title
stringlengths 6
88
| about_speakers
stringlengths 34
1.43k
⌀ | event
stringclasses 459
values | transcript
stringlengths 18
60.6k
|
|---|---|---|---|
The benefits of a bilingual brain | null | TED-Ed | ¿Hablas español? Parlez-vous français? 你会说中文吗？ If you answered, "sí," "oui," or "会" and you're watching this in English, chances are you belong to the world's bilingual and multilingual majority. And besides having an easier time traveling or watching movies without subtitles, knowing two or more languages means that your brain may actually look and work differently than those of your monolingual friends. So what does it really mean to know a language? Language ability is typically measured in two active parts, speaking and writing, and two passive parts, listening and reading. While a balanced bilingual has near equal abilities across the board in two languages, most bilinguals around the world know and use their languages in varying proportions. And depending on their situation and how they acquired each language, they can be classified into three general types. For example, let's take Gabriella, whose family immigrates to the US from Peru when she's two-years old. As a compound bilingual, Gabriella develops two linguistic codes simultaneously, with a single set of concepts, learning both English and Spanish as she begins to process the world around her. Her teenage brother, on the other hand, might be a coordinate bilingual, working with two sets of concepts, learning English in school, while continuing to speak Spanish at home and with friends. Finally, Gabriella's parents are likely to be subordinate bilinguals who learn a secondary language by filtering it through their primary language. Because all types of bilingual people can become fully proficient in a language regardless of accent or pronunciation, the difference may not be apparent to a casual observer. But recent advances in brain imaging technology have given neurolinguists a glimpse into how specific aspects of language learning affect the bilingual brain. It's well known that the brain's left hemisphere is more dominant and analytical in logical processes, while the right hemisphere is more active in emotional and social ones, though this is a matter of degree, not an absolute split. The fact that language involves both types of functions while lateralization develops gradually with age, has lead to the critical period hypothesis. According to this theory, children learn languages more easily because the plasticity of their developing brains lets them use both hemispheres in language acquisition, while in most adults, language is lateralized to one hemisphere, usually the left. If this is true, learning a language in childhood may give you a more holistic grasp of its social and emotional contexts. Conversely, recent research showed that people who learned a second language in adulthood exhibit less emotional bias and a more rational approach when confronting problems in the second language than in their native one. But regardless of when you acquire additional languages, being multilingual gives your brain some remarkable advantages. Some of these are even visible, such as higher density of the grey matter that contains most of your brain's neurons and synapses, and more activity in certain regions when engaging a second language. The heightened workout a bilingual brain receives throughout its life can also help delay the onset of diseases, like Alzheimer's and dementia by as much as five years. The idea of major cognitive benefits to bilingualism may seem intuitive now, but it would have surprised earlier experts. Before the 1960s, bilingualism was considered a handicap that slowed a child's development by forcing them to spend too much energy distinguishing between languages, a view based largely on flawed studies. And while a more recent study did show that reaction times and errors increase for some bilingual students in cross-language tests, it also showed that the effort and attention needed to switch between languages triggered more activity in, and potentially strengthened, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This is the part of the brain that plays a large role in executive function, problem solving, switching between tasks, and focusing while filtering out irrelevant information. So, while bilingualism may not necessarily make you smarter, it does make your brain more healthy, complex and actively engaged, and even if you didn't have the good fortune of learning a second language as a child, it's never too late to do yourself a favor and make the linguistic leap from, "Hello," to, "Hola," "Bonjour" or "你好’s" because when it comes to our brains a little exercise can go a long way. |
Free yourself from your filter bubbles | {0: 'Joan Blades shares a simple six-person conversation guide that helps people with differences get to know and even like each other.', 1: 'John Gable is the founder and CEO of AllSides.com, which builds better understanding across divides.'} | TEDWomen 2017 | Joan Blades: Do you have politically diverse friends? What do you talk about with them? I'm a progressive; I live in a town full of progressives, and 15 years ago, I didn't have any conservative friends. Now I have a wonderful mix of friends, and they include John. John Gable: I am not a progressive. I'm a Republican who grew up in a Republican family in the conservative South, and even worked in Republican politics, locally and at the national level. But the last 24 years, I've been in technology and living in a very progressive area. So I have a lot of progressive friends, including Joan. JB: I was born in Berkeley, California, a notoriously progressive college town. And I live there now. In 1998, six months into the Monica Lewinsky-Clinton impeachment scandal, I helped cofound MoveOn.org with a one-sentence petition: "Congress must immediately censure the president and move on to pressing issues facing the nation." Now, that was actually a very unifying petition in many ways. You could love Clinton or hate Clinton and agree that the best thing for the country was to move on. As the leader of MoveOn, I saw the polarization just continue. And I found myself wondering why I saw things so differently than many people in other parts of the country. So in 2005, when I had an opportunity to get together with grassroots leaders across the political divide, I grabbed it. And I became friends with a lot of people I never had a chance to talk to before. And that included leadership in the Christian Coalition, often seen as on the right the way MoveOn is seen as on the left. And this lead to me showing up on Capitol Hill with one of the Christian Coalition leaders, my friend, to lobby for net neutrality. That was powerful. We turned heads. So this work was transformational for me. And I found myself wondering: How could vast numbers of people have the opportunity to really connect with people that have very different views? JG: I was born Oneida, Tennessee, right across the state border from a small coal mining town, Stearns, Kentucky. And I lived there for the first few years of my life, before moving to another small town, Frankfort, Kentucky. Basically, I grew up in small-town America, conservative at its heart. Now, Stearns and Berkeley — they're a little different. (Laughter) So in the '90s I moved out west to a progressive area to work in technology — worked at Microsoft, worked at Netscape. I actually became the product manager lead for Netscape Navigator, the first popular web browser. Now in the early days of the internet, we were just moved and inspired by a vision: when we're connected to all these different people around the world and all these different ideas, we'll be able to make great decisions, and we'll be able to appreciate each other for the beautiful diversity that the whole world has to offer. Now I also, 20 years ago, gave a speech saying it might not work out that way, that we might actually be trained to discriminate against each other in new ways. So what happened? It's not like we just woke up one day and decided to hate each other more. Here's what happened. There's just too much noise — too many people, too many ideas — so we use technology to filter it out a little bit. And what happens? It lets in ideas I already agree with. It lets in the popular ideas, it lets in people just like me who think just like me. That sounds kind of good, right? Well, not necessarily, because two very scary things happen when we have such narrow worldviews. First, we become more extreme in our beliefs. Second, we become less tolerant of anybody who's different than we are. Does this sound familiar? Does this sound like modern America? The modern world? Well, the good news is that technology is changing, and it could change for the better. And that's, in fact, why I started AllSides.com — to create technologies and services to free us from these filter bubbles. The very first thing we did was create technology that identifies bias, so we could show different perspectives side by side to free us from the filter bubbles of news media. And then I met Joan. JB: So I met John outside of Washington, DC, with an idealistic group of cross-partisan bridge builders, and we wanted to re-weave the fabric of our communities. We believe that our differences can be a strength, that our values can be complimentary and that we have to overcome the fight so that we can honor everyone's values and not lose any of our own. I went for this wonderful walk with John, where I started learning about the work he was doing to pierce the filter bubble. It was powerful; it was brilliant. Living in separate narratives is not good. We can't even have a conversation or do collaborative problem-solving when we don't share the same facts. JG: So one thing you take away from today is if Joan Blades asks you to go on a walk, go on that walk. (Laughter) It changed things. It really changed the way I was thinking about things. To free ourselves from the filter bubbles, we can't just think about information filter bubbles, but also relationship and social filter bubbles. You see, we human beings — we're not nearly as smart as we think we are. We don't generally make decisions intellectually. We make them emotionally, intuitively, and then we use our big old brains to rationalize anything we want to rationalize. We're not really like Vulcans like Mr. Spock, we're more like bold cowboys like Captain Kirk, or passionate idealists like Dr. McCoy. OK, for those of y'all who prefer the new "Star Trek" crew, here you go. (Laughter) JB: Don't forget the strong women! JG: Come on, strong women. OK. JB: All right. John and I are both "Star Trek" fans. What's not to love about a future with that kind of optimism? JG: And having a good future in mind is a big deal — very important. And understanding what the problem is is very important. But we have to do something. So what do we do? It's actually not that hard. We have to add diversity to our lives — not just information, but relationship diversity. And by diversity, I mean big "D" diversity, not just racial and gender, which are very important, but also ... diversity of age, like young and old; rural and urban; liberal and conservative; in the US, Democrat and Republican. Now, one of the great examples of somebody freeing themselves from their filter bubbles and getting a more diverse life is, once again, next to me — Joan. JB: So the question is: Who among you has had relationships lost or harmed due to differences in politics, religion or whatever? Raise your hands. Yeah. This year I have talked to so many people that have experienced that kind of loss. I've seen tears well up in people's eyes as they talk about family members from whom they're estranged. Living Room Conversations were designed to begin to heal political and personal differences. They're simple conversations where two friends with different viewpoints each invite two friends for structured conversation, where everyone's agreed to some simple ground rules: curiosity, listening, respect, taking turns — everything we learned in kindergarten, right? Really easy. So by the time you're talking about the topic you've agreed to talk about, you actually have the sense that, "You know, I kind of like this person," and you listen to each other differently. That's kind of a human condition; we listen differently to people we care about. And then there's reflection and possibly next steps. This is a deep listening practice; it's never a debate. And that's incredibly powerful. These conversations in our own living rooms with people who have different viewpoints are an incredible adventure. We rediscover that we can respect and even love people that are different from us. And it's powerful. JG: So, what are you curious about? JB: What's the conversation you yearn to have? JG: Let's do this together. Together. JB: Yes. (Laughter) (Applause) JB and JG: Thank you. |
Lessons from a solar storm chaser | {0: 'TED Fellow Miho Janvier studies the the Sun -- in particular the origin of phenomena called "solar storms" which can impact planets in the solar system.'} | TEDGlobal 2017 | It is almost the end of the winter, and you've woken up to a cold house, which is weird, because you left the heater on all night. You turn on the light. It's not working. Actually, the coffee maker, the TV — none of them are working. Life outside also seems to have stopped. There are no schools, most of the businesses are shut, and there are no working trains. This is not the opening scene of a zombie apocalypse movie. This is what happened in March 1989 in the Canadian province of Quebec, when the power grid lost power. The culprit? A solar storm. Solar storms are giant clouds of particles escaping from the Sun from time to time, and a constant reminder that we live in the neighborhood of an active star. And I, as a solar physicist, I have a tremendous chance to study these solar storms. But you see, "solar storm chaser" is not just a cool title. My research helps to understand where they come from, how they behave and, in the long run, aims to mitigate their effects on human societies, which I'll get to in a second. At the beginning of the space exploration age 50 years ago only, the probes we sent in space revealed that the planets in our Solar System constantly bathe in a stream of particles that are coming from the Sun and that we call the solar wind. And in the same way that global wind patterns here on Earth can be affected by hurricanes, the solar wind is sometimes affected by solar storms that I like to call "space hurricanes." When they arrive at planets, they can perturb the space environment, which in turn creates the northern or southern lights, for example, here on Earth, but also Saturn and also Jupiter. Luckily, here on Earth, we are protected by our planet's natural shield, a magnetic bubble that we call the magnetosphere and that you can see here on the right side. Nonetheless, solar storms can still be responsible for disrupting satellite telecommunications and operations, for disrupting navigation systems, such as GPS, as well as electric power transmission. All of these are technologies on which us humans rely more and more. I mean, imagine if you woke up tomorrow without a working cell phone — no internet on it, which means no social media. I mean, to me that would be worse than the zombie apocalypse. (Laughter) By constantly monitoring the Sun, though, we now know where the solar storms come from. They come from regions of the Sun where a tremendous amount of energy is being stored. You have an example here, as a complex structure hanging above the solar surface, just on the verge of erupting. Unfortunately, we cannot send probes in the scorching hot atmosphere of the Sun, where temperatures can rise up to around 10 million degrees Kelvin. So what I do is I use computer simulations in order to analyze but also to predict the behavior of these storms when they're just born at the Sun. This is only one part of the story, though. When these solar storms are moving in space, some of them will inevitably encounter space probes that we humans have sent in order to explore other worlds. What I mean by other worlds is, for example, planets, such as Venus or Mercury, but also objects, such as comets. And while these space probes have been made for different scientific endeavors, they can also act like tiny cosmic meteorological stations and monitor the evolution of these space storms. So I, with a group of researchers, gather and analyze this data coming from different locations of the Solar System. And by doing so, my research shows that, actually, solar storms have a generic shape, and that this shape evolves as solar storms move away from the Sun. And you know what? This is key for building tools to predict space weather. I would like to leave you with this beautiful image. This is us here on Earth, this pale blue dot. And while I study the Sun and its storms every day, I will always have a deep love for this beautiful planet — a pale blue dot indeed, but a pale blue dot with an invisible magnetic shield that helps to protect us. Thank you. (Applause) |
Success stories from Kenya's first makerspace | {0: "At Gearbox, Kamau Gachigi empowers Kenya's next generation of creators to prototype and fabricate their visions."} | TEDGlobal 2017 | By the year 2050, the population of Africa will have doubled. One in four people on Earth will be African at that point, and this is both really exciting and daunting all at once. It's really exciting because, for the first time in the modern era, there will be enough Africans on the Earth to bully everybody else. (Laughter) I'm only kidding. But it's daunting, because we're going to have to have economies that can sustain this population growth, and many of the people are going to be very young. Now most of governments in Africa have a plan for this economic growth — in Kenya, we call ours Vision2030 — and they're all predicated on industrialization. The thing is, though, that the world is going through the Fourth Industrial Revolution right now, which means that there's a merger of the physical, cyber, and biological worlds. It means that because of massive interconnectivity and the availability of artificial intelligence and robotics, many of the jobs that we know and are used to right now won't exist in the future. So the challenge is a lot greater, in many ways, than it even was when Asia was industrializing, for example. To add to this, one of the kinds of person that you need for industrialization is an engineer, and they're really in short supply on the continent. If you compare, for example, the number of engineers that those same Asian countries had a couple of decades ago when they were industrializing, we fall far short. And I've taught for a while, and many of the students who are studying engineering end up actually working in auditing firms and banks, and many of them spend half their time doing accounting and so on as they're preparing. Now, I was fortunate enough to do my undergrad and postgrad education in the UK and the US, in countries, environments, where there was all the equipment that you required, all the sophistication in the systems, and then I worked for about three years in Japan doing R&D for a large firm. And so I was very used to having good equipment, and went back home and joined the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Nairobi, wanting to contribute and be on the continent. And I quickly found I was really quite useless, because there wasn't all the equipment that I had become accustomed to available. And I was teaching students who I would find very bright ideas in their minds and they'd be presenting things that I knew if only we had sufficient equipment, they'd be able to really contribute to the challenge of industrialization. So I kind of had to change hats, and became quite entrepreneurial and started looking for money to buy the equipment that we required. And I heard about a concept out of MIT, called the Fab Labs. These are digital fabrication labs that allow, in a rather small space with not very expensive equipment, people to have access to these tools to be able to make almost anything, as the slogan goes. And so I was able to convince a government official to buy one of these for the university where I was teaching. And immediately, we had wonderful results. We saw all kinds of innovations coming through, and for the first time in this context at the university, engineering students from different disciplines were doing the lab and practical exercises together in the same space. Normally, they'd be siloed. And not just that, but students who weren't engineers at all were also working in the same place, and non-students, people who had nothing to do with the university, were also coming into this space. So you had this rich mix of people, people who think differently from one another, and this always is really good for innovation. I was really proud of what we were seeing. So you can imagine my surprise when one day the dean of engineering came and said to me, "Kamau, the students who spend most of the time in the Fab Lab are failing their exams." I said, "What do you mean?" And I looked into it, and he was right, and the reason they were failing is that they'd honed their skills so well in certain things that they were going out into the city and offering services for money. So they were making money — (Laughter) and they therefore weren't focusing on their studies. And I thought, what a good problem to have. (Laughter) Don't quote me on that. I'm an academician. So we needed to scale this, and at the university, things were a bit too bureaucratic, and so I moved out and I hooked up with people who, in Nairobi, were providing spaces for IT experts to share fast internet and things like that. And some of these places are really quite famous. They've made Kenya famous for IT. And together we set up a space which we are setting up right now. We've moved from where we were. We are in a much larger space, and we're sort of making available a wide range of equipment, including the digital fabrication tools that I mentioned, and analog tools, to anybody really, on a membership basis. It's a bit like a gym, so you come in, you pay, you get taught how to use the equipment, and then you're set free to innovate and do whatever it is that you want, and you don't have to be an engineer, necessarily. And some of the people in the space are setting up a small company. They just need a space at a desk, and so we provide that at a fee, and others take up bigger spaces and are able to set up their offices. They're further along. Maybe their company has been running for a certain period of time. And so we're able to accommodate all of this in an innovation space that is really quite active. What you're seeing in this image over here is Douglas, and Douglas is an electrical engineer, one of the people who was really active in the Fab Lab. I'm pretty sure he passed his exams. And the image on the top left is a copper sheet. And he designed a circuit that the client came to him and said, "I need this circuit for a pay-as-you-go system." And so this is a model for business that's made accessibility to goods and services for very poor people really much easier, because they're able to pay a little bit, like a dollar a day, for example, for a specific service. And so this company wanted to pilot a new idea that they had, and so they just needed 50 circuits, so they hired him to make them, and what you're seeing him doing there is, he's able to design on the computer what the circuit will be and then transfer it to an etching process — that's the image on the top right — and then populate the board using this robot. And so what would normally take him maybe a day or something to solder by hand, he can do in a few minutes using this machine. So he was able to complete the entire order within Gearbox, and this is really important, because if it wasn't for what we provided right now, he would have had to have hired a company in China to do this, and because it's such a small order, it would have taken a long time. It would be a small company, because big companies wouldn't take small orders, and even then, if they got a bigger order, they'd bump him off in favor of that. And there's language problems and so on, so being able to do it in country is really very important, and of course piloting as a phase within the progress of the business idea is extremely important, because you can go back and make corrections and so on. In this image — Thank you. (Applause) In this image you see on the top left, what you're looking at is a 3D render of a digital fabrication machine. In this instance, it doubles as a plasma cutter and also a wood router. And so the plasma cutter makes possible the cutting of plate and sheet metal, and basically, you make a design on the computer and send it over to the machine, and then quickly and precisely, it will cut the shapes you want. But in this machine, you can also change the plasma cutter and put on a spindle, and then you can carve wood as well. So this was designed by my Head of Engineering. His name is Wachira, and when I hired him about two years ago, I asked him, "Just give me two years, and by the time you've trained a lot of people so that we have good staff under you, then you can move out and become a good story for us." And that's exactly what's just happened. He's got two types of customers. The higher-tier customer is a company that's actually using his machine to cut sheet metal for Isuzu truck fabrication in Nairobi, which is being done by General Motors. So we're really proud to be able to say that we have an original equipment manufacturer in Nairobi that's provided what's effectively an industrial robot to supply parts for General Motors. Now this is really important — (Applause) and it's really important because the population growth being what it is, a lot of very large companies are looking very closely at the market that's developing in Africa. So in Kenya right now, we have Volkswagen, Peugeot, Renault, we have Mercedes doing lorries, and we've also got Toyota, they've been there a long time. And these are all manufacturers planning to assemble vehicles and in the future, to manufacture in the country. Many of them are planning to train lots of people that they'd hire, and that's really important for the economy, but when the magic really happens, when these companies begin to buy their parts for the vehicles from local companies, so supply chain development is something that's very important for us to be able to pivot and to have very productive economies, and that's something we're focused on at our space. This other image shows another class of customer that he has. On the top left, you have these people who are actually using very crude tools to work metal and wood. And Kenya has a population of about 44 million people. The work force is about 13 million, and about 80 to 90 percent of those are in the informal sector. And what you're seeing in the image at the top left over there is very typical of semi-skilled artisans who are making products for the marketplace that are really crude. Their production rate is very slow. The quality of the product isn't high. And so we've teamed Wachira up with a bank, and the bank is paying him to train people from this sector on how to use this industrial robot. And the result is that some of them are going to be able to get loans to buy the machine for themselves. Others will be able to go to centers where they can carry their material, get the design done, and take the materials back that have been made really, really fast and assemble them in their own spaces. So somebody making a gate, for example, out of metal, may take a week to make just one gate, but with this machine, they might make 10 in a day. So the productivity of a large swathe of our population should be able to jump by a quantum amount, quite significantly, because of this kind of machine. And that's what we're at the beginning of, so this is really very exciting. This is another person who uses our space. Her name is Esther. She's in her mid-20s, and she came in very passionate about a problem that she explained. She said that schools days are missed every month by young girls because of their menstrual cycle, and they're not able to buy a sanitary towel. And the reason that she described was that the manufacturers packaged these in bundles of seven to 10, and breaking it down is unhygienic at the retail level, and packaging each one of them is too expensive. So she thought up an idea, which is brilliant, and simple. Why don't we just use vending machines? And she, in a very clean environment, can break down the bundles and fill up the vending machines, and then girls can buy these sanitary towels in the privacy of a toilet, in a public space, in a school, and so on. She was able to pilot this and it worked really very well, and she's been able to sort of get the bugs out and so on. So the significance here is that the piloting process is possible. She's not an engineer. She was able to engage people in our space to be able to help her to do this, and she's off and running now with a business accelerator, so we expect to see great results. (Applause) In this image you're looking at — the result of a master's project that was done at University of Nairobi by Tony Nyagah, an engineering student, and he just integrated a solar cell into a roof tile and decided to make it a business. He joined up with his sister who is an architect, and they have this business, and they present the roof tile to a person who is doing development and say, "You can buy it for the cost of just the roof tile without the solar." So they're giving it at a discount, and then they'll build them using the internet of things over time, they'll pay about a third of the utility charges for the electricity and they can sell the excess back to the grid. And so they'll make their money over time, and they've been able to do quite a few installments. We were very proud to be able to show this to somebody kind of famous, as you can see there, and this other famous guy actually presented the same idea, but as far as we're concerned, if it was after us, so — (Laughter) (Applause) So in closing, going forward, of course being able to prototype and do low manufacturing in this kind of a setting is very important for the industrialization process, but we're also taking advantage of a lot of new ways of doing things: the open source movement, distributive manufacturing, circular production. So it's all very important for not just industrializing and being able to meet people's needs, but also making sure that the environment is taken care of. We're also really interested in culture. We have lots of discussions in our space around who we were as Africans, who we are today, and who we want to be vis-à-vis things like consumerism and ethnicity and corruption and so on. So we see ourselves as providing, adding value to people by teaching them to add value to things or materials so that they can build things that matter. Thank you very much for your attention. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
How China is changing the future of shopping | {0: "BCG's Angela Wang works with a broad range of clients in China on strategy formulation, business development and operational excellence."} | TED@BCG Milan | This is my nephew, Yuan Yuan. He's five years old, super adorable. I asked him the other day, "What would you like for your birthday this year?" He said, "I want to have a one-way mirror Spider-Man mask." I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about, so I said, "Wow, that's really cool, but how are you going to get it?" He told me, without a blink of his eyes, "I'm going to tell my mom and make a wish before I go to bed. My mom will go to shake her mobile phone. The next morning, the delivery uncle will give it to me when I wake up." I was about to tease him, but suddenly I realized he was simply telling me the truth, the truth of what shopping looks like for this generation. If you think of it, for a child like Yuan Yuan, shopping is a very different idea compared to what my generation had in mind. Shopping is always done on mobile, and payment is all virtual. A huge shopping revolution is happening in China right now. Shopping behaviors, and also technology platforms, have evolved differently than elsewhere in the world. For instance, e-commerce in China is soaring. It's been growing at twice the speed of the United States and a lot of the growth is coming from mobile. Every month, 500 million consumers are buying on mobile phones, and to put that into context, that is a total population of the United States, UK and Germany combined. But it is not just about the scale of the e-commerce, it is the speed of adoption and the aggregation of the ecosystems. It took China less than five years to become a country of mobile commerce, and that is largely because of the two technology platforms, Alibaba and Tencent. They own 90 percent of the e-commerce — pretty much the whole market — 85 percent of social media, 85 percent of internet payment. And they also own large volumes of digital content, video, online movie, literature, travel information, gaming. When this huge base of mobile shoppers meets with aggregated ecosystems, chemical reactions happen. Today, China is like a huge laboratory generating all sorts of experiments. You should come to China, because here you will get a glimpse into the future. One of the trends I have seen concerns the spontaneity of shopping. Five years ago, in a fashion study, we found that on average, a Chinese consumer would be buying five to eight pairs of shoes. This number tripled to reach about 25 pairs of shoes a year. Who would need so many pairs of shoes? So I asked them, "What are the reasons you buy?" They told me a list of inspirations: blogs, celebrity news, fashion information. But really, for many of them, there was no particular reason to buy. They were just browsing on their mobile site and then buying whatever they saw. We have observed the same level of spontaneity in everything, from grocery shopping to buying insurance products. But it is not very difficult to understand if you think about it. A lot of the Chinese consumers are still very new in their middle-class or upper-middle-class lifestyles, with a strong desire to buy everything new, new products, new services. And with this integrated ecosystem, it is so easy for them to buy, one click after another. However, this new shopping behavior is creating a lot of challenges for those once-dominant businesses. The owner of a fashion company told me that he's so frustrated because his customers keep complaining that his products are not new enough. Well, for a fashion company, really bad comment. And he already increased the number of products in each collection. It doesn't seem to work. So I told him there's something more important than that. You've got to give your consumer exactly what they want when they still want it. And he can learn something from the online apparel players in China. These companies, they collect real consumer feedback from mobile sites, from social media, and then their designers will translate this information into product ideas, and then send them to microstudios for production. These microstudios are really key in this overall ecosystem, because they take small orders, 30 garments at a time, and they can also make partially customized pieces. The fact that all these production designs are done locally, the whole process, from transporting to product on shelf or online sometimes takes only three to four days. That is super fast, and that is highly responsive to what is in and hot on the market. And that is giving enormous headaches to traditional retailers who are only thinking about a few collections a year. Then there's a consumer's need for ultraconvenience. A couple of months ago, I was shopping with a friend in Tokyo. We were in the store, and there were three to four people standing in front of us at the checkout counter. Pretty normal, right? But both of us dropped our selection and walked away. This is how impatient we have become. Delivering ultraconvenience is not just something nice to have. It is crucial to make sure your consumer actually buys. And in China, we have learned that convenience is really the glue that will make online shopping a behavior and a habit that sticks. It is sometimes more effective than a loyalty program alone. Take Hema. It's a retail grocery concept developed by Alibaba. They deliver a full basket of products from 4,000 SKUs to your doorstep within 30 minutes. What is amazing is that they deliver literally everything: fruits, vegetables, of course. They also deliver live fish and also live Alaska king crab. Like my friend once told me, "It's really my dream coming true. Finally, I can impress my mother-in-law when she comes to visit me for dinner unexpectedly." (Laughter) Well, companies like Amazon and FreshDirect are also experimenting in the same field. The fact that Hema is part of the Alibaba ecosystem makes it faster and also a bit easier to implement. For an online grocery player, it is very difficult, very costly, to deliver a full basket quickly, but for Hema, it's got a mobile app, it's got mobile payment, and also it's built 20 physical stores in high-density areas in Shanghai. These stores are built to ensure the freshness of the product — they actually have fish tanks in the store — and also to give locations that will enable high-speed delivery. I know the question you have on your mind. Are they making money? Yes, they are making money. They are breaking even, and what is also amazing is that the sales revenue per store is three to four times higher than the traditional grocery store, and half of the revenue orders are coming from mobile. This is really proof that a consumer, if you give them ultraconvenience that really works in grocery shopping, they're going to switch their shopping behaviors online, like, in no time. So ultraconvenience and spontaneity, that's not the full story. The other trend I have seen in China is social shopping. If you think of social shopping elsewhere in the world, it is a linear process. You pick up something on Facebook, watch it, and you switch to Amazon or brand.com to complete the shopping journey. Clean and simple. But in China it is a very different thing. On average, a consumer would spend one hour on their mobile phone shopping. That's three times higher than the United States. Where does the stickiness come from? What are they actually doing on this tiny little screen? So let me take you on a mobile shopping journey that I usually would be experiencing. 11pm, yes, that's usually when I shop. I was having a chat in a WeChat chatroom with my friends. One of them took out a pack of snack and posted the product link in that chatroom. I hate it, because usually I would just click that link and then land on the product page. Lots of information, very colorful, mind-blowing. Watched it and then a shop assistant came online and asked me, "How can I help you tonight?" Of course I bought that pack of snack. What is more beautiful is I know that the next day, around noontime, that pack of snack will be delivered to my office. I can eat it and share it with my colleagues and the cost of delivery, maximum one dollar. Just when I was about to leave that shopping site, another screen popped up. This time it is the livestreaming of a grassroots celebrity teaching me how to wear a new color of lipstick. I watched for 30 seconds — very easy to understand — and also there is a shopping link right next to it, clicked it, bought it in a few seconds. Back to the chatroom. The gossiping is still going on. Another friend of mine posted the QR code of another pack of snack. Clicked it, bought it. So the whole experience is like you're exploring in an amusement park. It is chaotic, it is fun and it's even a little bit addictive. This is what's happening when you have this integrated ecosystem. Shopping is embedded in social, and social is evolving into a multidimensional experience. The integration of ecosystems reaches a whole new level. So does its dominance in all aspects of our life. And of course, there are huge commercial opportunities behind it. A Chinese snack company, Three Squirrels, built a half-a-billion-dollar business in just three years by investing in 300 to 500 shop assistants who are going to be online to provide services 24/7. In the social media environment, they are like your neighborhood friends. Even when you are not buying stuff, they will be happy to just tell you a few jokes and make you happy. In this integrated ecosystem, social media can really redefine the relationship between brand, retailer and consumer. These are only fragments of the massive changes I have seen in China. In this huge laboratory, a lot of experiments are generated every single day. The ecosystems are reforming, supply chain distribution, marketing, product innovation, everything. Consumers are getting the power to decide what they want to buy, when they want to buy it, how they want to buy it, how they want to social. It is now back to business leaders of the world to really open their eyes, see what's happening in China, think about it and take actions. Thank you. (Applause) Massimo Portincaso: Angela, what you shared with us is truly impressive and almost incredible, but I think many in the audience had the same question that I had, which is: Is this kind of impulsive consumption both economically and environmentally sustainable over the longer term? And what is the total price to be paid for such an automized and ultraconvenient retail experience? Angela Wang: Yeah. One thing we have to keep in mind is really, we are at the very beginning of a huge transformation. So with this trading up needs of the consumer, together with the evolution of the ecosystem, there are a lot of opportunities and also challenges. So I've seen some early signs that the ecosystems are shifting their focus to pay attention to solve these challenges. For example, paying more consideration to sustainability alongside just about speed, and also quality over quantity. But there are really no simple answers to these questions. That is exactly why I'm here to tell everyone that we need to watch it, study it, and play a part in this evolution. MP: Thank you very much. AW: Thank you. (Applause) |
A new weapon in the fight against superbugs | {0: 'We are decidedly losing the war against superbugs, and with a projected annual death toll by 2050 of 10 million people. David Brenner would like to stop that.'} | TED2017 | So ... we're in a real live war at the moment, and it's a war that we're truly losing. It's a war on superbugs. So you might wonder, if I'm going to talk about superbugs, why I'm showing you a photograph of some soccer fans — Liverpool soccer fans celebrating a famous victory in Istanbul, a decade ago. In the back, in the red shirt, well, that's me, and next to me in the red hat, that's my friend Paul Rice. So a couple of years after this picture was taken, Paul went into hospital for some minor surgery, and he developed a superbug-related infection, and he died. And I was truly shocked. He was a healthy guy in the prime of life. So there and then, and actually with a lot of encouragement from a couple of TEDsters, I declared my own personal war on superbugs. So let's talk about superbugs for a moment. The story actually starts in the 1940s with the widespread introduction of antibiotics. And since then, drug-resistant bacteria have continued to emerge, and so we've been forced to develop newer and newer drugs to fight these new bacteria. And this vicious cycle actually is the origin of superbugs, which is simply bacteria for which we don't have effective drugs. I'm sure you'll recognize at least some of these superbugs. These are the more common ones around today. Last year, around 700,000 people died from superbug-related diseases. Looking to the future, if we carry on on the path we're going, which is basically a drugs-based approach to the problem, the best estimate by the middle of this century is that the worldwide death toll from superbugs will be 10 million. 10 million. Just to put that in context, that's actually more than the number of people that died of cancer worldwide last year. So it seems pretty clear that we're not on a good road, and the drugs-based approach to this problem is not working. I'm a physicist, and so I wondered, could we take a physics-based approach — a different approach to this problem. And in that context, the first thing we know for sure, is that we actually know how to kill every kind of microbe, every kind of virus, every kind of bacteria. And that's with ultraviolet light. We've actually known this for more than 100 years. I think you all know what ultraviolet light is. It's part of a spectrum that includes infrared, it includes visible light, and the short-wavelength part of this group is ultraviolet light. The key thing from our perspective here is that ultraviolet light kills bacteria by a completely different mechanism from the way drugs kill bacteria. So ultraviolet light is just as capable of killing a drug-resistant bacteria as any other bacteria, and because ultraviolet light is so good at killing all bugs, it's actually used a lot these days to sterilize rooms, sterilize working surfaces. What you see here is a surgical theater being sterilized with germicidal ultraviolet light. But what you don't see in this picture, actually, is any people, and there's a very good reason for that. Ultraviolet light is actually a health hazard, so it can damage cells in our skin, cause skin cancer, it can damage cells in our eye, cause eye diseases like cataract. So you can't use conventional, germicidal, ultraviolet light when there are people are around. And of course, we want to sterilize mostly when there are people around. So the ideal ultraviolet light would actually be able to kill all bacteria, including superbugs, but would be safe for human exposure. And actually that's where my physics background kicked into this story. Together with my physics colleagues, we realized there actually is a particular wavelength of ultraviolet light that should kill all bacteria, but should be safe for human exposure. That wavelength is called far-UVC light, and it's just the short-wavelength part of the ultraviolet spectrum. So let's see how that would work. What you're seeing here is the surface of our skin, and I'm going to superimpose on that some bacteria in the air above the skin. Now we're going to see what happens when conventional, germicidal, ultraviolet light impinges on this. So what you see is, as we know, germicidal light is really good at killing bacteria, but what you also see is that it penetrates into the upper layers of our skin, and it can damage those key cells in our skin which ultimately, when damaged, can lead to skin cancer. So let's compare now with far-UVC light — same situation, skin and some bacteria in the air above them. So what you're seeing now is that again, far-UVC light's perfectly fine at killing bacteria, but what far-UVC light can't do is penetrate into our skin. And there's a good, solid physics reason for that: far-UVC light is incredibly, strongly absorbed by all biological materials, so it simply can't go very far. Now, viruses and bacteria are really, really, really small, so the far-UVC light can certainly penetrate them and kill them, but what it can't do is penetrate into skin, and it can't even penetrate the dead-cell area right at the very surface of our skin. So far-UVC light should be able to kill bacteria, but kill them safely. So that's the theory. It should work, should be safe. What about in practice? Does it really work? Is it really safe? So that's actually what our lab has been working on the past five or six years, and I'm delighted to say the answer to both these questions is an emphatic yes. Yes, it does work, but yes, it is safe. So I'm delighted to say that, but actually I'm not very surprised to say that, because it's purely the laws of physics at work. So let's look to the future. I'm thrilled that we now have a completely new weapon, and I should say an inexpensive weapon, in our fight against superbugs. For example, I see far-UVC lights in surgical theaters. I see far-UVC lights in food preparation areas. And in terms of preventing the spread of viruses, I see far-UVC lights in schools, preventing the spread of influenza, preventing the spread of measles, and I see far-UVC lights in airports or airplanes, preventing the global spread of viruses like H1N1 virus. So back to my friend Paul Rice. He was actually a well-known and well-loved local politician in his and my hometown of Liverpool, and they put up a statue in his memory in the center of Liverpool, and there it is. But me, I want Paul's legacy to be a major advance in this war against superbugs. Armed with the power of light, that's actually within our grasp. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Stay up here, David, I've got a question for you. (Applause) David, tell us where you're up to in developing this, and what are the remaining obstacles to trying to roll out and realize this dream? David Brenner: Well, I think we now know that it kills all bacteria, but we sort of knew that before we started, but we certainly tested that. So we have to do lots and lots of tests about safety, and so it's more about safety than it is about efficacy. And we need to do short-term tests, and we need to do long-term tests to make sure you can't develop melanoma many years on. So those studies are pretty well done at this point. The FDA of course is something we have to deal with, and rightly so, because we certainly can't use this in the real world without FDA approval. CA: Are you trying to launch first in the US, or somewhere else? DB: Actually, in a couple of countries. In Japan and in the US, both. CA: Have you been able to persuade biologists, doctors, that this is a safe approach? DB: Well, as you can imagine, there is a certain skepticism because everybody knows that UV light is not safe. So when somebody comes along and says, "Well, this particular UV light is safe," there is a barrier to be crossed, but the data are there, and I think that's what we're going to be standing on. CA: Well, we wish you well. This is potentially such important work. Thank you so much for sharing this with us. Thank you, David. (Applause) |
Want to get great at something? Get a coach | {0: 'Surgeon and public health professor by day, writer by night, Atul Gawande explores how doctors can dramatically improve their practice using approaches as simple as a checklist – or coaching.'} | TED2017 | I don't come to you today as an expert. I come to you as someone who has been really interested in how I get better at what I do and how we all do. I think it's not just how good you are now, I think it's how good you're going to be that really matters. I was visiting this birth center in the north of India. I was watching the birth attendants, and I realized I was witnessing in them an extreme form of this very struggle, which is how people improve in the face of complexity — or don't. The women here are delivering in a region where the typical birth center has a one-in-20 death rate for the babies, and the moms are dying at a rate ten times higher than they do elsewhere. Now, we've known the critical practices that stop the big killers in birth for decades, and the thing about it is that even in this place — in this place especially, the simplest things are not simple. We know for example you should wash hands and put on clean gloves, but here, the tap is in another room, and they don't have clean gloves. To reuse their gloves, they wash them in this basin of dilute bleach, but you can see there's still blood on the gloves from the last delivery. Ten percent of babies are born with difficulty breathing everywhere. We know what to do. You dry the baby with a clean cloth to stimulate them to breathe. If they don't start to breathe, you suction out their airways. And if that doesn't work, you give them breaths with the baby mask. But these are skills that they've learned mostly from textbooks, and that baby mask is broken. In this one disturbing image for me is a picture that brings home just how dire the situation is. This is a baby 10 minutes after birth, and he's alive, but only just. No clean cloth, has not been dried, not warming skin to skin, an unsterile clamp across the cord. He's an infection waiting to happen, and he's losing his temperature by the minute. Successful child delivery requires a successful team of people. A whole team has to be skilled and coordinated; the nurses who do the deliveries in a place like this, the doctor who backs them up, the supply clerk who's responsible for 22 critical drugs and supplies being in stock and at the bedside, the medical officer in charge, responsible for the quality of the whole facility. The thing is they are all experienced professionals. I didn't meet anybody who hadn't been part of thousands of deliveries. But against the complexities that they face, they seem to be at their limits. They were not getting better anymore. It's how good you're going to be that really matters. It presses on a fundamental question. How do professionals get better at what they do? How do they get great? And there are two views about this. One is the traditional pedagogical view. That is that you go to school, you study, you practice, you learn, you graduate, and then you go out into the world and you make your way on your own. A professional is someone who is capable of managing their own improvement. That is the approach that virtually all professionals have learned by. That's how doctors learn, that's how lawyers do, scientists ... musicians. And the thing is, it works. Consider for example legendary Juilliard violin instructor Dorothy DeLay. She trained an amazing roster of violin virtuosos: Midori, Sarah Chang, Itzhak Perlman. Each of them came to her as young talents, and they worked with her over years. What she worked on most, she said, was inculcating in them habits of thinking and of learning so that they could make their way in the world without her when they were done. Now, the contrasting view comes out of sports. And they say "You are never done, everybody needs a coach." Everyone. The greatest in the world needs a coach. So I tried to think about this as a surgeon. Pay someone to come into my operating room, observe me and critique me. That seems absurd. Expertise means not needing to be coached. So then which view is right? I learned that coaching came into sports as a very American idea. In 1875, Harvard and Yale played one of the very first American-rules football games. Yale hired a head coach; Harvard did not. The results? Over the next three decades, Harvard won just four times. Harvard hired a coach. (Laughter) And it became the way that sports works. But is it necessary then? Does it transfer into other fields? I decided to ask, of all people, Itzhak Perlman. He had trained the Dorothy DeLay way and became arguably the greatest violinist of his generation. One of the beautiful things about getting to write for "The New Yorker" is I call people up, and they return my phone calls. (Laughter) And Perlman returned my phone call. So we ended up having an almost two-hour conversation about how he got to where he got in his career. And I asked him, I said, "Why don't violinists have coaches?" And he said, "I don't know, but I always had a coach." "You always had a coach?" "Oh yeah, my wife, Toby." They had graduated together from Juilliard, and she had given up her job as a concert violinist to be his coach, sitting in the audience, observing him and giving him feedback. "Itzhak, in that middle section, you know you sounded a little bit mechanical. What can you differently next time?" It was crucial to everything he became, he said. Turns out there are numerous problems in making it on your own. You don't recognize the issues that are standing in your way or if you do, you don't necessarily know how to fix them. And the result is that somewhere along the way, you stop improving. And I thought about that, and I realized that was exactly what had happened to me as a surgeon. I'd entered practice in 2003, and for the first several years, it was just this steady, upward improvement in my learning curve. I watched my complication rates drop from one year to the next. And after about five years, they leveled out. And a few more years after that, I realized I wasn't getting any better anymore. And I thought: "Is this as good as I'm going to get?" So I thought a little more and I said ... "OK, I'll try a coach." So I asked a former professor of mine who had retired, his name is Bob Osteen, and he agreed to come to my operating room and observe me. The case — I remember that first case. It went beautifully. I didn't think there would be anything much he'd have to say when we were done. Instead, he had a whole page dense with notes. (Laughter) "Just small things," he said. (Laughter) But it's the small things that matter. "Did you notice that the light had swung out of the wound during the case? You spent about half an hour just operating off the light from reflected surfaces." "Another thing I noticed," he said, "Your elbow goes up in the air every once in a while. That means you're not in full control. A surgeon's elbows should be down at their sides resting comfortably. So that means if you feel your elbow going in the air, you should get a different instrument, or just move your feet." It was a whole other level of awareness. And I had to think, you know, there was something fundamentally profound about this. He was describing what great coaches do, and what they do is they are your external eyes and ears, providing a more accurate picture of your reality. They're recognizing the fundamentals. They're breaking your actions down and then helping you build them back up again. After two months of coaching, I felt myself getting better again. And after a year, I saw my complications drop down even further. It was painful. I didn't like being observed, and at times I didn't want to have to work on things. I also felt there were periods where I would get worse before I got better. But it made me realize that the coaches were onto something profoundly important. In my other work, I lead a health systems innovation center called Ariadne Labs, where we work on problems in the delivery of health care, including global childbirth. As part of it, we had worked with the World Health Organization to devise a safe childbirth checklist. It lays out the fundamentals. It breaks down the fundamentals — the critical actions a team needs to go through when a woman comes in in labor, when she's ready to push, when the baby is out, and then when the mom and baby are ready to go home. And we knew that just handing out a checklist wasn't going to change very much, and even just teaching it in the classroom wasn't necessarily going to be enough to get people to make the changes that you needed to bring it alive. And I thought on my experience and said, "What if we tried coaching? What if we tried coaching at a massive scale?" We found some incredible partners, including the government of India, and we ran a trial there in 120 birth centers. In Uttar Pradesh, in India's largest state. Half of the centers basically we just observed, but the other half got visits from coaches. We trained an army of doctors and nurses like this one who learned to observe the care and also the managers and then help them build on their strengths and address their weaknesses. One of the skills for example they had to work on with people — turned out to be fundamentally important — was communication. Getting the nurses to practice speaking up when the baby mask is broken or the gloves are not in stock or someone's not washing their hands. And then getting others, including the managers, to practice listening. This small army of coaches ended up coaching 400 nurses and other birth attendants, and 100 physicians and managers. We tracked the results across 160,000 births. The results ... in the control group you had — and these are the ones who did not get coaching — they delivered on only one-third of 18 basic practices that we were measuring. And most important was over the course of the years of study, we saw no improvement over time. The other folks got four months of coaching and then it tapered off over eight months, and we saw them increase to greater than two-thirds of the practices being delivered. It works. We could see the improvement in quality, and you could see it happen across a whole range of centers that suggested that coaching could be a whole line of way that we bring value to what we do. You can imagine the whole job category that could reach out in the world and that millions of people could fulfill. We were clearly at the beginning of it, though, because there was still a distance to go. You have to put all of the checklist together to achieve the substantial reductions in mortality. But we began seeing the first places that were getting there, and this center was one of them because coaching helped them learn to execute on the fundamentals. And you could see it here. This is a 23-year-old woman who had come in by ambulance, in labor with her third child. She broke her water in the triage area, so they brought her directly to the labor and delivery room, and then they ran through their checks. I put the time stamp on here so you could see how quickly all of this happens and how much more complicated that makes things. Within four minutes, they had taken the blood pressure, measured her pulse and also measured the heart rate of the baby. That meant that the blood pressure cuff and the fetal Doppler monitor, they were all there, and the nurse knew how to use them. The team was skilled and coordinated. The mom was doing great, the baby's heart rate was 143, which is normal. Eight minutes later, the intensity of the contractions picked up, so the nurse washed her hands, put on clean gloves, examined her and found that her cervix was fully dilated. The baby was ready to come. She then went straight over to do her next set of checks. All of the equipment, she worked her way through and made sure she had everything she needed at the bedside. The baby mask was there, the sterile towel, the sterile equipment that you needed. And then three minutes later, one push and that baby was out. (Applause) I was watching this delivery, and suddenly I realized that the mood in that room had changed. The nurse was looking at the community health worker who had come in with the woman because that baby did not seem to be alive. She was blue and floppy and not breathing. She would be one of that one-in-20. But the nurse kept going with her checkpoints. She dried that baby with a clean towel. And after a minute, when that didn't stimulate that baby, she ran to get the baby mask and the other one went to get the suction. She didn't have a mechanical suction because you could count on electricity, so she used a mouth suction, and within 20 seconds, she was clearing out that little girl's airways. And she got back a green, thick liquid, and within a minute of being able to do that and suctioning out over and over, that baby started to breathe. (Applause) Another minute and that baby was crying. And five minutes after that, she was pink and warming on her mother's chest, and that mother reached out to grab that nurse's hand, and they could all breathe. I saw a team transformed because of coaching. And I saw at least one life saved because of it. We followed up with that mother a few months later. Mom and baby were doing great. The baby's name is Anshika. It means "beautiful." And she is what's possible when we really understand how people get better at what they do. Thank you. (Applause) |
The history of human emotions | {0: 'Tiffany Watt Smith investigates the hidden cultural forces which shape our emotions.'} | TED@Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany | I would like to begin with a little experiment. In a moment, I'm going to ask if you would close your eyes and see if you can work out what emotions you're feeling right now. Now, you're not going to tell anyone or anything. The idea is to see how easy or perhaps hard you find it to pinpoint exactly what you're feeling. And I thought I'd give you 10 seconds to do this. OK? Right, let's start. OK, that's it, time's up. How did it go? You were probably feeling a little bit under pressure, maybe suspicious of the person next to you. Did they definitely have their eyes closed? Perhaps you felt some strange, distant worry about that email you sent this morning or excitement about something you've got planned for this evening. Maybe you felt that exhilaration that comes when we get together in big groups of people like this; the Welsh called it "hwyl," from the word for boat sails. Or maybe you felt all of these things. There are some emotions which wash the world in a single color, like the terror felt as a car skids. But more often, our emotions crowd and jostle together until it is actually quite hard to tell them apart. Some slide past so quickly you'd hardly even notice them, like the nostalgia that will make you reach out to grab a familiar brand in the supermarket. And then there are others that we hurry away from, fearing that they'll burst on us, like the jealousy that causes you to search a loved one's pockets. And of course, there are some emotions which are so peculiar, you might not even know what to call them. Perhaps sitting there, you had a little tingle of a desire for an emotion one eminent French sociologist called "ilinx," the delirium that comes with minor acts of chaos. For example, if you stood up right now and emptied the contents of your bag all over the floor. Perhaps you experienced one of those odd, untranslatable emotions for which there's no obvious English equivalent. You might have felt the feeling the Dutch called "gezelligheid," being cozy and warm inside with friends when it's cold and damp outside. Maybe if you were really lucky, you felt this: "basorexia," a sudden urge to kiss someone. (Laughter) We live in an age when knowledge of emotions is an extremely important commodity, where emotions are used to explain many things, exploited by our politicians, manipulated by algorithms. Emotional intelligence, which is the skill of being able to recognize and name your own emotions and those of other people, is considered so important, that this is taught in our schools and businesses and encouraged by our health services. But despite all of this, I sometimes wonder if the way we think about emotions is becoming impoverished. Sometimes, we're not even that clear what an emotion even is. You've probably heard the theory that our entire emotional lives can be boiled down to a handful of basic emotions. This idea is actually about 2,000 years old, but in our own time, some evolutionary psychologists have suggested that these six emotions — happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, surprise — are expressed by everyone across the globe in exactly the same way, and therefore represent the building blocks of our entire emotional lives. Well, if you look at an emotion like this, then it looks like a simple reflex: it's triggered by an external predicament, it's hardwired, it's there to protect us from harm. So you see a bear, your heart rate quickens, your pupils dilate, you feel frightened, you run very, very fast. The problem with this picture is, it doesn't entirely capture what an emotion is. Of course, the physiology is extremely important, but it's not the only reason why we feel the way we do at any given moment. What if I was to tell you that in the 12th century, some troubadours didn't see yawning as caused by tiredness or boredom like we do today, but thought it a symbol of the deepest love? Or that in that same period, brave men — knights — commonly fainted out of dismay? What if I was to tell you that some early Christians who lived in the desert believed that flying demons who mainly came out at lunchtime could infect them with an emotion they called "accidie," a kind of lethargy that was sometimes so intense it could even kill them? Or that boredom, as we know and love it today, was first really only felt by the Victorians, in response to new ideas about leisure time and self-improvement? What if we were to think again about those odd, untranslatable words for emotions and wonder whether some cultures might feel an emotion more intensely just because they've bothered to name and talk about it, like the Russian "toska," a feeling of maddening dissatisfaction said to blow in from the great plains. The most recent developments in cognitive science show that emotions are not simple reflexes, but immensely complex, elastic systems that respond both to the biologies that we've inherited and to the cultures that we live in now. They are cognitive phenomena. They're shaped not just by our bodies, but by our thoughts, our concepts, our language. The neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett has become very interested in this dynamic relationship between words and emotions. She argues that when we learn a new word for an emotion, new feelings are sure to follow. As a historian, I've long suspected that as language changes, our emotions do, too. When we look to the past, it's easy to see that emotions have changed, sometimes very dramatically, in response to new cultural expectations and religious beliefs, new ideas about gender, ethnicity and age, even in response to new political and economic ideologies. There is a historicity to emotions that we are only recently starting to understand. So I agree absolutely that it does us good to learn new words for emotions, but I think we need to go further. I think to be truly emotionally intelligent, we need to understand where those words have come from, and what ideas about how we ought to live and behave they are smuggling along with them. Let me tell you a story. It begins in a garret in the late 17th century, in the Swiss university town of Basel. Inside, there's a dedicated student living some 60 miles away from home. He stops turning up to his lectures, and his friends come to visit and they find him dejected and feverish, having heart palpitations, strange sores breaking out on his body. Doctors are called, and they think it's so serious that prayers are said for him in the local church. And it's only when they're preparing to return this young man home so that he can die, that they realize what's going on, because once they lift him onto the stretcher, his breathing becomes less labored. And by the time he's got to the gates of his hometown, he's almost entirely recovered. And that's when they realize that he's been suffering from a very powerful form of homesickness. It's so powerful, that it might have killed him. Well, in 1688, a young doctor, Johannes Hofer, heard of this case and others like it and christened the illness "nostalgia." The diagnosis quickly caught on in medical circles around Europe. The English actually thought they were probably immune because of all the travel they did in the empire and so on. But soon there were cases cropping up in Britain, too. The last person to die from nostalgia was an American soldier fighting during the First World War in France. How is it possible that you could die from nostalgia less than a hundred years ago? But today, not only does the word mean something different — a sickening for a lost time rather than a lost place — but homesickness itself is seen as less serious, sort of downgraded from something you could die from to something you're mainly worried your kid might be suffering from at a sleepover. This change seems to have happened in the early 20th century. But why? Was it the invention of telephones or the expansion of the railways? Was it perhaps the coming of modernity, with its celebration of restlessness and travel and progress that made sickening for the familiar seem rather unambitious? You and I inherit that massive transformation in values, and it's one reason why we might not feel homesickness today as acutely as we used to. It's important to understand that these large historical changes influence our emotions partly because they affect how we feel about how we feel. Today, we celebrate happiness. Happiness is supposed to make us better workers and parents and partners; it's supposed to make us live longer. In the 16th century, sadness was thought to do most of those things. It's even possible to read self-help books from that period which try to encourage sadness in readers by giving them lists of reasons to be disappointed. (Laughter) These self-help authors thought you could cultivate sadness as a skill, since being expert in it would make you more resilient when something bad did happen to you, as invariably it would. I think we could learn from this today. Feel sad today, and you might feel impatient, even a little ashamed. Feel sad in the 16th century, and you might feel a little bit smug. Of course, our emotions don't just change across time, they also change from place to place. The Baining people of Papua New Guinea speak of "awumbuk," a feeling of lethargy that descends when a houseguest finally leaves. (Laughter) Now, you or I might feel relief, but in Baining culture, departing guests are thought to shed a sort of heaviness so they can travel more easily, and this heaviness infects the air and causes this awumbuk. And so what they do is leave a bowl of water out overnight to absorb this air, and then very early the next morning, they wake up and have a ceremony and throw the water away. Now, here's a good example of spiritual practices and geographical realities combining to bring a distinct emotion into life and make it disappear again. One of my favorite emotions is a Japanese word, "amae." Amae is a very common word in Japan, but it is actually quite hard to translate. It means something like the pleasure that you get when you're able to temporarily hand over responsibility for your life to someone else. (Laughter) Now, anthropologists suggest that one reason why this word might have been named and celebrated in Japan is because of that country's traditionally collectivist culture, whereas the feeling of dependency may be more fraught amongst English speakers, who have learned to value self-sufficiency and individualism. This might be a little simplistic, but it is tantalizing. What might our emotional languages tell us not just about what we feel, but about what we value most? Most people who tell us to pay attention to our well-being talk of the importance of naming our emotions. But these names aren't neutral labels. They are freighted with our culture's values and expectations, and they transmit ideas about who we think we are. Learning new and unusual words for emotions will help attune us to the more finely grained aspects of our inner lives. But more than this, I think these words are worth caring about, because they remind us how powerful the connection is between what we think and how we end up feeling. True emotional intelligence requires that we understand the social, the political, the cultural forces that have shaped what we've come to believe about our emotions and understand how happiness or hatred or love or anger might still be changing now. Because if we want to measure our emotions and teach them in our schools and listen as our politicians tell us how important they are, then it is a good idea that we understand where the assumptions we have about them have come from, and whether they still truly speak to us now. I want to end with an emotion I often feel when I'm working as a historian. It's a French word, "dépaysement." It evokes the giddy disorientation that you feel in an unfamiliar place. One of my favorite parts of being a historian is when something I've completely taken for granted, some very familiar part of my life, is suddenly made strange again. Dépaysement is unsettling, but it's exciting, too. And I hope you might be having just a little glimpse of it right now. Thank you. (Applause) |
The gift of words | {0: 'Javed Akhtar is an eminent Indian film scriptwriter, lyricist and poet, whose lineage can be traced back to seven generations of renowned Urdu writers, poets and freedom fighters.'} | TED Talks India | Shah Rukh Khan: The speaker you are about to meet is someone who knows and understands the value of words like no one else does. In his writing career spanning over four decades, this man has chosen words with beauty and versatility, like a flower springing to life ... like Mr. Bachchan’s memorable punches ... (Laughter) like a best-selling book of Urdu poetry ... like well ... what do I say, only Javed Akhtar Sahab. (Applause) Please welcome onstage, the one and only Javed Akhtar Sahab. (Cheers and applause) Javed Akhtar: Friends, this topic — the power of words — is an interesting one, and one that's very close to my heart. It’s strange how we often overlook things that are so close to us, near us. How many people question, "Why is air transparent?" Or, "Why is water wet?" How many think about what is it that has passed? Time has passed. What came? What went away? How many of us wonder? Similarly ... the words that we speak and hear all day, how many times have we really thought, "What exactly are these words?" Words are a strange thing. You once saw an animal and decided it’s a "cat." But cat is a sound. This cat has nothing to do with the animal. But I have decided it’s a cat. So a cat it is. So I gave the sound the identity of this animal. After that I made a semicircle, a pyramid, cut into half, then a straight line, then another below it, and wrote: "cat." In these criss-crossed lines, I filled a sound and into that sound, a meaning. Now like with this cat, even with love, anger, a thought, an idea, pain, suffering, happiness, surprise, everything has been linked with a sound. And then sounds were fit into some criss-crossed lines that we call a script. So three things that had nothing in common were joined by us to create a word. A sound that is actually gibberish has been added onto it. And the lines, crooked lines, they formed a word. Incredible! And I have come to believe that with time, these words have become like human beings. A man is known by the company he keeps. Similarly, with words, what is the company it has been keeping? What are the other words being used with it? For an average noun or an average verb, an average mind can quickly create reference. Where did they hear it? See it? What does it remind them of? What is its connection? When was it last used in conversation? What has been my experience with it? A host of memories appear when you hear a word you remember. And a good writer or orator is one who knows that when he uses a certain word, an average mind will associate it with a certain reference, specific memories will be evoked. Then he can create a world around a word. What is the power of a word? Be it a mother’s lullaby, a politician’s speech, love letters from your beloved, or a complaint against someone, a protest call ... anger, sadness, happiness, surprise, belonging, alienation anything in the world, any feeling in the world, any emotion, any reaction, until it is expressed in a word, it will not have any meaning for you, forget getting across to anyone else. Words are not thoughts, just like bricks are not homes. But houses are made with bricks. If you have less bricks, you will make a small house. The more words you have, the clearer your thoughts, and the more clearly you can convey them. Nowadays I often hear, especially from young ones, “You know what I mean?" No, I don't know what you mean. (Laughter) “You know what I mean,” is running out of words. Everything is now moving fast so communication has to be fast as well. But the tragedy is that we have attained this speed at the cost of depth of words. We want to speak faster, so everything is faster, so the language is also faster, hence communication is faster. But this speed has affected depth. Which means that forget about other people, just look at yourself. You are not being able to articulate your own feelings, thoughts or emotions in a detailed manner or clearly. And these words, as long as words exist, they aren’t there just for a meaning. They are also a conveyer belt of language, words. They reflect your culture, your traditions, your inheritance, your cultural wealth accumulated over generations, all of that is carried forward with words. If you cut a man off from some words, you cut him off from a culture, a history. This is exactly what is happening with us today. So language is a very powerful thing. Words are extremely powerful. But by themselves, they are neither good nor bad. If we start loving words and understand their power, we would realize that everything that happens in the world is because of words. Or there would be nothing between us and the rest of the creatures, the rest of the animals, although we too are animals. The only difference is that we can pass on, through our words, our experience, our learning and our knowledge to the next generation. So we don’t only live on instinct but our slowly accumulated experience and knowledge over generations is passed on to the next. Through what? Through words. And if we didn’t have these words our advantage is gradually over other species would diminish over time. We advanced only because we have language. And if we didn’t have that we wouldn’t be here. We would be right where we started. So what does language mean? Words! So learn to respect words. Love them. Befriend them. Listen to them attentively. And speak attentively. Thank you! (Applause) SRK: Thanks a lot, Javed Sahab, for coming here today and sharing such wonderful things with us. I have known Javed Sahab since I came to Mumbai about 25 years ago. JA: I was really young then. (Laughter) SRK: Yes. You are still very young, Sir. But I have got a lot of my education, my ideologies and many more things from Javed Sahab. I’ll share a small incident. He got angry with us while working on a film. He sometimes gets angry when unlettered people like us give him suggestions that maybe we could use this word or that instead. So our film was called "Kuch Kuch Hota Hai." (Cheers) And he did not like the title at all. So once when he was really mad at us kids, who are like his kids even now, he retorted: "Now my heart remains neither awake nor rests. What do I do? Oh! I feel something strange. Is that what you want?" In fact the entire song, all the words, were thrown at us by Javed Sahab in anger. And that song went on to become extremely popular. So even when Javed Sahab throws out words in anger, they turn into golden words. That’s his gift. (Cheers) JA: Well, the incident that Shah Rukh Sahab shared is indeed true. So on hearing this title, "'Kuch Kuch Hota Hai," I was shocked. I felt it wasn’t dignified enough. (Laughter) Though to be honest, I regret leaving such a super hit film over its title. So I left the film. Later I also felt a little embarrassed, and he too felt bad. So we decided to let bygones be bygones and work on some other film. Hence, the film "Kal Ho Naa Ho." I told him that everything else is still fine but I owe you two kuchs. Two kuchs. (Laughter) So I’ll write a song and return these two to you. I wrote a song specially for this reason called "Kuch to hua hai, kuch ho gaya hai." (Cheers and applause) and he returned his two. (Applause) Ladies and gentlemen, big round of applause for Javed Akhtar Sahab. (Applause) |
Increase your self-awareness with one simple fix | {0: 'As a third-generation entrepreneur, Dr. Tasha Eurich was born with a passion for business, pairing her scientific savvy in human behavior with a practical approach to solving business challenges. As an organizational psychologist, she’s helped thousands of leaders improve their effectiveness, from Fortune 500 executives to early-stage entrepreneurs. Her new book, Insight, reveals the findings of her three-year research program on self-awareness, which she calls the meta-skill of the 21st century.'} | TEDxMileHigh | Tennessee Williams once told us, "There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all you'll ever be, and then you accept it or you kill yourself, (Laughter) or you stop looking in mirrors." (Laughter) And speaking of mirrors, someone else once said, "If we spend too much time scrutinizing what's in our rearview mirror, we're certain to crash into a light post.'' I've spent the last four years of my life studying people who look in mirrors, rearview and otherwise in their search for self-awareness. I wanted to know what self-awareness really is, where it comes from, why we need it, and how to get more of it. My research team surveyed quantitatively thousands of people. We analyzed nearly 800 scientific studies. And we conducted dozens of in-depth interviews with people who made dramatic improvements in their self-awareness. Now, initially, we were actually so worried that we wouldn't find any of these people that we called them self-awareness unicorns. (Laughter) True. But thank goodness, we did find them. Because what these unicorns taught me would create a ground-breaking revelation for how all of us can find genuine self-awareness. And that's what I want to share with you. Today, I want you to reflect on how you're reflecting. I know that's a mouthful. And to get there, we're going to need to shatter one of the most widely held beliefs about finding self-awareness. But first things first. What is this thing we call self-awareness anyway? It's the ability to see ourselves clearly, to understand who we are, how others see us and how we fit into the world. Self-awareness gives us power. We might not always like what we see, but there's a comfort in knowing ourselves. And there's actually a ton of research showing that people who are self-aware are more fulfilled. They have stronger relationships. They're more creative. They're more confident and better communicators. They are less likely to lie, cheat, and steal. They perform better at work and are more promotable. And they're more effective leaders with more profitable companies. In the world of self-awareness, there are two types of people: those who think they're self-aware, (Laughter) and those who actually are. It's true. My team has found that 95% of people think they're self-aware, (Laughter) but the real number is closer to 10 to 15%. You know what this means, don't you? (Laughter) It means that on a good day - on a good day - 80% of us are lying to ourselves (Laughter) about whether we're lying to ourselves. (Laughter) Pretty scary, right? So you can imagine the challenge we had in figuring out who was truly self-aware. What do you think would've happened if I had said, "Hey! How self-aware are you?" Exactly. So to be part of our research, our unicorns had to clear four hurdles. They had to believe they were self-aware as measured by an assessment my team developed and validated. Using that same assessment, someone who knew them well had to agree. They had to believe that they'd increased their self-awareness in their life, and the person rating them had to agree. We found 50 people out of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds who met our criteria. They were professionals, entrepreneurs, artists, students, stay-at-home parents. And we didn't find any patterns by industry, age, gender or any other demographic characteristic. These unicorns helped my team discover a most surprising truth. That approach you're using to examine your thoughts, your feelings, and your motives, you know, introspection. Well, you're probably doing it - there's no easy way to say this - you're probably doing it totally wrong. Yes, there is a reason so few of us are self-aware. So let me tell you about the evening that I first discovered the ugly truth about introspection. It was about 10 p.m. on a beautiful Colorado spring evening. And I was in my office, hopped up on Diet Coke and Smartfood popcorn. (Laughter) And I just analyzed a set of data, and to say that I was surprised would be an understatement. My team and I had just run a simple study looking at the relationship between introspection and things like happiness, stress and job satisfaction. Naturally, the people who introspected would be better off. Wouldn't you think so? Our data told the exact opposite story. People who introspected were more stressed and depressed, less satisfied with their jobs and their relationships, less in control of their lives. I had no idea what was going on. And it got worse. These negative consequences increased the more they introspected. (Laughter) So I was quite confused. Later that week, I ended up coming across a 20-year-old study that looked at how widowers adjusted to life without their partners. The researchers found that those who try to understand the meaning of their loss were happier, less depressed one month later, but one year later, were more depressed. They were fixated on what happened instead of moving forward. Have you been there? I have. Self-analysis can trap us in a mental hell of our own making. So things were starting to make sense. Now, you Die Hard self-awareness fans and particularly introspection fans in the audience might be thinking, "Sure, introspection may be depressing, but it's worth it because of the insight it produces." And you're right. I'm not here today to tell you that the pursuit of self-awareness is a waste of time. Not at all. I am here to tell you that the way you're pursuing it doesn't work. Here is the surprising reality: Thinking about ourselves isn't related to knowing ourselves. So to understand this, let's look at the most common introspective question: "Why?" We might be searching for the cause of a bad mood. Why am I so upset after that fight with my friend? Or we might be questioning our beliefs. Why don't I believe in the death penalty? Or we might be trying to understand a negative outcome. "Why did I choke in that meeting?" Unfortunately, when we ask "Why?" it doesn't lead us towards the truth about ourselves. It leads us away from it. There are so many reasons this is the case. Today I'll give you two. Here is the first reason we shouldn't ask why: Researchers have found that no matter how hard we try, we can't excavate our unconscious thoughts, feelings and motives. And because so much is hidden from our conscious awareness, we end up inventing answers that feel true but are often very wrong. Let me give you an example. Psychologists Timothy Wilson and Richard Nisbett set up a card table outside their local Meijers thrifty store in Ann Arbor, Michigan. And on that card table, they laid out four identical pairs of pantyhose. And they asked the people walking by to pick their favorite. (Laughter) Now, consumer research shows that people tend to prefer products on the right. And that's exactly what happened. Even though every pair was identical, people chose pair D at a rate of four to one. And when asked why they have chosen the pair they had, they confidently declared that pair D was just better. (Laughter) And even - get this - even when the researchers told them about the effect of positioning, they refused to believe it. The second reason asking "Why?" is a bad idea is that it leads us away from our true nature. We like to think of our brains as supercomputers rationally analyzing information and arriving at accurate conclusions. Unfortunately, that's not what happens. Let's do a quick exercise that's based on another classic psychology study. So if I were to ask you to make a list of all the reasons your romantic relationship was going the way it was, what would you say? Let's say that in general your relationship is pretty awesome. But let's just pretend that yesterday you happened to get in a huge fight about the proper way to load the dishwasher. (Laughter) Really bad. Now, because of something called "the recency effect," this is going to carry an unfair amount of weight. You might start thinking of things like, "I am so sick of his mansplaining!" (Laughter) Or you might think, "Why the hell does it matter so much how I load the dishwasher?" And before you know it, you're thinking your relationship isn't going so well. (Laughter) Asking "Why?" created "alternative facts." (Laughter) And over time, this leads us away from who we really are. It clouds our self-perceptions. So you might be wondering if asking "Why?" makes us depressed, over-confident and wrong; it's probably not going to increase our self-awareness. But don't worry. I'm not here today to tell you to stop thinking about yourselves. I am here to tell you to start doing it just a little bit differently. So if we shouldn't ask "Why?" then, what should we ask? Do you remember our self-awareness unicorns? When we looked at how they approached introspection, we found the answer. We analyzed literally hundreds of pages of transcripts, and we saw a very clear pattern. Although the word "why" appeared less than 150 times, the word "what" appeared more than 1000 times. Let me give you a few examples. Nathan, a brand manager, got a terrible performance review from his new boss. Instead of asking, "Why are we like oil and water?" he asked, "What can I do to show her I'm the best person for this job?" It changed everything. People now point to Nathan and his boss as proof that polar opposites can work together. Sarah, an education leader, was diagnosed with breast cancer in her late 40s. And when she asked, "Why me?" she said it felt like a death sentence. So then she asked, "What's most important to me?" This helped her define what she wanted her life to look like in whatever time she had left. She's now cancer free and more focused on the relationships that mean the most to her. Jose, an entertainment industry veteran, hated his job. And instead of getting stuck, what most of us would do, and ask, "Why do I feel so terrible?" he asked, "What are the situations that make me feel terrible, and what do they have in common?" He quickly realized that he would never be happy in this job, and it gave him the courage to pursue a new and far more fulfilling career path as a wealth manager. So these are just three examples of dozens of unicorns that asked "What?" instead of "Why?" Do I have any Nathans or Sarahs, or Joses in the room? I'll add one more: Tasha. So earlier this year, I published a book about all of this, which I am so proud of. But one day, for some unknown reason, I did what every author is never supposed to do. I read my Amazon reviews. (Laughter) And, you guys, it was devastating. I asked, "Why are people being so mean to me about a book that I spent thousands of hours researching and wrote to make their lives better?" Right? I fell into a spiral of self-loathing. It was honestly one of the low points of my life. A couple of weeks went by, and it dawned on me that maybe I should take my own advice. (Laughter) So I tried a different question. I asked, "What about all those people who were telling me that my book has helped them change their lives." What a different outcome. So no, I wasn't doing it right either. This is not an easy world, is it? Not at all. (Laughter) She knows, we all know. But I have seen so much evidence that self-awareness gives us a much better shot at finding happiness and success in this crazy world. To start, we just need to change one simple word. Change "why" to "what." Why-questions trap us in that rearview mirror. What-questions move us forward to our future. As human beings, we are blessed with the ability to understand who we are, what we want to contribute, and the kind of life we want to lead. Remember, our self-awareness unicorns had nothing in common except a belief in the importance of self-awareness and a daily commitment to developing it. That means we can all be unicorns. The search for self-awareness never ever stops. Life goes on. It's up to us to choose to learn and grow from our mistakes and our tragedies, and our successes. One of the best quotes I've ever heard on this subject is from Rumi. He said, "Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I'm wise, so I am changing myself." Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The power of citizen video to create undeniable truths | {0: 'Yvette Alberdingk Thijm helps activists use video and technology to protect and defend human rights.'} | TEDxSkoll | It's 1996 in Uvira in eastern Congo. This is Bukeni. Militia commanders walk into his village, knock on his neighbors' doors and whisk their children away to training camps. Bukeni borrows a video camera from a local wedding photographer, he disguises as a journalist and he walks into the camps to negotiate the release of the children. He filmed footage of the children being trained as soldiers. [Soldiers don't worry!] [You'll wear uniforms!] [You'll have free cars!] [Free beans!] Many of these children are under 15 years old, and that is a war crime. [Free!] But you don't have to go to eastern Congo to find human rights abuses. In America, a country with a rapidly aging population, experts estimate that one in 10 people over 60 will experience abuse. It's a hidden epidemic, and most of that abuse actually happens at the hands of close caretakers or family. This is Vicky. Vicky put an iron gate on her bedroom door and she became a prisoner, in fact, in her own house, out of fear for her nephew who had taken over her home as a drug den. And this is Mary. Mary picked up a video camera for the first time in her life when she was 65 years old, and she asked Vicky and 99 other older people who had experienced abuse to tell their stories on camera. And I am Dutch, so in the Netherlands we are obsessed with the truth. Now, when you are a child, that's a great thing, because you can basically get away with anything, like "Yes, Mama, it was me who smoked the cigars." (Laughter) But I think this is why I have dedicated my life to promoting citizen video to expose human rights violations, because I believe in the power of video to create undeniable truths. And my organization, WITNESS, helped use the Congolese videos to help convict and send a notorious warlord called Thomas Lubanga to jail. And the videos that Mary shot, we trained Mary and many other elder justice advocates, to make sure that the stories of elder abuse reached lawmakers, and those stories helped convince lawmakers to pass landmark legislation to protect older Americans. So I wonder, billions of us now have this powerful tool right at our fingertips. It's a camera. So why are all of us not a more powerful army of civic witnesses, like Mary and Bukeni? Why is it that so much more video is not leading to more rights and more justice? And I think it is because being an eyewitness is hard. Your story will get denied, your video will get lost in a sea of images, your story will not be trusted, and you will be targeted. So how do we help witnesses? In Oaxaca, in Mexico, the teachers' movement organized a protest after the president pushed down very undemocratic reforms. The federal police came down in buses and started shooting at the protesters. At least seven people died and many, many more were wounded. Images started circulating of the shootings, and the Mexican government did what it always does. It issued a formal statement, and the statement basically accused the independent media of creating fake news. It said, "We were not there, that was not us doing the shooting, this did not happen." But we had just trained activists in Mexico to use metadata strategically with their images. Now, metadata is the kind of information that your camera captures that shows the date, the location, the temperature, the weather. It can even show the very unique way you hold your camera when you capture something. So the images started recirculating, and this time with the very verifying, validating information on top of them. And the federal government had to retract their statement. Now, justice for the people for Oaxaca is still far off, but their stories, their truths, can no longer be denied. So we started thinking: What if you had "Proof Mode?" What if everybody had a camera in their hands and all the platforms had that kind of validating ability. So we developed — together with amazing Android developers called the Guardian Project, we developed something called a technology that's called Proof Mode, that marries those metadata together with your image, and it validates and it verifies your video. Now, imagine there is a deluge of images coming from the world's camera phones. Imagine if that information could be trusted just a little bit more, what the potential would be for journalists, for human rights investigators, for human rights lawyers. So we started sharing Proof Mode with our partners in Brazil who are an amazing media collective called Coletivo Papo Reto. Brazil is a tough place for human rights. The Brazilian police kills thousands of people every year. The only time that there's an investigation, guess when? When there's video. Seventeen-year-old Eduardo was killed in broad daylight by the Rio police, and look what happens after they kill him. They put a gun in the dead boy's hand, they shoot the gun twice — (Shot) to fabricate their story of self-defense. The woman who filmed this was a very, very courageous eyewitness, and she had to go into hiding after she posted her video for fear of her life. But people are filming, and they're not going to stop filming, so we're now working together with media collectives so the residents on their WhatsApp frequently get guidance and tips, how to film safely, how to upload the video that you shoot safely, how to capture a scene so that it can actually count as evidence. And here is an inspiration from a group called Mídia Ninja in Brazil. The man on left is a heavily armed military policeman. He walks up to a protester — when you protest in Brazil, you can be arrested or worse — and he says to the protester, "Watch me, I am going to search you right now." And the protester is a live-streaming activist — he wears a little camera — and he says to the military policeman, he says, "I am watching you, and there are 5,000 people watching you with me." Now, the tables are turned. The distant witnesses, the watching audience, they matter. So we started thinking, what if you could tap into that power, the power of distant witnesses? What if you could pull in their expertise, their leverage, their solidarity, their skills when a frontline community needs them to be there? And we started developing a project that's called Mobilize Us, because many of us, I would assume, want to help and lend our skills and our expertise, but we are often not there when a frontline community or a single individual faces an abuse. And it could be as simple as this little app that we created that just shows the perpetrator on the other side of the phone how many people are watching him. But now, imagine that you could put a layer of computer task routing on top of that. Imagine that you're a community facing an immigration raid, and at that very moment, at that right moment, via livestream, you could pull in a hundred legal observers. How would that change the situation? So we started piloting this with our partner communities in Brazil. This is a woman called Camilla, and she was able — she's the leader in a favela called Favela Skol — she was able to pull in distant witnesses via livestream to help translation, to help distribution, to help amplify her story after her community was forcibly evicted to make room for a very glossy Olympic event last summer. So we're talking about good witnessing, but what happens if the perpetrators are filming? What happens if a bystander films and doesn't do anything? This is the story of Chrissy. Chrissy is a transgender woman who walked into a McDonald's in Maryland to use the women's bathroom. Two teens viciously beat her for using that woman's bathroom, and the McDonald's employee filmed this on his mobile phone. And he posted his video, and it has garnered thousands of racist and transphobic comments. So we started a project that's called Capturing Hate. We took a very, very small sample of eyewitness videos that showed abuse against transgender and gender-nonconforming people. We searched two words, "tranny fight" and "stud fight." And those 329 videos were watched and are still being watched as we sit here in this theater, a stunning almost 90 million times, and there are hundreds of thousands of comments with these videos, egging on to more violence and more hate. So we started developing a methodology that took all that unquantified visual evidence and turned it into data, turning video into data, and with that tool, LGBT organizations are now using that data to fight for rights. And we take that data and we take it back to Silicon Valley, and we say to them: "How is it possible that these videos are still out there in a climate of hate egging on more hate, summoning more violence, when you have policies that actually say you do not allow this kind of content? — urging them to change their policies. So I have hope. I have hope that we can turn more video into more rights and more justice. Ten billion video views on Snapchat, per day. So what if we could turn that Snapchat generation into effective and safe civic witnesses? What if they could become the Bukenis of this new generation? In India, women have already started using Snapchat filters to protect their identity when they speak out about domestic violence. [They tortured me at home and never let me go out.] The truth is, the real truth, the truth that doesn't fit into any TED Talk, is fighting human rights abuse is hard. There are no easy solutions for human rights abuse. And there's not a single piece of technology that can ever stop the perpetrators. But for the survivors, for the victims, for the marginalized communities, their stories, their truths, matter. And that is where justice begins. Thank you. (Applause) |
A vehicle built in Africa, for Africa | {0: 'TED Fellow Joel Jackson is the founder and CEO of Mobius Motors, set to launch a durable, low-cost SUV made in Africa.'} | TEDGlobal 2017 | Imagine if your daily commute involved tens of kilometers on these kinds of roads, driving this kind of vehicle, without any nearby service stations or breakdown assistance. For millions of drivers in many parts of Africa, this is the norm. Since over 90 percent of passenger cars are imported, often used, they're just not designed for local usage. High import duties often compound the problem, sometimes doubling the price of a car. So most vehicles are either too expensive or too unreliable for the average consumer. Well-designed vehicles are only part of the transport challenge, though. For every 100 adults in Africa, less than five people actually own a vehicle. Public transport is available, and in countries like Kenya, it's often run by local entrepreneurs using minivans like this. But in most rural and peri-urban areas, it's fragmented and unreliable. In more remote areas without transport, people have to walk, typically tens of kilometers, to get to school or collect clean drinking water or buy supplies from nearby markets. Bad roads, disparate communities, low average income levels and inadequate vehicles all impair the transport system and ultimately constrain economic output. Despite this constraint, the Pan-African economy is booming. Combined GDP is already over two trillion dollars. This is a massive commercial and social opportunity, not a helpless continent. So why isn't there already something better? Around the world, automotive is quarter the manufacturing sector. But in Africa, it's generally been overlooked by carmakers, who are focused on larger, established markets and emerging economies like India and China. This lack of industrialization, which itself creates a vicious-cycle barrier to the emergence of industry, has caused the dependence on imports. There is a supply-demand disconnect, with the vast majority of automotive spending on the continent today, essentially funding an international network of car exporters instead of fueling the growth of local industry. It's entirely possible to solve this disconnect, though, starting with products that people actually want. And this is what motivated me to start Mobius, to build a vehicle in Africa, for Africa. To us, this meant reimagining the car around the needs of the consumer, simplifying nonessential features like interior fixtures and investing in performance-critical systems like suspension to create durable and affordable vehicles built for purpose. And built for purpose is exactly where we started with our first-generation model, Mobius II, which was designed as a really rugged, low-cost SUV, able to handle heavy loads and rough terrain reliably. This launched in 2015, and we've now developed the next-generation version based on customer feedback. For high stress and heavy loading, we engineered a sturdy steel space frame. To handle acute vibration from rough roads, we ruggedized the suspension. For potholes and uneven terrain, high ground clearance was a no-brainer. And to make this something customers could actually be proud to drive in, we designed an aspirational body aesthetic. Underpinning all of this, we simplified or eliminated components like parking sensors and automatic windows wherever we could, to keep costs low and sell this at half the price of a five-year-old SUV in Kenya today. The new — (Applause) The new Mobius II launches in 2018. And while durable, affordable vehicles like this are vital, a broader solution to immobility needs to go further. Over the last decade, a transport-centric, shared economy has connected people across Africa with minivans, auto rickshaws and sedans. It's just not operated very effectively or efficiently. Enabling better access to transport is all about strengthening this public transit network, empowering local entrepreneurs who already offer similar services in their communities to operate these services more profitably and more widely. With this aim, we're taking human-centered design a step further and developing a transport platform model, which enables owners to plug in different modules, like a goods cage or ambulance unit, and run other services like goods delivery or medical transport, as well as public transport. Transportation services like this are the fundamental driver of logistics, trade, social services, access to education, health care and employment. The transportation grid to physical economies is akin to the internet to virtual economies. And the impact of increased mobility is only part of the potential here. Since the late 1700s, the Industrial Revolution has catapulted the development of economies around the world into thriving societies. Today, manufacturing is still the engine of economic growth and stability, even as new technologies have inevitably transformed the way we live. Making stuff is important, especially for nation-states wanting to boost employment, increase skills and reduce import dependence. But while few countries can skip this industrialized stage, many have negligible manufacturing output. There are various reasons for this, but one reason is universal: hardware is hard. (Laughter) So what are the challenges to industry, and how are we approaching them? The first issue many people think of is a lack of skilled labor. In areas where access to good primary and secondary education are limited and employment opportunities are scarce, a small skill base is inevitable. But that doesn't mean it's immutable. There's an abundance of smart, hardworking and ambitious people in Africa, obviously. What's really lacking are good jobs that offer a path not just to employment but also professional growth. The first person we employed at Mobius over six years ago was a mechanic named Kazungu. Kazungu had gone to school up to the age of 18 and worked as an odd-job mechanic. Joining the company at the time was a near-vertical learning curve. But he rose to the challenge, and with more technical guidance from an expanding engineering team, he's grown over the years to lead a group of mechanics in R&D prototyping. A thirst for learning and the work ethic to step up to a challenge are values we now recruit on. Pairing innate values like this with on-the-job training and systems has strengthened our skill base. This works really well on the production line, where work can be systematized around clear procedural instructions and then reinforced through training. In our experience, it is possible to build a skilled workforce, and we plan to hire hundreds more people using this approach. A second challenge is a lack of suppliers. In countries like Kenya, there are only a handful of automotive suppliers manufacturing parts like electrical harnesses, seats and glass. It's a burgeoning group, and without much demand from industry, most of these suppliers have no impetus to grow. We've worked hard with a few of them to develop the capacity to consistently manufacture components at the quality levels we need, like this supplier in Nairobi, who are helping to reduce the production cost of metal brackets and improve their ability to build conformant parts to our engineering drawings. Supply and development is standard practice in automotive globally, but it needs to be applied from the ground up with a vast majority of local suppliers to properly bolster the ecosystem. And as production volumes rise, these suppliers can employ more staff, invest in better equipment and continue to develop new manufacturing techniques to further increase output. Building up skills and suppliers are not the only hurdles to local industrialization, but they're good examples of how we think about the challenge. You see, we're not just reimagining the car, we're reimagining our entire value chain. None of this has been easy, and we're only just getting started. But once African industry starts to scale, the potential is huge. Better products, costing less, built locally, together creating millions of jobs. Frugal innovation offers a path to economic acceleration across many industries, and the future of this continent depends on it. The Africa 2.0 I believe in can apply locally relevant design and a commitment to solving its industrial challenges to create a more connected, more prosperous future, not just for the privileged few, but for everyone. Thank you. (Applause) |
