when our foot starts to tap along. But when scientists turned from observing the brains of music listeners to those of musicians, the little backyard fireworks became a jubilee. It turns out that while listening to music engages the brain in some pretty interesting activities, playing music is the brain's equivalent of a full-body workout. The neuroscientists saw multiple areas of the brain light up, simultaneously processing different information in intricate, interrelated, and astonishingly fast sequences. But what is it about making music that sets the brain alight? The research is still fairly new, but neuroscientists have a pretty good idea. Playing a musical instrument engages practically every area of the brain at once, especially the visual, auditory, and motor cortices. As with any other workout, disciplined, structured practice in playing music strengthens those brain functions, allowing us to apply that strength to other activities. The most obvious difference between listening to music and playing it is that the latter requires fine motor skills, which are controlled in both hemispheres of the brain. It also combines the linguistic and mathematical precision, in which the left hemisphere is more involved, with the novel and creative content that the right excels in. For these reasons, playing music has been found to increase the volume and activity in the brain's corpus callosum, the bridge between the two hemispheres, allowing messages to get across the brain faster and through more diverse routes. This may allow musicians to solve problems more effectively and creatively, in both academic and social settings. Because making music also involves crafting and understanding its emotional content and message, musicians often have higher levels of executive function, a category of interlinked tasks that includes planning, strategizing, and attention to detail and requires simultaneous analysis of both cognitive and emotional aspects. This ability also has an impact on how our memory systems work. And, indeed, musicians exhibit enhanced memory functions, creating, storing, and retrieving memories more quickly and efficiently. Studies have found that musicians appear to use their highly connected brains to give each memory multiple tags, such as a conceptual tag, an emotional tag, an audio tag, and a contextual tag, like a good Internet search engine. How do we know that all these benefits are unique to music, as opposed to, say, sports or painting? Or could it be that people who go into music were already smarter to begin with? Neuroscientists have explored these issues, but so far, they have found that the artistic and aesthetic aspects of learning to play a musical instrument are different from any other activity studied, including other arts. And several randomized studies of participants, who showed the same levels of cognitive function and neural processing at the start, found that those who were exposed to a period of music learning showed enhancement in multiple brain areas, compared to the others. This recent research about the mental benefits of playing music has advanced our understanding of mental function, revealing the inner rhythms and complex interplay that make up the amazing orchestra of our brain. |
Why should you listen to Vivaldi's "Four Seasons"? | null | TED-Ed | Light, bright, and cheerful. It's some of the most familiar of all early 18th century music. It's been featured in uncounted films and television commercials, but what is it and why does it sound that way? This is the opening of "Spring" from "The Four Seasons," by Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi. "The Four Seasons" are famous in part because they are a delight to the ear. However, even more notable is the fact that they have stories to tell. At the time of their publication in Amsterdam in 1725, they were accompanied by poems describing exactly what feature of that season Vivaldi intended to capture in musical terms. In providing specific plot content for instrumental music, Vivaldi was generations ahead of his time. If one were to read the poems simultaneously to hearing the music, one would find the poetic scenes synchronizing nicely with the musical imagery. We are told that the birds welcome spring with happy song, and here they are doing exactly that. Soon, however, a thunderstorm breaks out. Not only is there musical thunder and lightning, there are also more birds, wet, frightened, and unhappy. In "Summer," the turtle dove sings her name "tortorella" in Italian, before a hail storm flattens the fields. "Autumn" brings eager hunters dashing out in pursuit of their prey. The "Winter" concerto begins with teeth chattering in the cold before one takes refuge by a crackling fire. Then it's back out into the storm where there'll be slips and falls on the ice. In these first weeks of winter, the old year is coming to a close, and so does Vivaldi's musical exploration of the seasons. Not until the early 19th century would such expressive instrumental program music, as it was known, become popular. By then, larger, more varied ensembles were the rule with woodwinds, brass, and percussion to help tell the tale. But Vivaldi pulled it off with just one violin, strings, and a