A mother and son united by love and art | {0: 'Deb Willis is a photographer and writer in search of beauty.', 1: 'Hank Willis Thomas is a conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to identity, history and popular culture. '} | TEDWomen 2017 | Hank Willis Thomas: I'm Deb's son. (Laughter) Deborah Willis: And I'm Hank's mom. HWT: We've said that so many times, we've made a piece about it. It's called "Sometimes I See Myself In You," and it speaks to the symbiotic relationship that we've developed over the years through our life and work. And really, it's because everywhere we go, together or apart, we carry these monikers. I've been following in my mother's footsteps since before I was even born and haven't figured out how to stop. And as I get older, it does get harder. No seriously, it gets harder. (Laughter) My mother's taught me many things, though, most of all that love overrules. She's taught me that love is an action, not a feeling. Love is a way of being, it's a way of doing, it's a way of listening and it's a way of seeing. DW: And also, the idea about love, photographers, they're looking for love when they make photographs. They're looking and looking and finding love. Growing up in North Philadelphia, I was surrounded by people in my family and friends who made photographs and used the family camera as a way of telling a story about life, about life of joy, about what it meant to become a family in North Philadelphia. So I spent most of my life searching for pictures that reflect on ideas about black love, black joy and about family life. So it's really important to think about the action of love overrules as a verb. HWT: Sometimes I wonder if the love of looking is genetic, because, like my mother, I've loved photographs since before I can even remember. I think sometimes that — after my mother and her mother — that photography and photographs were my first love. No offense to my father, but that's what you get for calling me a "ham" wherever you go. I remember whenever I'd go to my grandmother's house, she would hide all the photo albums because she was afraid of me asking, "Well, who is that in that picture?" and "Who are they to you and who are they to me, and how old were you when that picture was taken? How old was I when that picture was taken? And why were they in black and white? Was the world in black and white before I was born?" DW: Well, that's interesting, just to think about the world in black and white. I grew up in a beauty shop in North Philadelphia, my mom's beauty shop, looking at "Ebony Magazine," found images that told stories that were often not in the daily news, but in the family album. I wanted the family album to be energetic for me, a way of telling stories, and one day I happened upon a book in the Philadelphia Public Library called "The Sweet Flypaper of Life" by Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes. I think what attracted me as a seven-year-old, the title, flypaper and sweet, but to think about that as a seven-year-old, I looked at the beautiful images that Roy DeCarava made and then looked at ways that I could tell a story about life. And looking for me is the act that basically changed my life. HWT: My friend Chris Johnson told me that every photographer, every artist, is essentially trying to answer one question, and I think your question might have been, "Why doesn't the rest of the world see how beautiful we are, and what can I do to help them see our community the way I do?" DW: While studying in art school — it's probably true — I had a male professor who told me that I was taking up a good man's space. He tried to stifle my dream of becoming a photographer. He attempted to shame me in a class full of male photographers. He told me I was out of place and out of order as a woman, and he went on to say that all you could and would do was to have a baby when a good man could have had your seat in this class. I was shocked into silence into that experience. But I had my camera, and I was determined to prove to him that I was worthy for a seat in that class. But in retrospect, I asked myself: "Why did I need to prove it to him?" You know, I had my camera, and I knew I needed to prove to myself that I would make a difference in photography. I love photography, and no one is going to stop me from making images. HWT: But that's when I came in. DW: Yeah, that year I graduated, I got pregnant. Yep, he was right. And I had you, and I shook off that sexist language that he used against me and picked up my camera and made photographs daily, and made photographs of my pregnant belly as I prepared for graduate school. But I thought about also that black photographers were missing from the history books of photography, and I was looking for ways to tell a story. And I ran across Gordon Parks' book "A Choice of Weapons," which was his autobiography. I began photographing and making images, and I tucked away that contact sheet that I made of my pregnant belly, and then you inspired me to create a new piece, a piece that said, "A woman taking a place from a good man," "You took the space from a good man," and then I used that language and reversed it and said, "I made a space for a good man, you." (Applause) HWT: Thanks, ma. Like mother, like son. I grew up in a house full of photographs. They were everywhere, and my mother would turn the kitchen into a darkroom. And there weren't just pictures that she took and pictures of family members. But there were pictures on the wall of and by people that we didn't know, men and women that we didn't know. Thanks, ma. (Laughter) I have my own timing. (Laughter) Did you see her poke me? (Laughter) Puppet strings. I grew up in a house full of photographs. (Applause) But they weren't just pictures of men and women that we knew, but pictures of people that I didn't know, Pretty much, it was pretty clear from what I learned in school, that the rest of the world didn't either. And it took me a long time to figure out what she was up to, but after a while, I figured it out. When I was nine years old, she published this book, "Black Photographers, 1840-1940: A Bio-Bibliography." And it's astounding to me to consider that in 1840, African Americans were making photographs. What does it mean for us to think that at a time that was two, three decades before the end of slavery, that people were learning how to read, they had to learn how to do math, they had to be on the cutting edge of science and technology, to do math, physics and chemistry just to make a single photograph. And what compelled them to do that if not love? Well, that book led her to her next book, "Black Photographers, 1940-1988," and that book led to another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another. (Applause) And throughout my life, she's edited and published dozens of books and curated numerous exhibitions on every continent, not all about black photographers but all inspired by the curiosity of a little black girl from North Philadelphia. DW: What I found is that black photographers had stories to tell, and we needed to listen. And then I found and I discovered black photographers like Augustus Washington, who made these beautiful daguerreotypes of the McGill family in the early 1840s and '50s. Their stories tended to be different, black photographers, and they had a different narrative about black life during slavery, but it was also about family life, beauty and telling stories about community. I didn't know how to link the stories, but I knew that teachers needed to know this story. HWT: So I think I was my mother's first student. Unwillingly and unwittingly — puppet strings — I decided to pick up a camera, and thought that I should make my own pictures about the then and now and the now and then. I thought about how I could use photography to talk about how what's going on outside of the frame of the camera can affect what we see inside. The truth is always in the hands of the actual image maker and it's up to us to really consider what's being cut out. I thought I could use her research as a jumping-off point of things that I was seeing in society and I wanted to start to think about how I could use historical images to talk about the past being present and think about ways that we can speak to the perennial struggle for human rights and equal rights through my appropriation of photographs in the form of sculpture, video, installation and paintings. But through it all, one piece has affected me the most. It continues to nourish me. It's based off of this photograph by Ernest Withers, who took this picture in 1968 at the Memphis Sanitation Workers March of men and women standing collectively to affirm their humanity. They were holding signs that said "I am a man," and I found that astounding, because the phrase I grew up with wasn't "I am a man," it was "I am the man," and I was amazed at how it went from this collective statement during segregation to this seemingly selfish statement after integration. And I wanted to ponder that, so I decided to remix that text in as many ways as I could think of, and I like to think of the top line as a timeline of American history, and the last line as a poem, and it says, "I am the man. Who's the man. You the man. What a man. I am man. I am many. I am, am I. I am, I am. I am, Amen. DW: Wow, so fascinating. (Applause) But what we learn from this experience is the most powerful two words in the English language is, "I am." And we each have the capacity to love. Thank you. (Applause) |
"Good" and "bad" are incomplete stories we tell ourselves | {0: 'Heather Lanier illuminates truths about the human condition that speak to both the head and the heart.'} | TED@BCG Milan | There's an ancient parable about a farmer who lost his horse. And neighbors came over to say, "Oh, that's too bad." And the farmer said, "Good or bad, hard to say." Days later, the horse returns and brings with it seven wild horses. And neighbors come over to say, "Oh, that's so good!" And the farmer just shrugs and says, "Good or bad, hard to say." The next day, the farmer's son rides one of the wild horses, is thrown off and breaks his leg. And the neighbors say, "Oh, that's terrible luck." And the farmer says, "Good or bad, hard to say." Eventually, officers come knocking on people's doors, looking for men to draft for an army, and they see the farmer's son and his leg and they pass him by. And neighbors say, "Ooh, that's great luck!" And the farmer says, "Good or bad, hard to say." I first heard this story 20 years ago, and I have since applied it 100 times. Didn't get the job I wanted: good or bad, hard to say. Got the job I wanted: good or bad, hard to say. To me, the story is not about looking on the bright side or waiting to see how things turn out. It's about how eager we can be to label a situation, to put concrete around it by judging it. But reality is much more fluid, and good and bad are often incomplete stories that we tell ourselves. The parable has been my warning that by gripping tightly to the story of good or bad, I close down my ability to truly see a situation. I learn more when I proceed and loosen my grip and proceed openly with curiosity and wonder. But seven years ago, when I was pregnant with my first child, I completely forgot this lesson. I believed I knew wholeheartedly what was good. When it came to having kids, I thought that good was some version of a superbaby, some ultrahealthy human who possessed not a single flaw and would practically wear a cape flying into her superhero future. I took DHA pills to ensure that my baby had a super-high-functioning, supersmart brain, and I ate mostly organic food, and I trained for a medication-free labor, and I did many other things because I thought these things would help me make not just a good baby, but the best baby possible. When my daughter Fiona was born, she weighed 4 pounds, 12 ounces, or 2.15 kilograms. The pediatrician said there were only two possible explanations for her tiny size. "Either," he said, "it's bad seed," "or it's bad soil." And I wasn't so tired from labor to lose the thread of his logic: my newborn, according to the doctor, was a bad plant. Eventually, I learned that my daughter had an ultra-rare chromosomal condition called Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome. She was missing a chunk of her fourth chromosome. And although my daughter was good — she was alive, and she had brand new baby skin and the most aware onyx eyes — I also learned that people with her syndrome have significant developmental delays and disabilities. Some never learn to walk or talk. I did not have the equanimity of the farmer. The situation looked unequivocally bad to me. But here's where the parable is so useful, because for weeks after her diagnosis, I felt gripped by despair, locked in the story that all of this was tragic. Reality, though — thankfully — is much more fluid, and it has much more to teach. As I started to get to know this mysterious person who was my kid, my fixed, tight story of tragedy loosened. It turned out my girl loved reggae, and she would smirk when my husband would bounce her tiny body up and down to the rhythm. Her onyx eyes eventually turned the most stunning Lake Tahoe blue, and she loved using them to gaze intently into other people's eyes. At five months old, she could not hold her head up like other babies, but she could hold this deep, intent eye contact. One friend said, "She's the most aware baby I've ever seen." But where I saw the gift of her calm, attentive presence, an occupational therapist who came over to our house to work with Fiona saw a child who was neurologically dull. This therapist was especially disappointed that Fiona wasn't rolling over yet, and so she told me we needed to wake her neurology up. One day she leaned over my daughter's body, took her tiny shoulders, jostled her and said, "Wake up! Wake up!" We had a few therapists visit our house that first year, and they usually focused on what they thought was bad about my kid. I was really happy when Fiona started using her right hand to bully a dangling stuffed sheep, but the therapist was fixated on my child's left hand. Fiona had a tendency not to use this hand very often, and she would cross the fingers on that hand. So the therapist said we should devise a splint, which would rob my kid of the ability to actually use those fingers, but it would at least force them into some position that looked normal. In that first year, I was starting to realize a few things. One: ancient parables aside, my kid had some bad therapists. (Laughter) Two: I had a choice. Like a person offered to swallow a red pill or a blue pill, I could choose to see my daughter's differences as bad; I could strive toward the goal that her therapists called, "You'd never know." They loved to pat themselves on the back when they could say about a kid, "You'd never know he was 'delayed' or 'autistic' or 'different.'" I could believe that the good path was the path that erased as many differences as possible. Of course, this would have been a disastrous pursuit, because at the cellular level, my daughter had rare blueprints. She wasn't designed to be like other people. She would lead a rare life. So, I had another choice: I could drop my story that neurological differences and developmental delays and disabilities were bad, which means I could also drop my story that a more able-bodied life was better. I could release my cultural biases about what made a life good or bad and simply watch my daughter's life as it unfolded with openness and curiosity. One afternoon she was lying on her back, and she arched her back on the carpet stuck her tongue out of the side of her mouth and managed to torque her body onto her belly. Then she tipped over and rolled back onto her back, and once there, she managed to do it all over again, rolling and wiggling her 12-pound self under a coffee table. At first, I thought she'd gotten stuck there, but then I saw her reaching for something that her eye had been on all along: a black electric cord. She was a year old. Other babies her age were for sure pulling up to stand and toddling around, some of them. To some, my kid's situation looked bad: a one-year-old who could only roll. But screw that. My kid was enjoying the new, limber freedom of mobility. I rejoiced. Then again, what I watched that afternoon was a baby yanking on an electric cord, so you know, good or bad, hard to say. (Laughter) I started seeing that when I released my grip about what made a life good or bad, I could watch my daughter's life unfold and see what it was. It was beautiful, it was complicated, joyful, hard — in other words: just another expression of the human experience. Eventually, my family and I moved to a new state in America, and we got lucky with a brand-new batch of therapists. They didn't focus on all that was wrong with my kid. They didn't see her differences as problems to fix. They acknowledged her limitations, but they also saw her strengths, and they celebrated her for who she was. Their goal wasn't to make Fiona as normal as possible; their goal was simply to help her be as independent as possible so that she could fulfill her potential, however that looked for her. But the culture at large does not take this open attitude about disabilities. We call congenital differences "birth defects," as though human beings were objects on a factory line. We might offer pitying expressions when we learn that a colleague had a baby with Down syndrome. We hail a blockbuster film about a suicidal wheelchair user, despite the fact that actual wheelchair users tell us that stereotype is unfair and damaging. And sometimes our medical institutions decide what lives are not worth living. Such is the case with Amelia Rivera, a girl with my daughter's same syndrome. In 2012, a famous American children's hospital initially denied Amelia the right to a lifesaving kidney transplant because, according to their form, as it said, she was "mentally retarded." This is the way that the story of disabilities as bad manifests in a culture. But there's a surprisingly insidious counterstory — the story, especially, that people with intellectual disabilities are good because they are here to teach us something magical, or they are inherently angelic and always sweet. You have heard this ableist trope before: the boy with Down syndrome who's one of God's special children, or the girl with the walker and the communication device who is a precious little angel. This story rears its head in my daughter's life around Christmastime, when certain people get positively giddy at the thought of seeing her in angel's wings and a halo at the pageant. The insinuation is that these people don't experience the sticky complexities of being human. And although at times, especially as a baby, my daughter has, in fact, looked angelic, she has grown into the type of kid who does the rascally things that any other kid does, such as when she, at age four, shoved her two-year-old sister. My girl deserves the right to annoy the hell out of you, like any other kid. When we label a person tragic or angelic, bad or good, we rob them of their humanity, along with not only the messiness and complexity that that title brings, but the rights and dignities as well. My girl does not exist to teach me things or any of us things, but she has indeed taught me: number one, how many mozzarella cheese sticks a 22-pound human being can consume in one day — which is five, for the record; and two, the gift of questioning my culture's beliefs about what makes a life good and what makes life bad. If you had told me six years ago that my daughter would sometimes use and iPad app to communicate, I might have thought that was sad. But now I recall the first day I handed Fiona her iPad, loaded with a thousand words, each represented by a tiny little icon or little square on her iPad app. And I recall how bold and hopeful it felt, even as some of her therapists said that my expectations were way too high, that she would never be able to hit those tiny targets. And I recall watching in awe as she gradually learned to flex her little thumb and hit the buttons to say words she loved, like "reggae" and "cheese" and a hundred other words she loved that her mouth couldn't yet say. And then we had to teach her less-fun words, prepositions — words like "of" and "on" and "in." And we worked on this for a few weeks. And then I recall sitting at a dining room table with many relatives, and, apropos of absolutely nothing, Fiona used her iPad app to say, "poop in toilet." (Laughter) Good or bad, hard to say. (Laughter) My kid is human, that's all. And that is a lot. Thank you. (Applause) |
The next generation of African architects and designers | {0: 'Christian Benimana wants to develop the talent and potential of the next generation of African designers with socially-focused design principles.'} | TEDGlobal 2017 | The longest journey that I have ever taken. That was in 2002. I was only 19 years old. It was the first time I had ever been on an airplane and the first time that I had left my country, Rwanda. I had to move thousands of kilometers away to follow a dream. A dream I have had ever since I was a child. And that dream was to become an architect. That was impossible at the time in my country. There were no schools of architecture. So when I got a scholarship to study in China, I left my life and my family behind and I moved to Shanghai. It was an amazing time. This country was going through a major building boom. Shanghai, my new home, was quickly turning into a skyscraper city. China was changing. World-class projects were built to convey a new image of development. Modern, striking engineering marvels were going up literally everywhere. But behind these facades, exploitation of huge numbers of migrant workers, massive displacement of thousands of people made these projects possible. And this fast-paced development also contributed significantly to the pollution that is haunting China today. Fast-forward to 2010, when I went back home to Rwanda. There, I found development patterns similar to what I saw in China. The country was and still is experiencing its own population and economic growth. The pressure to build cities, infrastructure and buildings is at its peak, and as a result, there is a massive building boom as well. This is the reality across the entire continent of Africa, and here's why. By 2050, Africa's population will double, reaching 2.5 billion people. At this point, the African population will be slightly less than the current population of China and India combined. The infrastructure and buildings needed to accommodate this many people is unprecedented in the history of humankind. We have estimated that by 2050, we have to build 700,000,000 more housing units, more than 300,000 schools and nearly 100,000 health centers. Let me put that into perspective for you. Every day for the next 35 years, we have to build seven health centers, 25 schools and nearly 60,000 housing units each day, every day. How are we going to build all of this? Are we going to follow a model of unsustainable building and construction similar to what I witnessed in China? Or can we develop a uniquely African model of sustainable and equitable development? I'm optimistic we can. I know Africans who are already doing it. Take Nigerian architect Kunlé Adeyemi for instance, and his work in slums of coastal megacities. Places like Makoko in Lagos, where hundreds of thousands of people live in makeshift structures on stilts on water, without government infrastructure or services. A community at great risk of rising sea levels and climate change. And yet, people who live here are examples of great ingenuity and the will to survive. Kunlé and his team have designed a prototype school that is resilient to rising sea levels. This is Makoko School. It's a floating prototype structure that can be adapted to clinics, to housing, to markets and other vital infrastructure this community needs. It's an ingenious solution that can ensure this community lives safely on the waters of Lagos. This is Francis Kéré. He works in the country where he comes from, Burkina Faso. Kéré and his team have designed projects that use traditional building techniques. Kéré and his team working in the communities have developed prototype schools that the whole community, similar to every project in the villages of this country, comes together to build. Children bring stones for the foundation, women bring water for the brick manufacturing, and everybody works together to pound the clay floors. Working with the community, Kéré and his team have created projects that function better, with adequate lighting and adequate ventilation. They're appropriate for this particular context and really, really beautiful as well. For the past seven years, I have been working as an architect at MASS Design Group. It's a design firm that began in Rwanda. We have worked in several countries in Africa, focusing on this more equitable and sustainable model of architectural practice, and Malawi is one of those countries. It's a country with beautiful, remote landscapes with high-peak mountains and fertile valleys. But it also has one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the world. A pregnant woman in Malawi either gives birth at home, or she has to walk a really long journey to the nearest clinic. And one out of 36 of these mothers dies during childbirth. In Malawi, with our team at MASS Design Group, we designed the Kasungu Maternity Waiting Village. This is a place women come to six weeks before their due dates. Here they receive prenatal care and train in nutrition and family planning. At the same time, they form a community with other expectant mothers and their families. The design of the of Kasungu Maternity Waiting Village borrows from the vernacular typologies of Malawi villages and is built using really simple materials and techniques. The earth blocks that we used were made from the same soil of this site. This reduces the carbon footprint of this building, but first and foremost, it provides a safe and dignified space for these expectant mothers. These examples show that architecture and design have the power and the agency to address complex problems. But more to point, that we can develop a model of effective solutions for our communities. But these three examples are not enough. 300 more examples will not be enough. We need a whole community of African architects and designers to lead with thousands more examples. In May of this year, we convened a symposium on African architecture, in Kigali, and we invited many of the leading African designers and architectural educators working across the continent. We all had one thing in common. Every single one of us went to school abroad and outside of Africa. This has to change. If we are to develop solutions unique to us, rather than attempting to turn Kigali into Beijing, or Lagos into Shenzhen, we need a community that will build the design confidence of the next generation of African architects and designers. (Applause) In September last year, we launched the African Design Centre to start building this community. We admitted 11 fellows from across the continent. It's a 20-month-long, design-build fellowship program. Here, they are learning to tackle big challenges such as urbanism and climate change, as Kunlé and his team have. They're working with communities to develop innovative building solutions and processes, as Kéré and his team have. They're learning to understand the health impact of better buildings as we at MASS Design Group have been researching for the past several years. The crowning moment of the fellowship is a real project that they designed and built. This is Ruhehe Primary School, the project they designed. They immersed themselves in the community to understand the challenges but also uncover opportunities, like using a wall made of local volcanic stone to turn the entire campus into a space of play and active learning. They evaluated the environmental conditions and developed a roof system that maximizes daylight and improves acoustic performance. The construction at Ruhehe Primary School will begin this year. (Applause) And over the coming months, the African Design Centre fellows are going to work hand-in-hand with the Ruhehe community to build it. When we asked the fellows what they want to do after their African Design Centre fellowship, Tshepo from South Africa said he wants to introduce this new way of building into his country, so he plans to open a private practice in Johannesburg. Zani wants to expand opportunities for women to become engineers. Before joining the African Design Centre, she helped start, in Nairobi, an organization to bridge the gender gaps for women in engineering fields, and she hopes to take this movement across Africa, eventually the whole world. Moses, from South Sudan, the world's newest country, wants to open the first polytechnic school that will teach people how to build using local materials from his country. Moses had to be determined to become an architect. The civil war in his country frequently interrupted his architectural education. At the time he was applying to join the African Design Centre, we could hear gunshots going off in the background of his interview call. But even in the middle of this civil war, Moses hangs on to this idea that architecture can be a way to bridge communities back together. You have to be inspired by this fellow's belief that great architecture can make a difference on how the future of Africa is built. The unprecedented growth of Africa cannot be ignored. Imagine Africa's future cities, but not as vast slums, but the most resilient and the most socially inclusive places on earth. This is achievable. And we have the talent to make it a reality. But the journey to ready that talent for the task ahead, like my own journey, is far too long. For the next generation of African creative leaders, we have to shorten and streamline that journey. But most importantly — and I cannot stress this enough — we have to build their design confidence and empower them to develop solutions that are truly African but globally inspiring. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How adoption worked for me | {0: 'TED Fellow Christopher Ategeka is on a mission to ensure a sustainable future for humanity and the planet.'} | TEDGlobal 2017 | How many of you are tired of seeing celebrities adopting kids from the African continent? (Laughter) Well, it's not all that bad. I was adopted. I grew up in rural Uganda, lost both my parents when I was very, very young. And when my parents passed, I experienced all the negative effects of poverty, from homelessness, eating out of trash piles, you name it. But my life changed when I got accepted into an orphanage. Through one of those sponsor-an-orphan programs, I was sponsored and given an opportunity to acquire an education. I started off in Uganda. I went through school, and the way this particular program worked, you finished high school and after high school, you go learn a trade — to become a carpenter, a mechanic or something along those lines. My case was a little different. The sponsor family that was sending these 25 dollars a month to this orphanage to sponsor me, which — I had never met them — said, "Well ... we would like to send you to college instead." Oh — it gets better. (Laughter) And they said, "If you get the paperwork, we'll send you to school in America instead." So with their help, I went to the embassy and applied for the visa. I got the visa. I remember this day like it was yesterday. I walked out of the embassy with this piece of paper in my hand, a hop in my step, smile on my face, knowing that my life is about to change. I went home that night, and I slept with my passport, because I was afraid that someone might steal it. (Laughter) I couldn't fall asleep. I kept feeling it. I had a good idea for security. I was like, "OK, I'm going to put it in a plastic bag, and take it outside and dig a hole, and put it in there." I did that, went back in the house. I could not fall asleep. I was like, "Maybe someone saw me." I went back — (Laughter) I pulled it out, and I put it with me the entire night — all to say that it was an anxiety-filled night. (Laughter) Going to the US was, just like another speaker said, was my first time to see a plane, be on one, let alone sit on it to fly to another country. December 15, 2006. 7:08pm. I sat in seat 7A. Fly Emirates. One of the most gorgeous, beautiful women I've ever seen walked up, red little hat with a white veil. I'm looking terrified, I have no idea what I'm doing. She hands me this warm towel — warm, steamy, snow white. I'm looking at this warm towel; I don't know what to do with my life, let alone with this damn towel — (Laughter) (Applause) I did one of the — you know, anything anyone could do in that situation: look around, see what everyone else is doing. I did the same. Mind you, I drove about seven hours from my village to the airport that day. So I grab this warm towel, wipe my face just like everyone else is doing, I look at it — damn. (Laughter) It was all dirt brown. (Laughter) I remember being so embarrassed that when she came by to pick it up, I didn't give mine. (Laughter) I still have it. (Laughter) (Applause) Going to America opened doors for me to live up to my full God-given potential. I remember when I arrived, the sponsor family embraced me, and they literally had to teach me everything from scratch: this is a microwave, that's a refrigerator — things I'd never seen before. And it was also the first time I got immersed into a new and different culture. These strangers showed me true love. These strangers showed me that I mattered, that my dreams mattered. (Applause) Thank you. These individuals had two of their own biological children. And when I came in, I had needs. They had to teach me English, teach me literally everything, which resulted in them spending a lot of time with me. And that created a little bit of jealousy with their children. So, if you're a parent in this room, and you have those teenager children who don't want anything to do with your love and affection — in fact, they find it repulsive — I got a solution: adopt a child. (Laughter) It will solve the problem. (Applause) I went on to acquire two engineering degrees from one of the best institutions in the world. I've got to tell you: talent is universal, but opportunities are not. And I credit this to the individuals who embrace multiculturalism, love, empathy and compassion for others. We live in a world filled with hate: building walls, Brexit, xenophobia here on the African continent. Multiculturalism can be an answer to many of these worst human qualities. Today, I challenge you to help a young child experience multiculturalism. I guarantee you that will enrich their life, and in turn, it will enrich yours. And as a bonus, one of them may even give a TED Talk. (Laughter) (Applause) We may not be able to solve the bigotry and the racism of this world today, but certainly we can raise children to create a positive, inclusive, connected world full of empathy, love and compassion. Love wins. Thank you. (Applause) |
You aren't at the mercy of your emotions -- your brain creates them | {0: 'Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD is a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, with positions in psychiatry and radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.'} | TED@IBM | My research lab sits about a mile from where several bombs exploded during the Boston Marathon in 2013. The surviving bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev of Chechnya, was tried, convicted and sentenced to death. Now, when a jury has to make the decision between life in prison and the death penalty, they base their decision largely on whether or not the defendant feels remorseful for his actions. Tsarnaev spoke words of apology, but when jurors looked at his face, all they saw was a stone-faced stare. Now, Tsarnaev is guilty, there's no doubt about that. He murdered and maimed innocent people, and I'm not here to debate that. My heart goes out to all the people who suffered. But as a scientist, I have to tell you that jurors do not and cannot detect remorse or any other emotion in anybody ever. Neither can I, and neither can you, and that's because emotions are not what we think they are. They are not universally expressed and recognized. They are not hardwired brain reactions that are uncontrollable. We have misunderstood the nature of emotion for a very long time, and understanding what emotions really are has important consequences for all of us. I have studied emotions as a scientist for the past 25 years, and in my lab, we have probed human faces by measuring electrical signals that cause your facial muscles to contract to make facial expressions. We have scrutinized the human body in emotion. We have analyzed hundreds of physiology studies involving thousands of test subjects. We've scanned hundreds of brains, and examined every brain imaging study on emotion that has been published in the past 20 years. And the results of all of this research are overwhelmingly consistent. It may feel to you like your emotions are hardwired and they just trigger and happen to you, but they don't. You might believe that your brain is prewired with emotion circuits, that you're born with emotion circuits, but you're not. In fact, none of us in this room have emotion circuits in our brain. In fact, no brain on this planet contains emotion circuits. So what are emotions, really? Well, strap on your seat belt, because ... emotions are guesses. They are guesses that your brain constructs in the moment where billions of brain cells are working together, and you have more control over those guesses than you might imagine that you do. Now, if that sounds preposterous to you, or, you know, kind of crazy, I'm right there with you, because frankly, if I hadn't seen the evidence for myself, decades of evidence for myself, I am fairly sure that I wouldn't believe it either. But the bottom line is that emotions are not built into your brain at birth. They are just built. To see what I mean, have a look at this. Right now, your brain is working like crazy. Your neurons are firing like mad trying to make meaning out of this so that you see something other than black and white blobs. Your brain is sifting through a lifetime of experience, making thousands of guesses at the same time, weighing the probabilities, trying to answer the question, "What is this most like?" not "What is it?" but "What is this most like in my past experience?" And this is all happening in the blink of an eye. Now if your brain is still struggling to find a good match and you still see black and white blobs, then you are in a state called "experiential blindness," and I am going to cure you of your blindness. This is my favorite part. Are you ready to be cured? (Cheers) All right. Here we go. (Gasps) All right. So now many of you see a snake, and why is that? Because as your brain is sifting through your past experience, there's new knowledge there, the knowledge that came from the photograph. And what's really cool is that that knowledge which you just acquired moments ago is changing how you experience these blobs right now. So your brain is constructing the image of a snake where there is no snake, and this kind of a hallucination is what neuroscientists like me call "predictions." Predictions are basically the way your brain works. It's business as usual for your brain. Predictions are the basis of every experience that you have. They are the basis of every action that you take. In fact, predictions are what allow you to understand the words that I'm speaking as they come out of my — Audience: Mouth. Lisa Feldman Barrett: Mouth. Exactly. Predictions are primal. They help us to make sense of the world in a quick and efficient way. So your brain does not react to the world. Using past experience, your brain predicts and constructs your experience of the world. The way that we see emotions in others are deeply rooted in predictions. So to us, it feels like we just look at someone's face, and we just read the emotion that's there in their facial expressions the way that we would read words on a page. But actually, under the hood, your brain is predicting. It's using past experience based on similar situations to try to make meaning. This time, you're not making meaning of blobs, you're making meaning of facial movements like the curl of a lip or the raise of an eyebrow. And that stone-faced stare? That might be someone who is a remorseless killer, but a stone-faced stare might also mean that someone is stoically accepting defeat, which is in fact what Chechen culture prescribes for someone in Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's situation. So the lesson here is that emotions that you seem to detect in other people actually come in part from what's inside your own head. And this is true in the courtroom, but it's also true in the classroom, in the bedroom, and in the boardroom. And so here's my concern: tech companies which shall remain nameless ... well, maybe not. You know, Google, Facebook — (Laughter) are spending millions of research dollars to build emotion-detection systems, and they are fundamentally asking the wrong question, because they're trying to detect emotions in the face and the body, but emotions aren't in your face and body. Physical movements have no intrinsic emotional meaning. We have to make them meaningful. A human or something else has to connect them to the context, and that makes them meaningful. That's how we know that a smile might mean sadness and a cry might mean happiness, and a stoic, still face might mean that you are angrily plotting the demise of your enemy. Now, if I haven't already gone out on a limb, I'll just edge out on that limb a little further and tell you that the way that you experience your own emotion is exactly the same process. Your brain is basically making predictions, guesses, that it's constructing in the moment with billions of neurons working together. Now your brain does come prewired to make some feelings, simple feelings that come from the physiology of your body. So when you're born, you can make feelings like calmness and agitation, excitement, comfort, discomfort. But these simple feelings are not emotions. They're actually with you every waking moment of your life. They are simple summaries of what's going on inside your body, kind of like a barometer. But they have very little detail, and you need that detail to know what to do next. What do you about these feelings? And so how does your brain give you that detail? Well, that's what predictions are. Predictions link the sensations in your body that give you these simple feelings with what's going on around you in the world so that you know what to do. And sometimes, those constructions are emotions. So for example, if you were to walk into a bakery, your brain might predict that you will encounter the delicious aroma of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. I know my brain would predict the delicious aroma of freshly baked chocolate cookies. And our brains might cause our stomachs to churn a little bit, to prepare for eating those cookies. And if we are correct, if in fact some cookies have just come out of the oven, then our brains will have constructed hunger, and we are prepared to munch down those cookies and digest them in a very efficient way, meaning that we can eat a lot of them, which would be a really good thing. You guys are not laughing enough. I'm totally serious. (Laughter) But here's the thing. That churning stomach, if it occurs in a different situation, it can have a completely different meaning. So if your brain were to predict a churning stomach in, say, a hospital room while you're waiting for test results, then your brain will be constructing dread or worry or anxiety, and it might cause you to, maybe, wring your hands or take a deep breath or even cry. Right? Same physical sensation, same churning stomach, different experience. And so the lesson here is that emotions which seem to happen to you are actually made by you. You are not at the mercy of mythical emotion circuits which are buried deep inside some ancient part of your brain. You have more control over your emotions than you think you do. I don't mean that you can just snap your fingers and change how you feel the way that you would change your clothes, but your brain is wired so that if you change the ingredients that your brain uses to make emotion, then you can transform your emotional life. So if you change those ingredients today, you're basically teaching your brain how to predict differently tomorrow, and this is what I call being the architect of your experience. So here's an example. All of us have had a nervous feeling before a test, right? But some people experience crippling anxiety before a test. They have test anxiety. Based on past experiences of taking tests, their brains predict a hammering heartbeat, sweaty hands, so much so that they are unable to actually take the test. They don't perform well, and sometimes they not only fail courses but they actually might fail college. But here's the thing: a hammering heartbeat is not necessarily anxiety. It could be that your body is preparing to do battle and ace that test ... or, you know, give a talk in front of hundreds of people on a stage where you're being filmed. (Laughter) I'm serious. (Laughter) And research shows that when students learn to make this kind of energized determination instead of anxiety, they perform better on tests. And that determination seeds their brain to predict differently in the future so that they can get their butterflies flying in formation. And if they do that often enough, they not only can pass a test but it will be easier for them to pass their courses, and they might even finish college, which has a huge impact on their future earning potential. So I call this emotional intelligence in action. Now you can cultivate this emotional intelligence yourself and use it in your everyday life. So just, you know, imagine waking up in the morning. I'm sure you've had this experience. I know I have. You wake up and as you're emerging into consciousness, you feel this horrible dread, you know, this real wretchedness, and immediately, your mind starts to race. You start to think about all the crap that you have to do at work and you have that mountain of email which you will never dig yourself out of ever, the phone calls you have to return, and that important meeting across town, and you're going to have to fight traffic, you'll be late picking your kids up, your dog is sick, and what are you going to make for dinner? Oh my God. What is wrong with your life? What is wrong with my life? (Laughter) That mind racing is prediction. Your brain is searching to find an explanation for those sensations in your body that you experience as wretchedness, just like you did with the blobby image. So your brain is trying to explain what caused those sensations so that you know what to do about them. But those sensations might not be an indication that anything is wrong with your life. They might have a purely physical cause. Maybe you're tired. Maybe you didn't sleep enough. Maybe you're hungry. Maybe you're dehydrated. The next time that you feel intense distress, ask yourself: Could this have a purely physical cause? Is it possible that you can transform emotional suffering into just mere physical discomfort? Now I am not suggesting to you that you can just perform a couple of Jedi mind tricks and talk yourself out of being depressed or anxious or any kind of serious condition. But I am telling you that you have more control over your emotions than you might imagine, and that you have the capacity to turn down the dial on emotional suffering and its consequences for your life by learning how to construct your experiences differently. And all of us can do this and with a little practice, we can get really good at it, like driving. At first, it takes a lot of effort, but eventually it becomes pretty automatic. Now I don't know about you, but I find this to be a really empowering and inspiring message, and the fact that it's backed up by decades of research makes me also happy as a scientist. But I have to also warn you that it does come with some fine print, because more control also means more responsibility. If you are not at the mercy of mythical emotion circuits which are buried deep inside your brain somewhere and which trigger automatically, then who's responsible, who is responsible when you behave badly? You are. Not because you're culpable for your emotions, but because the actions and the experiences that you make today become your brain's predictions for tomorrow. Sometimes we are responsible for something not because we're to blame but because we're the only ones who can change it. Now responsibility is a big word. It's so big, in fact, that sometimes people feel the need to resist the scientific evidence that emotions are built and not built in. The idea that we are responsible for our own emotions seems very hard to swallow. But what I'm suggesting to you is you don't have to choke on that idea. You just take a deep breath, maybe get yourself a glass of water if you need to, and embrace it. Embrace that responsibility, because it is the path to a healthier body, a more just and informed legal system, and a more flexible and potent emotional life. Thank you. (Applause) |
3 thoughtful ways to conserve water | {0: 'BCG’s Lana Mazahreh wants individuals, companies and countries to take action against the fast-growing water crisis.'} | TED@BCG Milan | In March 2017, the mayor of Cape Town officially declared Cape Town a local disaster, as it had less than four months left of usable water. Residents were restricted to 100 liters of water per person, per day. But what does that really mean? With 100 liters of water per day, you can take a five-minute shower, wash your face twice and probably flush the toilet about five times. You still didn't brush your teeth, you didn't do laundry, and you definitely didn't water your plants. You, unfortunately, didn't wash your hands after those five toilet flushes. And you didn't even take a sip of water. The mayor described this as that it means a new relationship with water. Today, seven months later, I can share two things about my second home with you. First: Cape Town hasn't run out of water just yet. But as of September 3rd, the hundred-liter limit dropped to 87 liters. The mayor defined the city's new normal as one of permanent drought. Second: what's happening in Cape Town is pretty much coming to many other cities and countries in the world. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, excluding countries that we don't have data for, less than five percent of the world's population is living in a country that has more water today than it did 20 years ago. Everyone else is living in a country that has less water today. And nearly one out of three are living in a country that is facing a water crisis. I grew up in Jordan, a water-poor country that has experienced absolute water scarcity since 1973. And still, in 2017, only 10 countries in the world have less water than Jordan. So dealing with a lack of water is quite ingrained in my soul. As soon as I was old enough to learn how to write my name, I also learned that I need to conserve water. My parents would constantly remind my siblings and I to close the tap when we brushed our teeth. We used to fill balloons with flour instead of water when we played. It's just as much fun, though. (Laughter) And a few years ago, when my friends and I were dared to do the Ice Bucket Challenge, we did that with sand. (Laughter) And you might think that, you know, that's easy, sand is not ice cold. I promise you, sand goes everywhere, and it took ages to get rid of it. But what perhaps I didn't realize as I played with flour balloons as a child, and as I poured sand on my head as an adult, is that some of the techniques that seem second nature to me and to others who live in dry countries might help us all address what is fast becoming a global crisis. I wish to share three lessons today, three lessons from water-poor countries and how they survived and even thrived despite their water crisis. Lesson one: tell people how much water they really have. In order to solve a problem, we need to acknowledge that we have one. And when it comes to water, people can easily turn a blind eye, pretending that since water is coming out of the tap now, everything will be fine forever. But some smart, drought-affected countries have adopted simple, innovative measures to make sure their citizens, their communities and their companies know just how dry their countries are. When I was in Cape Town earlier this year, I saw this electronic billboard on the freeway, indicating how much water the city had left. This is an idea they may well have borrowed from Australia when it faced one of the worst droughts of the country's history from 1997 to 2009. Water levels in Melbourne dropped to a very low capacity of almost 26 percent. But the city didn't yell at people. It didn't plead with them not to use water. They used electronic billboards to flash available levels of water to all citizens across the city. They were honestly telling people how much water they really have, and letting them take responsibility for themselves. By the end of the drought, this created such a sense of urgency as well as a sense of community. Nearly one out of three citizens in Melbourne had invested in installing rainwater holding tanks for their own households. Actions that citizens took didn't stop at installing those tanks. With help from the city, they were able to do something even more impactful. Taking me to lesson two: empower people to save water. Melbourne wanted people to spend less water in their homes. And one way to do that is to spend less time in the shower. However, interviews revealed that some people, women in particular, weren't keen on saving water that way. Some of them honestly said, "The shower is not just to clean up. It's my sanctuary. It's a space I go to relax, not just clean up." So the city started offering water-efficient showerheads for free. And then, now some people complained that the showerheads looked ugly or didn't suit their bathrooms. So what I like to call "The Showerhead Team" developed a small water-flow regulator that can be fitted into existing showerheads. And although showerhead beauty doesn't matter much to me, I loved how the team didn't give up and instead came up with a simple, unique solution to empower people to save water. Within a span of four years, more than 460,000 showerheads were replaced. When the small regulator was introduced, more than 100,000 orders of that were done. Melbourne succeeded in reducing the water demands per capita by 50 percent. In the United Arab Emirates, the second-most water-scarce country in the world, officials designed what they called the "Business Heroes Toolkit" in 2010. The aim was to motivate and empower businesses to reduce water and energy consumption. The toolkit practically taught companies how to measure their existing water-consumption levels and consisted of tips to help them reduce those levels. And it worked. Hundreds of organizations downloaded the toolkit. And several of them joined what they called the "Corporate Heroes Network," where companies can voluntarily take on a challenge to reduce their water-consumption levels to preset targets within a period of one year. Companies which completed the challenge saved on average 35 percent of water. And one company, for example, implemented as many water-saving tips as they could in their office space. They replaced their toilet-flushing techniques, taps, showerheads — you name it. If it saved water, they replaced it, eventually reducing their employees' water consumption by half. Empowering individuals and companies to save water is so critical, yet not sufficient. Countries need to look beyond the status quo and implement country-level actions to save water. Taking me to lesson three: look below the surface. Water savings can come from unexpected places. Singapore is the eighth most water-scarce country in the world. It depends on imported water for almost 60 percent of its water needs. It's also a very small island. As such, it needs to make use of as much space as possible to catch rainfall. So in 2008, they built the Marina Barrage. It's the first-ever urban water reservoir built in the middle of the city-state. It's the largest water catchment in the country, almost one-sixth the size of Singapore. What's so amazing about the Marina Barrage is that it has been built to make the maximum use of its large size and its unexpected yet important location. It brings three valuable benefits to the country: it has boosted Singapore's water supply by 10 percent; it protects low areas around it from floods because of its connection to the sea; and, as you can see, it acts as a beautiful lifestyle attraction, hosting several events, from art exhibitions to music festivals, attracting joggers, bikers, tourists all around that area. Now, not all initiatives need to be stunning or even visible. My first home, Jordan, realized that agriculture is consuming the majority of its fresh water. They really wanted to encourage farmers to focus on growing low water-intensive crops. To achieve that, the local agriculture is increasing its focus on date palms and grapevines. Those two are much more tolerant to drought conditions than many other fruits and vegetables, and at the same time, they are considered high-value crops, both locally and internationally. Locals in Namibia, one of the most arid countries in Southern Africa, have been drinking recycled water since 1968. Now, you may tell me many countries recycle water. I would say yes. But very few use it for drinking purposes, mostly because people don't like the thought of water that was in their toilets going to their taps. But Namibia could not afford to think that way. They looked below the surface to save water. They are now a great example of how, when countries purify waste water to drinking standards, they can ease their water shortages, and in Namibia's case, provide drinking water for more than 300,000 citizens in its capital city. As more countries which used to be more water rich are becoming water scarce, I say we don't need to reinvent the wheel. If we just look at what water-poor countries have done, the solutions are out there. Now it's really just up to all of us to take action. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why we need to move manufacturing off-planet | {0: 'James Orsulak serves as the Director of Business Development at Planetary Resources, an asteroid mining company that has embarked on the world’s first commercial deep space exploration. The company focuses on technologies such as rocket propellant, water for life support functions, and construction materials sourced from asteroids. Previously, James spent a decade developing industrial-scale fueling stations on Earth. He is an avid gardener, owner of a dog named Waffles, and the parent of 2-year-old twins.'} | TEDxMileHigh | All of the resources that we have ever used as a civilization have come from the same place. Everything. All the energy, the fuels, minerals, metals, construction materials. The water, the air that you're breathing right now. Every resource that we've ever used has come from the same place: Earth. Now, this actually presents a severe problem, because when we study biological history, we very quickly see that any time there's a dominant species in a finite ecosystem, consuming a limited amount of resources, that species will collapse. Now, that collapse usually begins at 50%. When a species has converted 50% of its environment, the ecosystem becomes unstable, and it changes. It’s no longer suitable for that particular species. Now, here’s the scary part. There are 7 billion people on this planet. We are the dominant species. And we’ve converted 43% of the available land mass on Earth. By the year 2050, there will be 9 billion people on our planet and we will be well past 50%. That means most of the people sitting in this auditorium will see this begin. We don’t know exactly what it's going to look like, we don't know exactly what the impact is going to be, but the worst case scenario is the end of the human race. Because Earth is no longer suitable for human life. Now, the reason that this problem exists is because it’s in our nature. Human beings consume resources. They alter their environment so they can reproduce. It’s the very definition of biological life. The problem is we’re running out of room, we're running out of resources and now we're running out of time. So we need a plan. What if - what if there was a way that we could make our ecosystem bigger? If we expand our view and we look out into space, we see that all the resources we hold of value here at home - energy, fuels, metals, water - are available in nearly infinite quantities in our solar system. What if there’s a way we could use those resources to prevent the collapse of our civilization? Now, I know, that sounds impossible. It sounds like science fiction. But I have a different viewpoint than you do. I work with some of the smartest people in the world: engineers who have consistently landed robots on other planets; a lot of scientists, rocket scientists, data scientists, planetary scientists, artificial intelligence experts. I’m the head of strategic partnerships for the largest asteroid-mining company in the world. And I believe we can use the resources of space to save our planet. We have proven again and again that we know how to destroy an environment. Now it’s time for us to prove that we can save it. From my vantage point, I see that there's more computing power in your car’s key fob than we use to send the astronauts to the Moon. That means we can do incredible things in space with cheap, affordable robots. For the very first time in history we’ve amassed the technological toolkit that we need to dispatch autonomous robotic explorers out into the solar system to find and access these resources and put them to work. Imagine a future where the resources we need do not only come from this planet, a future where we have access to the vast resources of space and we are using them to improve life here on Earth. That’s the future I’m going to show you. It all starts with water. See, today if you want water in space you have to take that resource, you have to load it onto a rocket and launch it into space. Now, that’s a shame because there’s a lot of water in space. There’s water on asteroids, on comets, on the poles of our Moon, and on other planets. Water is everywhere in space. And that’s a good thing because water is one of the most critical resources we will need. You see, this plan involves a lot of robots, but it also involves a lot of people. People will be living and working in space to make this possible. And those people need water for sustenance, for hygiene, for growing food. But water in space is also fuel. If we pass water through an electrical field, we can produce liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. That’s high-efficiency rocket propellant. So if the source water from space and turn it into rocket propellant, we can set up fuel depots in the solar system, gas stations! And when we do that, for the first time we have access to this new resource base because we’re not trying to launch all our fuel from Earth. And now that we have access, we can turn our sights to the next step: construction. You see, asteroids are also made of pure, high-quality metals: nickel, iron, cobalt, platinum. This is the first object that was created from an asteroid. It was the 3D-printed from a meteorite. It’s very heavy, it’s very strong, you’d never want to launch something like this into space from Earth. But if you source metals from space and feed them to orbital construction robots - which by the way, that's already a thing, we already have that - then you can create structures that are no longer limited by size. See, this is the International Space Station. It is the most expensive object humans have ever built. It cost a hundred billion dollars. Why was it so expensive? Well, it was created using the resources of Earth, that were turned into products, loaded onto rockets, launched into space and then assembled by humans. But that’s backwards. It doesn’t make sense anymore. That’s like roughly the equivalent of you living in Europe and saying, "I’m going to move to the United States and build a house there, but I’m going to ship all the materials to build that house across the ocean; all of the wood, the metal, the plumbing, the electrical, the shower heads, I'm going to ship it across the ocean,'' when all of the resources you need are already there at your destination. It doesn't make sense. We can reduce the cost and logistical inefficiencies of building large livable structures in space by a factor of a hundred by simply sourcing what we need from our destination. So we can build things in space! What should we build? Well, energy is the single largest driver of resource consumption in the world. We mine for coal. We drill for oil and natural gas. We mine for metals to build our wind plants. We mine for silicon to make our solar panels. We mine for nickel to make batteries so we can store it. One thing remains the same. As the population grows, so does the energy demand, so does the resource consumption that goes with it. We've always assumed that our energy production must happen here on Earth because there's never been an alternative, because we haven't built one. If we use the resources of space, we can create massive, kilometer-scale solar farms in space. These huge facilities will capture the energy of the sun, that shines in space 24 hours a day, and beam that energy back to Earth. The technology to do this exists today, but it's simply too expensive when we try to use the resources of Earth. But if we use the resources in space, we can create planetary-scale macrogrids. You've heard of the electricity grid, maybe you've heard of the microgrid. This is the opposite. This is a planetary-scale, power-generation system. It's the energy that we need and the energy is in space. It's not the resources buried under our feet. So we have water, fuel, construction capabilities, now power, we have all of the utilities we need to build cities in space. Orbital megastructures spun up to produce artificial gravity so they're livable for large populations. These are emerging today as commercial space stations. They're research labs for sovereign astronauts from around the world; hotels for adventurous tourists, certainly. But the primary function of these facilities will be manufacturing. We will build things in space. It starts with satellites and spacecraft. Why would we want to build satellites in space? Today when we build a satellite, it's constrained by the rocket that takes it to space. It has to be built and designed to fit on top of that rocket. And it has to be designed to survive the violent rocket launch to the atmosphere. (Mimicking a rocket) (Laughter) But if we remove that constraint, we can build things that are as big as our imagination and vastly more capable. And if we've come this far, we can take the final step and we can start to solve our resource crisis. We can move our industrial manufacturing into space, all of it. You see, manufacturing is resource consumption. We use the resources of Earth, we turn them into manufactured products, so we can sell them and do useful things. That is what drives commerce on Earth. But what if we reverse that? What if we gather and harvest all of our raw materials and resources from deep space and import them to an orbital manufacturing ring around the planet, and then return only the finished products to the surface? Let's use your smartphone as an example. This was created using raw materials from Earth. Yet, every single one of the raw materials in this exists in infinite quantities in space. The most expensive component of your phone is platinum, and platinum is readily available in near-earth asteroids passing by us all the time. This is created here on Earth using the resources of Earth, in a factory that produces emissions, consumes resources. They use toxic chemicals like benzene to produce this. And that factory produces hazardous waste that's the byproduct of manufacturing. That's the bad stuff: poisons, toxins, heavy metals, radiation. The problem is all of the hazardous waste from manufacturing is stuck with us here in the finite ecosystem that we live in. It's poisoning our air, our water, our fish, our wildlife, our food our kids! Do you know where this should not be made? (Laughter) (Breathing in) (Breathing out) (Laughter) In the only breathable atmosphere that we know of anywhere, a resource that we take for granted every minute of every day. So if we do this, we reverse the human supply chain, we push all of our mining and manufacturing outside the atmosphere, what have we done? We've now zoned the Earth for residential access only. Imagine if you walked outside one day and there were no factories, no power plants, no refineries, no oil rigs, no pipelines to protest, and instead we simply allowed the planet to return to a more natural state, we intentionally stabilized our environment. We'd have more space here on Earth, more room for the population, because we're not trying to live on top of our consumable resource base. And to be clear, this is not a vision about scarcity. And yes, we still have to conserve all of the precious resources we have here at home. But this is a vision about abundance. It's about having access to all of the resources we need to grow as a civilization. They're simply coming from a different place. Now, I know, I know this sounds impossible, but it's happening fast, faster than you could ever imagine, and it's already started. My kids are two. By the time they're in high school, they will see operational asteroid mines. They'll grow up in a world knowing that the resources we need do not simply come from only this planet. As a parent this gives me a lot of hope, because I want to create a world for those kids that gets better and better, not worse and worse. And when someone asks them, "Why we should be exploring space when we have so many problems here at home?", they will know the answer to that. The resources of space are the solutions to our greatest problems. It is only by exploring space that we safeguard this world, the one that matters the most. This is what I ask of you: believe that this is possible, because for the very first time in human history, it is possible. When we access the infinite resources of space, we do so so we can protect and preserve the single most important asset that we know of anywhere in the universe, the only place that we know of that can support human life: our home, Earth. Thank you. (Applause) |
Our treatment of HIV has advanced. Why hasn't the stigma changed? | {0: 'Arik Hartmann is tackling the ignorance and misinformation surrounding HIV/AIDS.'} | TEDxVermilionStreet | So I want to start this talk by showing y'all a photo, and it's a photo many of you have probably seen before. So I want you all to take a moment and look at this photo, and really reflect on some of the things that come to mind, and what are some of those things, those words. Now, I'm going to ask you all to look at me. What words come to mind when you look at me? What separates that man up there from me? The man in that photo is named David Kirby and it was taken in 1990 as he was dying from AIDS-related illness, and it was subsequently published in "Life Magazine." The only real thing separating me from Kirby is about 30 years of medical advancements in the way that we treat HIV and AIDS. So what I want to ask next is this: If we have made such exponential progress in combatting HIV, why haven't our perceptions of those with the virus evolved alongside? Why does HIV elicit this reaction from us when it's so easily managed? When did the stigmatization even occur, and why hasn't it subsided? And these are not easy questions to answer. They're the congealing of so many different factors and ideas. Powerful images, like this one of Kirby, these were the faces of the AIDS crisis in the '80s and '90s, and at the time the crisis had a very obvious impact on an already stigmatized group of people, and that was gay men. So what the general straight public saw was this very awful thing happening to a group of people who were already on the fringes of society. The media at the time began to use the two almost interchangeably — gay and AIDS — and at the 1984 Republican National Convention, one of the speakers joked that gay stood for: "Got AIDS yet?" And that was the mindset at the time. But as we started to understand the virus more and how it was transmitted, we realized that that risk had increased its territory. The highly profiled case of Ryan White in 1985, who was a 13-year-old hemophiliac who had contracted HIV from a contaminated blood treatment, and this marked the most profound shift in America's perception of HIV. No longer was it restricted to these dark corners of society, to queers and drug users, but now it was affecting people that society deemed worthy of their empathy, to children. But that permeating fear and that perception, it still lingers. And I want a show of hands for these next few questions. How many of you in here were aware that with treatment, those with HIV not only fend off AIDS completely, but they live full and normal lives? Y'all are educated. (Laughter) How many of you are aware that with treatment, those with HIV can reach an undetectable status, and that makes them virtually uninfectious? Much less. How many of you were aware of the pre- and postexposure treatments that are available that reduce the risk of transmission by over 90 percent? See, these are incredible advancements that we have made in fighting HIV, yet they have not managed to dent the perception that most Americans have of the virus and those living with it. And I don't want you to think I'm downplaying the danger of this virus, and I am not ignorant of the harrowing past of the AIDS epidemic. I am trying to convey that there is hope for those infected and HIV is not the death sentence it was in the '80s. And now you may ask, and I asked this question myself initially: Where are the stories? Where are these people living with HIV? Why haven't they been vocal? How can I believe these successes, or these statistics, without seeing the successes? And this is actually a very easy question for me to answer. Fear, stigma and shame: these keep those living with HIV in the closet, so to speak. Our sexual histories are as personal to us as our medical histories, and when you overlap the two, you can find yourself in a very sensitive space. The fear of how others perceive us when we're honest keeps us from doing many things in life, and this is the case for the HIV-positive population. To face social scrutiny and ridicule is the price that we pay for transparency, and why become a martyr when you can effectively pass as someone without HIV? After all, there are no physical indications you have the virus. There's no sign that you wear. There is safety in assimilation, and there is safety in invisibility. I'm here to throw back that veil and share my story. So in the fall of 2014, I was a sophomore in college and like most college students, I was sexually active, and I generally took precautions to minimize the risk that sex carries. Now, I say generally, because I wasn't always safe. It only takes a single misstep before we're flat on the ground, and my misstep is pretty obvious. I had unprotected sex, and I didn't think much of it. Fast-forward about three weeks, and it felt like I'd been trampled by a herd of wildebeest. The aches in my body were like nothing I have felt before or since. I would get these bouts of fever and chill. I would reel with nausea, and it was difficult to walk. Being a biology student, I had some prior exposure to disease, and being a fairly informed gay man, I had read a bit on HIV, so to me, it clicked that this was seroconversion, or as it's sometimes called, acute HIV infection. And this is the body's reaction in producing antibodies to the HIV antigen. It's important to note that not everybody goes through this phase of sickness, but I was one of the lucky ones who did. And I was lucky as in, there were these physical symptoms that let me know, hey, something is wrong, and it let me detect the virus pretty early. So just to clarify, just to hit the nail on head, I got tested on campus. And they said they would call me the next morning with the results, and they called me, but they asked me to come in and speak to the doctor on staff. And the reaction I received from her wasn't what I was expecting. She reassured me what I already knew, that this wasn't a death sentence, and she even offered to put me in contact with her brother, who had been living with HIV since the early '90s. I declined her offer, but I was deeply touched. I was expecting to be reprimanded. I was expecting pity and disappointment, and I was shown compassion and human warmth, and I'm forever grateful for that first exchange. So obviously for a few weeks, I was a physical mess. Emotionally, mentally, I was doing OK. I was taking it well. But my body was ravaged, and those close to me, they weren't oblivious. So I sat my roommates down, and I let them know I'd been diagnosed with HIV, that I was about to receive treatment, and I didn't want them to worry. And I remember the look on their faces. They were holding each other on the couch and they were crying, and I consoled them. I consoled them about my own bad news, but it was heartwarming to see that they cared. But from that night, I noticed a shift in the way that I was treated at home. My roommates wouldn't touch anything of mine, and they wouldn't eat anything I had cooked. Now, in South Louisiana, we all know that you don't refuse food. (Laughter) And I'm a damn good cook, so don't think that passed me by. (Laughter) But from these first silent hints, their aversion got gradually more obvious and more offensive. I was asked to move my toothbrush from the bathroom, I was asked to not share towels, and I was even asked to wash my clothes on a hotter setting. This wasn't head lice, y'all. This wasn't scabies. This was HIV. It can be transmitted through blood, sexual fluids like semen or vaginal fluids and breast milk. Since I wasn't sleeping with my roommates, I wasn't breastfeeding them — (Laughter) and we weren't reenacting "Twilight," I was of no risk to them and I made this aware to them, but still, this discomfort, it continued, until eventually I was asked to move out. And I was asked to move out because one of my roommates had shared my status with her parents. She shared my personal medical information to strangers. And now I'm doing that in a roomful of 300 of y'all, but at the time, this was not something I was comfortable with, and they expressed their discomfort with their daughter living with me. So being gay, raised in a religious household and living in the South, discrimination wasn't new to me. But this form was, and it was tremendously disappointing because it came from such an unlikely source. Not only were these college-educated people, not only were they other members of the LGBT community, but they were also my friends. So I did. I moved out at the end of the semester. But it wasn't to appease them. It was out of respect for myself. I wasn't going to subject myself to people who were unwilling to remedy their ignorance, and I wasn't going to let something that was now a part of me ever be used as a tool against me. So I opted for transparency about my status, always being visible. And this is what I like to call being the everyday advocate. The point of this transparency, the point of this everyday advocacy, was to dispel ignorance, and ignorance is a very scary word. We don't want to be seen as ignorant, and we definitely don't want to be called it. But ignorance is not synonymous with stupid. It's not the inability to learn. It's the state you're in before you learn. So when I saw someone coming from a place of ignorance, I saw an opportunity for them to learn. And hopefully, if I could spread some education, then I could mitigate situations for others like I had experienced with my roommates and save someone else down the line that humiliation. So the reactions I received haven't been all positive. Here in the South, we have a lot stigma due to religious pressures, our lack of a comprehensive sex education and our general conservative outlook on anything sexual. We view this as a gay disease. Globally, most new HIV infections occur between heterosexual partners, and here in the States, women, especially women of color, are at an increased risk. This is not a gay disease. It never has been. It's a disease we should all be concerned with. So initially, I felt limited. I wanted to expand my scope and reach beyond what was around me. So naturally, I turned to the dark underworld of online dating apps, to apps like Grindr, and for those of you who are unfamiliar, these are dating apps targeted towards gay men. You can upload a profile and a picture and it will show you available guys within a radius. Y'all have probably heard of Tinder. Grindr has been around for a lot longer, since it was much harder to meet your future gay husband at church or the grocery store, or whatever straight people did before they found out they could date on their phones. (Laughter) So on Grindr, if you liked what you saw or read, you could send someone a message, you can meet up, you can do other things. So on my profile, I obviously stated that I had HIV, I was undetectable, and I welcomed questions about my status. And I received a lot of questions and a lot of comments, both positive and negative. And I want to start with the negative, just to frame some of this ignorance that I've mentioned before. And most of these negative comments were passing remarks or assumptions. They would assume things about my sex life or my sex habits. They would assume I put myself or others at risk. But very often I would just be met with these passing ignorant remarks. In the gay community, it's common to hear the word "clean" when you're referring to someone who is HIV negative. Of course the flip side to that is being unclean, or dirty, when you do have HIV. Now, I'm not sensitive and I'm only truly dirty after a day in the field, but this is damaging language. This is a community-driven stigma that keeps many gay men from disclosing their status, and it keeps those newly diagnosed from seeking support within their own community, and I find that truly distressing. But thankfully, the positive responses have been a lot more numerous, and they came from guys who were curious. And they were curious about the risks of transmission, or what exactly "undetectable" meant, or where they could get tested, or some guys would ask me about my experiences, and I could share my story with them. But most importantly, I would get approached by guys who were newly diagnosed with HIV and they were scared, and they were alone, and they didn't know what step to take next. They didn't want to tell their family, they didn't want to tell their friends and they felt damaged, and they felt dirty. And I did whatever I could to immediately calm them, and then I would put them in contact with AcadianaCares, which is a wonderful resource we have in our community for those with HIV. And I'd put them in contact with people I knew personally so that they could not only have this safe space to feel human again, but so they could also have the resources they needed in affording their treatment. And this was by far the most humbling aspect of my transparency, that I could have some positive impact on those who were suffering like I did, that I could help those who were in the dark, because I had been there, and it wasn't a good place to be. These guys came from all different backgrounds, and many of them weren't as informed as I had been, and they were coming to me from a place of fear. Some of these people I knew personally, or they knew of me, but many more, they were anonymous. They were these blank profiles who were too afraid to show their faces after what they had told me. And on the topic of transparency, I want to leave y'all with a few thoughts. I found that with whatever risk or gamble I took in putting my face out there, it was well worth any negative comment, any flak I received, because I felt I was able to make this real and this tangible impact. And it showed me that our efforts resound, that we can alter the lives that we encounter for the good, and they in turn can take that momentum and push it even further. And if any of you or anyone you know is dealing with HIV, or if you want to see what resources you have in your community, or just educate yourself more on the disease, here are some wonderful national sites that you can access and you are more than welcome to find me after this talk and ask me anything you'd like. We've all heard the phrase "to see the forest through the trees," so I implore all of you here to really see the human through the disease. It's a very easy thing to see numbers and statistics and only see the perceived dangers. It's a much harder thing to see all the faces behind those numbers. So when you find yourself thinking those things, those words, what you might have thought looking at David Kirby, I ask you instead, think son, or think brother, think friend and most importantly, think human. Seek education when faced with ignorance, and always be mindful, and always be compassionate. Thank you. (Applause) |
What we don't teach kids about sex | {0: 'TED Resident Sue Jaye Johnson explores the ways cultural expectations shape our public and private behavior. '} | TED Residency | I remember my aunt brushing my hair when I was a child. I felt this tingling in my stomach, this swelling in my belly. All her attention on me, just me. My beautiful Aunt Bea, stroking my hair with a fine-bristled brush. Do you have a memory like that that you can feel in your body right now? Before language, we're all sensation. As children, that's how we learn to differentiate ourselves in the world — through touch. Everything goes in the mouth, the hands, on the skin. Sensation — it is the way that we first experience love. It's the basis of human connection. We want our children to grow up to have healthy intimate relationships. So as parents, one of the things that we do is we teach our children about sex. We have books to help us, we have sex ed at school for the basics. There's porn to fill in the gaps — and it will fill in the gaps. (Laughter) We teach our children "the talk" about biology and mechanics, about pregnancy and safe sex, and that's what our kids grow up thinking that sex is pretty much all about. But we can do better than that. We can teach our sons and daughters about pleasure and desire, about consent and boundaries, about what it feels like to be present in their body and to know when they're not. And we do that in the ways that we model touch, play, make eye contact — all the ways that we engage their senses. We can teach our children not just about sex, but about sensuality. This is the kind of talk that I needed as a girl. I was extremely sensitive, but by the time I was an adolescent, I had numbed out. The shame of boys mocking my changing body and then girls exiling me for, ironically, my interest in boys, it was so much. I didn't have any language for what I was experiencing; I didn't know it was going to pass. So I did the best thing I could at the time and I checked out. And you can't isolate just the difficult feelings, so I lost access to the joy, the pleasure, the play, and I spent decades like that, with this his low-grade depression, thinking that this is what it meant to be a grown-up. For the past year, I've been interviewing men and women about their relationship to sex and I've heard my story again and again. Girls who were told they were too sensitive, too much. Boys who were taught to man up — "don't be so emotional." I learned I was not alone in checking out. It was my daughter who reminded me of how much I used to feel. We were at the beach. It was this rare day. I turned off my cell phone, put in the calendar, "Day at the beach with the girls." I laid our towels down just out of reach of the surf and fell asleep. And when I woke up, I saw my daughter drizzling sand on her arm like this, and I could feel that light tickle of sand on her skin and I remembered my aunt brushing my hair. So I curled up next to her and I drizzled sand on her other arm and then her legs. And then I said, "Hey, you want me to bury you?" And her eyes got really big and she was like, "Yeah!" So we dug a hole and I covered her in sand and shells and drew this little mermaid tail. And then I took her home and lathered her up in the shower and massaged her scalp and I dried her off in a towel. And I thought, "Ah. How many times had I done that — bathed her and dried her off — but had I ever stopped and paid attention to the sensations that I was creating for her?" I'd been treating her like she was on some assembly line of children needing to be fed and put to bed. And I realized that when I dry my daughter off in a towel tenderly the way a lover would, I'm teaching her to expect that kind of touch. I'm teaching her in that moment about intimacy. About how to love her body and respect her body. I realized there are parts of the talk that can't be conveyed in words. In her book, "Girls and Sex," writer Peggy Orenstein finds that young women are focusing on their partner's pleasure, not their own. This is something I'm going to talk about with my girls when they're older, but for now, I look for ways to help them identify what gives them pleasure and to practice articulating that. "Rub my back," my daughter says when I tuck her in. And I say, "OK, how do you want me to rub your back?" "I don't know," she says. So I pause, waiting for her directions. Finally she says, "OK, up and to the right, like you're tickling me." I run my fingertips up her spine. "What else?" I ask. "Over to the left, a little harder now." We need to teach our children how to articulate their sensations so they're familiar with them. I look for ways to play games with my girls at home to do this. I scratch my fingernails on my daughter's arm and say, "Give me one word to describe this." "Violent," she says. I embrace her, hold her tight. "Protected," she tells me. I find opportunities to tell them how I'm feeling, what I'm experiencing, so we have common language. Like right now, this tingling in my scalp down my spine means I'm nervous and I'm excited. You are likely experiencing sensations in response to me. The language I'm using, the ideas I'm sharing. And our tendency is to judge these reactions and sort them into a hierarchy: better or worse, and then seek or avoid them. And that's because we live in this binary culture and we're taught from a very young age to sort the world into good and bad. "Did you like that book?" "Did you have a good day?" How about, "What did you notice about that story?" "Tell me a moment about your day. What did you learn?" Let's teach our children to stay open and curious about their experiences, like a traveler in a foreign land. And that way they can stay with sensation without checking out — even the heightened and challenging ones — the way I did, the way so many of us have. This sense education, this is education I want for my daughters. Sense education is what I needed as girl. It's what I hope for all of our children. This awareness of sensation, it's where we began as children. It's what we can learn from our children and it's what we can in turn remind our children as they come of age. Thank you. (Applause) |
Mammoths resurrected, geoengineering and other thoughts from a futurist | {0: "Since the counterculture '60s, Stewart Brand has been creating our internet-worked world. Now, with biotech accelerating four times faster than digital technology, Stewart Brand has a bold new plan ...", 1: 'After a long career in journalism and publishing, Chris Anderson became the curator of the TED Conference in 2002 and has developed it as a platform for identifying and disseminating ideas worth spreading.'} | TED2017 | Chris Anderson: OK, Stewart, in the '60s, you — I think it was '68 — you founded this magazine. Stewart Brand: Bravo! It's the original one. That's hard to find. CA: Right. Issue One, right? SB: Mm hmm. CA: Why did that make so much impact? SB: Counterculture was the main event that I was part of at the time, and it was made up of hippies and New Left. That was sort of my contemporaries, the people I was just slightly older than. And my mode is to look at where the interesting flow is and then look in the other direction. CA: (Laughs) SB: Partly, I was trained to do that as an army officer, but partly, it's just a cheap heuristic to find originalities: don't look where everybody else is looking, look the opposite way. So the deal with counterculture is, the hippies were very romantic and kind of against technology, except very good LSD from Sandoz, and the New Left was against technology because they thought it was a power device. Computers were: do not spindle, fold, or mutilate. Fight that. And so, the Whole Earth Catalog was kind of a counter-counterculture thing in the sense that I bought Buckminster Fuller's idea that tools of are of the essence. Science and engineers basically define the world in interesting ways. If all the politicians disappeared one week, it would be ... a nuisance. But if all the scientists and engineers disappeared one week, it would be way more than a nuisance. CA: We still believe that, I think. SB: So focus on that. And then the New Left was talking about power to the people. And people like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak cut that and just said, power to people, tools that actually work. And so, where Fuller was saying don't try to change human nature, people have been trying for a long time and it does not even bend, but you can change tools very easily. So the efficient thing to do if you want to make the world better is not try to make people behave differently like the New Left was, but just give them tools that go in the right direction. That was the Whole Earth Catalog. CA: And Stewart, the central image — this is one of the first images, the first time people had seen Earth from outer space. That had an impact, too. SB: It was kind of a chance that in the spring of '66, thanks to an LSD experience on a rooftop in San Francisco, I got thinking about, again, something that Fuller talked about, that a lot of people assume that the Earth is flat and kind of infinite in terms of its resources, but once you really grasp that it's a sphere and that there's only so much of it, then you start husbanding your resources and thinking about it as a finite system. "Spaceship Earth" was his metaphor. And I wanted that to be the case, but on LSD I was getting higher and higher on my hundred micrograms on the roof of San Francisco, and noticed that the downtown buildings which were right in front of me were not all parallel, they were sort of fanned out like this. And that's because they are on a curved surface. And if I were even higher, I would see that even more clearly, higher than that, more clearly still, higher enough, and it would close, and you would get the circle of Earth from space. And I thought, you know, we've been in space for 10 years — at that time, this is '66 — and the cameras had never looked back. They'd always been looking out or looking at just parts of the Earth. And so I said, why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet? And it went around and NASA got it and senators, secretaries got it, and various people in the Politburo got it, and it went around and around. And within two and a half years, about the time the Whole Earth Catalog came out, these images started to appear, and indeed, they did transform everything. And my idea of hacking civilization is that you try to do something lazy and ingenious and just sort of trick the situation. So all of these photographs that you see — and then the march for science last week, they were carrying these Whole Earth banners and so on — I did that with no work. I sold those buttons for 25 cents apiece. So, you know, tweaking the system is, I think, not only the most efficient way to make the system go in interesting ways, but in some ways, the safest way, because when you try to horse the whole system around in a big way, you can get into big horsing-around problems, but if you tweak it, it will adjust to the tweak. CA: So since then, among many other things, you've been regarded as a leading voice in the environmental movement, but you are also a counterculturalist, and recently, you've been taking on a lot of, well, you've been declaring what a lot of environmentalists almost believe are heresies. I kind of want to explore a couple of those. I mean, tell me about this image here. SB: Ha-ha! That's a National Geographic image of what is called the mammoth steppe, what the far north, the sub-Arctic and Arctic region, used to look like. In fact, the whole world used to look like that. What we find in South Africa and the Serengeti now, lots of big animals, was the case in this part of Canada, throughout the US, throughout Eurasia, throughout the world. This was the norm and can be again. So in a sense, my long-term goal at this point is to not only bring back those animals and the grassland they made, which could be a climate stabilization system over the long run, but even the mammoths there in the background that are part of the story. And I think that's probably a 200-year goal. Maybe in 100, by the end of this century, we should be able to dial down the extinction rate to sort of what it's been in the background. Bringing back this amount of bio-abundance will take longer, but it's worth doing. CA: We'll come back to the mammoths, but explain how we should think of extinctions. Obviously, one of the huge concerns right now is that extinction is happening at a faster rate than ever in history. That's the meme that's out there. How should we think of it? SB: The story that's out there is that we're in the middle of the Sixth Extinction or maybe in the beginning of the Sixth Extinction. Because we're in the de-extinction business, the preventing-extinction business with Revive & Restore, we started looking at what's actually going on with extinction. And it turns out, there's a very confused set of data out there which gets oversimplified into the narrative of we're becoming ... Here are five mass extinctions that are indicated by the yellow triangles, and we're now next. The last one there on the far right was the meteor that struck 66 million years ago and did in the dinosaurs. And the story is, we're the next meteor. Well, here's the deal. I wound up researching this for a paper I wrote, that a mass extinction is when 75 percent of all the species in the world go extinct. Well, there's on the order of five-and-a-half-million species, of which we've identified one and a half million. Another 14,000 are being identified every year. There's a lot of biology going on out there. Since 1500, about 500 species have gone extinct, and you'll see the term "mass extinction" kind of used in strange ways. So there was, about a year and a half ago, a front-page story by Carl Zimmer in the New York Times, "Mass Extinction in the Oceans, Broad Studies Show." And then you read into the article, and it mentions that since 1500, 15 species — one, five — have gone extinct in the oceans, and, oh, by the way, none in the last 50 years. And you read further into the story, and it's saying, the horrifying thing that's going on is that the fisheries are so overfishing the wild fishes, that it is taking down the fish populations in the oceans by 38 percent. That's the serious thing. None of those species are probably going to go extinct. So you've just put, that headline writer put a panic button on the top of the story. It's clickbait kind of stuff, but it's basically saying, "Oh my God, start panicking, we're going to lose all the species in the oceans." Nothing like that is in prospect. And in fact, what I then started looking into in a little more detail, the Red List shows about 23,000 species that are considered threatened at one level or another, coming from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the IUCN. And Nature Magazine had a piece surveying the loss of wildlife, and it said, "If all of those 23,000 went extinct in the next century or so, and that rate of extinction carried on for more centuries and millennia, then we might be at the beginning of a sixth extinction. So the exaggeration is way out of hand. But environmentalists always exaggerate. That's a problem. CA: I mean, they probably feel a moral responsibility to, because they care so much about the thing that they are looking at, and unless you bang the drum for it, maybe no one listens. SB: Every time somebody says moral this or moral that — "moral hazard," "precautionary principle" — these are terms that are used to basically say no to things. CA: So the problem isn't so much fish extinction, animal extinction, it's fish flourishing, animal flourishing, that we're crowding them to some extent? SB: Yeah, and I think we are crowding, and there is losses going on. The major losses are caused by agriculture, and so anything that improves agriculture and basically makes it more condensed, more highly productive, including GMOs, please, but even if you want to do vertical farms in town, including inside farms, all the things that have been learned about how to grow pot in basements, is now being applied to growing vegetables inside containers — that's great, that's all good stuff, because land sparing is the main thing we can do for nature. People moving to cities is good. Making agriculture less of a destruction of the landscape is good. CA: There people talking about bringing back species, rewilding ... Well, first of all, rewilding species: What's the story with these guys? SB: Ha-ha! Wolves. Europe, connecting to the previous point, we're now at probably peak farmland, and, by the way, in terms of population, we are already at peak children being alive. Henceforth, there will be fewer and fewer children. We are in the last doubling of human population, and it will get to nine, maybe nine and a half billion, and then start not just leveling off, but probably going down. Likewise, farmland has now peaked, and one of the ways that plays out in Europe is there's a lot of abandoned farmland now, which immediately reforests. They don't do wildlife corridors in Europe. They don't need to, because so many of these farms are connected that they've made reforested wildlife corridors, that the wolves are coming back, in this case, to Spain. They've gotten all the way to the Netherlands. There's bears coming back. There's lynx coming back. There's the European jackal. I had no idea such a thing existed. They're coming back from Italy to the rest of Europe. And unlike here, these are all predators, which is kind of interesting. They are being welcomed by Europeans. They've been missed. CA: And counterintuitively, when you bring back the predators, it actually increases rather than reduces the diversity of the underlying ecosystem often. SB: Yeah, generally predators and large animals — large animals and large animals with sharp teeth and claws — are turning out to be highly important for a really rich ecosystem. CA: Which maybe brings us to this rather more dramatic rewilding project that you've got yourself involved in. Why would someone want to bring back these terrifying woolly mammoths? SB: Hmm. Asian elephants are the closest relative to the woolly mammoth, and they're about the same size, genetically very close. They diverged quite recently in evolutionary history. The Asian elephants are closer to woolly mammoths than they are to African elephants, but they're close enough to African elephants that they have successfully hybridized. So we're working with George Church at Harvard, who has already moved the genes for four major traits from the now well-preserved, well-studied genome of the woolly mammoth, thanks to so-called "ancient DNA analysis." And in the lab, he has moved those genes into living Asian elephant cell lines, where they're taking up their proper place thanks to CRISPR. I mean, they're not shooting the genes in like you did with genetic engineering. Now with CRISPR you're editing, basically, one allele, and replacing it in the place of another allele. So you're now getting basically Asian elephant germline cells that are effectively in terms of the traits that you're going for to be comfortable in the Arctic, you're getting them in there. So we go through the process of getting that through a surrogate mother, an Asian elephant mother. You can get a proxy, as it's being called by conservation biologists, of the woolly mammoth, that is effectively a hairy, curly-trunked, Asian elephant that is perfectly comfortable in the sub-Arctic. Now, it's the case, so many people say, "Well, how are you going to get them there? And Asian elephants, they don't like snow, right?" Well, it turns out, they do like snow. There's some in an Ontario zoo that have made snowballs bigger than people. They just love — you know, with a trunk, you can start a little thing, roll it and make it bigger. And then people say, "Yeah, but it's 22 months of gestation. This kind of cross-species cloning is tricky business, anyway. Are you going to lose some of the surrogate Asian elephant mothers?" And then George Church says, "That's all right. We'll do an artificial uterus and grow them that way." Then people say, "Yeah, next century, maybe," except the news came out this week in Nature that there's now an artificial uterus in which they've grown a lamb to four weeks. That's halfway through its gestation period. So this stuff is moving right along. CA: But why should we want a world where — Picture a world where there are thousands of these things thundering across Siberia. Is that a better world? SB: Potentially. It's — (Laughter) There's three groups, basically, working on the woolly mammoth seriously: Revive & Restore, we're kind of in the middle; George Church and the group at Harvard that are doing the genetics in the lab; and then there's an amazing old scientist named Zimov who works in northern Siberia, and his son Nikita, who has bought into the system, and they are, Sergey and Nikita Zimov have been, for 25 years, creating what they call "Pleistocene Park," which is a place in a really tough part of Siberia that is pure tundra. And the research that's been done shows that there's probably one one-hundredth of the animals on the landscape there that there used to be. Like that earlier image, we saw lots of animals. Now there's almost none. The tundra is mostly moss, and then there's the boreal forest. And that's the way it is, folks. There's just a few animals there. So they brought in a lot of grazing animals: musk ox, Yakutian horses, they're bringing in some bison, they're bringing in some more now, and put them in at the density that they used to be. And grasslands are made by grazers. So these animals are there, grazing away, and they're doing a couple of things. First of all, they're turning the tundra, the moss, back into grassland. Grassland fixes carbon. Tundra, in a warming world, is thawing and releasing a lot of carbon dioxide and also methane. So already in their little 25 square miles, they're doing a climate stabilization thing. Part of that story, though, is that the boreal forest is very absorbent to sunlight, even in the winter when snow is on the ground. And the way the mammoth steppe, which used to wrap all the way around the North Pole — there's a lot of landmass around the North Pole — that was all this grassland. And the steppe was magnificent, probably one of the most productive biomes in the world, the biggest biome in the world. The forest part of it, right now, Sergey Zimov and Nikita go out with this old military tank they got for nothing, and they knock down the trees. And that's a bore, and it's tiresome, and as Sergey says, "... and they make no dung!" which, by the way, these big animals do, including mammoths. So mammoths become what conservation biologists call an umbrella species. It's an exciting animal — pandas in China or wherever — that the excitement that goes on of making life good for that animal is making a habitat, an ecosystem, which is good for a whole lot of creatures and plants, and it ideally gets to the point of being self-managing, where the conservation biologists can back off and say, "All we have to do is keep out the destructive invasives, and this thing can just cook." CA: So there's many other species that you're dreaming of de-extincting at some point, but I think what I'd actually like to move on to is this idea you talked about how mammoths might help green Siberia in a sense, or at least, I'm not talking about tropical rainforest, but this question of greening the planet you've thought about a lot. And the traditional story is that deforestation is one of the most awful curses of modern times, and that it's a huge contributor to climate change. And then you went and sent me this graph here, or this map. What is this map? SB: Global greening. The thing to do with any narrative that you get from headlines and from short news stories is to look for what else is going on, and look for what Marc Andreessen calls "narrative violation." So the narrative — and Al Gore is master of putting it out there — is that there's this civilization-threatening climate change coming on very rapidly. We have to cease all extra production of greenhouse gases, especially CO2, as soon as possible, otherwise, we're in deep, deep trouble. All of that is true, but it's not the whole story, and the whole story is more interesting than these fragmentary stories. Plants love CO2. What plants are made of is CO2 plus water via sunshine. And so in many greenhouses, industrialized greenhouses, they add CO2 because the plants turn that into plant matter. So the studies have been done with satellites and other things, and what you're seeing here is a graph of, over the last 33 years or so, there's 14 percent more leaf action going on. There's that much more biomass. There's that much more what ecologists call "primary production." There's that much more life happening, thanks to climate change, thanks to all of our goddam coal plants. So — whoa, what's going on here? By the way, crop production goes up with this. This is a partial counter to the increase of CO2, because there's that much more plant that is sucking it down into plant matter. Some of that then decays and goes right back up, but some of it is going down into roots and going into the soil and staying there. So these counter things are part of what you need to bear in mind, and the deeper story is that thinking about and dealing with and engineering climate is a pretty complex process. It's like medicine. You're always, again, tweaking around with the system to see what makes an improvement. Then you do more of that, see it's still getting better, then — oop! — that's enough, back off half a turn. CA: But might some people say, "Not all green is created equal." Possibly what we're doing is trading off the magnificence of the rainforest and all that diversity for, I don't know, green pond scum or grass or something like that. SB: In this particular study, it turns out every form of plant is increasing. Now, what's interestingly left out of this study is what the hell is going on in the oceans. Primary production in the oceans, the biota of the oceans, mostly microbial, what they're up to is probably the most important thing. They're the ones that create the atmosphere that we're happily breathing, and they're not part of this study. This is one of the things James Lovelock has been insisting; basically, our knowledge of the oceans, especially of ocean life, is fundamentally vapor, in this sense. So we're in the process of finding out by inadvertent bad geoengineering of too much CO2 in the atmosphere, finding out, what is the ocean doing with that? Well, the ocean, with the extra heat, is swelling up. That's most of where we're getting the sea level rise, and there's a lot more coming with more global warming. We're getting terrible harm to some of the coral reefs, like off of Australia. The great reef there is just a lot of bleaching from overheating. And this is why I and Danny Hillis, in our previous session on the main stage, was saying, "Look, geoengineering is worth experimenting with enough to see that it works, to see if we can buy time in the warming aspect of all of this, tweak the system with small but usable research, and then see if we should do more than tweak. CA: OK, so this is what we're going to talk about for the last few minutes here because it's such an important discussion. First of all, this book was just published by Yuval Harari. He's basically saying the next evolution of humans is to become as gods. I think he — SB: Now, you've talked to him. And you've probably finished the book. I haven't finished it yet. Where does he come out on — CA: I mean, it's a pretty radical view. He thinks that we will completely remake ourselves using data, using bioengineering, to become completely new creatures that have, kind of, superpowers, and that there will be huge inequality. But we're about to write a very radical, brand-new chapter of history. That's what he believes. SB: Is he nervous about that? I forget. CA: He's nervous about it, but I think he also likes provoking people. SB: Are you nervous about that? CA: I'm nervous about that. But, you know, with so much at TED, I'm excited and nervous. And the optimist in me is trying hard to lean towards "This is awesome and really exciting," while the sort of responsible part of me is saying, "But, uh, maybe we should be a little bit careful as to how we think of it." SB: That's your secret sauce, isn't it, for TED? Staying nervous and excited. CA: It's also the recipe for being a little bit schizophrenic. But he didn't quote you. What I thought was an astonishing statement that you made right back in the original Whole Earth Catalog, you ended it with this powerful phrase: "We are as gods, and might as well get good at it." And then more recently, you've upgraded that statement. I want you talk about this philosophy. SB: Well, one of the things I'm learning is that documentation is better than memory — by far. And one of the things I've learned from somebody — I actually got on Twitter. It changed my life — it hasn't forgiven me yet! And I took ownership of this phrase when somebody quoted it, and somebody else said, "Oh by the way, that isn't what you originally wrote in that first 1968 Whole Earth Catalog. You wrote, 'We are as gods and might as well get used to it.'" I'd forgotten that entirely. The stories — these goddam stories — the stories we tell ourselves become lies over time. So, documentation helps cut through that. It did move on to "We are as gods and might as well get good at it," and that was the Whole Earth Catalog. By the time I was doing a book called "Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto," and in light of climate change, basically saying that we are as gods and have to get good at it. CA: We are as gods and have to get good at it. So talk about that, because the psychological reaction from so many people as soon as you talk about geoengineering is that the last thing they believe is that humans should be gods — some of them for religious reasons, but most just for humility reasons, that the systems are too complex, we should not be dabbling that way. SB: Well, this is the Greek narrative about hubris. And once you start getting really sure of yourself, you wind up sleeping with your mother. (Laughter) CA: I did not expect you would say that. (Laughter) SB: That's the Oedipus story. Hubris is a really important cautionary tale to always have at hand. One of the guidelines I've kept for myself is: every day I ask myself how many things I am dead wrong about. And I'm a scientist by training and getting to work with scientists these days, which is pure joy. Science is organized skepticism. So you're always insisting that even when something looks pretty good, you maintain a full set of not only suspicions about whether it's as good as it looks, but: What else is going on? So this "What else is going?" on query, I think, is how you get away from fake news. It's not necessarily real news, but it's welcomely more complex news that you're trying to take on. CA: But coming back to the application of this just for the environment: it seems like the philosophy of this is that, whether we like it or not, we are already dominating so many aspects of what happens on planets, and we're doing it unintentionally, so we really should start doing it intentionally. What would it look like to start getting good at being a god? How should we start doing that? Are there small-scale experiments or systems we can nudge and play with? How on earth do we think about it? SB: The mentor that sort of freed me from total allegiance to Buckminster Fuller was Gregory Bateson. And Gregory Bateson was an epistemologist and anthropologist and biologist and psychologist and many other things, and he looked at how systems basically look at themselves. And that is, I think, part of how you want to always be looking at things. And what I like about David Keith's approach to geoengineering is you don't just haul off and do it. David Keith's approach — and this is what Danny Hillis was talking about earlier — is that you do it really, really incrementally, you do some stuff to tweak the system, see how it responds, that tells you something about the system. That's responding to the fact that people say, quite rightly, "What are we talking about here? We don't understand how the climate system works. You can't engineer a system you don't understand." And David says, "Well, that certainly applies to the human body, and yet medicine goes ahead, and we're kind of glad that it has." The way you engineer a system that is so large and complex that you can't completely understand it is you tweak it, and this is kind of an anti-hubristic approach. This is: try a little bit here, back the hell off if it's an issue, expand it if it seems to go OK, meanwhile, have other paths going forward. This is the whole argument for diversity and dialogue and all these other things and the things we were hearing about earlier with Sebastian [Thrun]. So the non-hubristic approach is looking for social license, which is a terminology that I think is a good one, of including society enough in these interesting, problematic, deep issues that they get to have a pretty good idea and have people that they trust paying close attention to the sequence of experiments as it's going forward, the public dialogue as it's going forward — which is more public than ever, which is fantastic — and you feel your way, you just ooze your way along, and this is the muddle-through approach that has worked pretty well so far. The reason that Sebastian and I are optimistic is we read people like Steven Pinker, "The Better Angels of Our Nature," and so far, so good. Now, that can always change, but you can build a lot on that sense of: things are capable of getting better, figure out the tools that made that happen and apply those further. That's the story. CA: Stewart, I think on that optimistic note, we're actually going to wrap up. I am in awe of how you always are willing to challenge yourself and other people. I feel like this recipe for never allowing yourself to be too certain is so powerful. I want to learn it more for myself, and it's been very insightful and inspiring, actually, listening to you today. Stewart Brand, thank you so much. SB: Thank you. (Applause) |
Inside Africa's thriving art scene | {0: 'To showcase vital new art from African nations and the diaspora, Touria El Glaoui founded the powerhouse 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair.'} | TEDGlobal 2017 | Let's talk about how the narrative of Africa is being told, and who is doing the telling. I want to share with you the selection of work by contemporary artists from Africa and its diaspora. I love this art. I find it beautiful and inspiring and thrilling, and I really hope I am able to pique your interest. I want to share something about myself and why art matters to me. I'm the daughter of an artist, so that means that growing up, I had the chance to see my father do artwork in his studio. My home was surrounded by art, and I had an early art education, being dragged to museums and exhibitions over the summer holidays. What I did not understand, really, at the time, is that this also gave me an early understanding about why art is important, how to look at it, how to understand it, but also how to love it. So art matters to me on a personal level, and not only because it's beautiful and inspiring and thrilling, but because art tells powerful stories. All these artists have stories to tell you about what it means to be African, stories that tell you and touches about our African identity, but also stories that tell us about who we are as Africans, but also stories that tell us about our complex history. So how can art tell you powerful stories? I want to share with you this series by Senegalese artist Omar Victor Diop. This is a series of self-portraits, and the artist in this particular series is focusing on the representation of Africans in art history between the 15th to the 19th century. I want to show you how, with one image, Diop is able to touch on our African identity, on the politics of representation, but also on our social value system. In this particular self-portrait, Diop is actually referencing another portrait by Anne-Louis Girodet. This picture is doing a portrait of Jean-Baptiste Belley. Jean-Baptiste Belley was a native of Senegal, a former slave of Haiti, but during his lifetime, he also was elected to represent the colony at the third government of the French Revolution, and he advocated strongly for the abolition of slavery. What is very smart and clever about Diop here is that he's going back to history. He's reclaiming this figure by restaging this beautiful royal blue uniform, where he is restaging also the pose, and he's doing that to actually underline the issues that are still impacting individuals of color today. There was nothing special about this very typical political portrait of the time, except that for the first time, an individual of color, in that case, Jean-Baptiste Belley, was actually named and acknowledged in a painting. What Diop is adding to this picture is this crucial element, which is the football under his arm, and by doing that, Diop is actually touching at our hero worship culture of African football stars, who unfortunately, despite their fame, their immense talent, and their royalty status, they are still invisible. Diop is asking us to dig deeper, to go beyond history and what has been written, and, basically, see how it still influences and impacts us in the present. I want to share this other beautiful series called "Kesh Angels," by artist Hassan Hajjaj. So in this particular series, the artist is really pushing on the boundaries of stereotype and cliché. Hassan Hajjaj is a friend, and honestly, I admire him dearly, but this particular series is talking to me directly as a Muslim woman. I experience this all the time, where, you know, people have a lot of expectations, religious ones and cultural ones, but what I love about this artist is that he's putting all this on its head. He's actually challenging every representation of Muslim, Arabic women that there is. Hassan Hajjaj is a child of the diaspora. He grew up in Morocco amongst bright logo goods, you know, counterfeit originals being sold at the souks. So to see those symbols representing in his work a celebration of the global culture, a critic of the global urban culture, is no surprise, but really at the heart of his work is his desire of a nuanced representation. He wants us to interrupt ourselves and all the perception that we might have on people, on a culture, and on environment. And for example, this particular picture, your common association would be, you know, certain street brand for a certain Western distinctive consumer. Well, he mashes it all up, where he is daring to imagine a female biker culture where actually Chanel or Louis Vuitton is designing the djellaba, and Nike, the babouche, and this is actually the standard uniform. What I love about the women in "Kesh Angels" is that they are able to hold your gaze. We are completely participating in the image, but they are the one inviting us in, and on their own terms. Hassan Hajjaj's "Kesh Angels" or "Project Diaspora" by Omar Victor Diop offer me two strong examples why art is so instrumental. It is instrumental as it really inspires us to ask questions, but it is also instrumental because it ignites change. Seeing diversity in race and ethnicity in contemporary art is the only way that we'll see changes in the art industry, but also for the relations between Africa and the Western canon. How we will participate in all this is really up to us. There's a lot of progress to be made, and honestly, we still need to support stronger voices, as they are the ones shaking things up and bringing new perspective. I want to share this beautiful old painting by younger emerging artist Kudzanai-Violet Hwami. For me, when I see her work, it really represents freedom. Hwami has fantastic takes on what it means to be an African and an African life. She has lived in three different countries: Zimbabwe, South Africa and Britain, and therefore has been influenced by a multitude of layers of communities and cultures, from LGBT to eco to Xhosa to emo to British cultures. And as she says herself, the beauty of being a child of the diaspora is really being able to reinvent ourselves and what it means to be African. I want to leave you with this powerful piece by South African artist Lawrence Lemaoana. Lawrence Lemaoana also criticized the influence of the media on our moral consciousness, and he's doing that by using those fabrics like banners in political demonstrations, where he's asking us to reclaim our voices. I believe in the transformative power of art, as it is our only way to paint a nuanced image of Africa, but also its diaspora, one that will be painted by its artists and its cultural producers with their radical but also very unique view of seeing the world and their place in it. It is really through art that we can regain our sense of agency and empowerment. It is through art that we can really tell our own story. So like Lawrence Lemaoana says, the power is ours. Thank you. (Applause) |
How adaptive clothing empowers people with disabilities | {0: 'Mindy Scheier is the founder of the Runway of Dreams Foundation. Prior to launching the nonprofit, Mindy spent over 20 years working in fashion as a key member of the design team for the INC collection and stylist for Saks Fifth Avenue in New York City. '} | TED@Tommy | I love fashion. I actually go to bed every night thinking about what I'm going to wear the next day. Clothing transforms me, defines me, gives me confidence. You may not feel the same way about fashion, but I bet you have a favorite T-shirt or a pair of jeans that transforms you — makes you feel good, makes you feel confident, makes you feel like you. When I was younger, I wanted to be Betsey Johnson. I thought we were kindred, crazy-hair spirits together. I did go to fashion design, I worked in the industry for years and loved it. I married, I had three kids. But life can be heartbreakingly ironic. My middle child, Oliver, was born with a rare form of muscular dystrophy, or MD. MD affects his muscle strength, his pulmonary system, distorts his body and makes everyday life more challenging than most. From the time he could walk, which wasn't until about two and a half, he had to wear leg braces for stability. Because he wasn't growing appropriately, he had to wear a feeding tube that was placed on his face. He endured stares, and so did I. But my husband Greg and I told him that no matter what, he was just like everybody else. But everyday tasks for Oliver that we all take for granted were incredibly challenging. That simple act of dressing yourself — the very thing that I adore — was a nightmare for him. His form of MD does not affect his mind. His brain is an A-plus, which means he's acutely aware of his shortcomings. This became very evident when he started school, and that daily act of dressing yourself was a constant reminder of what he could and could not do. So our solution was for Oliver to wear sweatpants every day: to school, to parties, on vacations — his uniform. For special occasions, he would wear proper pants. But many times, because he couldn't manage the button and zipper, I would have to take him to the men's room, which was incredibly embarrassing for him and the other men that were in there. But them — I said, "Oh, please. There's nothing I haven't seen before." (Laughter) For years we muddled through. But when Oliver was in third grade, I found out he was more like me than I ever imagined. Oliver, too, cared about fashion. He came home from school one day and said very definitively that he was going to wear jeans to school like everybody else gets to wear. Well, I certainly couldn't go to class with him and take him to the boys' room, but there was no way I was telling my eight-year-old that he couldn't wear what he wanted to wear. So that night, I MacGyvered the hell out of his jeans. I remembered when I was pregnant and unwilling to stop wearing my own favorite pants, even though I was busting out of them, that rubber-band trick. You moms remember what I'm talking about? The rubber band through the buttonhole, around the button and back? Instant stretch. So I removed the zipper so he could pull it up and down on his own. I cut up the side seam of the bottom of his pants to accommodate for his leg braces, applied Velcro — hold your ears, everybody: peel and stick, mind you — so that it would close around it. When I showed Oliver my arts and crafts project, he absolutely beamed. He went into school with his head held so high. Those jeans transformed him. He was able to get dressed on his own, he was able to go to the bathroom on his own; those jeans gave him confidence. I didn't realize it at the time, but this was my first foray into the world of adaptive clothing. Adaptive clothing is defined as clothing designed for people with disabilities, the elderly and anyone who struggles with dressing themselves. Adaptive clothing did exist, but it was missing that mainstream fashion component. It was very medicinal and very functional but not stylish. And that's a huge problem, because what you wear matters. Clothing can affect your mood, your health and your self-esteem. Now, being a fashion lover, I've known this forever, but scientists actually have a name for it. It's called "Enclothed Cognition," the co-occurrence of two factors: the symbolic meaning of clothing and the physical experience of wearing the clothing, both of which have a direct correlation to how you feel about yourself. There's actually a professor in the UK by the name of Karen J. Pine. She wrote a book called "Mind What You Wear: The Psychology of Fashion." She states in her book that when you put clothes on, you adapt the characteristics of what you're wearing, whether you realize it or not. That's why you feel like a rock star when you put on those perfect-fitting jeans. That's why you feel invincible when you put on that power suit, and that's why you feel beautiful in that little black dress. But that's exactly why Oliver felt so isolated when he couldn't wear what he wanted to wear. He even said to me one time, "Mom, wearing sweatpants every day makes me feel like I'm dressing disabled." There are one billion people on our planet that experience some type of disability. One billion. If 10 percent of that billion experience clothing challenges, that's an enormous amount of people that may not be as confident, as successful or even as happy as they could be. The morning after Oliver left for school wearing those jeans, I realized that I could do something about that. And so I did. In 2013, I founded an organization called Runway of Dreams. The mission was to educate the fashion industry that modifications could be made to mainstream clothing for this community that has never been served. And it began with an entire year of research. I went to schools, I went to facilities, I went to hospitals. I literally chased down people on the street who were in wheelchairs or if they had walkers or even if they had a slight limp. (Laughter) I know I must have looked insane, but I knew that if I was really going to make a difference, I had to truly understand the clothing challenges of as many different people as I possibly could. I met a young man who was 18 who has cerebral palsy. He was going to Harvard University. He said to me, "Can you imagine? I got myself into Harvard, but my dream is to be able to wear jeans on campus, like the other freshmen will wear." I met a little girl named Gianna, who was missing her left forearm and her hand. Her mother told me she could not bear to see her daughter's difference magnified by a dangling sleeve, so she had every single long-sleeve shirt professionally tailored. Can you imagine the time and money she spent? I also had the great privilege of spending time with Eric LeGrand, former Rutgers football player who was paralyzed during a tackle in 2010. I had, at this point, seen some unfathomable things, but this, by far, was the most heart-stopping. You see, Eric is a really big guy, and it took two aides and a lifting machine to get him dressed. I sat and watched this process for over two hours. When I expressed my shock to Eric, he looked at me and said, "Mindy, this is every single day. What can I say? I like to look sharp." Research done. I knew that if I was going to make a change in the industry, I had to use my background and really figure out how to make these clothes modified. So I took the information I gathered over that past year, and I figured out that there were actually three categories that were affected across the board. The first were closures. Buttons, snaps, zippers, hook-and-eyes were a challenge for almost everybody. So I replaced them with a more manageable technology: magnets. Magnets made our Harvard freshman able to wear jeans on campus, because he could dress himself. Second: adjustability. Pant lengths, sleeve lengths, waistbands were a challenge for so many different-shaped bodies. So I added elastic, an internal hemming system. This way, Gianna could wear a shirt right off the rack and just adjust the one sleeve. Last: alternate ways to get the clothing on and off the body, outside the traditional way of over your head. So I designed a way to go in arms first. This, for somebody like Eric, could actually take five steps off his dressing process and give him back the gift of time. So I went out, I bought clothing right off the rack, I sat at my kitchen table, ripped them apart, did prototype after prototype, until I felt I had great modifications. And then I was ready for the big leagues: the fashion industry. Rather than designing my own collection, I knew if I was really going to make a difference, I had to go mainstream. I believed that I just needed to educate the industry of the enormity of this population and the fact that these were consumers that simply weren't being considered. And I am thrilled to say that the industry heard me. Runway of Dreams collaborated with the most amazing, forward-thinking brand on our planet — (Applause) who took my vision to market and made fashion history by launching the first mainstream adaptive collection. And the rest is yet to come. (Applause) So — (Applause) Fashion holds the key to a vital lifeline. Clothing can be transformative. Clothing equals confidence. So tomorrow, when you are starting your day and you're thinking about what you're going to wear, I hope you appreciate the process and think about how what you chose makes you feel. Today, Oliver is 13. He wears his adaptive khakis, his magnetic button-front shirt — feels like the coolest kid around. My boy has total swagger. (Laughter) As I mentioned, Oliver's disease is degenerative, which means his muscles are going to break down over time. This, by far, is the most devastating part for me. I have to sit on the sidelines and watch my boy deteriorate. And there's nothing I can do about it. So I am looking up from the things that I cannot control to the things that I can, because I have no option. And so, I am looking up. And I'm asking the fashion industry to look up. And now, I'm asking all of you to look up, too. Thank you. (Applause) |
Medical tech designed to meet Africa's needs | {0: 'TED Fellow Soyapi Mumba creates technology solutions for low-resource environments.'} | TEDGlobal 2017 | Like every passionate software engineer out there, I closely follow technology companies in Silicon Valley, pretty much the same way soccer fans follow their teams in Europe. I read articles on tech blogs and listen to podcasts on my phone. But after I finish the article, lock my phone and unplug the headphones, I'm back in sub-Saharan Africa, where the landscape is not quite the same. We have long and frequent power outages, low penetration of computers, slow internet connections and a lot of patients visiting understaffed hospitals. Since the HIV epidemic, hospitals have been struggling to manage regular HIV treatment records for increasing volumes of patients. For such environments, importing technology systems developed elsewhere has not worked, but in 2006, I joined Baobab Health, a team that uses locally based engineers to develop suitable interventions that are addressing health care challenges in Malawi. We designed an electronic health record system that is used by health care workers while seeing patients. And in the process we realized that we not only had to design the software, we had to implement the infrastructure as well. We don't have enough medical staff to comprehensively examine every patient, so we embedded clinical guidelines within the software to guide nurses and clerks who assist with handling some of the workload. Everyone has a birthday, but not everyone knows their birthday, so we wrote algorithms to handle estimated birthdates as complete dates. How do we follow up patients living in slums with no street and house numbers? We used landmarks to approximate their physical addresses. Malawi had no IDs to uniquely identify patients, so we had to implement unique patient IDs to link patient records across clinics. The IDs are printed as barcodes on labels that are stuck on personal health booklets kept by each patient. With this barcoded ID, a simple scan with a barcode reader quickly pulls up the patient's records. No need to rewrite their personal details on paper registers at every visit. And suddenly, queues became shorter. This meant patients, typically mothers with little children on their backs, had to spend less time waiting to be assisted. And if they lose their booklets, their records can still be pulled by searching with their names. Now, the way we pronounce and spell names varies tremendously. We freely mix R's and L's, English and vernacular versions of their names. Even soundex, a standard method for grouping words by how similar they sound, was not good enough. So we had to modify it to help us link and match existing records. Before the iPhone, software engineers developed for personal computers, but from our experience, we knew our power system is not reliable enough for personal computers. So we repurposed touch screen point-of-sale terminals that are meant for retail shops to become clinical workstations. At the time, we imported internet appliances called i-Openers that were manufactured during the dot-com era by a failed US company. We modified their screens to add touch sensors and their power system to run from rechargeable batteries. When we started, we didn't find a reliable network to transmit data, especially from rural hospitals. So we built our own towers, created a wireless network and linked clinics in Lilongwe, Malawi's capital. (Applause) With a team of engineers working within a hospital campus, we observed health care workers use the system and iteratively build an information system that is now managing HIV records in all major public hospitals in Malawi. These are hospitals serving over 2,000 HIV patients, each clinic. Now, health care workers who used to spend days to tally and prepare quarterly reports are producing the same reports within minutes, and health care experts from all over the world are now coming to Malawi to learn how we did it. (Applause) It is inspiring and fun to follow technology trends across the globe, but to make them work in low-resourced environments like public hospitals in sub-Saharan Africa, we have had to become jacks-of-all-trades and build whole systems, including the infrastructure, from the ground up. Thank you. (Applause) |
How we can stop Africa's scientific brain drain | {0: "Kevin Njabo is coordinating the development of UCLA's newly established Congo Basin Institute (CBI) in Yaoundé, Cameroon."} | TEDGlobal 2017 | So many of us who care about sustainable development and the livelihood of local people do so for deeply personal reasons. I grew up in Cameroon, a country of enchanting beauty and rich biodiversity, but plagued by poor governance, environmental destruction, and poverty. As a child, like we see with most children in sub-Saharan Africa today, I regularly suffered from malaria. To this day, more than one million people die from malaria every year, mostly children under the age of five, with 90 percent occurring in sub-Saharan Africa. When I was 18, I left Cameroon in search of better educational opportunities. At the time, there was just one university in Cameroon, but Nigeria next door offered some opportunities for Cameroonians of English extraction to be trained in various fields. So I moved there, but practicing my trade, upon graduation as an ecologist in Nigeria, was an even bigger challenge. So I left the continent when I was offered a scholarship to Boston University for my PhD. It is disheartening to see that, with all our challenges, with all the talents, with all the skills we have in Africa as a continent, we tend to solve our problems by parachuting in experts from the West for short stays, exporting the best and brightest out of Africa, and treating Africa as a continent in perpetual need of handouts. After my training at Boston University, I joined a research team at the University of California's Institute of the Environment and Sustainability because of its reputation for groundbreaking research and the development of policies and programs that save the lives of millions of people the world over, including in the developing world. And it has been shown that for every skilled African that returns home, nine new jobs are created in the formal and informal sectors. So as part of our program, therefore, to build a sustainable Africa together, we are leading a multi-initiative to develop the Congo Basin Institute, a permanent base where Africans can work in partnership with international researchers, but working out their own solutions to their own problems. We are using our interdisciplinary approach to show how universities, NGOs and private business can partner in international development. So instead of parachuting in experts from the West for short stays, we are building a permanent presence in Africa, a one-stop shop for logistics, housing and development of collaborative projects between Africans and international researchers. So this has allowed students like Michel to receive high-quality training in Africa. Michel is currently working in our labs to investigate the effects of climate change on insects, for his PhD, and has already secured his post-doctorate fellowship that will enable him to stay on the continent. Also through our local help program, Dr. Gbenga Abiodun, a young Nigerian scientist, can work as a post-doctoral fellow with the Foundation for Professional Development in the University of Western Cape in South Africa and the University of California at the same time, investigating the effects of climate variability and change on malaria transmission in Africa. Indeed, Gbenga is currently developing models that will be used as an early warning system to predict malaria transmission in Africa. So rather than exporting our best and brightest out of Africa, we are nurturing and supporting local talent in Africa. For example, like me, Dr. Eric Fokam was trained in the US. He returned home to Cameroon, but couldn't secure the necessary grants, and he found it incredibly challenging to practice and learn the science he knew he could. So when I met Eric, he was on the verge of returning to the US. But we convinced him to start collaborating with the Congo Basin Institute. Today, his lab in Buea has over half a dozen collaborative grants with researchers from the US and Europe supporting 14 graduate students, nine of them women, all carrying out groundbreaking research understanding biodiversity under climate change, human health and nutrition. (Applause) So rather than buy into the ideas of Africa taking handouts, we are using our interdisciplinary approach to empower Africans to find their own solutions. Right now, we are working with local communities and students, a US entrepreneur, scientists from the US and Africa to find a way to sustainably grow ebony, the iconic African hardwood. Ebonies, like most African hardwood, are exploited for timber, but we know very little about their ecology, what disperses them, how they survive in our forest 80 to 200 years. This is Arvin, a young PhD student working in our labs, conducting what is turning out to be some cutting-edge tissue culture work. Arvin is holding in her hands the first ebony tree that was produced entirely from tissues. This is unique in Africa. We can now show that you can produce African timber from different plant tissues — leaves, stems, roots — in addition from generating them from seeds, which is a very difficult task. (Applause) So other students will take the varieties of ebony which Arvin identifies in our lab, graft them to produce saplings, and work with local communities to co-produce ebony with local fruit tree species in their various farms using our own tree farm approach, whereby we invite all the farmers to choose their own tree species they want in their farms. So in addition to the ebony, the species which the farmers choose themselves will be produced using our modern techniques and incorporated into their land-use systems, so that they start benefiting from these products while waiting for the ebony to mature. Today we are planting 15,000 ebony trees in Cameroon, and for the first time, ebony won't be harvested from the middle of a pristine forest. This is the model for our African hardwoods, and we are extending this to include sapele and bubinga, other highly prized hardwoods. So if these examples existed when I was 18, I would never have left, but because of initiatives by the Congo Basin Institute, I am coming back, but I'm not coming back alone. I'm bringing with me Western scientists, entrepreneurs and students, the best science from the best universities in the world, to work and to live in Africa. But we all need to scale up this local, powerful and empowering approach. So far we have half a dozen universities and NGOs as partners. We are planning to build a green facility that will expand on our existing laboratory space and add more housing and conference facilities to promote a long-term disciplinary approach. I want it to offer more opportunities to young African scholars, and would scale it up by leveraging the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture's existing network of 17 research stations across sub-Saharan Africa. The tables are starting to turn ... and I hope they keep turning, to reach several African nations like Côte d'Ivoire, Tanzania and Senegal, among the top fastest growing economies that can attract several opportunities for private-sector investment. We want to give more opportunities to African scholars, and I long to see a day when the most intelligent Africans will stay on this continent and receive high-quality education through initiatives like the Congo Basin Institute, and when that happens, Africa will be on the way to solving Africa's problems. And in 50 years, I hope someone will be giving a TED Talk on how to stop the brain drain of Westerners leaving your homes to work and live in Africa. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
How record collectors find lost music and preserve our cultural heritage | {0: 'Alexis Charpentier (aka Lexis from Music Is My Sanctuary) believes record collectors, music curators and DJs serve a crucial role as cultural preservationists and alternative voices to mainstream music platforms.'} | TEDxMontreal | I became obsessed with records when I was about 12 years old. My parents used to give me money to eat and on most days, instead of eating, I would save it and buy myself a record at the end of the week. Here I am with a gigantic Walkman that's about half my leg — (Laughter) It actually looks more like a VCR. (Laughter) So when I was a teenager, the obsession of buying cassettes, vinyls and CDs just kept growing. I was even working in a record store for many years and only ever got paid in records. One day I realized that I had thousands of records more than I could even listen to in my life. I became what many of us are: record junkies — or record diggers, as we like to call ourselves. Record digging, as the name suggests, means getting your hands dirty. It means spending hours rummaging through warehouses, church basements, yard sales, record stores — all to find records that have been forgotten for decades. Records that have become cultural waste. The earliest record collectors from about the '30s to the 1960s found and preserved so many important records that would have been lost forever. In those days, most cultural and public institutions didn't really care to preserve these treasures. In many cases, they were just throwing them into the garbage. Record digging is a lifestyle. We're absolutely obsessed with obscure records, expensive records, dollar-bin records, crazy artwork, sub-subgenres. And all of the tiniest details that go with each release. When the media talks about the vinyl revival that's been happening these last few years, they often forget to mention this community that's been keeping the vinyl and the tradition and the culture alive for these last 30 years. It's a very close-knit but competitive society, a little bit, because when you're hunting for extremely rare records, if you miss your opportunity, you might not see that record ever in your life. But I guess the only person in here truly impressed by record collectors is another record collector. To the outside world, we seem like a very weird, oddball group of individuals. And — (Laughter) And they're mostly right. All the record collectors I know are obsessive maniacs. We know we're all crazy in some way. But I think we should be viewed a little bit more like this. (Laughter) We're music archaeologists. We're hunting down the lost artifact. We all have a list of records that we would do anything to get our hands on, that we've been chasing for years, and we actually call this list our "holy grails." When you're digging for records, you're surrounded by music you don't know. You're surrounded by mystery and by all these dreams — records that people once believed in. Imagine the thousands of artists who were destined to be legends but for various reasons, were just overlooked. Many of these records only exist in a handful of copies, and some have never even been found, never been heard. They're literally endangered species. I'll tell you a story that for me sort of sums up the value of the work of record diggers. The story of a brilliant Montreal musician and composer. Henri-Pierre Noël was born and raised in Haiti, but he lived briefly in the US and in Belgium. He passed through Montreal what was supposed to be for two weeks, but he ended up staying for the next 40 years. When he was young, he learned to play piano and developed a very particular way of playing his instrument: very fast and almost like a percussion. His style was a mix of his Haitian influences and folklore mixed with the American influences that he grew up hearing. So he created a mix of compas mixed with funk and jazz. As a young man, he played and toured with live bands in the US and in Europe, but had never recorded an album or a song before moving to Canada. It was in Montreal in 1979 that he released his first album called, "Piano." Completely on his own, on Henri-Pierre Noël Records. He only made what he could afford: 2,000 copies of the record. The record received a little bit of airplay, a little bit of support in Canada and in Haiti, but without a big label behind it, it was very, very difficult. Back then, if your record wasn't getting played on mainstream radio, if you weren't in jukeboxes or if you weren't invited to play on TV, the odds were completely against you. Releasing an album as an independent artist was so much more difficult than it is today, both in terms of being heard and just distributing the thing. So, soon after, he released a second album, kept a busy schedule playing piano in various clubs in the city, but his records started to accumulate dust slowly. And those 2,000 copies in the span of 30 years easily started to get lost until only a few copies in the world remained. Then in the mid-2000s, a Montreal record digger that goes by the name Kobal was doing his weekly rounds of just hunting for records. He was in a flea market surrounded by thousands of other dirty, dusty, moldy records. That's where he found the "Piano" album. He wasn't specifically looking for it. Actually, you could say it sort of found him. You could also say that after 20 years of record digging every single week, he had developed a sixth sense for finding the gold. He took the record and inspected it: the front, the artwork, the back, the liner notes, and he was intrigued by the fact that this Haitian musician made a record in Quebec in the late '70s, so he was intrigued. He took out his little, plastic, portable turntable that he brought with him whenever he was on these digging quests and put the record on. So why don't we do the same thing? (Music) He fell in love with the music instantly, but he had to know the backstory behind it. He didn't know where it came from. He knew the artist, at the time of the recording, was living in Montreal, so for months, he tried to track him down. He even found Noël's business card inside the record sleeve. That's how DIY Henri-Pierre Noël was. So he found the card inside the record sleeve — of course he did try to call, but after 30 years, the number didn't work anymore. So it was only in Belgium, where the artist had once lived, that Kobal managed to find someone that knew the artist personally and gave him the contact. So when he finally sat down with the artist, he made him a promise to someday find a way to get the album rereleased. He then arranged for a British label called Wah Wah 45s to get the two albums reissued. And what happens very often is, in these reissue projects, that it becomes very difficult to find the master tapes — the original recording of the sessions. Art can be destroyed by fires, floods, earthquakes, thrown in the garbage, or just lost forever. But thankfully, the Henri-Pierre Noël tapes were safe and they were ready for remastering. The record was finally rereleased and received praise from music critics, DJs and listeners worldwide — the praise that it should have received in 1979. The artist was so inspired that he decided to revive his music career, get back on a stage, and play for new audiences. The artist, now in his 60s, told me, "This changed everything for me. I went from planning my retirement to playing on the BBC Radio in London, and on Radio Canada and more." But also it gave him a chance to play in front of his three sons for the first time. To me, this story shows perfectly the work of record diggers at its best. Beyond the rarity and the dollar value — and I'll be honest, we're totally obsessed by that — the true beauty is to give art a second chance; to save art from oblivion. The work of a good record digger is a constant loop of three phases. The first thing we do is hunt. We spend hours, days, years of our lives rummaging through dirty and dusty record bins. Everything that we can do to find our hands on the gold. Yes, you can find good records online, but for the deepest treasures, you need to get off the couch and into the wild. That's why we call it record digging and not record clicking. (Laughter) So what we are is music archaeologists. But then the next thing we do is we gather. Based on our taste, expertise, personal agenda, we choose carefully which records to save, which records mean something to us. We then try and find out every little thing we can about that record — the artist, the label and supervital information like "Who's that playing trumpet on track three?" Then we file them, we contextualize them, and we keep them safe. We are music archivists. And the last thing we do to close the loop is we share. Most record diggers that I know have some sort of a way to share their discovery and elevate the artist through an album reissue, a web article, a radio show. We give records back their rightful place in music history. We are tastemakers and curators. We are musicologists. So for myself and most of the record collectors I've encountered in 20 years, I think that we all have some sort of an outlet for these discoveries. I think it's our way to keep our sanity and sort of sense of purpose in this very maddening obsession, because it can be sort of a lonely one. But I think we also do it because it serves the human need to pass along cultural knowledge. Speaking of the need for curation, in an era of overwhelming choice, it's been demonstrated that too much choice actually hinders discovery. For example, if you're trying to watch something on Netflix, you're actually only browsing through a catalog of 6,000 titles. Now, compare that with Spotify; if you want to pick something to listen to, you're browsing through a catalog of 30 million songs. So I think as you can see, this notion of paralysis by choice affects music more than movies, for example. And there's a few studies that are starting to show the effects of this. A recent look at the UK music market shows that the top one percent of artists in the UK are actually earning 77 percent of the total revenues inside the music industry. That's 2013, and that's progressively getting worse, or progressing. Anyway, if you're in the one percent, I'm sure you're happy. (Laughter) So the takeaway for me is it's easier for people to listen to music than ever before. People have more music at their disposal than ever before, yet people choose to listen to more of the same music than ever before. And that's a sad thing. Inspired by my love for music research, record digging and curation, I started a website called "Music Is My Sanctuary" in 2007. Our slogan has always been "Future Classics and Forgotten Treasures." And it shows our love for discovering music and introducing music both old and new. From humble beginnings, we've built a worldwide platform with a massive audience with over 100 collaborators. We've created over 10,000 pieces of content, over 500 hours of audio content. Our audience consists of people who just want more than what's being offered to them by mainstream music channels. They want to do — they want to dig deeper, but they don't necessarily have 20 hours a week like us nerds, so they trust us to do that for them. Curation is at the heart of everything we do. We believe in human recommendations over algorithms. I could talk about the passion of record digging for days, but let me conclude this way. After many years of doing it, a record collector's collection becomes sort of his autobiography. Last year, I was DJ-ing in Poland, and the people that were hosting me, they had this amazing record collection, and of course I was intrigued and I said, "Are you selling these?" They then explained to me that it was the collection that belonged to their dear friend Maceo who passed away a few months earlier. And they were doing a project of inviting different people to take the collection and to create something new from it, whether it's sampling or DJ mixes, you know, just to give it a second life. And so after a few hours of going through the collection myself and creating a DJ mix from it, even though I never got the chance to meet him, it felt like in a special way, me and him, we got to talk about records for a few hours. So, as record diggers, our work and our record collections are there to be passed on to the next generation. Beautiful art deserves to be cherished, shared and rediscovered. Embrace curators; we are alternative voices to the mainstream music channels, digital or otherwise. Go beyond the algorithm. Whatever kind of music you like, there are so many websites, radio shows, DJs, record stores out there that are just waiting to share their discoveries with you. We do this work for you. All you have to do is open your ears and take risks. This music will change your life. Thank you. (Applause) |
Want to be more creative? Go for a walk | {0: 'Marily Oppezzo studies how the movement of the body can affect the movement of the mind. '} | TEDxStanford | The creative process — you know this — from the first idea to the final product, is a long process. It's super-iterative, lots of refinement, blood, sweat, tears and years. And we're not saying you're going to go out for a walk and come back with the Sistine Chapel in your left hand. So what frame of the creative process did we focus on? Just this first part. Just brainstorming, coming up with a new idea. We actually ran four studies with a variety of people. You were either walking indoors or outdoors. And all of these studies found the same conclusion. I'm only going to tell you about one of them today. One of the tests we used for creativity was alternate uses. In this test, you have four minutes. Your job is to come up with as many other ways to use common everyday objects as you can think of. So, for example, what else would you do with a key, other than to use it for opening up a lock? Clearly, you could use it as a third eyeball for a giraffe, right? Maybe. That's sort of interesting, kind of new. But is it creative? So people came up with as many ideas as they could, and we had to decide: Is this creative or not? The definition of creativity that a lot of people go with is "appropriate novelty." For something to be appropriate, it has to be realistic, so unfortunately, you can't use a key as an eyeball. Boo! But "novel," the second thing, is that nobody had to have said it. So for us, it had to be appropriate first, and then for novelty, nobody else in the entire population that we surveyed could have said it. So you might think you could use a key to scratch somebody's car, but if somebody else said that, you didn't get credit for it. Neither of you did. However, only one person said this: "If you were dying and it were a murder mystery, and you had to carve the name of the murderer into the ground with your dying words." One person said this. (Laughter) And it's a creative idea, because it's appropriate and it's novel. You either did this test and came up with ideas while you were seated or while you were walking on a treadmill. (Laughter) They did the test twice, with different objects. Three groups: the first group sat first and then sat again for the second test. The second group sat first and then did the second test while walking on a treadmill. The third group — and this is interesting — they walked on the treadmill first, and then they sat. OK, so the two groups that sat together for the first test, they looked pretty similar to each other, and they averaged about 20 creative ideas per person. The group that was walking on the treadmill did almost twice as well. And they were just walking on a treadmill in a windowless room. Remember, they took the test twice. The people who sat twice for that second test didn't get any better; practice didn't help. But these same people who were sitting and then went on the treadmill got a boost from walking. Here's the interesting thing. The people who were walking on the treadmill still had a residue effect of the walking, and they were still creative afterwards. So the implication of this is that you should go for a walk before your next big meeting and just start brainstorming right away. We have five tips for you that will help make this the best effect possible. First, you want to pick a problem or a topic to brainstorm. So, this is not the shower effect, when you're in the shower and all of a sudden, a new idea pops out of the shampoo bottle. This is something you're thinking about ahead of time. They're intentionally thinking about brainstorming a different perspective on the walk. Secondly — I get asked this a lot: Is this OK while running? Well, the answer for me is that if I were running, the only new idea I would have would be to stop running, so ... (Laughter) But if running for you is a comfortable pace, good. It turns out, whatever physical activity is not taking a lot of attention. So just walking at a comfortable pace is a good choice. Also, you want to come up with as many ideas as you can. One key of creativity is to not lock on that first idea. Keep going. Keep coming up with new ones, until you pick one or two to pursue. You might worry that you don't want to write them down, because what if you forget them? So the idea here is to speak them. Everybody was speaking their new ideas. So you can put your headphones on and record through your phone and then just pretend you're having a creative conversation, right? Because the act of writing your idea down is already a filter. You're going to be like, "Is this good enough to write down?" And then you write it down. So just speak as many as you can, record them and think about them later. And finally: don't do this forever. Right? If you're on the walk and that idea's not coming to you, come back to it later at another time. I think we're coming up on a break right now, so I have an idea: Why don't you grab a leash and take your thoughts for a walk? Thank you. (Applause) |
A one-man musical phenomenon | {0: 'In his videos and performances, Jacob Collier sings every part, plays every instrument and visualizes every component with a captivating vision.'} | TED2017 | (Music) (Singing) I was walking down the line, trying to find some peace of mind. Then I saw you. You were takin' it slow and walkin' it one step at a time. I said, "Listen, stranger, I'm feeling low now. I don't know which way to go." I said, "If you're lost now, maybe I could help you along and sing you a song, and move you on and on and on." Singing down the line. Where shall we go? Where shall we go? She said, "I'm looking for a kind of shelter. A place for me to call my own. I've been walking all night long, but I don't know where to call my home." "The only way to find that place is close to where my heart is. I know I'm gonna get there, but I've got to keep on walking down the line." Down the line. Down the line. Thank you so much. (Applause) How's everybody feeling today? You feeling good? (Cheers) Fantastic. Would everybody mind singing with me for just one second? Could you sing something? Could you sing a D? Sing "Ooh." (Audience hums) Oh — louder for me, louder for me. (Singing) Oh. Now, please, if you could sing, "Oh oh oh." Audience: Oh oh oh. Jacob Collier: Whoa oh oh. Audience: Whoa oh oh. JC: Sing, "Whoa oh." Audience: Whoa oh. JC: Oh oh oh. Audience: Oh oh oh. JC: Sing, "Whoa oh oh." Audience: Whoa oh oh. JC: Sing, "Whoa oh oh." Audience: Whoa oh oh. JC: Whoa oh oh. Audience: Whoa oh oh. JC: Sing, "Whoa oh oh." Audience: Whoa oh oh. Thank you so much. That's beautiful. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. So do you feel that motion? Do you feel yourself as part of that motion, things moving underneath the surface? So the language of musical harmony is an absolutely extraordinary one. It's a way of navigating one's emotional frameworks, but without the need to put things into words, and I think that, as with many other languages, it doesn't matter how much you know about a language. It doesn't matter how many words you can say, how many phrases you know. What matters is the emotional choices you make with this language. So I encourage us to embrace this idea as a community, which is the thing which in time may grow us towards as opposed to away from our own humanity. Thank you so much. (Applause) (Music) (Singing) Take me anywhere you want to go. You know that my love is strong. In my hideaway. Softly, like the calm that follows storms, Find what I've been searching for all along. In my hideaway. Even when I close my eyes, darling, if you've gone astray, I'm on my way to my hideaway. Touch me like I've never loved before, in the place that I adore, in my hideaway. I know whichever way the wind may blow, there will be a place for me to go in my hideaway. My hideaway. Sticks and stones I won't hide from you no more. And in time I find what I've been searching for. Heard your voice calling out to me. I'm on my way to where I can be free. And if she won't wait for me, do it right, don't look back, keep my heart on the future. On the soles of my shoes all the places I've been that I've known since I knew her. 'Cause it's you, don't you know that you're making me guess that you're the one for me. That it's you that I guess that I wanted to know all along. Girl, it's you that I want, that makes me complete, cause you're the one for me. It's thanks to you that I guess that I want you to know I belong. One, two, three, four, five. (Applause) Thank you so much. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thanks so much. Thank you guys. Kelly Stoetzel: OK, Jacob. Wow. OK, we have some questions. JC: OK. KS: That was spectacular. JC: Thank you, Kelly. Thank you. KS: Those visualizations we just saw, those were happening in real time, yeah? JC: Yeah, so everything visual takes cues from things which are audial, or something, if that's a word, and so everything is real time. I cue the loops, I play the instruments and then the tree, for example, that you saw grow, grows in such a way that it takes low long notes and grows thick long branches, and it takes high, quiet notes, whatever, and then it grows thin, small branches. And then my singing voice sort of blows wind against the tree. KS: So you're 22 years old. JC: Yes, indeed. Moderator: You played all of that by yourself. How did you get started and how did this all evolve? JC: I have this magical room in my house in North London, which is, like, over there. (Cheers) Thank you. Represent North London. And this room — I mean, this is my family home. I grew up in this room filled with musical instruments, but most importantly, I had a family who encouraged me to invest in my own imagination, and so things I created, things I built were good things to be building just because I was making them, and I think that's such an important idea. But this room was my paradise, essentially, and when I came to tour my album, which is called "In My Room," I thought I'd try and tour the room on the road, and that's quite a strange idea, but it's something that I've been working on for a couple of years, and it's quite exciting to be inside the circle. KS: So this is really like the setup in your room, here. JC: It kind of is. It's similar to the room in the sense that I can generate things on the spot and I can be spontaneous, which is what I think both music and all of the best ideas are all about. KS: So you won two Grammys for a record that you made in your room by yourself. And how is that even possible? We couldn't have done that, that couldn't have happened five years ago even. JC: It's a brand new world. The power is now in the hands of the creator, as I'm sure you guys would agree, as opposed to the big record company executive or the big man or something like that. It's somebody with a good idea. Here I am at TED saying this to you guys who know this already, but it's somebody with a good idea who can sow that seed. That's the person who carries the torch into the world. And yeah, I made this album completely on my own and I didn't wait for somebody to say, "Hey Jacob, you should make an album on your own." I just went ahead and made it and I didn't mind what people thought, and two Grammys is a massive bonus. (Applause) KS: Thank you so much, Jacob. JC: Thanks, Kelly. Thanks so much. (Applause) |
How to put the power of law in people's hands | {0: 'Vivek Maru is the founder of Namati, a movement for legal empowerment around the world powered by cadres of grassroots legal advocates.'} | TEDGlobal 2017 | I want to tell you about someone. I'm going to call him Ravi Nanda. I'm changing his name to protect his safety. Ravi's from a community of herdspeople in Gujarat on the western coast of India, same place my own family comes from. When he was 10 years old, his entire community was forced to move because a multinational corporation constructed a manufacturing facility on the land where they lived. Then, 20 years later, the same company built a cement factory 100 meters from where they live now. India has got strong environmental regulations on paper, but this company has violated many of them. Dust from that factory covers Ravi's mustache and everything he wears. I spent just two days in his place, and I coughed for a week. Ravi says that if people or animals eat anything that grows in his village or drink the water, they get sick. He says children now walk long distances with cattle and buffalo to find uncontaminated grazing land. He says many of those kids have dropped out of school, including three of his own. Ravi has appealed to the company for years. He said, "I've written so many letters my family could cremate me with them. They wouldn't need to buy any wood." (Laughter) He said the company ignored every one of those letters, and so in 2013, Ravi Nanda decided to use the last means of protest he thought he had left. He walked to the gates of that factory with a bucket of petrol in his hands, intending to set himself on fire. Ravi is not alone in his desperation. The UN estimates that worldwide, four billion people live without basic access to justice. These people face grave threats to their safety, their livelihoods, their dignity. There are almost always laws on the books that would protect these people, but they've often never heard of those laws, and the systems that are supposed to enforce those laws are corrupt or broken or both. We are living with a global epidemic of injustice, but we've been choosing to ignore it. Right now, in Sierra Leone, in Cambodia, in Ethiopia, farmers are being cajoled into putting their thumbprints on 50-year lease agreements, signing away all the land they've ever known for a pittance without anybody even explaining the terms. Governments seem to think that's OK. Right now, in the United States, in India, in Slovenia, people like Ravi are raising their children in the shadow of factories or mines that are poisoning their air and their water. There are environmental laws that would protect these people, but many have never seen those laws, let alone having a shot at enforcing them. And the world seems to have decided that's OK. What would it take to change that? Law is supposed to be the language we use to translate our dreams about justice into living institutions that hold us together. Law is supposed to be the difference between a society ruled by the most powerful and one that honors the dignity of everyone, strong or weak. That's why I told my grandmother 20 years ago that I wanted to go to law school. Grandma didn't pause. She didn't skip a beat. She said to me, "Lawyer is liar." (Laughter) That was discouraging. (Laughter) But grandma's right, in a way. Something about law and lawyers has gone wrong. We lawyers are usually expensive, first of all, and we tend to focus on formal court channels that are impractical for many of the problems people face. Worse, our profession has shrouded law in a cloak of complexity. Law is like riot gear on a police officer. It's intimidating and impenetrable, and it's hard to tell there's something human underneath. If we're going to make justice a reality for everyone, we need to turn law from an abstraction or a threat into something that every single person can understand, use and shape. Lawyers are crucial in that fight, no doubt, but we can't leave it to lawyers alone. In health care, for example, we don't just rely on doctors to serve patients. We have nurses and midwives and community health workers. The same should be true of justice. Community legal workers, sometimes we call them community paralegals, or barefoot lawyers, can be a bridge. These paralegals are from the communities they serve. They demystify law, break it down into simple terms, and then they help people look for a solution. They don't focus on the courts alone. They look everywhere: ministry departments, local government, an ombudsman's office. Lawyers sometimes say to their clients, "I'll handle it for you. I've got you." Paralegals have a different message, not "I'm going to solve it for you," but "We're going to solve it together, and in the process, we're both going to grow." Community paralegals saved my own relationship to law. After about a year in law school, I almost dropped out. I was thinking maybe I should have listened to my grandmother. It was when I started working with paralegals in Sierra Leone, in 2003, that I began feeling hopeful about the law again, and I have been obsessed ever since. Let me come back to Ravi. 2013, he did reach the gates of that factory with the bucket of petrol in his hands, but he was arrested before he could follow through. He didn't have to spend long in jail, but he felt completely defeated. Then, two years later, he met someone. I'm going to call him Kush. Kush is part of a team of community paralegals that works for environmental justice on the Gujarat coast. Kush explained to Ravi that there was law on his side. Kush translated into Gujarati something Ravi had never seen. It's called the "consent to operate." It's issued by the state government, and it allows the factory to run only if it complies with specific conditions. So together, they compared the legal requirements with reality, they collected evidence, and they drafted an application — not to the courts, but to two administrative institutions, the Pollution Control Board and the district administration. Those applications started turning the creaky wheels of enforcement. A pollution officer came for a site inspection, and after that, the company started running an air filtration system it was supposed to have been using all along. It also started covering the 100 trucks that come and go from that plant every day. Those two measures reduced the air pollution considerably. The case is far from over, but learning and using law gave Ravi hope. There are people like Kush walking alongside people like Ravi in many places. Today, I work with a group called Namati. Namati helps convene a global network dedicated to legal empowerment. All together, we are over a thousand organizations in 120 countries. Collectively, we deploy tens of thousands of community paralegals. Let me give you another example. This is Khadija Hamsa. She is one of five million people in Kenya who faces a discriminatory vetting process when trying to obtain a national ID card. It is like the Jim Crow South in the United States. If you are from a certain set of tribes, most of them Muslim, you get sent to a different line. Without an ID, you can't apply for a job. You can't get a bank loan. You can't enroll in university. You are excluded from society. Khadija tried off and on to get an ID for eight years, without success. Then she met a paralegal working in her community named Hassan Kassim. Hassan explained to Khadija how vetting works, he helped her gather the documents she needed, helped prep her to go before the vetting committee. Finally, she was able to get an ID with Hassan's help. First thing she did with it was use it to apply for birth certificates for her children, which they need in order to go to school. In the United States, among many other problems, we have a housing crisis. In many cities, 90 percent of the landlords in housing court have attorneys, while 90 percent of the tenants do not. In New York, a new crew of paralegals — they're called Access to Justice Navigators — helps people to understand housing law and to advocate for themselves. Normally in New York, one out of nine tenants brought to housing court gets evicted. Researchers took a look at 150 cases in which people had help from these paralegals, and they found no evictions at all, not one. A little bit of legal empowerment can go a long way. I see the beginnings of a real movement, but we're nowhere near what's necessary. Not yet. In most countries around the world, governments do not provide a single dollar of support to paralegals like Hassan and Kush. Most governments don't even recognize the role paralegals play, or protect paralegals from harm. I also don't want to give you the impression that paralegals and their clients win every time. Not at all. That cement factory behind Ravi's village, it's been turning off the filtration system at night, when it's least likely that the company would get caught. Running that filter costs money. Ravi WhatsApps photos of the polluted night sky. This is one he sent to Kush in May. Ravi says the air is still unbreathable. At one point this year, Ravi went on hunger strike. Kush was frustrated. He said, "We can win if we use the law." Ravi said, "I believe in the law, I do, but it's not getting us far enough." Whether it's India, Kenya, the United States or anywhere else, trying to squeeze justice out of broken systems is like Ravi's case. Hope and despair are neck and neck. And so not only do we urgently need to support and protect the work of barefoot lawyers around the world, we need to change the systems themselves. Every case a paralegal takes on is a story about how a system is working in practice. When you put those stories together, it gives you a detailed portrait of the system as a whole. People can use that information to demand improvements to laws and policies. In India, paralegals and clients have drawn on their case experience to propose smarter regulations for the handling of minerals. In Kenya, paralegals and clients are using data from thousands of cases to argue that vetting is unconstitutional. This is a different way of approaching reform. This is not a consultant flying into Myanmar with a template he's going to cut and paste from Macedonia, and this is not an angry tweet. This is about growing reforms from the experience of ordinary people trying to make the rules and systems work. This transformation in the relationship between people and law is the right thing to do. It's also essential for overcoming all of the other great challenges of our times. We are not going to avert environmental collapse if the people most affected by pollution don't have a say in what happens to the land and the water, and we won't succeed in reducing poverty or expanding opportunity if poor people can't exercise their basic rights. And I believe we won't overcome the despair that authoritarian politicians prey upon if our systems stay rigged. I called Ravi before coming here to ask permission to share his story. I asked if there was any message he wanted to give people. He said, "[Gujarati]." Wake up. "[Gujarati]." Don't be afraid. "[Gujarati]." Fight with paper. By that I think he means fight using law rather than guns. "[Gujarati]." Maybe not today, maybe not this year, maybe not in five years, but find justice. If this guy, whose entire community is being poisoned every single day, who was ready to take his own life — if he's not giving up on seeking justice, then the world can't give up either. Ultimately, what Ravi calls "fighting with paper" is about forging a deeper version of democracy in which we the people, we don't just cast ballots every few years, we take part daily in the rules and institutions that hold us together, in which everyone, even the least powerful, can know law, use law and shape law. Making that happen, winning that fight, requires all of us. Thank you guys. Thank you. (Applause) Kelo Kubu: Thanks, Vivek. So I'm going to make a few assumptions that people in this room know what the Sustainable Development Goals are and how the process works, but I want us to talk a little bit about Goal 16: Peace, justice and strong institutions. Vivek Maru: Yeah. Anybody remember the Millennium Development Goals? They were adopted in 2000 by the UN and governments around the world, and they were for essential, laudable things. It was reduce child mortality by two thirds, cut hunger in half, crucial things. But there was no mention of justice or fairness or accountability or corruption, and we have made progress during the 15 years when those goals were in effect, but we are way behind what justice demands, and we're not going to get there unless we take justice into account. And so when the debate started about the next development framework, the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, our community came together around the world to argue that access to justice and legal empowerment should be a part of that new framework. And there was a lot of resistance. Those things are more political, more contentious than the other ones, so we didn't know until the night before whether it was going to come through. We squeaked by. The 16th out of 17 goals commits to access to justice for all, which is a big deal. It's a big deal, yes. Let's clap for justice. (Applause) Here's the scandal, though. The day the goals were adopted, most of them were accompanied by big commitments: a billion dollars from the Gates Foundation and the British government for nutrition; 25 billion in public-private financing for health care for women and children. On access to justice, we had the words on the paper, but nobody pledged a penny, and so that is the opportunity and the challenge that we face right now. The world recognizes more than ever before that you can't have development without justice, that people can't improve their lives if they can't exercise their rights, and what we need to do now is turn that rhetoric, turn that principle, into reality. (Applause) KK: How can we help? What can people in this room do? VM: Great question. Thank you for asking. I would say three things. One is invest. If you have 10 dollars, or a hundred dollars, a million dollars, consider putting some of it towards grassroots legal empowerment. It's important in its own right and it's crucial for just about everything else we care about. Number two, push your politicians and your governments to make this a public priority. Just like health or education, access to justice should be one of the things that a government owes its people, and we're nowhere close to that, neither in rich countries or poor countries. Number three is: be a paralegal in your own life. Find an injustice or a problem where you live. It's not hard to find, if you look. Is the river being contaminated, the one that passes through the city where you live? Are there workers getting paid less than minimum wage or who are working without safety gear? Get to know the people most affected, find out what the rules say, see if you can use those rules to get a solution. If it doesn't work, see if you can come together to improve those rules. Because if we all start knowing law, using law and shaping law, then we will be building that deeper version of democracy that I believe our world desperately needs. (Applause) KK: Thanks so much, Vivek. VM: Thank you. |
Talk about your death while you're still healthy | {0: "Westpac's Michelle Knox has led large-scale transformation programs in the UK, Ireland and Australia."} | TED@Westpac | To kick the bucket, bite the dust, cash in your chips, check out, depart, expire, launch into eternity ... These are all euphemisms we use in humor to describe the one life event we are all going to experience: death. But most of us don't want to acknowledge death, we don't want to plan for it, and we don't want to discuss it with the most important people in our lives. I grew up in an Australian community where people got old or sick and passed away, and only the adults attended the funeral. My parents would come home looking sad and drained, but they didn't discuss it with us. So I was ignorant to death and of the grieving process. At 15, I got my invitation. A dear neighbor who was like an aunt to me died suddenly of a heart attack, and I attended my first funeral and did my first reading. I didn't know the tightness in my chest and the dryness in my mouth was normal. The celebrant got some of the facts wrong, and it made me really angry. He talked about how she loved knitting. Knitting. (Laughter) He didn't mention that, at 75, she still mowed her own lawn, built an amazing fish pond in her front yard and made her own ginger beer. I'm pretty sure "keen knitter" isn't what she would have chosen for her eulogy. (Laughter) I believe if we discuss death as part of day-to-day living, we give ourselves the opportunity to reflect on our core values, share them with our loved ones, and then our survivors can make informed decisions without fear or regret of having failed to honor our legacy. I am blessed to lead a wonderful, culturally diverse team, and in the last 12 months, we've lost five parents, including my own father, and most recently, a former colleague who died at 41 from bowel cancer. We started having open and frank conversations about what we were experiencing. We talked about the practical stuff, the stuff no one prepares you for: dealing with government agencies, hospitals, nursing homes, advanced care directives, funeral directors and extended family members, (Laughter) making decisions about coffins, headstones, headstone wording, headstone font size, all while sleep-deprived. We also discussed some of the issues triggered by our various cultural backgrounds, and we realized there can be some significant differences in how we honor the passing of a loved one. A great example of this is "Sorry Business," practiced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. During Sorry Business, family members will take on specific roles and responsibilities, protocols such as limiting the use of photographs, saying the name of the deceased, and holding a smoking ceremony are all a sign of respect and allow for a peaceful transition of the spirit. These customs can be a complete contrast to those we might practice in Western cultures, where we would honor the memory of a loved one by talking about them and sharing photographs. So my lesson from this last year is, life would be a lot easier to live if we talked about death now, while we're healthy. For most of us, we wait until we are too emotional, too ill or too physically exhausted — and then it's too late. Isn't it time we started taking ownership of our finale on this earth? So let's get going. Do you know what you want when you die? Do you know how you want to be remembered? Is location important? Do you want to be near the ocean or in the ocean? (Laughter) Do you want a religious service or an informal party, or do you want to go out with a bang, literally, in a firework? (Laughter) When it comes to death, there's so much to discuss, but I want to focus on two aspects: why talking about and planning your death can help you experience a good death, and then reduce the stress on your loved ones; and how talking about death can help us support those who are grieving. So let's start with planning. How many of you have a will? Put your hand up. Oh, this is fantastic. In Australia, 45 percent of adults over the age of 18 do not have a legal will. You're a little bit above average. This is a startling statistic given that writing a will can actually be quite simple and inexpensive. So I started asking my friends and neighbors and was really surprised to learn many of them don't have a will, and some couples don't realize they need individual wills. The usual explanation was, well, it's all going to go to my partner anyway. So keep in mind that laws vary from state to state and country to country, but this is what happens in New South Wales if you die without leaving a legal will. Firstly, a suitable administrator must be appointed by the Supreme Court of New South Wales. Chances are this is someone who would never have met the deceased. That person is then responsible for arranging your funeral, collecting assets and distributing them after paying debts and taxes. And one of those debts will be the bill for their services. This is not someone who would have known you want the four-foot wooden giraffe in your living room to go to the person who helped you carry it halfway across the world, and yes, that's in my will. (Laughter) If you die leaving a spouse or a domestic partner, then chances are they will receive your estate, but if you are single, it's far more complicated, as parents, siblings, half-siblings and dependents all come into play. And did you know that if you make a regular donation to charity, that charity may have grounds to make a claim on your estate? The most important thing to know is the bigger your estate, the more complicated that will will be, and the more expensive that bill. So if you don't have a will, I ask you ... when else in your life have you willingly given money to the government when you didn't have to? (Laughter) I lost my father in February to a progressive lung disease. When dad knew his death was imminent, he had three clear wishes. He wanted to die at home; he wanted to die surrounded by family; and he wanted to die peacefully, not choking or gasping for air. And I'm pleased to say that my family were able to support dad's wishes, and he achieved his goals, and in that sense, he had a good death. He had the death he planned for. Because dad wanted to die at home, we had to have some pretty tough conversations and fill out a lot of paperwork. The questions on the forms cover everything from resuscitation to organ donation. Dad said, "Take whatever organs you can use." This was upsetting to my mum, as my dad's health was deteriorating rapidly, and it was no longer the right time to talk about organ donation. I believe we need to discuss these issues when we are fit and healthy, so we can take the emotion out of it, and then we can learn not just what is important, but why it's important. So as part of my journey, I started engaging my family and friends to find out their thoughts on death, and how they wanted to be remembered. I discovered you can host a "Death Over Dinner," or a "Death Cafe," which is a great, casual way to introduce the topic ... (Laughter) and gain some wonderful insight. (Laughter) Did you know that your body has to be legally disposed of, and you can't just be shoved off a cliff or set fire to in the backyard? (Laughter) In Australia, you have three options. The two most common are burial and cremation, but you can also donate your body to science. And I am pleased to report that innovation has touched the world of corpse disposal. (Laughter) You can now opt for an eco-funeral. You can be buried at the base of a tree in recycled cardboard or a wicker basket, and for those who love the ocean, there are eco-friendly urns that will dissolve at sea. Personally, I plan to be cremated, but given that I get seasick, I can think of nothing worse than having my ashes flung into a huge ocean swell. I've actually bought a plot in the rose garden next to my dad. I call it my investment property. (Laughter) But sadly, there's no tax deduction. (Laughter) So if you plan for your death, then your survivors will know how to experience a healthy bereavement without fear or guilt of having failed to honor your legacy. As part of my research, I've been to seminars, read books and talked to palliative care nurses. And I've come to understand as a consequence of not talking about death, we don't know how to be around grief. And on the flip side, if we talk about death more, we will become more comfortable with the emotions we experience around grief. I discovered, this year, it's actually a privilege to help someone exit this life, and although my heart is heavy with loss and sadness, it is not heavy with regret. I knew what dad wanted, and I feel at peace knowing I could support his wishes. My dad's last 24 hours were in a peaceful coma, and after days of around-the-clock care, we had time to sit, hold his hand, and say goodbye. He passed away on a Monday morning just before breakfast, and after the doctor came and we waited for the funeral home, I went into the kitchen, and I ate a big bowl of porridge. When I told some of my friends this, they were really shocked. "How could you eat at a time like that?" Well, I was hungry. (Laughter) You see, grief impacted my sleep and my ability to concentrate, but it never impacted my stomach. I was always hungry. (Laughter) It's different for all of us, and it's really important that we acknowledge that. So if we don't talk about our death and the death of loved ones, how can we possibly support a friend, a colleague, a neighbor who is grieving? How do we support someone who has lost someone suddenly, like an accident or suicide? We tend to avoid them ... not because we don't care, because we don't know what to say. We know as a friend we can't fix it, we can't take away that pain, so we say things to fill that awkward silence, sometimes things we regret saying. Examples would be: "At least he isn't suffering anymore." "At least you've got your memories." "At least you don't have to pay for hospital parking anymore." (Laughter) Really, we don't need to say anything. We just need to be. Be patient, be understanding, and be a listener. And if you can't be any of those things, then please, be the person who makes the lasagna, the curry or the casserole, because your offerings will be greatly appreciated. (Laughter) I've been to 10 funerals in the last year, one of which I helped arrange. They ran the full gamut: a very solemn Greek Orthodox service, four Catholic requiem masses and a garden party where I made a toast while scattering my friend's ashes around her garden with a soup ladle. (Laughter) I have carried, kissed, written on and toasted coffins with a shot of ouzo. I have worn all black, all color and a party dress. Despite the vast differences in sendoff, despite me being at times out of my comfort zone doing something I've never done before, I drew comfort from one thing — knowing that this is what each person would have wanted. So what do I want? Well, I like to be organized, so I have the will, I'm a registered organ donor, and I have my investment property. All that is left is planning my sendoff, a big party, lots of champagne, color, laughter, and of course, music to remember me by. Thank you. (Applause) |
The search for "aha!" moments | {0: 'Matt Goldman is a co-founder of the international theatrical sensation Blue Man Group and the NYC-based Blue School.'} | TED Salon Brightline Initiative | So it's 1969, New York City, third grade music class, and our teacher brings us into a room with nothing but a piano and chairs. And one by one, he calls us up, and he plays middle C, and he asks us to sing it. (Singing) And you're either instructed to go to the right of the room or the left side of the room. (Laughter) And when all 35 kids are done, the left side of the room, which I was a part of, was told to stand up and go back to home room. (Laughter) And none of us ever received another music class again in elementary school. An in club and an out club was established, and I didn't even know what the gating test was in the moment. A few years later, English class ... (Laughter) first paper of a new semester, and I get the paper back, and it's C+, with the comment, "Good as can be expected." (Laughter) Now, honestly, I didn't mind a C+. I was just happy it wasn't a C- or a D. But the "good as can be expected" comment ... even at that young age, it didn't seem right. It seemed somehow limiting. Now, how many people here have had an experience similar to that, either at school or the workplace? We're not alone. So I guess it might be ironic that my life path would lead me to a career of making music and writing for Blue Man Group (Laughter) and starting a school. (Laughter) But school was torture for me. As someone who didn't have a natural proclivity for academics, and my teachers never seemed to understand me, I didn't know how to navigate schools and schools didn't know what to do with me. So I started to ask the question, even back then, if these environments didn't know what to do with people who didn't fit a standard mold, why weren't we reshaping the environments to take advantage of people's strengths? What I've come to believe is that we need to cultivate safe and conducive conditions for new and innovative ideas to evolve and thrive. We know that humans are innately innovative, because if we weren't, we'd all be using the same arrowheads that we were using 10,000 years ago. So one of the things that I started to question is, are there ways to make innovation easier and happen more frequently? Is there a way to take those aha moments, those breakthroughs that seem to happen randomly and occasionally, and have them happen intentionally and frequently? When we started Blue Man Group in 1988, we had never done an off-Broadway show before. We'd actually done almost no theater. But we knew what we were passionate about, and it was a whole series of things that we had never seen onstage before, things like art and pop culture and technology and sociology and anthropology and percussion and comedy and following your bliss. We established a rule that nothing made it onstage if we had seen it before, and we wanted to inspire creativity and connectedness in ourselves and our audiences; we wanted to do a little bit of social good, and we wanted to have fun doing it. And in the office, we wanted to create an environment where people treated each other just a little bit better, just a little bit more respect and consideration than in the outside world. And we continued to iterate and collaborate and find solutions to create things that hadn't been seen. Over time, I've come to identify the optimal conditions for these types of creative and innovative environments are clear intent, purpose and passion: this is working on something bigger than ourselves. Personal integrity: it's doing what we say we're going to do. It's being our authentic self in all interactions. Direct communication and clear expectations, even when the subject matter is difficult. Grit and perseverance: iteration, iteration, iteration. Establish collaborative teams. Instill deep trust and mutual respect. Everyone on your team is in. There is no out club. We rise as a team, we fall as a team, and decisions are decisions until they're not. Embrace multiple perspectives. This means all voices matter, all emotions matter. Address disagreements head-on. People should feel seen and heard. Take risks and celebrate mistakes. A commitment to being a learning organization, always trying to spiral upwards the innovation and learning curves. And speak in one voice. This is perhaps the glue that holds all these conditions together. The concept is that we speak in the exact same manner about someone who's not in the room as if they are in the room. Now this seems basic, but it's an aspirational practice that helps deal with difficult situations in a more respectful way. Sewing this practice in can have a profound effect on raising the bar, on mutual respect, trust, reducing gossip and politics in the office and the classroom, and thus reducing the noise that gets in the way of the innovative process. At Blue Man Group, iteration was essential for our creative process. We were writing a piece where we were trying to illustrate the consumption / waste loop in a funny and creative and surprising way for our audiences. Now, if you have yourselves thought about trying to do the same endeavor, I can save you a lot of time right here and now. I can definitively tell you that oatmeal, Jell-O, Cream of Wheat, Gak, pudding, clay, tapioca, Silly Putty and tomato paste do not slide through a tube that's coiled up under your costumes that's meant to come out an orifice in your chest and spray towards the audience. It won't happen. (Laughter) After months of iteration, we finally happened upon bananas. (Laughter) Who knew that bananas would have the exact right properties to stay solid even when pushed through a tube with forced air, yet slippery enough to have the dramatic oozing effect that we were looking for. (Laughter) This piece became a signature of the Blue Man show. But we didn't throw out all the rules of theater altogether. We had set designs. We had lighting designs. We had a stage manager calling the shows. But I'm fairly sure we were one of the very first shows that was connecting with our audience in a respectful way, by hanging them upside down, (Laughter) dipping them in paint, slamming them against a canvas, (Laughter) putting their heads in 70 pounds of Jell-O, and then making them one of the heroes of the show. (Laughter) Besides that, we didn't reinvent what didn't need to be reinvented. (Laughter) Years later, we took all this learning and we created a school — a school for our children that we wish we had gone to, a school where it was just as important what happened in the hallways between classes as what happened in the classes; a place where you got music class even when you couldn't sing middle C. At Blue School, teachers and parents and students are equal collaborators at the table, intentionally creating a safe space where they can develop a lifelong, joyful passion for learning. Again, we didn't try to reinvent the wheel when it didn't need to be reinvented. We don't shy away from the more traditional methods like direct instruction, when it's the best way into a lesson. But we balance it with an integrated learning across all subjects approach, and balance is the key. In fact, Blue School was founded on a balance between academic mastery, creative thinking, and self and social intelligence. I realize that this might sound like common sense, but in some circles, this is radical. (Laughter) And these qualities have brought a lot of attention to Blue School as a truly innovative school. Nearly 10 years in, we announced the expansion of the middle school. Our faculty asked our sixth graders to participate in the development of middle school values. Their process began with a question: What do you need from our community to be happy and productive at school? Students moved through a six-week process of individual work, collaborative work, refinement, and consensus, and the list they came up with is really extraordinary. Be engaged and present with each other. Respect and support what others need in order to learn. Be inclusive of our diversity — the way we look, think and act. Cultivate the practice of self-awareness and awareness of others. Honor and make time for fun and joy. And challenge ourselves, practice being OK, making mistakes, and support each other through them. Remember, these kids were 11 years old when they came up with this. They articulated what took us 20 years to identify. One of the great by-products of creating these vibrant communities is that we become attractors for people who want to prioritize these values. They want to prioritize it above things like money and prestige and tradition. We can all be on this road together, you at your own values in your own companies, in your own communities and families. For us, for me, it was about prioritizing children's voices to give them the tools to help build a harmonious and sustainable world. I invite you to be on this exciting, passionate, joyful journey together. And together, good as can be expected is limitless when the expectation is that by reshaping our environments, we can change the world. Thank you. (Applause) |
The hidden role informal caregivers play in health care | {0: 'Scott Williams thinks the modern health systems would cease to function without the crucial role played by caregivers.'} | TED@Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany | Let's put the care back into health care. I've been working in the healthcare sector for the last 15 years, and one of the things that drew me to this sector was my interest in the care component of our healthcare systems — more specifically, to the invaluable role played by carers. Now, how many of you in this room consider yourself a carer? By this, I mean how many of you have cared for someone suffering from an illness, injury or disability? Can you raise your hand if this is the case? About half of the room. I want to thank all of you who raised your hands for the time that you've spent as a carer. What you do is extremely precious. I am a former cared-for patient myself. When I was a teenager, I suffered from Lyme disease and underwent 18 months of antibiotic treatment. I was repeatedly misdiagnosed: bacterial meningitis, fibromyalgia, you name it. They couldn't figure it out. And if I'm standing here in front of you today, it's because I owe my life to the stubbornness and commitment of one carer. He did everything he could for me — driving long distances from one treatment center to another, searching for the best option, and above all, never giving up, despite the difficulties he encountered, including from a work and quality-of-life perspective. That was my father. I recovered, and this is largely thanks to his dedication. This experience turned me into a patient advocate. The closer I looked, the more I saw carers providing the same kind of support that my father provided to me, and playing a crucial role in the healthcare system. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that without informal carers like him, our health and social systems would crumble. And yet, they're largely going unrecognized. I am now a long-distance carer for my mother, who suffers from multiple chronic conditions. I understand, now more than ever, the demands that caregivers face. With aging populations, economic instability, healthcare system stress and increased incidents of long-term chronic care needs, the importance and demands on family caregivers are greater than ever. Carers all over the world are sacrificing their own physical, financial and psychosocial well-being to provide care for their loved ones. Carers have their own limits and needs, and in absence of adequate support, many could be stretched to the breaking point. Once seen as a personal and private matter in family life, unpaid caregiving has formed the invisible backbone of our health and social systems all over the world. Many of these carers are even in this room, as we have just seen. Who are they, and how many are they? What are the challenges that they are facing? And, above all, how can we make sure that their value to patients, our healthcare system and society is recognized? Anyone can be a carer, really: a 15-year-old girl caring for a parent with multiple sclerosis; a 40-year-old man juggling full-time work while caring for his family who lives far away; a 60-year-old man caring for his wife who has terminal cancer; or an 80-year-old woman caring for her husband who has Alzheimer's disease. The things carers do for their patients are varied. They provide personal care, like getting someone dressed, feeding them, helping them to the bathroom, helping them move about. They also provide a significant level of medical care, because they often know a lot about their loved one's condition and needs, sometimes better than the patients themselves, who may be paralyzed or confused by their diagnosis. In those situations, carers are also advocates for the patient. Also of critical importance is the fact that carers also provide emotional support. They organize doctor's appointments, they manage finances, and they also deal with daily household tasks. These challenges are challenges that we can't ignore. There are currently more than 100 million carers providing 80 percent of care across Europe. And even if these numbers are impressive, they're most likely underestimated, given the lack of recognition of carers. As we have just seen, many of you in this room weren't sure if you could be qualified or considered to be a carer. Many of you probably thought I was referring to a nurse or some other healthcare professional. Also stunning are the benefits that carers bring to our societies. I want to give you just one example from Australia in 2015. The annual value provided by informal carers to those suffering from mental illness was evaluated at 13.2 billion Australian dollars. This is nearly two times what the Australian government spends on mental health services annually. These numbers, among others, demonstrate that if carers were to stop caring tomorrow, our health and social systems would crumble. And while the importance of these millions of silent carers cannot be denied, they've largely been unnoticed by governments, healthcare systems and private entities. In addition, carers are facing enormous personal challenges. Many carers face higher costs and can face financial difficulties, given the fact that they may not be able to work full time or they may not be able to hold down a job altogether. Many studies have shown that often carers sacrifice their own health and well-being in order to care for their loved ones. Many carers spend so much time caring for their loved ones that often their family and their relationships can suffer. Many carers report that often, their employers don't have adequate policies in place to support them. There has been improvement, though, in the recognition of carers around the world. Just a few years ago, an umbrella organization called the International Alliance of Carer Organizations, or IACO, was formed to bring together carer groups from all over the world, to provide strategic direction, facilitate information sharing, as well as actively advocate for carers on an international level. Private entities are also starting to recognize the situation of carers. I am proud that my personal engagement and enthusiasm towards this topic of carers found an echo in my own workplace. My company is committed to this cause and has developed an unprecedented framework for its employees and society as a whole. The objective is to empower carers to improve their own health and well-being and bring about a greater balance to their lives. Nevertheless, much more needs to be done to complement these relatively isolated initiatives. Our societies are facing increased health pressures, including aging populations, increased incidence of cancer and chronic conditions, widespread inequality, amongst many others. To confront these challenges, policymakers must look beyond traditional healthcare pathways and employment policies and recognize that informal care will continue to form the bedrock of care. Caring for someone should be a choice and should be done without putting one's own well-being in the balance. But to really put the care back into health care, what's needed is a deep, societal, structural change. And this can only happen through a change in mindset. And this can start today. Today, we can plant the seed for a change for millions of carers around the world. Here's what I want to suggest: when you go home today or to the office tomorrow morning, embrace a carer. Thank them, offer him or her a bit of help, maybe even volunteer as a carer yourself for a couple hours a week. If carers around the world felt better recognized, it would not only improve their own health and well-being and sense of fulfillment, but it would also improve the lives of those that they're caring for. Let's care more. Thank you. (Applause) |
See how the rest of the world lives, organized by income | {0: "Anna Rosling Rönnlund's personal mission: to make it easy for anyone to understand the world visually."} | TED2017 | What images do we see from the rest of the world? We see natural disasters, war, terror. We see refugees, and we see horrible diseases. Right? We see beautiful beaches, cute animals, beautiful nature, cultural rites and stuff. And then we're supposed to make the connection in our head and create a worldview out of this. And how is that possible? I mean, the world seems so strange. And I don't think it is. I don't think the world is that strange, actually. I've got an idea. So, imagine the world as a street, where the poorest live on one end and the richest on the other, and everyone in the world lives on this street. You live there, I live there, and the neighbors we have are the ones with the same income. People that live in the same block as me, they are from other countries, other cultures, other religions. The street might look something like this. And I was curious. In Sweden where I live, I've been meeting quite a lot of students. And I wanted to know, where would they think they belong on a street like this? So we changed these houses into people. This is the seven billion people that live in the world. And just by living in Sweden, most likely you belong there, which is the richest group. But the students, when you ask them, they think they are in the middle. And how can you understand the world when you see all these scary images from the world, and you think you live in the middle, while you're actually atop? Not very easy. So I sent out photographers to 264 homes in 50 countries — so far, still counting — and in each home, the photographers take the same set of photos. They take the bed, the stove, the toys and about 135 other things. So we have 40,000 images or something at the moment, and it looks something like this. Here we see, it says on the top, "Families in the world by income," and we have the street represented just beneath it, you can see. And then we see some of the families we have visited. We have the poorer to the left, the richer to the right, and everybody else in between, as the concept says. We can go down and see the different families we have been to so far. Here, for instance, we have a family in Zimbabwe, one in India, one in Russia, and one in Mexico, for instance. So we can go around and look at the families this way. But of course, we can choose if we want to see some certain countries and compare them, or regions, or if we want, to see other things. So let's go to the front doors and see what they look like. Go here, and this is the world by front doors, ordered by income. And we can see the big difference from India, Philippines, China, Ukraine, in these examples, for instance. What if we go into the home? We can look at beds. This is what beds can look like. Doesn't look like the glossy magazines. Doesn't look like the scary images in the media. So remember that the students in Sweden, they thought they were in the middle of the world income. So let's go there. We zoom in here by filtering the street to the middle, like this, and then I ask the students: Is this what your bedroom looks like? And they would actually not feel very at home. So we go down and see, do they feel more at home here? And they would say, no, this is not what a Swedish typical bedroom looks like. We go up here, and suddenly, they feel sort of at home. And we can see here in this image, we see bedrooms in China, Netherlands, South Korea, France and the United States, for instance. So we can click here. If we want to know more about the family, the home in which this bed stands, we can just click it and go to the family, and we can see all the images from that family. We can go this way, too. And of course, this is free for anyone to use. So just go here, and please add more images, of course. My personal favorite that everyone always tries to make me not show, I'm going to show you now, and that's toilets, because you're not really allowed to look at people's toilets, but now we can just do it, right? So here (Laughter) we have a lot of toilets. They look pretty much as we're used to, right? And they are in China, Netherlands, United States, Nepal and so forth, Ukraine, France. And they look pretty similar, right? But remember, we are in the top. So what about checking all the toilets? Now it looks a bit different, doesn't it? So this way we can visually browse through categories of imagery, using photos as data. But not everything works as a photo. Sometimes it's easier to understand what people do, so we also do video snippets of everyday activities, such as washing hands, doing laundry, brushing teeth, and so on. And I'm going to show you a short snippet of tooth-brushing, and we’re going to start at the top. So we see people brushing their teeth. Pretty interesting to see the same type of plastic toothbrush is being used in all these places in the same way, right? Some are more serious than others — (Laughter) but still, the toothbrush is there. And then, coming down to this poorer end, then we will see people start using sticks, and they will sometimes use their finger to brush their teeth. So this particular woman in Malawi, when she brushes her teeth, she scrapes some mud off from her wall and she mixes it with water, and then she's brushing. Therefore, in the Dollar Street material, we have tagged this image not only as her wall, which it is, but also as her toothpaste, because that is also what she uses it for. So we can say, in the poorer end of the street, you will use a stick or your finger, you come to the middle, you will start using a toothbrush, and then you come up to the top, and you will start using one each. Pretty nice, not sharing a toothbrush with your grandma. And you can also look at some countries. Here, we have the income distribution within the US, most people in the middle. We have a family we visited in the richer end, the Howards. We can see their home here. And we also visited a family in the poorer end, down here. And then what we can do now is we can do instant comparisons of things in their homes. Let's look in their cutlery drawer. So, observe the Hadleys: they have all their cutlery in a green plastic box. and they have a few different types and some of them are plastic, while the Howards, they have this wooden drawer with small wooden compartments in it and a section for each type of cutlery. We can add more families, and we can see kitchen sinks, or maybe living rooms. Of course, we can do the same in other countries. So we go to China, we pick three families. we look at their houses, we can look at their sofas, we can look at their stoves. And when you see these stoves, I think it's obvious that it's a stupid thing that usually, when we think about other countries, we think they have a certain way of doing things. But look at these stoves. Very different, right, because it depends on what income level you have, how you're going to cook your food. But the cool thing is when we start comparing across countries. So here we have China and the US. See the big overlap between these two. So we picked the two homes we have already seen in these countries, the Wus and the Howards. Standing in their bedroom, pretty hard to tell which one is China and which one is the US, right? Both have brown leather sofas, and they have similar play structures. Most likely both are made in China, so, I mean, that's not very strange — (Laughter) but that is similar. We can of course go down to the other end of the street, adding Nigeria. So let's compare two homes in China and Nigeria. Looking at the family photos, they do not look like they have a lot in common, do they? But start seeing their ceiling. They have a plastic shield and grass. They have the same kind of sofa, they store their grain in similar ways, they're going to have fish for dinner, and they're boiling their water in identical ways. So if we would visit any of these homes, there's a huge risk that we would say we know anything about the specific way you do things in China or Nigeria, while, looking at this, it's quite obvious — this is how you do things on this income level. That is what you can see when you go through the imagery in Dollar Street. So going back to the figures, the seven billion people of the world, now we're going to do a quick recap. We're going to look at comparisons of things in the poorest group: beds, roofs, cooking. And observe, in all these comparisons, their homes are chosen so they are in completely different places of the world. But what we see is pretty identical. So the poorest billion cooking would look somewhat the same in these two places; you might not have shoes; eating, if you don't have a spoon; storing salt would be similar whether you're in Asia or in Africa; and going to the toilet would be pretty much the same experience whether you're in Nigeria or Nepal. In the middle, we have a huge group of five billion, but here we can see you will have electric light, most likely; you will no longer sleep on the floor; you will store your salt in a container; you will have more than one spoon; you will have more than one pen; the ceiling is no longer leaking that much; you will have shoes; you might have a phone, toys, and produce waste. Coming to our group up here, similar shoes, Jordan, US. We have sofas, fruits, hairbrushes, bookshelves, toilet paper in Tanzania, Palestine, hard to distinguish if we would sit in US, Palestine or Tanzania from this one. Vietnam, Kenya: wardrobes, lamps, black dogs, floors, soap, laundry, clocks, computers, phones, and so on, right? So we have a lot of similarities all over the world, and the images we see in the media, they show us the world is a very, very strange place. But when we look at the Dollar Street images, they do not look like that. So using Dollar Street, we can use photos as data, and country stereotypes — they simply fall apart. So the person staring back at us from the other side of the world actually looks quite a lot like you. And that implies both a call to action and a reason for hope. Thank you. (Applause) |