harpsichord. Unlike his contemporary Bach, Vivaldi wasn't much interested in complicated fugues. He preferred to offer readily accessible entertainment to his listeners with melodies that pop back up later in a piece to remind us of where we've been. So the first movement of the "Spring" concerto begins with a theme for spring and ends with it, too, slightly varied from when it was last heard. It was an inspired way to attract listeners, and Vivaldi, considered one of the most electrifying violinists of the early 18th century, understood the value of attracting audiences. Such concerts might feature himself as the star violinist. Others presented the young musicians of the Pietà, a Venetian girls' school where Vivaldi was Director of Music. Most of the students were orphans. Music training was intended not only as social skills suitable for young ladies but also as potential careers for those who might fail to make good marriages. Even in the composer's own time, Vivaldi's music served as diversion for all, not just for the wealthy aristocrats. 300 years later, it's an approach that still works, and Vivaldi's music still sounds like trotting horses on the move. |
Einstein's miracle year | null | TED-Ed | As 1905 dawned, the soon-to-be 26-year-old Albert Einstein faced life as a failed academic. Most physicists of the time would have scoffed at the idea that this minor civil servant could have much to contribute to science. Yet within the following year, Einstein would publish not one, not two, not three, but four extraordinary papers, each on a different topic, that were destined to radically transform our understanding of the universe. The myth that Einstein had failed math is just that. He had mastered calculus on his own by the age of 15 and done well at both his Munich secondary school and at the Swiss Polytechnic, where he studied for a math and physics teaching diploma. But skipping classes to spend more time in the lab and neglecting to show proper deference to his professors had derailed his intended career path. Passed over even for a lab assistant position, he had to settle for a job at the Swiss patent office, obtained with the help of a friend's father. Working six days a week as a patent clerk, Einstein still managed to make some time for physics, discussing the latest work with a few close friends, and publishing a couple of minor papers. It came as a major surprise when in March 1905 he submitted a paper with a shocking hypothesis. Despite decades of evidence that light was a wave, Einstein proposed that it could, in fact, be a particle, showing that mysterious phenomena, such as the photoelectric effect, could be explained by his hypothesis. The idea was derided for years to come, but Einstein was simply twenty years ahead of his time. Wave-particle duality was slated to become a cornerstone of the quantum revolution. Two months later in May, Einstein submitted a second paper, this time tackling the centuries old question of whether atoms actually exist. Though certain theories were built on the idea of invisible atoms, some prominent scientists still believed them to be a useful fiction, rather than actual physical objects. But Einstein used an ingenious argument, showing that the behavior of small particles randomly moving around in a liquid, known as Brownian motion, could be precisely predicted by the collisions of millions of invisible atoms. Experiments soon confirmed Einstein's model, and atomic skeptics threw in the towel. The third paper came in June. For a long time, Einstein had been troubled by an inconsistency between two fundamental principles of physics. The well established principle of relativity, going all the way back to Galileo, stated that absolute motion could not be defined. Yet electromagnetic theory, also well established, asserted that absolute motion did exist. The discrepancy, and his inability to resolve it, left Einstein in what he described as a state of psychic tension. But one day in May, after he had mulled over the puzzle with his friend Michele Besso, the clouds parted. Einstein realized that the contradiction could be resolved if it was the speed of light that remained constant, regardless of reference frame, while both time and space were relative to the observer. It took Einstein only a few weeks to work out the details and formulate what came to be known as special relativity. The theory not only shattered our previous understanding of reality but would also pave the way for technologies, ranging from particle accelerators, to the global positioning system. One might think that this was enough, but in September, a fourth paper arrived as a "by the way" follow-up to the special relativity paper. Einstein had thought a little bit more about his theory, and realized it also implied that mass and energy, one apparently solid and the other supposedly ethereal, were actually equivalent. And their relationship could be expressed in what was to become the most famous and consequential equation in history: E=mc^2. Einstein would not become a world famous icon for nearly another fifteen years. It was only after his later general theory of relativity was confirmed in 1919 by measuring the bending of starlight during a solar eclipse that the press would turn him into a celebrity. But even if he had disappeared back into the patent office and accomplished nothing else after 1905, those four papers of his miracle year would have remained the gold standard of startling unexpected genius. |