American bipartisan politics can be saved -- here's how | {0: 'Former United States Congressman Bob Inglis promotes free enterprise action on climate change.'} | TEDxBeaconStreet | Imagine that you're a member of Congress. You've worked very hard. You've knocked on thousands of doors, sweating and shivering, depending on the season. You've made hundreds, maybe thousands of phone calls to people you don't even know asking for their support, begging for their money. And now you've got one of these. It's hanging on a door in Washington, DC. It says you're a member of Congress, that you represent the people of your state. Now, imagine you're a conservative member of Congress. For some of you here in Boston, Massachusetts, that's going to take a powerful imagination, all right? (Laughter) But imagine with me that you're a conservative member of Congress. You grew up on Milton Friedman. You love his free markets, free enterprise and free trade. You've watched Ronald Reagan's farewell address over and over, and you cry every time — (Laughter) he gets to the part about the shining city on the hill, and how if the city had to have walls, the walls had doors — doors to let in those yearning to breathe free. You get goosebumps when you think of him telling Mr. Gorbachev to tear down his wall. You're a conservative member of Congress, and you agree with President John F. Kennedy that America is an exceptional place. For inspiration, you go to YouTube and you watch his speech at Rice University, September of 1962, the "moon shot" speech. And you're amazed that he admits in that speech — a speech of 17 minutes of pure American exceptionalism — that some of the materials needed for the spacecraft hadn't been invented yet. No matter. We're going to the Moon before the decade is out. You agree with him that the vows of this nation can be fulfilled only if we in this nation are first and therefore we intend to be first. You've taken as your own the affect that he so embodied: that when leaders are optimistic, they're saying they believe in the people they represent. You're a conservative member of Congress, and you believe in the precautionary principle. You believe in data-driven analysis. You know that climate change is real and human-caused, and you see in climate change a silent and slow-moving Sputnik moment. One that calls for the greatness of your nation as much as the original Sputnik moment. You are a conservative member of Congress. You high-five the memory of Jack Kemp, and believe with him that the test of conservatism is that it works for everyone, regardless of skin color. You're appalled by the alt-right. You want them to have nothing to do with your brand, your party, your legacy. You utterly reject them. You — (Applause) You're a conservative member of Congress. You rise with compassion to protect the lives of the unborn, but otherwise you think the bedroom of consenting adults is a rather strange place for the government to be. You are a conservative member of Congress. With John Adams, you fear the mob. Because you know, as he knew, that a mob is not able to protect liberty, not even its own. And you're amazed at the wisdom that he and other framers had in establishing a slow, deliberative governing process — an inherently conservative governing process. It would serve a country. It would grow far greater than they could ever imagine. You are a conservative member of Congress. You fear the fire of populist nationalism, because you know that those who play with fire can't control it. You see their pitchforks and torches, and you know they're not good building tools. The pitchforks and torches can tear down and burn up but they can't build up. They can't build up the institutions and the communities so necessary to a stable and prosperous country. You're a conservative member of Congress, and you fear the next county party convention. You so wish for your party to be the grand opportunity party, not the grumpy old party. (Laughter) You know that they want to hear from you some old saw about how a secret Muslim, non-American socialist took over in the White House and destroyed the country, and you know that none of that's true. (Applause) You know that they want to hear you say that you're OK with insults, OK with "lock her up" chants and OK with policy pronouncements with all the sincerity and thoughtfulness that 140 characters can muster. You are a conservative member of Congress. You realize that many in your party look to some good old days that you know never existed. They hold on, for example, to the fossils that fueled the last century of growth, but you know that better, cleaner more abundant fuels await us, and you know that that abundance can lead the world to more energy, more mobility and more freedom. You're a conservative member of Congress. You realize that many in your party pine for the '50s and the '60s because those were, after all, the good old days. But you know that the Cuyahoga River was on fire back then. You know that in Pittsburgh, street lights came on at noon because of the soot in the air. The schools were segregated, neighborhoods redlined, that communism threatened freedom, and if you got cancer, you weren't likely to fight for long. You're a conservative member of Congress and you want to sound like JFK at Rice, where JFK said, "It's understandable why some would have us stay where we are a little bit longer, to wait and to rest." But everything within you says with him, this city of Houston, this state of Texas, this country of the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. You are ready to lead. You are ready to prove the power of free enterprise to solve challenges like climate change. You are ready to lead. So I've got a suggestion for you then: lead ... now. Step out, step up. You know, we ask America's best to die on literal hills in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Is it too much to ask you to die a figurative death on a political hill in Washington, DC? You know, at the end of your time in Washington, they're going to take this plaque off the door. They're going to hand it to you; you're going to go home with it. Can you imagine the emptiness of knowing that you stood for nothing, that you risk nothing, that all you did was follow fearful people to where they were already going rather than trying to lead them to a better place? If you're not willing to lose your seat in Congress, there's really very little reason to be there. (Applause) So here's the thing: it's not too late. There's still time to lead. Speak out, speak up, call lunacy what it is: lunacy. Tell the American people that we still have moon shots in us. Tell the folks at the county party convention, "You bet free enterprise can solve climate change." Tell them that Milton Friedman would say to tax pollution rather than profits. Tell them that it's OK — no, it's a good thing that progressives would agree. Tell them the very good news that we can bring America together to solve these challenges and to lead the world. Tell them that free enterprise can do these things. Tell them that America must stop the dividing, and must start the uniting. Tell them. Play your part before it's too late. (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Want to change the world? Start by being brave enough to care | {0: 'Cleo Wade creates uplifting messages, blending simplicity with positivity and arresting honesty.'} | TEDWomen 2017 | My best friend recently had a baby. And when I met him, I was in awe of witnessing this tiny, beautiful being enter into our lives. I also had this realization that he wasn't just entering our lives, he was entering the world — this crazy world that, especially now, feels so incredibly challenging. I spend a lot time in my work talking to people about who we are, who we must be and what our healing looks like. So the first time I held him, I had my pep talk ready. You know, I wanted him to know that the way we find our strength is through our challenges. I wanted him to know that we can all do something big when we start small. I wanted him to know that each of us is more resilient than we could ever imagine. So here I am holding little Thelonious. I look down at him, and it hits me: he's a baby. (Laughter) He's not going to understand a single word I say to him. So instead, I thought it would probably be a better idea if I went home and wrote. So, this is for grownups, but it's also for Thelonious, when he's old enough to read it: The world will say to you, "Be a better person." Do not be afraid to say, "Yes." Start by being a better listener. Start by being better at walking down the street. See people. Say, "Hello." Ask how they are doing and listen to what they say. Start by being a better friend, a better parent, a better child to your parents; a better sibling, a better lover, a better partner. Start by being a better neighbor. Meet someone you do not know, and get to know them. The world will say to you, "What are you going to do?" Do not be afraid to say, "I know I can't do everything, but I can do something." Walk into more rooms saying, "I'm here to help." Become intimate with generosity. Give what you can give, and do what you can do. Give dollars, give cents, give your time, give your love, give your heart, give your spirit. The world will say to you, "We need peace." Find your peace within, hold it sacred, bring it with you everywhere you go. Peace cannot be shared or created with others if we cannot first generate it within. The world will say to you, "They are the enemy." Love enough to know that just because someone disagrees with you, it does not make them your enemy. You may not win an argument, you may not change a mind, but if you choose to, you can always achieve the triumph of radical empathy — an understanding of the heart. The world will say to you, "We need justice." Investigate. Find truth beyond the stories you are told. Find truth beyond the way things seem. Ask, "Why?" Ask, "Is this fair?" Ask, "How did we get here?" Do this with compassion. Do this with forgiveness. Learn to forgive others. Start by truly learning how to forgive yourself. We are all more than our mistakes. We are all more than who we were yesterday. We are all deserving of our dignity. See yourself in others. Recognize that your justice is my justice, and mine is yours. There can be no liberation for one of us if the other is not free. (Applause) The world will say to you, "I am violent." Respond by saying, "I am not. Not with my words and not with my actions." The world will say to you, "We need to heal the planet." Start by saying, "No, thank you. I don't need a plastic bag." Recycle, reuse. Start by picking up one piece of trash on your block. The world will say to you, "There are too many problems." Do not be afraid to be a part of the solutions. Start by discussing the issues. We cannot overcome what we ignore. The more we talk about things, the more we see that the issues are connected because we are connected. The world will say to you, "We need to end racism." Start by healing it in your own family. The world will say to you, "How do we speak to bias and bigotry?" Start by having the first conversation at your own kitchen table. The world will say to you, "There is so much hate." Devote yourself to love. Love yourself so much that you can love others without barriers and without judgment. When the world asks us big questions that require big answers, we have two options. One: to feel so overwhelmed or unqualified, we do nothing. Two: to start with one small act and qualify ourselves. I am the director of national security, and so are you. Maybe no one appointed us and there were no senate confirmations, but we can secure a nation. When you help just one person to be more secure, a nation is more secure. With just one outstretched hand that says, "Are you OK? I am here for you," we can transform insecurity into security. We find ourselves saying to the world, "What should I do?" "What should we do?" The better question might be: "How am I showing up?" I ask the world for peace, but do I show up with peace when I see my family and friends? I ask the world to end hatred, but do I show up with love not only for those I know, but those I don't know? Do I show up with love for those whose ideas conflict with my own? I ask the world to end suffering, but do I show up for those who are suffering on my street corner? We say to the world, "Please change; we need change." But how do we show up to change our own lives? How do we show up to change the lives of the people in our communities? James Baldwin said, "Everything now, we must assume is in our own hands; we have no right to assume otherwise." This has always been true. No one nominated Harriet Tubman to her purpose, to her mission, to her courage. She did not say, "I'm not a congressman or the president of the United States, so how could I possibly participate in the fight to abolish a system as big as slavery?" She instead spent 10 years making 19 trips, freeing 300 people, one group of people at a time. Think about the children of those 300 people, the grandchildren, the great-grandchildren and beyond. Our righteous acts create immeasurable ripples in the endless river of justice. Whether it's Hurricane Katrina, Harvey, Irma or Maria, people did not say, "There is so much damage. What should I do?" They got to work on what they could do. Those with boats got in their boats and started loading in every woman, man and child they came across. Near and far, people gave their dollars, they gave their cents, they gave their hearts, they gave their spirit. We spend so much time thinking we don't have the power to change the world. We forget that the power to change someone's life is always in our hands. Change-making does not belong to one group of people; it belongs to all of us. You don't have to wait on anyone to tell you that you are in this. Begin. Start by doing what you can with what you've got, where you are and in your own way. We don't have to be heroes, wear a uniform, call ourselves activists or get elected to participate. We just have to be brave enough to care. Now, around the time Thelonious was born, I went to the birthday party of a man named Gene Moretti. It was his 100th birthday, which means he lived in the United States through the Depression, World War II, the struggle for workers' rights, the achievement of a woman's right to vote, the Civil Rights Movement, a man on the moon, the Vietnam War and the election of the first black president. I sat with him, and I said, "Gene, you have lived in America for 100 years. Do you have any advice during these current times?" He smiled and said to me simply, "Yes. Be good to as many people as possible." And as he danced with my mother, who is, by the way, half his age, in a room full of generations of his family and hundreds of people, many of whom traveled thousands of miles to be there to celebrate him, I realized that he had not just given me advice, he had given me the first step that every single one of us is capable of making if we want to create a real, wholehearted impact on the world around us, right now. "Be good to as many people as possible." Thank you. (Applause) |
What comes after tragedy? Forgiveness | {0: 'Azim Khamisa speaks to students and adults on nonviolence, forgiveness and peace-building, and he is a founder of two nonprofit organizations that target youth violence.', 1: 'Ples Felix is a leader in the Tariq Khamisa Foundation, dedicated to helping stop youth violence.'} | TEDWomen 2017 | Azim Khamisa: We humans have many defining moments in our lives. Sometimes these moments are joyous, and sometimes they are heartbreaking, tragic. But at these defining moments, if we are able to make the right choice, we literally manifest a miracle in us and others. My only son Tariq, a university student, kind, generous, a good writer, a good photographer, had aspirations to work for National Geographic, engaged to a beautiful lady, worked as a pizza deliveryman on Fridays and Saturdays. He was lured to a bogus address by a youth gang. And in a gang initiation, a 14-year-old shot and killed him. The sudden, senseless death of an innocent, unarmed human being; the overwhelming grief of a family; the total confusion as you try to absorb a new, hideous reality. Needless to say it brought my life to a crashing halt. One of the hardest things I've ever had to do was to call his mother, who lived in a different city. How do you tell a mother she's never going to see her son again, or hear him laugh, or give him a hug? I practice as a Sufi Muslim. I meditate two hours a day. And sometimes, in deep trauma and deep tragedy, there is a spark of clarity. So what I downloaded in my meditation is that there were victims at both ends of the gun. It's easy to see that my son was a victim of the 14-year-old, a little bit complicated to see that he was a victim of American society. And that begs the question, well, who is American society? Well, it's you and me, because I don't believe that society is just happenstance. I think we are all responsible for the society we've created. And children killing children is not a mark of a civil society. So nine months after Tariq died, I started the Tariq Khamisa Foundation and our mandate at the Tariq Khamisa Foundation is to stop kids from killing kids by breaking the cycle of youth violence. And essentially we have three mandates. Our first and foremost is to save lives of children. It's important to do. We lose so many on a daily basis. Our second mandate is to empower the right choices so kids don't fall through the cracks and choose lives of gangs and crime and drugs and alcohol and weapons. And our third mandate is to teach the principles of nonviolence, of empathy, of compassion, of forgiveness. And I started with a very simple premise that violence is a learned behavior. No child was born violent. If you accept that as a truism, nonviolence can also be a learned behavior, but you have to teach it, because kids are not going to learn that through osmosis. Soon after that, I reached out to my brother here, with the attitude that we had both lost a son. My son died. He lost his grandson to the adult prison system. And I asked him to join me. As you see, 22 years later, we are still here together, because I can't bring Tariq back from the dead, you can't take Tony out of prison, but the one thing we can do is make sure no other young people in our community end up dead or end up in prison. With the grace of God, the Tariq Khamisa Foundation has been successful. We have a safe school model which has four different programs. The first one is a live assembly with Ples and me. We are introduced, this man's grandson killed this man's son, and here they are together. We have in-classroom curriculum. We have an after school mentoring program, and we create a peace club. And I'm happy to share with you that besides teaching these principles of nonviolence, we are able to cut suspensions and expulsions by 70 percent, which is huge. (Applause) Which is huge. Five years after Tariq died, and for me to complete my journey of forgiveness, I went to see the young man who killed my son. He was 19 years old. And I remember that meeting because we were — he's 37, still in prison — but at that first meeting, we locked eyeballs. I'm looking in his eyes, he's looking in my eyes, and I'm looking in his eyes trying to find a murderer, and I didn't. I was able to climb through his eyes and touch his humanity that I got that the spark in him was no different than the spark in me or anybody else here. So I wasn't expecting that. He was remorseful. He was articulate. He was well-mannered. And I could tell that my hand of forgiveness had changed him. So with that, please welcome my brother, Ples. (Applause) Ples Felix: Tony is my one and only daughter's one and only child. Tony was born to my daughter, who was 15 when she gave birth to Tony. Mothering is the toughest job on the planet. There is no tougher job on the planet than raising another human being and making sure they're safe, secure and well-positioned to be successful in life. Tony experienced a lot of violence in his life as a young kid. He saw one of his favorite cousins be murdered in a hail of automatic weapon fire and gang involvement in Los Angeles. He was very traumatized in so many different ways. Tony came to live with me. I wanted to make sure he had everything a kid needed to be successful. But on this particular evening, after years of being with me and struggling mightily to try to be successful and to live up to my expectations of being a successful person, on this one particular day, Tony ran away from home that evening, he went to be with people he thought were his friends, he was given drugs and alcohol and he took them because he thought they would make him feel carefree. But all it did was to make his anxiety go higher and to create a more ... more deadly thinking on his part. He was invited to a robbery, he was given a 9mm handgun. And at the presence of an 18-year-old who commanded him and two 14-year-old boys he thought were his friends, he shot and killed Tariq Khamisa, this man's son. There are no words, there are no words that can express the loss of a child. At my understanding that my grandson was responsible for the murder of this human being, I went to the prayer closet, like I was taught by my old folks, and began to pray and meditate. The one thing that Mr. Khamisa and I have in common, and we didn't know this, besides being wonderful human beings, is that we both meditate. (Laughter) It was very helpful for me because it offered me an opportunity to seek guidance and clarity about how I wanted to be of support of this man and his family in this loss. And sure enough, my prayers were answered, because I was invited to a meeting at this man's house, met his mother, his father, his wife, his brother, met their family and had a chance to be in the presence of God-spirited people led by this man, who in the spirit of forgiveness, made way, made an opportunity for me to be of value and to share with him and to share with children the importance of understanding the need to be with a responsible adult, focus on your anger in a way that's healthy, learn to meditate. The programs that we have in the Tariq Khamisa Foundation provide so many tools for the kids to put in their toolkit so they could carry them throughout their lives. It's important that our children understand that loving, caring adults care for them and support them, but it's also important that our children learn to meditate, learn to be peaceful, learn to be centered and learn to interact with the other children in a kind, empathetic and wonderfully loving way. We need more love in our society and that's why we are here to share the love with children, because our children will lead the way for us, because all of us will depend on our children. As we grow older and retire, they will take over this world for us, so as much love as we teach them, they will give it back to us. Blessings. Thank you. (Applause) AK: So I was born in Kenya, I was educated in England, and my brother here is a Baptist. I practice as a Sufi Muslim. He's African American, but I always tell him, I'm the African American in the group. I was born in Africa. You were not. (Laughter) And I naturalized as a citizen. I'm a first-generation citizen. And I felt that, as an American citizen, I must take my share of the responsibility for the murder of my son. Why? Because it was fired by an American child. You could take the position, he killed my one and only son, he should be hung from the highest pole. How does that improve society? And I know you are probably wondering what happened to that young man. He's still in prison. He just turned 37 on September 22, but I have some good news. We've been trying to get him out for 12 years. He finally will join us a year from now. (Applause) And I'm very excited to have him join us, because I know we've saved him, but he will save tens of thousands of students when he shares his testimony in schools that we are present at on a regular basis. When he says to the kids, "When I was 11, I joined a gang. When I was 14, I murdered Mr. Khamisa's son. I've spent the last umpteen years in prison. I'm here to tell you: it's not worth it," do you think the kids will listen to that voice? Yes, because his intonations will be of a person that pulled the trigger. And I know that he wants to turn the clock back. Of course, that's not possible. I wish it was. I would have my son back. My brother would have his grandson back. So I think that demonstrates the power of forgiveness. So what's the big takeaway here? So I want to end our session with this quote, which is the basis of my fourth book, which incidentally, the foreword for that book was written by Tony. So it goes like this: sustained goodwill creates friendship. You don't make friends by bombing them, right? You make friends by extending goodwill. That ought to be obvious. So sustained goodwill creates friendship, sustained friendship creates trust, sustained trust creates empathy, sustained empathy creates compassion, and sustained compassion creates peace. I call this my peace formula. It starts with goodwill, friendship, trust, empathy, compassion and peace. But people ask me, how do you extend goodwill to the person who murdered your child? I tell them, you do that through forgiveness. As it's evident it worked for me. It worked for my family. What's a miracle is it worked for Tony, it worked for his family, it can work for you and your family, for Israel and Palestine, North and South Korea, for Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and Syria. It can work for the United States of America. So let me leave you with this, my sisters, and a couple of brothers — (Laughter) that peace is possible. How do I know that? Because I am at peace. Thank you very much. Namaste. (Applause) |
An economic case for protecting the planet | {0: 'Naoko Ishii leads the Global Environment Facility (GEF), a public financial institution that provides around US$1 billion every year to help tackle our planet’s most pressing environmental problems.'} | TEDGlobal>NYC | Good evening, everyone. I am from Japan, so I'd like to start with a story about Japanese fishing villages. In the past, every fisherman was tempted to catch as many as fish as possible, but if everybody did that, the fish, common shared resource in the community, would disappear. The result would be hardship and poverty for everyone. This happened in some cases, but it did not happen in other cases. In these communities, the fishermen developed a kind of social contract that told each one of them to hold back a bit to prevent overfishing. The fisherman would keep an eye on each other. There would be a penalty if you were caught cheating. But once the benefit of a social contract became clear to everyone, the incentive to cheat dramatically dropped. We find the same story around the world. This is how villagers in medieval Europe managed pasture and forests. This is how communities in Asia managed water, and this is how indigenous peoples in the Amazon managed wildlife. These communities realized they relied on a finite, shared resource. They developed rules and practices on how to manage those resources, and they changed their behavior so that they could continue to rely on those shared resources tomorrow by not overfishing, not overgrazing, not polluting or depleting water streams today. This is a story of the commons, and also how to avoid the so-called tragedy of the commons. But this is also a story of an economy that was mainly local, where everybody had a very strong sense of belonging. Our economies are no longer local. When we moved away from being local, we started to lose our connection to the commons. We carried economic objectives, goals and systems beyond the local, but we did not carry the notion of taking care of the commons. So our oceans, forests, once very close to us as our local commons, moved very far away from us. So today, we pump millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the air, we dump plastics, fertilizers and industrial waste into the rivers and oceans, and we cut down forests that absorb CO2. We make the wild biodiversity much more fragile. We seem to have totally forgotten that there is such a thing as global commons: air, water, forests and biodiversity. Now, it is modern science that reminds us how vital the global commons are. In 2009, a group of scientists proposed how to assess the health of the global commons. They defined nine planetary boundaries vital to our survival, then they measured how far we could go before we cross over the tipping points or thresholds that would lead us to the irreversible or even catastrophic change. This is where we were in the 1950s. We broadly remained within safe operating space, marked by the green line. But look at where we are now. We have crossed four of those boundaries, and we will be crossing others in the future. How did we end up in this situation? Well, my personal story may tell us something. Five years ago, I was appointed as CEO of the GEF, Global Environment Facility, but I am not a conservationist or an environmental activist. I am an economist, and for the last 30 years, I had worked for public finance in my home country and around the world. I can tell you one thing for sure: during these 30 years, the notion of the global commons never crossed my mind. I didn't have a single conversation about the global commons with my colleagues. This tells me that the notion of the global commons was not really entering into the big money decisions like state budgets or investment plans. And I'm wondering, why do we have this sheer ignorance about the global commons, including me, myself? One possible explanation might be that until recently, it didn't really matter too much. Even if we mess up some part of the environment, we were not fundamentally changing the functions of the earth system. The global commons had still enough capacity to take the punches we gave them. In fact, the fish were still plentiful, the fields for grazing were still vast. Our mistake was to assume that the capacity of the earth for self-repair had no limits. It does have limits. The message from the science is very clear: we humans have become an overwhelming force to determine the future living conditions on earth, and what's more, we are running out of time. If we don't act on them, we will be losing the global commons. It's only our generation who are able to preserve it — preserve the commons as we know them. Now is the time we start managing the global commons as our parents or our grandparents managed their local commons. The first thing we need to do is to simply recognize that we do have the global commons and they are very, very important. Then we need to build the stewardship of the global commons into all of our thinking, our business, our economy, our policy-making — in all of our actions. We need to recreate the social contract of the fishing villages on the global scale. But what does it mean in practice? Where to start with? I see there are four key economic systems that fundamentally need to change. First, we need to change our cities. By 2050, two thirds of our population will live in cities. We need green cities. Second, we need to change our energy system. The world economy must sharply decarbonize, essentially in one generation. Third, we need to change our production-consumption system. We need to break away from current take-make-waste consumption patterns. And finally, we need to change our food system, what to eat and how to produce it. And all of those four systems are putting enormous pressure on the global commons, and it's also very difficult to flip them. They are extremely complex, with many decision-makers, actors involved. Let's take the example of the food system. Food production is currently responsible for one quarter of greenhouse gas emissions. It is also a main user of the world's water resources. In fact, 70 percent of today's water is used to grow crops. Vast areas of tropical forest are used for agriculture. This deforestation drives extinction. In fact, we are losing species 1,000 times faster than the natural rate. And on top of all of that bad news, one third of food produced today globally is not eaten. It's wasted. But there is the good news, good signs. Coalitions of stakeholders are now coming together to try to transform the food system with one shared goal: how to produce enough healthy food for everyone, at the same time, to try to cut, to sharply reduce, the footprint from the food system on the global commons. I had an opportunity to fly over the Indonesian island of Sumatra, and I saw with my own eyes the massive deforestation to make room for palm oil plantations. By the way, palm oil is included in thousands of food products we eat every day. The global demand for palm oil is just increasing. In Sumatra, I met smallholder farmers who need to make a day-to-day living from growing oil palm. I met global food companies, financial institutions and local government officials. All of them told me that they can't make the change by themselves, and only by working together under a kind of new contract, or a new practice, do they have a chance to protect tropical forests. So it's so encouraging to see, at least for the last few years, this new coalition among these committed actors along the supply chain come together to try to transform the food system. In fact, what they are trying to do is to create a new kind of social contract to manage the global commons. All changes start at home, at your place and at my place. At GEF, Global Environment Facility, we have now a new strategy, and we put the global commons at its center. I hope we won't be the only ones. If everybody stays on the sidelines, waiting for others to step in, the global commons will continue to deteriorate, and everybody will be much worse off. We need to save ourselves from the tragedy of the commons. So, I invite all of you to embrace the global commons. Please do remember that global commons do exist and are waiting for your stewardship. We all share one planet in common. We breathe the same air, we drink the same water, we depend on the same oceans, forests, and biodiversity. There is no space left on earth for egoism. The global commons must be kept within their safe operating space, and we can only do it together. Thank you so much. (Applause) |
The dangerous evolution of HIV | {0: 'TED Fellow Edsel Salvaña studies the genetics of HIV, and he worries that we are just a few mutations away from the next deadly pandemic.'} | TEDGlobal 2017 | The Philippines: an idyllic country with some of the clearest water and bluest skies on the planet. It is also the epicenter of one of the fastest-growing HIV epidemics in the world. On the surface, it seems as if we are just a late bloomer. However, the reasons for our current epidemic are much more complicated and may foreshadow a global resurgence of HIV. While overall new cases of HIV continue to drop in the world, this trend may be short-lived when the next wave of more aggressive and resistant viruses arrive. HIV has a potential to transform itself into a new and different virus every time it infects a cell. Despite the remarkable progress we've made in reversing the epidemic, the truth is that we are just a few viral mutations away from disaster. To appreciate the profound way in which HIV transforms itself every time it reproduces, let's make a genetic comparison. If we look at the DNA variation among humans of different races from different continents, the actual DNA difference is only 0.1 percent. If we look at the genetic difference between humans, great apes, and rhesus macaques, that number is seven percent. In contrast, the genetic difference between HIV subtypes from different patients may be as much as 35 percent. Within a person infected with HIV, the genetic difference between an infecting mother virus and subsequent daughter viruses has been shown to be as much as five percent. This is the equivalent of a gorilla giving birth to a chimpanzee, then to an orangutan, then to a baboon, then to any random great ape within its lifetime. There are nearly 100 subtypes of HIV, with new subtypes being discovered regularly. HIV in the developed world is almost all of one subtype: subtype B. Mostly everything we know and do to treat HIV is based on studies on subtype B, even though it only accounts for 12 percent of the total number of cases of HIV in the world. But because of the profound genetic difference among different subtypes, some subtypes are more likely to become drug-resistant or progress to AIDS faster. We discovered that the explosion of HIV cases in the Philippines is due to a shift from the Western subtype B to a more aggressive Southeast Asian subtype AE. We are seeing younger and sicker patients with high rates of drug resistance. Initial encroachment of this subtype is already occurring in developed countries, including Australia, Canada and the United States. We may soon see a similar explosion of cases in these countries. And while we think that HIV is done and that the tide has turned for it, just like with real tides, it can come right back. In the early 1960s, malaria was on the ropes. As the number of cases dropped, people and governments stopped paying attention. The result was a deadly resurgence of drug-resistant malaria. We need to think of HIV not as a single virus that we think we've figured out, but as a collection of rapidly evolving and highly unique viruses, each of which can set off the next deadly epidemic. We are incorporating more powerful and new tools to help us detect the next deadly HIV strain, and this needs to go hand in hand with urgent research on the behavior and proper treatment of non-B subtypes. We need to convince our governments and our funding agencies that HIV is not yet done. Over 35 million people have died of HIV. We are on the verge of an AIDS-free generation. We need to pay attention. We need to remain vigilant and follow through. Otherwise, millions more will die. Thank you. (Applause) |
The business benefits of doing good | {0: "Wendy Woods is a Senior Partner and Managing Director of The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Global Leader of BCG's Social Impact practice, which she helped create. "} | TED@BCG Milan | A few years ago, all the developed countries in the world — the wealthier ones — and all of the charities together donated about 200 billion dollars to developing countries in the world — the ones that bear most of the burden, the heaviest burden of the world's biggest problems: poverty, hunger, climate change and inequality. That same year, businesses invested in those same countries 3.7 trillion dollars. Now, I get to travel a lot in my work and I'm privileged to see the amazing things that NGOs and some governments are doing with some of that 200 billion dollars: helping malnourished children or families that don't have access to clean water, children who wouldn't be educated otherwise. But it's not enough because the biggest problems in our world need trillions not just billions. So if we're going to make lasting and significant progress in the big challenges in our world, we need business, both the companies and the investors, to drive the solutions. So let's talk about what business should do. And when I say that, you probably think that I'm going to talk about corporate philanthropy or corporate social responsibility. CSR is the norm today, and it's very useful. It provides a route for corporate generosity and that generosity is important to many corporations' employees and customers. But you know what? It's just not big enough, or strong enough, or durable enough to drive solutions to the biggest problems in our world today because it's incremental cost. Even when business is booming, CSR just isn't designed to scale. And then of course in a downturn, it's one of the first programs to be cut. So no, CSR — corporate social responsibility — isn't the answer, but TSI — total societal impact, is. TSI is the sum of all of the ways business can affect society by doing the real work: thinking about their supply chains, working on their product design and manufacturing processes and their distribution. The real work of business, when done with innovation, can actually create core business benefits for the company and it can solve the meaningful problems in our world today. So what does TSI look like? Focusing on TSI means incorporating social and environmental considerations. And you know what? It's something that isn't completely new. It's been thought about for a while. But the hard part is that corporations almost exclusively still think about something called TSR: total shareholder returns. But TSI — total societal impact — needs to stand alongside TSR as an important and valid driver of corporate strategy and corporate decision-making. And we've got the data to show you why and how. Some companies are already making this happen. They're beginning to make it happen. So let me tell you the story about Mars. Mars is the sixth-largest private company in the United States. If you're like me, they make some important products, like coffee and chocolate. So not surprisingly, one of their most important ingredients is cocoa. And some of their competitors are actually really worried about the sustainability and the availability of cocoa supplies. But not Mars. They're confident in the stable supply of that crop for the long term. And why is that? It's because they partner with NGOs around the world that are working with small shareholder farmers. And those certification agency's NGOs are working to help farmers improve crop yields, they're making sure that they get a fair, premium, livable wage and they're helping them address any human rights potential issues in supply chains, and they're helping minimize the effects on the environment, like deforestation. Mars is on a path to 100 percent certified cocoa, so this is a good program for farming communities, it's a good program for the environment, and it's a good program for Mars, who has solved a significant risk in their supply chain. But now let's get to the data, because it's actually really awesome. And let me explain exactly what the data points I'm going to talk about are. When analysts and financial people look at companies, they think about a lot of different statistics. I want to talk about two of the most important ones. I'm going to talk about the overall value of a company — its valuation — and I'm going to talk about its margin. Basically the difference between all of its earnings and all of its costs. So in our study, we looked at oil and gas companies, and the oil and gas companies that are performing most strongly on TSI — total societal impact — see a 19 percent premium on their valuation. 19 percent. When they do really well on things like minimizing the impact of their company on the environment and water, and when they have very strong occupational health and safety programs. And when they also add in strong employee training programs, they get a 3.4 percentage point premium on their margins. But what about other industries? Biopharmaceutical companies that are the strongest performers on TSI see a 12 percent premium on their valuation. And then if they're best at expanded access to medicines — making medicines available for the people who need them — they see a 6.7 percentage point premium on their gross margins. For the retail banks that are strongest on TSI, they see a three percentage point premium on their valuation, and then for those that differentially provide financial inclusion — access to financial products for people who need it — they see a 0.5 percentage point premium in their net income margin. Now, these numbers for banks may not seem very big, but in highly competitive industries, even really small differences in margin matter a lot. Now, what about those consumer goods companies — the ones who make those products we love like coffee and chocolate? Consumer goods companies that perform best on total societal impact see an 11 percent valuation premium. And then if they do those smart things with their supply chain — inclusive and responsibly sourcing their product — they see a 4.8 percentage point premium on their gross margins. These numbers are significant. We've long known that things like fundamental financials, growth rates and financial risks are key drivers of valuation, but this rigorous analysis shows that social and environmental factors — total societal impact measures — are also linked to valuations and margins. Wow. All else equal — we didn't confuse the analysis with anything. All else being equal, companies that perform strongly on social and environmental areas achieve higher margins and higher valuations. Now, I do understand that companies are under a lot of short-term earnings pressures. But fortunately, the investors who create some of this pressure are actually more and more themselves starting to think longer-term and starting to think with this TSI lens. In our conversations and surveys with investors, 75 percent of them say they expect to see improved revenues and improved operating efficiency for companies that are thinking with a TSI lens. And they're actually starting to incorporate this in their own investing behavior. Last year, 23 trillion in global assets were in the category of socially responsible investing. Now, that's five billion over just the last two years. And it represents a quarter of the total global assets managed in the world. I know that some of you may be cringing a little bit right now. Because in my decades of strategy consulting with businesses and NGOs and governments around the world, I find that many businesspeople are hesitant to talk or even sometimes think about the business benefits of doing good. They somehow think it's going to negate the value of the benefits they're creating for society. Or that they'll be perceived as heartless or even mercenary. But we really do need to think differently. We need to think differently because the only way we're going to make substantial progress on the challenging problems of our time is for business to drive the solutions. The job of business is to meet customer needs and to do so profitably. They need to to survive. So one of the best ways for businesses to help ensure their own growth, their own longevity, is to meet some of the hardest challenges in our society and to do so profitably. And when they do that innovatively, when they do that ethically, responsibly, incredibly, they should be proud. But if you still aren't sure about this, let's talk about a few more examples. What if you're a technology company and you're trying to grow your platform and you're trying to grow your customers? Like, Airbnb. Airbnb has a portfolio of total societal impact activities. They're all spot-on their core business. In one initiative, they're helping enable their community to provide housing for free to those in disaster: crisis survivors and relief workers. In another effort on their part, they're actually helping and working with NGOs to ensure that people can provide housing for free for refugees. Now, what I love about this program is that I don't think most people would've figured out how to express their generosity and open their homes for those in such dire need — certainly not so quickly or so easily or efficiently — without this innovation by Airbnb. But at the same time, this is core to their corporate strategy and core to their growth because they grow by increasing the number of hosts and guests using their platform. But if they'd only been thinking exclusively about the return side of things, I'm not sure they would have ever figured out this route to growth, because they're not charging transaction fees. So it's a pretty exciting way, when they were thinking about how to bring their capabilities to a need in society and at the same time drive their own growth. But what if you're trying to find new customer segments? Let's move to South Africa, and let's talk about Standard Bank. In South Africa, the government has a regulation that requires all banks to donate 0.2 percent of their profits to small and medium black-owned enterprises. And many banks just donate this to the entrepreneurs, but Standard Bank thought creatively. And what they did is they took those funds and they invested them in an independent trust, and they used that trust to fund loans to these black entrepreneurs. This is a highly leveraged model. They can support a lot more entrepreneurs with capital, and because their success is completely intertwined with the success of the entrepreneurs, they're actually also using the fund to provide technical assistance. More entrepreneurs supported, more people and communities being lifted out of poverty. And it's successful for Standard Bank. So successful that they're actually working on expanding this program to other areas in their portfolio. It's not like we haven't been trying to solve the problems in our world for a long time. We have, and they're still here. We're making progress, but it's not far enough, or fast enough, or universal enough. We need to flip our thinking. We need to have business — both companies and investors — bring creative, innovative corporate strategy and capital to solving the biggest problems in our world. And when they do that innovatively, and when they do that with all of their thinking and all of their strategy and all of their capital, and they're creating both total shareholder returns and total societal impact, we know that we will solve those problems, both profitably and generously. Thank you. (Applause) |
Photos of Africa, taken from a flying lawn chair | {0: 'Best known f\xador his exploration photography, George Steinmetz has a restless curiosity for the unknown: remote deserts, obscure cultures and the \xadmysteries of science and technology.'} | TEDGlobal 2017 | I have to tell you, it's more than a little intimidating being up here, an old American guy trying to tell Africans something new about your own continent. But sometimes, an outsider can see things in a different way, like from the air. That's what I found by flying low and slow all over the African continent as I photographed the spectacle of its diversity. And I wasn't always an old guy. (Laughter) This is me in 1979, a kid from California backpacking his way through the Ituri Forest of Zaire. I was on a yearlong hitchhiking trip. I had just dropped out of Stanford University, and I went from Tunis to Kisangani to Cairo and learned how to live on 10 dollars a day. It was an amazing experience for me. I spent about a week in this Dinka cattle camp on the banks of the Nile in South Sudan. The Dinka taught me how to tie papyrus into a shelter, and also I observed how they had adapted their way of life around the migratory needs of their beloved cattle. It was a like a graduate course in ecological ethnography, and I got busy taking notes with a camera. With no money for rides, they often made the Mzungu ride on the roof of the trucks, or in this case, on the top of the train going across South Sudan. I felt like I was riding on the back of an insect going across the enormous tapestry of Africa. It was an incredible view from up there, but I couldn't help but think, wouldn't it be even more amazing if I could fly over that landscape like a bird? Well, that notion stayed with me, and 20 years later, after becoming a professional photographer, I was able to talk National Geographic into doing a big story in the central Sahara, and I came back with a new kind of flying machine. This is me piloting the world's lightest and slowest aircraft. (Laughter) It's called a motorized paraglider. It consists of a backpack motor and a parachute-style wing, and it flies at about 30 miles an hour. With 10 liters of fuel, I can fly for about two hours, but what's really amazing about it is it gives me an unobstructed view, both horizontally and vertically, like a flying lawn chair. My hitchhiker's dream of flying over Africa came true when I spotted these two camel caravans passing out in the middle of the Sahara. The one in the foreground is carrying salt out of the desert, while the one in the background is carrying fodder for the animals heading back in. I realized you couldn't take this kind of picture with a conventional aircraft. An airplane moves too fast, a helicopter would be too loud with too much downdraft, and it dawned on me that this crazy little aircraft I was flying would open up a new way of seeing remote parts of the African landscape in a way that had never really been possible before. Let me show you how it works. (Applause) Thanks. (Applause) This may seem a bit dangerous, but I am not some kind of adventure dude. I'm a photographer who flies, and I only fly to take pictures. My favorite altitude is between 200 and 500 feet, where I can see the world three-dimensionally, but also at a human scale. I find that a lot of what I'd done over the years in Africa, you could try to do with a drone, but drones aren't really made for exploration. They only fly for about 20 minutes of battery life and about three kilometers of range, and all you get to see is what's on a little screen. But I like to explore. I want to go over the horizon and find new things, find weird stuff, like this volcanic caldera in Niger. If you look at the altimeter on my left leg, you'll see that I'm about a mile above takeoff. Flying that high really freaked me out, but if you talk to a pro pilot, they'll tell you that altitude is actually your friend, because the higher you are, the more time you have to figure out your problems. (Laughter) As a rank amateur, I figured this gave me more time to scream on the way back down. (Laughter) To calm myself down, I started taking pictures, and as I did, I became rational again, and I was getting buffeted by a Harmattan wind which was coming out of the upper right hand corner of this picture, and I started to notice how it had filled the entire crater with sand. When I got to the north of Chad, I found a different kind of volcano. These had had their entire exteriors stripped away, and all that was left was the old core, and in the middle of the Sahara, I felt like I was seeing the earth with its living skin stripped away. Much of the Sahara is underlain by an enormous freshwater aquifer. When you go to the basin, sometimes you can see it leaking out. If you were to walk through those palm groves, you could drink fresh water out of your footsteps. But that green lake water? Due to extreme evaporation, it's saltier than seawater and virtually lifeless. In Niger, I was amazed to see how the locals learned how to exploit a different kind of desert spring. Here, they mix the salty mud with spring water and spread it out in shallow ponds, and as it evaporated, it turned into a spectacle of color. My rig is also amazing for looking at agriculture. This picture was taken in southern Algeria, where the locals have learned how to garden in a mobile dune field by tapping into shallow groundwater. I also loved looking at how animals have adapted to the African landscape. This picture was taken in Lake Amboseli, just across the border from here in Kenya. The elephants have carved the shallow lake water up into a network of little pathways, and they're spaced just enough apart that only elephants, with their long trunks, can tap into the most succulent grasses. In Namibia, the zebra have learned how to thrive in an environment that gets no rainfall at all. These grasses are irrigated by the dense coastal fog that blankets the area every morning. And those bald patches out there? They call them fairy circles, and scientists still struggle to understand what causes them. This is Mount Visoke, with a small crater lake in its summit at 3,700 meters. It forms the roof of the Great Rift Valley and also the border between Rwanda and Congo. It's also the center of the reserve for the fabled mountain gorilla. They're actually the big money-maker in Rwanda, and on this side of the border, conservation has become a huge success. Rwanda has the highest rural population density in Africa, and I saw it in almost every corner of the country I went to. I've heard it said that competition for land was one of the things that led to the tensions that caused the genocide of the 1990s. I went back to South Sudan a few years ago, and it was amazing to see how much things had changed. The Dinka were still in love with their cattle, but they had turned in their spears for Kalashnikovs. The cattle camps from above were even more spectacular than I could have imagined, but things had changed there too. You see those little blue dots down there? The Dinka had adapted to the new reality, and now they covered their papyrus shelters with the tarps from UN food convoys. In Mali, the Bozo people have learned how to thrive in the pulsating rhythms of the Niger River. As the rainy season ends and the water subsides, they plant their rice in the fertile bottoms. And that village in the lower right corner, that's Gao, one of the jumping off points for the major trade routes across the Sahara. At the end of the harvest, the Bozo take the leftover rice straw and they mix it with mud to reinforce their roofs and the village mosque. I must have flown over a dozen villages like this along the Niger River, and each one was unique, it had a different pattern. And each mosque was like a sculptural masterpiece, and no two were alike. I've flown all over the world, and nothing can really compare to the cultural diversity of Africa. You see it in every country, from Morocco to Ethiopia, to South Africa, to Mozambique, to South Sudan, to Mali. The array of environments and cultural adaptations to them is really extraordinary, and the history is pretty cool too. From the air, I have a unique window into the earliest waves of colonial history. This is Cyrene on the coastal mountains of Libya, that was founded by the Greeks, in 700 BC, as a learning center, and Timgad, which was founded in what's now Algeria by the Romans in 100 AD. This was built as a retirement community for old Roman soldiers, and it amazed me to think that North Africa was once the breadbasket for the Roman Empire. But 700 years after Timgad was built, it was buried in sand, and even then, the African climate was wetter than it is today. The African climate continues to change, and you see it everywhere, like here in the Gorges de Ziz, where a freak rainstorm came barreling out of the Sahara and blanketed the mountains in snow. I never thought I would see date palms in snow, but the kids that day had a great time throwing snowballs at each other. But it made me wonder, how are Africans going to adapt to this rapidly changing climate going forward? In a continent as dynamic and diverse as Africa, sometimes it seems that the only constant is change. But one thing I've learned is that Africans are the ultimate improvisers, always adapting and finding a way forward. Thank you. (Applause) |
What's it like to be a robot? | {0: 'Leila Takayama conducts research on human-robot interaction. '} | TEDxPaloAlto | You only get one chance to make a first impression, and that's true if you're a robot as well as if you're a person. The first time that I met one of these robots was at a place called Willow Garage in 2008. When I went to visit there, my host walked me into the building and we met this little guy. He was rolling into the hallway, came up to me, sat there, stared blankly past me, did nothing for a while, rapidly spun his head around 180 degrees and then ran away. And that was not a great first impression. The thing that I learned about robots that day is that they kind of do their own thing, and they're not totally aware of us. And I think as we're experimenting with these possible robot futures, we actually end up learning a lot more about ourselves as opposed to just these machines. And what I learned that day was that I had pretty high expectations for this little dude. He was not only supposed to be able to navigate the physical world, but also be able to navigate my social world — he's in my space; it's a personal robot. wWhy didn't it understand me? My host explained to me, "Well, the robot is trying to get from point A to point B, and you were an obstacle in his way, so he had to replan his path, figure out where to go, and then get there some other way," which was actually not a very efficient thing to do. If that robot had figured out that I was a person, not a chair, and that I was willing to get out of its way if it was trying to get somewhere, then it actually would have been more efficient at getting its job done if it had bothered to notice that I was a human and that I have different affordances than things like chairs and walls do. You know, we tend to think of these robots as being from outer space and from the future and from science fiction, and while that could be true, I'd actually like to argue that robots are here today, and they live and work amongst us right now. These are two robots that live in my home. They vacuum the floors and they cut the grass every single day, which is more than I would do if I actually had time to do these tasks, and they probably do it better than I would, too. This one actually takes care of my kitty. Every single time he uses the box, it cleans it, which is not something I'm willing to do, and it actually makes his life better as well as mine. And while we call these robot products — it's a "robot vacuum cleaner, it's a robot lawnmower, it's a robot littler box," I think there's actually a bunch of other robots hiding in plain sight that have just become so darn useful and so darn mundane that we call them things like, "dishwasher," right? They get new names. They don't get called robot anymore because they actually serve a purpose in our lives. Similarly, a thermostat, right? I know my robotics friends out there are probably cringing at me calling this a robot, but it has a goal. Its goal is to make my house 66 degrees Fahrenheit, and it senses the world. It knows it's a little bit cold, it makes a plan and then it acts on the physical world. It's robotics. Even if it might not look like Rosie the Robot, it's doing something that's really useful in my life so I don't have to take care of turning the temperature up and down myself. And I think these systems live and work amongst us now, and not only are these systems living amongst us but you are probably a robot operator, too. When you drive your car, it feels like you are operating machinery. You are also going from point A to point B, but your car probably has power steering, it probably has automatic braking systems, it might have an automatic transmission and maybe even adaptive cruise control. And while it might not be a fully autonomous car, it has bits of autonomy, and they're so useful and they make us drive safer, and we just sort of feel like they're invisible-in-use, right? So when you're driving your car, you should just feel like you're going from one place to another. It doesn't feel like it's this big thing that you have to deal with and operate and use these controls because we spent so long learning how to drive that they've become extensions of ourselves. When you park that car in that tight little garage space, you know where your corners are. And when you drive a rental car that maybe you haven't driven before, it takes some time to get used to your new robot body. And this is also true for people who operate other types of robots, so I'd like to share with you a few stories about that. Dealing with the problem of remote collaboration. So, at Willow Garage I had a coworker named Dallas, and Dallas looked like this. He worked from his home in Indiana in our company in California. He was a voice in a box on the table in most of our meetings, which was kind of OK except that, you know, if we had a really heated debate and we didn't like what he was saying, we might just hang up on him. (Laughter) Then we might have a meeting after that meeting and actually make the decisions in the hallway afterwards when he wasn't there anymore. So that wasn't so great for him. And as a robotics company at Willow, we had some extra robot body parts laying around, so Dallas and his buddy Curt put together this thing, which looks kind of like Skype on a stick on wheels, which seems like a techy, silly toy, but really it's probably one of the most powerful tools that I've seen ever made for remote collaboration. So now, if I didn't answer Dallas' email question, he could literally roll into my office, block my doorway and ask me the question again — (Laughter) until I answered it. And I'm not going to turn him off, right? That's kind of rude. Not only was it good for these one-on-one communications, but also for just showing up at the company all-hands meeting. Getting your butt in that chair and showing people that you're present and committed to your project is a big deal and can help remote collaboration a ton. We saw this over the period of months and then years, not only at our company but at others, too. The best thing that can happen with these systems is that it starts to feel like you're just there. It's just you, it's just your body, and so people actually start to give these things personal space. So when you're having a stand-up meeting, people will stand around the space just as they would if you were there in person. That's great until there's breakdowns and it's not. People, when they first see these robots, are like, "Wow, where's the components? There must be a camera over there," and they start poking your face. "You're talking too softly, I'm going to turn up your volume," which is like having a coworker walk up to you and say, "You're speaking too softly, I'm going to turn up your face." That's awkward and not OK, and so we end up having to build these new social norms around using these systems. Similarly, as you start feeling like it's your body, you start noticing things like, "Oh, my robot is kind of short." Dallas would say things to me — he was six-foot tall — and we would take him via robot to cocktail parties and things like that, as you do, and the robot was about five-foot-tall, which is close to my height. And he would tell me, "You know, people are not really looking at me. I feel like I'm just looking at this sea of shoulders, and it's just — we need a taller robot." And I told him, "Um, no. You get to walk in my shoes for today. You get to see what it's like to be on the shorter end of the spectrum." And he actually ended up building a lot of empathy for that experience, which was kind of great. So when he'd come visit in person, he no longer stood over me as he was talking to me, he would sit down and talk to me eye to eye, which was kind of a beautiful thing. So we actually decided to look at this in the laboratory and see what others kinds of differences things like robot height would make. And so half of the people in our study used a shorter robot, half of the people in our study used a taller robot and we actually found that the exact same person who has the exact same body and says the exact same things as someone, is more persuasive and perceived as being more credible if they're in a taller robot form. It makes no rational sense, but that's why we study psychology. And really, you know, the way that Cliff Nass would put this is that we're having to deal with these new technologies despite the fact that we have very old brains. Human psychology is not changing at the same speed that tech is and so we're always playing catch-up, trying to make sense of this world where these autonomous things are running around. Usually, things that talk are people, not machines, right? And so we breathe a lot of meaning into things like just height of a machine, not a person, and attribute that to the person using the system. You know, this, I think, is really important when you're thinking about robotics. It's not so much about reinventing humans, it's more about figuring out how we extend ourselves, right? And we end up using things in ways that are sort of surprising. So these guys can't play pool because the robots don't have arms, but they can heckle the guys who are playing pool and that can be an important thing for team bonding, which is kind of neat. People who get really good at operating these systems will even do things like make up new games, like robot soccer in the middle of the night, pushing the trash cans around. But not everyone's good. A lot of people have trouble operating these systems. This is actually a guy who logged into the robot and his eyeball was turned 90 degrees to the left. He didn't know that, so he ended up just bashing around the office, running into people's desks, getting super embarrassed, laughing about it — his volume was way too high. And this guy here in the image is telling me, "We need a robot mute button." And by that what he really meant was we don't want it to be so disruptive. So as a robotics company, we added some obstacle avoidance to the system. It got a little laser range finder that could see the obstacles, and if I as a robot operator try to say, run into a chair, it wouldn't let me, it would just plan a path around, which seems like a good idea. People did hit fewer obstacles using that system, obviously, but actually, for some of the people, it took them a lot longer to get through our obstacle course, and we wanted to know why. It turns out that there's this important human dimension — a personality dimension called locus of control, and people who have a strong internal locus of control, they need to be the masters of their own destiny — really don't like giving up control to an autonomous system — so much so that they will fight the autonomy; "If I want to hit that chair, I'm going to hit that chair." And so they would actually suffer from having that autonomous assistance, which is an important thing for us to know as we're building increasingly autonomous, say, cars, right? How are different people going to grapple with that loss of control? It's going to be different depending on human dimensions. We can't treat humans as if we're just one monolithic thing. We vary by personality, by culture, we even vary by emotional state moment to moment, and being able to design these systems, these human-robot interaction systems, we need to take into account the human dimensions, not just the technological ones. Along with a sense of control also comes a sense of responsibility. And if you were a robot operator using one of these systems, this is what the interface would look like. It looks a little bit like a video game, which can be good because that's very familiar to people, but it can also be bad because it makes people feel like it's a video game. We had a bunch of kids over at Stanford play with the system and drive the robot around our office in Menlo Park, and the kids started saying things like, "10 points if you hit that guy over there. 20 points for that one." And they would chase them down the hallway. (Laughter) I told them, "Um, those are real people. They're actually going to bleed and feel pain if you hit them." And they'd be like, "OK, got it." But five minutes later, they would be like, "20 points for that guy over there, he just looks like he needs to get hit." It's a little bit like "Ender's Game," right? There is a real world on that other side and I think it's our responsibility as people designing these interfaces to help people remember that there's real consequences to their actions and to feel a sense of responsibility when they're operating these increasingly autonomous things. These are kind of a great example of experimenting with one possible robotic future, and I think it's pretty cool that we can extend ourselves and learn about the ways that we extend ourselves into these machines while at the same time being able to express our humanity and our personality. We also build empathy for others in terms of being shorter, taller, faster, slower, and maybe even armless, which is kind of neat. We also build empathy for the robots themselves. This is one of my favorite robots. It's called the Tweenbot. And this guy has a little flag that says, "I'm trying to get to this intersection in Manhattan," and it's cute and rolls forward, that's it. It doesn't know how to build a map, it doesn't know how to see the world, it just asks for help. The nice thing about people is that it can actually depend upon the kindness of strangers. It did make it across the park to the other side of Manhattan — which is pretty great — just because people would pick it up and point it in the right direction. (Laughter) And that's great, right? We're trying to build this human-robot world in which we can coexist and collaborate with one another, and we don't need to be fully autonomous and just do things on our own. We actually do things together. And to make that happen, we actually need help from people like the artists and the designers, the policy makers, the legal scholars, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists — we need more perspectives in the room if we're going to do the thing that Stu Card says we should do, which is invent the future that we actually want to live in. And I think we can continue to experiment with these different robotic futures together, and in doing so, we will end up learning a lot more about ourselves. Thank you. (Applause) |
The surprising solution to ocean plastic | {0: "David is founder and CEO of The Plastic Bank, the world’s only organization to monetize plastic waste and provide an opportunity for the world's disadvantaged to collect and trade plastic waste as a currency."} | TED@IBM | We've had it all wrong. Everybody. We've had it all wrong. The very last thing we need to do is clean the ocean. Very last. Yeah, there is a garbage truck of plastic entering the ocean every minute of every hour of every day. And countless birds and animals are dying just from encountering plastic. We are experiencing the fastest rate of extinction ever, and plastic is in the food chain. And I'm still here, standing in front of you, telling you the very last thing we need to do is clean the ocean. Very last. If you were to walk into a kitchen, sink overflowing, water spilling all over the floor, soaking into the walls, you had to think fast, you're going to panic; you've got a bucket, a mop or a plunger. What do you do first? Why don't we turn off the tap? It would be pointless to mop or plunge or scoop up the water if we don't turn off the tap first. Why aren't we doing the same for the ocean? Even if the Ocean Cleanup project, beach plastic recycling programs or any well-meaning ocean plastic company was a hundred percent successful, it would still be too little, too late. We're trending to produce over 300 million ton of plastic this year. Roughly eight million ton are racing to flow into the ocean to join the estimated 150 million ton already there. Reportedly, 80 percent of ocean plastic is coming from those countries that have extreme poverty. And if you live in the grips of poverty concerned, always, about food or shelter or a sense of security, recycling — it's beyond your realm of imagination. And that is exactly why I created the Plastic Bank. We are the world's largest chain of stores for the ultra-poor, where everything in the store is available to be purchased using plastic garbage. Everything. School tuition. Medical insurance. Wi-Fi, cell phone minutes, power. Sustainable cooking fuel, high-efficiency stoves. And we keep wanting to add everything else that the world may need and can't afford. Our chain of stores in Haiti are more like community centers, where one of our collectors, Lise Nasis, has the opportunity to earn a living by collecting material from door to door, from the streets, from business to business. And at the end of her day, she gets to bring the material back to us, where we weigh it, we check it for quality, and we transfer the value into her account. Lise now has a steady, reliable source of income. And that value we transfer into an online account for her. And because it's a savings account, it becomes an asset that she can borrow against. And because it's online, she has security against robbery, and I think more importantly, she has a new sense of worth. And even the plastic has a new sense of value. Hm. And that plastic we collect, and we add value to, we sort it, we remove labels, we remove caps. We either shred it or we pack it into bales and get it ready for export. Now, it's no different than walking over acres of diamonds. If Lise was to walk over acres of diamonds but there was no store, no bank, no way to use the diamonds, no way to exchange them, they'd be worthless, too. And Lise was widowed after the 2010 Haitian earthquake, left homeless without an income. And as a result of the program, Lise can afford her two daughters' school tuition and uniforms. Now, that plastic we sell. We sell it to suppliers of great brands like Marks and Spencer, who have commissioned the use of social plastic in their products. Or like Henkel, the German consumer-goods company, who are using social plastic directly into their manufacturing. We've closed the loop in the circular economy. Now buy shampoo or laundry detergent that has social plastic packaging, and you are indirectly contributing to the extraction of plastic from ocean-bound waterways and alleviating poverty at the same time. And that model is completely replicable. In São Paulo, a church sermon encourages parishioners to not just bring offering on Sunday, but the recycling, too. We then match the church with the poor. Or, I believe more powerfully, we could match a mosque in London with an impoverished church in Cairo. Or like in Vancouver, with our bottle-deposit program: now any individual or any group can now return their deposit-refundable recyclables, and instead of taking back the cash, they have the opportunity to deposit that value into the account of the poor around the world. We can now use our recycling to support and create recyclers. One bottle deposited at home could help extract hundreds around the world. Or, like Shell, the energy company, who's invested in our plastic-neutral program. Plastic neutrality is like carbon-neutral. But plastic neutrality invests in recycling infrastructure where it doesn't exist. And it provides an incentive for the poor by providing a price increase. Or — like in the slums of Manila, where the smallest market with a simple scale and a phone can now accept social plastic as a new form of payment by weight, allowing them to serve more people and have their own greater social impact. And what's common here is that social plastic is money. Social plastic is money, a globally recognizable and tradable currency that, when used, alleviates poverty and cleans the environment at the same time. It's not just plastic. It's not recycled plastic, it's social plastic, a material whose value is transferred through the lives of the people who encounter it, rich and poor. Humans have produced over eight trillion kilograms of plastic, most of it still here as waste. Eight trillion kilograms. Worth roughly 50 cents a kilo, we're potentially unleashing a four-trillion-dollar value. See, I see social plastic as the Bitcoin for the earth — (Laughter) and available for everyone. Now the entire ecosystem is managed and supported through an online banking platform that provides for the safe, authentic transfer of value globally. You can now deposit your recyclables in Vancouver or Berlin, and a family could withdraw building bricks or cell phone minutes in the slums of Manila. Or Lise — she could deposit recycling at a center in Port-au-Prince, and her mother could withdraw cooking fuel or cash across the city. And the app adds rewards, incentives, group prizes, user rating. We've gamified recycling. We add fun and formality into an informal industry. We're operating in Haiti and the Philippines. We've selected staff and partners for Brazil. And this year, we're committing to India and Ethiopia. We're collecting hundreds and hundreds of tons of material. We continue to add partners and customers, and we increase our collection volumes every day. Now as a result of our program with Henkel, they've committed to use over 100 million kilograms of material every year. That alone will put hundreds of millions of dollars into the hands of the poor in the emerging economies. And so now, we can all be a part of the solution and not the pollution. And so, OK, maybe cleaning the ocean is futile. It might be. But preventing ocean plastic could be humanity's richest opportunity. Thank you. (Applause) |
The thrilling potential for off-grid solar energy | {0: 'Amar Inamdar works with businesses and entrepreneurs to imagine, create and grow markets that address our biggest social and environmental challenges.'} | TEDGlobal 2017 | There's something really incredible happening. So there's over a billion people who have no access to energy whatsoever across the world, 620 million of them here in Africa. It costs about 1,500 dollars to connect each household up to the grid. If you are going to wait for it, it takes about nine years, on average, and that feels like a lifetime when you're trying to make that happen. That's kind of unbelievable, and it's also unacceptable. So let's do something about it. The lightbulb comes from this idea that you have an energy system that's made up of the ideas of Tesla and the ideas of Thomas Edison. There was an evolution that said it's not just about the lightbulb, it's about the whole system, the whole energy system that goes with that lightbulb, and what happened in that gilded age was the creation of an industrial system that every country around the world has now started to emulate. So to get to the appliances, you need to have power stations. From power stations, you need to have infrastructure, and that infrastructure takes you to the point of having electricity, and you get to the lightbulbs and the appliances that we all take for granted. But the amazing thing, in a way, is that there's a revolution happening in the villages and towns all around us here in East Africa. And the revolution is an echo of the cell phone revolution. It's wireless, and that revolution is about solar and it's about distributed solar. Photons are wireless, they fall on every rooftop, and they generate enough power to be sufficient for every household need. So that's an incredible thing. There's also a problem with it. Up until now, the technology hasn't been there to make it happen, and the mindset has been that we have to have the grid to provide industrial growth and let countries develop and create jobs and industrialize. So we've gotten ourselves to the point where actually the costs of building these grids and following that pattern of development are really unsustainable. If you add up the deficits that all of the utilities run in Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, you get to a number of 21 billion dollars every year to maintain that system and keep it going. So an extraordinary amount of resources that's been put in to creating a system that ultimately we will have to wait a very long time for, and when it comes, it often doesn't come with sufficient robustness to allow us to go down that path to development. So what a shame. But here's what's happening, and here's the opportunity that I think we should all get excited about. So there's a group of companies that have been chipping away at this problem over the last 10 years, and this group of companies have recognized the reality that there's a great big nuclear reactor up there in the sky, and that Africa is more endowed with that solar power that comes from the sky, the sun, than almost any other continent. So the opportunity has come to convert some of that solar power, wireless power, into energy at the household level. And three things have happened at the same time. First, the costs of solar productivity have come down. So putting a panel on your roof and generating power from it, that cost has absolutely collapsed over the last 30 years, and it's gone down by 95 percent. Second, the appliance network. So the group of appliances that we've all gotten used to, we all want and we all need, we all see as part of our everyday lives that give us health and security, those appliances have come down in cost. So if you take the LED lightbulb, for example, a very simple thing, they're now 85 percent less than they were five years ago, and their efficiency, when you compare them to an incandescent bulb, like the lightbulb I showed in the previous slide, is incredible. They give you 10 times the amount of light, and they last 30 times as long. And then the last thing that's happened is of course the cell phone revolution, so we're piggybacking off the cell phone revolution, and we can now make decentralized customers make small payments for bits of equipment and appliances where actually they're now affordable. We can pay them off over a daily or a weekly schedule. So this is an incredible change in the economy that's happening, and it's really opened up something very, very innovative. So I'm going to introduce you to a lady I met with last week. Her name's Susan. It may not look like it, but Susan is a representative of a $27 billion market. 27 billion dollars is what people like Susan spend every year on cell phone charging, flashlight batteries and kerosene to light their homes. So Susan is a proud owner of a small solar system. It's a kit rather than a planetary thing, so a small solar system, and her small solar system allows her to have a couple of lightbulbs, and she's made this transition, this jump, from kerosene into light. She has four or five lights and a radio. It's fantastic, and she talks about it. She talks about her kids doing homework at night because she has light. I'm not sure what the kids feel about that. She talks about the fact that she can go out at 4am and look after the cows, and she's not so worried, but also, with a little twinkle in her eye, she talks about how light turns her house into a home at night. She's not scared of her own house at night, because it has light in it, and I thought that was amazing. So Susan does something that many customers of these companies that I talked about do, and she forces us to innovate. She challenges companies, saying, "I've got the radio and the lights. You know what? I'd like a TV. I'd like to entertain, educate me and my kids. And then I would like to have some hair clippers for my kids, you know, to cut my kids' hair, and I'd love to have a fridge. And she's coined something that the energy world is really hungry to do. The idea that she's coined is the energy ladder. It starts, again, with a lightbulb. Right? And the lightbulb is an idea that we can get our kids to do homework, and very cheap, about five dollars, and we can get it distributed. But then let's go up from there. This is the kit that Susan has: four lightbulbs, radio, maybe a little flashlight, a little solar panel on the roof. And then let's go up again. We can get maybe at about 500 dollars, the previous kit was maybe $150, again, paid for over time, two years to pay it all off, you can get the TV, so the lightbulbs and the TV. And you start to ask yourself, "So where is this headed?" Is this headed here, where we can have distributed systems with the right infrastructure to provide power for our hospitals and our schools? And really how far can this go? And this is the mindset shift that I think is really exciting. How far can we go? Could it get up to here? You know, this is the conceptual design for one of the world's biggest factories, designed to be fully solar-powered and fully off grid. Maybe we can get that. So there's a generation of these companies that are out there doing this work and creating thousands of jobs, creating, selling, tens of thousands of these solar systems, so bringing tens of thousands of families into light, and tackling that big $1 billion problem that I talked about at the beginning, and really innovating. And what they're doing is, they're not only energy companies, they're also credit finance companies, so they're bringing people into an economy. They're retail companies, so they're taking products out to people in the connecting markets. And they're appliance companies, so they're developing extraordinary products that are very efficient and very cheap. So an extraordinary thing is happening out there that's worth recognizing. And where does it take us? From a governmental perspective, from a social perspective, it takes us out to two really big goals. We aspire towards energy access for everybody, and we aspire towards a fully-functioning low-carbon economy. And we're getting to the point where we're seeing the fully-functioning low-carbon economy is not just about getting people onto the grid, it's about getting people onto electricity and doing it in a way that's really dignified. So I want us all to picture it for a moment, really picture what this could mean: [New energy ecosystem] an energy system that's not just about subsistence power, getting the family off the kerosene, but it's actually the full suite of appliances and tools and productivity that we've all gotten used to, so actually energy at a scale that can drive industrial development. And it's the ability to have powerful tools. It's the ability to be productive in the households, as a farmer, or as a carpenter or as a tailor and get your businesses to work and bring you into the economy. And I was working again a couple of days ago with a farmer just outside of Nairobi, small field, and he has an irrigation pump that's run off solar, and he was bragging about how much of a difference it made to his productivity. When we were listening to him, we were asking ourselves, at what point will it be that actually, you will be charging an electric scooter off your rooftop and taking your crops to market with mobility that you've charged yourself, using your own power? And that's an extraordinary thing that's happening, and if you listen to Susan and Francis, you get to this point where you say, "These guys have this extraordinary sense of dignity about the way they're achieving their power, the sense of ownership and the sense of pride, and I'm going to flip into a little tiny video clip, which is from a distributor of one of these companies that I'm talking about. And he puts it better than anyone I've ever heard it. So just listen to this. Martin: So if it does happen that we get to a point where every home has their own independent supply of energy, that will give us the democracy of energy. That's it. And everybody has that choice, and everybody knows when they want to switch it on or off, whether they want to sell access or whether they want to store it. That freedom getting back into the hands of the consumer, that would be the most exciting thing. Amar Inamdar: Brilliant, right? That was Martin, and he has a really wonderful turn of phrase, and what a sense of vision that he captures. So picture that for a moment: every household a proud producer as well as consumer of energy ... the ability to generate power, to share power, to sell power, all coming from your own generating asset sitting on your own property. Maybe even think about crowdsourcing with your neighbors the grid from the ground up, rather than waiting for the government to bring it from the top down. So in Africa, we have this extraordinary opportunity right now, an extraordinary opportunity, to change the world and create an energy system that everybody will be jealous of, and everybody will look to us as the innovators of. And that's the democracy of energy. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Quick question. So it's a really exciting vision. Help us understand, what are the key roadblocks right now? Like, what could make this go faster? AI: So the first one, I think, is really the intermittency of solar power. So the problem is that the sun only shines for 12 hours a day, so you've got darkness for 12 hours a day, and we need to have storage solutions that are better to help us take us down that path. So storage is really one. CA: And those prices are coming down. AI: And those prices are coming down very quickly. Second, the appliance set. So it needs to get more efficient, and it needs to get more diverse. We need to do more of the things we in Africa want to do with the appliance set. CA: DC appliances. AI: DC appliances, and I think there's a real opportunity there, Chris. I think the opportunity is that we could shift some of these 21 billion dollars of subsidies that governments are spending on the current electricity system and we could promote R&D here in Africa to create some of these products, to be some of these entrepreneurs, and make this happen. So create this new system here. CA: And some of the companies themselves, I mean, there's plenty of demand there. What's holding them back from supplying that demand? I mean, some of them talk about, they would like to sell 10x what they can currently sell. AI: Exactly. So for many of these capitals, it's that markets don't price consumer risk very well, and particularly in markets like ours, in emerging markets and here in Africa. So there's not enough working capital coming into this space because the big financiers look at this space and say, "I don't know how to price that risk, so I'm going to stay away from it." And that's holding a lot of these companies back. CA: Well, it's incredibly exciting to picture what could happen here. In my mind, this might be the biggest leapfrog of them all. And thank you for all you're doing and for sharing that vision so powerfully. |
Why I study the most dangerous animal on earth -- mosquitoes | {0: 'Fredros Okumu studies human-mosquito interactions, hoping to better understand how to keep people from getting malaria.'} | TEDGlobal 2017 | I guess because I'm from Tanzania I have a responsibility to welcome all of you once again. Thank you for coming. So, first of all, before we start, how many of you in the audience have been in the past a victim of this bug here? We apologize on behalf of all the mosquito catchers. (Laughter) Ladies and gentlemen, imagine getting seven infectious mosquito bites every day. That's 2,555 infectious bites every year. When I was in college, I moved to the Kilombero River valley in the southeastern part of Tanzania. This is historically one of the most malarious zones in the world at that time. Life here was difficult. In its later stages malaria manifested with extreme seizures locally known as degedege. It's killed both women and men, adults and children, without mercy. My home institution, Ifakara Health Institute, began in this valley in the 1950s to address priority health needs for the local communities. In fact, the name Ifakara refers to a place you go to die, which is a reflection of what life used to be here in the days before organized public health care. When I first moved here, my primary role was to estimate how much malaria transmission was going on across the villages and which mosquitoes were transmitting the disease. So my colleague and myself came 30 kilometers south of Ifakara town across the river. Every evening we went into the villages with flashlights and siphons. We rolled up our trousers, and waited for mosquitoes that were coming to bite us so we could collect them to check if they were carrying malaria. (Laughter) My colleague and myself selected a household, and we started inside and outside, swapping positions every half hour. And we did this for 12 hours every night for 24 consecutive nights. We slept for four hours every morning and worked the rest of the day, sorting mosquitoes, identifying them and chopping off their heads so they could be analyzed in the lab to check if they were carrying malaria parasites in their blood mouthparts. This way we were able to not only know how much malaria was going on here but also which mosquitoes were carrying this malaria. We were also able to know whether malaria was mostly inside houses or outside houses. Today, ladies and gentlemen, I still catch mosquitoes for a living. But I do this mostly to improve people's lives and well-being. This has been called by some people the most dangerous animal on earth — which unfortunately is true. But what do we really know about mosquitoes? It turns out we actually know very little. Consider the fact that at the moment our best practice against malaria are bednets — insecticide treated bednets. We know now that across Africa you have widespread resistance to insecticides. And these are the same insecticides, the pyrethroid class, that are put on these bednets. We know now that these bednets protect you from bites but only minimally kill the mosquitoes that they should. What it means is that we've got to do more to be able to get to zero. And that's part of our duty. At Ifakara Health Institute we focus very much on the biology of the mosquito, and we try to do this so we can identify new opportunities. A new approach. New ways to try and get new options that we can use together with things such as bednets to be able to get to zero. And I'm going to share with you a few examples of the things that my colleagues and myself do. Take this, for example. Mosquitoes breed in small pools of water. Not all of them are easy to find — they can be scattered across villages, they can be as small as hoofprints. They can be behind your house or far from your house. And so, if you wanted to control mosquito larvae, it can actually be quite difficult to get them. What my colleagues and I have decided to do is to think about what if we used mosquitoes themselves to carry the insecticides from a place of our choice to their own breeding habitats so that whichever eggs they lay there shall not survive. This is Dickson Lwetoijera. This is my colleague who runs this show at Ifakara. And he has demonstrated cleverly that you can actually get mosquitoes to come to the place where they normally come to get blood to pick up a dose of sterilants or insecticide, carry this back to their own breeding habitat and kill all their progeny. And we have demonstrated that you can do this and crush populations very, very rapidly. This is beautiful. This is our mosquito city. It is the largest mosquito farm available in the world for malaria research. Here we have large-scale self-sustaining colonies of malaria mosquitoes that we rear in these facilities. Of course, they are disease-free. But what these systems allow us to do is to introduce new tools and test them immediately, very quickly, and see if we can crush these populations or control them in some way. And my colleagues have demonstrated that if you just put two or three positions where mosquitoes can go pick up these lethal substances, we can crush these colonies in just three months. That's autodissemination, as we call it. But what if we could use the mosquitoes' sexual behavior to also control them? So, first of all I would like to tell you that actually mosquitoes mate in what we call swarms. Male mosquitoes usually congregate in clusters around the horizon, usually after sunset. The males go there for a dance, the females fly into that dance and select a male mosquito of their choice, usually the best-looking male in their view. They clump together and fall down onto the floor. If you watch this, it's beautiful. It's a fantastic phenomenon. This is where our mosquito-catching work gets really interesting. What we have seen, when we go swarm hunting in the villages, is that these swarm locations tend to be at exactly the same location every day, every week, every month, year in, year out. They start at exactly the same time of the evening, and they are at exactly the same locations. What does this tell us? It means that if we can map all these locations across villages, we could actually crush these populations by just a single blow. Kind of, you know, bomb-spray them or nuke them out. And that is what we try to do with young men and women across the villages. We organize these crews, teach them how to identify the swarms, and spray them out. My colleagues and I believe we have a new window to get mosquitoes out of the valley. But perhaps the fact that mosquitoes eat blood, human blood, is the reason they are the most dangerous animal on earth. But think about it this way — mosquitoes actually smell you. And they have developed incredible sensory organs. They can smell from as far sometimes as 100 meters away. And when they get closer, they can even tell the difference between two family members. They know who you are based on what you produce from your breath, skin, sweat and body odor. What we have done at Ifakara is to identify what it is in your skin, your body, your sweat or your breath that these mosquitoes like. Once we identified these substances, we created a concoction, kind of a mixture, a blend of synthetic substances that are reminiscent of what you produce from your body. And we made a synthetic blend that was attracting three to five times more mosquitoes than a human being. What can you do with this? You put in a trap, lure a lot of mosquitoes and you kill them, right? And of course, you can also use it for surveillance. At Ifakara we wish to expand our knowledge on the biology of the mosquito; to control many other diseases, including, of course, the malaria, but also those other diseases that mosquitoes transmit like dengue, Chikungunya and Zika virus. And this is why my colleagues, for example — we have looked at the fact that some mosquitoes like to bite you on the leg region. And we've now created these mosquito repellent sandals that tourists and locals can wear when they're coming. And you don't get bitten — this gives you 'round the clock protection until the time you go under your bednet. (Applause) My love-hate relationship with mosquitoes continues. (Laughter) And it's going to go a long way, I can see. But that's OK. WHO has set a goal of 2030 to eliminate malaria from 35 countries. The African Union has set a goal of 2030 to eliminate malaria from the continent. At Ifakara we are firmly behind these goals. And we've put together a cohort of young scientists, male and female, who are champions, who are interested in coming together to make this vision come true. They do what they can to make it work. And we are supporting them. We are here to make sure that these dreams come true. Ladies and gentlemen, even if it doesn't happen in our lifetime, even if it doesn't happen before you and me go away, I believe that your child and my child shall inherit a world free of malaria transmitting mosquitoes and free of malaria. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. (Applause) Thank you. Kelo Kubu: OK, Fredros. Let's talk about CRISPR for a bit. (Laughter) It's taken the world by storm, it promises to do amazing things. What do you think of scientists using CRISPR to kill off mosquitoes? Fredros Okumu: To answer this question, let's start from what the problem is. First of all, we're talking about a disease that still kills — according to the latest figures we have from WHO — 429,000 people. Most of these are African children. Of course, we've made progress, there are countries that have achieved up to 50-60 percent reduction in malaria burden. But we still have to do more to get to zero. There is already proof of principle that gene-editing techniques, such as CRISPR, can be used effectively to transform mosquitoes so that either they do not transmit malaria — we call this population alteration — or that they no longer exist, population suppression. This is already proven in the lab. There is also modeling work that has demonstrated that even if you were to release just a small number of these genetically modified mosquitoes, that you can actually achieve elimination very, very quickly. So, CRISPR and tools like this offer us some real opportunities — real-life opportunities to have high-impact interventions that we can use in addition to what we have now to eventually go to zero. This is important. Now, of course people always ask us — which is a common question, I guess you're going to ask this as well — "What happens if you eliminate mosquitoes?" KK: I won't ask then, you answer. FO: OK. In respect to this, I would just like to remind my colleagues that we have 3,500 mosquito species in this world. Maybe more than that. About 400 of these are Anophelenes, and only about 70 of them have any capacity to transmit malaria. In Africa, we're having to deal with three or four of these as the major guys. They carry most — like 99 percent of all the malaria we have. If we were to go out with gene editing like CRISPR, if we were to go out with gene drives to control malaria, we would be going after only one or two. I don't see a diversity problem with that. But that's personal view. I think it's OK. And remember, by the way, all these years we've been trying to eliminate these mosquitoes effectively by spraying them — our colleagues in America have sprayed with — really bomb-spraying these insects out of the villages. In Africa we do a lot of household spraying. All these are aimed solely at killing the mosquitoes. So there's really no problem if we had a new tool. But having said that, I have to say we also have to be very, very responsible here. So there's the regulatory side, and we have to partner with our regulators and make sure that everything that we do is done correctly, is done responsibly and that we also have to do independent risk assessments, to just make sure that all these processes do not fall into the wrong hands. Thank you very much. KK: Thank you. (Applause) |
The gift and power of emotional courage | {0: 'Harvard Medical School psychologist Susan David studies emotional agility: the psychology of how we can use emotion to bring forward our best selves in all aspects of how we love, live, parent and lead.'} | TEDWomen 2017 | Hello, everyone. Sawubona. In South Africa, where I come from, "sawubona" is the Zulu word for "hello." There's a beautiful and powerful intention behind the word because "sawubona" literally translated means, "I see you, and by seeing you, I bring you into being." So beautiful, imagine being greeted like that. But what does it take in the way we see ourselves? Our thoughts, our emotions and our stories that help us to thrive in an increasingly complex and fraught world? This crucial question has been at the center of my life's work. Because how we deal with our inner world drives everything. Every aspect of how we love, how we live, how we parent and how we lead. The conventional view of emotions as good or bad, positive or negative, is rigid. And rigidity in the face of complexity is toxic. We need greater levels of emotional agility for true resilience and thriving. My journey with this calling began not in the hallowed halls of a university, but in the messy, tender business of life. I grew up in the white suburbs of apartheid South Africa, a country and community committed to not seeing. To denial. It's denial that makes 50 years of racist legislation possible while people convince themselves that they are doing nothing wrong. And yet, I first learned of the destructive power of denial at a personal level, before I understood what it was doing to the country of my birth. My father died on a Friday. He was 42 years old and I was 15. My mother whispered to me to go and say goodbye to my father before I went to school. So I put my backpack down and walked the passage that ran through to where the heart of our home my father lay dying of cancer. His eyes were closed, but he knew I was there. In his presence, I had always felt seen. I told him I loved him, said goodbye and headed off for my day. At school, I drifted from science to mathematics to history to biology, as my father slipped from the world. From May to July to September to November, I went about with my usual smile. I didn't drop a single grade. When asked how I was doing, I would shrug and say, "OK." I was praised for being strong. I was the master of being OK. But back home, we struggled — my father hadn't been able to keep his small business going during his illness. And my mother, alone, was grieving the love of her life trying to raise three children, and the creditors were knocking. We felt, as a family, financially and emotionally ravaged. And I began to spiral down, isolated, fast. I started to use food to numb my pain. Binging and purging. Refusing to accept the full weight of my grief. No one knew, and in a culture that values relentless positivity, I thought that no one wanted to know. But one person did not buy into my story of triumph over grief. My eighth-grade English teacher fixed me with burning blue eyes as she handed out blank notebooks. She said, "Write what you're feeling. Tell the truth. Write like nobody's reading." And just like that, I was invited to show up authentically to my grief and pain. It was a simple act but nothing short of a revolution for me. It was this revolution that started in this blank notebook 30 years ago that shaped my life's work. The secret, silent correspondence with myself. Like a gymnast, I started to move beyond the rigidity of denial into what I've now come to call emotional agility. Life's beauty is inseparable from its fragility. We are young until we are not. We walk down the streets sexy until one day we realize that we are unseen. We nag our children and one day realize that there is silence where that child once was, now making his or her way in the world. We are healthy until a diagnosis brings us to our knees. The only certainty is uncertainty, and yet we are not navigating this frailty successfully or sustainably. The World Health Organization tells us that depression is now the single leading cause of disability globally — outstripping cancer, outstripping heart disease. And at a time of greater complexity, unprecedented technological, political and economic change, we are seeing how people's tendency is more and more to lock down into rigid responses to their emotions. On the one hand we might obsessively brood on our feelings. Getting stuck inside our heads. Hooked on being right. Or victimized by our news feed. On the other, we might bottle our emotions, pushing them aside and permitting only those emotions deemed legitimate. In a survey I recently conducted with over 70,000 people, I found that a third of us — a third — either judge ourselves for having so-called "bad emotions," like sadness, anger or even grief. Or actively try to push aside these feelings. We do this not only to ourselves, but also to people we love, like our children — we may inadvertently shame them out of emotions seen as negative, jump to a solution, and fail to help them to see these emotions as inherently valuable. Normal, natural emotions are now seen as good or bad. And being positive has become a new form of moral correctness. People with cancer are automatically told to just stay positive. Women, to stop being so angry. And the list goes on. It's a tyranny. It's a tyranny of positivity. And it's cruel. Unkind. And ineffective. And we do it to ourselves, and we do it to others. If there's one common feature of brooding, bottling or false positivity, it's this: they are all rigid responses. And if there's a single lesson we can learn from the inevitable fall of apartheid it is that rigid denial doesn't work. It's unsustainable. For individuals, for families, for societies. And as we watch the ice caps melt, it is unsustainable for our planet. Research on emotional suppression shows that when emotions are pushed aside or ignored, they get stronger. Psychologists call this amplification. Like that delicious chocolate cake in the refrigerator — the more you try to ignore it ... (Laughter) the greater its hold on you. You might think you're in control of unwanted emotions when you ignore them, but in fact they control you. Internal pain always comes out. Always. And who pays the price? We do. Our children, our colleagues, our communities. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not anti-happiness. I like being happy. I'm a pretty happy person. But when we push aside normal emotions to embrace false positivity, we lose our capacity to develop skills to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. I've had hundreds of people tell me what they don't want to feel. They say things like, "I don't want to try because I don't want to feel disappointed." Or, "I just want this feeling to go away." "I understand," I say to them. "But you have dead people's goals." (Laughter) (Applause) Only dead people never get unwanted or inconvenienced by their feelings. (Laughter) Only dead people never get stressed, never get broken hearts, never experience the disappointment that comes with failure. Tough emotions are part of our contract with life. You don't get to have a meaningful career or raise a family or leave the world a better place without stress and discomfort. Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life. So, how do we begin to dismantle rigidity and embrace emotional agility? As that young schoolgirl, when I leaned into those blank pages, I started to do away with feelings of what I should be experiencing. And instead started to open my heart to what I did feel. Pain. And grief. And loss. And regret. Research now shows that the radical acceptance of all of our emotions — even the messy, difficult ones — is the cornerstone to resilience, thriving, and true, authentic happiness. But emotional agility is more that just an acceptance of emotions. We also know that accuracy matters. In my own research, I found that words are essential. We often use quick and easy labels to describe our feelings. "I'm stressed" is the most common one I hear. But there's a world of difference between stress and disappointment or stress and that knowing dread of "I'm in the wrong career." When we label our emotions accurately, we are more able to discern the precise cause of our feelings. And what scientists call the readiness potential in our brain is activated, allowing us to take concrete steps. But not just any steps — the right steps for us. Because our emotions are data. Our emotions contain flashing lights to things that we care about. We tend not to feel strong emotion to stuff that doesn't mean anything in our worlds. If you feel rage when you read the news, that rage is a signpost, perhaps, that you value equity and fairness — and an opportunity to take active steps to shape your life in that direction. When we are open to the difficult emotions, we are able to generate responses that are values-aligned. But there's an important caveat. Emotions are data, they are not directives. We can show up to and mine our emotions for their values without needing to listen to them. Just like I can show up to my son in his frustration with his baby sister — but not endorse his idea that he gets to give her away to the first stranger he sees in a shopping mall. (Laughter) We own our emotions, they don't own us. When we internalize the difference between how I feel in all my wisdom and what I do in a values-aligned action, we generate the pathway to our best selves via our emotions. So, what does this look like in practice? When you feel a strong, tough emotion, don't race for the emotional exits. Learn its contours, show up to the journal of your hearts. What is the emotion telling you? And try not to say "I am," as in, "I'm angry" or "I'm sad." When you say "I am" it makes you sound as if you are the emotion. Whereas you are you, and the emotion is a data source. Instead, try to notice the feeling for what it is: "I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad" or "I'm noticing that I'm feeling angry." These are essential skills for us, our families, our communities. They're also critical to the workplace. In my research, when I looked at what helps people to bring the best of themselves to work, I found a powerful key contributor: individualized consideration. When people are allowed to feel their emotional truth, engagement, creativity and innovation flourish in the organization. Diversity isn't just people, it's also what's inside people. Including diversity of emotion. The most agile, resilient individuals, teams, organizations, families, communities are built on an openness to the normal human emotions. It's this that allows us to say, "What is my emotion telling me?" "Which action will bring me towards my values?" "Which will take me away from my values?" Emotional agility is the ability to be with your emotions with curiosity, compassion, and especially the courage to take values-connected steps. When I was little, I would wake up at night terrified by the idea of death. My father would comfort me with soft pats and kisses. But he would never lie. "We all die, Susie," he would say. "It's normal to be scared." He didn't try to invent a buffer between me and reality. It took me a while to understand the power of how he guided me through those nights. What he showed me is that courage is not an absence of fear; courage is fear walking. Neither of us knew that in 10 short years, he would be gone. And that time for each of us is all too precious and all too brief. But when our moment comes to face our fragility, in that ultimate time, it will ask us, "Are you agile?" "Are you agile?" Let the moment be an unreserved "yes." A "yes" born of a lifelong correspondence with your own heart. And in seeing yourself. Because in seeing yourself, you are also able to see others, too: the only sustainable way forward in a fragile, beautiful world. Sawubona. And thank you. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
Could fish social networks help us save coral reefs? | {0: 'TED Fellow Mike Gil conducts field experiments and builds mathematical models to understand how marine ecosystems function. '} | TEDGlobal 2017 | Who here is fascinated by life under the sea? Fantastic. Now, what did we just do? Let's dissect this for a second. The simple action of an individual raising a hand led many others to do the same. Now, it's true that when individuals in a social network have common priorities, it's often beneficial to copy one another. Think back to grade school and dressing like the cool kids made you "cool." But copying behavior is also common in wild animals. For example, some birds copy the alarm calls of other birds to spread information about approaching predators. But could copying behavior in wild animals affect entire ecosystems that we humans depend on? I was led to this question while studying coral reefs, which support millions of people through fisheries and tourism here in Africa and around the world. But coral reefs depend on fish that perform a critical job by eating algae. Because if left unchecked, these algae can kill coral and take over entire coral reefs, a costly change that is difficult or impossible to reverse. So to understand how fish may prevent this, I spy on them while they're eating algae, which can be difficult for them to do in open parts of the reef exposed to predators, some of which, on rare occasion, appear to realize I'm watching them. (Laughter) So clearly, clearly, for reef fish, dining out can be scary. But I wanted to understand how these fish do their job in risky situations. So my colleagues and I put massive video camera stands in a coral reef to remotely monitor entire feeding grounds that produce a lot of algae but are exposed to predators. And this perspective from above shows us the feeding behavior and precise movements of many different fish, shown here with colored dots. And by analyzing thousands of fish movements to and from feeding grounds, we discovered a pattern. These fish, despite being from different species and not swimming in schools, were copying one another, such that one fish entering these dangerous feeding grounds could lead many others to do the same. And fish stayed for longer and ate more algae when they were surrounded by more feeding fish. Now, this could be happening because even simple movements by individual fish can inadvertently communicate vital information. For example, if even one fish sees a predator and flees, this can alert many others to danger. And a fish safely entering feeding grounds can show others that the coast is clear. So it turns out that even when these fish are different species, they are connected within social networks which can provide information on when it's safe to eat. And our analyses indicate that fish simply copying other fish in their social network could account for over 60 percent of the algae eaten by the fish community, and thus could be critical to the flow of energy and resources through coral reef ecosystems. But these findings also suggest that overfishing, a common problem in coral reefs, not only removes fish, but it could break up the social network of remaining fish, which may hide more and eat less algae because they're missing critical information. And this would make coral reefs more vulnerable than we currently predict. So remarkably, fish social networks allow the actions of one to spread to many and could affect entire coral reefs, which feed millions of us and support the global economy for all of us. Now, our discovery points us towards better ways to sustainably manage coral reefs, but it also shows us, we humans are not just affected by the actions of other humans, but we could be affected by the actions of individual fish on a distant coral reef through their simple copying behavior. Thank you. (Applause) |
My failed mission to find God -- and what I found instead | {0: 'Anjali Kumar is a Brooklyn-born, first-generation Indian American author, attorney, advisor, speaker and “idea acupuncturist.”'} | TEDWomen 2017 | A few years ago, I set out on a mission to find God. Now, I'm going to tell you right up front that I failed, which, as a lawyer, is a really hard thing for me to admit. But on that failed journey, a lot of what I found was enlightening. And one thing in particular gave me a lot of hope. It has to do with the magnitude and significance of our differences. So, I was raised in America by Indian parents — culturally Hindu, but practicing a strict and relatively unknown religion outside of India called Jainism. To give you an idea of just how minority that makes me: people from India represent roughly one percent of the US population; Hindus, about 0.7 percent; Jains, at most .00046 percent. To put that in context: more people visit the Vermont Teddy Bear Factory each year than are followers of the Jain religion in America. To add to my minority mix, my parents then decided, "What a great idea! Let's send her to Catholic school" — (Laughter) where my sister and I were the only non-white, non-Catholic students in the entire school. At the Infant Jesus of Prague School in Flossmoor, Illinois — yes, that's really what it was called — we were taught to believe that there is a single Supreme Being who is responsible for everything, the whole shebang, from the creation of the Universe to moral shepherding to eternal life. But at home, I was being taught something entirely different. Followers of the Jain religion don't believe in a single Supreme Being or even a team of Supreme Beings. Instead, we're taught that God manifests as the perfection of each of us as individuals, and that we're actually spending our entire lives striving to remove the bad karmas that stand in the way of us becoming our own godlike, perfect selves. On top of that, one of the core principles of Jainism is something called "non-absolutism." Non-absolutists believe that no single person can hold ownership or knowledge of absolute truth, even when it comes to religious beliefs. Good luck testing that concept out on the priests and nuns in your Catholic school. (Laughter) No wonder I was confused and hyperaware of how different I was from my peers. Cut to 20-something years later, and I found myself to be a highly spiritual person, but I was floundering. I was spiritually homeless. I came to learn that I was a "None," which isn't an acronym or a clever play on words, nor is it one of these. It's simply the painfully uninspired name given to everyone who checks off the box "none" when Pew Research asks them about their religious affiliation. (Laughter) Now, a couple of interesting things about Nones are: there are a lot of us, and we skew young. In 2014, there were over 56 million religiously unaffiliated Nones in the United States. And Nones account for over one-third of adults between the ages of 18 to 33. But the most interesting thing to me about Nones is that we're often spiritual. In fact, 68 percent of us believe, with some degree of certainty, that there is a God. We're just not sure who it is. (Laughter) So the first takeaway for me when I realized I was a None and had found that information out was that I wasn't alone. I was finally part of a group in America that had a lot of members, which felt really reassuring. But then the second, not-so-reassuring takeaway was that, oh, man, there are a lot of us. That can't be good, because if a lot of highly spiritual people are currently godless, maybe finding God is not going to be as easy as I had originally hoped. So that is when I decided that on my spiritual journey, I was going to avoid the obvious places and skip the big-box religions altogether and instead venture out into the spiritual fringe of mediums and faith healers and godmen. But remember, I'm a non-absolutist, which means I was pretty inclined to keep a fairly open mind, which turned out to be a good thing, because I went to a witch's potluck dinner at the LGBT Center in New York City, where I befriended two witches; drank a five-gallon jerrican full of volcanic water with a shaman in Peru; got a hug from a saint in the convention center — she smelled really nice — (Laughter) chanted for hours in a smoke-filled, heat-infused sweat lodge on the beaches of Mexico; worked with a tequila-drinking medium to convene with the dead, who oddly included both my deceased mother-in-law and the deceased manager of the hip-hop group The Roots. (Laughter) Yeah, my mother-in-law told me she was really happy her son had chosen me for his wife. Duh! But — (Laughter) Yeah. But the manager of The Roots said that maybe I should cut back on all the pasta I was eating. I think we can all agree that it was lucky for my husband that it wasn't his dead mother who suggested I lay off carbs. (Laughter) I also joined a laughing yoga group out of South Africa; witnessed a woman have a 45-minute orgasm — I am not making this up — as she tapped into the energy of the universe — I think I'm going to go back there — (Laughter) called God from a phone booth in the Nevada desert at Burning Man, wearing a unitard and ski goggles; and I had an old Indian guy lie on top of me, and no, he wasn't my husband. This was a perfect stranger named Paramji, and he was chanting into my chakras as he tapped into the energy forces of the Universe to heal my "yoni," which is a Sanskrit word for "vagina." (Laughter) I was going to have a slide here, but a few people suggested that a slide of my yoni at TED — even TEDWomen — not the best idea. (Laughter) Very early in my quest, I also went to see the Brazilian faith healer John of God at his compound down in Brazil. Now, John of God is considered a full-trance medium, which basically means he can talk to dead people. But in his case, he claims to channel a very specific group of dead saints and doctors in order to heal whatever's wrong with you. And although John of God does not have a medical degree or even a high school diploma, he actually performs surgery — the real kind, with a scalpel, but no anesthesia. Yeah, I don't know. He also offers invisible surgery, where there is no cutting, and surrogate surgery, where he supposedly can treat somebody who is thousands of miles away by performing a procedure on a loved one. Now, when you go to visit John of God, there are all kinds of rules and regulations. It's a whole complicated thing, but the bottom line is that you can visit John of God and present him with three things that you would like fixed, and he will set the dead saints and doctors to work on your behalf to get the job done. (Laughter) Now, before you snicker, consider that, at least according to his website, over eight million people — including Oprah, the Goddess of Daytime TV — have gone to see John of God, and I was pre-wired to keep an open mind. But to be honest, the whole thing for me was kind of weird and inconclusive, and in the end, I flew home, even more confused than I already started out. But that doesn't mean I came home empty-handed. In the weeks leading up to my trip to Brazil, I mentioned my upcoming plans to some friends and to a couple of colleagues at Google, where I was a lawyer at the time. And I might have mentioned it to a couple more people because I'm chatty, including my neighbor, the guy who works at the local coffee shop I go to each morning, the checkout lady at Whole Foods and a stranger who sat next to me on the subway. I told each of them where I was going and why, and I offered to carry three wishes of theirs down to Brazil, explaining that anyone going to see John of God could act as a proxy for others and save them the trip. And to my surprise, my in-box overflowed. Friends told friends who told friends, and those friends apparently told more friends, other strangers and the guys at their coffee shops, until it seemed that days before I left for Brazil that there was no one who did not have my email address. And at the time, all I could conclude was that I had offered too much to too many. But when I actually reread those messages a few years later, I noticed something completely different. Those emails actually shared three commonalities, the first of which was rather curious. Almost everyone sent me meticulous details about how they could be reached. I had told them, or their friends had told them, that along with the list of the three things they wanted fixed, I needed their photo, their name and their date of birth. But they gave me full addresses, with, like, apartment numbers and zip codes, as if John of God was going to stop by their house and see them in person or send along a package. It was as if, in the highly unlikely event that their wishes were granted by John of God, they just wanted to make sure that they weren't delivered to the wrong person or the wrong address. Even if they didn't believe, they were hedging their bets. The second commonality was just as curious, but far more humbling. Virtually everyone — the stranger on the subway, the guy at the coffee shop, the lawyer down the hall, the Jew, the atheist, the Muslim, the devout Catholic — all asked for essentially the same three things. OK, there were a couple of outliers, and yes, a few people asked for cash. But when I eliminated what were ultimately a handful of anomalies, the similarities were staggering. Almost every single person first asked for good health for themselves and their families. Almost universally, they next asked for happiness and then love, in that order: health, happiness, love. Sometimes they asked for a specific health issue to be fixed, but more often than not, they just asked for good health in general. When it came to happiness, they each phrased it slightly differently, but they all asked for the same specific subtype of happiness, too — the kind of happiness that sinks in and sets down roots in your soul; the kind of happiness that could sustain us, even if we were to lose absolutely everything else. And for love, they all asked for the kind of romantic love, the soul mate that we read about in epic romantic novels, the kind of love that will stay with us till the end of our days. Sorry, that's my husband. Crap! Now I forgot my place. (Laughter) (Applause) So by and large, all of these friends and strangers, regardless of their background, race or religion, all asked for the same things, and they were the same things that I really wanted, the simplified version of the basic human needs identified by social scientists like Abraham Maslow and Manfred Max-Neef. No one asked for answers to the big existential questions or for proof of God or the meaning of life like I had set out to find. They didn't even ask for an end to war or global hunger. Even when they could have asked for absolutely anything, they all asked for health, happiness and love. So now those emails had a third commonality as well. Each of them ended in the exact same way. Instead of thanking me for carting their wishes all the way to Brazil, everyone said, "Please don't tell anyone." So I decided to tell everyone — (Laughter) right here on this stage, not because I'm untrustworthy, but because the fact that we have so much in common feels especially important for us all to hear, especially now, when so many of the world's problems seem to be because we keep focusing on the things that make us different, not on what binds us together. And look — I am the first to admit that I am not a statistician, and that the data I presented to you that I just accumulated in my in-box is more anecdotal than scientific, more qualitative than quantitative. It is, as anyone who works with data would tell you, hardly a statistically significant or demographically balanced sample. But nonetheless, I find myself thinking about those emails every time I reflect back on the bias and prejudice that I've faced in my life, or when there's another hate crime or a senseless tragedy that underscores the disheartening sense that our differences might be insurmountable. I then remind myself that I have evidence that the humbling, unifying commonality of our humanity is that, even when presented with the opportunity to ask for anything at all, most of us want the same things, and that this is true no matter who we are, what name we call our god, or which religion, if any, we call home. I then also note that apparently some of us want these things so badly that we would email a None, a spiritually confused None like me — some might say otherwise confused as well — and that we would seek out this stranger and email her our deepest wishes, just in case there is the remote possibility that they might be granted by someone who is not a god, much less our god, someone who is not even a member of our chosen religion, someone who, when you look at him on paper, seems like an unlikely candidate to deliver. And so now, when I reflect back on my spiritual quest, even though I did not find God, I found a home in this: even today, in a world fractured by religious, ethnic, political, philosophical, and racial divides, even with all of our obvious differences, at the end of the day, and the most fundamental level, we are all the same. Thank you. (Applause) |
Black life at the intersection of birth and death | {0: 'Mwende "FreeQuency" Katwiwa is a storyteller, a truth-teller, a builder and breaker trying to figure out what it means to be human in a world that removes so much of our humanity in order to survive.'} | TEDWomen 2017 | My name is Mwende Katwiwa and I am a poet, a Pan-Africanist and a freedom fighter. I was 23 years old when I first heard about Reproductive Justice. I was working at Women with a Vision, where I learned that Reproductive Justice was defined by Sister Song as: One: A woman's right to decide if and when she will have a baby and the conditions under which she will give birth. Two: A woman's right to decide if she will not have a baby and her options for preventing or ending a pregnancy. And three: A woman's right to parent the children she already has in safe and healthy environments without fear of violence from individuals or the government. I've always wanted to be a mother. Growing up, I heard all about the joys of motherhood. I used to dream of watching my womb weave wonder into this world. See, I knew I was young. But I figured, it couldn't hurt to start planning for something so big, so early. But now, I'm 26 years old. And I don't know if I have what it takes to stomach motherhood in this country. See, over the years, America has taught me more about parenting than any book on the subject. It has taught me how some women give birth to babies and others to suspects. It has taught me that this body will birth kin who are more likely to be held in prison cells than to hold college degrees. There is something about being Black in America that has made motherhood seem complicated. Seem like, I don't know what to do to raise my kids right and keep them alive. Do I tell my son not to steal because it is wrong, or because they will use it to justify his death? Do I tell him that even if he pays for his Skittles and sweet tea there will still be those who will watch him and see a criminal before child; who will call the police and not wait for them to come. Do I even want the police to come? Too many Sean Bells go off in my head when I consider calling 911. I will not take it for Oscar Grant-ed that they will not come and kill my son. So, we may have gotten rid of the nooses, but I still consider it lynching when they murder Black boys and leave their bodies for four hours in the sun. As a historical reminder that there is something about being Black in America that has made motherhood sound like mourning. Sound like one morning I could wake up and see my son as a repeat of last week's story. Sound like I could wake up and realize the death of my daughter wouldn't even be newsworthy. So you can't tell me that Sandra Bland is the only Black woman whose violence deserves more than our silence. What about our other dark-skinned daughters in distress whose deaths we have yet to remember? What about our children whose lives don't fit neatly between the lives of your genders? See, apparently, nothing is a great protector if you come out of a body that looks like this. See, there is something about being Black in America that has made motherhood sound like something I'm not sure I look forward to. I've written too many poems about dead Black children to be naïve about the fact that there could one day be a poem written about my kids. But I do not want to be a mother who gave birth to poems. I do not want a stanza for a son nor a line for a little girl nor a footnote for a child who doesn't fit into this world. No. I do not want children who will live forever in the pages of poetry, yet can't seem to outlive me. (Applause) I was invited to the TEDWomen conference to perform a poem. But for me, poetry is not about art and performance. It is a form of protest. Yesterday, during rehearsal, I was told that there had been two to three recent TED Talks about Black Lives Matter. That maybe I should cut down my TED Talk so it could "just" be about Reproductive Justice. But that poem and this talk is fundamentally about my inability to separate the two. I was 21 years old — (Applause) I was 21 years old when Trayvon Martin was murdered. Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old Black boy, a Black child, reminded me reminded us how little this nation actually values Black life. The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter became the most recognized call for Black people and our children to live in safe environments and healthy communities without fear from violence from individuals or the state or government. Months later, when George Zimmerman was not held responsible for murdering Trayvon Martin, I heard Sybrina Fulton, Trayvon Martin's mother, speak. Her testimony so deeply impacted me that I found myself constantly asking, what would it mean to mother in the United Stated of America in this skin? What does motherhood really mean, when for so many who look like me it is synonymous with mourning? Without realizing it, I had begun to link the Reproductive Justice framework and the Movement for Black Lives. As I learned more about Reproductive Justice at Women With A Vision, and as I continued to be active in the Movement for Black Lives, I found myself wanting others to see and feel these similarities. I found myself asking: Whose job is it in times like this to connect ideas realities and people? I want to dedicate this talk and that poem to Constance Malcolm. She is the mother of Ramarley Graham who was another Black child who was murdered before their time. She reminded me once over dinner, as I was struggling to write that poem, that it is the artist's job to unearth stories that people try to bury with shovels of complacency and time. Recently, Toni Morrison wrote, "In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent. There is no time for self-pity, no room for fear." Yesterday, during rehearsal, when I was told that I should "maybe cut the Black Lives Matter portion from my talk," I found myself fearful for a moment. Fearful that again our stories were being denied the very stages they deserve to be told on. And then I remembered the words I had just spoken. "In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent. There is no time for self-pity. (Applause) There is no time for self-pity. And no room for fear." And I have made my choice. And I am always choosing. Thank you. (Applause) |
6 space technologies we can use to improve life on Earth | {0: 'Danielle Wood designs satellites and space technology applications that contribute to sustainable development. '} | TEDNYC | I was 17 when I chose my career. I was standing outside on a hot summer night in Florida and just a few miles from the ocean. I was waiting for a miracle to happen. That summer, I was privileged to work as an intern at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, and the miracle I was waiting for was the launch of the Columbia Space Shuttle carrying the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, a telescope that would allow scientists to peer into the edge of black holes. The entire sky filled with light. And it was as if it was daytime in the middle of the night. Soon, we could feel the rumble of the engines vibrating in our chests. And it wasn't a miracle; it was the combined effort of a team of thousands of people who worked together to make was seemed impossible a reality. And I wanted to join that team. So I decided to apply to a university where I could study aerospace engineering. And the following year, I started at MIT in my engineering training and joined a student project building space robots. And everything was going as I planned, except I was confused about something important. Now, my confusion arose in my summer breaks. I traveled to a school in Kenya, and there I volunteered with girls ages five to 17, giving them lessons in English and math and science. And they taught me songs in Swahili. And mostly, I just spent time getting to know the girls, enjoying their presence. And I saw that these girls and the leaders in their community, they were overcoming important barriers to allow these girls to have the best possible chances in life. And I wanted to join that team. I wanted to be part of a team that would help break down barriers and improve the lives of girls around the world. But I was worried that studying aerospace engineering wasn't the most useful. I was worried this team in Kenya couldn't use the technology I was learning about space. But thankfully, I still learned that I was wrong. I came back and interned at NASA again, and this time, a mentor taught me that countries like Kenya had been using space technology for decades to improve the lives in their own countries. And then I knew that I could have a career in space and in development. This idea is not new. In fact, in 1967, the nations of the world came together to write the Outer Space Treaty. This treaty made a bold statement, saying, "The exploration and use of outer space should be carried on for the benefit of all peoples, irrespective of their level of economic or scientific development." We have not truly lived up to this ideal, although people have worked for decades to make this a reality. Forces such as colonialism and racism and gender inequality have actually excluded many people from the benefits of space and caused us to believe that space is for the few or the rich or elite. But we cannot afford this attitude, because the world is engaged in a vital mission to improve life for everyone. Our road map for this mission comes from the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. All the member states of the United Nations have agreed that these are priorities between now and 2030. These goals give us our key moments and opportunities of our time — opportunities to end extreme poverty, to insure that everyone has access to food and clean water. We must pursue these goals as a global community. And technology from space supports sustainable development. In fact, there are six space services that can help us pursue the Sustainable Development Goals. Over the next few minutes, let's explore these six services, and see examples of just a few of the goals they help support. You ready? OK. Communication satellites provide access to phone and internet service to almost any location on Earth. This is particularly important during times of disaster recovery. When Typhoon Haiyan struck the Philippines, the local communication networks needed to be repaired, and teams brought in inflatable communication antennas that could link to satellites. This was useful during the time of repair and recovery. Positioning satellites tell us where we are by telling us where they are. Scientists can use this technology to track endangered wildlife. This turtle has been fitted with a system that allows it to receive location information from positioning satellites, and they send the location information to scientists via communication satellites. Scientists can use this knowledge to then make better policies and help determine how to keep these animals alive. Earth observation satellites. They tell us what's going on in our environment. Right now, there are about 150 satellites operated by over 60 government agencies, and these are just those observing the Earth. And meanwhile, companies are adding to this list. Most of the governments provide the data from the satellites for free online. Some of these satellites provide images like this, that show what you would see from a camera. This is an image showing agricultural land in Kansas. However, the majority of the Earth observation satellites don't take pictures at all. They take measurements. And they combine these measurements with complex computer models and make beautiful, global visualizations such as this one, showing the ocean currents and the temperature of the ocean, globally. Or we can look at the salt and smoke and dust in the atmosphere, or the rainfall and snowfall, globally, as well as the annual cycle of vegetation on land and in the ocean. Now, scientists can take this information about the rainfall and the vegetation and use it to understand what areas on Earth are in danger of a famine or a drought and provide that information to aid organizations so they can be prepared with food aid before the hunger becomes severe. In space, we have an orbiting laboratory on the International Space Station. The vehicle and everything inside are in a form of free fall around the Earth, and they don't experience the effect of gravity. And because of this, we call it "microgravity." When astronauts are in the microgravity environment, their bodies react as if they're aging rapidly. Their bones and muscles weaken, and their cardiovascular system and their immune system change. As scientists study how to keep astronauts healthy in space, we can take the exercises and techniques we use for astronauts and transfer them to people on Earth to improve our health here. Often, as we develop technology for astronauts and exploration or for spacecraft, we can also transfer those inventions to improve life on Earth. Here's one of my favorites. It's a water filtration system, and a key component of it is based on the technology to filter wastewater on the space station. It's now being used around the world. Space is also an infinite source of inspiration, through education, through research and astronomy and that age-old experience of stargazing. Now, countries around the world are engaging in advancing their own development by increasing their local knowledge of engineering and science and space. Let's meet some of the world's newest satellite engineers. This is Elyka Abello, from Venezuela. Elyka is training as a satellite engineer as part of her national satellite program in Venezuela. She has designed a software tool that allows her team to better design the power systems for engineering. This is Adel Castillo-Duran, from the Philippines. Adel is both a meteorologist and a satellite engineer, and she uses data from satellites in her weather forecasting. And finally, meet Hala. Hala is from the Sudan, and as she was studying electrical engineering as an undergraduate in Khartoum, she and several students decided to build their own satellite. And later, Hala earned a scholarship to study satellite engineering at the graduate level. These stories that I've shared with you all illustrate that space truly is useful for sustainable development for the benefit of all peoples. But we have more work to do, because there are still barriers that exclude people from space and limit the impact of this technology. For many people, Earth observation data is complex. And satellite communication services are too expensive. And microgravity research just appears to be inaccessible. This is what motivates my work as a professor at MIT's Media Lab. I've recently founded a new research group called Space Enabled. We are working to tear down these barriers that limit the benefits of space. And we're also going to develop the future applications that will continue to contribute to sustainable development. We'll keep on this work until we can truly say that space is for the benefit of all peoples, and we are all space enabled. Thank you. (Applause) |
From death row to law graduate | {0: 'Pete Ouko champions access to justice for inmates and the indolent in Africa.'} | TEDGlobal 2017 | I want to tell you a story about Manson. Manson was this 28-year-old interior designer, a father to a loving daughter, and a son who found himself behind bars due to a broken-down judicial system. He was framed for a murder he didn't commit and was sentenced to the gallows. There were two victims of this murder — the victim who actually died in the murder and Manson, who had been sentenced to prison for an offense which he did not commit. He was locked up in a cell, eight by seven, with 13 other grown-up men for 23 and a half hours a day. Food was not guaranteed that you'd get. And I remember yesterday, as I walked into the room where I was, I imagined the kind of cell that Manson would have been living in. Because the toilet — The row of the small rooms that were there were slightly bigger than the eight-by-seven cell. But being in that cell as he awaited the executioner — because in prison, he did not have a name — Manson was known by a number. He was just a statistic. He did not know how long he would wait. The wait could have been a minute, the executioner could have come the next minute, the next day, or it could have taken 30 years. The wait had no end. And in the midst of the excruciating pain, the mental torture, the many unanswered questions that Manson faced, he knew he was not going to play the victim. He refused to play the role of the victim. He was angry at the justice system that had put him behind bars. But he knew the only way he could change that justice system or help other people get justice was not to play the victim. Change came to Manson when he decided to embrace forgiveness for those who had put him in prison. I speak that as a fact. Because I know who Manson is. I am Manson. My real name is Peter Manson Ouko. And after my conviction, after that awakening of forgiveness, I had this move to help change the system. I already decided I was not going to be a victim anymore. But how was I going to help change a system that was bringing in younger inmates every day who deserve to be with their families? So I started mobilizing my colleagues in prison, my fellow inmates, to write letters and memoranda to the justice system, to the Judicial Service Commission, the numerous task forces that had been set up in our country, Kenya, to help change the constitution. And we decided to grasp at those — to clutch at those straws, if I may use that word — if only to make the justice system work, and work for all. Just about the same time, I met a young university graduate from the UK, called Alexander McLean. Alexander had come in with three or four of his colleagues from university in their gap year, and they wanted to help assist, set up a library in Kamiti Maximum Prison, which if you Google, you will see is written as one of the 15 worst prisons in the world. That was then. But when Alexander came in, he was a young 20-year-old boy. And I was on death row at that time. And we took him under our wing. It was an honest trust issue. He trusted us, even though we were on death row. And through that trust, we saw him and his colleagues from the university refurbish the library with the latest technology and set up the infirmary to very good standards so that those of us falling sick in prison would not necessarily have to die in indignity. Having met Alexander, I had a chance, and he gave me the opportunity and the support, to enroll for a university degree at the University of London. Just like Mandela studied from South Africa, I had a chance to study at Kamiti Maximum Security Prison. And two years later, I became the first graduate of the program from the University of London from within the prison system. Having graduated, what happened next — (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Having graduated, now I felt empowered. I was not going to play the helpless victim. But I felt empowered not only to assist myself, to prosecute my own case, but also to assist the other inmates who are suffering the similar injustices that have just been spoken about here. So I started writing legal briefs for them. With my other colleagues in prison, we did as much as we could. That wasn't enough. Alexander McLean and his team at the African Prisons Project decided to support more inmates. And as I'm speaking to you today, there are 63 inmates and staff in the Kenya Prison Service studying law at the University of London through distance learning. (Applause) These are changemakers who are being motivated not only to assist the most indolent in society, but also to help the inmates and others get access to justice. Down there in my prison cell, something kept stirring me. The words of Martin Luther King kept hitting me. And he was always telling me, "Pete, if you can't fly, you can run. And if you can't run, you can walk. But if you can't walk, then you can crawl. But whatever it is, whatever it takes, just keep on moving." And so I had this urge to keep moving. I still have this urge to keep moving in whatever I do. Because I feel the only way we can change our society, the only way we can change the justice system — which has really improved in our country — is to help get the systems right. So, on 26th October last year, after 18 years in prison, I walked out of prison on presidential pardon. I'm now focused on helping APP — the African Prisons Project — achieve its mandate of training and setting up the first law school and legal college behind bars. Where we are going to train — (Applause) Where we are going to train inmates and staff not only to assist their fellow inmates, but to assist the entire wider society of the poor who cannot access legal justice. So as I speak before you today, I stand here in the full knowledge that we can all reexamine ourselves, we can all reexamine our situations, we can all reexamine our circumstances and not play the victim narrative. The victim narrative will not take us anywhere. I was behind bars, yeah. But I never felt and I was not a prisoner. The basic thing I got to learn was that if I thought, and if you think, you can, you will. But if you sit thinking that you can't, you won't. It's as simple as that. And so I'm encouraged by the peaceful revolutionaries I've heard on this stage. The world needs you now, the world needs you today. And as I finish my talk, I'd just like to ask each and every single one of you here, wonderful thinkers, changemakers, innovators, the wonderful global citizens we have at TED, just remember the words of Martin Luther King. Let them continue ringing in your heart and your life. Whatever it is, wherever you are, whatever it takes, keep on moving. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
How I use Minecraft to help kids with autism | {0: 'Stuart Duncan is the creator of AutCraft, the first Minecraft server for children with autism and their families.'} | TEDxYorkU | My name is Stuart Duncan, but I'm actually probably better known online as "AutismFather." That's me on the internet. I know the resemblance is uncanny. (Laughter) But I'm going to talk a little bit today about Minecraft. That's my Minecraft character. If you don't know the game very well, don't worry too much about it. It's just the medium that I used at the time to fill a need. And what I want to talk about applies to pretty much every situation. So about four years ago, I started a Minecraft server for children with autism and their families, and I called it "Autcraft." And since then, we've been in the news all around the world, on television and radio and magazines. Buzzfeed called us "one of the best places on the internet." We're also the subject of an award-winning research paper called "Appropriating Minecraft as an Assistive Technology for Youth with Autism." It's a bit of a mouthful. But you get the idea, I think. So I want to talk a little bit about that research paper and what it's about, but first I have to give you a little bit of history on how the server came to be. Back in 2013, everybody was playing Minecraft, kids and adults alike, with and without autism, of course. But it was the big thing. But I saw parents on social media reaching out to other parents, asking if their autistic children could play together. And the reason is that when they tried to play on public servers, they kept running into bullies and trolls. When you have autism, you behave a little differently sometimes, sometimes a lot differently. And we all know a little bit of difference is all you really need for a bully to make you their next target. So these terrible, terrible people online, they would destroy everything that they tried to make, they would steal all their stuff, and they would kill them over and over again, making the game virtually unplayable. But the worst part, the part that really hurt the most, was what these bullies would say to these kids. They'd call them rejects and defects and retards. And they would tell these kids, some as young as six years old, that society doesn't want them, and their own parents never wanted a broken child, so they should just kill themselves. And of course, these kids, you understand, they would sign off from these servers angry and hurt. They would break their keyboards, they'd quite literally hate themselves, and their parents felt powerless to do anything. So I decided I had to try and help. I have autism, my oldest son has autism, and both my kids and I love Minecraft, so I have to do something. So I got myself a Minecraft server, and I spent some time, built a little village with some roads and a big welcome sign and this guy and a lodge up on a mountaintop, and tried to make it inviting. The idea was pretty simple. I had a white list, so only people that I approved could join, and I would just monitor the server as much as I could, just to make sure that nothing went wrong. And that was it, that was the whole promise: to keep the kids safe so they could play. When it was done, I went to Facebook and posted a pretty simple message to my friends list, not publicly. I wanted to see if there was any interest in this, and if it really could help. Turns out that I greatly underestimated just how much this was needed, because within 48 hours, I got 750 emails. I don't have that many Facebook friends. (Laughter) Within eight days, I had to upgrade the hosting package eight times, from the bottom package to the most expensive package they had, and now, almost four years later, I have 8,000 names on the white list from all around the world. But the reason I'm up here today to talk to you isn't just because I gave kids a safe place to play. It's what happened while they played. I started hearing from parents who said their children were learning to read and write by playing on the server. At first they spelled things by sound, like most kids do, but because they were part of a community, they saw other people spelling the same words properly and just picked it up. I started hearing from parents who said that their nonverbal children were starting to speak. They only talked about Minecraft, but they were talking. (Laughter) Some kids made friends at school for the first time ever. Some started to share, even give things to other people. It was amazing. And every single parent came to me and said it was because of Autcraft, because of what you're doing. But why, though? How could all of this be just from a video game server? Well, it goes back to that research paper I was talking about. In it, she covers some of the guidelines I used when I created the server, guidelines that I think help encourage people to be their very best. I hope. For example, communication. It can be tough for kids with autism. It could be tough for grown-ups without autism. But I think that kids should not be punished, they should be talked to. Nine times out of ten, when the kids on the server act out, it's because of something that's happened in the day at school or home. Maybe a pet died. Sometimes it's just a miscommunication between two kids. One doesn't say what they're about to do. And so we just offer to help. We always tell the children on the server that we're not mad, and they're not in trouble; we only want to help. And it shows that not only do we care, but we respect them enough to listen to their point of view. Respect goes a long way. Plus, it shows them that they have everything they need to be able to resolve these problems on their own in the future and maybe even avoid them, because, you know, communication. On most servers, as video games are, children are rewarded, well, players are rewarded, for how well they do in a competition, right? The better you do, the better reward you get. That can be automated; the server does the work, the code is there. On Autcraft, we don't do that. We have things like "Player of the Week" and "CBAs," which is "Caught Being Awesome." (Laughter) We award players ranks on the servers based on the attributes they exhibit, such as the "Buddy" rank for people who are friendly towards others, and "Junior Helper" for people that are helpful towards others. We have "Senior Helper" for the adults. But they're obvious, right? Like, people know what to expect and how to earn these things because of how they're named. As soon as somebody signs onto the server, they know that they're going to be rewarded for who they are and not what they can do. Our top award, the AutismFather Sword, which is named after me because I'm the founder, is a very powerful sword that you can't get in the game any other way than to show that you completely put the community above yourself, and that compassion and kindness is at the core of who you are. We've given away quite a few of those swords, actually. I figure, if we're watching the server to make sure nothing bad happens, we should also watch for the good things that happen and reward people for them. We're always trying to show all the players that everybody is considered to be equal, even me. But we know we can't treat people equally to do that. Some of the players get angry very easily. Some of them have additional struggles on top of autism, such as OCD or Tourette's. So, I have this knack of remembering all of the players. I remember their first day, the conversations we've had, things we've talked about, things they've built. So when somebody comes to me with a problem, I handle that situation differently than I would with any other player, based on what I know about them. For the other admins and helpers, we document everything so that, whether it's good or bad or a concerning conversation, it's there, so everybody is aware. I want to give you one example of this one player. He was with us for a little while, but at some point he started spamming dashes in the chat, like a big long line of dashes all the way across the screen. A little while later, he'd do it again. The other players asked him not to do that, and he'd say, "OK." And then he'd do it again. It started to frustrate the other players. They asked me to mute him or to punish him for breaking the rules, but I knew there had to be something more to it. So I went to his aunt, who is the contact that I have for him. She explained that he had gone blind in one eye and was losing his vision in the other. So what he was doing was splitting up the chat into easier-to-see blocks of text, which is pretty smart. So that very same night, I talked to a friend of mine who writes code and we created a brand-new plug-in for the server that makes it so that any player on the server, including him, of course, could just enter a command and instantly have every single line separated by dashes. Plus, they can make it asterisks or blank lines or anything they want — whatever works best for them. We even went a little bit extra and made it so it highlights your name, so that it's easier to see if somebody mentions you. It's just one example of how doing a little bit extra, a small modification, still helps everybody be on equal footing, even though you did a little extra just for that one player. The big one is to be not afraid. The children on my server are not afraid. They are free to just be themselves, and it's because we support and encourage and celebrate each other. We all know what it feels like to be the outcast and to be hated simply for existing, and so when we're together on the server, we're not afraid anymore. For the first two years or so on the server, I talked to two children per week on average that were suicidal. But they came to me because I'm the one that made them feel safe. They felt like I was the only person in the world they could talk to. So I guess my message is: whether you have a charity or some other organization, or you're a teacher or a therapist or you're a parent who is just doing your very best, or you're an autistic, like I am, no matter who you are, you absolutely must help these children strip away those fears before you do anything else, because anything else is going to feel forced unless they're not afraid. It's why positive reinforcement will always do better than any form of punishment. They want to learn when they feel safe and happy. It just happens naturally; they don't even try to learn. These are words from the kids on the server to describe the server. The one thing I would hope that you could take away is that no matter what somebody else is going through in life right now, whether they're being bullied at school or at home, if they're questioning their sexuality or even their gender, which happens a lot in the autism community, if they're feeling alone or even suicidal, you have to live your life in such a way that that person feels like they can come to and tell you. They have to feel perfectly safe in talking to you about it. If you want to see a group of autistic children — kids who society wrongly thinks are supposed to be antisocial and lacking in empathy — if you want to see them come together and build the most compassionate and friendly and generous community you've ever seen, the kind of place that people would write about as one of the best places on the internet, they'll do that. I've seen it. I'm there every day. But they have some huge obstacles that they have to overcome to do that, and it would be really helpful to have somebody there who could help to show them that the only thing they really have to fear is self-doubt. So I guess I'm asking you to please be that person for them, because to them, those kids — it means everything. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How to fix a broken heart | {0: 'Guy Winch asks us to take our emotional health as seriously as we take our physical health -- and explores how to heal from common heartaches.'} | TED2017 | At some point in our lives, almost every one of us will have our heart broken. My patient Kathy planned her wedding when she was in middle school. She would meet her future husband by age 27, get engaged a year later and get married a year after that. But when Kathy turned 27, she didn't find a husband. She found a lump in her breast. She went through many months of harsh chemotherapy and painful surgeries, and then just as she was ready to jump back into the dating world, she found a lump in her other breast and had to do it all over again. Kathy recovered, though, and she was eager to resume her search for a husband as soon as her eyebrows grew back in. When you're going on first dates in New York City, you need to be able to express a wide range of emotions. (Laughter) Soon afterwards, she met Rich and fell in love. The relationship was everything she hoped it would be. Six months later, after a lovely weekend in New England, Rich made reservations at their favorite romantic restaurant. Kathy knew he was going to propose, and she could barely contain her excitement. But Rich did not propose to Kathy that night. He broke up with her. As deeply as he cared for Kathy — and he did — he simply wasn't in love. Kathy was shattered. Her heart was truly broken, and she now faced yet another recovery. But five months after the breakup, Kathy still couldn't stop thinking about Rich. Her heart was still very much broken. The question is: Why? Why was this incredibly strong and determined woman unable to marshal the same emotional resources that got her through four years of cancer treatments? Why do so many of us flounder when we're trying to recover from heartbreak? Why do the same coping mechanisms that get us through all kinds of life challenges fail us so miserably when our heart gets broken? In over 20 years of private practice, I have seen people of every age and background face every manner of heartbreak, and what I've learned is this: when your heart is broken, the same instincts you ordinarily rely on will time and again lead you down the wrong path. You simply cannot trust what your mind is telling you. For example, we know from studies of heartbroken people that having a clear understanding of why the relationship ended is really important for our ability to move on. Yet time and again, when we are offered a simple and honest explanation like the one Rich offered Kathy, we reject it. Heartbreak creates such dramatic emotional pain, our mind tells us the cause must be equally dramatic. And that gut instinct is so powerful, it can make even the most reasonable and measured of us come up with mysteries and conspiracy theories where none exist. Kathy became convinced something must have happened during her romantic getaway with Rich that soured him on the relationship, and she became obsessed with figuring out what that was. And so she spent countless hours going through every minute of that weekend in her mind, searching her memory for clues that were not there. Kathy's mind tricked her into initiating this wild goose chase. But what compelled her to commit to it for so many months? Heartbreak is far more insidious than we realize. There is a reason we keep going down one rabbit hole after another, even when we know it's going to make us feel worse. Brain studies have shown that the withdrawal of romantic love activates the same mechanisms in our brain that get activated when addicts are withdrawing from substances like cocaine or opioids. Kathy was going through withdrawal. And since she could not have the heroin of actually being with Rich, her unconscious mind chose the methadone of her memories with him. Her instincts told her she was trying to solve a mystery, but what she was actually doing was getting her fix. This is what makes heartbreak so difficult to heal. Addicts know they're addicted. They know when they're shooting up. But heartbroken people do not. But you do now. And if your heart is broken, you cannot ignore that. You have to recognize that, as compelling as the urge is, with every trip down memory lane, every text you send, every second you spend stalking your ex on social media, you are just feeding your addiction, deepening your emotional pain and complicating your recovery. Getting over heartbreak is not a journey. It's a fight, and your reason is your strongest weapon. There is no breakup explanation that's going to feel satisfying. No rationale can take away the pain you feel. So don't search for one, don't wait for one, just accept the one you were offered or make up one yourself and then put the question to rest, because you need that closure to resist the addiction. And you need something else as well: you have to be willing to let go, to accept that it's over. Otherwise, your mind will feed on your hope and set you back. Hope can be incredibly destructive when your heart is broken. Heartbreak is a master manipulator. The ease with which it gets our mind to do the absolute opposite of what we need in order to recover is remarkable. One of the most common tendencies we have when our heart is broken is to idealize the person who broke it. We spend hours remembering their smile, how great they made us feel, that time we hiked up the mountain and made love under the stars. All that does is make our loss feel more painful. We know that. Yet we still allow our mind to cycle through one greatest hit after another, like we were being held hostage by our own passive-aggressive Spotify playlist. (Laughter) Heartbreak will make those thoughts pop into your mind. And so to avoid idealizing, you have to balance them out by remembering their frown, not just their smile, how bad they made you feel, the fact that after the lovemaking, you got lost coming down the mountain, argued like crazy and didn't speak for two days. What I tell my patients is to compile an exhaustive list of all the ways the person was wrong for you, all the bad qualities, all the pet peeves, and then keep it on your phone. (Laughter) And once you have your list, you have to use it. When I hear even a hint of idealizing or the faintest whiff of nostalgia in a session, I go, "Phone, please." (Laughter) Your mind will try to tell you they were perfect. But they were not, and neither was the relationship. And if you want to get over them, you have to remind yourself of that, frequently. None of us is immune to heartbreak. My patient Miguel was a 56-year-old senior executive in a software company. Five years after his wife died, he finally felt ready to start dating again. He soon met Sharon, and a whirlwind romance ensued. They introduced each other to their adult children after one month, and they moved in together after two. When middle-aged people date, they don't mess around. It's like "Love, Actually" meets "The Fast and the Furious." (Laughter) Miguel was happier than he had been in years. But the night before their first anniversary, Sharon left him. She had decided to move to the West Coast to be closer to her children, and she didn't want a long-distance relationship. Miguel was totally blindsided and utterly devastated. He barely functioned at work for many, many months, and he almost lost his job as a result. Another consequence of heartbreak is that feeling alone and in pain can significantly impair our intellectual functioning, especially when performing complex tasks involving logic and reasoning. It temporarily lowers our IQ. But it wasn't just the intensity of Miguel's grief that confused his employers; it was the duration. Miguel was confused by this as well and really quite embarrassed by it. "What's wrong with me?" he asked me in our session. "What adult spends almost a year getting over a one-year relationship?" Actually, many do. Heartbreak shares all the hallmarks of traditional loss and grief: insomnia, intrusive thoughts, immune system dysfunction. Forty percent of people experience clinically measurable depression. Heartbreak is a complex psychological injury. It impacts us in a multitude of ways. For example, Sharon was both very social and very active. She had dinners at the house every week. She and Miguel went on camping trips with other couples. Although Miguel was not religious, he accompanied Sharon to church every Sunday, where he was welcomed into the congregation. Miguel didn't just lose his girlfriend; he lost his entire social life, the supportive community of Sharon's church. He lost his identity as a couple. Now, Miguel recognized the breakup had left this huge void in his life, but what he failed to recognize is that it left far more than just one. And that is crucial, not just because it explains why heartbreak could be so devastating, but because it tells us how to heal. To fix your broken heart, you have to identify these voids in your life and fill them, and I mean all of them. The voids in your identity: you have to reestablish who you are and what your life is about. The voids in your social life, the missing activities, even the empty spaces on the wall where pictures used to hang. But none of that will do any good unless you prevent the mistakes that can set you back, the unnecessary searches for explanations, idealizing your ex instead of focusing on how they were wrong for you, indulging thoughts and behaviors that still give them a starring role in this next chapter of your life when they shouldn't be an extra. Getting over heartbreak is hard, but if you refuse to be misled by your mind and you take steps to heal, you can significantly minimize your suffering. And it won't just be you who benefit from that. You'll be more present with your friends, more engaged with your family, not to mention the billions of dollars of compromised productivity in the workplace that could be avoided. So if you know someone who is heartbroken, have compassion, because social support has been found to be important for their recovery. And have patience, because it's going to take them longer to move on than you think it should. And if you're hurting, know this: it's difficult, it is a battle within your own mind, and you have to be diligent to win. But you do have weapons. You can fight. And you will heal. Thank you. (Applause) |
This deep-sea mystery is changing our understanding of life | {0: "Karen Lloyd investigates novel types of microbes in Earth's deep surface biosphere, collecting them from remote places such as Arctic fjords, volcanoes in Costa Rica, even deep in mud near the Marianas Trench."} | TED@BCG Milan | I'm an ocean microbiologist at the University of Tennessee, and I want to tell you guys about some microbes that are so strange and wonderful that they're challenging our assumptions about what life is like on Earth. So I have a question. Please raise your hand if you've ever thought it would be cool to go to the bottom of the ocean in a submarine? Yes. Most of you, because the oceans are so cool. Alright, now — please raise your hand if the reason you raised your hand to go to the bottom of the ocean is because it would get you a little bit closer to that exciting mud that's down there. (Laughter) Nobody. I'm the only one in this room. Well, I think about this all the time. I spend most of my waking hours trying to determine how deep we can go into the Earth and still find something, anything, that's alive, because we still don't know the answer to this very basic question about life on Earth. So in the 1980s, a scientist named John Parkes, in the UK, was similarly obsessed, and he came up with a crazy idea. He believed that there was a vast, deep, and living microbial biosphere underneath all the world's oceans that extends hundreds of meters into the seafloor, which is cool, but the only problem is that nobody believed him, and the reason that nobody believed him is that ocean sediments may be the most boring place on Earth. (Laughter) There's no sunlight, there's no oxygen, and perhaps worst of all, there's no fresh food deliveries for literally millions of years. You don't have to have a PhD in biology to know that that is a bad place to go looking for life. (Laughter) But in 2002, [Steven D'Hondt] had convinced enough people that he was on to something that he actually got an expedition on this drillship, called the JOIDES Resolution. And he ran it along with Bo Barker Jørgensen of Denmark. And so they were finally able to get good pristine deep subsurface samples some really without contamination from surface microbes. This drill ship is capable of drilling thousands of meters underneath the ocean, and the mud comes up in sequential cores, one after the other — long, long cores that look like this. This is being carried by scientists such as myself who go on these ships, and we process the cores on the ships and then we send them home to our home laboratories for further study. So when John and his colleagues got these first precious deep-sea pristine samples, they put them under the microscope, and they saw images that looked pretty much like this, which is actually taken from a more recent expedition by my PhD student, Joy Buongiorno. You can see the hazy stuff in the background. That's mud. That's deep-sea ocean mud, and the bright green dots stained with the green fluorescent dye are real, living microbes. Now I've got to tell you something really tragic about microbes. They all look the same under a microscope, I mean, to a first approximation. You can take the most fascinating organisms in the world, like a microbe that literally breathes uranium, and another one that makes rocket fuel, mix them up with some ocean mud, put them underneath a microscope, and they're just little dots. It's really annoying. So we can't use their looks to tell them apart. We have to use DNA, like a fingerprint, to say who is who. And I'll teach you guys how to do it right now. So I made up some data, and I'm going to show you some data that are not real. This is to illustrate what it would look like if a bunch of species were not related to each other at all. So you can see each species has a list of combinations of A, G, C and T, which are the four sub-units of DNA, sort of randomly jumbled, and nothing looks like anything else, and these species are totally unrelated to each other. But this is what real DNA looks like, from a gene that these species happen to share. Everything lines up nearly perfectly. The chances of getting so many of those vertical columns where every species has a C or every species has a T, by random chance, are infinitesimal. So we know that all those species had to have had a common ancestor. They're all relatives of each other. So now I'll tell you who they are. The top two are us and chimpanzees, which y'all already knew were related, because, I mean, obviously. (Laughter) But we're also related to things that we don't look like, like pine trees and Giardia, which is that gastrointestinal disease you can get if you don't filter your water while you're hiking. We're also related to bacteria like E. coli and Clostridium difficile, which is a horrible, opportunistic pathogen that kills lots of people. But there's of course good microbes too, like Dehalococcoides ethenogenes, which cleans up our industrial waste for us. So if I take these DNA sequences, and then I use them, the similarities and differences between them, to make a family tree for all of us so you can see who is closely related, then this is what it looks like. So you can see clearly, at a glance, that things like us and Giardia and bunnies and pine trees are all, like, siblings, and then the bacteria are like our ancient cousins. But we're kin to every living thing on Earth. So in my job, on a daily basis, I get to produce scientific evidence against existential loneliness. So when we got these first DNA sequences, from the first cruise, of pristine samples from the deep subsurface, we wanted to know where they were. So the first thing that we discovered is that they were not aliens, because we could get their DNA to line up with everything else on Earth. But now check out where they go on our tree of life. The first thing you'll notice is that there's a lot of them. It wasn't just one little species that managed to live in this horrible place. It's kind of a lot of things. And the second thing that you'll notice, hopefully, is that they're not like anything we've ever seen before. They are as different from each other as they are from anything that we've known before as we are from pine trees. So John Parkes was completely correct. He, and we, had discovered a completely new and highly diverse microbial ecosystem on Earth that no one even knew existed before the 1980s. So now we were on a roll. The next step was to grow these exotic species in a petri dish so that we could do real experiments on them like microbiologists are supposed to do. But no matter what we fed them, they refused to grow. Even now, 15 years and many expeditions later, no human has ever gotten a single one of these exotic deep subsurface microbes to grow in a petri dish. And it's not for lack of trying. That may sound disappointing, but I actually find it exhilarating, because it means there are so many tantalizing unknowns to work on. Like, my colleagues and I got what we thought was a really great idea. We were going to read their genes like a recipe book, find out what it was they wanted to eat and put it in their petri dishes, and then they would grow and be happy. But when we looked at their genes, it turns out that what they wanted to eat was the food we were already feeding them. So that was a total wash. There was something else that they wanted in their petri dishes that we were just not giving them. So by combining measurements from many different places around the world, my colleagues at the University of Southern California, Doug LaRowe and Jan Amend, were able to calculate that each one of these deep-sea microbial cells requires only one zeptowatt of power, and before you get your phones out, a zepto is 10 to the minus 21, because I know I would want to look that up. Humans, on the other hand, require about 100 watts of power. So 100 watts is basically if you take a pineapple and drop it from about waist height to the ground 881,632 times a day. If you did that and then linked it up to a turbine, that would create enough power to make me happen for a day. A zeptowatt, if you put it in similar terms, is if you take just one grain of salt and then you imagine a tiny, tiny, little ball that is one thousandth of the mass of that one grain of salt and then you drop it one nanometer, which is a hundred times smaller than the wavelength of visible light, once per day. That's all it takes to make these microbes live. That's less energy than we ever thought would be capable of supporting life, but somehow, amazingly, beautifully, it's enough. So if these deep-subsurface microbes have a very different relationship with energy than we previously thought, then it follows that they'll have to have a different relationship with time as well, because when you live on such tiny energy gradients, rapid growth is impossible. If these things wanted to colonize our throats and make us sick, they would get muscled out by fast-growing streptococcus before they could even initiate cell division. So that's why we never find them in our throats. Perhaps the fact that the deep subsurface is so boring is actually an asset to these microbes. They never get washed out by a storm. They never get overgrown by weeds. All they have to do is exist. Maybe that thing that we were missing in our petri dishes was not food at all. Maybe it wasn't a chemical. Maybe the thing that they really want, the nutrient that they want, is time. But time is the one thing that I'll never be able to give them. So even if I have a cell culture that I pass to my PhD students, who pass it to their PhD students, and so on, we'd have to do that for thousands of years in order to mimic the exact conditions of the deep subsurface, all without growing any contaminants. It's just not possible. But maybe in a way we already have grown them in our petri dishes. Maybe they looked at all that food we offered them and said, "Thanks, I'm going to speed up so much that I'm going to make a new cell next century. Ugh. (Laughter) So why is it that the rest of biology moves so fast? Why does a cell die after a day and a human dies after only a hundred years? These seem like really arbitrarily short limits when you think about the total amount of time in the universe. But these are not arbitrary limits. They're dictated by one simple thing, and that thing is the Sun. Once life figured out how to harness the energy of the Sun through photosynthesis, we all had to speed up and get on day and night cycles. In that way, the Sun gave us both a reason to be fast and the fuel to do it. You can view most of life on Earth like a circulatory system, and the Sun is our beating heart. But the deep subsurface is like a circulatory system that's completely disconnected from the Sun. It's instead being driven by long, slow geological rhythms. There's currently no theoretical limit on the lifespan of one single cell. As long as there is at least a tiny energy gradient to exploit, theoretically, a single cell could live for hundreds of thousands of years or more, simply by replacing broken parts over time. To ask a microbe that lives like that to grow in our petri dishes is to ask them to adapt to our frenetic, Sun-centric, fast way of living, and maybe they've got better things to do than that. (Laughter) Imagine if we could figure out how they managed to do this. What if it involves some cool, ultra-stable compounds that we could use to increase the shelf life in biomedical or industrial applications? Or maybe if we figure out the mechanism that they use to grow so extraordinarily slowly, we could mimic it in cancer cells and slow runaway cell division. I don't know. I mean, honestly, that is all speculation, but the only thing I know for certain is that there are a hundred billion billion billlion living microbial cells underlying all the world's oceans. That's 200 times more than the total biomass of humans on this planet. And those microbes have a fundamentally different relationship with time and energy than we do. What seems like a day to them might be a thousand years to us. They don't care about the Sun, and they don't care about growing fast, and they probably don't give a damn about my petri dishes ... (Laughter) but if we can continue to find creative ways to study them, then maybe we'll finally figure out what life, all of life, is like on Earth. Thank you. (Applause) |
How we can help hungry kids, one text at a time | {0: 'TED Fellow Su Kahumbu is working to improve farmer livelihoods and contribute to nutritional security and environmental sustainability.'} | TEDGlobal 2017 | I want to introduce you to my badass friends. Meet Thelma and Louise. (Laughter) I'm passionate about cows. And although they've been getting a lot of crap lately due to methane emissions and climate change, I hope that I can redeem their reputation in part by showing you how incredibly important they are in solving one of the world's biggest problems: food security. But more importantly, for Africa — it's resultant childhood stunting. Nutritional stunting manifests itself in a reduction of growth rate in human development. And according to UNICEF, stunting doesn't come easy. It doesn't come quickly. It happens over a long period of time during which a child endures painful and debilitating cycles of illness, depressed appetite, insufficient nutrition and inadequate care. And most kids simply can't endure such rigors. But those that do survive, they carry forward long-term cognitive problems as well as losses of stature. The numbers of stunted children under the age of five, in most regions of the world, has been declining. And I really hate to say this, but the only place where they haven't been declining is here, in Africa. Here, 59 million children, three in 10 in that age group, struggle to meet their genetic potential — their full genetic potential. Protein is one of our most important dietary requirements, and evidence shows that lack of essential amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, in young children's diets, can result in stunting. Essential amino acids are called essential because we can't synthesize them in our bodies. We have to get them from our foods and the best sources are animal-derived: milk, meat and eggs. Most protein consumed on the African continent is crop-based. And although we have millions of smallholder farmers rearing animals, livestock production is not as easy as we think. The big livestock gaps between rich countries and poor countries are due to poor animal health. Endemic livestock diseases, some of them transmissible to humans, threaten not only livestock producers in those poor countries, but all human health across all countries. This is a global pathogens network. It shows the pathogens found across the world according to the Enhanced Infectious Diseases database. And it shows those pathogens that share hosts. In a nutshell, we share pathogens, and thus diseases, with the species we live closest to: our livestock. And we call these zoonotic diseases. Recent reports show that the deadly dozen zoonotic diseases kill 2.2 million people and sicken 2.4 billion people annually. And Jimmy says, "The greatest burden of zoonoses falls on one billion poor livestock keepers." We totally underestimate the importance of our smallholder farmers. We're beginning to recognize how important they are and how they influence our medical health, our biosafety and more recently, our cognitive and our physical health. They stand at the frontline of zoonotic epidemics. They pretty much underpin our existence. And they need to know so much, yet most lack knowledge on livestock disease prevention and treatment. So how do they learn? Apart from shared experiences, trial and error, conventional farming extension services are boots on the ground and radio — expensive and hard to scale in the face of population growth. Sounds pretty gloomy, doesn't it? But we're at an interesting point in Africa. We're changing that narrative using innovative solutions, riding across scalable technologies. Knowledge doesn't have to be expensive. My company developed an agricultural platform called iCow. We teach farmers best livestock practices using SMS over simple, low-end phones. Farmers receive three SMSs a week on best livestock practices, and those that execute the messages go on to see increases in productivity within as short a time as three months. The first increases in productivity, of course, are improved animal health. We use SMS because it is retentive. Farmers store their messages, they write them down in books, and in effect, we're drip-feeding agricultural manuals into the fields. We recognize that we are all part of the global food network: producers and consumers, you and me, and every farmer. We're focusing now on trying to bring together producers and consumers to take action and take responsibility for not only food security, but for food safety. This beautiful animal is an African-Asian Sahiwal crossed with a Dutch Fleckvieh. She's milkier than her Sahiwal mom, and she's sturdier and more resistant to disease than her Fleckvieh father. In Ethiopia and Tanzania, the African Dairy Genetic Gains program is using SMS and cutting-edge genomics and pioneering Africa's first tropically adapted dairy breeding centers and dairy performance recording centers. Farmers contribute their production data — milking records, breeding records and feeding records — to the ADGG platform. This stage is synthesized through algorithms from some of the top livestock institutions in the world before it lands back in the farmers' hands in actionable SMSs. Customized data, customized responses all aimed at increasing productivity based on the potential on the ground. We're at a very interesting place in agriculture in Africa. By the end of this year, we'll have almost one billion mobile phone subscriptions. We have the power in our hands to ensure that livestock production systems are not only healthy, productive and profitable, but that farmers are knowledgeable, and more importantly, that our farmers are safe. Working with smallholder farmers is one of the best ways to guarantee food security. Working with smallholder farmers is one of the best ways to guarantee each and every child their full opportunity and ability to reach their full genetic potential. And harnessing the power of millions of smallholder farmers and their badass cows like mine, we should be able to bring a halt to stunting in Africa. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. |
How architecture can create dignity for all | {0: 'An architect by training, John Cary has devoted his career to expanding the practice of design for the public good.'} | TEDWomen 2017 | On a beautiful day, just a few years ago my wife and I entered a hospital near our home in Oakland, California for the birth of our first daughter, Maya. We had responsibly toured the birthing center in advance and yet we were somehow still startled to find ourselves in the place where we would experience one of the most significant moments of our lives. We were stuck in a windowless room with no hint of the bright and sunny day that we had left. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, the paint on the walls was beige and machines beeped inexplicably as a wall clock indicated day turning to night. That clock was placed above a door in direct line of sight to where my wife lay as her contractions increased hour after hour. Now, I've never given birth — (Laughter) but she assured me that the last thing that a birthing woman would ever want is to watch the seconds tick by. (Laughter) An architect by training, I've always been fascinated watching people experience design in the world around them. I believe design functions like the soundtrack that we're not even fully aware is playing. It sends us subconscious messages about how to feel and what to expect. That room that we were in seemed completely misaligned with the moment that we were experiencing — welcoming a human being, our daughter, into this world. At one point a nurse, without any prompt, turned to us and said, "I always think to myself, 'I wish I had become an architect, because I could have designed rooms like this better.'" I said to her, "An architect did design this room." (Laughter) Despite the immense joy of our daughter's birth, the messages of that hospital room stick with she and I to this day. Those messages are, "You are not at home, you are in a foreign place." "You are not in control of anything. Not even the lighting." "Your comfort, simply, is secondary." At best, a hospital room like this might just be described or dismissed as uninspiring. At worst, it is undignifying. And I use it to point out that none of us, anywhere in the world, are immune from bad design. I went into architecture because I believed it was about creating spaces for people to live their best lives. And yet what I found is a profession largely disconnected from the people most directly impacted by its work. I believe this is because architecture remains a white, male, elitist profession — seemingly unconcerned with some of the greatest needs in the world or even the relatively simple needs of an expectant mother. Students are trained in school using highly theoretical projects, rarely interacting with real people or actual communities. Graduates are funneled through a long, narrow unforgiving path to licensure. Meanwhile, the profession holds up a select few through relentless award programs focused almost exclusively on the aesthetics of buildings, rather than the societal impact or contributions of them. It only goes to reinforce a warped view of professional responsibility and success and yet this isn't why so many young, hopeful people go into architecture. It's not why I did. I believed then, though I didn't have a language for it, and I know now, that design has a unique ability to dignify. It can make people feel valued, respected, honored and seen. Now I'd like for you to just think about some of the spaces that you inhabit. And I'd like to have you think about how they make you feel. Now, there are places that make us feel unhappy, unhealthy or uninspiring. They may be the places that you work or where you heal or even where you live. And I ask, how might these places be better designed with you in mind? It's a really simple question and it can somehow, sometimes be very difficult to answer. Because we are conditioned to feel like we don't have much agency over the spaces and places that we live, work and play. And in many cases we don't. But we all should. Now, here's a potentially dumb question for any women watching: Have you ever stood in a disproportionately long bathroom line? (Laughter) Did you ever think to yourself, "What is wrong with this picture?" Well, what if the real question is, "What is wrong with the men that designed these bathrooms?" (Applause) It may seem like a small thing, but it's representative of a much more serious issue. The contemporary world was literally built by men who have rarely taken the time to understand how people unlike them experience their designs. A long bathroom line might seem like a minor indignity. But the opposite can also be true. Thoughtful design can make people feel respected and seen. I've come to believe that dignity is to design what justice is to law and health is to medicine. In the simplest of terms, it's about having the spaces you inhabit reflect back your value. Over the past two years I had the opportunity to interview over 100 people from all walks of life about their experience of design. I wanted to test my hunch that dignity and design are uniquely related. I listened to Gregory, a resident of this cottage community designed specifically for the 50 most chronically homeless people in Dallas. Gregory had been living on the streets, drifting from town to town for over 30 years. A broad coalition of social service agencies, funders and designers, created this place. Each 400 square foot cottage is designed beautifully as a permanent home. Gregory now has a key to a door to his own house. He describes the sense of security that it brings him. Something he had lived without for three decades. When he arrived with little more than the clothes on his back, he found everything: from a toaster, Crock-Pot and stove to a toothbrush and toothpaste awaiting for him. He describes it simply as heaven. On the other side of the world, I listened to Antoinette, the director of this training and community center for women in rural Rwanda. Hundreds of women come to this place daily — to learn new skills, be in community, and continue rebuilding their lives following the country's civil war. These women literally pressed the 500,000 bricks that make up the 17 classroom pavilions like this one. Antoinette told me, "Everyone is so proud of it." And then back here in the US I listened to Monika, the director of a free clinic primarily serving the uninsured in Arkansas. Monika loves telling me that the doctors, who volunteer at her free clinic routinely tell her that they've never worked in such a beautiful, light-filled place. Monika believes that even people experiencing poverty deserve quality health care. And what's more, she believes they deserve to receive that care in a dignified setting. People like these are invaluable ambassadors for design and yet they are roundly absent from architectural discourse. Similarly, the people who can most benefit from good design often have the least access to it. Your cousin, a homeless veteran; your grandma or grandpa who live in a house with a kitchen that's no longer accessible to them; your wheelchair-bound sister in a suburban area planned without sidewalks. If good design is only for a privileged few, what good is it? It's time designers change this by dedicating their practices to the public good in the model of firms like Orkidstudio, Studio Gang and MASS Design Group. Their clients are orphaned children in Kenya, foster children in Chicago and pregnant women in Malawi. Their practices are premised on the belief that everyone deserves good design. Dedicating more practices to the public good will not only create more design that is dignifying, but it will also dignify the practice of design. It will not only diversify the client base of design, but it will also create new, more diverse forms of design for the world. Now, in order to do this, my architecture and design friends, especially my fellow white guys, we must simultaneously and significantly diversify our ranks. If we want the public to believe that design is for them and for everyone. Today, barely 15 percent of registered architects in the United States are women. And a far smaller percentage are persons of color. Other professions, like law and medicine had made far greater strides in these crucial areas. How might our shared built environment — our homes, our hospitals, our schools, our public spaces — be shaped differently if women and people of color were behind half of the proverbial blueprints? It is not a question of whether, but to what extent our buildings, our landscapes, our cities and our rural communities are less beautiful, less functional, less equitable and less dignifying because women and people of color are less likely to be creating them. As Winston Churchill famously noted in 1943 when he called for the rebuilding of London's war-damaged parliamentary chambers, "We shape our buildings, and afterward, they shape us." The good news is that we can change how we build and who we build for. Be that a health worker in rural Rwanda, or a birthing mother and nervous new father in the United States. We can do this by recommitting architecture to the health, safety and welfare of the public. This will pay dividends. Because once you see what design can do, you can't unsee it. And once you experience dignity, you can't accept anything less. Both become part of your possible. One of my favorite conversation partners is my 90-year-old grandmother, Audrey Gorwitz, from Oshkosh, Wisconsin. After one of our conversations about design, she wrote me a letter. She said, "Dear Johnny, I thought the other day, as I sat in my doctor's office, how depressing it was, from the color on the wall, to the carpet on the floor. (Laughter) Now I will have to call to see who is responsible for the drabness in that place." (Laughter) In the same letter, mind you, she said, "I did call, and I got the man in charge, and he said he appreciated someone calling him. My doctor's office is now on the list for an upgrade." (Laughter) She signed it by saying, "It is always good to express one's opinion if done in a proper manner." (Laughter) (Applause) I love my grandma. (Laughter) Like my grandma Audrey, you deserve good design. Because well-designed spaces are not just a matter of taste or a questions of aesthetics. They literally shape our ideas about who we are in the world and what we deserve. That is the essence of dignity. And both the opportunity and the responsibility of design for good and for all. Thank you. (Applause) |
This company pays kids to do their math homework | {0: 'Mohamad Jebara is the founder and CEO of Mathspace, an education technology product that provides students with guided feedback through the mathematics curriculum. '} | TED@Westpac | For as long as I remember, I've loved mathematics. Actually, it's not 100 percent true. I've loved mathematics for all but a two-week period in senior high school. (Laughter) I was top of my class, and we were about to start the Extension Maths course. I was really excited about this brand new topic coming up, complex numbers. I like complex. My teacher was priming us for the concepts with some questions about square roots. Square of nine — three; square of 256 — sixteen. Too easy. Then she asked the trick question: What about the square root of negative one? Of course, we were all over it — "Come on, Miss! We all know you can't take the square root of a negative." "That's true in the real world," she said. "But in the complex world, the square root of negative one is the imaginary number i." (Laughter) That day, my entire mathematical world came crashing down on me. (Laughter) "Imaginary numbers? Seriously? But mathematics is a source of truth, please don't go abstract on me. I would have studied art if I wanted to play with imaginary numbers." (Laughter) "This is Extension Maths, let's get back with our program!" She didn't, and over the next couple of weeks, I reluctantly performed meaningless calculations, (Laughter) finding imaginary solutions to quadratic equations. (Laughter) But then something amazing happened. We began finding elegant solutions to real-world problems we previously had no answers to, starting with the complex world of imaginary numbers. So some mathematician 500 years ago decides to have some fun and make up these imaginary numbers, and because of that we can now derive these amazing identities with applications in the real world, in fields like electrical engineering. Wow! I gained a whole new level of appreciation for mathematics. And after my brief mistrust, I was now in love with the subject more than ever. Francis Su, the mathematician, sums it up beautifully when he says, "We study mathematics for play, for beauty, for truth, for justice and for love." But if you ask a student today, you'll probably hear a different story. You might hear "difficult" and "boring." And they might be right about difficult. But it's certainly not boring. In fact, I'd say being difficult to master is part of what makes it beautiful. Because nothing worth doing is easy. So we need students to stick around long enough through the difficult parts to appreciate the beauty when it all ties together. Much like I did for that brief couple of weeks in high school. Unfortunately, our school systems — we move students through mathematics in a lockstep process. So those who fall a little behind find it near impossible to ever catch up and appreciate that beauty. But why is this a problem? Why should we care? Well today, more than ever, our world needs every citizen to be skilled in mathematics. With the advent of artificial intelligence and automation, many of the jobs we see today will either not exist or be transformed to require less routine work and more analysis and application of expertise. But we're not producing the extra mathematics students to fill these new roles. This graph shows the number of students taking Standard Mathematics and Advanced Mathematics over a period of 20 years in Australia. It's clear that while we have demand for mathematics skills rapidly increasing, supply is in steady decline. To put things in perspective, half of the students completing high school today in Australia are not prepared to understand any argument about rates of change in data. In this digital age where fake news can influence election results, this is very concerning. Let me give you a concrete example. Let's take a closer look at that graph. Can everyone see what I've done there to stress my point? If you can't, let me show you now, with the vertical axis starting at zero, where it should be. There, you see it now, right? It's the exact same data but I've manipulated the representation to influence you. And that's cool, that's my job up here. (Laughter) But in all seriousness, unless we do something to drastically improve student engagement with mathematics, we'll not only have a huge skills shortage crisis but a fickle population, easily manipulated by whoever can get the most air time. So what's the solution? There are a lot of things we have to do. We need curriculum reform. We need our best and brightest encouraged to become teachers. We need to put an end to high-stakes tests and instead follow a mastery-based learning approach. But all these things take time. And I'm impatient. See, I've been thinking about this for eight years now. Ever since I left my job as a derivative trader to build a web application to help students learn mathematics. Today, our app is used by schools across the globe. And we're seeing big improvements for students who use the program regularly. But here's the thing — we're only seeing it for students who use the program regularly. And most of them don't. So after years of developing and refining the application, our biggest challenge was not so much product related, our biggest challenge was motivating students to want to work on their gaps in understanding. You can imagine in today's attention economy, we're competing against Facebook, Snapchat and PlayStation to try and get these students' time. So we went back to the drawing board and started to think about how we could make it worthwhile for students to spend some of their "attention budget" on their education. We tinkered with gamification elements like points, badges and avatars, and we'd see a temporary spike in engagement but things would go back to normal as soon as the novelty wore off. Then one day, my cofounder, Alvin, came across a study of students in Chicago led by the behavioral economist, Steven Levitt, where they paid students who improved on their test scores. He started telling me about some of the things they tested for and the interesting findings they had. For instance, they found that incentivizing students for inputs, like effort, worked a lot better than incentivizing for outputs, like test scores. They found that for younger students, you could win them over with a trophy but for older students, you really needed cash. (Laughter) And the amount of cash mattered — 10 dollars was good, 20 dollars — even better. But perhaps most importantly, they found that the rewards had to be instant rather than promised at a later date. They went as far as to give the students 20 dollars and say, "Touch it, feel it, smell it —" (Sniffing) "It's all yours. But if you fail, I'm going to take it back." And that worked really well. I immediately got excited about the possibilities of implementing this in our program. But once the excitement settled down, there were a few concerns that crept in our minds. Firstly, was this ethical? (Laughter) Secondly, how would we fund this thing? (Laughter) And finally, would the results be sustained if the students were no longer paid? Now, let's look at the ethical part first. I'm a bit of a mathematical purist. So I'd be one of the first people to say that we should study mathematics for the sake of mathematics. Remember — for play, for beauty, for truth, for justice and for love! Not for money! (Laughter) As I struggled with this, I came to see that, while it's a way I look at mathematics now, it's only because I studied it long enough to appreciate it. It's very difficult to tell a student struggling with mathematics today to work hard for a payoff in the distant future. And it's not so much bribery that's at work here, because I could bribe students by telling them about my big bonuses in my derivative trading days as a reward for doing well at maths. But it doesn't pay off for a very long time. So it's practically naught. Behavioral economists call this hyperbolic discounting. And Levitt goes as far as to say that all motivating power vanishes when rewards are handed out with a delay. So, from a purely economic point of view: if we don't use immediate incentives, we are underinvesting in student outcomes. I took heart from that, and came to see that as a society, we're actually quite used to financial incentives. Whether it be by the government, by employers or at home. For instance, many parents would pay their children an allowance or pocket money for doing chores in the house. So it wasn't really all that controversial. As I thought about that, it started to answer that second question of how we were going to fund this. Naturally, parents are the most invested in their children's education. So, let's charge them a weekly subscription fee to use our program, but — if the students complete their weekly maths goal, we'll refund the subscription amount directly into the child's bank account. We chose three exercises completed over a one week period for a 10 dollar reward. That way we're incentivizing effort rather than performance over a short enough period and with a substantial enough payout for the students to care. Now, I remember when I first told my wife about this new business model. If she had any doubt left that I've gone completely mad, that pretty much confirmed it for her. She said to me, "Mo ... you realize that if everybody does their homework, which you want, you're not going to make any revenue, which you don't want. Great business model." (Laughter) I say it's more like an antibusiness model, it's free if you use it, but you pay if you don't. Now, I knew from experience that not everybody in the country was going to jump on and do their maths homework every week. And if they did, sure we'd go bust pretty quickly, but hey, we would have solved the country's maths skills crisis. (Laughter) As a company, we've always run a double bottom line, looking to both make a return for investors as well as improve student outcomes. We know that our path to long-term profitability is through improving student outcomes. So our dual objectives should never be at odds. So we're always looking to make our product decisions around helping students reach their weekly maths goal, effectively ensuring that they get paid and not us. Now you must be wondering: How is this crazy business model going? You'll be glad to know we're still in business. We've been testing this now for the last five months on just our personal home users in Australia before we think about rolling it out to schools. And here are the early results. The green represents students who are completing their weekly maths goal and the red those who aren't. You can see a lot more completing their homework than not. In fact, as our user base has grown, we found the percentage to be pretty steady, at around 75 percent. So on average, we receive our weekly subscription fee once every four weeks, and the other three weeks, we're rewarding the students. Now of course we're leaving some money on the table here, but guess what? It turns out these students are 70 percent more engaged than students not on the reward program. Check. From a business perspective, they are less likely to churn and more likely to refer friends, so we're hoping to trade off a lower revenue per user for a bigger and more engaged user base. Check and check. Now for that final question. Would they keep coming back if they were no longer paid? Mathematics is so much more than just a subject you study at school. It's a human endeavor. It's what helps us to understand the world around us. And the more you know, the more you want to know. So yes, we've triggered initial engagement with a financial reward. But in the long run, the money won't matter anymore. Because in the long run, the wonder of mathematics will be the incentive and understanding it will be the reward. Thank you. (Applause) |
How protest is redefining democracy around the world | {0: 'Zachariah Mampilly is an expert on the politics of both violent and non-violent resistance.'} | TEDGlobal 2017 | Like many of you, I'm often frustrated by the democratic process. It's messy, it's complicated, it's often inefficient. Our political leaders feel disconnected from the concerns of ordinary people. Many feel that voting every few years for leaders disconnected from their daily challenges is pointless. But before we reject democracy, let's imagine what it could be. And I believe that African activists are redefining democracy by putting protest at its center, what I refer to as "protest democracy." International organizations and academic experts define democracy as regular, multiparty electoral competition. But democracy should not only be about elites competing at the ballot box. For it to have meaning, it's something we must engage in every day. When I say "protest democracy," I'm challenging how we think about democratic action. Viewing democracy as only elections is no longer adequate and threatens democracy itself. So we must protest democracy to give it a renewed meaning. What would this look like? We need to turn to African societies, where ordinary people are increasingly taking to the streets to transform their lives. African social movements have often been at the forefront of conceptualizing democracy in this way. This may come as a surprise to those of who think that the only way Africans engage in politics is through the barrel of the gun. But increasingly, young people are taking to the streets and abandoning organized violence in favor of more effective nonviolent action. I've spent much of the past two decades talking to African activists, both violent and nonviolent. Across Africa, young people are rising up to challenge almost every type of regime known to humanity. This is my friend Thiat. He's a rapper from Senegal. He led a large movement in Senegal that was successful in preventing the president from stealing a third term. From Morocco to Lesotho, young people are rising up against entrenched monarchies: in Egypt and Sudan, against brutal dictatorships; in Uganda and Ethiopia, against powerful militarized states with quasi-democratic veneers; in South Africa, where this image was taken, and Burundi, against democratically elected leaders who have done little to improve the conditions for ordinary people. Across the continent, protest is not exceptional, but a normal part of life. Africans use protests to challenge both dictators as well as power cuts. In a way, Africans are protesting democracy itself, enriching its possibilities for us all. There have been two major waves of African protest, and we are currently living through the third, which began around 2005. It includes the so-called Arab Spring, which took place mostly on the continent. The first wave took place in the 1940s and 1950s and led to Africa's decolonization. Kwame Nkrumah led a broad coalition in Ghana that overthrew British rule, providing a template for nonviolent movements globally. The second wave took place in the 1980s and 1990s against austerity measures that imposed harsh conditions on African economies. These protests led to the overthrow of autocratic regimes and led to the introduction of multiparty elections across the continent. The ongoing third wave is correcting the shortcomings of the earlier two. If the first wave brought liberation but not democracy, and the second, elections but only for the elites, then it is the third wave that is most concerned with transforming democracy into the rule of the people. It includes movements like Y'en a Marre in Senegal, Le Balai Citoyen in Burkina Faso, Tajamuka in Zimbabwe, LUCHA and Filimbi in the Democratic Republic of Congo, movements that work outside of more conventional nongovernmental organizations and political parties to challenge the economic and political system itself, often at great risk. Brilliant young activists like LUCHA's Fred Bauma have been detained and tortured, often with little to no outcry from the international community. The list goes on, as you can see from some of the data we collected. There have been large popular protests in over 40 African countries since 2005, and if you look, you'll recognize that in 2011, the year of the so-called Arab Spring, was actually the spike of this broader wave. Contrary to popular belief, many of these protests have been successful. We know of the dictators falling in Tunisia and in Egypt, but popular movements have prevented presidents from stealing third terms in Senegal, in Malawi and Burkina Faso as well. What's driving this upsurge of protest? Demographically, Africa is both the youngest and the fastest-growing continent, with the largest age gap between the people and their rulers. It is urbanizing at a tremendous pace. Economically, African countries have been growing for over a decade now, largely driven by investments from Asia. But little of this wealth is trickling down. Formal jobs in the industrial sector are actually decreasing, with informal labor the only option left for people to eke out a living. As a result, inequality is skyrocketing, and political leaders are increasingly disconnected from their much younger populations. For those of us from outside of Africa, we're familiar with parts of this story: a massive spike in inequality, the product of a decline in good jobs for good wages that were once considered the hallmark of an advanced society; the capture of our political parties by elites accompanied by the hollowing out of civil society that once provided a voice to ordinary people; that sinking feeling that no matter what you do, external factors related to the global economy can disrupt our lives for the worse. Our political leaders seem helpless, insisting on austerity, even as public goods diminish to levels unseen in decades. And this is when they're not succumbing to exclusionary nationalism, blaming our woes on the weak rather than the powerful. What those of us from North America and Western Europe consider to be new has been the normal condition of African life since the 1970s. So who better to learn from than those who have been engaged in resistance to these conditions for the longest period of time? What can we learn from African protest democracy? First, democracy must begin with ordinary people. Viewing democracy as only elections has led to widespread disillusionment. We must instead work to center ordinary people in democratic life. Protest provides us one way to do that. Regardless of your age, sexuality, your gender, whether you're a citizen or a non-citizen, able-bodied or disabled, anyone can participate. In contrast to elections, protests are not confined by rigid electoral cycles. They offer a much more immediate form of action in our era of instant feedback. Second, while protests may be messy, this is what makes them powerful. Protests are contentious and contested processes, defined by contingent actions, often devoid of clear messaging, characterized by incomplete organization. These dynamics are what makes it easy to dismiss protests as riots or to assume they are of limited political utility. But it also makes them easier to suppress. Too often, governments do not view protests as elementary to democracy. Instead, they violently crush social movements or work to discredit their message. Third, as I already hinted, protest is the space from which new political imaginations may emerge. Protests are about coloring outside the lines, a way for ordinary people to rewrite the rules of the game that too many feel are stacked against them. Many young people in Africa have grown up in societies where a single ruler has ruled their entire lives. Protest is the space for new possibilities to emerge, as young people begin to discover their own power. Consider the situation of my friend Linda Masarira, a single mother of five, who is leading protests against the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. She has been beaten, arrested, harassed. But Linda perseveres, because as she told me a few months ago, protest has given her a sense of meaning and direction. And though she knows the odds against her, Linda perseveres. Like Linda and other young African activists, we all must work to redefine democracy as something more than just elections and political parties. Democracy is a creative process, and protest has always been the vehicle for expanding our political imaginations beyond what we are told is possible. (In Swahili) Thank you very much. (Applause) |