The benefits of a good night's sleep | null | TED-Ed | It's 4 a.m., and the big test is in eight hours, followed by a piano recital. You've been studying and playing for days, but you still don't feel ready for either. So, what can you do? Well, you can drink another cup of coffee and spend the next few hours cramming and practicing, but believe it or not, you might be better off closing the books, putting away the music, and going to sleep. Sleep occupies nearly a third of our lives, but many of us give surprisingly little attention and care to it. This neglect is often the result of a major misunderstanding. Sleep isn't lost time, or just a way to rest when all our important work is done. Instead, it's a critical function, during which your body balances and regulates its vital systems, affecting respiration and regulating everything from circulation to growth and immune response. That's great, but you can worry about all those things after this test, right? Well, not so fast. It turns out that sleep is also crucial for your brain, with a fifth of your body's circulatory blood being channeled to it as you drift off. And what goes on in your brain while you sleep is an intensely active period of restructuring that's crucial for how our memory works. At first glance, our ability to remember things doesn't seem very impressive at all. 19th century psychologist Herman Ebbinghaus demonstrated that we normally forget 40% of new material within the first twenty minutes, a phenomenon known as the forgetting curve. But this loss can be prevented through memory consolidation, the process by which information is moved from our fleeting short-term memory to our more durable long-term memory. This consolidation occurs with the help of a major part of the brain, known as the hippocampus. Its role in long-term memory formation was demonstrated in the 1950s by Brenda Milner in her research with a patient known as H.M. After having his hippocampus removed, H.M.'s ability to form new short-term memories was damaged, but he was able to learn physical tasks through repetition. Due to the removal of his hippocampus, H.M.'s ability to form long-term memories was also damaged. What this case revealed, among other things, was that the hippocampus was specifically involved in the consolidation of long-term declarative memory, such as the facts and concepts you need to remember for that test, rather than procedural memory, such as the finger movements you need to master for that recital. Milner's findings, along with work by Eric Kandel in the 90's, have given us our current model of how this consolidation process works. Sensory data is initially transcribed and temporarily recorded in the neurons as short-term memory. From there, it travels to the hippocampus, which strengthens and enhances the neurons in that cortical area. Thanks to the phenomenon of neuroplasticity, new synaptic buds are formed, allowing new connections between neurons, and strengthening the neural network where the information will be returned as long-term memory. So why do we remember some things and not others? Well, there are a few ways to influence the extent and effectiveness of memory retention. For example, memories that are formed in times of heightened feeling, or even stress, will be better recorded due to the hippocampus' link with emotion. But one of the major factors contributing to memory consolidation is, you guessed it, a good night's sleep. Sleep is composed of four stages, the deepest of which are known as slow-wave sleep and rapid eye movement. EEG machines monitoring people during these stages have shown electrical impulses moving between the brainstem, hippocampus, thalamus, and cortex, which serve as relay stations of memory formation. And the different stages of sleep have been shown to help consolidate different types of memories. During the non-REM slow-wave sleep, declarative memory is encoded into a temporary store in the anterior part of the hippocampus. Through a continuing dialogue between the cortex and hippocampus, it is then repeatedly reactivated, driving its gradual redistribution to long-term storage in the cortex. REM sleep, on the other hand, with its similarity to waking brain activity, is associated with the consolidation of procedural memory. So based on the studies, going to sleep three hours after memorizing your formulas and one hour after practicing your scales would be the most ideal. So hopefully you can see now that skimping on sleep not only harms your long-term health, but actually makes it less likely that you'll retain all that knowledge and practice from the previous night, all of which just goes to affirm the wisdom of the phrase, "Sleep on it." When you think about all the internal restructuring and forming of new connections that occurs while you slumber, you could even say that proper sleep will have you waking up every morning with a new and improved brain, ready to face the challenges ahead. |
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