"My Fine Reward" | {0: 'Tito Deler is a soulful musician with a story to tell.'} | TED@Tommy | (Music) Sun shining up above down here it's 10 below I'm moving on to a place now where the streets are paved with gold There'll be two trains running — running side by side Some trains are going out Two trains running — running side by side I'm going to catch that fast express train to my reward in the sky Many rooms in my father's house now — Oh Lord there's one for you and me Many rooms in my father's house now — Oh there's one for you and me No blues and no trouble Oh my Lord sweet Jesus victory There's one glory from the moon — Lord another, oh another from the sun Oh one glory from the moon and another from the sun Behind I'll leave this earthly body when my Lord king Jesus comes Thank you very much. (Applause) |
3 lessons of revolutionary love in a time of rage | {0: 'Valarie Kaur is a social justice activist, lawyer, filmmaker, innovator, mother and Sikh American thought leader who founded the Revolutionary Love Project -- a movement that envisions a world where love is a public ethic.'} | TEDWomen 2017 | (Sikh Prayer) Waheguru Ji Ka Khalsa, Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh. There is a moment on the birthing table that feels like dying. The body in labor stretches to form an impossible circle. The contractions are less than a minute apart. Wave after wave, there is barely time to breathe. The medical term: "transition," because "feels like dying" is not scientific enough. (Laughter) I checked. During my transition, my husband was pressing down on my sacrum to keep my body from breaking. My father was waiting behind the hospital curtain ... more like hiding. But my mother was at my side. The midwife said she could see the baby's head, but all I could feel was a ring of fire. I turned to my mother and said, "I can't," but she was already pouring my grandfather's prayer in my ear. (Sikh Prayer) "Tati Vao Na Lagi, Par Brahm Sarnai." "The hot winds cannot touch you." "You are brave," she said. "You are brave." And suddenly I saw my grandmother standing behind my mother. And her mother behind her. And her mother behind her. A long line of women who had pushed through the fire before me. I took a breath; I pushed; my son was born. As I held him in my arms, shaking and sobbing from the rush of oxytocin that flooded my body, my mother was already preparing to feed me. Nursing her baby as I nursed mine. My mother had never stopped laboring for me, from my birth to my son's birth. She already knew what I was just beginning to name. That love is more than a rush of feeling that happens to us if we're lucky. Love is sweet labor. Fierce. Bloody. Imperfect. Life-giving. A choice we make over and over again. I am an American civil rights activist who has labored with communities of color since September 11, fighting unjust policies by the state and acts of hate in the street. And in our most painful moments, in the face of the fires of injustice, I have seen labors of love deliver us. My life on the frontlines of fighting hate in America has been a study in what I've come to call revolutionary love. Revolutionary love is the choice to enter into labor for others who do not look like us, for our opponents who hurt us and for ourselves. In this era of enormous rage, when the fires are burning all around us, I believe that revolutionary love is the call of our times. Now, if you cringe when people say, "Love is the answer ..." I do, too. (Laughter) I am a lawyer. (Laughter) So let me show you how I came to see love as a force for social justice through three lessons. My first encounter with hate was in the schoolyard. I was a little girl growing up in California, where my family has lived and farmed for a century. When I was told that I would go to hell because I was not Christian, called a "black dog" because I was not white, I ran to my grandfather's arms. Papa Ji dried my tears — gave me the words of Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh faith. "I see no stranger," said Nanak. "I see no enemy." My grandfather taught me that I could choose to see all the faces I meet and wonder about them. And if I wonder about them, then I will listen to their stories even when it's hard. I will refuse to hate them even when they hate me. I will even vow to protect them when they are in harm's way. That's what it means to be a Sikh: S-i-k-h. To walk the path of a warrior saint. He told me the story of the first Sikh woman warrior, Mai Bhago. The story goes there were 40 soldiers who abandoned their post during a great battle against an empire. They returned to a village, and this village woman turned to them and said, "You will not abandon the fight. You will return to the fire, and I will lead you." She mounted a horse. She donned a turban. And with sword in her hand and fire in her eyes, she led them where no one else would. She became the one she was waiting for. "Don't abandon your posts, my dear." My grandfather saw me as a warrior. I was a little girl in two long braids, but I promised. Fast-forward, I'm 20 years old, watching the Twin Towers fall, the horror stuck in my throat, and then a face flashes on the screen: a brown man with a turban and beard, and I realize that our nation's new enemy looks like my grandfather. And these turbans meant to represent our commitment to serve cast us as terrorists. And Sikhs became targets of hate, alongside our Muslim brothers and sisters. The first person killed in a hate crime after September 11 was a Sikh man, standing in front of his gas station in Arizona. Balbir Singh Sodhi was a family friend I called "uncle," murdered by a man who called himself "patriot." He is the first of many to have been killed, but his story — our stories barely made the evening news. I didn't know what to do, but I had a camera, I faced the fire. I went to his widow, Joginder Kaur. I wept with her, and I asked her, "What would you like to tell the people of America?" I was expecting blame. But she looked at me and said, "Tell them, 'Thank you.' 3,000 Americans came to my husband's memorial. They did not know me, but they wept with me. Tell them, 'Thank you.'" Thousands of people showed up, because unlike national news, the local media told Balbir Uncle's story. Stories can create the wonder that turns strangers into sisters and brothers. This was my first lesson in revolutionary love — that stories can help us see no stranger. And so ... my camera became my sword. My law degree became my shield. My film partner became my husband. (Laughter) I didn't expect that. And we became part of a generation of advocates working with communities facing their own fires. I worked inside of supermax prisons, on the shores of Guantanamo, at the sites of mass shootings when the blood was still fresh on the ground. And every time, for 15 years, with every film, with every lawsuit, with every campaign, I thought we were making the nation safer for the next generation. And then my son was born. In a time ... when hate crimes against our communities are at the highest they have been since 9/11. When right-wing nationalist movements are on the rise around the globe and have captured the presidency of the United States. When white supremacists march in our streets, torches high, hoods off. And I have to reckon with the fact that my son is growing up in a country more dangerous for him than the one I was given. And there will be moments when I cannot protect him when he is seen as a terrorist ... just as black people in America are still seen as criminal. Brown people, illegal. Queer and trans people, immoral. Indigenous people, savage. Women and girls as property. And when they fail to see our bodies as some mother's child, it becomes easier to ban us, detain us, deport us, imprison us, sacrifice us for the illusion of security. (Applause) I wanted to abandon my post. But I made a promise, so I returned to the gas station where Balbir Singh Sodhi was killed 15 years to the day. I set down a candle in the spot where he bled to death. His brother, Rana, turned to me and said, "Nothing has changed." And I asked, "Who have we not yet tried to love?" We decided to call the murderer in prison. The phone rings. My heart is beating in my ears. I hear the voice of Frank Roque, a man who once said ... "I'm going to go out and shoot some towel heads. We should kill their children, too." And every emotional impulse in me says, "I can't." It becomes an act of will to wonder. "Why?" I ask. "Why did you agree to speak with us?" Frank says, "I'm sorry for what happened, but I'm also sorry for all the people killed on 9/11." He fails to take responsibility. I become angry to protect Rana, but Rana is still wondering about Frank — listening — responds. "Frank, this is the first time I'm hearing you say that you feel sorry." And Frank — Frank says, "Yes. I am sorry for what I did to your brother. One day when I go to heaven to be judged by God, I will ask to see your brother. And I will hug him. And I will ask him for forgiveness." And Rana says ... "We already forgave you." Forgiveness is not forgetting. Forgiveness is freedom from hate. Because when we are free from hate, we see the ones who hurt us not as monsters, but as people who themselves are wounded, who themselves feel threatened, who don't know what else to do with their insecurity but to hurt us, to pull the trigger, or cast the vote, or pass the policy aimed at us. But if some of us begin to wonder about them, listen even to their stories, we learn that participation in oppression comes at a cost. It cuts them off from their own capacity to love. This was my second lesson in revolutionary love. We love our opponents when we tend the wound in them. Tending to the wound is not healing them — only they can do that. Just tending to it allows us to see our opponents: the terrorist, the fanatic, the demagogue. They've been radicalized by cultures and policies that we together can change. I looked back on all of our campaigns, and I realized that any time we fought bad actors, we didn't change very much. But when we chose to wield our swords and shields to battle bad systems, that's when we saw change. I have worked on campaigns that released hundreds of people out of solitary confinement, reformed a corrupt police department, changed federal hate crimes policy. The choice to love our opponents is moral and pragmatic, and it opens up the previously unimaginable possibility of reconciliation. But remember ... it took 15 years to make that phone call. I had to tend to my own rage and grief first. Loving our opponents requires us to love ourselves. Gandhi, King, Mandela — they taught a lot about how to love others and opponents. They didn't talk a lot about loving ourselves. This is a feminist intervention. (Applause) Yes. Yes. (Applause) Because for too long have women and women of color been told to suppress their rage, suppress their grief in the name of love and forgiveness. But when we suppress our rage, that's when it hardens into hate directed outward, but usually directed inward. But mothering has taught me that all of our emotions are necessary. Joy is the gift of love. Grief is the price of love. Anger is the force that protects it. This was my third lesson in revolutionary love. We love ourselves when we breathe through the fire of pain and refuse to let it harden into hate. That's why I believe that love must be practiced in all three directions to be revolutionary. Loving just ourselves feels good, but it's narcissism. (Laughter) Loving only our opponents is self-loathing. Loving only others is ineffective. This is where a lot of our movements live right now. We need to practice all three forms of love. And so, how do we practice it? Ready? Number one ... in order to love others, see no stranger. We can train our eyes to look upon strangers on the street, on the subway, on the screen, and say in our minds, "Brother, sister, aunt, uncle." And when we say this, what we are saying is, "You are a part of me I do not yet know. I choose to wonder about you. I will listen for your stories and pick up a sword when you are in harm's way." And so, number two: in order to love our opponents, tend the wound. Can you see the wound in the ones who hurt you? Can you wonder even about them? And if this question sends panic through your body, then your most revolutionary act is to wonder, listen and respond to your own needs. Number three: in order to love ourselves, breathe and push. When we are pushing into the fires in our bodies or the fires in the world, we need to be breathing together in order to be pushing together. How are you breathing each day? Who are you breathing with? Because ... when executive orders and news of violence hits our bodies hard, sometimes less than a minute apart, it feels like dying. In those moments, my son places his hand on my cheek and says, "Dance time, mommy?" And we dance. In the darkness, we breathe and we dance. Our family becomes a pocket of revolutionary love. Our joy is an act of moral resistance. How are you protecting your joy each day? Because in joy we see even darkness with new eyes. And so the mother in me asks, what if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb? What if our future is not dead, but still waiting to be born? What if this is our great transition? Remember the wisdom of the midwife. "Breathe," she says. And then — "push." Because if we don't push, we will die. If we don't breathe, we will die. Revolutionary love requires us to breathe and push through the fire with a warrior's heart and a saint's eyes so that one day ... one day you will see my son as your own and protect him when I am not there. You will tend to the wound in the ones who want to hurt him. You will teach him how to love himself because you love yourself. You will whisper in his ear, as I whisper in yours, "You are brave." You are brave. Thank you. (Applause) (Sikh Prayer) Waheguru Ji Ka Khalsa, Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh. (Applause) (Cheering) (Applause) |
Capitalism isn't an ideology -- it's an operating system | {0: 'Bhu Srinivasan writes about economics, history and statecraft.'} | TED Salon Brightline Initiative | So, what is capitalism? Capitalism, fundamentally, is a series of marketplaces. You can have a marketplace for lemonade, a marketplace for lemons, a marketplace for trucks that transport lemons, a marketplace that fuels those trucks, marketplaces that sell wood to build lemonade stands. However, capitalism of course, as we know, is this either celebrated term or condemned term. It's either revered or it's reviled. And I'm here to argue that this is because capitalism, in the modern iteration, is largely misunderstood. In my view, capitalism should not be thought of as an ideology, but instead should be thought of as an operating system. Think of your iPhone. Your iPhone merges hardware with software. Apps and hardware. Now think about all the hardware as the physical reality all around you, and think of the apps as entrepreneurial activity, creative energy. And in-between, you have an operating system. As you have advances in hardware, you have advances in software. And the operating system needs to keep up. It needs to be patched, it needs to be updated, new releases have to happen. And all of these things have to happen symbiotically. The operating system needs to keep getting more and more advanced to keep up with innovation. And this is why, fundamentally, when you think about it as an operating system, it devolves the language of ideology away from what traditional defenders of capitalism think. But even if you go to the constitution, you'll notice, before the founders even got to the First Amendment — with free speech, free religion, free press, they thought about patents and copyright. They talked about the government's role in promoting arts and sciences. It's the reason why I could not start a search engine tomorrow called Goggle. (Laughter) Google doesn't own Gs, but I couldn't do it because there could be some confusion. So even property rights have ambiguity built into them. And on and on. And by 1900, you have other types of property that come into being. For instance, imagine that in 1900, you owned 100 acres of land someplace in the Midwest. It's very easy to see where your fence ends, your neighbor's property begins. Now let me ask you, where in the sky does your property end? Does it end at 1,000 feet, 5,000 feet, 10,000 feet? It makes no difference, because other than the novelty of a few hot-air balloons, man couldn't fly. But within three years, he could. Now all of a sudden, it was very much relevant whether your land ends at 1,000 feet in the sky, 5,000 feet, 10,000 feet. And you have to have someone arbitrate that. And indeed, that's exactly what happened. And five or ten years from now, when Amazon wants to deliver a package over your house to your neighbor from that UPS truck, we're going to have to decide: Does you property end at five feet, 10 feet, 50 feet, 100 feet? Where does it end? And there is no ideology that will tell you where your property ends. It's an operating system. And similarly, we're going to see this with automobiles. A few years after the Wright brothers figured out flight, human beings started using more and more cars. And all of a sudden, the regulatory system — the operating system — had to be patched to all of a sudden address the safety of consumers. That the consumers of vehicles were presenting danger to horses, other pedestrians, trolleys, what have you. And all of a sudden, the drivers of these automobiles had to have driver's licenses, eye exams, registered motor vehicles, speed limits, rules of the road, so that horses, pedestrians, could coexist with cars. It had to be backwards compatible. So a new invention had to basically fit advances from the past. Similarly, five or ten years from now, we're going to see the same thing with self-driving cars — coexisting with human-driven cars. The reason why this is important, is in 10 years, another thing is going to happen beyond drones and self-driving cars, but you're going to see the most valuable economy in the world — the largest economy in the world — is going to be a country run by communists. The Chinese seem to be very good at capitalism. And this is going to have fundamental problems and present an identity crisis for the United States. Because for a long time, free markets coincided with liberties such as free speech, free press, free religion. And all of a sudden, this equation is going to be decoupled. And when it gets decoupled, we might find that democracy, the multitude of voices, actually impedes capitalism because a state that does not have any pretense of limited government can very quickly mandate a regulatory framework for drones, for electric cars, for self-driving cars, for any new innovation where they feel that they can leapfrog Western societies. And this is a very unique thing in the American experience. And this is why it's very important to think of American capitalism as an operating system and not as an ideology. Because when you think about it as an ideology, you can have good politics make for very, very bad policy. That market outcomes and democratic voices and battles for votes can end up stifling progress. So over the next few years, as this political cycle plays out, you're going to see American democracy rise to meet the challenges that capitalism poses and modernity poses. And I ask policymakers to think about — decoupling ideology from economics, and think about how good policy can ultimately become good politics. Thank you. (Applause) |
The surprising ingredient that makes businesses work better | {0: 'Marco Alverà is an Italian/American businessman and CEO of Snam, Europe’s largest natural gas utility.'} | TED@BCG Milan | For me, it was not being invited to a friend's wedding. At first, I didn't really mind. I thought he was having a small reception. But then I kept meeting people who were going to the same wedding, and they weren't as close to the groom as I was ... and I felt left out. That really sucked. It felt really unfair. For my daughters, Lipsi and Greta, it was last week. They were taking turns massaging their mom's back with a toy for back rubs, and then one of the girls felt that the other girl had a longer go. That's when I walk into the room to find Greta in a rage, shouting, "That's not fair!" and Lipsi in tears, and my wife holding a stopwatch to make sure that each girl had precisely one minute on the toy. So if you're anything like me or my girls, the last thing that upset you probably also had to do with unfairness. That's because unfairness triggers us so strongly that we can't think straight. We become afraid and suspicious. Our unfairness antennae stick up. We feel pain, and we walk away. Unfairness is one of the defining issues of our society, it's one of the root causes of polarization, and it's bad news for business. At work, unfairness makes people defensive and disengaged. A study shows that 70 percent of workers in the US are disengaged, and this is costing the companies 550 billion dollars a year every year. This is, like, half the total spent on education in the US. This is the size of the GDP of a country like Austria. So removing unfairness and promoting fairness should be our priority. But what does it mean in practice? Is it about more rules? Is it about systems? Is it about equality? Well, partly, but fairness is more interesting than rules and equality. Fairness works in surprising ways. 15 years ago, I left a US investment bank to join a large Italian state-owned oil company. It was a different world. I thought the key to getting the best performance was a risk-reward system where you could give the high performers bonuses and promotions and give the underperformers something to worry about. But in this company, we had fixed salaries and lifelong jobs. Careers were set, so my toolkit wasn't very effective, and I was frustrated. But then I saw that this company was producing some pockets of excellence, areas in which they beat the competition in very tough, competitive sectors. This was true in trading, in project management — it was very true in exploration. Our exploration team was finding more oil and gas than any other company in the world. It was a phenomenon. Everyone was trying to figure out how this was possible. I thought it was luck, but after each new discovery, that became less and less likely. So did we have a special tool? No. Did we have a killer application that no one else had? No. Was it one genius who was finding oil for the whole team? No, we hadn't hired a senior guy in years. So what was our secret sauce? I started looking at them really carefully. I looked at my friend, who drilled seven dry wells, writing off more than a billion dollars for the company, and found oil on the eighth. I was nervous for him ... but he was so relaxed. I mean, these guys knew what they were doing. And then it hit me: it was about fairness. These guys were working in a company where they didn't need to worry about short-term results. They weren't going to be penalized for bad luck or for an honest mistake. They knew they were valued for what they were trying to do, not the outcome. They were valued as human beings. They were part of a community. Whatever happened, the company would stand by them. And for me, this is the definition of fairness. It's when you can lower those unfairness antennae, put them at rest. Then great things follow. These guys could be true to their purpose, which was finding oil and gas. They didn't have to worry about company politics or greed or fear. They could be good risk-takers, because they weren't too defensive and they weren't gambling to take huge rewards. And they were excellent team workers. They could trust their colleagues. They didn't need to look behind their backs. And they were basically having fun. They were having so much fun, one guy even confessed that he was having more fun at the company Christmas dinner than at his own Christmas dinner. (Laughter) But these guys, essentially, were working in a fair system where they could do what they felt was right instead of what's selfish, what's quick, what's convenient, and to be able to do what we feel is right is a key ingredient for fairness, but it is also a great motivator. And it wasn't just explorers who were doing the right thing. There was an HR director who proposed that I hire someone internally and give him a managerial job. This guy was very good, but he didn't finish high school, so formally, he had no qualifications. But he was so good, it made sense, and so we gave him the job. Or the other guy, who asked me for a budget to build a cheese factory next to our plant in Ecuador, in the village. It didn't make any sense: no one ever built a cheese factory. But this is what the village wanted, because the milk they had would spoil before they could sell it, so that's what they needed. And so we built it. So in these examples and many others, I learned that to be fair, my colleagues and I, we needed to take a risk and stick our head out, but in a fair system, you can do that. You can dare to be fair. So I realized that these guys and other colleagues were achieving great results, doing great things, in a way that no bonus could buy. So I was fascinated. I wanted to learn how this thing really worked, and I wanted to learn it also for myself, to become a better leader. So I started talking to colleagues, to coaches, to headhunters and neuroscientists, and what I discovered is that what these guys were up to and the way they worked is really supported by recent brain science. And I've also discovered that this can work at all levels in any type of company. You don't need the fixed salaries or the stable careers. This is because science shows that humans have an innate sense of fairness. We know what is right and what is wrong before we can talk or think about it. My favorite experiment has six-month old babies watching a ball trying to struggle up a hill. And there's a helpful, friendly square that pushes the ball up the hill, and then a mean triangle pushes the ball back down. After watching this several times, they ask the babies to pick, to choose what to play with. They can pick a ball, a square or a triangle. They never pick up the triangle. All the babies want to be the square. And science also shows that when we see or perceive fairness, our brain releases a substance that gives us pleasure, proper joy. But when we perceive unfairness, we feel pain ... even greater pain than the same type of pain as if I really hurt myself. That's because unfairness triggers the primitive, reptile part of our brain, the part that deals with threats and survival, and when unfairness triggers a threat, that's all we can think about. Motivation, creativity, teamwork, they all go way back. And it makes sense that we're wired this way, because we're social animals. We need to be part of a community to survive. We're born so helpless that someone needs to look after us until we're maybe 10 years old, so our brain evolves towards food. We need to be in that community. So whether I like it or not, not being invited to the friend's wedding, my lizard brain is generating the same response as if I'm about to be pushed out from my community. So science explains quite nicely why fairness is good and why unfairness makes us really defensive, but science also shows that in a fair environment, not only do we all want to be the square, but we tend to be the square, and this allows other people to be fair in turn. This creates a beautiful fairness circle. But while we start off fair ... one drop of unfairness contaminates the whole pool, and unfortunately, there's plenty of drops in that pool. So our effort should be to filter out as much unfairness as we can from everywhere, starting from our communities, starting from our companies. I worry about this a lot because I lead a team of 3,000 excellent people, and the difference between 3,000 happy, motivated team workers and 3,000 clock-watchers is everything. So the first thing I try to do in my fairness crusade is to try to take myself out of the equation. That means being aware of my own biases. For example, I really like people who say yes to whatever I suggest. (Laughter) But that's not very good for the company and not very good for anyone who has different ideas. So we try to actively promote a culture of diversity of opinions and diversity of character. The second thing we do is a little more procedural. We look at all the rules, the processes, the systems in the company, the ones we use to take decisions and allocate resources, and we try to get rid of anything that's not very clear, not very rational, doesn't make sense, and we also try to fix anything that's limiting the transfer of information within the company. We then look at the culture and the motivation for the same reasons. But my point is that however hard you look at the rules, the processes, the systems — and we have to do that — but however hard we look, we're never going to do enough to get to the real essence of fairness. That's because the last mile of fairness requires something else. It's about what people's emotions are, what their needs are, what's going on in their private lives, what society needs. These are all questions and elements that are very hard to put into a spreadsheet, into an algorithm. It's very hard to make them part of our rational decision. But if we miss these, we're missing key important points, and the outcome is likely to feel unfair. So we should cross-check our decisions with our fairness center switched on. Is it right that this guy should get the job he's really hoping to get? Is it right that this guy should be fired? Is it right that we should be charging so much for this product? These are tough questions. But if we take the time to ask ourselves whether the rational answer is the right one ... we all know deep inside what the answer is. We've known since we were babies. And to know what the right answer is is pretty cool for decision-making. And if we turn on our hearts, that's the key to getting the real best out of people, because they can smell it if you care, and only when you really care will they leave their fears behind and bring their true selves to work. So if fairness is a keystone of life, why isn't every leader making it their priority? Wouldn't it be cool to work in a company that was more fair? Wouldn't it be great to have colleagues and bosses that were selected and trained for fairness and for character and not based on 60-year-old GMATs? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to knock on the door of a Chief Fairness Officer? We'll get there, but why is it not happening now? Well, partly, it's because of inertia, partly, it's because fairness isn't always easy. It requires judgment and risk. Drilling that eighth well was a risk. Promoting the guy who didn't finish high school was a risk. Building a cheese factory in Ecuador was a risk. But fairness is a risk worth taking, so we should be asking ourselves, where can we take this risk? Where can we push ourselves a little bit further, to go beyond what's rational and do what's right? Thank you. (Applause) |
The virginity fraud | {0: 'Nina Dølvik Brochmann, M.D. wants to empower women through good sexual education.', 1: 'Ellen Støkken Dahl is spreading medical expertise and enthusiasm for sexual health as a teacher for teenagers, sex workers and refugees.'} | TEDxOslo | Nina Dølvik Brochmann: We grew up believing that the hymen is a proof of virginity. But it turns out, we were wrong. What we discovered is that the popular story we're told about female virginity is based on two anatomical myths. The truth has been known in medical communities for over 100 years, yet somehow these two myths continue to make life difficult for women around the world. Ellen Støkken Dahl: The first myth is about blood. It tells us that the hymen breaks and bleeds the first time a woman has vaginal sex. In other words, if there is no blood on the sheets afterwards, then the woman was simply not a virgin. The second myth is a logical consequence of the first. Since the hymen is thought to break and bleed, people also believe that it actually disappears or is in some way radically altered during a woman's first intercourse. If that were true, one would easily be able to determine if a woman is a virgin or not by examining her genitals, by doing a virginity check. NDB: So that's our two myths: virgins bleed, and hymens are lost forever. Now, this may sound like a minor issue to you. Why should you care about an obscure little skin fold on the female body? But the truth is, this is about so much more than an anatomical misunderstanding. The myths about the hymen have lived on for centuries because they have cultural significance. They have been used as a powerful tool in the effort to control women's sexuality in about every culture, religion and historical decade. Women are still mistrusted, shamed, harmed and, in the worst cases, subjected to honor killings if they don't bleed on their wedding night. Other women are forced through degrading virginity checks, simply to obtain a job, to save their reputation or to get married. ESD: Like in Indonesia, where women are systematically examined to enter military service. After the Egyptian uprisings in 2011, a group of female protesters were forced to undergo virginity checks by their military. In Oslo, doctors are examining the hymens of young girls to reassure parents that their children are not ruined. And sadly, the list goes on. Women are so afraid not to live up to the myths about the hymen that they choose to use different virginity quick fixes to assure a bleeding. That could be plastic surgery, known as "revirgination," it could be vials of blood poured on the sheets after sex or fake hymens bought online, complete with theater blood and a promise to "kiss your deep, dark secret goodbye." NDB: By telling girls that no deed can be kept secret, that their bodies will reveal them no matter what, we have endowed them with fear. Girls are afraid of ruining themselves, either through sport, play, tampon use or a sexual activity. We have curtailed their opportunities and their freedoms. It's time we put an end to the virginity fraud. It's time we break the myths about the hymen once and for all. ESD: We are medical students, sexual health workers and the authors of "The Wonder Down Under." (Laughter) That's a popular science book about the female genitals. And in our experience, people seem to believe that the hymen is some kind of a seal covering the vaginal opening. In Norwegian, it is even called "the virgin membrane." And with this, we picture something fragile, something easily destructible, something you can rip through, perhaps like a sheet of plastic wrapping. You may have wondered why we brought a hula hoop onstage today. We'll show you. (Laughter) Now, it is very hard to hide that something has happened to this hoop, right? It is different before and after I punched it. The seal is broken, and unless we change the plastic, it won't get back to its intact state. So if we wanted to do a virginity check on this hoop right here, right now, that would be very easy. It's easy to say that this hoop is not a virgin anymore. (Laughter) NDB: But the hymen is nothing like a piece of plastic you can wrap around your food, or a seal. In fact ... it's more like this — a scrunchie or a rubber band. The hymen is a rim of tissue at the outer opening of the vagina. And usually, it has a doughnut or a half-moon shape with a large, central hole. But this varies a lot, and sometimes hymens can have fringes, it can have several holes, or it can consist of lobes. In other words, hymens naturally vary a lot in looks, and that is what makes it so hard to do a virginity check. ESD: Now that we know a bit more about the hymen's anatomy, it's time to get back to our two myths: virgins bleed, hymens are lost forever. But the hymen doesn't have to break at all. The hymen is like a scrunchie in function as well as in looks. And you can stretch a scrunchie, right? (Laughter) You can stretch a hymen, too. In fact, it's very elastic. And for a lot of women, the hymen will be elastic enough to handle a vaginal intercourse without sustaining any damage. For other women, the hymen may tear a bit to make room for the penis, but that won't make it disappear. But it may look a bit different from before. It naturally follows that you can't examine the hymen to check for virginity status. This was noted over 100 years ago in 1906 by the Norwegian doctor Marie Jeancet. She examined a middle-aged sex worker and concluded that her genitalia were reminiscent of a teenage virgin. But that makes sense, right? Because if her hymen was never damaged during sex, then what were we expecting to see? ESD: Since hymens come in every shape and form, it is difficult to know if a dent or a fold in it is there because of previous damage or if it's just a normal anatomical variant. The absurdity of virgin testing is illustrated in a study done on 36 pregnant teenagers. When doctors examined their hymens, they could only find clear signs of penetration in two out of the 36 girls. So unless you believe in 34 cases of virgin births — (Laughter) we must all agree that also our second myth has taken a vital blow. You simply cannot look a woman between her legs and read her sexual story. NDB: Like most myths, the myths about the hymen are untrue. There is no virgin seal that magically disappears after sex, and half of virgins can easily have sex without bleeding. We wish we could say that by removing these myths, everything would be OK, that shame, harm and honor killings would all just disappear. But of course, it's not that simple. Sexual oppression of women comes from something much deeper than a simple anatomical misunderstanding about the properties of the hymen. It's a question of cultural and religious control of women's sexuality. And that is much harder to change. But we must try. ESD: As medical professionals, this is our contribution. We want every girl, parent and [future] husband to know what the hymen is and how it works. We want them to know that the hymen can't be used as a proof of virginity. And that way, we can remove one of the most powerful tools used to control young women today. After telling you this, you may wonder what the alternative is, for if we cannot use the hymen as a proof of virginity for women, then what should we use? We opt for using nothing. (Cheering) If you — (Applause) If you really want to know if a woman is a virgin or not, ask her. (Laughter) But how she answers that question is her choice. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why I train grandmothers to treat depression | {0: 'Dixon Chibanda is passionate about the human brain, how it influences our behavior and what we can do to make everybody happy.'} | TEDWomen 2017 | On a warm August morning in Harare, Farai, a 24-year-old mother of two, walks towards a park bench. She looks miserable and dejected. Now, on the park bench sits an 82-year-old woman, better known to the community as Grandmother Jack. Farai hands Grandmother Jack an envelope from the clinic nurse. Grandmother Jack invites Farai to sit down as she opens the envelope and reads. There's silence for three minutes or so as she reads. And after a long pause, Grandmother Jack takes a deep breath, looks at Farai and says, "I'm here for you. Would you like to share your story with me?" Farai begins, her eyes swelling with tears. She says, "Grandmother Jack, I'm HIV-positive. I've been living with HIV for the past four years. My husband left me a year ago. I have two kids under the age of five. I'm unemployed. I can hardly take care of my children." Tears are now flowing down her face. And in response, Grandmother Jack moves closer, puts her hand on Farai, and says, "Farai, it's OK to cry. You've been through a lot. Would you like to share more with me?" And Farai continues. "In the last three weeks, I have had recurrent thoughts of killing myself, taking my two children with me. I can't take it anymore. The clinic nurse sent me to see you." There's an exchange between the two, which lasts about 30 minutes. And finally, Grandmother Jack says, "Farai, it seems to me that you have all the symptoms of kufungisisa." The word "kufungisisa" opens up a floodgate of tears. So, kufungisisa is the local equivalent of depression in my country. It literally means "thinking too much." The World Health Organization estimates that more than 300 million people globally, today, suffer from depression, or what in my country we call kufungisisa. And the World Health Organization also tells us that every 40 seconds, someone somewhere in the world commits suicide because they are unhappy, largely due to depression or kufungisisa. And most of these deaths are occurring in low- and middle-income countries. In fact, the World Health Organization goes as far as to say that when you look at the age group between 15 to 29, a leading cause of death now is actually suicide. But there are wider events that lead to depression and in some cases, suicide, such as abuse, conflict, violence, isolation, loneliness — the list is endless. But one thing that we do know is that depression can be treated and suicides averted. But the problem is we just don't have enough psychiatrists or psychologists in the world to do the job. In most low- and middle-income countries, for instance, the ratio of psychiatrists to the population is something like one for every one and a half million people, which literally means that 90 percent of the people needing mental health services will not get it. In my country, there are 12 psychiatrists, and I'm one of them, for a population of approximately 14 million. Now, let me just put that into context. One evening while I was at home, I get a call from the ER, or the emergency room, from a city which is some 200 kilometers away from where I live. And the ER doctor says, "One of your patients, someone you treated four months ago, has just taken an overdose, and they are in the ER department. Hemodynamically, they seem to be OK, but they will need neuropsychiatric evaluation." Now, I obviously can't get into my car in the middle of the night and drive 200 kilometers. So as best as we could, over the phone with the ER doctor, we come up with an assessment. We ensure that suicidal observations are in place. We ensure that we start reviewing the antidepressants that this patient has been taking, and we finally conclude that as soon as Erica — that was her name, 26-year-old — as soon as Erica is ready to be released from the ER, she should come directly to me with her mother, and I will evaluate and establish what can be done. And we assumed that that would take about a week. A week passes. Three weeks pass. No Erica. And one day I get a call from Erica's mother, and she says, "Erica committed suicide three days ago. She hanged herself from the mango tree in the family garden." Now, almost like a knee-jerk reaction, I couldn't help but ask, "But why didn't you come to Harare, where I live? We had agreed that as soon as you're released from the ER, you will come to me." Her response was brief. "We didn't have the 15 dollars bus fare to come to Harare." Now, suicide is not an unusual event in the world of mental health. But there was something about Erica's death that struck me at the core of my very being. That statement from Erica's mother: "We didn't have 15 dollars bus fare to come to you," made me realize that it just wasn't going to work, me expecting people to come to me. And I got into this state of soul-searching, trying to really discover my role as a psychiatrist in Africa. And after considerable consultation and soul-searching, talking to colleagues, friends and family, it suddenly dawned on me that actually, one the most reliable resources we have in Africa are grandmothers. Yes, grandmothers. And I thought, grandmothers are in every community. There are hundreds of them. And — (Laughter) And they don't leave their communities in search of greener pastures. (Laughter) See, the only time they leave is when they go to a greener pasture called heaven. (Laughter) So I thought, how about training grandmothers in evidence-based talk therapy, which they can deliver on a bench? Empower them with the skills to listen, to show empathy, all of that rooted in cognitive behavioral therapy; empower them with the skills to provide behavior activation, activity scheduling; and support them using digital technology. You know, mobile phone technology. Pretty much everyone in Africa has a mobile phone today. So in 2006, I started my first group of grandmothers. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Today, there are hundreds of grandmothers who are working in more than 70 communities. And in the last year alone, more than 30,000 people received treatment on the Friendship Bench from a grandmother in a community in Zimbabwe. (Applause) And recently, we published this work that is done by these grandmothers in the Journal of the American Medical Association. And — (Applause) And our results show that six months after receiving treatment from a grandmother, people were still symptom-free: no depression, suicidal ideation completely reduced. In fact, our results — this was a clinical trial — in fact, this clinical trial showed that grandmothers were more effective at treating depression than doctors and — (Laughter) (Applause) And so, we're now working towards expanding this program. There are more than 600 million people currently aged above 65 in the world. And by the year 2050, there will be 1.5 billion people aged 65 and above. Imagine if we could create a global network of grandmothers in every major city in the world, who are trained in evidence-based talk therapy, supported through digital platforms, networked. And they will make a difference in communities. They will reduce the treatment gap for mental, neurological and substance-use disorders. Finally, this is a file photograph of Grandmother Jack. So, Farai had six sessions on the bench with Grandmother Jack. Today, Farai is employed. She has her two children at school. And as for Grandmother Jack, one morning in February, we expected her to see her 257th client on the bench. She didn't show up. She had gone to a greener pasture called heaven. But I believe that Grandmother Jack, from up there, she's cheering on all the other grandmothers — the increasing number of grandmothers who are making a difference in the lives of thousands of people. And I'm sure she's in awe when she realizes that something that she helped to pioneer is now spreading to other countries, like Malawi, the island of Zanzibar and coming closer to home here in the Unites States in the city of New York. May her soul rest in peace. Thank you. (Applause) (Cheering) (Applause) |
Fashion that celebrates African strength and spirit | {0: 'TED Fellow Walé Oyéjidé combats bias with creative storytelling.'} | TEDGlobal 2017 | It is often said that the stories of history are written by its victors, but if this is true, what becomes of the downtrodden, and how can they ever hope to aspire for something greater if they are never told the stories of their own glorious pasts? Ostensibly, I stand before you as a mere maker of clothing, but within the folds of ancient fabrics and modern textiles, I have found a higher calling. Through my work as a designer, I've discovered the importance of providing representation for the marginalized members of our society, and the importance of telling the most vulnerable among us that they no longer have to compromise themselves just so they can fit in with an uncompromising majority. It turns out that fashion, a discipline many of us consider to be trivial, can actually be a powerful tool for dismantling bias and bolstering the self-images of underrepresented populations. My interest in using design as a vehicle for social change happens to be a personal one. As a Nigerian American, I know how easily the term "African" can slip from being an ordinary geographic descriptor to becoming a pejorative. For those of us from this beautiful continent, to be African is to be inspired by culture and to be filled with undying hope for the future. So in an attempt to shift the misguided perceptions that many have about the place of my birth, I use design as a means to tell stories, stories about joy, stories about triumph, stories about perseverance all throughout the African diaspora. I tell these stories as a concerted effort to correct the historical record, because, no matter where any of us is from, each of us has been touched by the complicated histories that brought our families to a foreign land. These histories shape the way we view the world, and they mold the biases we carry around with us. To combat these biases, my work draws aesthetics from different parts of the globe and crafts a narrative about the importance of fighting for inclusivity. By refashioning images from classic European art and marrying them with African aesthetics, I am able to recast people of color in roles of prominence, providing them with a degree of dignity they didn't have in earlier times. This approach subverts the historically accepted narrative of African inferiority, and it serves as inspiration for people of color who have grown wary of seeing themselves depicted without sophistication and without grace. Each of these culture-bending tapestries becomes a tailored garment or a silk scarf, like the one I am very coincidentally wearing right now. (Laughter) And even when surrounded in a structure of European classicism, these narratives boldly extoll the merits of African empowerment. In this way, the tools of the masters become masterworks to celebrate those who were once subservient. This metaphor extends beyond the realm of art and out into the real world. Whether worn by refugees or world-changing entrepreneurs, when people are allowed the freedom to present themselves in a manner that celebrates their own unique identities, a magical thing happens. We stand taller. We're more proud and self-aware because we're presenting our true, authentic selves. And those of us who are around them in turn become more educated, more open and more tolerant of their different points of view. In this way, the clothes that we wear can be a great illustration of diplomatic soft power. The clothes that we wear can serve as bridges between our seemingly disparate cultures. And so, yeah, ostensibly I stand before you as a mere maker of clothing. But my work has always been about more than fashion. It has become my purpose to rewrite the cultural narratives so that people of color can be seen in a new and nuanced light, and so that we, the proud children of sub-Saharan Africa, can traverse the globe while carrying ourselves with pride. It was indeed true that the stories of history were told by its old victors, but I am of a new generation. My work speaks for those who will no longer let their futures be dictated by a troubled past. Today, we stand ready to tell our own stories without compromise, without apologies. But the question still remains: are you prepared for what you are about to hear? I hope you are, because we are coming regardless. (Applause) |
3 creative ways to fix fashion's waste problem | {0: "Amit Kalra wants to fix fashion's pollution problem."} | TED@Tommy | A few years ago, I found myself looking for the most cost-effective way to be stylish. So naturally, I wound up at my local thrift store, a wonderland of other people's trash that was ripe to be plucked to become my treasure. Now, I wasn't just looking for your average off-the-secondhand-rack vintage T-shirt to wear. For me, real style lives at the intersection of design and individuality. So to make sure that I was getting the most out of the things I was finding, I bought a sewing machine so I could tailor the 90's-style garments that I was finding, to fit a more contemporary aesthetic. I've been tailoring and making my own clothes from scratch ever since, so everything in my closet is uniquely my own. But as I was sorting through the endless racks of clothes at these thrift stores, I started to ask myself, what happens to all the clothes that I don't buy? The stuff that isn't really cool or trendy but kind of just sits there and rots away at these secondhand stores. I work in the fashion industry on the wholesale side, and I started to see some of the products that we sell end up on the racks of these thrift stores. So the question started to work its way into my work life, as well. I did some research and I pretty quickly found a very scary supply chain that led me to some pretty troubling realities. It turned out that the clothes I was sorting though at these thrift stores represented only a small fraction of the total amount of garments that we dispose of each year. In the US, only 15 percent of the total textile and garment waste that's generated each year ends up being donated or recycled in some way, which means that the other 85 percent of textile and garment waste end up in landfills every year. Now, I want to put this into perspective, because I don't quite think that the 85 percent does the problem justice. This means that almost 13 million tons of clothing and textile waste end up in landfills every year in just the United States alone. This averages out to be roughly 200 T-shirts per person ending up in the garbage. In Canada, we throw away enough clothing to fill the largest stadium in my home town of Toronto, one that seats 60,000 people, with a mountain of clothes three times the size of that stadium. Now, even with this, I still think that Canadians are the more polite North Americans, so don't hold it against us. (Laughter) What was even more surprising was seeing that the fashion industry is the second-largest polluter in the world behind the oil and gas industry. This is an important comparison to make. I don't want to defend the oil and gas industry but I'd be lying if I said I was surprised to hear they were the number one polluter. I just assumed, fairly or not, that that's an industry that doesn't really mind sticking to the status quo. One where the technology doesn't really change and the focus is more so on driving profitability at the expense of a sustainable future. But I was really surprised to see that the fashion industry was number two. Because maintaining that status quo is the opposite of what the fashion industry stands for. The unfortunate reality is, not only do we waste a lot of the things we do consume, but we also use a lot to produce the clothes that we buy each year. On average, a household's purchase of clothing per year requires 1,000 bathtubs of water to produce. A thousand bathtubs of water per household, per year. That's a lot of water. It seems that the industry that always has been and probably always will be on the forefront of design, creates products that are designed to be comfortable, designed to be trendy and designed to be expressive but aren't really designed to be sustainable or recyclable for that matter. But I think that can change. I think the fashion industry's aptitude for change is the exact thing that should make it patient zero for sustainable business practices. And I think to get started, all we have to do is start to design clothes to be recyclable at the end of their life. Now, designing recyclable clothing is definitely something to leave to the professionals. But as a 24-year-old thrift store aficionado armed with a sewing machine, if I were to very humbly posit one perspective, it would be to approach clothing design kind of like building with Lego. When we put together a brick of Lego, it's very strong but very easily manipulated. It's modular in its nature. Clothing design as it stands today is very rarely modular. Take this motorcycle jacket as an example. It's a pretty standard jacket with its buttons, zippers and trim. But in order for us to efficiently recycle a jacket like this, we need to be able to easily remove these items and quickly get down to just the fabric. Once we have just the fabric, we're able to break it down by shredding it and getting back to thread level, make new thread that then gets made into new fabric and ultimately new clothing, whether it be a new jacket or new T-shirts, for example. But the complexity lies with all of these extra items, the buttons, the zippers and the trim. Because in reality, these items are actually quite difficult to remove. So in many cases it requires more time or more money to disassemble a jacket like this. In some cases, it's just more cost-effective to throw it away rather than recycle it. But I think this can change if we design clothes in a modular way to be easily disassembled at the end of their lives. We could redesign this jacket to have a hidden wireframe, kind of like the skeleton of a fish, that holds all important items together. This invisible fish-bone structure can have all of these extra items, the zippers and the buttons and the trim, sewn into it and then attached to the fabric. So at the end of the jacket's life, all you have to do is remove its fish bone and the fabric comes with it a lot quicker and a lot easier than before. Now, recycling clothing is definitely one piece of the puzzle. But if we want to take fixing the environmental impact that the fashion industry has more seriously, then we need to take this to the next step and start to design clothes to also be compostable at the end of their lives. For most of the types of clothes we have in our closet the average lifespan is about three years. Now, I'm sure there's many of us that have gems in our drawers that are much older than that, which is great. Because being able to extend the life of a garment by even only nine months reduces the waste and water impact that that garment has by 20 to 30 percent. But fashion is fashion. Which means that styles are always going to change and you're probably going to be wearing something different than you were today eight seasons from now, no matter how environmentally friendly you want to be. But lucky for us, there are some items that never go out of style. I'm talking about your basics — your socks, underwear, even your pajamas. We're all guilty of wearing these items right down to the bone, and in many cases throwing them in the garbage because it's really difficult to donate your old ratty socks that have holes in them to your local thrift store. But what if we were able to compost these items rather than throw them in the trash bin? The environmental savings could be huge, and all we would have to do is start to shift more of our resources to start to produce more of these items using more natural fibers, like 100 percent organic cotton. Now, recycling and composting are two critical priorities. But one other thing that we have to rethink is the way that we dye our clothes. Currently, 10 to 20 percent of the harsh chemical dye that we use end up in water bodies that neighbor production hubs in developing nations. The tricky thing is that these harsh chemicals are really effective at keeping a garment a specific color for a long period of time. It's these harsh chemicals that keep that bright red dress bright red for so many years. But what if we were able to use something different? What if we were able to use something that we all have in our kitchen cabinets at home to dye our clothes? What if we were able to use spices and herbs to dye our clothes? There's countless food options that would allow for us to stain material, but these stains change color over time. This would be pretty different than the clothes that were dyed harshly with chemicals that we're used to. But dyeing clothes naturally this way would allow for us to make sure they're more unique and environmentally friendlier. Let's think about it. Fashion today is all about individuality. It's about managing your own personal appearance to be just unique enough to be cool. These days, everybody has the ability to showcase their brand their personal style, across the world, through social media. The pocket-sized billboards that we flick through on our Instagram feeds are chock-full of models and taste-makers that are showcasing their individuality through their personal microbrands. But what could be more personalized, more unique, than clothes that change color over time? Clothes that with each wash and with each wear become more and more one of a kind. People have been buying and wearing ripped jeans for years. So this would just be another example of clothes that exist in our wardrobe that evolve with us over our lives. This shirt, for example, is one that, much to the dismay of my mother and the state of her kitchen, I dyed at home, using turmeric, before coming here today. This shirt is something that none of my friends are going to have on their Instagram feed. So it's unique, but more importantly, it's naturally dyed. Now, I'm not suggesting that everybody dye their clothes in their kitchen sink at home. But if we were able to apply this or a similar process on a commercial scale, then our need to rely on these harsh chemical dyes for our clothes could be easily reduced. The 2.4-trillion-dollar fashion industry is fiercely competitive. So the business that can provide a product at scale while also promising its customers that each and every garment will become more unique over time will have a serious competitive advantage. Brands have been playing with customization for years. The rise of e-commerce services, like Indochino, a bespoke suiting platform, and Tinker Tailor, a bespoke dress-making platform, have made customization possible from your couch. Nike and Adidas have been mastering their online shoe customization platforms for years. Providing individuality at scale is a challenge that most consumer-facing businesses encounter. So being able to tackle this while also providing an environmentally friendly product could lead to a pretty seismic industry shift. And at that point, it's not just about doing what's best for our environment but also what's best for the bottom line. There's no fix-all, and there's no one-step solution. But we can get started by designing clothes with their death in mind. The fashion industry is the perfect industry to experiment with and embrace change that can one day get us to the sustainable future we so desperately need. Thank you. (Applause) |
The secret to great opportunities? The person you haven't met yet | {0: 'Tanya Menon speaks, writes and consults on collaboration. Her research focuses on how people think about their relationships and the habits that allow them to build positive connections with other people.'} | TEDxOhioStateUniversity | I started teaching MBA students 17 years ago. Sometimes I run into my students years later. And when I run into them, a funny thing happens. I don't remember just their faces; I also remember where exactly in the classroom they were sitting. And I remember who they were sitting with as well. This is not because I have any special superpowers of memory. The reason I can remember them is because they are creatures of habit. They are sitting with their favorite people in their favorite seats. They find their twins, they stay with them for the whole year. Now, the danger of this for my students is they're at risk of leaving the university with just a few people who are exactly like them. They're going to squander their chance for an international, diverse network. How could this happen to them? My students are open-minded. They come to business school precisely so that they can get great networks. Now, all of us socially narrow in our lives, in our school, in work, and so I want you to think about this one. How many of you here brought a friend along for this talk? I want you to look at your friend a little bit. Are they of the same nationality as you? Are they of the same gender as you? Are they of the same race? Really look at them closely. Don't they kind of look like you as well? (Laughter) The muscle people are together, and the people with the same hairstyles and the checked shirts. We all do this in life. We all do it in life, and in fact, there's nothing wrong with this. It makes us comfortable to be around people who are similar. The problem is when we're on a precipice, right? When we're in trouble, when we need new ideas, when we need new jobs, when we need new resources — this is when we really pay a price for living in a clique. Mark Granovetter, the sociologist, had a famous paper "The Strength of Weak Ties," and what he did in this paper is he asked people how they got their jobs. And what he learned was that most people don't get their jobs through their strong ties — their father, their mother, their significant other. They instead get jobs through weak ties, people who they just met. So if you think about what the problem is with your strong ties, think about your significant other, for example. The network is redundant. Everybody that they know, you know. Or I hope you know them. Right? Your weak ties — people you just met today — they are your ticket to a whole new social world. The thing is that we have this amazing ticket to travel our social worlds, but we don't use it very well. Sometimes we stay awfully close to home. And today, what I want to talk about is: What are those habits that keep human beings so close to home, and how can we be a little bit more intentional about traveling our social universe? So let's look at the first strategy. The first strategy is to use a more imperfect social search engine. What I mean by a social search engine is how you are finding and filtering your friends. And so people always tell me, "I want to get lucky through the network. I want to get a new job. I want to get a great opportunity." And I say, "Well, that's really hard, because your networks are so fundamentally predictable." Map out your habitual daily footpath, and what you'll probably discover is that you start at home, you go to your school or your workplace, you maybe go up the same staircase or elevator, you go to the bathroom — the same bathroom — and the same stall in that bathroom, you end up in the gym, then you come right back home. It's like stops on a train schedule. It's that predictable. It's efficient, but the problem is, you're seeing exactly the same people. Make your network slightly more inefficient. Go to a bathroom on a different floor. You encounter a whole new network of people. The other side of it is how we are actually filtering. And we do this automatically. The minute we meet someone, we are looking at them, we meet them, we are initially seeing, "You're interesting." "You're not interesting." "You're relevant." We do this automatically. We can't even help it. And what I want to encourage you to do instead is to fight your filters. I want you to take a look around this room, and I want you to identify the least interesting person that you see, and I want you to connect with them over the next coffee break. And I want you to go even further than that. What I want you to do is find the most irritating person you see as well and connect with them. What you are doing with this exercise is you are forcing yourself to see what you don't want to see, to connect with who you don't want to connect with, to widen your social world. To truly widen, what we have to do is, we've got to fight our sense of choice. We've got to fight our choices. And my students hate this, but you know what I do? I won't let them sit in their favorite seats. I move them around from seat to seat. I force them to work with different people so there are more accidental bumps in the network where people get a chance to connect with each other. And we studied exactly this kind of an intervention at Harvard University. At Harvard, when you look at the rooming groups, there's freshman rooming groups, people are not choosing those roommates. They're of all different races, all different ethnicities. Maybe people are initially uncomfortable with those roommates, but the amazing thing is, at the end of a year with those students, they're able to overcome that initial discomfort. They're able to find deep-level commonalities with people. So the takeaway here is not just "take someone out to coffee." It's a little more subtle. It's "go to the coffee room." When researchers talk about social hubs, what makes a social hub so special is you can't choose; you can't predict who you're going to meet in that place. And so with these social hubs, the paradox is, interestingly enough, to get randomness, it requires, actually, some planning. In one university that I worked at, there was a mail room on every single floor. What that meant is that the only people who would bump into each other are those who are actually on that floor and who are bumping into each other anyway. At another university I worked at, there was only one mail room, so all the faculty from all over that building would run into each other in that social hub. A simple change in planning, a huge difference in the traffic of people and the accidental bumps in the network. Here's my question for you: What are you doing that breaks you from your social habits? Where do you find yourself in places where you get injections of unpredictable diversity? And my students give me some wonderful examples. They tell me when they're doing pickup basketball games, or my favorite example is when they go to a dog park. They tell me it's even better than online dating when they're there. So the real thing that I want you to think about is we've got to fight our filters. We've got to make ourselves a little more inefficient, and by doing so, we are creating a more imprecise social search engine. And you're creating that randomness, that luck that is going to cause you to widen your travels, through your social universe. But in fact, there's more to it than that. Sometimes we actually buy ourselves a second-class ticket to travel our social universe. We are not courageous when we reach out to people. Let me give you an example of that. A few years ago, I had a very eventful year. That year, I managed to lose a job, I managed to get a dream job overseas and accept it, I had a baby the next month, I got very sick, I was unable to take the dream job. And so in a few weeks, what ended up happening was, I lost my identity as a faculty member, and I got a very stressful new identity as a mother. What I also got was tons of advice from people. And the advice I despised more than any other advice was, "You've got to go network with everybody." When your psychological world is breaking down, the hardest thing to do is to try and reach out and build up your social world. And so we studied exactly this idea on a much larger scale. What we did was we looked at high and low socioeconomic status people, and we looked at them in two situations. We looked at them first in a baseline condition, when they were quite comfortable. And what we found was that our lower socioeconomic status people, when they were comfortable, were actually reaching out to more people. They thought of more people. They were also less constrained in how they were networking. They were thinking of more diverse people than the higher-status people. Then we asked them to think about maybe losing a job. We threatened them. And once they thought about that, the networks they generated completely differed. The lower socioeconomic status people reached inwards. They thought of fewer people. They thought of less-diverse people. The higher socioeconomic status people thought of more people, they thought of a broader network, they were positioning themselves to bounce back from that setback. Let's consider what this actually means. Imagine that you were being spontaneously unfriended by everyone in your network other than your mom, your dad and your dog. (Laughter) This is essentially what we are doing at these moments when we need our networks the most. Imagine — this is what we're doing. We're doing it to ourselves. We are mentally compressing our networks when we are being harassed, when we are being bullied, when we are threatened about losing a job, when we feel down and weak. We are closing ourselves off, isolating ourselves, creating a blind spot where we actually don't see our resources. We don't see our allies, we don't see our opportunities. How can we overcome this? Two simple strategies. One strategy is simply to look at your list of Facebook friends and LinkedIn friends just so you remind yourself of people who are there beyond those that automatically come to mind. And in our own research, one of the things we did was, we considered Claude Steele's research on self-affirmation: simply thinking about your own values, networking from a place of strength. What Leigh Thompson, Hoon-Seok Choi and I were able to do is, we found that people who had affirmed themselves first were able to take advice from people who would otherwise be threatening to them. Here's a last exercise. I want you to look in your email in-box, and I want you to look at the last time you asked somebody for a favor. And I want you to look at the language that you used. Did you say things like, "Oh, you're a great resource," or "I owe you one," "I'm obligated to you." All of this language represents a metaphor. It's a metaphor of economics, of a balance sheet, of accounting, of transactions. And when we think about human relations in a transactional way, it is fundamentally uncomfortable to us as human beings. We must think about human relations and reaching out to people in more humane ways. Here's an idea as to how to do so. Look at words like "please," "thank you," "you're welcome" in other languages. Look at the literal translation of these words. Each of these words is a word that helps us impose upon other people in our social networks. And so, the word "thank you," if you look at it in Spanish, Italian, French, "gracias," "grazie," "merci" in French. Each of them are "grace" and "mercy." They are godly words. There's nothing economic or transactional about those words. The word "you're welcome" is interesting. The great persuasion theorist Robert Cialdini says we've got to get our favors back. So we need to emphasize the transaction a little bit more. He says, "Let's not say 'You're welcome.' Instead say, 'I know you'd do the same for me.'" But sometimes it may be helpful to not think in transactional ways, to eliminate the transaction, to make it a little bit more invisible. And in fact, if you look in Chinese, the word "bú kè qì" in Chinese, "You're welcome," means, "Don't be formal; we're family. We don't need to go through those formalities." And "kembali" in Indonesian is "Come back to me." When you say "You're welcome" next time, think about how you can maybe eliminate the transaction and instead strengthen that social tie. Maybe "It's great to collaborate," or "That's what friends are for." I want you to think about how you think about this ticket that you have to travel your social universe. Here's one metaphor. It's a common metaphor: "Life is a journey." Right? It's a train ride, and you're a passenger on the train, and there are certain people with you. Certain people get on this train, and some stay with you, some leave at different stops, new ones may enter. I love this metaphor, it's a beautiful one. But I want you to consider a different metaphor. This one is passive, being a passenger on that train, and it's quite linear. You're off to some particular destination. Why not instead think of yourself as an atom, bumping up against other atoms, maybe transferring energy with them, bonding with them a little and maybe creating something new on your travels through the social universe. Thank you so much. And I hope we bump into each other again. (Applause) |
How we can build AI to help humans, not hurt us | {0: "Margaret Mitchell is a senior research scientist in Google's Research & Machine Intelligence group, working on artificial intelligence."} | TED@BCG Milan | I work on helping computers communicate about the world around us. There are a lot of ways to do this, and I like to focus on helping computers to talk about what they see and understand. Given a scene like this, a modern computer-vision algorithm can tell you that there's a woman and there's a dog. It can tell you that the woman is smiling. It might even be able to tell you that the dog is incredibly cute. I work on this problem thinking about how humans understand and process the world. The thoughts, memories and stories that a scene like this might evoke for humans. All the interconnections of related situations. Maybe you've seen a dog like this one before, or you've spent time running on a beach like this one, and that further evokes thoughts and memories of a past vacation, past times to the beach, times spent running around with other dogs. One of my guiding principles is that by helping computers to understand what it's like to have these experiences, to understand what we share and believe and feel, then we're in a great position to start evolving computer technology in a way that's complementary with our own experiences. So, digging more deeply into this, a few years ago I began working on helping computers to generate human-like stories from sequences of images. So, one day, I was working with my computer to ask it what it thought about a trip to Australia. It took a look at the pictures, and it saw a koala. It didn't know what the koala was, but it said it thought it was an interesting-looking creature. Then I shared with it a sequence of images about a house burning down. It took a look at the images and it said, "This is an amazing view! This is spectacular!" It sent chills down my spine. It saw a horrible, life-changing and life-destroying event and thought it was something positive. I realized that it recognized the contrast, the reds, the yellows, and thought it was something worth remarking on positively. And part of why it was doing this was because most of the images I had given it were positive images. That's because people tend to share positive images when they talk about their experiences. When was the last time you saw a selfie at a funeral? I realized that, as I worked on improving AI task by task, dataset by dataset, that I was creating massive gaps, holes and blind spots in what it could understand. And while doing so, I was encoding all kinds of biases. Biases that reflect a limited viewpoint, limited to a single dataset — biases that can reflect human biases found in the data, such as prejudice and stereotyping. I thought back to the evolution of the technology that brought me to where I was that day — how the first color images were calibrated against a white woman's skin, meaning that color photography was biased against black faces. And that same bias, that same blind spot continued well into the '90s. And the same blind spot continues even today in how well we can recognize different people's faces in facial recognition technology. I though about the state of the art in research today, where we tend to limit our thinking to one dataset and one problem. And that in doing so, we were creating more blind spots and biases that the AI could further amplify. I realized then that we had to think deeply about how the technology we work on today looks in five years, in 10 years. Humans evolve slowly, with time to correct for issues in the interaction of humans and their environment. In contrast, artificial intelligence is evolving at an incredibly fast rate. And that means that it really matters that we think about this carefully right now — that we reflect on our own blind spots, our own biases, and think about how that's informing the technology we're creating and discuss what the technology of today will mean for tomorrow. CEOs and scientists have weighed in on what they think the artificial intelligence technology of the future will be. Stephen Hawking warns that "Artificial intelligence could end mankind." Elon Musk warns that it's an existential risk and one of the greatest risks that we face as a civilization. Bill Gates has made the point, "I don't understand why people aren't more concerned." But these views — they're part of the story. The math, the models, the basic building blocks of artificial intelligence are something that we call access and all work with. We have open-source tools for machine learning and intelligence that we can contribute to. And beyond that, we can share our experience. We can share our experiences with technology and how it concerns us and how it excites us. We can discuss what we love. We can communicate with foresight about the aspects of technology that could be more beneficial or could be more problematic over time. If we all focus on opening up the discussion on AI with foresight towards the future, this will help create a general conversation and awareness about what AI is now, what it can become and all the things that we need to do in order to enable that outcome that best suits us. We already see and know this in the technology that we use today. We use smart phones and digital assistants and Roombas. Are they evil? Maybe sometimes. Are they beneficial? Yes, they're that, too. And they're not all the same. And there you already see a light shining on what the future holds. The future continues on from what we build and create right now. We set into motion that domino effect that carves out AI's evolutionary path. In our time right now, we shape the AI of tomorrow. Technology that immerses us in augmented realities bringing to life past worlds. Technology that helps people to share their experiences when they have difficulty communicating. Technology built on understanding the streaming visual worlds used as technology for self-driving cars. Technology built on understanding images and generating language, evolving into technology that helps people who are visually impaired be better able to access the visual world. And we also see how technology can lead to problems. We have technology today that analyzes physical characteristics we're born with — such as the color of our skin or the look of our face — in order to determine whether or not we might be criminals or terrorists. We have technology that crunches through our data, even data relating to our gender or our race, in order to determine whether or not we might get a loan. All that we see now is a snapshot in the evolution of artificial intelligence. Because where we are right now, is within a moment of that evolution. That means that what we do now will affect what happens down the line and in the future. If we want AI to evolve in a way that helps humans, then we need to define the goals and strategies that enable that path now. What I'd like to see is something that fits well with humans, with our culture and with the environment. Technology that aids and assists those of us with neurological conditions or other disabilities in order to make life equally challenging for everyone. Technology that works regardless of your demographics or the color of your skin. And so today, what I focus on is the technology for tomorrow and for 10 years from now. AI can turn out in many different ways. But in this case, it isn't a self-driving car without any destination. This is the car that we are driving. We choose when to speed up and when to slow down. We choose if we need to make a turn. We choose what the AI of the future will be. There's a vast playing field of all the things that artificial intelligence can become. It will become many things. And it's up to us now, in order to figure out what we need to put in place to make sure the outcomes of artificial intelligence are the ones that will be better for all of us. Thank you. (Applause) |
Looking for a job? Highlight your ability, not your experience | {0: 'TED Resident Jason Shen uses data and technology to help leaders identify talent. '} | TED Residency | You know who I'm envious of? People who work in a job that has to do with their college major. (Laughter) Journalists who studied journalism, engineers who studied engineering. The truth is, these folks are no longer the rule, but the exception. A 2010 study found that only a quarter of college graduates work in a field that relates to their degree. I graduated with not one but two degrees in biology. To my parents' dismay, I am neither a doctor nor a scientist. (Laughter) Years of studying DNA replication and photosynthesis did little to prepare me for a career in technology. I had to teach myself everything from sales, marketing, strategy, even a little programming, on my own. I had never held the title of Product Manager before I sent my resume in to Etsy. I had already been turned down by Google and several other firms and was getting frustrated. The company had recently gone public, so as part of my job application, I read the IPO filings from cover to cover and built a website from scratch which included my analysis of the business and four ideas for new features. It turned out the team was actively working on two of those ideas and had seriously considered a third. I got the job. We all know people who were ignored or overlooked at first but went on to prove their critics wrong. My favorite story? Brian Acton, an engineering manager who was rejected by both Twitter and Facebook before cofounding WhatsApp, the mobile messaging platform that would sell for 19 billion dollars. The hiring systems we built in the 20th century are failing us and causing us to miss out on people with incredible potential. The advances in robotics and machine learning and transforming the way we work, automating routine tasks in many occupations while augmenting and amplifying human labor in others. At this rate, we should all be expecting to do jobs we've never done before for the rest of our careers. So what are the tools and strategies we need to identify tomorrow's high performers? In search for answers, I've consulted with leaders across many sectors, read dozens of reports and research papers and conducted some of my own talent experiments. My quest is far from over, but here are three ideas to take forward. One: expand your search. If we only look for talent in the same places we always do — gifted child programs, Ivy League schools, prestigious organizations — we're going to get the same results we always have. Baseball was transformed when the cash-strapped Oakland Athletics started recruiting players who didn't score highly on traditionally valued metrics, like runs batted in, but who had the ability to help the team score points and win games. This idea is taking hold outside of sports. The Head of Design and Research at Pinterest told me that they've built one of the most diverse and high-performing teams in Silicon Valley because they believe that no one type of person holds a monopoly on talent. They've worked hard to look beyond major tech hubs and focus on designers' portfolios, not their pedigrees. Two: hire for performance. Inspired by my own job experience, I cofounded a hiring platform called Headlight, which gives candidates an opportunity to shine. Just as teams have tryouts and plays have auditions, candidates should be asked to demonstrate their skills before they're hired. Our clients are benefiting from 85 years of employment research, which shows that work samples are one of the best predictors of success on the job. If you're hiring a data analyst, give them a spreadsheet of historical data and ask them for their key insights. If you're hiring a marketing manager, have them plan a launch campaign for a new product. And if you're a candidate, don't wait for an employer to ask. Seek out ways to showcase your unique skills and abilities outside of just the standard resume and cover letter. Three: get the bigger picture. I've heard about recruiters who are quick to label a candidate a job-hopper based on a single short stint on their resume; read about professors who are more likely to ignore identical messages from students because their name was black or Asian instead of white. I was almost put on a special needs track as a child. A month into kindergarten, my teacher wrote a page-long memo noting that I was impulsive, had a short attention span, and despite my wonderful curiosity, I was exhausting to work with. (Laughter) The principal asked my parents into a meeting, asked my mother if there had been complications at birth and suggested I meet with a school psychologist. My father saw what was happening and quickly explained our family situation. As recent immigrants, we lived in the attic of a home that cared for adults with mental disabilities. My parents worked nights to make ends meet, and I had little opportunity to spend time with kids my own age. Is it really a surprise that an understimulated five-year-old boy might be a little excited in a kindergarten classroom after an entire summer by himself? Until we get a holistic view of someone, our judgment of them will always be flawed. Let's stop equating experience with ability, credentials with competence. Let's stop settling for the safe, familiar choice and leave the door open for someone who could be amazing. We need employers to let go of outdated hiring practices and embrace new ways of identifying and cultivating talent, and candidates can help by learning to tell their story in powerful and compelling ways. We could live in a world where people are seen for what they're truly capable of and have the opportunity to realize their full potential. So let's go out and build it. Thank you. (Applause) |
A life-saving invention that prevents human stampedes | {0: 'Nilay Kulkarni is the co-founder and chief technical officer of Ashioto Analytics, a real-time crowd flow analysis platform.'} | TEDNYC | I was only nine when my grandfather first described to me the horrors he witnessed six years earlier when human stampedes killed 39 people in our hometown of Nashik, India. It was during the 2003 Nashik Kumbh Mela, one of the world's largest religious gatherings. Every 12 years, over 30 million Hindu worshippers descend upon our city — which is built only for 1.5 million people — and stay for 45 days. The main purpose is to wash away all their sins by bathing in the river Godavari. And stampedes may easily happen because a high-density crowd moves at a slow pace. Apart from Nashik, this event happens in three other places in India, with varying frequency, and between 2001 and 2014, over 2,400 lives have been lost in stampedes at these events. What saddened me the most is seeing people around me resigning to the city's fate in witnessing the seemingly inevitable deaths of dozens at every Kumbh Mela. I sought to change this, and I thought, why can't I try to find a solution to this? Because I knew it is wrong. Having learned coding at an early age and being a maker, I considered the wild idea — (Laughter) [Makers always find a way] I considered the wild idea of building a system that would help regulate the flow of people and use it in the next Kumbh Mela in 2015, to have fewer stampedes and, hopefully, fewer deaths. It seemed like a mission impossible, a dream too big, especially for a 15-year-old, yet that dream came true in 2015, when not only did we succeed in reducing the stampedes and their intensity, but we marked 2015 as the first Nashik Kumbh Mela to have zero stampedes. (Applause) It was the first time in recorded history that this event passed without any casualties. How did we do it? It all started when I joined an innovation workshop by MIT Media Lab in 2014 called the Kumbhathon that aimed at solving challenges faced at the grand scale of Kumbh Mela. Now, we figured out to solve the stampede problem, we wanted to know only three things: the number of people, the location, and the rate of the flow of people per minute. So we started to look for technologies that would help us get these three things. Can we distribute radio-frequency tokens to identify people? We figured out that it would be too expensive and impractical to distribute 30 million tags. Can you use CCTV cameras with image-processing techniques? Again, too expensive for that scale, along with the disadvantages of being non-portable and being completely useless in the case of rain, which is a common thing to happen in Kumbh Mela. Can we use cell phone tower data? It sounds like the perfect solution, but the funny part is, most of the people do not carry cell phones in events like Kumbh Mela. Also, the data wouldn't have been granular enough for us. So we wanted something that was real-time, low-cost, sturdy and waterproof, and it was easy to get the data for processing. So we built Ashioto, meaning "footstep" in Japanese, as it consists of a portable mat which has pressure sensors which can count the number of people walking on it, and sends the data over the internet to the advanced data analysis software we created. The possible errors, like overcounting or double-stepping, were overcome using design interventions. The optimum breadth of the mat was determined to be 18 inches, after we tested many different versions and observed the average stride length of a person. Otherwise, people might step over the sensor. We started with a proof of concept built in three days, made out of cardboard and aluminum foil. (Laughter) It worked, for real. We built another one with aluminum composite panels and piezoelectric plates, which are plates that generate a small pulse of electricity under pressure. We tested this at 30 different pilots in public, in crowded restaurants, in malls, in temples, etc., to see how people reacted. And people let us run these pilots because they were excited to see localites work on problems for the city. I was 15 and my team members were in their early 20s. When the sensors were colored, people would get scared and would ask us questions like, "Will I get electrocuted if I step on this?" (Laughter) Or, if it was very obvious that it was an electronic sensor on the ground, they would just jump over it. (Laughter) So we decided to design a cover for the sensor so that people don't have to worry what it is on the ground. So after some experimentation, we decided to use an industrial sensor, used as a safety trigger in hazardous areas as the sensor, and a black neoprene rubber sheet as the cover. Now, another added benefit of using black rubber was that dust naturally accumulates over the surface, eventually camouflaging it with the ground. We also had to make sure that the sensor is no higher than 12 millimeters. Otherwise, people might trip over it, which in itself would cause stampedes. (Laughter) We don't want that. (Laughter) So we were able to design a sensor which was only 10 millimeters thick. Now the data is sent to the server in real time, and a heat map is plotted, taking into account all the active devices on the ground. The authorities could be alerted if the crowd movement slowed down or if the crowd density moved beyond a desired threshold. We installed five of these mats in the Nashik Kumbh Mela 2015, and counted over half a million people in 18 hours, ensuring that the data was available in real time at various checkpoints, ensuring a safe flow of people. Now, this system, eventually, with other innovations, is what helped prevent stampedes altogether at that festival. The code used by Ashioto during Kumbh Mela will soon be made publicly available, free to use for anyone. I would be glad if someone used this code to make many more gatherings safer. Having succeeded at Kumbh Mela has inspired me to help others who may also suffer from stampedes. The design of the system makes it adaptable to pretty much any event that involves an organized gathering of people. And my new dream is to improve, adapt and deploy the system all over the world to prevent loss of life and ensure a safe flow of people, because every human soul is precious, whether at concerts or sporting events, the Maha Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, the Hajj in Mecca, the Shia procession to Karbala or at the Vatican City. So what do you all think, can we do it? (Audience) Yes! Thank you. (Cheers) (Applause) |
How to resolve racially stressful situations | {0: "Dr. Howard C. Stevenson's work involves developing culturally relevant, in-the-moment, strength-based measures and therapeutic interventions that teach emotional and racial literacy to families and youth."} | TEDMED 2017 | There's an African proverb that goes, "The lion's story will never be known as long as the hunter is the one to tell it." More than a racial conversation, we need a racial literacy to decode the politics of racial threat in America. Key to this literacy is a forgotten truth, that the more we understand that our cultural differences represent the power to heal the centuries of racial discrimination, dehumanization and illness. Both of my parents were African-American. My father was born in Southern Delaware, my mother, North Philadelphia, and these two places are as different from each other as east is from west, as New York City is from Montgomery, Alabama. My father's way of dealing with racial conflict was to have my brother Bryan, my sister Christy and I in church what seemed like 24 hours a day, seven days a week. (Laughter) If anybody bothered us because of the color of our skin, he believed that you should pray for them, knowing that God would get them back in the end. (Laughter) You could say that his racial-coping approach was spiritual — for later on, one day, like Martin Luther King. My mother's coping approach was a little different. She was, uh, you could say, more relational — right now, like, in your face, right now. More like Malcolm X. (Laughter) She was raised from neighborhoods in which there was racial violence and segregation, where she was chased out of neighborhoods, and she exacted violence to chase others out of hers. When she came to Southern Delaware, she thought she had come to a foreign country. She didn't understand anybody, particularly the few black and brown folks who were physically deferential and verbally deferential in the presence of whites. Not my mother. When she wanted to go somewhere, she walked. She didn't care what you thought. And she pissed a lot of people off with her cultural style. Before we get into the supermarket, she would give us the talk: "Don't ask for nothin', don't touch nothin'. Do you understand what I'm saying to you? I don't care if all the other children are climbing the walls. They're not my children. Do you understand what I'm saying to you?" In three-part harmony: "Yes, Mom." Before we'd get into the supermarket, that talk was all we needed. Now, how many of you ever got that talk? How many of you ever give that talk? (Laughter) How many of you ever give that talk today? My mother didn't give us the talk because she was worried about money or reputation or us misbehaving. We never misbehaved. We were too scared. We were in church 24 hours a day, seven days a week. (Laughter) She gave us that talk to remind us that some people in the world would interpret us as misbehaving just by being black. Not every parent has to worry about their children being misjudged because of the color of their skin, just by breathing. So we get into the supermarket, and people look at us — stare at us as if we just stole something. Every now and then, a salesperson would do something or say something because they were pissed with our cultural style, and it would usually happen at the conveyor belt. And the worst thing they could do was to throw our food into the bag. And when that happened, it was on. (Laughter) My mother began to tell them who they were, who their family was, where to go, how fast to get there. (Laughter) If you haven't been cursed out by my mother, you haven't lived. (Laughter) The person would be on the floor, writhing in utter decay and decomposition, whimpering in a pool of racial shame. (Laughter) Now, both my parents were Christians. The difference is my father prayed before a racial conflict and my mother prayed after. (Laughter) There is a time, if you use both of their strategies, if you use them in the right time and the right way. But it's never a time — there's a time for conciliation, there's a time for confrontation, but it's never a time to freeze up like a deer in the headlights, and it's never a time to lash out in heedless, thoughtless anger. The lesson in this is that when it comes to race relations, sometimes, we've got to know how to pray, think through, process, prepare. And other times, we've got to know how to push, how to do something. And I'm afraid that neither of these two skills — preparing, pushing — are prevalent in our society today. If you look at the neuroscience research which says that when we are racially threatened, our brains go on lockdown, and we dehumanize black and brown people. Our brains imagine that children and adults are older than they really are, larger than they really are and closer than they really are. When we're at our worst, we convince ourselves that they don't deserve affection or protection. At the Racial Empowerment Collaborative, we know that some of the scariest moments are racial encounters, some of the scariest moments that people will ever face. If you look at the police encounters that have led to some wrongful deaths of mostly Native Americans and African-Americans in this country, they've lasted about two minutes. Within 60 seconds, our brains go on lockdown. And when we're unprepared, we overreact. At best, we shut down. At worst, we shoot first and ask no questions. Imagine if we could reduce the intensity of threat within those 60 seconds and keep our brains from going on lockdown. Imagine how many children would get to come home from school or 7-Eleven without getting expelled or shot. Imagine how many mothers and fathers wouldn't have to cry. Racial socialization can help young people negotiate 60-second encounters, but it's going to take more than a chat. It requires a racial literacy. Now, how do parents have these conversations, and what is a racial literacy? Thank you for asking. (Laughter) A racial literacy involves the ability to read, recast and resolve a racially stressful encounter. Reading involves recognizing when a racial moment happens and noticing our stress reactions to it. Recasting involves taking mindfulness and reducing my tsunami interpretation of this moment and reducing it to a mountain-climbing experience, one that is — from impossible situation to one that is much more doable and challenging. Resolving a racially stressful encounter involves being able to make a healthy decision that is not an underreaction, where I pretend, "That didn't bother me," or an overreaction, where I exaggerate the moment. Now, we can teach parents and children how to read, recast and resolve using a mindfulness strategy we call: "Calculate, locate, communicate, breathe and exhale." Stay with me. "Calculate" asks, "What feeling am I having right now, and how intense is it on a scale of one to 10?" "Locate" asks, "Where in my body do I feel it?" And be specific, like the Native American girl at a Chicago fifth-grade school said to me, "I feel angry at a nine because I'm the only Native American. And I can feel it in my stomach, like a bunch of butterflies are fighting with each other, so much so that they fly up into my throat and choke me." The more detailed you can be, the easier it is to reduce that spot. "Communicate" asks, "What self-talk and what images are coming in my mind?" And if you really want help, try breathing in and exhaling slowly. With the help of my many colleagues at the Racial Empowerment Collaborative, we use in-the-moment stress-reduction in several research and therapy projects. One project is where we use basketball to help youth manage their emotions during 60-second eruptions on the court. Another project, with the help of my colleagues Loretta and John Jemmott, we leverage the cultural style of African-American barbershops, where we train black barbers to be health educators in two areas: one, to safely reduce the sexual risk in their partner relationships; and the other, to stop retaliation violence. The cool part is the barbers use their cultural style to deliver this health education to 18- to 24-year-old men while they're cutting their hair. Another project is where we teach teachers how to read, recast and resolve stressful moments in the classroom. And a final project, in which we teach parents and their children separately to understand their racial traumas before we bring them together to problem-solve daily microaggressions. Now, racially literate conversations with our children can be healing, but it takes practice. And I know some of you are saying, "Practice? Practice? We're talking about practice?" Yes, we are talking about practice. I have two sons. My oldest, Bryan, is 26, and my youngest, Julian, is 12. And we do not have time to talk about how that happened. (Laughter) But, when I think of them, they are still babies to me, and I worry every day that the world will misjudge them. In August of 2013, Julian, who was eight at the time, and I were folding laundry, which in and of itself is such a rare occurrence, I should have known something strange was going to happen. On the TV were Trayvon Martin's parents, and they were crying because of the acquittal of George Zimmerman. And Julian was glued to the TV. He had a thousand questions, and I was not prepared. He wanted to know why: Why would a grown man stalk and hunt down and kill an unarmed 17-year-old boy? And I did not know what to say. The best thing that could come out of my mouth was, "Julian, sometimes in this world, there are people who look down on black and brown people and do not treat them — and children, too — do not treat them as human." He interpreted the whole situation as sad. (Voice-over) Julian Stevenson: That's sad. "We don't care. You're not our kind." HS: Yes. JS: It's like, "We're better than you." HS: Yes. JS: "And there's nothing you can do about that. And if you scare me, or something like that, I will shoot you because I'm scared of you." HS: Exactly. But if somebody's stalking you — JS: It's not the same for everyone else. HS: It's not always the same, no. You've got to be careful. JS: Yeah, because people can disrespect you. HS: Exactly. JS: And think that you're, "You don't look — you don't look like you're ..." It's like they're saying that "You don't look right, so I guess I have the right to disrespect you." HS: Yeah, and that's what we call, we call that racism. And we call that racism, Julian, and yes, some people — other people — can wear a hoodie, and nothing happens to them. But you and Trayvon might, and that's why Daddy wants you to be safe. (Voice-over) HS: And that's why — JS: So you mean like, when you said "other people," you mean, like if Trayvon was a white, um, that he wouldn't be disrespected like that? HS: Yes, Julian, Daddy meant white people when I said, "other people," all right? So there was a way in which I was so awkward in the beginning, but once I started getting my rhythm and my groove, I started talking about stereotypes and issues of discrimination, and just when I was getting my groove on, Julian interrupted me. (Voice-over) HS: ... dangerous, or you're a criminal because you're black, and you're a child or a boy — That is wrong, it doesn't matter who does it. JS: Dad, I need to stop you there. HS: What? JS: Remember when we were ... HS: So he interrupts me to tell me a story about when he was racially threatened at a swimming pool with a friend by two grown white men, which his mother confirmed. And I felt happy that he was able to talk about it; it felt like he was getting it. We moved from the sadness of Trayvon's parents and started talking about George Zimmerman's parents, which, I read in a magazine, condoned the stalking of Trayvon. And Julian's reaction to me was priceless. It made me feel like he was getting it. (Voice-over) JS: What did they say about him? HS: Well, I think they basically felt that he was justified to follow and stalk — JS: What the — ? HS: Yeah, I think that's wrong. JS: That's — one minute. So they're saying he has the right to follow a black kid, get in a fight with him and shoot him? HS: As Julian was getting it, I started to lose it. Because in my mind's eye, I was thinking: What if my Julian or Bryan was Trayvon? I calculated my anger at a 10. I found, located, my right leg was shaking uncontrollably like I was running. And in my mind's eye, I could see somebody chasing Julian, and I was chasing them. And the only thing that could come out of my mouth was if anybody tries to bother my child ... (Voice-over) HS: If anybody tries to bother my child ... mmm, mmm, mmm. JS: What will happen? HS: Well, they better run. JS: Because what? HS: I'm gonna get 'em. JS: See? (Laughs) HS: I'm gonna get 'em. JS: Really? HS: Oh, yeah. JS: Then they're gonna get you because they might have weapons. HS: Well, you know what, I'm gonna call police, too, like I should. But I feel like I wanna get 'em. But you can't; you're right, you can't just go chasing people. JS: They can be armed. HS: Yeah, you right. Yeah, you right. I feel like I wanna chase 'em. JS: Plus they could be an army or something. HS: I know — I feel like I wanna go get 'em, messing with my son. I don't like that. JS: Um ... HS: But you right. You gotta be careful. And um, you gotta be careful. You never know what some crazy people will think about you. Just as long as you believe you're beautiful like Daddy believes you're beautiful and handsome, and Mommy believes you're beautiful and handsome and smart. And you deserve to be on this planet, just as happy and beautiful and smart as you want to be. You can do anything you want, baby. HS: Racial socialization is not just what parents teach their children. It's also how children respond to what their parents teach. Is my child prepared? Can they recognize when a racial elephant shows up in a room? Can they reduce their tsunami interpretation down to a mountain-climbing adventure that they can engage and not run away? Can they make a healthy and just decision in 60 seconds? Can I? Can you? Yes, we can. We can build healthier relationships around race if we learn to calculate, locate communicate, breathe and exhale in the middle of our most threatening moments, when we come face-to-face with our lesser selves. If you take the centuries of racial rage that boils up in all of our bodies, minds and souls — and anything that affects our bodies, minds and souls affects our health — we could probably use gun control for our hearts. I just want what all parents want for their children when we're not around: affection and protection. When police and teachers see my children, I want them to imagine their own, because I believe if you see our children as your children, you won't shoot them. With racial literacy, and yes, practice, we can decode the racial trauma from our stories, and our healing will come in the telling. But we must never forget that our cultural differences are full of affection and protection, and remember always that the lion's story will never be known as long as the hunter is the one to tell it. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How to have a healthier, positive relationship to sex | {0: 'The curator of HOLAAfrica, Tiffany Kagure Mugo is a wine bar philosopher who pontificates on all things and is willing to learn about everything else.', 1: 'Siphumeze Khundayi is founder and artistic director of HOLAAfrica, sparking conversations about sex and sexuality.'} | TEDWomen 2017 | [This talk contains mature content Viewer discretion is advised] Tiffany Kagure Mugo: OK. So we've signed up, there's no turning back now. (Laughter) Siphumeze Khundayi: Hi, guys. TKM: Hello, everyone. TKM: So, you think you know about sex. Chances are you don't, and we are here to tell you that you don't. SK: We are here to tell you that no matter where you come from, Abuja to Alabama, Dubai to downtown London, sex has and continues to change. And we need to understand this if we're going to keep things safe and spicy. TKM: So now, the act of rubbing our naked bodies together has undergone a number of changes. And those changes have been affected by eons of ideas. Even you, as an adult, have some internalized ideas about sex that you never challenge. Some good, some bad and some very, very strange. (Laughter) SK: So when you allow someone to see you butt naked, do you ever think about how the ideas that you internally have will affect whether you will like them tickling your elbow or kissing your thigh or shouting out the name of a chose deity? One must do internal monitoring and evaluation if we are going to live our best sexy lives. TKM: And we're going to tell you how to have a great sex life, right? But the first thing you need to do is let go of the bad ideas you have about sex. SK: Think about the things that we need to change. TKM: And the things we need to embrace in all of their shiny newness. So, we're going to take you on a journey of sex: the bad parts of sex, historically great sexual practices and the future of sex. SK: Now, judging by the cool seven billion people on this planet, human beings have been doing the sex thing for a long time. And in vast quantities. But this does not mean we are actually good at it. From the top of my head — rape culture. TKM: How tradition and culture limit ideas of pleasure. SK: Or even the idea that the nipple deserves the same treatment that a DJ gives his deck when he's trying to turn up the volume. TKM: Like, that is a personal pet peeve of mine. SK: We are so scared of sex. TKM: And we need somebody to blame for our fear. Enter women, and our fear of every part of their anatomy, unless we are the ones using their sexiness. SK: Think about it. You can quite easily go to someone and say, "My elbow hurts." But try going to someone and saying, "Excuse me, my vagina has a strange buzzing feeling, do you know where I can find the buzzing-vagina ointment?" And see how well that goes down. (Laughter) TKM: Does not go down well. I once challenged friends to simply go into supermarkets and say to strangers, "Thighs." No one did it, despite the fact that they could have been talking about chicken or turkey. (Laughter) SK: So a number of cultural and historical notions have burrowed so deeply within us, we don't even notice that it's strange to freak out when somebody says "nipple" as opposed to "left knee." We refuse to engage with sex properly. And the first step is admitting that it exists outside of trying to sell us products like bottled water or coffee. The unrealistic depictions in movies or that one thing that you saw on the internet "by mistake." TKM: Mhm. So, now in order to cure this ailment, again, let us just first admit that we have some messed-up ideas of sex. SK: And breathe in — (Inhales) And let it all go. Now, it all seems pretty morbid — that culture and society have failed us in our quest for coitus. But this is not the case. There are things that the past can teach us to help us upgrade the present. TKM: So now, if I had a glass of Merlot — which I really wish I did — I would pour the ancestors a drink, because there are ways in which African societies huddled this sex thing before the C that shall not be named — SK: (Whispering) Colonization. TKM: Came through. Within African societies, we had spaces, both social and spiritual, that helped institutionalize healthy sexual practices. We had sexuality schools that taught social and erotic cues. We had spaces where teenagers could engage, understand and like, properly know how to handle sexual urges, and places where adults could handle the stresses and strifes of adulting. SK: Ways that didn't include you hiding your credit card bill or deleting that toll-free number from your phone. These spaces of old were so important for women. TKM: There were African sexual practices that centered women and in particular, their pleasure. SK: And we're going to talk about one in particular that's named "osunality." TKM: Also known as the African erotic. Yes, my people, welcome to the Thunderdome. The erotic takes on different shapes and forms as you travel the globe. Now let's take a bow to the "Kama Sutra," the world's first book on the pleasures of sensual living. More than just a mere depiction of contortionist sexual positions, it provided a comprehensive guide on living a good life. What is particularly interesting for us is that it focused on women and creating pleasure for women. TKM: Mhm. Shout-out to the "Kama Sutra," but back to the African erotic. SK: OK, my bad, bringing it back. So, Nkiru Nzegwu says that Osun, who is an orisha of the Yoruba people, typically associated with water, purity, fertility, love and, most importantly, sensuality, represents a female-centered life-transforming energy that courses through and animates life. She says that women who typify the osun force brandish their sexuality quite openly and unselfconsciously. And she goes on to say ... TKM: There you go, you got that line this time. "The flow need not result in conception and birth but doesn't tell the principle of pleasure at the heart of copulation. This pleasure principle at the heart of the creative energy is metaphorically known as 'osun honey'." Sorry, I did not want to misquote that. So now, osun honey and osunality re-affirm the normality of sexual pleasure and the erotic. Osun, like other female deities of fertility across Africa, made sure and emphasized the importance of female sexuality without negating male sexuality. We had the Tonga, the Bemba, the Sande and other similar sexuality schools of thought that taught young women about the power of this inner force. TKM: So within the African continent, there's a great deal of talk about the synergic nature of sex and how it comes together as a social good. For example, within Rwanda, there is the notion that the rivers are replenished by the act of a woman squirting. (Laughter) SK: But modern-day ideas of sex have become some sort of battle in which we are all trying to subvert each other. TKM: We are pounding the pussy, using sex as a weapon, playing hard to get, conquering — a constant power struggle. SK: And there is always a loser when it comes to this war. TKM: So now the ability to openly brandish and explore your sexuality and your sex without it being a threat to others is at the core of engaging with healthy sexual practices. SK: Now this is where it begins to get really, really good. TKM: So what does it mean to reconceptualize sex away from this idea of the monster hiding in the night? What is the potential for doing greatness on the kitchen counter, a secluded beach, the backseat of a car or even simply in between the sheets? Now in learning from the past and sliding into the present, a radical theory of sex must identify, it must describe, explain and denounce sexual oppression and erotic injustice. TKM: And sex positivity is one of the realms in which the new can be unpacked and explored. SK: We're asking you to call upon the osun honey to engage with new ideas of sex and pleasure so that we can start to build a new identity that feels more like a fitted dress and less like a wooden coffin slowly choking the life out of us. Now there are a lot of people charting their own sexual paths. But, because as HOLAAfrica — SK: We do sex and sexuality online — TKM: We would be foolhardy not to mention the digital realm. There are women who are online, creating incredible conversations, chatting about the clitoris, chatting about the reverse cowgirl and also cunnilingus. SK: I like the word "cunnilingus." TKM: I bet you do. But that's not the point. Anyway, these women are resurrecting the work of ancestors to have some incredible conversations that have been previously buried and sealed. SK: They are asking the questions that we are so afraid to ask, so that we don't end up in sticky situations. TKM: That's true. And another space that we've been seeing the charting of a new sexual path is by queer women and their engagement in kink. SK: Now, think "Fifty Shades of Grey" without the creepy rich guy who does not understand consent. (Laughter) TKM: So one fascinating subset of kink is actually rope play. SK: Shibari, also known as Kinbaku, is the Japanese art of rope play. Originally used as a means of restraining captives, it became sexualized and spreading across the globe as a kinky form of restraint with a respected and erotic aesthetic. TKM: And it landed on our shores. Who would have thought that African queer women would be kinksters? Coming from a history of sexual violence, slavery and a lack of bodily autonomy. Is it not too soon, you ask. SK: No, it's not, and these women have taught us that despite the dark history that covers the body of women from our beautiful continent, these women are actively and beautifully constructing what sex and pleasure means to them. TKM: This is not to say that everyone now needs to rush out and engage in kink. But if these queer women can come out of a history of, again, sexual violence, slavery, colonization and all manner of traditional, religious and cultural pitfalls, to reconceptualize what sex and pleasure means to them, then you can do it, too. SK: You can do it too, boo-boo. Yes, you can. (Laughter) TKM: It is in taking the ideas that we have about sex — the bad ones, and head-butting them, holding on to the good ones and creating new ones that we can have an incredible engagement with one of the most prolific and natural human acts ever. SK: It's about figuring out what counts as a system bug. TKM: What to term a classic. SK: And what new features we should add. Human beings are infamous for their superpower to upgrade. This should count for our sex, too. TKM: Thank you. (Applause) |
Refugees want empowerment, not handouts | {0: 'TED Fellow Robert Hakiza is the co-founder of the Young African Refugees for Integral Development (YARID), which empowers refugees and builds community through vocational education, English classes, access to sports and computer literacy skills.'} | TEDGlobal 2017 | Currently, most refugees live in the cities rather than in the refugee camps. We represent over 60 percent of the number of refugees globally. With the majority of refugees living in urban areas, there is a strong need for a paradigm shift and new thinking. Rather than wasting money on building walls, it would be better to spend on programs to help refugees to help themselves. (Applause) We always have to leave behind all our possessions. But not our skills and knowledge. If allowed to live a productive life, refugees can help themselves and contribute to the development of their host country. I was born in the city called Bukavu, South Kivu, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I am the fifth-born in a family of 12 children. My father, a mechanic by profession, worked very hard to send me to school. Just like other young people, I had a lot of plans and dreams. I wanted to complete my studies, get a nice job, marry and have my own children and support my family. But this didn't happen. War in my homeland forced me to flee to Uganda in 2008, nine years ago. My family joined a steady exodus of refugees who settled in Uganda's capital, Kampala. In my country, I lived already in the city, and we felt Kampala was much better than a refugee camp. Refugees in the cities have always been denied international assistance, even after their recognition by UNHCR in 1997. In addition to the poverty problem we were confronted with as the local urban poor, we were facing challenges due to our refugee status, such as a language barrier. In Congo, the official language is French. But in Uganda, it is English. We didn't have access to education and health. We were exposed to harassment, exploitation, intimidation and discrimination. Humanitarian organizations mostly focused on the formal settlement in rural areas, and there was nothing in place for us. But we didn't want handouts. We wanted to work and support ourselves. I joined my other two colleagues in exile and set up an organization to support other refugees. YARID — Young African Refugees for Integral Development — began as a conversation within the Congolese community. We asked the community how they could organize themselves to solve these challenges. The YARID programs for support evolve in stages, progressing from soccer community, to English language to sewing livelihoods. The soccer changed the energy of unemployed youth and connected people from different communities. The free English classes help empower people to engage with the Ugandan community, allowing them to get to know their neighbors and sell wares. The vocational training program offers livelihood skills, and with them, important opportunities for economic self-reliance. We've seen so many families become self-sustaining. We've seen who no longer needs our help. As YARID's programs have expanded, it has included an increasing range of nationalities — Congolese, Rwandan, Burundian, Somalis, Ethiopian, South Sudanese. Today, YARID has supported over 3,000 refugees across Kampala and continues supporting more. (Applause) Refugees want empowerment, not handouts. We know our community better than anyone. We understand the challenges and opportunities we face to become self-reliant. I know better than anyone that initiatives created by refugees work. They need to be internationally recognized and supported. Give us the support we deserve, and we will pay you back with interest. Thank you so much. (Applause) |
You don't have to be an expert to solve big problems | {0: "Tapiwa Chiwewe, PhD, manages the advanced and applied artificial intelligence group at IBM Research – Africa, which uses artificial intelligence to develop solutions for some of Africa's grand challenges whilst making scientific advances."} | TED@IBM | One winter morning, a couple of years ago, I was driving to work in Johannesburg, South Africa, and noticed a haze hanging over the city. I make that drive on most days, so it was unusual that I hadn't noticed this before. Johannesburg is known for its distinctive skyline, which I could barely see that morning. It didn't take long for me to realize that I was looking at an enormous cloud of air pollution. The contrast between the scenic environment I knew and this smog-covered skyline stirred up something within me. I was appalled by the possibility of this city of bright and vivid sunsets being overrun by a dull haze. At that moment, I felt an urge to do something about it, but I didn't know what. All I knew was I couldn't just stand idly by. The main challenge was, I didn't know much about environmental science air-quality management or atmospheric chemistry. I am a computer engineer, and I was pretty sure I couldn't code my way out of this air pollution problem. (Laughter) Who was I to do anything about this issue? I was but a citizen. In the following years, I learned a very important lesson, a lesson we all need to take to heart if we are to work towards a better future. Even if you're not an expert in a particular domain, your outside expertise may hold the key to solving big problems within that domain. Sometimes the unique perspective you have can result in unconventional thinking that can move the needle, but you need to be bold enough to try. That's the only way you'll ever know. What I knew back then was that if I was even going to try to make a difference, I had to get smart about air pollution first, and so I became a student again. I did a bit of basic research and soon learned that air pollution is the world's biggest environmental health risk. Data from the World Health Organization shows that almost 14 percent of all deaths worldwide in 2012 were attributable to household and ambient air pollution, with most occurring in low- and middle-income countries. Ambient air pollution alone causes more deaths each year than malaria and HIV/AIDS. In Africa, premature deaths from unsafe sanitation or childhood malnutrition pale in comparison to deaths due to air pollution, and it comes at a huge economic cost: over 400 billion US dollars as of 2013, according to a study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. Now, in my work, I explore new frontiers for artificial intelligence, where the symbiotic relationship between man and machine can find a beneficial footing and help us to make better decisions. As I thought about the air pollution problem, it became clear that we needed to find a way to make better decisions about how we manage air pollution, and given the scale of the problem, it was necessary to do it in a collaborative way. So I decided I'd better get to know some people working within the field. I started to speak to officials from the City of Johannesburg and other surrounding cities, and I engaged the local scientific community, and I also made a few cold calls. The process of engagement I embarked upon helped me to develop a deeper understanding of the problem. It also helped me to avoid the trap people in my profession sometimes fall into when trying to innovate, where we are quick to apply a technology before we've firmly grasped the problem at hand. I began to develop an idea about what I could do to improve the situation. I started by simply asking myself how I could bring together in some meaningful way my skills in software engineering and artificial intelligence and the expertise of the people I'd reached out to. I wanted to create an online air-quality management platform that would uncover trends in pollution and project into the future to determine what outcomes can be expected. I was determined to see my idea translate into a practical solution, but I faced uncertainty and had no guarantee of success. What I had was a very particular set of engineering skills, skills I'd acquired over my career (Laughter) that were new to people who had been working on the air pollution problem for so many years. What I have come to realize is that sometimes just one fresh perspective, one new skill set, can make the conditions right for something remarkable to happen. Our willpower and imagination are a guiding light, enabling us to chart new paths and navigate through obstacles. Armed with a firmer understanding of the air pollution problem, and having managed to source over a decade's worth of data on air pollutant levels and the meteorological conditions for in and around Johannesburg, my colleagues from South Africa and China and myself created an air-quality decision support system that lives in the cloud. This software system analyzes historical and real-time data to uncover the spatial-temporal trends in pollution. We then used new machine learning technology to predict future levels of pollution for several different pollutants days in advance. This means that citizens can make better decisions about their daily movements and about where to settle their families. We can predict adverse pollution events ahead of time, identify heavy polluters, and they can be ordered by the relevant authorities to scale back their operations. Through assisted scenario planning, city planners can also make better decisions about how to extend infrastructure, such as human settlements or industrial zones. We completed a pilot of our technology that was run over a period of 120 days, covering all of South Africa. Our results were confirmed when we demonstrated a tight correlation between the forecasting data and the data we were getting on the ground. Through our leadership, we have brought cutting-edge, world-leading assets that can perform air-quality forecasting at an unprecedented resolution and accuracy, benefiting the city that I drove into one winter morning not very long ago, and thought to myself, "Something is wrong here. I wonder what can be done?" So here is the point: What if I'd not investigated the problem of air pollution further? What if I'd not shown some concern for the state of the environment and just hoped that someone, somewhere, was taking care of the matter? What I have learned is that, when embarking on a challenging endeavor that advances a cause that we firmly believe in, it is important to focus on the possibility of success and consider the consequence of not acting. We should not get distracted by resistance and opposition, but this should motivate us further. So wherever you are in the world, the next time you find that there's some natural curiosity you have that is being piqued, and it's about something you care about, and you have some crazy or bold ideas, and perhaps it's outside the realm of your expertise, ask yourself this: Why not? Why not just go ahead and tackle the problem as best as you can, in your own way? You may be pleasantly surprised. Thank you. (Applause) |
The role of human emotions in science and research | {0: 'Ilona Stengel focuses her work on the synthesis of new organic molecules, stemming from her passion for organic chemistry.'} | TED@Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany | I'm a scientist, and I'm a big fan of Star Trek, especially of Mr. Spock. Mr. Spock is a scientist as well, and at the same time, he's the first [officer] of the starship Enterprise, and during the adventures of the Enterprise crew, he and his colleagues are dealing a lot with the presence or absence of Mr. Spock's emotions. Mr. Spock is half-human and half-Vulcan, and Vulcans are an alien race who learn to control and suppress their feelings and to act purely out of logic. As Mr. Spock is only half-Vulcan, he sees himself constantly in conflict in between logic and emotions, and as he's part of a team, the whole crew is struggling with, is analyzing, and is making fun of this conflict. And also the fans of Star Trek watch with amusement this seemingly contradictory behavior. They find it quite fascinating. And the matter is a golden thread through the whole Star Trek series and movies from the '60s until today. And that's actually what I want to talk about today: the role of emotions in science. We tend to think that science is all about facts and logic and human feelings are often neglected or considered an obstacle to get rid of. I would like to suggest that emotions are as important in science as they are in any other part of our lives. Science is made by humans, and as human beings, even if we try hard, we cannot get rid of our emotions. So instead of fighting them, I believe that even in science, we should make use of our feelings, because for breakthroughs and innovation, they are equally important as facts and logic. I will come back to Mr. Spock, but first let me share my experience on the role of emotions in science, and one story in particular kept me thinking about it for the last couple of years. I'm working in research on organic light-emitting diodes, so-called OLEDs. This is how you might know them, as new generation of displays. OLEDs are more and more used in smartphone displays and TV screens. They make them appear bright, truly colorful and bendable. This is how they look like in the research lab of my physicist colleagues. And this is what I, as a chemist, have in mind when I think about them. I've loved it ever since I started to work on it. So I didn't really like the news when the company I had been working for — that was my previous employer — announced that they wanted to stop OLED research. At the time, the management had reasons for this decision, and the company handled it very well, actually. Nobody lost their jobs, and everybody was rewarded for their performed work. What I want to show you today is what happened with my scientist colleagues and me during the time in between the announcement and the last working day on our project. Consider it a small case study on emotions in science. In 2015, our research team had grown to more than 80 people, and even after the announcement that our project was discontinued, we could not stop working from one day to another. It took several months to bring all activities to a sound end and to find new jobs within the company for everyone. Here's what happened. Even though we knew that we were working on a project that was to be stopped, during those months our output hit the roof. We were actually working on two different OLED projects: first, the development of materials for blue-shining OLEDs, which had started in 2001; and second, materials for green OLEDs, which had started in 2014. And the results I show you here concern the green OLED project. In the graph, you can see how the lifetime, which is a crucial measure for the durability of our devices, developed over time. In 2015, just half a year into the project, we were told to scale down, to stop working on the project as soon as possible and to start over in other jobs. Nevertheless, from this time on, our results continued to improve rapidly. How did that happen? After the announcement, pretty quickly, colleagues started leaving the team, and soon, we were left in a small group, all pretty much sharing the same attitude of, "I'm going to be the last person leaving the ship." What I mean is, while the number of scientists working on the project was decreasing, the dedication of people remaining grew dramatically. And also, a new and more intense team spirit formed. We all shared the same passion for our work, we all were sad that it was about to end, and we all wanted to show that we could turn our ideas into reality. We felt that we belonged to something bigger. And furthermore, our project was less and less in the focus of the management, because they started to think about new projects, restructuring and so on. This resulted in additional freedom and the possibility to take a few things into our own hands. Of course, more freedom also means more responsibility, which we were happy to take, because we believed in our work. We felt empowered. And these three pillars — dedication, belonging and empowerment — worked together in a kind of self-reinforcing cycle, and the closer we got to shutdown, the better our output became. So we were working with such personal engagement on a project already sentenced to death because we felt connected to something meaningful. Of course, it was also a hard and sometimes frustrating time, but we were sitting together in the lab, or occasionally in the café, sharing our sadness about the end of our project as well as the joy in our work. So overall, we had a very intense and mesmerizingly exciting time. And the lifetime we finally obtained for our materials was on one level with already commercialized materials for green OLEDs at the time, and we achieved this within just one year. And those results helped our employer to sell the patents for real value. Now, let me tell you the same story with different characters and a slightly different operation. The story is part of Star Trek. And sorry for those of you who haven't seen the movies, but I need to introduce a spoiler here. After Mr. Spock sacrificed himself to save the starship Enterprise at the end of Star Trek II, Captain Kirk and his core team were determined to hunt through the universe to search for Spock, even though they could see only very little chance in finding him alive. And Starfleet Command did not give them permission nor a starship to do so, so they took it very passionately into their own hands to travel out to find Spock. And after dealing with great challenges, they eventually found Spock, and he happily and gratefully joined the team again. He could feel the dedication and the connection of his team towards their project, which was to save him and to hold the crew together. And over the years, over the episodes of the saga, Mr. Spock came to realize that the combination of both logic and emotions is crucial for facing challenges and exploring new worlds, and there was no contradiction anymore. So the storyline here for both our OLED story and Star Trek is actually the basic setting for a lot of breakthrough stories, in and out of science. The main characters are all part of a great team. All team members show a huge dedication towards reaching their goal. They strive to seize all the freedom they can get, and they take the responsibility they need to take. During the time our OLED project was nearing the end, I received one piece of advice several times. "Don't take it to your heart. You can work on something else." If I had followed it, it would have saved me several depressed evenings and many tears, but at the same time, I would have failed to gain a great deal in personal development and happiness. And as the same is true for my colleagues and our whole project, we would have achieved far less. So of course, science should be based on facts and logic. When I say we should use our emotions in science, I do not suggest we should use feelings instead of facts. But I say we should not be afraid of using our feelings to implement and to catalyze fact-based science and innovation. Emotions and logic do not oppose each other. They complement each other, and they reinforce each other. The feeling of being dedicated to something meaningful, of belonging to something bigger and of being empowered is crucial for creativity and innovation. Whatever you are working on, make sure that it matters, and take it to your heart as much as you like. Thank you. (Applause) |
Be humble -- and other lessons from the philosophy of water | {0: "Westpac's Raymond Tang wants to help bridge the East and the West by exploring and applying ancient Chinese philosophy in the modern world."} | TED@Westpac | You may know this feeling: you wake up to multiple unread notifications on your mobile phone. Your calendar is already packed with meetings, sometimes double- or triple-booked. You feel engaged, you feel busy. In fact, you feel productive. But at the end of it all, something still feels missing. You try to figure out what it is. But before you do, the next day starts all over again. That was how I felt two years ago. I felt stressed; I felt anxious. I felt a bit trapped. The world around me was moving very quickly. And I didn't know what to do. I started wondering to myself: How do I keep up with all this? How do we find fulfillment in a world that's literally changing as fast as we can think, or maybe even faster? I started looking for answers. I spoke to many people, I spoke to my friends, I spoke to my family. I even read many self-help books. But I couldn't find anything satisfactory. In fact, the more self-help books I read, the more stressed and anxious I became. (Laughter) It was like I was feeding my mind with junk food, and I was becoming mentally obese. (Laughter) I was about to give up, until one day, I found this. "The Tao Te Ching: The Book of the Way and Its Virtue." This is an ancient Chinese philosophy classic that was written more than 2,600 years ago. And it was by far the thinnest and the smallest book on the bookshelf. It only had 81 pages. And each page had a short poem. I remember I flipped to one particular poem. Here it is. It's beautiful, isn't it? (Laughter) Let me read it out to you. "The supreme goodness is like water. It benefits all things without contention. In dwelling, it stays grounded. In being, it flows to depths. In expression, it is honest. In confrontation, it stays gentle. In governance, it does not control. In action, it aligns to timing. It is content with its nature and therefore cannot be faulted." Wow! I remember when I first read this passage. I felt the biggest chills down my spine. I still feel that today, reading it to you guys. My anxiety and stress just suddenly disappeared. Ever since that day, I've been trying to apply the concepts in this passage to my day-to-day life. And today, I'd like to share with you three lessons I learned so far from this philosophy of water — three lessons that I believe have helped me find greater fulfillment in almost everything that I do. The first lesson is about humility. If we think about water flowing in a river, it is always staying low. It helps all the plants grow and keeps all the animals alive. It doesn't actually draw any attention to itself, nor does it need any reward or recognition. It is humble. But without water's humble contribution, life as we know it may not exist. Water's humility taught me a few important things. It taught me that instead of acting like I know what I'm doing or I have all the answers, it's perfectly OK to say, "I don't know. I want to learn more, and I need your help." It also taught me that, instead of promoting my glory and success, it is so much more satisfying to promote the success and glory of others. It taught me that, instead of doing things where I can get ahead, it so much more fulfilling and meaningful to help other people overcome their challenges so they can succeed. With a humble mindset, I was able to form a lot richer connections with the people around me. I became genuinely interested in the stories and experiences that make them unique and magical. Life became a lot more fun, because every day I'd discover new quirks, new ideas and new solutions to problems I didn't know before, all thanks to the ideas and help from others. All streams eventually flow to the ocean because it is lower than them. Humility gives water its power. But I think it gives us the capacity to remain grounded, to be present, to learn from and be transformed by the stories of the people around us. The second lesson I learned is about harmony. If we think about water flowing towards a rock, it will just flow around it. It doesn't get upset, it doesn't get angry, it doesn't get agitated. In fact, it doesn't feel much at all. When faced with an obstacle, somehow water finds a solution, without force, without conflict. When I was thinking through this, I began to understand why I was feeling stressed out in the first place. Instead of working in harmony with my environment, I was working against it. I was forcing things to change because I was consumed by the need to succeed or to prove myself. In the end, nothing did. And I got more frustrated. By simply shifting my focus from trying to achieve more success to trying to achieve more harmony, I was immediately able to feel calm and focused again. I started asking questions like: Will this action bring me greater harmony and bring more harmony to my environment? Does this align with my nature? I became more comfortable simply being who I am, rather than who I'm supposed to be or expected to be. Work actually became easier, because I stopped focusing on things that I cannot control and only on the things that I can. I stopped fighting with myself, and I learned to work with my environment to solve its problems. Nature does not hurry. Yet, everything is accomplished. That's Tao Te Ching's way of describing the power of harmony. Just as water is able to find a solution without force or conflict, I believe we can find a greater sense of fulfillment in our endeavors by shifting focus from achieving more success to achieving more harmony. The third lesson I learned from the philosophy of water is about openness. Water is open to change. Depending on the temperature, it can be a liquid, solid or gas. Depending on the medium it's in, it can be a teapot, a cup or a flower vase. In fact, it's water's ability to adapt and change and remain flexible that made it so enduring through the ages, despite all the changes in the environment. We also live in a world today of constant change. We can no longer expect to work to a static job description or follow a single career path. We, too, are expected to constantly reinvent and refresh our skills to stay relevant. In our organization, we host a lot of hackathons, where small groups or individuals come together to solve a business problem in a compressed time frame. And what's interesting to me is that the teams that usually win are not the ones with the most experienced team members, but the ones with members who are open to learn, who are open to unlearn and who are open to helping each other navigate through the changing circumstances. Life is like a hackathon in some way. It's calling to each and every one of us to step up, to open up and cause a ripple effect. Now, we can stay behind closed doors and continue to be paralyzed by our self-limiting beliefs, such as: "I will never be able to talk about Chinese philosophy in front of a huge audience." (Laughter) Or we can just open up and enjoy the ride. It can only be an amazing experience. So humility, harmony and openness. Those are the three lessons I learned from the philosophy of water so far. They nicely abbreviate to H-H-O, or H2O. (Laughter) And they have become my guiding principles in life. So nowadays, whenever I feel stressed, unfulfilled, anxious or just not sure what to do, I simply ask the question: What would water do? (Laughter) This simple and powerful question inspired by a book written long before the days of bitcoin, fintech and digital technology has changed my life for the better. Try it, and let me know how it works for you. I would love to hear from you. Thank you. (Applause) |
A funny look at the unintended consequences of technology | {0: ' Chuck Nice is a radio and TV veteran with a passion for science communication and comedy.'} | TED2017 | Future tech always comes with two things: promise and unintended consequences. And it's those consequences that I want to explore. And before we get to how future tech may affect us, I'd like to spend a little time exploring the unintended consequences of some of our recent tech, namely, social media. Social media, a few short years ago, was the tech of future you. Now it just is you. Social media was supposed to bring us together in ways we could never imagine. And the predictors were correct. These three girls are talking to one another without the awkward discomfort of eye contact. (Laughter) I call that advancement. We were supposed to be caught up in a communication tsunami, the likes of which the world has never seen. And that did happen. And so did this. (Sings) One of these things is not like the other. (Speaks) Now, look at this picture. If you picked the guy with the book, you’re wrong — or, as a certain president would say, "Wrong!" (Laughter) Clearly, three of these guys are reading, and one guy, on the end, is listening to music and playing "Candy Crush." (Laughter) So are we more connected, or are we just more connected to our devices? Social media was supposed to place us in a veritable town square, where we could engage one another with challenging ideas and debates. And instead what we got were trolls. This is an actual tweet that I received. "Chuck, no one wants to hear your stupid, ill-informed political views! I hope you get leprosy and die. Love, Dad" (Laughter) Now, the great thing about that tweet if you look at it, just like most trolls, it's not that bad, because he wished "leporsy" on me instead of "leprosy," and "leporsy" is not dangerous at all. (Laughter) (Applause) Along with trolls, we got a brand new way of torturing teenagers — cyberbullying. A concept that my 75-year-old mother just can't seem to wrap her head around. "So, uh, did they hit him?" "No, Mom, they didn't hit him." "Did they take his money?" "No, Mom, they didn't take his money." "Did they put his face in the toilet?" "No, Mom, they didn't —" "Well, what did they do?" "They attacked him on the internet." "Attacked him on the internet?" (Laughter) "Well, why don't you just turn off the internet?" (Laughter) "Your whole generation is a bunch of wussies." (Laughter) She's got a point. (Laughter) She's got a point. And I don't even want to talk about what social media has done to dating. I was on Grindr until I found out it wasn't a sandwich app. (Laughter) And I can't even tell you about Tinder, except for the fact that if you think there is a limit to the amount of anonymous sex we can have on this planet, you are sadly mistaken. (Laughter) So where do we go from here? Well, let's just jump right in and play the hits. Driverless cars. Something that has already been around for many years, just without the assistance of computers. (Laughter) (Applause) Because for years, we have been driving while texting, putting on makeup, shaving, reading — actually reading — that would be me. (Laughter) The other thing is that since driverless cars will be shared, most people won't own cars, and that means the DMV will go away. The DMV — I know what you're saying right now. "There's no way this guy is going to stand up here and make a case for the DMV." Well, I don't know about you, but I do not want to live in a world where harsh fluorescent lights, endless lines, terrible forms to fill out and disaffected, soulless bureaucrats remind me that I am pretty damn lucky not to work here. (Laughter) That is the real service they provide. The DMV: come for the registration renewal, stay for the satisfaction of knowing you made some pretty good life choices. (Laughter) Nobody will own their car in the future, and that means teenagers will not have a place to make out. So you know what that means. That means they will order driverless cars to do just that. I do not want to step into a vehicle and ask the question: "Why does this car smell like awkwardness, failure and shame?" (Laughter) If I want to ask that question, I'll walk into my own bedroom. (Laughter) So what else do we have to look forward to? That's right, artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence, yes. You know, there was a time when artificial intelligence was a joke. I mean, literally a quip that you would hear at a cocktail party when somebody would bring it up in conversation: "Artificial intelligence. The only real artificial intelligence is our American Congress. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha." Well, it's not funny anymore. (Laughter) Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates have all gone on record expressing grave reservations about artificial intelligence. That's like Jesus, Moses and Muhammad coming together and saying, "Guy, guys — here's something we can all believe in." (Laughter) You might want to go with that, is all I'm saying. We are actually teaching machines how to think, how to understand our behavior, how to defend themselves and even practice deception. What could possibly go wrong? (Laughter) The one thing that's for sure: the creation always despises its creator. OK? The Titans rose up against the gods; Lucifer against Jehovah. And anybody who has a teenager has heard these words: "I hate you and you're ruining my life! I hate you!" Now just imagine that sentiment with a machine that can outthink you and is heavily armed. (Laughter) The result? Absolutely. (Laughter) What we need to do before we perfect artificial intelligence is perfect artificial emotions. That way, we can teach the robots or machines how to love us unconditionally, so that when they figure out that the only real problem on this planet is us, instead of destroying us — which, by the way, is totally logical — they will find us adorable — (Laughter) like baby poop. (Laughter) "Oh my god, I just love the way you just destroyed the planet. I can't stay mad at you, you're so cute! You're so cute!" (Laughter) Can't talk about this without talking about robotics. OK? Remember when you thought robotics were cool? I remember when I thought robotics were cool, until I figured out that they were going to take everybody's place, from the delivery guy down to the heart surgeon. The one thing, though, that is very disappointing about robotics is the holy grail of robotics, and it hasn't even happened. I'm talking about the robot girlfriend, the dream of one lonely geek in a windowless basement who vowed one day: "I am going to marry my creation." And there actually is a movement underway to stop this from happening, for fear of exploitation. And I, for one, am against that movement. I believe we should have robot girlfriends. I just believe that they should come with a feminist protocol and artificial intelligence, so she can take one look at that guy and go, "I am too good for you. I'm leaving." (Laughter) (Applause) And finally, I have to talk about bioengineering, an area of science that promises to end disease before it even begins, to help us live longer, fuller, healthier lives. And when you couple that with implantable hardware, you are looking at the next incarnation of human evolution. And all of that sounds great, until you figure out where it's really going. One place: designer babies, where, no matter where you are on the globe or what your ethnicity, babies will end up looking like that. (Laughter) That boy is surprised because he just found out both his parents are black. (Laughter) Can you imagine him at a cocktail party in 20 years? "Yeah, both my parents are black. I mean, it's a little awkward at times, but you should see my credit rating. Impressive, very impressive." (Laughter) Now, all of this seems scary, and everybody in this room knows that it isn't. Technology isn't scary. Never has been and it never will be. What's scary is us and what we will do with technology. Will we allow it to expose our humanity, showing our true selves and reinforcing the fact that we are indeed our brother's keeper? Or will we allow it to reveal our deepest, darkest demons? The true question is not whether or not technology is scary. The true question is: How human are you? Thank you. (Applause) |
The brain-changing benefits of exercise | {0: 'Wendy Suzuki is researching the science behind the extraordinary, life-changing effects that physical activity can have on the most important organ in your body: your brain.'} | TEDWomen 2017 | What if I told you there was something that you can do right now that would have an immediate, positive benefit for your brain including your mood and your focus? And what if I told you that same thing could actually last a long time and protect your brain from different conditions like depression, Alzheimer's disease or dementia. Would you do it? Yes! I am talking about the powerful effects of physical activity. Simply moving your body, has immediate, long-lasting and protective benefits for your brain. And that can last for the rest of your life. So what I want to do today is tell you a story about how I used my deep understanding of neuroscience, as a professor of neuroscience, to essentially do an experiment on myself in which I discovered the science underlying why exercise is the most transformative thing that you can do for your brain today. Now, as a neuroscientist, I know that our brains, that is the thing in our head right now, that is the most complex structure known to humankind. But it's one thing to talk about the brain, and it's another to see it. So here is a real preserved human brain. And it's going to illustrate two key areas that we are going to talk about today. The first is the prefrontal cortex, right behind your forehead, critical for things like decision-making, focus, attention and your personality. The second key area is located in the temporal lobe, shown right here. You have two temporal lobes in your brain, the right and the left, and deep in the temporal lobe is a key structure critical for your ability to form and retain new long-term memories for facts and events. And that structure is called the hippocampus. So I've always been fascinated with the hippocampus. How could it be that an event that lasts just a moment, say, your first kiss, or the moment your first child was born, can form a memory that has changed your brain, that lasts an entire lifetime? That's what I want to understand. I wanted to start and record the activity of individual brain cells in the hippocampus as subjects were forming new memories. And essentially try and decode how those brief bursts of electrical activity, which is how neurons communicate with each other, how those brief bursts either allowed us to form a new memory, or did not. But a few years ago, I did something very unusual in science. As a full professor of neural science, I decided to completely switch my research program. Because I encountered something that was so amazing, with the potential to change so many lives that I had to study it. I discovered and I experienced the brain-changing effects of exercise. And I did it in a completely inadvertent way. I was actually at the height of all the memory work that I was doing — data was pouring in, I was becoming known in my field for all of this memory work. And it should have been going great. It was, scientifically. But when I stuck my head out of my lab door, I noticed something. I had no social life. I spent too much time listening to those brain cells in a dark room, by myself. (Laughter) I didn't move my body at all. I had gained 25 pounds. And actually, it took me many years to realize it, I was actually miserable. And I shouldn't be miserable. And I went on a river-rafting trip — by myself, because I had no social life. And I came back — (Laughter) thinking, "Oh, my God, I was the weakest person on that trip." And I came back with a mission. I said, "I'm never going to feel like the weakest person on a river-rafting trip again." And that's what made me go to the gym. And I focused my type-A personality on going to all the exercise classes at the gym. I tried everything. I went to kickbox, dance, yoga, step class, and at first it was really hard. But what I noticed is that after every sweat-inducing workout that I tried, I had this great mood boost and this great energy boost. And that's what kept me going back to the gym. Well, I started feeling stronger. I started feeling better, I even lost that 25 pounds. And now, fast-forward a year and a half into this regular exercise program and I noticed something that really made me sit up and take notice. I was sitting at my desk, writing a research grant, and a thought went through my mind that had never gone through my mind before. And that thought was, "Gee, grant-writing is going well today." And all the scientists — (Laughter) yeah, all the scientists always laugh when I say that, because grant-writing never goes well. It is so hard; you're always pulling your hair out, trying to come up with that million-dollar-winning idea. But I realized that the grant-writing was going well, because I was able to focus and maintain my attention for longer than I had before. And my long-term memory — what I was studying in my own lab — seemed to be better in me. And that's when I put it together. Maybe all that exercise that I had included and added to my life was changing my brain. Maybe I did an experiment on myself without even knowing it. So as a curious neuroscientist, I went to the literature to see what I could find about what we knew about the effects of exercise on the brain. And what I found was an exciting and a growing literature that was essentially showing everything that I noticed in myself. Better mood, better energy, better memory, better attention. And the more I learned, the more I realized how powerful exercise was. Which eventually led me to the big decision to completely shift my research focus. And so now, after several years of really focusing on this question, I've come to the following conclusion: that exercise is the most transformative thing that you can do for your brain today for the following three reasons. Number one: it has immediate effects on your brain. A single workout that you do will immediately increase levels of neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin and noradrenaline. That is going to increase your mood right after that workout, exactly what I was feeling. My lab showed that a single workout can improve your ability to shift and focus attention, and that focus improvement will last for at least two hours. And finally, studies have shown that a single workout will improve your reaction times which basically means that you are going to be faster at catching that cup of Starbucks that falls off the counter, which is very, very important. (Laughter) But these immediate effects are transient, they help you right after. What you have to do is do what I did, that is change your exercise regime, increase your cardiorespiratory function, to get the long-lasting effects. And these effects are long-lasting because exercise actually changes the brain's anatomy, physiology and function. Let's start with my favorite brain area, the hippocampus. The hippocampus — or exercise actually produces brand new brain cells, new brain cells in the hippocampus, that actually increase its volume, as well as improve your long-term memory, OK? And that including in you and me. Number two: the most common finding in neuroscience studies, looking at effects of long-term exercise, is improved attention function dependent on your prefrontal cortex. You not only get better focus and attention, but the volume of the hippocampus increases as well. And finally, you not only get immediate effects of mood with exercise but those last for a long time. So you get long-lasting increases in those good mood neurotransmitters. But really, the most transformative thing that exercise will do is its protective effects on your brain. Here you can think about the brain like a muscle. The more you're working out, the bigger and stronger your hippocampus and prefrontal cortex gets. Why is that important? Because the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus are the two areas that are most susceptible to neurodegenerative diseases and normal cognitive decline in aging. So with increased exercise over your lifetime, you're not going to cure dementia or Alzheimer's disease, but what you're going to do is you're going to create the strongest, biggest hippocampus and prefrontal cortex so it takes longer for these diseases to actually have an effect. You can think of exercise, therefore, as a supercharged 401K for your brain, OK? And it's even better, because it's free. So this is the point in the talk where everybody says, "That sounds so interesting, Wendy, but I really will only want to know one thing. And that is, just tell me the minimum amount of exercise I need to get all these changes." (Laughter) And so I'm going to tell you the answer to that question. First, good news: you don't have to become a triathlete to get these effects. The rule of thumb is you want to get three to four times a week exercise minimum 30 minutes an exercise session, and you want to get aerobic exercise in. That is, get your heart rate up. And the good news is, you don't have to go to the gym to get a very expensive gym membership. Add an extra walk around the block in your power walk. You see stairs — take stairs. And power-vacuuming can be as good as the aerobics class that you were going to take at the gym. So I've gone from memory pioneer to exercise explorer. From going into the innermost workings of the brain, to trying to understand how exercise can improve our brain function, and my goal in my lab right now is to go beyond that rule of thumb that I just gave you — three to four times a week, 30 minutes. I want to understand the optimum exercise prescription for you, at your age, at your fitness level, for your genetic background, to maximize the effects of exercise today and also to improve your brain and protect your brain the best for the rest of your life. But it's one thing to talk about exercise, and it's another to do it. So I'm going to invoke my power as a certified exercise instructor, to ask you all to stand up. (Laughter) We're going to do just one minute of exercise. It's call-and-response, just do what I do, say what I say, and make sure you don't punch your neighbor, OK? Music! (Upbeat music) Five, six, seven, eight, it's right, left, right, left. And I say, I am strong now. Let's hear you. Audience: I am strong now. Wendy Suzuki: Ladies, I am Wonder Woman-strong. Let's hear you! Audience: I am Wonder Woman-strong. WS: New move — uppercut, right and left. I am inspired now. You say it! Audience: I am inspired now. WS: Last move — pull it down, right and left, right and left. I say, I am on fire now! You say it. Audience: I am on fire now. WS: And done! OK, good job! (Applause) Thank you. I want to leave you with one last thought. And that is, bringing exercise in your life will not only give you a happier, more protective life today, but it will protect your brain from incurable diseases. And in this way it will change the trajectory of your life for the better. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
How we look kilometers below the Antarctic ice sheet | {0: 'Dustin Schroeder develops and uses geophysical radar to study Antarctica, Greenland and the icy moons of Jupiter. '} | TEDxStanford | I'm a radio glaciologist. That means that I use radar to study glaciers and ice sheets. And like most glaciologists right now, I'm working on the problem of estimating how much the ice is going to contribute to sea level rise in the future. So today, I want to talk to you about why it's so hard to put good numbers on sea level rise, and why I believe that by changing the way we think about radar technology and earth-science education, we can get much better at it. When most scientists talk about sea level rise, they show a plot like this. This is produced using ice sheet and climate models. On the right, you can see the range of sea level predicted by these models over the next 100 years. For context, this is current sea level, and this is the sea level above which more than 4 million people could be vulnerable to displacement. So in terms of planning, the uncertainty in this plot is already large. However, beyond that, this plot comes with the asterisk and the caveat, "... unless the West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapses." And in that case, we would be talking about dramatically higher numbers. They'd literally be off the chart. And the reason we should take that possibility seriously is that we know from the geologic history of the Earth that there were periods in its history when sea level rose much more quickly than today. And right now, we cannot rule out the possibility of that happening in the future. So why can't we say with confidence whether or not a significant portion of a continent-scale ice sheet will or will not collapse? Well, in order to do that, we need models that we know include all of the processes, conditions and physics that would be involved in a collapse like that. And that's hard to know, because those processes and conditions are taking place beneath kilometers of ice, and satellites, like the one that produced this image, are blind to observe them. In fact, we have much more comprehensive observations of the surface of Mars than we do of what's beneath the Antarctic ice sheet. And this is even more challenging in that we need these observations at a gigantic scale in both space and time. In terms of space, this is a continent. And in the same way that in North America, the Rocky Mountains, Everglades and Great Lakes regions are very distinct, so are the subsurface regions of Antarctica. And in terms of time, we now know that ice sheets not only evolve over the timescale of millennia and centuries, but they're also changing over the scale of years and days. So what we want is observations beneath kilometers of ice at the scale of a continent, and we want them all the time. So how do we do this? Well, we're not totally blind to the subsurface. I said in the beginning that I was a radio glaciologist, and the reason that that's a thing is that airborne ice-penetrating radar is the main tool we have to see inside of ice sheets. So most of the data used by my group is collected by airplanes like this World War II-era DC-3, that actually fought in the Battle of the Bulge. You can see the antennas underneath the wing. These are used to transmit radar signals down into the ice. And the echos that come back contain information about what's happening inside and beneath the ice sheet. While this is happening, scientists and engineers are on the airplane for eight hours at a stretch, making sure that the radar's working. And I think this is actually a misconception about this type of fieldwork, where people imagine scientists peering out the window, contemplating the landscape, its geologic context and the fate of the ice sheets. We actually had a guy from the BBC's "Frozen Planet" on one of these flights. And he spent, like, hours videotaping us turn knobs. (Laughter) And I was actually watching the series years later with my wife, and a scene like this came up, and I commented on how beautiful it was. And she said, "Weren't you on that flight?" (Laughter) I said, "Yeah, but I was looking at a computer screen." (Laughter) So when you think about this type of fieldwork, don't think about images like this. Think about images like this. (Laughter) This is a radargram, which is a vertical profile through the ice sheet, kind of like a slice of cake. The bright layer on the top is the surface of the ice sheet, the bright layer on the bottom is the bedrock of the continent itself, and the layers in between are kind of like tree rings, in that they contain information about the history of the ice sheet. And it's amazing that this works this well. The ground-penetrating radars that are used to investigate infrastructures of roads or detect land mines struggle to get through a few meters of earth. And here we're peering through three kilometers of ice. And there are sophisticated, interesting, electromagnetic reasons for that, but let's say for now that ice is basically the perfect target for radar, and radar is basically the perfect tool to study ice sheets. These are the flight lines of most of the modern airborne radar-sounding profiles collected over Antarctica. This is the result of heroic efforts over decades by teams from a variety of countries and international collaborations. And when you put those together, you get an image like this, which is what the continent of Antarctica would look like without all the ice on top. And you can really see the diversity of the continent in an image like this. The red features are volcanoes or mountains; the areas that are blue would be open ocean if the ice sheet was removed. This is that giant spatial scale. However, all of this that took decades to produce is just one snapshot of the subsurface. It does not give us any indication of how the ice sheet is changing in time. Now, we're working on that, because it turns out that the very first radar observations of Antarctica were collected using 35 millimeter optical film. And there were thousands of reels of this film in the archives of the museum of the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge. So last summer, I took a state-of-the-art film scanner that was developed for digitizing Hollywood films and remastering them, and two art historians, and we went over to England, put on some gloves and archived and digitized all of that film. So that produced two million high-resolution images that my group is now working on analyzing and processing for comparing with contemporary conditions in the ice sheet. And, actually, that scanner — I found out about it from an archivist at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. So I'd like to thank the Academy — (Laughter) for making this possible. (Laughter) And as amazing as it is that we can look at what was happening under the ice sheet 50 years ago, this is still just one more snapshot. It doesn't give us observations of the variation at the annual or seasonal scale, that we know matters. There's some progress here, too. There are these recent ground-based radar systems that stay in one spot. So you take these radars and put them on the ice sheet and you bury a cache of car batteries. And you leave them out there for months or years at a time, and they send a pulse down into the ice sheet every so many minutes or hours. So this gives you continuous observation in time — but at one spot. So if you compare that imaging to the 2-D pictures provided by the airplane, this is just one vertical line. And this is pretty much where we are as a field right now. We can choose between good spatial coverage with airborne radar sounding and good temporal coverage in one spot with ground-based sounding. But neither gives us what we really want: both at the same time. And if we're going to do that, we're going to need totally new ways of observing the ice sheet. And ideally, those should be extremely low-cost so that we can take lots of measurements from lots of sensors. Well, for existing radar systems, the biggest driver of cost is the power required to transmit the radar signal itself. So it’d be great if we were able to use existing radio systems or radio signals that are in the environment. And fortunately, the entire field of radio astronomy is built on the fact that there are bright radio signals in the sky. And a really bright one is our sun. So, actually, one of the most exciting things my group is doing right now is trying to use the radio emissions from the sun as a type of radar signal. This is one of our field tests at Big Sur. That PVC pipe ziggurat is an antenna stand some undergrads in my lab built. And the idea here is that we stay out at Big Sur, and we watch the sunset in radio frequencies, and we try and detect the reflection of the sun off the surface of the ocean. Now, I know you're thinking, "There are no glaciers at Big Sur." (Laughter) And that's true. (Laughter) But it turns out that detecting the reflection of the sun off the surface of the ocean and detecting the reflection off the bottom of an ice sheet are extremely geophysically similar. And if this works, we should be able to apply the same measurement principle in Antarctica. And this is not as far-fetched as it seems. The seismic industry has gone through a similar technique-development exercise, where they were able to move from detonating dynamite as a source, to using ambient seismic noise in the environment. And defense radars use TV signals and radio signals all the time, so they don't have to transmit a signal of radar and give away their position. So what I'm saying is, this might really work. And if it does, we're going to need extremely low-cost sensors so we can deploy networks of hundreds or thousands of these on an ice sheet to do imaging. And that's where the technological stars have really aligned to help us. Those earlier radar systems I talked about were developed by experienced engineers over the course of years at national facilities with expensive specialized equipment. But the recent developments in software-defined radio, rapid fabrication and the maker movement, make it so that it's possible for a team of teenagers working in my lab over the course of a handful of months to build a prototype radar. OK, they're not any teenagers, they’re Stanford undergrads, but the point holds — (Laughter) that these enabling technologies are letting us break down the barrier between engineers who build instruments and scientists that use them. And by teaching engineering students to think like earth scientists and earth-science students who can think like engineers, my lab is building an environment in which we can build custom radar sensors for each problem at hand, that are optimized for low cost and high performance for that problem. And that's going to totally change the way we observe ice sheets. Look, the sea level problem and the role of the cryosphere in sea level rise is extremely important and will affect the entire world. But that is not why I work on it. I work on it for the opportunity to teach and mentor extremely brilliant students, because I deeply believe that teams of hypertalented, hyperdriven, hyperpassionate young people can solve most of the challenges facing the world, and that providing the observations required to estimate sea level rise is just one of the many such problems they can and will solve. Thank you. (Applause) |
To learn is to be free | {0: 'Shameem Akhtar is a teacher working to empower girls in Sindh, a province in the southeast of Pakistan.'} | TEDWomen 2017 | A room full of boys. A girl child, hardly nine or ten years old, she is sitting in the center of the room, surrounded by books. She is the only girl among boys, and is barely missing her female cousins and friends, who are inside the home instead of the school, because they are not allowed to get an education alongside boys. There isn't a single functional girls' school in her village. She was born in a Baloch conservative tribe, where women and girls are a matter of honor. She is the eldest in her family, and when she was about to be born, her parents wanted a baby boy. But they had bad luck; a baby girl arrived. It was customary in her family to keep girls inside the homes. But her uncle, who was a university graduate, he wanted to give her an opportunity to see the world, to be part of the society. Luckily, she has a name that can be used for both men and women. So he saw a chance to change her course of life. So he decided to raise her as a boy. At three months old, she went from being a baby girl, to baby boy. She is given a boy's getup. She is allowed to go outside and get an education alongside boys. She is free, she is confident. She observes, she notes small, everyday injustices faced by women and girls in her village. When newspapers arrive at her home, she watches as it passes from the eldest man to the youngest man. By the time women get hold of the paper, it is old news. She completes her eighth-grade year. Now fear starts to come in. This will be the end of her education, because the only option for high school for further study is five kilometers away. Boys have bicycles, they are free. But she knows her father will not allow her to travel on her own, even if she were posing as a boy. "I can't let you do that. And I don't have the time to walk you there and back. Sorry, it is impossible." She gets very upset. But a miracle happened. A long-distance relative offers to teach her ninth- and tenth-grade curricula during summer vacations. This is how she completed her matriculation. The girl whom I am talking about to you is me, Shameem, who is talking before you now. (Applause) Throughout centuries, people have been fighting for their identity. People have been loved, privileged, because of their identity, their nationality, their ethnicity. Again, people have been hated, denied, because of their nationality, their identity, their race, their gender, their religion. Identity determines your position in society, wherever you live. So if you ask me, I would say I hate this question of identity. Millions of girls in this world are being denied their basic rights because of being female. I would have faced the same, if I hadn't been raised as a boy. I was determined to continue my studies, to learn, to be free. After my schooling, even enrolling in college was not easy for me. I went on a three-day hunger strike. (Laughter) Then, I got permission for college. (Laughter) (Applause) In that way, I completed my college. Two years later, when the time came for me to go to university, my father turned his eyes, his attention, to my younger brothers. They need to be in school, secure jobs and support the family. And as a woman, my place was to be home. But, I don't give up. I sign up for a two-year program to become a lady health visitor. Then I hear about Thardeep Rural Development Program, a non-profit organization working to empower rural communities. I sneak away. I travel five hours to interview for a position. It is the first time I am the farthest from my home I have ever been. I am closest to my freedom I have ever been. Luckily, I got the job, but the hardest part is facing my father. (Laughter) Relatives are already scaring him about his daughter wandering off, teasing him with talk of his daughter crossing the border. When I return home, I want nothing more than just to accept the position in Thardeep. So that night, I packed all my things in a bag, and I walked into my father's room and told him, "Tomorrow morning, the bus is going to come in. If you believe in me, if you believe in me, you will wake me up and take me to the bus station. If you don't, I'll understand." Then I went to sleep. The next morning, my father was standing beside me to take me to the bus stop. (Applause) That day, I understood the importance of words. I understood how words affect our hearts, how words play an important role in our lives. I understood words are more powerful than fighting. At TRDP, I saw there was a Pakistan which I didn't know, a country much more complex than I had realized. Until that, I thought I had a difficult life. But here, I saw what women in other parts of Pakistan were experiencing. It really opened my eyes. Some women had 11 children but nothing to feed them. For getting water, they would walk three hours every day to wells. The nearest hospital was at least 32 kilometers away. So if a woman is in labor, she travels by camel to get to the hospital. The distance is great; she may die on her way. So now, this became more than just a job for me. I discovered my power. Now, as I was getting salary, I started sending back money to my home. Relatives and neighbors were noticing this. Now they started to understand the importance of education. By that time, some other parents started sending their daughters to school. Slowly, it became easier and acceptable for young women to be in college. Today, there isn't a single girl out of school in my village. (Applause) Girls are doing jobs in health sites, even in police. Life was good. But somewhere in my heart, I realized that my region, beyond my village needs further change. This was also the time when I joined Acumen Fellowship. There, I met leaders like me across the country. And I saw they are taking risks in their lives. I started to understand what leadership really means. So I decided to go back to my region and take a position as a teacher in a remote school, a school that I have to reach by bus — two hours traveling, every morning and evening. Though it was hard, on my first day I knew I made the right decision. The first day I walked into the school, I saw all these little Shameems staring back at me — (Laughter) with dreams in their eyes, the same dream of freedom which I had in my childhood. So the girls are eager to learn, but the school is understaffed. Girls sit hopeful, learn nothing, and they leave. I can't bear to see this happening. There was no turning back. I found my purpose. I enlisted a few of my friends to help me to teach. I'm introducing my girls to the outside world by extracurricular activities and books. I share with them the profiles of the world's best leaders, like Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. Last year, a few of our students went to college. For me, I never stop studying. Today, I'm working to complete my PhD in education — (Applause) which will allow me to gain a management position in the school system, and I will be able to make more decisions and play a pivotal role in the system. I believe that without educating the girls, we may not make world peace. We may not reduce child marriage. We may not reduce infant mortality rate. We may not reduce maternal mortality rate. For this, we have to continuously and collectively work together. At least I am playing my role, though the destination is not close. The road is not easy. But I have dreams in my eyes, and I am not going to look back now. Thank you. (Applause) |
How we became sisters | {0: 'Felice Belle consumes and creates stories to make sense of the world and her place in it. She spends her free time solving fictional crimes.', 1: 'Jennifer Murphy is an award-winning writer, performer and private investigator who spends her time solving crimes -- some real, some imagined.'} | TEDWomen 2017 | Chris Waddell: Felice Bell and Jennifer Murphy are going to do an excerpts from their play "Other Women," which is created and directed by Monica L. Williams, so please welcome Felice Bell and Jennifer Murphy. (Applause) (Music) Felice Bell: Gambling. Quit your job. With no savings and a rough sketch of the rest of your life. Withdraw money from your 401K, pay the penalty, why wait? In this economy, everything you own is worth more than it will ever be. Cut your hair, call yourself "new," call your ex, call Robin, tell her you bought a ticket to the Bay. Paso Robles road trip, wine taste, buy a Malbec and a tight red tee, eat a cookie from an LA dispensary, chain-smoke around bed and breakfast hillside fire pit with San Diego newlyweds and vineyard view. (Laughter) Go to the water with your girls and grease-stained bags of burgers. Sit on driftwood. Sunset. Remember you folded. Remember your place. Spend the night in Reno. Resent the safety of the slots, sit at the blackjack table, hand the dealer rent, retirement, pray God cares enough to pony up an ace. (Laughter) Leaving. Lunch on Lake Tahoe, they say, is deep and cold enough to preserve a body whole. Railroad workers, mafia, military and possibly a monster like Loch Ness — no one can prove it. Ignore the math. Odds are a distraction. What matters is the chip count. The cards on the table, the cards in your hand. You must be willing to lose. Jennifer Murphy: When the dream was a notion, it lived in the desert near Edwards Air Force Base, where NASA tested space ships. It fed on cactus and stars, but it kept being delayed. "It's not time," they said. The dream grew impatient, broke water, extracted from its mother in a bed of wrecked strawberries. As a teenager, it cried, took endless drives over the grapevine out of a town ripe with oranges and silence, "Get me out of here," it begged. It was so tiny and delicate, you feared for its life. It seemed a butterfly might land on its face and crush it. It frightened you to love something so much. Later it rebelled, got drunk, handcuffed for urinating whiskey on your neighbor's rose bushes. The dream had issues, needs. "Don't ignore me," it screamed. It needed skyscrapers and nicotine, needed to stay home reading the "Easter Parade" instead of going to its job as a waitress at a restaurant where it could not afford the food. It was a dream, for Christ's sake, it had better things to do. It had to write, pray, dispatch fleets of messages to God about how to make itself known in daylight. All its life, the dream made plans. It planned to write, publish, get rich, publish, have sex with reckless, attractive men in the backseats of taxis, yes, that happened — no, it didn't. The dream argued with itself, with the truth. You didn't have the dream, the dream had you. Every single one of its plans fell through. "I give up," it cried, "I quit." Hid itself in the dark until finally it heard its name being called. Pondered the unspeakable miracle of sticking around long enough to be seen. Now it looks around for the ones who've waited years for its arrival. They always come for you, don't they, your girls? With their crossed fingers and belief in you, "No destination," they say, "No maps, no idea where we're headed." And even though you cannot believe this is happening, even though you are hallucinating with fear, you hear yourself say it, "I am ready, I am ready, let's go!" FB: Episode one. JM: Everyone always wants to know how we became sisters. "How did you two meet?" Like we're a married couple. I like to say we met online. (Laughter) FB: We met at the Nuyorican Poets Café in 1999. Every Friday night of our young lives spent in the audience or on the mic. Miss one Friday, and you would hear about the poet who killed it. You should have been there! JM: I killed it. FB: The night I met Jen, she was sitting on the lap of my archnemesis. I swear we are never going to be friends. JM: Really? We are not going to be friends because I'm friends with someone you don't like? FB: Absolutely. Without a doubt. (Laughter) JM: Misdemeanor one: menacing. I love it when women size me up and spit me out before they've ever met me, before I've said one word. The phrase "dismissed before investigation" comes to mind. Misdemeanor two: fraud. Felice likes to claim she believes in science and math, that she proceeds through life with logic, like a man. Lot of logic in this example, lot of fairness and justice, real open-minded play. Felice is not a detective, she only plays one onstage. And when I say that, I say it as a private investigator, licensed in the state of New York. (Laughter) FB: Sherlock Holmes doesn't need a license. (Laughter) He solves crime. So do I. Using science and my intuition. Everything I know about detective work, I learned on TV. JM: Episode two. How we became sisters. FB: Right, so about a year later, Jen and I were invited to read poems in the basement of Two Boots pizzeria. JM: Our careers had taken off! (Laughter) FB: After the pizzeria reading, we have a slice. I don't know why, but I tell her something I hadn't told anyone. I spent the weekend in Reno with Nacho Velasquez. First thing she says — JM: Did you see Nacho's little nacho? FB: And we were friends. JM: That — (Laughter) That is not how I remember it. In my mind, we became friends after I was diagnosed with cancer. You came with me to Sloan Kettering, because my family wasn't handy. FB: OK, let's hear that version. JM: So, we walk into Sloan Kettering, and I have never seen my sister happier. Reminder: we are at the cancer hospital. There are people limping by with carved faces and missing ears. FB: This place has everything. There is a waterfall, there are orchids, little packets of graham crackers. JM: I am sitting in the waiting room, sweating through my dress, she's making herself a cappuccino. FB: It's delicious. JM: I cannot handle you right now. FB: Episode three. JM: Six years after we first met. FB: My childhood best friend dies. The day of his wake there is a transit strike. Jen walks from Cobble Hill to Crown Heights so she can go with me. There are moments that bond, and this one is key. When there is no train, no car service, no bus, my sister will walk miles just to be by my side. JM: When a sister loves a sister. When she says, "It's time for bibimbap," she means, "I need to talk, I'm having a meltdown." And when she says, "Did you sleep with my man, Nacho Velasquez," she means, "I'm having trust issues around our friendship again. You are supposed to know this." (Laughter) FB: When a sister loves a sister, you are in Crown Heights and she is in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Or you're in Spain, sipping absinthe, and she is in Paris, writing. Or you are in your apartment, sun-glassed and hoodied, creating new choreography to the right soundtrack. JM: While you're home having flashbacks to 9/11, listening to the last call of your friend, a firefighter who perished in the North Tower. His last words, "Thank you." You find it difficult to say goodbye. FB: When a sister loves a sister, it is five o’clock in the morning, you are asleep and she is calling. You say, "Hey, sis, did someone die?" JM: You are sobbing, saying your boyfriend, the cop, got shot and straight away, her voice contains the depth and calm of a windless lake. For hours, she stays on the line and remains very quiet and very kind. FB: Whatever you need to get through this. JM: When she says, "Let's see each other this week," she means, "Let's cancel and talk on the phone instead." When she says, "This thing Tara Brach said reminded me of you," she means it reminded her of her and then you. It means she's been doing guided meditations again, is about to drop some spiritual-wisdom-type shit about radical acceptance, ergo — FB: The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle. JM: In the '90s, you fought with the constancy of dawn. It was entertaining, a sport, a pastime. FB: What is wrong with you? JM: What's wrong with you? FB: I'm not the one being aggressive. JM: I'm relaxed. FB: I'm not doing this with you. JM: Your wide-eyed friends would raise their hands and say, "What is going on with you two?" One winter, when you had no money, you mailed her flowers from Paris because she was having surgery. One spring in your deepest heartbreak she stood with you in the rain on Fulton Street. FB: This isn't your dream, sis. You can leave him. JM: One winter, one spring, two decades, two women, one dream. Your mothers' names are Sheila. They quote the Bible, say — FB: "You are fearfully and wonderfully made." JM: Say — FB: "Boy, it's good you're done with that MFA." JM: You and your sister laugh, thank God that pesky dream is finished, now you can finally get back to peeling potatoes and shucking corn. FB: When a sister loves a sister, you want her in the audience when your play premieres at the National Theatre in Washington DC. JM: When a sister loves a sister, she cheers and screams when an agent agrees to send out your stories. FB: When a sister loves a sister, she celebrates your artistic, romantic and spiritual victories. JM: You are like young girls becoming what they always dreamed of becoming when they grew up. FB: When a sister loves a sister, you listen to her read, thinking — JM: As heaven to the gods is poetry to the beloved. (Applause) JM: Love you. (Applause) |
How to connect with depressed friends | {0: 'Bill Bernat is a recovering addict living with bipolar condition who advocates for mental health awareness through speaking, comedy and storytelling. '} | TEDxSnoIsleLibraries | The one conversation that uplifted me more than any other in my life was with a woman who told me how, a few days earlier, she drove her Jeep Wrangler to the edge of the Grand Canyon and sat there, revving the engine, thinking about driving over. Even though I had severe social anxiety, in that conversation, I was totally at ease. (Laughter) She told me what was going on in her life in the days and months leading up, what her thoughts were at that exact moment, why she wanted to die, and why she didn't do it. We nodded and half-smiled, and then it was my turn to talk about my journey to a dining table in the hygienic community area of the mental health wing of a mountain-town hospital. I took too many sleeping pills, and after they treated me for that, they were like, "Hey, we would love it if you would be our guest in the psych ward." (Laughter) We joked that her suicide would have made a way better postcard. (Laughter) We talked shop. (Laughter) She allowed me to be deeply depressed and have a genuine connection to another person, simultaneously. For the first time, I identified as somebody living with depression, and I felt good about it — like I wasn't a bad person for it. Now imagine one of the people at that table was a member of your family or a close friend. Would you be comfortable talking to them? What if instead of the hospital, they were at your kitchen table and told you they were really depressed? The World Health Organization says that depression is the leading cause of ill health and disability worldwide, affecting 350 million people. The National Institute of Mental Health reports seven percent of Americans experiencing depression in a year. So depression is super common, yet in my experience, most folks don't want to talk to depressed people unless we pretend to be happy. A cheerful facade is appropriate for casual interactions. A depressed person can ask for extra syrup in their pumpkin spice latte without explaining that they need it because they're trapped in the infinite darkness of their soul and they've lost all hope of escape — (Laughter) again. (Laughter) Depression doesn't diminish a person's desire to connect with other people, just their ability. So in spite of what you might think, talking to friends and family living with depression can be really easy and maybe even fun. Not, like, Facebook-selfie-with-Lady-Gaga- at-an-underground-party fun — I'm talking about the kind of fun where people enjoy each other's company effortlessly. Nobody feels awkward, and no one accuses the sad person of ruining the holidays. Why does this chasm even exist? On the one side, you have people living with depression who may act in off-putting or confusing ways because they're fighting a war in their head that nobody else can see. On the other side, the vast majority of people look across the chasm and shake their heads, like, "Why you gotta be so depressed?" You may recognize a divide like this in your life. Do you want to build a bridge across it? You may not want to build a bridge — and that's a totally valid choice. Or maybe you'd like to build a stronger connection, but you have a lot of questions and concerns. You're what I might call "bridge curious." (Laughter) Here are some possible reasons why some of you may avoid depressed people. You might be afraid that if you talk to somebody while they're depressed, you're suddenly responsible for their well-being. You're not expected to be Dr. Phil. Just be friendly — more like Ellen. (Laughter) You may worry that you won't know what to say, and every attempt at conversation will be awkward, and the only time you'll feel comfortable is when you both just give up on talking and stare at your phones. Words are not the most important thing to focus on. You might fear seeing your shadow. Hey, if you have been successfully outrunning your personal emotional demons, that's awesome. May the wind be at your back. (Laughter) You can be the least woo-woo person in the world and still connect with depressed people. Maybe you've heard that depression is contagious, and you're afraid of catching it. Bring some hand sanitizer. (Laughter) You're much more likely to catch the joy of human bonding. Maybe you see depressed people differently. You think of them as flawed or defective. Multiple university studies have shown that A students are more likely to have bipolar condition. Our brains aren't broken or damaged, they just work differently. I spent a lot of years thinking happy people just don't get it. (Laughter) I did eventually stop discriminating against happy people — (Laughter) I began battling depression when I was eight, and decades later, to my surprise, I started winning. I shifted from being miserable much of the time to enjoying life. I live pretty well with my bipolar condition, and I've overcome some other mental health conditions like overeating, addiction and social anxiety. So I live on both sides of this chasm. And I'm offering some guidance based on my experience to help you build a bridge across it if you want to. It's not hard science, but I worked with a lot people I know who've lived with depression to refine these suggestions. First up, some things you might want to avoid — some "don'ts." One of the most off-putting things you can say is, "Just get over it." Great idea — love it, it's just we already thought of that. (Laughter) The absence of the ability to just get over it is depression. (Laughter) (Applause) We feel it in our bodies — it's a physical thing for us. And medically it's no different from telling someone with a broken ankle or cancer, "just get over it." Don't be hell-bent on fixing us. Like, thank you, but ... the pressure can make us depressed people feel like we're disappointing you. Also, things that make some people feel better may not work for us. You can't cure clinical depression by getting ice cream ... which is unfortunate, because that would be living the dream. (Laughter) Don't take a negative response personally. So, I have a friend who, about a year ago, messaged me that he was really isolated and depressed. And I suggested some things for him to do, and he was like, "No, no and no." And I got mad, like, how dare he not embrace my brilliant wisdom? (Laughter) And then I remembered times I've been depressed, and how I thought I was doomed in all possible futures, or everybody suddenly hated me, and things like that. It didn't matter how many people told me otherwise — I didn't believe them. So I let my friend know I cared, and I didn't take it personally. Don't let a lack of bubbly happiness freak you out. It's not a shark attack. "Call the coast guard, my friend is sad!" (Laughter) We can be sad and OK at the same time. I'm going to say that again, because in our society, we're taught the opposite, and so it's counterintuitive. People can be sad and OK at the same time. So some of these things may apply to you personally, some may not. Take what's useful. And remember, you don't have to connect. If you want to, here are some suggestions that may help — some "dos." Talk to us in your natural voice, right? (Laughter) You don't need to put on a sad voice because we're depressed — you don't sneeze when you're talking to somebody with a cold. (Laughter) It's not rude to be upbeat. You can be you, OK? If you make an offer to be there for us, clearly state what you can and can't do. I have told people, "Hey, call or text any time, but I might not be able to get back to you that same day." It's totally cool to not make an offer, or to make a narrow offer with really clear boundaries around it. Give us a sense of control. Like, get our consent. I have a friend who, a while back, when I was having a depressive episode, reached out and said, "Hey, I want to check in with you. Can I call you every day? Maybe text you every day and call later in the week? What works for you?" By getting my permission, she earned my complete confidence and remains one of my best friends today. And my last suggestion is: interact about not depression, aka, normal stuff. I have a friend who, when people were worried about him, they would call and ask if he wanted to go shopping or help them clean out their garage. Your depressed friends could be a good source of free labor — (Laughter) What I'm really getting at is, invite them to contribute to your life in some way, even if it's as small as asking you to go see a movie that you wanted to see in the theater. So that's a lot of dos and don'ts and maybes, and it's not by any means a definitive list. The thing to remember is that they're all grounded in one guiding principle. It's what allowed the woman in the Jeep Wrangler to start me on the path to recovery without even trying. She talked to me like I belonged and contributed exactly as I was at that moment. If you talk to a depressed person as if their life is just as valuable, intense and beautiful as yours, then there's no need to build a bridge between you, because you've closed the chasm. Focus on that instead of your words, and it may be the most uplifting conversation of their life. What could that do for somebody you care about? What could it do for you? Thank you. (Applause) |
What soccer can teach us about freedom | {0: 'Marc Bamuthi Joseph investigates cultural erasure through performances that range from opera to dance theater.'} | TEDGlobal 2017 | The two places where I feel most free aren't actually places. They're moments. The first is inside of dance. Somewhere between rising up against gravity and the feeling that the air beneath me is falling in love with my body's weight. I'm dancing and the air is carrying me like I might never come down. The second place that I feel free is after scoring a goal on the soccer pitch. My body floods with the chemical that they put inside of EpiPens to revive the dead, and I am weightless, raceless. My story is this: I'm a curator at a contemporary arts center, but I don't really believe in art that doesn't bleed or sweat or cry. I imagine that my kids are going to live in a time when the most valuable commodities are fresh water and empathy. I love pretty dances and majestic sculpture as much as the next guy, but give me something else to go with it. Lift me up with the aesthetic sublime and give me a practice or some tools to turn that inspiration into understanding and action. For instance, I'm a theater maker who loves sports. When I was making my latest piece /peh-LO-tah/ I thought a lot about how soccer was a means for my own immigrant family to foster a sense of continuity and normality and community within the new context of the US. In this heightened moment of xenophobia and assault on immigrant identity, I wanted to think through how the game could serve as an affirmational tool for first-generation Americans and immigrant kids, to ask them to consider movement patterns on the field as kin to migratory patterns across social and political borders. Whether footballers or not, immigrants in the US play on endangered ground. I wanted to help the kids understand that the same muscle that they use to plan the next goal can also be used to navigate the next block. For me, freedom exists in the body. We talk about it abstractly and even divisively, like "protect our freedom," "build this wall," "they hate us because of our freedom." We have all these systems that are beautifully designed to incarcerate us or deport us, but how do we design freedom? For these kids, I wanted to track the idea back to something that exists inside that no one could take away, so I developed this curriculum that's part poli-sci class, part soccer tournament, inside of an arts festival. It accesses /peh-LO-tah/'s field of inquiry to create a sports-based political action for young people. The project is called "Moving and Passing." It intersects curriculum development, site-specific performance and the politics of joy, while using soccer as a metaphor for the urgent question of enfranchisement among immigrant youth. Imagine that you are a 15-year-old kid from Honduras now living in Harlem, or you're a 13-year-old girl born in DC to two Nigerian immigrants. You love the game. You're on the field with your folks. You've just been practicing dribbling through cones for, like, 15 minutes, and then, all of a sudden, a marching band comes down the field. I want to associate the joy of the game with the exuberance of culture, to locate the site of joy in the game at the same physical coordinate as being politically informed by art, a grass-laden theater for liberation. We spend a week looking at how the midfielder would explain Black Lives Matter, or how the goalkeeper would explain gun control, or how a defender's style is the perfect metaphor for the limits of American exceptionalism. As we study positions on the field, we also name and imagine our own freedoms. I don't know, man, soccer is, like, the only thing on this planet that we can all agree to do together. You know? It's like the official sport of this spinning ball. I want to be able to connect the joy of the game to the ever-moving footballer, to connect that moving footballer to immigrants who also moved in sight of a better position. Among these kids, I want to connect their families' histories to the bliss of a goal-scorer's run, family like that feeling after the ball beats the goalie, the closest thing going to freedom. Thank you. (Applause) |
What I learned when I conquered the world's toughest triathlon | {0: 'A record-setting triathlete, Minda Dentler is a polio survivor committed to inspiring people to move beyond their fear of failure and achieve their goals.'} | TEDWomen 2017 | It was October 13, 2012, a day that I will never forget. I was on my bike, pushing up what seemed like a never-ending barren hill. And it wasn't just any hill: it was a 15-mile climb up to a town called Hawi on the Big Island of Hawaii. And it wasn't just any ride: it was at the Ironman World Championship. I can still feel my muscles burning. I was struggling, tired and dehydrated, as I could feel the heat emanating from the asphalt, measuring almost 98 degrees. I was near the halfway point of the bike portion of one of the most prestigious, longest, single-day endurance race events in the world. Every year, during my childhood, I watched this very race on TV in our family living room. I sat next to my dad on our 1970s-style orange and brown sofa, and I remember being in utter awe at how these athletes pushed themselves to their limit in this grueling race. And just so you don't get the wrong idea, my family members weren't just spectators. They were incredibly athletic, and I always participated from the sidelines, cheering on my three siblings or handing out water at local races. I remember wanting so badly to be able to compete, but I couldn't. Even though I couldn't play sports, I decided to be active in my community. I volunteered at the local hospital in high school. In college, I interned at the White House, studied abroad in Spain and backpacked through Europe all by myself with my leg braces and crutches. Upon graduating, I moved to New York City for a job in management consulting, earned an MBA, got married and now have a daughter. (Applause) At age 28, I was introduced to the sport of hand-cycling, and then triathlon, and by luck, I met Jason Fowler, an Ironman World Champion, at a camp for athletes with disabilities. And like me, he competed in a wheelchair. And with his encouragement, at age 34, I decided to go after Kona. The Kona, or Hawaii Ironman is the oldest Iron-distance race in the sport, and if you're not familiar, it's like the Super Bowl of triathlon. And the Ironman, for a wheelchair athlete like me, consists of a 2.4-mile open-water swim in the Pacific Ocean, a 112-mile hand cycle ride in lava fields — now, that sounds exotic, but it's not as scenic as it sounds, and it's pretty desolate — and then you top it off with a marathon, or a 26.2-mile run in 90-degree heat using a racing wheelchair. That's right, it's a total distance of 140.6 miles using just your arms in less than 17 hours. No female wheelchair athlete had ever completed the race because of the strict, seemingly impossible cutoff times. And so there I was, putting it all out on the line. And when I finally reached the top of that 15-mile climb, I was discouraged. There was no way I was going to make that swim in my time limit of 10 and a half hours, because I was almost two hours off pace. I had to make the agonizing decision to quit. I removed my timing chip, and I handed it over to a race official. My day was done. My best friend Shannon and my husband Shawn were waiting at the top of Hawi to drive me back to town. And on my way back to town, I began to cry. I had failed. My dream of completing the Ironman World Championship was crushed. I was embarrassed. I felt like I'd messed up. I worried about what my friends, my family and people at work would think of me. What was I going to put on Facebook? (Laughter) How was I going to explain to everyone that things didn't go the way I had assumed or planned? A few weeks later I was talking to Shannon about the Kona "disaster," and she said this to me: "Minda, big dreams and goals can only be realized when you're ready to fail." I knew I had to put that failure behind me in order to move forward, and it wouldn't be the first time that I had faced insurmountable odds. I was born in Bombay, India, and just before my first birthday, I contracted polio, which left me paralyzed from the hips down. Unable to care for me, my birth mother left me at an orphanage. Fortunately, I was adopted by an American family, and I moved to Spokane, Washington just shortly after my third birthday. Over the next few years, I underwent a series of surgeries on my hips, my legs and my back that allowed me to walk with leg braces and crutches. As a child, I struggled with my disability. I felt like I didn't fit in. People stared at me all the time, and I was embarrassed about wearing a back brace and leg braces, and I always hid my chicken legs under my pants. As a young girl, I thought thick, heavy braces on my legs did not look pretty or feminine. Among my generation, I am one of the very few individuals in the US who are living with paralysis by polio today. Many people who contract polio in developing countries do not have access to the same medical care, education, or opportunities like I have had in America. Many do not even live to reach adulthood. I have the humbling knowledge that, had I not been adopted, I most certainly wouldn't be in front of you today. I may not even be alive. All of us, in our own lives, may face seemingly insurmountable goals. I want to share with you what I learned when I tried again. One year after my first attempt, on a sunny Saturday morning, my husband Shawn dumped me into the ocean at the Kona Pier and, with 2,500 of my closest friends and competitors, we started swimming as that cannon went off promptly at 7am. I focused on one stroke at a time, staying in between bodies, counting my strokes — one, two, three, four — and lifting my head to sight every so often just so I wouldn't get too off track. And when I finally reached the shoreline, Shawn picked me up, and he carried me out of the water. I was so stunned and thrilled when Shawn had told me I had managed a one-hour-and-43-minute swim time. On to the bike segment. I had eight hours and 45 minutes to complete the 112-mile bike course. I broke up the course in seven- to 10-mile segments in my mind just to reduce the enormity of the race. The first 40 miles, they clipped by as we benefited from a little tail wind. By 4pm, I had made it to mile 94, and I did the math and I realized I was in serious time jeopardy because I had 18 miles to go and less than 90 minutes, and that included a few sizable hill climbs. I was stressed out, and I was scared that I wasn't going to make that time cutoff again. At this point, I pushed my internal voice aside that said, "This hurts. Quit." And I told myself, "Minda, you better focus. Focus on what you can control, and that is your attitude and your effort." I resolved to be OK being uncomfortable, and I told myself, "Push harder, forget about the pain, and keep that laser focus." For the next 90 minutes, I cranked as though my life depended on it. And when I rolled into town, I heard on the loudspeaker, "Minda Dentler is one of the last competitors to make the bike cutoff." I did it! (Applause) By only three minutes. (Laughter) It was 5:27pm, and I had been racing for 10-and-a-half hours. The first 10 miles of the run went pretty quickly, as I was so excited to finally pass people with my three wheels to their two feet. The sun quickly went down, and I found myself pulling up to the bottom of Palani hill, looking straight into a half-mile hill that looked like Mt. Everest at mile 124 of the race. My friends and family were ready at their stations to talk me up that hill. I was struggling, tired, desperately gripping those rims just so I wouldn't tip backwards. When I finally reached the top of that hill, I turned left onto a very lonely 15-mile stretch onto the Queen K Highway, totally exhausted. I pressed on, focusing on one push at a time. By 9:30pm, I made that final right-hand turn onto Ali'i Drive. I heard the crowd's roar, and I was overcome with emotion. I crossed that finish line. (Applause) (Applause ends) And my final time was 14 hours and 39 minutes. For the first time in the 35-year history, a female wheelchair athlete completed the Ironman World Championship. (Applause) (Applause ends) And it wasn't just any female athlete. It was me. (Laughter) A paralyzed orphan from India. Against all odds, I achieved my dream, and through this very personal commitment to myself, I slowly realized that completing the Ironman was about more than conquering Kona. It was about conquering polio and other disabling but preventable diseases, not only for myself, but for the millions of children who have been and still will be afflicted by vaccine-preventable diseases. Today, we are closer than ever to eliminating one of those diseases everywhere in the world. In the mid-1980s, polio once paralyzed more than 350,000 children a year in more than 125 countries. That amounted to a staggering 40 cases an hour. By contrast, so far this year, the last endemic countries have reported a total of only 12 cases. Since 1988, more than 2.5 billion children have been immunized against polio, and an estimated 16 million children, who otherwise would have been paralyzed like me, are walking. Despite this incredible progress, we know that until it's eradicated, polio remains a very real threat, especially to children in the poorest communities of the world. It can reemerge in some of the most remote and dangerous places, and from there, it can spread. And so this is my new Ironman: to end polio. And I am reminded every day, when I look at my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter Maya. She is able to climb a ladder in the park, push her scooter or kick a ball across the grass. Almost everything that I see her do at her age reminds me of what I could not do at that age. And when she was two months old, I took her to get her first polio vaccine. And when the doctor came in the room to prepare the shot, I asked him if I could take a picture to document the moment. When we left the room, I could feel my eyes welling up with tears. I cried the entire way home. It was in that moment that I realized that my daughter's life would be very different from mine. She will never be faced with the crippling disability of polio, because a vaccine was available, and I chose to get her immunized. She can do anything she wants, as can each of you. (Laughter) Now I'd like to leave you all with one question: what is your Ironman? Thank you. (Applause) |
Do you really know why you do what you do? | {0: 'Petter Johansson and his research group study self-knowledge and attitude change using methods ranging from questionnaires to close-up card magic.'} | TEDxUppsalaUniversity | So why do you think the rich should pay more in taxes? Why did you buy the latest iPhone? Why did you pick your current partner? And why did so many people vote for Donald Trump? What were the reasons, why did they do it? So we ask this kind of question all the time, and we expect to get an answer. And when being asked, we expect ourselves to know the answer, to simply tell why we did as we did. But do we really know why? So when you say that you prefer George Clooney to Tom Hanks, due to his concern for the environment, is that really true? So you can be perfectly sincere and genuinely believe that this is the reason that drives your choice, but to me, it may still feel like something is missing. As it stands, due to the nature of subjectivity, it is actually very hard to ever prove that people are wrong about themselves. So I'm an experimental psychologist, and this is the problem we've been trying to solve in our lab. So we wanted to create an experiment that would allow us to challenge what people say about themselves, regardless of how certain they may seem. But tricking people about their own mind is hard. So we turned to the professionals. The magicians. So they're experts at creating the illusion of a free choice. So when they say, "Pick a card, any card," the only thing you know is that your choice is no longer free. So we had a few fantastic brainstorming sessions with a group of Swedish magicians, and they helped us create a method in which we would be able to manipulate the outcome of people's choices. This way we would know when people are wrong about themselves, even if they don't know this themselves. So I will now show you a short movie showing this manipulation. So it's quite simple. The participants make a choice, but I end up giving them the opposite. And then we want to see: How did they react, and what did they say? So it's quite simple, but see if you can spot the magic going on. And this was shot with real participants, they don't know what's going on. (Video) Petter Johansson: Hi, my name's Petter. Woman: Hi, I'm Becka. PJ: I'm going to show you pictures like this. And you'll have to decide which one you find more attractive. Becka: OK. PJ: And then sometimes, I will ask you why you prefer that face. Becka: OK. PJ: Ready? Becka: Yeah. PJ: Why did you prefer that one? Becka: The smile, I think. PJ: Smile. Man: One on the left. Again, this one just struck me. Interesting shot. Since I'm a photographer, I like the way it's lit and looks. Petter Johansson: But now comes the trick. (Video) Woman 1: This one. PJ: So they get the opposite of their choice. And let's see what happens. Woman 2: Um ... I think he seems a little more innocent than the other guy. Man: The one on the left. I like her smile and contour of the nose and face. So it's a little more interesting to me, and her haircut. Woman 3: This one. I like the smirky look better. PJ: You like the smirky look better? (Laughter) Woman 3: This one. PJ: What made you choose him? Woman 3: I don't know, he looks a little bit like the Hobbit. (Laughter) PJ: And what happens in the end when I tell them the true nature of the experiment? Yeah, that's it. I just have to ask a few questions. Man: Sure. PJ: What did you think of this experiment, was it easy or hard? Man: It was easy. PJ: During the experiments, I actually switched the pictures three times. Was this anything you noticed? Man: No. I didn't notice any of that. PJ: Not at all? Man: No. Switching the pictures as far as ... PJ: Yeah, you were pointing at one of them but I actually gave you the opposite. Man: The opposite one. OK, when you — No. Shows you how much my attention span was. (Laughter) PJ: Did you notice that sometimes during the experiment I switched the pictures? Woman 2: No, I did not notice that. PJ: You were pointing at one, but then I gave you the other one. No inclination of that happening? Woman 2: No. Woman 2: I did not notice. (Laughs) PJ: Thank you. Woman 2: Thank you. PJ: OK, so as you probably figured out now, the trick is that I have two cards in each hand, and when I hand one of them over, the black one kind of disappears into the black surface on the table. So using pictures like this, normally not more than 20 percent of the participants detect these tries. And as you saw in the movie, when in the end we explain what's going on, they're very surprised and often refuse to believe the trick has been made. So this shows that this effect is quite robust and a genuine effect. But if you're interested in self-knowledge, as I am, the more interesting bit is, OK, so what did they say when they explained these choices? So we've done a lot of analysis of the verbal reports in these experiments. And this graph simply shows that if you compare what they say in a manipulated trial with a nonmanipulated trial, that is when they explain a normal choice they've made and one where we manipulated the outcome, we find that they are remarkably similar. So they are just as emotional, just as specific, and they are expressed with the same level of certainty. So the strong conclusion to draw from this is that if there are no differences between a real choice and a manipulated choice, perhaps we make things up all the time. But we've also done studies where we try to match what they say with the actual faces. And then we find things like this. So here, this male participant, he preferred the girl to the left, he ended up with the one to the right. And then, he explained his choice like this. "She is radiant. I would rather have approached her at the bar than the other one. And I like earrings." And whatever made him choose the girl on the left to begin with, it can't have been the earrings, because they were actually sitting on the girl on the right. So this is a clear example of a post hoc construction. So they just explained the choice afterwards. So what this experiment shows is, OK, so if we fail to detect that our choices have been changed, we will immediately start to explain them in another way. And what we also found is that the participants often come to prefer the alternative, that they were led to believe they liked. So if we let them do the choice again, they will now choose the face they had previously rejected. So this is the effect we call "choice blindness." And we've done a number of different studies — we've tried consumer choices, choices based on taste and smell and even reasoning problems. But what you all want to know is of course does this extend also to more complex, more meaningful choices? Like those concerning moral and political issues. So the next experiment, it needs a little bit of a background. So in Sweden, the political landscape is dominated by a left-wing and a right-wing coalition. And the voters may move a little bit between the parties within each coalition, but there is very little movement between the coalitions. And before each elections, the newspapers and the polling institutes put together what they call "an election compass" which consists of a number of dividing issues that sort of separates the two coalitions. Things like if tax on gasoline should be increased or if the 13 months of paid parental leave should be split equally between the two parents in order to increase gender equality. So, before the last Swedish election, we created an election compass of our own. So we walked up to people in the street and asked if they wanted to do a quick political survey. So first we had them state their voting intention between the two coalitions. Then we asked them to answer 12 of these questions. They would fill in their answers, and we would ask them to discuss, so OK, why do you think tax on gas should be increased? And we'd go through the questions. Then we had a color coded template that would allow us to tally their overall score. So this person would have one, two, three, four five, six, seven, eight, nine scores to the left, so he would lean to the left, basically. And in the end, we also had them fill in their voting intention once more. But of course, there was also a trick involved. So first, we walked up to people, we asked them about their voting intention and then when they started filling in, we would fill in a set of answers going in the opposite direction. We would put it under the notepad. And when we get the questionnaire, we would simply glue it on top of the participant's own answer. So there, it's gone. And then we would ask about each of the questions: How did you reason here? And they'll state the reasons, together we will sum up their overall score. And in the end, they will state their voting intention again. So what we find first of all here, is that very few of these manipulations are detected. And they're not detected in the sense that they realize, "OK, you must have changed my answer," it was more the case that, "OK, I must've misunderstood the question the first time I read it. Can I please change it?" And even if a few of these manipulations were changed, the overall majority was missed. So we managed to switch 90 percent of the participants' answers from left to right, right to left, their overall profile. And what happens then when they are asked to motivate their choices? And here we find much more interesting verbal reports than compared to the faces. People say things like this, and I'll read it to you. So, "Large-scale governmental surveillance of email and internet traffic ought to be permissible as means to combat international crime and terrorism." "So you agree to some extent with this statement." "Yes." "So how did you reason here?" "Well, like, as it is so hard to get at international crime and terrorism, I think there should be those kinds of tools." And then the person remembers an argument from the newspaper in the morning. "Like in the newspaper today, it said they can like, listen to mobile phones from prison, if a gang leader tries to continue his crimes from inside. And I think it's madness that we have so little power that we can't stop those things when we actually have the possibility to do so." And then there's a little bit back and forth in the end: "I don't like that they have access to everything I do, but I still think it's worth it in the long run." So, if you didn't know that this person just took part in a choice blindness experiment, I don't think you would question that this is the true attitude of that person. And what happens in the end, with the voting intention? What we find — that one is also clearly affected by the questionnaire. So we have 10 participants shifting from left to right or from right to left. We have another 19 that go from clear voting intention to being uncertain. Some go from being uncertain to clear voting intention. And then there is a number of participants staying uncertain throughout. And that number is interesting because if you look at what the polling institutes say the closer you get to an election, the only people that are sort of in play are the ones that are considered uncertain. But we show there is a much larger number that would actually consider shifting their attitudes. And here I must point out, of course, that you are not allowed to use this as an actual method to change people's votes before an election, and we clearly debriefed them afterwards and gave them every opportunity to change back to whatever they thought first. But what this shows is that if you can get people to see the opposite view and engage in a conversation with themselves, that could actually make them change their views. OK. So what does it all mean? What do I think is going on here? So first of all, a lot of what we call self-knowledge is actually self-interpretation. So I see myself make a choice, and then when I'm asked why, I just try to make as much sense of it as possible when I make an explanation. But we do this so quickly and with such ease that we think we actually know the answer when we answer why. And as it is an interpretation, of course we sometimes make mistakes. The same way we make mistakes when we try to understand other people. So beware when you ask people the question "why" because what may happen is that, if you asked them, "So why do you support this issue?" "Why do you stay in this job or this relationship?" — what may happen when you ask why is that you actually create an attitude that wasn't there before you asked the question. And this is of course important in your professional life, as well, or it could be. If, say, you design something and then you ask people, "Why do you think this is good or bad?" Or if you're a journalist asking a politician, "So, why did you make this decision?" Or if indeed you are a politician and try to explain why a certain decision was made. So this may all seem a bit disturbing. But if you want to look at it from a positive direction, it could be seen as showing, OK, so we're actually a little bit more flexible than we think. We can change our minds. Our attitudes are not set in stone. And we can also change the minds of others, if we can only get them to engage with the issue and see it from the opposite view. And in my own personal life, since starting with this research — So my partner and I, we've always had the rule that you're allowed to take things back. Just because I said I liked something a year ago, doesn't mean I have to like it still. And getting rid of the need to stay consistent is actually a huge relief and makes relational life so mush easier to live. Anyway, so the conclusion must be: know that you don't know yourself. Or at least not as well as you think you do. Thanks. (Applause) |
How fashion helps us express who we are -- and what we stand for | {0: 'Kaustav Dey leads marketing for Tommy Hilfiger in India.'} | TED@Tommy | I was around 10 when one day, I discovered a box of my father's old things. In it, under a bunch of his college textbooks, was a pair of black corduroy bell-bottom pants. These pants were awful — musty and moth-eaten. And of course, I fell in love with them. I'd never seen anything like them. Until that day, all I'd ever known and worn was my school uniform, which, in fact, I was pretty grateful for, because from quite a young age, I'd realized I was somewhat different. I'd never been one of the boys my age; terrible at sports, possibly the unmanliest little boy ever. (Laughter) I was bullied quite a bit. And so, I figured that to survive I would be invisible, and the uniform helped me to seem no different from any other child. (Laughter) Well, almost. This became my daily prayer: "God, please make me just like everybody else." I think this went straight to God's voicemail, though. (Laughter) And eventually, it became pretty clear that I was not growing up to be the son that my father always wanted. Sorry, Dad. No, I was not going to magically change. And over time, I grew less and less sure that I actually wanted to. Therefore, the day those black corduroy bell-bottom pants came into my life, something happened. I didn't see pants; I saw opportunity. The very next day, I had to wear them to school, come what may. And once I pulled on those god-awful pants and belted them tight, almost instantly, I developed what can only be called a swagger. (Laughter) All the way to school, and then all the way back because I was sent home at once — (Laughter) I transformed into a little brown rock star. (Laughter) I finally didn't care anymore that I could not conform. That day, I was suddenly celebrating it. That day, instead of being invisible, I chose to be looked at, just by wearing something different. That day, I discovered the power of what we wear. That day, I discovered the power of fashion, and I've been in love with it ever since. Fashion can communicate our differences to the world for us. And with this simple act of truth, I realized that these differences — they stopped being our shame. They became our expressions, expressions of our very unique identities. And we should express ourselves, wear what we want. What's the worst that could happen? The fashion police are going to get you for being so last season? (Laughter) Yeah. Well, unless the fashion police meant something entirely different. Nobel Prize laureate Malala survived Taliban extremists in October 2012. However, in October 2017, she faced a different enemy, when online trolls viciously attacked the photograph that showed the 20-year-old wearing jeans that day. The comments, the hatred she received, ranged from "How long before the scarf comes off?" to, and I quote, "That's the reason the bullet directly targeted her head a long time ago." Now, when most of us decide to wear a pair of jeans someplace like New York, London, Milan, Paris, we possibly don't stop to think that it's a privilege; something that somewhere else can have consequences, something that can one day be taken away from us. My grandmother was a woman who took extraordinary pleasure in dressing up. Her fashion was colorful. And the color she loved to wear so much was possibly the only thing that was truly about her, the one thing she had agency over, because like most other women of her generation in India, she'd never been allowed to exist beyond what was dictated by custom and tradition. She'd been married at 17, and after 65 years of marriage, when my grandfather died suddenly one day, her loss was unbearable. But that day, she was going to lose something else as well, the one joy she had: to wear color. In India, according to custom, when a Hindu woman becomes a widow, all she's allowed to wear is white from the day of the death of her husband. No one made my grandmother wear white. However, every woman she'd known who had outlived her husband, including her mother, had done it. This oppression was so internalized, so deep-rooted, that she herself refused a choice. She passed away this year, and until the day she died, she continued to wear only white. I have a photograph with her from earlier, happier times. In it, you can't really see what she's wearing — the photo is in black and white. However, from the way she's smiling in it, you just know she's wearing color. This is also what fashion can do. It has the power to fill us with joy, the joy of freedom to choose for ourselves how we want to look, how we want to live — a freedom worth fighting for. And fighting for freedom, protest, comes in many forms. Widows in India like my grandmother, thousands of them, live in a city called Vrindavan. And so, it's been a sea of white for centuries. However, only as recently as 2013, the widows of Vrindavan have started to celebrate Holi, the Indian festival of color, which they are prohibited from participating in. On this one day in March, these women take the traditional colored powder of the festival and color each other. With every handful of the powder they throw into the air, their white saris slowly start to suffuse with color. And they don't stop until they're completely covered in every hue of the rainbow that's forbidden to them. The color washes off the next day, however, for that moment in time, it's their beautiful disruption. This disruption, any kind of dissonance, can be the first gauntlet we throw down in a battle against oppression. And fashion — it can create visual disruption for us — on us, literally. Lessons of defiance have always been taught by fashion's great revolutionaries: its designers. Jean Paul Gaultier taught us that women can be kings. Thom Browne — he taught us that men can wear heels. And Alexander McQueen, in his spring 1999 show, had two giant robotic arms in the middle of his runway. And as the model, Shalom Harlow began to spin in between them, these two giant arms — furtively at first and then furiously, began to spray color onto her. McQueen, thus, before he took his own life, taught us that this body of ours is a canvas, a canvas we get to paint however we want. Somebody who loved this world of fashion was Karar Nushi. He was a student and actor from Iraq. He loved his vibrant, eclectic clothes. However, he soon started receiving death threats for how he looked. He remained unfazed. He remained fabulous, until July 2017, when Karar was discovered dead on a busy street in Baghdad. He'd been kidnapped. He'd been tortured. And eyewitnesses say that his body showed multiple wounds. Stab wounds. Two thousand miles away in Peshawar, Pakistani transgender activist Alisha was shot multiple times in May 2016. She was taken to the hospital, but because she dressed in women's clothing, she was refused access to either the men's or the women's wards. What we choose to wear can sometimes be literally life and death. And even in death, we sometimes don't get to choose. Alisha died that day and then was buried as a man. What kind of world is this? Well, it's one in which it's natural to be afraid, to be frightened of this surveillance, this violence against our bodies and what we wear on them. However, the greater fear is that once we surrender, blend in and begin to disappear one after the other, the more normal this false conformity will look, the less shocking this oppression will feel. For the children we are raising, the injustice of today could become the ordinary of tomorrow. They'll get used to this, and they, too, might begin to see anything different as dirty, something to be hated, something to be extinguished, like lights to be put out, one by one, until darkness becomes a way of life. However, if I today, then you tomorrow, maybe even more of us someday, if we embrace our right to look like ourselves, then in the world that's been violently whitewashed, we will become the pinpricks of color pushing through, much like those widows of Vrindavan. How then, with so many of us, will the crosshairs of a gun be able to pick out Karar, Malala, Alisha? Can they kill us all? The time is now to stand up, to stand out. Where sameness is safeness, with something as simple as what we wear, we can draw every eye to ourselves to say that there are differences in this world, and there always will be. Get used to it. And this we can say without a single word. Fashion can give us a language for dissent. It can give us courage. Fashion can let us literally wear our courage on our sleeves. So wear it. Wear it like armor. Wear it because it matters. And wear it because you matter. Thank you. (Applause) |
The wonderful world of life in a drop of water | {0: "A theoretical physicist by training, IBM's Simone Bianco believes that the 21st century will be the century when the synergy between AI and biology will be fully realized.", 1: 'Tom Zimmerman is a master inventor at IBM Research – Almaden exploring the frontiers of human-machine interaction and environmental sensing.'} | TED@IBM | Tom Zimmerman: We'd like to take you on a fantastic journey to visit the creatures we call the Elders. We call them the Elders because a half a billion years ago they tripled the amount of oxygen in the air, which led to an explosion of life, which led to all of us. We call them the Elders, but you probably know them as plankton. (Laughter) Now, Simone is a physicist, and I'm an inventor. A couple of years ago, I was giving a talk about an invention I made — it was a 3D microscope. And Simone was in the audience. He realized that my microscope could solve a big problem he was having. Which was, how to measure the movement of plankton in 3D fast enough so he could mathematically model their sensing and behavior. And I frankly needed an application for my microscope, so ... (Laughter) It was like peanut butter meets chocolate. (Laughter) So we started working together, studying these amazing creatures. And then we were alarmed to discover something. And that's why we're here today. And I just want to do something with you. Now, please, just hold your breath for a second. Yes, literally hold your breath. This is the world without plankton. You see, plankton generate two-thirds of our oxygen using the sun. OK, now you can breathe, because they're still here. For now. Simone Bianco: As many of you know, since 1950, the average surface temperature of the earth has increased by one degree Centigrade due to all the carbon dioxide we are pumping into the air. Now, while this temperature increase may not seem like a big deal to us, it is to plankton. Indirect measurements have shown that the global phytoplankton population may have decreased by as much as 40 percent between 1950 and 2010 because of climate change. And you see, this is a problem also because it's starving the fish that eat them. And about a billion people around the world depend on fish as their primary source of protein from animals. So you see, this isn't just about breathing. No plankton means no fish. And that is a lot of food we will need to replace. There's something else that is interesting. The bodies of plankton's ancestors actually make up a for lot of the carbon we burn today. Which is kind of ironic, if you ask me. Because the plankton that are here today clean that carbon out of the air. But you see, they don't really hold a grudge. (Laughter) The problem is they cannot keep up with the tremendous amount of carbon we are dumping into the air. So what does all of this mean? Well, it means that our big carbon footprint is crushing the very creatures that sustain us. And yes, like Tom said, killing almost half of the creatures that allow us to breathe is a really big deal. So you're probably asking yourself: Why aren't we doing something about it? Our theory is that plankton are tiny, and it's really, really hard to care about something you cannot see. You see, there's a quote I really like in "The Little Prince" that goes, "What is essential is invisible to the eye." We really believe that if more people could come face to ... cilia with plankton, there is a greater chance we could all rally together and save these creatures that are so important to life on our planet. TZ: Exactly, Simone. So to do this, we're going to bring you scuba diving with plankton. But I just need to shrink you by a factor of 1000, to a scale where the diameter of a human hair is as big as my hand. And I happen to have invented a machine to do just that. SB: Anyone here remember "Fantastic Voyage" or "Innerspace?" Yeah, yeah. Martin Short is one of my all-time favorite actors. And now this — this is just like that. TZ: Indeed, yes. When I was a boy, I saw "Fantastic Voyage," and I really loved how I could travel through the bloodstream and see biology work on a cellular level. I've always been inspired by science fiction. As an inventor, I try and turn fantasy into reality. And I once invented this glove which let me travel and help people like you explore the virtual world. So now I've invented this machine to let us explore the microscopic world. It's not virtual, it's real. Just really, really tiny. It's based on the microscope that got Simone's attention. So, here's how it works. I have an image sensor like the kind in your cell phone, behind the lens. And then I have a little tray of plankton water like you might find from a river or my fish tank, which I never change the water on. (Laughter) Because I love plankton. (Laughter) And underneath I have a light, an LED, which is going to cast shadows of the plankton on the image sensor. And now this silver thing is an XY plotter, so I can move the image sensor to follow the plankton as they swim. Now comes the fantasy part. (Laughter) I put a tilt sensor on this helmet so I can control the microscope with my head. And now let's look at the video from this image sensor. These are all plankton. This is in that little tray, and with my head, I can move the microscope. So now we're ready to go scuba diving with plankton. My head will be the navigator, and Simone will be our tour guide. SB: Yes. (Laughter) So welcome all to the wonderful world of life in a drop of water. Actually, as you can see, with this instrument, we are not at all limited to a single drop. Alright, let's find something. The little creatures you see in the center of your screen, they are called rotifer. They are the garbage collectors of our waters. They break down organic matter and allow it to be reclaimed by the environment. Now, you know, nature is an amazing recycler. Structures are continuously built, they are decomposed and recycled, and all of that is powered by solar energy. But just think. Think about what will happen if, you know, our garbage collectors didn't come anymore, if they disappeared. Something else? Let's look for something else. Oh, look at that. You see the big ice-cream-cone-shaped things? Those are called Stentor, those are amazing creatures. You know, they are big, but they are a single cell. You remember the rotifer we just met? That's about half a millimeter, it's about 1,000 cells — it's typically 15 for the brain, 15 for the stomach and you know, about the same for reproduction, which is kind of the right mix, if you ask me. (Laughter) But ... right? TZ: I agree. SB: But a Stentor is only a single cell. And it's able to sense and react to its environment. You see, it will swim forward when it's happy; it will swim backward when it's trying to get away from something like, you know, a toxic chemical. With our friends in the Center for Cellular Construction and the help of the National Science Foundation, we are using Stentor to sense the presence of contamination in food and water, which I think is really cool. Alright, last one. So the dots that you see there that are, let's say, behind everything, they're algae. They are the creatures that provide the majority of oxygen in the air. They convert solar light and carbon dioxide into the oxygen that is filling your lungs right now. So you see, we all got algae breath. TZ: (Exhales) SB: Yay! (Laughter) You know, there's something interesting. About a billion years ago, ancient plants got their photosynthesis capability by incorporating tiny, tiny plankton into their cells. That's exactly like us putting solar panels on top of our roofs. So you see, the microscopic world is even more amazing than science fiction. TZ: Oh, indeed. So now you've seen how vital plankton are to our lives and how much we need them. If we kill the plankton, we will die of asphyxiation or starvation, take your pick. Oh, yes, I know it's sad, yes. (Laughter) In the game of plankton, you win or you die. (Laughter) Now, what amazes me is, we have known about global warming for over a century. Ever since the Swedish scientist, Arrhenius, calculated the effect of burning fossil fuel on the earth's temperature. We've known about this for a long time, but it's not too late if we act now. Yes, yes, I know, I know, our world is based on fossil fuels, but we can adjust our society to run on renewable energy from the Sun to create a more sustainable and secure future. That's good for the little creatures here, the plankton, and that good for us — here's why. The three greatest concerns of people all around the globe typically are jobs, violence and health. A job means food and shelter. Look at these creatures, they're swimming around, they're looking for a place to eat and reproduce. If a single cell is programmed to do that, it's no surprise that 30 trillion cells have the same agenda. Violence. Dependence on fossil fuels makes a country vulnerable. Which leads to conflicts all around the oil resources. Solar energy, on the other hand, is distributed around the whole globe, and no one can blockade the sun. (Laughter) And then, finally, health. Fossil fuels are like a global cigarette. And in my opinion, coal is like an unfiltered type. Now, just like smoking, the best time to quit is when? Audience: Now. TZ: Now! Not when you get lung cancer. Now I know if you look around, some people may abandon facts and reason. Only until suffering — (Laughter) Yes, they will abandon facts and reason. But suffering will eventually and inevitably force change. But let's instead use our neocortex, our new brain, to save the Elders, some of the oldest creatures on the earth. And let's apply science to harness the energy that has fueled the Elders for millions of years — the sun. Thank you. (Applause) |
How shocking events can spark positive change | {0: 'Naomi Klein is a public intellectual, journalist and activist.'} | TEDGlobal>NYC | There's a question I've been puzzling over and writing about for pretty much all of my adult life. Why do some large-scale crises jolt us awake and inspire us to change and evolve while others might jolt us a bit, but then it's back to sleep? Now, the kind of shocks I'm talking about are big — a cataclysmic market crash, rising fascism, an industrial accident that poisons on a massive scale. Now, events like this can act like a collective alarm bell. Suddenly, we see a threat, we get organized. We discover strength and resolve that was previously unimaginable. It's as if we're no longer walking, but leaping. Except, our collective alarm seems to be busted. Faced with a crisis, we often fall apart, regress and that becomes a window for antidemocratic forces to push societies backwards, to become more unequal and more unstable. Ten years ago, I wrote about this backwards process and I called it the "Shock Doctrine." So what determines which road we navigate through crisis? Whether we grow up fast and find those strengths or whether we get knocked back. And I'd say this is a pressing question these days. Because things are pretty shocking out there. Record-breaking storms, drowning cities, record-breaking fires threatening to devour them, thousands of migrants disappearing beneath the waves. And openly supremacist movements rising, in many of our countries there are torches in the streets. And now there's no shortage of people who are sounding the alarm. But as a society, I don't think we can honestly say that we're responding with anything like the urgency that these overlapping crises demand from us. And yet, we know from history that it is possible for crisis to catalyze a kind of evolutionary leap. And one of the most striking examples of this progressive power of crisis is the Great Crash of 1929. There was the shock of the sudden market collapse followed by all of the aftershocks, the millions who lost everything thrown onto breadlines. And this was taken by many as a message that the system itself was broken. And many people listened and they leapt into action. In the United States and elsewhere, governments began to weave a safety net so that the next time there was a crash there would be programs like social security to catch people. There were huge job-creating public investments in housing, electrification and transit. And there was a wave of aggressive regulation to reign in the banks. Now, these reforms were far from perfect. In the US, African American workers, immigrants and women were largely excluded. But the Depression period, along with the transformation of allied nations and economies during the World War II effort, show us that it is possible for complex societies to rapidly transform themselves in the face of a collective threat. Now, when we tell this story of the 1929 Crash, that's usually the formula that it follows — that there was a shock and it induced a wake-up call and that produced a leap to a safer place. Now, if that's really what it took, then why isn't it working anymore? Why do today's non-stop shocks — why don't they spur us into action? Why don't they produce leaps? Especially when it comes to climate change. So I want to talk to you today about what I think is a much more complete recipe for deep transformation catalyzed by shocking events. And I'm going to focus on two key ingredients that usually get left out of the history books. One has to do with imagination, the other with organization. Because it's in the interplay between the two where revolutionary power lies. So let's start with imagination. The victories of the New Deal didn't happen just because suddenly everybody understood the brutalities of laissez-faire. This was a time, let's remember, of tremendous ideological ferment, when many different ideas about how to organize societies did battle with one another in the public square. A time when humanity dared to dream big about different kinds of futures, many of them organized along radically egalitarian lines. Now, not all of these ideas were good but this was an era of explosive imagining. This meant that the movements demanding change knew what they were against — crushing poverty, widening inequality — but just as important, they knew what they were for. They had their "no" and they had their "yes," too. They also had very different models of political organization than we do today. For decades, social and labor movements had been building up their membership bases, linking their causes together and increasing their strength. Which meant that by the time the Crash happened, there was already a movement that was large and broad enough to, for instance, stage strikes that didn't just shut down factories, but shut down entire cities. The big policy wins of the New Deal were actually offered as compromises. Because the alternative seemed to be revolution. So, let's adjust that equation from earlier. A shocking event plus utopian imagination plus movement muscle, that's how we get a real leap. So how does our present moment measure up? We are living, once again, at a time of extraordinary political engagements. Politics is a mass obsession. Progressive movements are growing and resisting with tremendous courage. And yet, we know from history that "no" is not enough. Now, there are some "yeses" out there that are emerging. And they're actually getting a lot bolder quickly. Where climate activists used to talk about changing light bulbs, now we're pushing for 100 percent of our energy to come from the sun, wind and waves, and to do it fast. Movements catalyzed by police violence against black bodies are calling for an end to militarized police, mass incarceration and even for reparations for slavery. Students are not just opposing tuition increases, but from Chile to Canada to the UK, they are calling for free tuition and debt cancellation. And yet, this still doesn't add up to the kind of holistic and universalist vision of a different world than our predecessors had. So why is that? Well, very often we think about political change in defined compartments these days. Environment in one box, inequality in another, racial and gender justice in a couple of other boxes, education over here, health over there. And within each compartment, there are thousands upon thousands of different groups and NGOs, each competing with one another for credit, name recognition and of course, resources. In other words, we act a lot like corporate brands. Now, this is often referred to as the problem of silos. Now, silos are understandable. They carve up our complex world into manageable chunks. They help us feel less overwhelmed. But in the process, they also train our brains to tune out when somebody else's issue comes up and when somebody else's issue needs our help and support. And they also keep us from seeing glaring connections between our issues. So for instance, the people fighting poverty and inequality rarely talk about climate change. Even though we see time and again that it's the poorest of people who are the most vulnerable to extreme weather. The climate change people rarely talk about war and occupation. Even though we know that the thirst for fossil fuels has been a major driver of conflict. The environmental movement has gotten better at pointing out that the nations that are getting hit hardest by climate change are populated overwhelmingly by black and brown people. But when black lives are treated as disposable in prisons, in schools and on the streets, these connections are too rarely made. The walls between our silos also means that our solutions, when they emerge, are also disconnected from each other. So progressives now have this long list of demands that I was mentioning earlier, those "yeses." But what we're still missing is that coherent picture of the world we're fighting for. What it looks like, what it feels like, and most of all, what its core values are. And that really matters. Because when large-scale crises hit us and we are confronted with the need to leap somewhere safer, there isn't any agreement on what that place is. And leaping without a destination looks a lot like jumping up and down. (Laughter) Fortunately, there are all kinds of conversations and experiments going on to try to overcome these divisions that are holding us back. And I want to finish by talking about one of them. A couple of years ago, a group of us in Canada decided that we were hitting the limits of what we could accomplish in our various silos. So we locked ourselves in a room for two days, and we tried to figure out what bound us together. In that room were people who rarely get face to face. There were indigenous elders with hipsters working on transit. There was the head of Greenpeace with a union leader representing oil workers and loggers. There were faith leaders and feminist icons and many more. And we gave ourselves a pretty ambitious assignment: agreeing on a short statement describing the world after we win. The world after we've already made the transition to a clean economy and a much fairer society. In other words, instead of trying to scare people about what will happen if we don't act, we decided to try to inspire them with what could happen if we did act. Sensible people are always telling us that change needs to come in small increments. That politics is the art of the possible and that we can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Well, we rejected all of that. We wrote a manifesto, and we called it "The Leap." I have to tell you that agreeing on our common "yes" across such diversity of experiences and against a backdrop of a lot of painful history was not easy work. But it was also pretty thrilling. Because as soon as we gave ourselves permission to dream, those threads connecting much of our work became self-evident. We realized, for instance, that the bottomless quest for profits that is forcing so many people to work more than 50 hours a week, without security, and that is fueling this epidemic of despair is the same quest for bottomless profits and endless growth that is at the heart of our ecological crisis and is destabilizing our planet. It also became clear what we need to do. We need to create a culture of care-taking. In which no one and nowhere is thrown away. In which the inherent value of all people and every ecosystem is foundational. So we came up with this people's platform, and don't worry, I'm not going to read the whole thing to you out loud — if you're interested, you can read it at theleap.org. But I will give you a taste of what we came up with. So we call for that 100 percent renewable economy in a hurry, but we went further. Calls for new kinds of trade deals, a robust debate on a guaranteed annual income, full rights for immigrant workers, getting corporate money out of politics, free universal day care, electoral reform and more. What we discovered is that a great many of us are looking for permission to act less like brands and more like movements. Because movements don't care about credit. They want good ideas to spread far and wide. What I love about The Leap is that it rejects the idea that there is this hierarchy of crisis, and it doesn't ask anyone to prioritize one struggle over another or wait their turn. And though it was birthed in Canada, we've discovered that it travels well. Since we launched, The Leap has been picked up around the world with similar platforms, being written from Nunavut to Australia, to Norway to the UK and the US, where it's gaining a lot of traction in cities like Los Angeles, where it's being localized. And also in rural communities that are traditionally very conservative, but where politics is failing the vast majority of people. Here's what I've learned from studying shocks and disasters for two decades. Crises test us. We either fall apart or we grow up fast. Finding new reserves of strength and capacity that we never knew we had. The shocking events that fill us with dread today can transform us, and they can transform the world for the better. But first we need to picture the world that we're fighting for. And we have to dream it up together. Right now, every alarm in our house is going off simultaneously. It's time to listen. It's time to leap. Thank you. (Applause) |
To solve the world's biggest problems, invest in women and girls | {0: 'Dr. Musimbi Kanyoro is globally recognized for her leadership of organizations and initiatives that advance health, development, human rights and philanthropy for communities, specifically for women and girls.'} | TEDWomen 2017 | My mother was a philanthropist. And now I know you're asking — let me give you the answer: yes, a little bit like Melinda Gates — (Laughter) but with a lot less money. (Laughter) She carried out her philanthropy in our community through a practice we call, "isirika." She supported the education of scores of children and invited many to live with us in our home in order to access schools. She mobilized resources for building the local health clinic and the maternity wing is named in memory of her. But most important, she was endeared by the community for her organizing skills, because she organized the community, and specifically women, to find solutions to anything that was needed. She did all of this through isirika. Let me repeat that word for you again: isirika. Now it's your turn. Say it with me. (Audience) Isirika. Musimbi Kanyoro: Thank you. That word is in my language, Maragoli, spoken in western Kenya, and now you speak my language. (Laughter) So, isirika is a pragmatic way of life that embraces charity, services and philanthropy all together. The essence of isirika is to make it clear to everybody that you're your sister's keeper — and yes, you're your brother's keeper. Mutual responsibility for caring for one another. A literal, simple English translation would be equal generosity, but the deep philosophical meaning is caring, together, for one another. So how does isirika really happen? I grew up in a farming community in western Kenya. I remember vividly the many times that neighbors would go to a neighbor's home — a sick neighbor's home — and harvest their crop for them. I tagged alongside with my mother to community events and to women's events, and had the conversation about vaccinations in school, building the health center and really big things — renewing seeds for the next planting season. And often, the community would come together to contribute money to send a neighbor's child to school — not only in the country but to universities abroad as well. And so we have a surgeon. The first surgeon in my country came from that rural village. (Applause) So ... what isirika did was to be inclusive. We as children would stand alongside the adults and give our contributions of money, and our names were inscripted in the community book just like every adult. And then I grew up, went to universities back at home and abroad, obtained a few degrees here and there, became organized and took up international jobs, working in development, humanitarian work and philanthropy. And very soon, isirika began to become small. It dissipated and then just disappeared. In each place, I gained a new vocabulary. The vocabulary of donors and recipients. The vocabulary of measuring impact, return on investment ... projects and programs. Communities such as my childhood community became referred to as "poor, vulnerable populations." Those are the communities of which literature speaks about as living on less than a dollar a day, and they become the targets for poverty eradication programs. And by the way, they are the targets of our first United Nations' sustainable development goal. Now, I'm really interested that we find solutions to poverty and to the world's other many big problems because they do exist. I however think that we could do a better job, and we could do a better job by embracing isirika. So let me tell you how. First, isirika affirms common humanity. For whatever that you do, you begin from the premise that you're human together. When you begin that you're human together, you see each other differently. You don't see a refugee first and you don't see a woman first and you don't see a person with disability first. You see a human being first. That is the essence of seeing a person first. And when you do that, you value their ideas, you value their contribution — small or big. And you value what they bring to the table. That is the essence of isirika. I just want to imagine what it would look like if everyone in this room — a medical doctor, a parent, a lawyer, a philanthropist, whatever you are — if you embraced isirika and made it your default. What could we achieve for each other? What could we achieve for humanity? What could we achieve for peace issues? What could we achieve for medical science? Let me give you a couple of hints, because I'm going to ask you to accompany me in this process of rebuilding and reclaiming isirika with me. First, you have to have faith that we are one humanity, we have one planet and we don't have two choices about that. So there's not going to be a wall that is high enough to separate humanity. So give up the walls. Give them up. (Applause) And we don't have a planet B to go to. So that's really important. Make that clear; move onto the next stage. The second stage: remember, in isirika, every idea counts. Bridges have big posters and they have nails. Every idea counts — small or big counts. And third, isirika affirms that those who have more really enjoy the privilege of giving more. It is a privilege to give more. (Applause) And this is the time for women to give more for women. It is the time to give more for women. Our parents, when they brought in other children to live with us, they didn't ask our permission. They made it clear that they had a responsibility because they had gone to school and they had an earning. And they made it clear that we should understand that their prosperity was not our entitlement, and I think that's good wisdom from isirika. We could use that wisdom today, I think, in every culture, in every place, passing to the next generation what we could do together. I have, over the years, encountered isirika in many places, but what gives me really the passion today to embrace isirika is the work that I do with women all over the world through the Global Fund for Women, though women's funds and through women's movements globally. If you work with women, you change every day because you experience them living isirika together in what they do. In the work that I do, we trust women leaders and their ideas. And we support them with funding so that they can expand, they can grow and they can thrive within their own communities. A woman in 1990 came to the Global Fund with a big idea — a woman from Mexico by the name of Lucero González. She wanted to begin a fund that would support a movement that would be rooted in the communities in Mexico. And she received a grant of 7,500 US dollars. Today, 25 years later, Semillas, the name of the fund, has raised and spent, within the community, 17.8 million dollars. (Applause) They have impacted over two million people, and they work with a group of 600,000 women in Mexico. During the recent earthquake, they were so well rooted that they could quickly assess within the community and with others, what were the short-term needs and what were the long-term needs. And I tell you, long after the lights have gone off Mexico, Semillas will be there with the communities, with the women, for a very long time. And that's what I'm talking about: when we are able to support the ideas of communities that are rooted within their own setting. Thirty years ago, there was very little funding that went directly to women's hands in their communities. Today we celebrate 168 women's funds all over the world, 100 of which are in this country. And they support — (Applause) they support grassroots women's organizations — community organizations under the leadership of girls and women, and together we have been able, collectively, to give a billion dollars to women and girls-led organizations. (Applause) But the challenge begins today. The challenge begins today because we see women everywhere organizing as isirika, including women organizing as isirika in TED. Because isirika is the evergreen wisdom that lives in communities. You find it in indigenous communities, in rural communities. And what it really ingrains in people is that ability to trust and to move the agenda ahead. So, three things that I have learned that I want to share with you through my work. One: if you want to solve the world's biggest problems, invest in women and girls. (Applause) Not only do they expand the investment, but they care for everyone in the community. Not only their needs but the needs of their children, the needs of the rest of the community, the needs of the elderly, and most important, they protect themselves — which is really important — and they protect their communities. Women who know how to protect themselves know what it means to make a difference. And the second reason that I'm asking you to invest in women and girls is because this is the smartest thing you could ever do at this particular time. And if we are going to have over 350 trillion dollars by 2030, those dollars need to be in the hands of women. And so I grew up with isirika. My mother was isirika. She was not a project or a program. And now, I pass that to you. That you will be able to share this with your families, with your friends and with your community, and embrace isirika as a way of living — as a pragmatic way of living. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
The best way to help is often just to listen | {0: 'Sophie Andrews is the CEO of The Silver Line, a 24-hour phone line that provides social connectivity for isolated senior citizens in the UK and receives approximately 1,500 calls per day. '} | TEDMED 2017 | After cutting her arm with a broken glass, she fell into a fitful, exhausted sleep on the railway station platform. Early in the morning, when the station toilets were opened, she got painfully to her feet, and made her way over to them. When she saw her reflection in the mirror, she started to cry. Her face was dirty and tearstained; her shirt was ripped and covered in blood. She looked as if she'd been on the streets for three months, not three days. She washed herself as best she could. Her arms and stomach were hurting badly. She tried to clean the wounds, but any pressure she applied just started the bleeding again. She needed stitches, but there was no way she would go to a hospital. They'd have sent her back home again. Back to him. She tightened her jacket — well, fastened her jacket tightly to cover the blood. She looked back at herself in the mirror. She looked a little better than before but was past caring. There was only one thing she could think of doing. She came out of the station and into a phone box nearby. (Telephone rings) (Telephone rings) Woman: Samaritans, can I help you? Hello, Samaritans. Can I help you? Girl: (Crying) I — I don't know. Woman: What's happened? You sound very upset. (Girl cries) Woman: Why not start with your name? I'm Pam. What can I call you? Where are you speaking from? Are you safe? Girl: It's a phone box in London. Pam: You sound very young. How old are you? Girl: Fourteen. Pam: And what's happened to make you so upset? Girl: I just want to die. Every day I wake up and wish I was dead. If he doesn't kill me, then, I think, I want to do it myself. Pam: I'm glad you called. Let's start at the beginning. Sophie Andrews: Pam continued to gently ask the girl about herself. She didn't say much; there were lots of silences. But she knew she was there, and having Pam on the end of the phone felt so comforting. The 14-year-old that made that call was me. That was me in the phone box. I was running away from home, sleeping rough on the streets in London. I was being sexually abused by my father and his friends. I was self-harming every day. I was suicidal. The first time I called Samaritans, I was 12 and absolutely desperate. It was a few months after my mother had deserted me, walked out and left me in the family home. And the abuse I was suffering at the hands of my father and his friends had left me a total wreck. I was running away, I was missing school, I was arriving drunk. I was without hope and wanted to die. And that's where Samaritans came in. Samaritans has been around since 1953. It's a 24/7 confidential helpline in the UK for anyone who might be feeling desperate or suicidal. Which I certainly was. Volunteers answer the phone around the clock every day of the year, and calls are confidential. During my teenage years, when I was most desperate, Samaritans became my lifeline. They promised me total confidentiality. And that allowed me to trust them. Disturbing as they no doubt found my story, they never showed it. They were always there for me and listened without judgment. Mostly, they gently encouraged me to get help; I never felt out of control with them — an interesting parallel, as I felt so out of control in every other aspect of my life. It felt my self-harm was probably the only area where I felt I had any control. A few years later, I managed to get some control in my life. And I had appropriate support around me to allow me to live with what had happened. I had become a survivor of abuse rather than a victim. And at 21, I contacted Samaritans again. This time because I wanted to become a volunteer. Wanted to pay something back to the organization that had really saved my life. I knew that the simple act of listening in an empathetic way could have a profound effect. I knew that somebody listening to me without judgment would make the biggest difference. So I caught up with my education, found someone I could persuade to give me a job, and I enjoyed my volunteering at Samaritans. And when I say "enjoyed," it's an odd word to use, because no one would want to think of anyone being in absolute distress or pain. But I knew that that profound impact of that listening ear and someone being alongside me at that desperate time had the biggest impact, and I felt a great sense of fulfillment that I was able to help people as a Samaritan. In my years volunteering at Samaritans, I was asked to perform many roles. But I guess the peak came in 2008, when I was asked to chair the organization for three years. So I had actually gone from that vulnerable caller in the phone box, desperate for help, to being the national lead for the organization and responsible for 22,000 volunteers. I actually used to joke at the time and say if you really screwed up as a caller, you might end up running the place. (Laughter) Which I did. But I guess in a world which is dominated by professionalizing everything we do, I really understood that that simple act of listening could have such a life-changing effect. I guess it's a simple concept that can be applied across all areas of life. So in the 1980s, when I called Samaritans, child abuse was a subject no one wanted to talk about. Victims were often blamed, victims were often judged. And it was a topic of shame, and no one really wanted to talk about it. Today, judgment and shame surround a different issue. There's a different stigma that's out there. And the stigma that's there today is to talk about loneliness. Loneliness and isolation have profound health impacts. Being lonely can have a significant impact on your own well-being. Recent systematic review of research actually said that it increased the mortality rates, or premature death rates, by up to 30 percent. It can lead to higher blood pressure, higher levels of depression, and actually aligned to mortality rates that might be more associated with alcohol abuse or smoking cigarettes. Loneliness is actually more harmful that smoking 15 cigarettes. A day. Not in your life, in your day. It's also associated with higher levels of dementia. So a recent study also found that lonely people are twice at risk of Alzheimer's disease. Of course, there's many people that live alone who are not lonely. But being a caregiver for a partner that maybe has dementia can be a very lonely place. And a recent landmark study gave us a very good, clear definition of what loneliness is. And it said it's a subjective, unwelcome feeling of a lack or loss of companionship. And it happens when there's a mismatch between the quality and the quantity of relationships that we have and those that we want. Now in my life, the best help I've ever received has been from those personal connections and being listened to in an empathetic way. Professionals, and I'm conscious I'm speaking to a room of professionals, have a very important place. But for me, a volunteer giving up their time and listening to me without judgment in a confidential way, had such a huge, life-changing effect for me. And that was something that really stayed with me. So as you will have gathered, in my teenage years, I was off the rails, I was going every day wondering if I'd even live the next day. But that profound impact of the volunteer listening to me stayed with me. When I finally got to a point in my life where I felt I could live with what had happened, I wanted to pay something back. And in my experience, people who have been helped in a transforming way always want to pay something back. So I started paying back by my 25 years volunteering with Samaritans. And then, in 2013, picking up on that whole issue and the new stigma of loneliness, I launched a new national helpline in the UK for older people, called The Silver Line, which is there to support lonely and isolated older people. In our short history, we've taken 1.5 million calls. And I know we're having a big impact, based on the feedback we get every day. Some people might be calling up for a friendly chat, maybe some information about local services. Some might be calling because they're suicidal. Some might be calling up because they're reporting abuse. And some quite simply, as I was, may have simply just given up on life. I guess it's a really simple idea, setting up a helpline. And I look back to those early days when I had the lofty title, I still have, of chief exec, but in the early days, I was chief exec of myself. Which, I have to say, I had the best meetings ever in my career — (Laughter) as chief exec of myself. But things have moved on, and now in 2017, we have over 200 staff listening to older people every day of the year, 24/7. We also have over 3,000 volunteers making weekly friendship calls from their own home. We also, for people that like the written word, offer Silver Letters, and we write pen-pal letters to older people who still enjoy receiving a letter. And we also have introduced something called Silver Circles — you notice I'm owning the word "silver" here — put "silver" in front of it and it's ours. Silver Circles are group conference calls where people actually talk about shared interests. My favorite group is the music group, where people, every week, play musical instruments down the phone to each other. Not always the same tune at the same time. (Laughter) But they do have fun. And "fun" is an interesting word, because I've talked very much about desperation, loneliness and isolation. But if you came to our helpline in the UK, you would also hear laughter. Because at the Silver Line, we do want to cherish the wonderful lives of older people and all the experiences that they bring. So here's an example, just a snippet of one of our calls. (Audio) Good morning, you're through to the Silver Line. My name's Alan, how can I help? Woman: Hello, Alan. Good morning. Alan: Hello. Woman: (Chipper) Hello! Alan: Oh, how are you this morning? Woman: I'm alright, thank you. Alan: I'm pleased to hear it. Woman: What a wonderful thing the telephone is, you know? Alan: It's a remarkable invention, isn't it? Woman: I remember when I was a little girl, donkey's years ago, if you wanted to make a phone call to somebody, you had to go to a shop and use the telephone of the shop and pay the shop for using the telephone and have your phone call. So you didn't make phone calls just whenever you fancied. Alan: Oh, no. Woman: (Coughs) Oh, sorry. (Coughs) Excuse me about that. You had to, you know, confine your phone calls to the absolute essentials. And now, here I am, sitting in my own home in my dressing gown still, and using the telephone, isn't it wonderful? Alan: It is. (Laughter) SA: And that's not untypical of a call we might receive at our helpline. That's someone who really sees us as part of the family. So Silver Line, I guess, are now helping older people in the same way that Samaritans has helped me. They're there 24/7, they're listening confidentially and quite often not giving any advice. How often do we really ever listen without giving advice? It's actually quite hard. Quite often on the phone calls, an older person would say, "Could you give me some advice, please?" And 20 minutes later, they say, "Thank you for your advice," and we realize we haven't given any. (Laughter) We've listened and listened, and we haven't interrupted. But to that person, maybe we have given advice. We recently conducted a survey at The Silver Line to 3,000 older people, to ask them what they thought of the service. And one person quite simply came back and said, for the first time in her life, she had what we would call in the sport cricket a wicketkeeper, and what you would call in baseball, a catcher. I've been here 48 hours, and I'm talking American. They will not recognize me when I get home. (Laughter) But for the first time in her life, she had that catcher, which is really, really important. And now it's come full circle, because actually, people that are calling Silver Line and needing a catcher are now becoming catchers themselves by putting something back and becoming volunteers and becoming part of our family. So I end my talk, really, where I started, talking about my own personal experience. Because when I talk about my life, I often say that I've been lucky. And people generally ask me why. And it's because, at every stage of my life, I have been lucky enough to have someone alongside me at the right time who maybe has believed in me, which in turn has helped me just to believe a little bit more in myself, which has been so important. And everyone needs a catcher at some point in their lives. This is my catcher. So that's Pam. And she answered the call to me when I was that 14-year-old in the phone box, over 30 years ago. So never, ever underestimate the power of a simple human connection. Because it can be and so often is the power to save a life. Thank you. (Applause) |
The radical beauty of Africa, in portraits | {0: 'The work of Nigerian-born Iké Udé explores a world of dualities: photographer/performance artist, artist/spectator, African/post-nationalist, mainstream/marginal, individual/everyman and fashion/art.'} | TEDGlobal 2017 | In 1996, I was commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum to execute a large body of work called "Uses of Evidence." It was a cube — a very well large cube, at that. Each side had a window in order for the spectators to view the interior of the structure. The exterior of the structure was a collage of Africa and Africans as portrayed in the Western media and literature. A look through the windows revealed a sharp contrast: within the cubes are tranquil, civilized, domestic images of African family members, friends and Nigerian professionals, ranging from writers, poets, fashion designers, etc. The thing is, both the exterior and the interior images are quite true. But the images captured by Western media overwhelmingly depict Africans as basically primitive at best, or barely distinguishable from the African animals. Not much has changed, I'm afraid, since 1996, when I executed this work. I began my professional photography practice in 1994, but my passion and enthusiasm for photography goes back to childhood, when my parents arranged for us to be photographed by a professional photographer on almost a monthly basis. It was also an opportunity for my siblings to dress up in our latest gear, made by our tailor. Later, when I was in boarding school, my friends and I bought Polaroid cameras, and then I began to experiment with self-portraiture, or what I would call "proto-selfie auto-portraits." (Laughter) "Cover Girl 1994" was my first major work that was critically well received in the US and Europe and quite instantly became a part of the school anthologies at universities and colleges. With the "Cover Girl" series, I wanted to reimagine the magazine cover with imagery totally unexpected, yet profoundly reasonable. The "Cover Girl" series proposed a different way the African can be represented in a more complex manner. Like "Cover Girl," the "Sartorial Anarchy" series is made up of self-portraits. It is an ongoing body of work, started in 2010. In each image, I married disparate costumes from widely diverse traditions, countries and time frames. And in mixing eras, cultures, I was able to bring harmony, as it were, to their similarly irreconcilable differences. These differences became a source of inspired artistic celebration. For example, in "Sartorial Anarchy #4," I mixed a boater hat, inspired by the traditional Eton-Oxford College Boat Race, with a green Afghan traditional coat and an American Boy Scout shirt — a culture clash that works. In "Sartorial Anarchy #5," I wore a macaroni wig, inspired by eighteenth-century macaroni headgear from England. This was paired with a British Norfolk jacket, Yoruba Nigerian trousers, and, improbably, a South African Zulu fighting stick. All harmoniously coexist on one body. And with "Sartorial Anarchy," I began to invest more into the organization of my pictures. I also began to investigate the vast possibilities of color: its emotional values, psychological impulse, poetic allure and a boundless capacity beyond the realm of meaning and logic. Now, enter Nollywood. In October of 2014, I returned to Lagos, Nigeria, after over three decades away and took photographs of 64 Nollywood personalities. I captured a cross section of the industry, as well as the next generation of rising stars. Nollywood is the first time that you have a school of African filmmakers truly, truly, profoundly in charge of telling African stories. In their varied movies — from romantic movies, horror films, gangster movies to action movies — one sees Nigerians portrayed with many layers of complexities. All the Nigerian, or "Naija," archetypes, if you allow, are there — from the divvers, the "Shakara," the coquette, the gangsters, the rich, the corrupt politicians, the whore, the pimp — all in their swagger. And of course, you have the lowlifes and the losers, too, all vividly portrayed. Nollywood is Africa's mirror par excellence. Typically, I direct all of my portraits, from the way my subject conducts his or her head, the way the neck is tilted, the expression of the fingers, the gestures of the hands, to the gaze and overall bearing and countenance. Let me describe some of the photographs for you. Genevieve Nnaji. She is the reigning queen of Nollywood. Here, I was quoting from the grand, Pharaonic African cultures of the Nile Valley civilizations; namely, Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia, so as to imbue her with a stately, ironic, calm grandeur. Taiwo Ajai-Lycett is the grande dame of Nollywood. Every aspect of her being commands attention. So I posed her with her back to the audience. Her face turned to meet us with a redoubtable gaze. She doesn't need to seek our approval. She's all that. Sadiq Daba. There was an unspoken authoritarian and imperial bearing that Sadiq Daba exudes upon meeting him. In this portrait, he simply sat and allowed his massive, massive Nigerian caftan to signal his status. Quite an accomplishment. Belinda Effah. Belinda Effah's portrait allowed me to indulge my passion for color, dressed in a long, fitted blue dress that emphasizes her curves, seated on an upholstered green velvet bench. I gamely employed the multicolored carpet and a vibrant color, in order to evoke the splendor of the multicolored painted bunting bird. Everything was designed to harmonize the figure of Belinda within the frame. Monalisa Chinda is, shall we say, the epitome of the luxe existence and lifestyle. Her picture, or portrait, pretty much speaks for itself. Alexx Ekubo is a sharp study in simplified elegance and dignity and a harmony in blue and white, as well. Enyinna Nwigwe is a Nollywood matinee idol. There is whiff of the rake about him, and that gives him an enchanting edge. That's what I felt when I designed and organized the portrait. Now, Nollywood is a new phase of Africa. It is modern, post-modern, meta-modern, bold sexy, shrewd and with a contagious attitude worth catching. As the finale of the project, I assembled the Nollywood stars into a group grand portrait of 64 subjects, called "The School of Nollywood," which was inspired by Rafael's "School of Athens," that was done circa 1509. It is at the Vatican. This grand group portrait is the exact same size as Rafael's "School of Athens." It measures roughly 27 feet in width by six and a half feet in height. Nollywood also exemplifies a type of modernity never before seen in Africa. Think of it: there has never been anything so ubiquitous with such iconic optics to come out of Africa since the Nile Valley civilizations of Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia. Outside of Nollywood, the image of Africa remains frozen in the old "National Geographic" mode and safari perspective. But as Africans continue to step and see themselves portrayed by Nollywood in their varied and fantastic complexities, they will, in turn, propagate and perpetuate the positive image of themselves. This is what Hollywood did and continues to do for the West. As shocking as this may be, it is almost a taboo in the art world to show Africans in a modern framework — that is to say, as polished, dry-cleaned, manicured, pedicured and coiffed. (Applause) Part of my job is to keep beautifying Africa for the world, one portrait at a time. Thank you. (Applause) |
What a world without prisons could look like | {0: 'Deanna Van Buren is an architect who designs spaces for peacemaking, inside and out.'} | TEDWomen 2017 | A lot of people call me a "justice architect." But I don't design prisons. I don't design jails. I don't design detention centers, and I don't even design courthouses. All the same, I get a call every week, saying, "OK, but you design better prisons, right? You know, like those pretty ones they're building in Europe." And I always pause. And I invite them, and I invite you today, to imagine a world without prisons. What does that justice feel and look like? What do we need to build to get there? I'd like to show you some ideas today of things that we're building. And I'm going to start with an early prototype. This I built when I was five. I call it "the healing hut." And I built it after I got sent home from school for punching this kid in the face because he called me the N-word. OK, he deserved it. It happened a lot, though, because my family had desegregated a white community in rural Virginia. And I was really scared. I was afraid. I was angry. And so I would run into the forest, and I would build these little huts. They were made out of twigs and leaves and blankets I had taken from my mom. And as the light would stream into my refuge, I would feel at peace. Despite my efforts to comfort myself, I still left my community as soon as I could, and I went to architecture school and then into a professional career designing shopping centers, homes for the wealthy and office buildings, until I stepped into a prison for the first time. It was the Chester State Correctional Institution in Pennsylvania. And my friend, she invited me there to work with some of her incarcerated students and teach them about the positive power of design. The irony is so obvious, right? As I approached this concrete building, these tiny little windows, barbed wire, high walls, observation towers, and on the inside, these cold, hard spaces, little light or air, the guards are screaming, the doors are clanking, there's a wall of cells filled with so many black and brown bodies. And I realized that what I was seeing was the end result of our racist policies that had caused mass incarceration. But as an architect, what I was seeing was how a prison is the worst building type we could have created to address the harm that we're doing to one another. I thought, "Well, could I design an alternative to this, other than building a prettier prison?" It didn't feel good to me; it still doesn't feel good. But back then, I just didn't know what to do. What do we build instead of this? And then I heard about restorative justice. I felt at peace again, because here was an alternative system that says when a crime is committed, it is a breach of relationship, that the needs of those who have been harmed must be addressed first; that those who have committed the offense have an obligation to make amends. And what they are are really intense dialogues, where all stakeholders come together to find a way to repair the breach. Early data shows that restorative justice builds empathy; that it reduces violent reoffending by up to 75 percent; that it eases PTSD in survivors of the most severe violence. And because of these reasons, we see prosecutors and judges and district attorneys starting to divert cases out of court and into restorative justice so that some people never touch the system altogether. And so I thought, "Well, damn — why aren't we designing for this system?" (Applause) Instead of building prisons, we should be building spaces to amplify restorative justice. And so I started in schools, because suspensions and expulsions have been fueling the pathway to prison for decades. And many school districts — probably some of your own — are turning to restorative justice as an alternative. So, my first project — I just turned this dirty little storage room into a peacemaking room for a program in a high school in my hometown of Oakland. And after we were done, the director said that the circles she was holding in this space were more powerful in bringing the community together after fighting at school and gun violence in the community, and that students and teachers started to come here just because they saw it as a space of refuge. So what was happening is that the space was amplifying the effects of the process. OK, then I did something that architects always do, y'all. I was like, I'm going to build something massive now, right? I'm going to build the world's first restorative justice center all by myself. And it's going to be a beautiful figure on the skyline, like a beacon in the night. Thousands of people will come here instead of going to court. I will single-handedly end mass incarceration and win lots of design awards. (Laughter) And then I checked myself — (Laughter) because here's the deal: we are incarcerating more of our citizens per capita than any country in the world. And the fastest-growing population there are black women. Ninety-five percent of all these folks are coming home. And most of them are survivors of severe sexual, physical and emotional abuse. They have literally been on both sides of the harm. So I thought, uh, maybe I should ask them what we should build instead of prisons. So I returned with a restorative justice expert, and we started to run the country's first design studios with incarcerated men and women around the intersection of restorative justice and design. And it was transformative for me. I saw all these people behind walls in a totally different way. These were souls deeply committed to their personal transformation and being accountable. They were creative, they were visionary. Danny is one of those souls. He's been incarcerated at San Quentin for 27 years for taking a life at the age of 21. From the very beginning, he's been focused on being accountable for that act and doing his best to make amends from behind bars. He brought that work into a design for a community center for reconciliation and wellness. It was a beautiful design, right? So it's this green campus filled with these circular structures for victim and offender dialogue. And when he presented the project to me, he started crying. He said, "After being in the brutality of San Quentin for so long, we don't think reconciliation will happen. This design is for a place that fulfills the promise of restorative justice. And it feels closer now." I know for a fact that just the visualization of spaces for restorative justice and healing are transformative. I've seen it in our workshops over and over again. But I think we know that just visualizing these spaces is not enough. We have to build them. And so I started to look for justice innovators. They are not easy to find. But I found one. I found the Center for Court Innovation. They were bringing Native American peacemaking practices into a non-Native community for the very first time in the United States. And I approached them, and I said, "OK, well, as you set up your process, could I work with the community to design a peacemaking center?" And they said yes. Thank God, because I had no backup to these guys. And so, in the Near Westside of Syracuse, New York, we started to run design workshops with the community to both locate and reenvision an old drug house to be a peacemaking center. The Near Westside Peacemaking Project is complete. And they are already running over 80 circles a year, with a very interesting outcome, and that it is the space itself that's convincing people to engage in peacemaking for the very first time in their lives. Isabel and her daughter are some of those community members. And they had been referred to peacemaking to heal their relationship after a history of family abuse, sexual abuse and other issues that they'd been having in their own family and the community. And, you know, Isabel didn't want to do peacemaking. She was like, "This is just like going to court. What is this peacemaking stuff?" But when she showed up, she was stressed, she was anxious. But when she got in, she kind of looked around, and she settled in. And she turned to the coordinator and said, "I feel comfortable here — at ease. It's homey." Isabel and her daughter made a decision that day to engage and complete the peacemaking process. And today, their relationship is transformed; they're doing really well and they're healing. So after this project, I didn't go into a thing where I'm going to make a huge peacemaking center. I did want to have peacemaking centers in every community. But then a new idea emerged. I was doing a workshop in Santa Rita Jail in California, and one of our incarcerated designers, Doug, said, "Yeah, you know, repairing the harm, getting back on my feet, healing — really important. But the reality is, Deanna, when I get home, I don't have anywhere to go. I have no job — who's going to hire me? I'm just going to end up back here." And you know what, he's right, because 60 to 75 percent of those returning to their communities will be unemployed a year after their release. We also know, if you can't meet your basic economic needs, you're going to commit crime — any of us would do that. So instead of building prisons, what we could build are spaces for job training and entrepreneurship. These are spaces for what we call "restorative economics." Located in East Oakland, California, "Restore Oakland" will be the country’s first center for restorative justice and restorative economics. (Applause) So here's what we're going to do. We're going to gut this building and turn it into three things. First, a restaurant called "Colors," that will break the racial divide in the restaurant industry by training low-wage restaurant workers to get living-wage jobs in fine dining. It does not matter if you have a criminal record or not. On the second floor, we have bright, open, airy spaces to support a constellation of activist organizations to amplify their cry of "Healthcare Not Handcuffs," and "Housing as a human right." And third, the county's first dedicated space for restorative justice, filled with nature, color, texture and spaces of refuge to support the dialogues here. This project breaks ground in just two months. And we have plans to replicate it in Washington D.C., Detroit, New York and New Orleans. (Applause) So you've seen two things we can build instead of prisons. And look, the price point is better. For one jail, we can build 30 restorative justice centers. (Applause) That is a better use of your tax dollars. So I want to build all of these. But building buildings is a really heavy lift. It takes time. And what was happening in the communities that I was serving is we were losing people every week to gun violence and mass incarceration. We needed to serve more people and faster and keep them out of the system. And a new idea emerged from the community, one that was a lot lighter on its feet. Instead of building prisons, we could build villages on wheels. It's called the Pop-Up Resource Village, and it brings an entire constellation of resources to isolated communities in the greater San Francisco area, including mobile medical, social services and pop-up shops. And so what we're doing now is we're building this whole village with the community, starting with transforming municipal buses into classrooms on wheels that bring GED and high school education across turf lines. (Applause) We will serve thousands of more students with this. We're creating mobile spaces of refuge for women released from jail in the middle of the night, at their most vulnerable. Next summer, the village will launch, and it pops up every single week, expanding to more and more communities as it goes. So look out for it. (Applause) So what do we build instead of prisons? We've looked at three things: peacemaking centers, centers for restorative justice and restorative economics and pop-up villages. But I'm telling you, I have a list a mile long. This is customized housing for youth transitioning out of foster care. These are reentry centers for women to reunite with their children. These are spaces for survivors of violence. These are spaces that address the root causes of mass incarceration. And not a single one of them is a jail or a prison. Activist, philosopher, writer Cornel West says that "Justice is what love looks like in public." So with this in mind, I ask you one more time to imagine a world without prisons, and join me in creating all the things that we could build instead. Thank you. (Applause) |
How to inspire every child to be a lifelong reader | {0: 'Whether speaking to barbers about early literacy, entertaining strangers at comedy clubs, or reading to kindergarteners at a local school, TED Resident Alvin Irby endeavors to make learning relevant and engaging.'} | TED Residency | As an elementary school teacher, my mom did everything she could to ensure I had good reading skills. This usually consisted of weekend reading lessons at our kitchen table while my friends played outside. My reading ability improved, but these forced reading lessons didn't exactly inspire a love of reading. High school changed everything. In 10th grade, my regular English class read short stories and did spelling tests. Out of sheer boredom, I asked to be switched into another class. The next semester, I joined advanced English. (Laughter) We read two novels and wrote two book reports that semester. The drastic difference and rigor between these two English classes angered me and spurred questions like, "Where did all these white people come from?" (Laughter) My high school was over 70 percent black and Latino, but this advanced English class had white students everywhere. This personal encounter with institutionalized racism altered my relationship with reading forever. I learned that I couldn't depend on a school, a teacher or curriculum to teach me what I needed to know. And more out of like, rebellion, than being intellectual, I decided I would no longer allow other people to dictate when and what I read. And without realizing it, I had stumbled upon a key to helping children read. Identity. Instead of fixating on skills and moving students from one reading level to another, or forcing struggling readers to memorize lists of unfamiliar words, we should be asking ourselves this question: How can we inspire children to identify as readers? DeSean, a brilliant first-grader I taught in the Bronx, he helped me understand how identity shapes learning. One day during math, I walk up to DeSean, and I say, "DeSean, you're a great mathematician." He looks at me and responds, "I'm not a mathematician, I'm a math genius!" (Laughter) OK DeSean, right? Reading? Completely different story. "Mr. Irby, I can't read. I'm never going to learn to read," he would say. I taught DeSean to read, but there are countless black boys who remain trapped in illiteracy. According to the US Department of Education, more than 85 percent of black male fourth graders are not proficient in reading. 85 percent! The more challenges to reading children face, the more culturally competent educators need to be. Moonlighting as a stand-up comedian for the past eight years, I understand the importance of cultural competency, which I define as the ability to translate what you want someone else to know or be able to do into communication or experiences that they find relevant and engaging. Before going on stage, I assess an audience. Are they white, are they Latino? Are they old, young, professional, conservative? Then I curate and modify my jokes based on what I think would generate the most laughter. While performing in a church, I could tell bar jokes. But that might not result in laughter. (Laughter) As a society, we're creating reading experiences for children that are the equivalent of telling bar jokes in a church. And then we wonder why so many children don't read. Educator and philosopher Paulo Freire believed that teaching and learning should be two-way. Students shouldn't be viewed as empty buckets to be filled with facts but as cocreators of knowledge. Cookie-cutter curriculums and school policies that require students to sit statue-still or to work in complete silence — these environments often exclude the individual learning needs, the interest and expertise of children. Especially black boys. Many of the children's books promoted to black boys focus on serious topics, like slavery, civil rights and biographies. Less than two percent of teachers in the United States are black males. And a majority of black boys are raised by single mothers. There are literally young black boys who have never seen a black man reading. Or never had a black man encourage him to read. What cultural factors, what social cues are present that would lead a young black boy to conclude that reading is even something he should do? This is why I created Barbershop Books. It's a literacy nonprofit that creates child-friendly reading spaces in barber shops. The mission is simple: to help young black boys identify as readers. Lots of black boys go to the barber shop once or twice a month. Some see their barbers more than they see their fathers. Barbershop Books connects reading to a male-centered space and involves black men and boys' early reading experiences. This identity-based reading program uses a curated list of children's books recommended by black boys. These are the books that they actually want to read. Scholastic's 2016 Kids and Family Report found that the number one thing children look for when choosing a book is a book that will make them laugh. So if we're serious about helping black boys and other children to read when it's not required, we need to incorporate relevant male reading models into early literacy and exchange some of the children's books that adults love so much for funny, silly or even gross books, like "Gross Greg". (Laughter) "You call them boogers. Greg calls them delicious little sugars." (Laughter) That laugh, that positive reaction or gross reaction some of you just had, (Laughter) black boys deserve and desperately need more of that. Dismantling the savage inequalities that plague American education requires us to create reading experiences that inspire all children to say three words: I'm a reader. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why we should end animal agriculture | {0: 'I\'m a social scientist currently working on my first book, "The End of Animal Farming." I sometimes write articles in outlets such as in Huffington Post and Vox, and I\'ve given talks in 15 different countries on the topics of effective altruism, animal protection, and food ethics. I\'m the Research Director at Sentience Institute, a nonprofit, effective altruism think tank launched in June 2017 focused on expanding humanity\'s moral circle. We\'re not currently hiring, but I\'m always excited to explore new research collaborations.\n\nI live in Brooklyn with my partner Kelly, our dog Apollo, and our two chickens Snow and Dualla, who were rescued from battery cage farms.'} | TEDxUniversityofMississippi | Before we dive in, I want to ask a couple of questions. First, how many of you are vegetarian or vegan? Okay, a few - around maybe 5%. If we asked all US adults, it would be around 5, maybe 10%. Now, how many of you have seen at least one of the following: a video of animal cruelty on factory farms, a documentary or news report on the environmental harms of animal agriculture, or a scientific article on the public health issues such as the overuse of antibiotics in animal feed? How many? Okay, almost everyone. Probably over 95%. Now, when I see that jump from 5%, I worry that I've made a huge mistake. Full disclosure, I'm a vegan. (Laughter) I'm even a preachy vegan, who tells everyone I meet about the problems of animal farming because I really do think it's one of the most important issues of our time. But my mistake, and the mistake of other food advocates, has been trying to fix these issues solely by telling you personally to go vegan, vegetarian, or to reduce your meat consumption. We need a bigger, better solution for our broken food system. And you might wonder if our country has at least switched from factory farming to more humane practices. I grew up in rural Texas. I spent a lot of time around farmed animals lounging on green pastures. Back then, I thought all farmed animals lived that way. Unfortunately, according to USDA data, over 99% of farmed animals live on factory farms. The situation is dire. There are over 100 billion animals in the global food system. Many of them are confined in tiny cages, barely larger than their own bodies. Their beaks and tails are cut off without anesthetic. They suffer, day and night, from infectious diseases and intense artificial selection that has them growing so much meat that they collapse under their own weight. Animal farming pollutes our land and water, endangering the health and economies of rural Americans. It's responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than all planes, cars, trains and other transportation combined. Eighty percent of all US antibiotics are fed to farmed animals, leading to dangerous, incurable human diseases. Finally, animal farming is just incredibly expensive. It receives $38 billion in subsidies every year from the US government, and it sucks up massive amounts of natural resources that should be going to help people in need. I think we can all agree that this is an urgent social issue that we desperately need to fix. And by "we," I don't just mean vegetarians. I mean everyone who cares about these problems. Finding a solution to this seemingly intractable issue is also a fascinating intellectual problem, one we can tackle with the tools of Effective Altruism ... their growing mindset in charity, business and politics of using evidence-based research to find and implement the most effective solutions to the world's biggest problems. The most powerful tool we have is innovation. The amazing thing is that we don't have to give up meat, dairy, or eggs to end animal farming. Think about it: what's meat? It's fat, protein, water and trace minerals. All these ingredients are readily available in the plant kingdom. They're just not assembled in the architecture of meat. That's what a cow does. But a cow also does a lot of stuff we don't need. She grows hair, teeth, bones. She walks around; she breathes, thinks, and feels. These extra processes mean that for every 10 calories of plant-based food we feed a farmed animal, we get around 1 calorie of meat in return. Even with the nutrient animal products are most known for, protein, for every 10 grams of plant-based, we get, at most, 2 grams of animal-based. So what if we assembled these ingredients ourselves with a more efficient, ethical process? That's the approach of companies like Beyond Meat, Hungry Planet, and Impossible Foods. They've already succeeded in making a beef burger made from plants. Many consumers can't even tell the difference. Today, they're just perfecting that product and scaling up the process to lower costs and widen distribution. In fact, the Beyond Burger pictured here is already available in Mississippi. But let's be cautious. What if consumers are really picky? What if they don't just want something that tastes like animal meat, but something that is actually made from animal cells? Well, there's good news. Scientists and chefs have been working on so-called clean meat, real meat made without the food safety and ethical cost of animal slaughter. To do this, they take a small sample of cells from a living animal and place those cells in a cultivator, which looks like one of the big tanks at a beer brewery. Inside, the cells mix with the nutrients they need to grow in the same process that happens inside an animal's body, and voila! You can have your cow and eat beef too. (Laughter) But you might be thinking, "Not all beneficial technologies are widely adopted, right? So what if something goes wrong? What if the technology is fully developed, but perceived as just another food for vegetarians? Or what if an irresponsible company lets their product get contaminated, leading to a cascade of negative press that cripples the industry?" With conventional meat, we see contamination scandals all the time, but for a young industry like clean meat, it could be fatal. It's like self-driving cars, where the industry needs to be especially careful about collisions, despite having an overall better safety record. So what social change will we see on our way to an animal-free food system? The biggest one is a shift beyond the individual and towards institutional change. Like I said earlier, advocates have thus far focused heavily on one-by-one diet change, but I believe we'll see the biggest changes happen with changes to institutions like businesses, government, nonprofits and society as a whole. There's a lot of evidence that this strategy is more effective. Last year, I was at a protest, calling for a restaurant chain to reform its animal-welfare policies, just basic stuff, like choosing healthier breeds of chickens, or having windows in the chicken sheds. A pedestrian walked up and thanked me profusely for helping these poor animals. I told him he was welcome to join us, as bystanders sometimes do, and he said, "Oh no, no, no. I can't. I'm not a vegetarian." I insisted that he was welcome to join us without being vegetarian. We were just calling for better treatment for these animals. But he was unconvinced. He saw vegetarianism as a prerequisite to helping farmed animals because advocates have conflated the two for so long. If we had, instead, used an institutional framing, that bystander might have joined us and maybe become vegetarian along the way. This strategy also helps people avoid what psychologists call "the collapse of compassion," the feeling of apathy that comes when we encounter a big problem without clearly seeing the big solution. The institutional framing puts that solution, changing society as a whole, front and center in our messaging. This strategy is also well-evidenced by historical social movements, which is what I spend most of my time researching. Virtually no movements - from environmentalism, children's rights, antislavery, feminism to antiwar movements - have succeeded with the heavy, individual focus that we see in the farmed-animal movement. Consumer advocacy like boycotts have succeeded when used as tools for institutional change, but failed when treated as an end goal. We need to learn from the past. The second big change is a shift beyond opposition to factory farming alone and towards opposition to animal farming as whole. There's a lot of evidence for this strategy too. First, numerous investigations have shown that so-called humane farms are rarely humane in practice. The most picturesque farm I've ever been on was an award-winning California egg farm. But because of the farm's natural and organic policies, they didn't vaccinate the birds or give them antibiotics, like factory farms do. This led to atrocious health. I saw many cases of Marek's, a highly contagious disease that often leads to blindness and missing eyes; fluid belly, some birds with over a pound of fluid buildup inside their less than five-pound bodies; fungal infections; lice on almost all of them; and many birds crippled by eggs that had gotten stuck inside them on the way out. I've been dismayed that the reality of these farms is nearly as bad as factory farming. While reduction in suffering is something we should applaud, and it can be a step towards abolition, the unmitigated suffering is still a moral catastrophe. Second, simply the idea that there are humane ways to raise and kill animals for food is a huge roadblock, even if you just oppose factory farming. Seventy-five percent of people think they usually eat meat from animals who were treated humanely, but as we saw earlier, less than 1% of farmed animals actually live on non-factory farms. That's crazy, right? Why are consumers so confused? Well, when we eat animals, there's a cognitive dissonance that claws at us because deep down, we care about animals too. What seems to happen is that our subconscious protects us from this dissonance by creating a psychological refuge. It tells us that, actually, everything is okay, that farmed animals are treated well, even when the facts point in the opposite direction. This mistaken belief protects us from the conflict between our values and our behavior. And the misleading labels on animal products, like pictures of green pastures on cartons of factory farm eggs, exacerbate this issue. Finally, these farms are just too expensive to feed this hungry planet. So-called humane animal products are already several times the normal price. Many of us just can't afford that. And the demand on natural resources is just too much for this planet to bear, especially when we can get the same foods from more sustainable sources. Fortunately, the future is bright. Today, we're at an inflection point, where the moral reasons to change our food system are very compelling. Technology is on its way and excellent alternatives are already here, and advocates are wising up to more impactful strategies. It's incredibly empowering to have this wealth of evidence available, from history, psychology and elsewhere, to analyze using the effective altruism perspective. Ultimately, that evidence suggests that we can achieve a truly humane food system if we strive towards the end of animal farming. And public opinion is already a lot further along on this than you might think. Forty-seven percent of US adults already say they support a ban on slaughter houses. As we transition, as we align our food system with our values, we're going to see a sweeping change in the relationship between humans and the other inhabitants of this planet. Once we're no longer eating animals three times a day, we'll see a huge relief in cognitive dissonance that frees our conscience to expand our moral circle to not just farmed animals, but other populations like dogs and cats in shelters, animals used in circuses and entertainment, and the vast number of wild animals who also need our help. Today, we're laying the foundation for future social movements just as social movements of the past laid the bedrock we now stand on. Richard Branson predicted that the food system will be animal-free in just 30 years. It might take a little longer than that, but it's clear that huge change is coming. You can stand on the right side of history and play a role in this exciting movement, whether it's by starting a business like a local restaurant or a clean-meat company, becoming an activist, making a donation, or simply sharing content on social media. You can, of course, also participate as a conscious consumer, but keep in mind that your own diet choice is just one of many ways to have an impact. This is a time of unbridled excitement and opportunity, as we look ahead at one of the next great social movements. Humanity's moral circle will continue to expand, but only if people like you and me take hold. Thank you. (Applause) |
3 myths about the future of work (and why they're not true) | {0: 'Daniel Susskind explores the impact of technology, particularly artificial intelligence, on work and society. '} | TED@Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany | Automation anxiety has been spreading lately, a fear that in the future, many jobs will be performed by machines rather than human beings, given the remarkable advances that are unfolding in artificial intelligence and robotics. What's clear is that there will be significant change. What's less clear is what that change will look like. My research suggests that the future is both troubling and exciting. The threat of technological unemployment is real, and yet it's a good problem to have. And to explain how I came to that conclusion, I want to confront three myths that I think are currently obscuring our vision of this automated future. A picture that we see on our television screens, in books, in films, in everyday commentary is one where an army of robots descends on the workplace with one goal in mind: to displace human beings from their work. And I call this the Terminator myth. Yes, machines displace human beings from particular tasks, but they don't just substitute for human beings. They also complement them in other tasks, making that work more valuable and more important. Sometimes they complement human beings directly, making them more productive or more efficient at a particular task. So a taxi driver can use a satnav system to navigate on unfamiliar roads. An architect can use computer-assisted design software to design bigger, more complicated buildings. But technological progress doesn't just complement human beings directly. It also complements them indirectly, and it does this in two ways. The first is if we think of the economy as a pie, technological progress makes the pie bigger. As productivity increases, incomes rise and demand grows. The British pie, for instance, is more than a hundred times the size it was 300 years ago. And so people displaced from tasks in the old pie could find tasks to do in the new pie instead. But technological progress doesn't just make the pie bigger. It also changes the ingredients in the pie. As time passes, people spend their income in different ways, changing how they spread it across existing goods, and developing tastes for entirely new goods, too. New industries are created, new tasks have to be done and that means often new roles have to be filled. So again, the British pie: 300 years ago, most people worked on farms, 150 years ago, in factories, and today, most people work in offices. And once again, people displaced from tasks in the old bit of pie could tumble into tasks in the new bit of pie instead. Economists call these effects complementarities, but really that's just a fancy word to capture the different way that technological progress helps human beings. Resolving this Terminator myth shows us that there are two forces at play: one, machine substitution that harms workers, but also these complementarities that do the opposite. Now the second myth, what I call the intelligence myth. What do the tasks of driving a car, making a medical diagnosis and identifying a bird at a fleeting glimpse have in common? Well, these are all tasks that until very recently, leading economists thought couldn't readily be automated. And yet today, all of these tasks can be automated. You know, all major car manufacturers have driverless car programs. There's countless systems out there that can diagnose medical problems. And there's even an app that can identify a bird at a fleeting glimpse. Now, this wasn't simply a case of bad luck on the part of economists. They were wrong, and the reason why they were wrong is very important. They've fallen for the intelligence myth, the belief that machines have to copy the way that human beings think and reason in order to outperform them. When these economists were trying to figure out what tasks machines could not do, they imagined the only way to automate a task was to sit down with a human being, get them to explain to you how it was they performed a task, and then try and capture that explanation in a set of instructions for a machine to follow. This view was popular in artificial intelligence at one point, too. I know this because Richard Susskind, who is my dad and my coauthor, wrote his doctorate in the 1980s on artificial intelligence and the law at Oxford University, and he was part of the vanguard. And with a professor called Phillip Capper and a legal publisher called Butterworths, they produced the world's first commercially available artificial intelligence system in the law. This was the home screen design. He assures me this was a cool screen design at the time. (Laughter) I've never been entirely convinced. He published it in the form of two floppy disks, at a time where floppy disks genuinely were floppy, and his approach was the same as the economists': sit down with a lawyer, get her to explain to you how it was she solved a legal problem, and then try and capture that explanation in a set of rules for a machine to follow. In economics, if human beings could explain themselves in this way, the tasks are called routine, and they could be automated. But if human beings can't explain themselves, the tasks are called non-routine, and they're thought to be out reach. Today, that routine-nonroutine distinction is widespread. Think how often you hear people say to you machines can only perform tasks that are predictable or repetitive, rules-based or well-defined. Those are all just different words for routine. And go back to those three cases that I mentioned at the start. Those are all classic cases of nonroutine tasks. Ask a doctor, for instance, how she makes a medical diagnosis, and she might be able to give you a few rules of thumb, but ultimately she'd struggle. She'd say it requires things like creativity and judgment and intuition. And these things are very difficult to articulate, and so it was thought these tasks would be very hard to automate. If a human being can't explain themselves, where on earth do we begin in writing a set of instructions for a machine to follow? Thirty years ago, this view was right, but today it's looking shaky, and in the future it's simply going to be wrong. Advances in processing power, in data storage capability and in algorithm design mean that this routine-nonroutine distinction is diminishingly useful. To see this, go back to the case of making a medical diagnosis. Earlier in the year, a team of researchers at Stanford announced they'd developed a system which can tell you whether or not a freckle is cancerous as accurately as leading dermatologists. How does it work? It's not trying to copy the judgment or the intuition of a doctor. It knows or understands nothing about medicine at all. Instead, it's running a pattern recognition algorithm through 129,450 past cases, hunting for similarities between those cases and the particular lesion in question. It's performing these tasks in an unhuman way, based on the analysis of more possible cases than any doctor could hope to review in their lifetime. It didn't matter that that human being, that doctor, couldn't explain how she'd performed the task. Now, there are those who dwell upon that the fact that these machines aren't built in our image. As an example, take IBM's Watson, the supercomputer that went on the US quiz show "Jeopardy!" in 2011, and it beat the two human champions at "Jeopardy!" The day after it won, The Wall Street Journal ran a piece by the philosopher John Searle with the title "Watson Doesn't Know It Won on 'Jeopardy!'" Right, and it's brilliant, and it's true. You know, Watson didn't let out a cry of excitement. It didn't call up its parents to say what a good job it had done. It didn't go down to the pub for a drink. This system wasn't trying to copy the way that those human contestants played, but it didn't matter. It still outperformed them. Resolving the intelligence myth shows us that our limited understanding about human intelligence, about how we think and reason, is far less of a constraint on automation than it was in the past. What's more, as we've seen, when these machines perform tasks differently to human beings, there's no reason to think that what human beings are currently capable of doing represents any sort of summit in what these machines might be capable of doing in the future. Now the third myth, what I call the superiority myth. It's often said that those who forget about the helpful side of technological progress, those complementarities from before, are committing something known as the lump of labor fallacy. Now, the problem is the lump of labor fallacy is itself a fallacy, and I call this the lump of labor fallacy fallacy, or LOLFF, for short. Let me explain. The lump of labor fallacy is a very old idea. It was a British economist, David Schloss, who gave it this name in 1892. He was puzzled to come across a dock worker who had begun to use a machine to make washers, the small metal discs that fasten on the end of screws. And this dock worker felt guilty for being more productive. Now, most of the time, we expect the opposite, that people feel guilty for being unproductive, you know, a little too much time on Facebook or Twitter at work. But this worker felt guilty for being more productive, and asked why, he said, "I know I'm doing wrong. I'm taking away the work of another man." In his mind, there was some fixed lump of work to be divided up between him and his pals, so that if he used this machine to do more, there'd be less left for his pals to do. Schloss saw the mistake. The lump of work wasn't fixed. As this worker used the machine and became more productive, the price of washers would fall, demand for washers would rise, more washers would have to be made, and there'd be more work for his pals to do. The lump of work would get bigger. Schloss called this "the lump of labor fallacy." And today you hear people talk about the lump of labor fallacy to think about the future of all types of work. There's no fixed lump of work out there to be divided up between people and machines. Yes, machines substitute for human beings, making the original lump of work smaller, but they also complement human beings, and the lump of work gets bigger and changes. But LOLFF. Here's the mistake: it's right to think that technological progress makes the lump of work to be done bigger. Some tasks become more valuable. New tasks have to be done. But it's wrong to think that necessarily, human beings will be best placed to perform those tasks. And this is the superiority myth. Yes, the lump of work might get bigger and change, but as machines become more capable, it's likely that they'll take on the extra lump of work themselves. Technological progress, rather than complement human beings, complements machines instead. To see this, go back to the task of driving a car. Today, satnav systems directly complement human beings. They make some human beings better drivers. But in the future, software is going to displace human beings from the driving seat, and these satnav systems, rather than complement human beings, will simply make these driverless cars more efficient, helping the machines instead. Or go to those indirect complementarities that I mentioned as well. The economic pie may get larger, but as machines become more capable, it's possible that any new demand will fall on goods that machines, rather than human beings, are best placed to produce. The economic pie may change, but as machines become more capable, it's possible that they'll be best placed to do the new tasks that have to be done. In short, demand for tasks isn't demand for human labor. Human beings only stand to benefit if they retain the upper hand in all these complemented tasks, but as machines become more capable, that becomes less likely. So what do these three myths tell us then? Well, resolving the Terminator myth shows us that the future of work depends upon this balance between two forces: one, machine substitution that harms workers but also those complementarities that do the opposite. And until now, this balance has fallen in favor of human beings. But resolving the intelligence myth shows us that that first force, machine substitution, is gathering strength. Machines, of course, can't do everything, but they can do far more, encroaching ever deeper into the realm of tasks performed by human beings. What's more, there's no reason to think that what human beings are currently capable of represents any sort of finishing line, that machines are going to draw to a polite stop once they're as capable as us. Now, none of this matters so long as those helpful winds of complementarity blow firmly enough, but resolving the superiority myth shows us that that process of task encroachment not only strengthens the force of machine substitution, but it wears down those helpful complementarities too. Bring these three myths together and I think we can capture a glimpse of that troubling future. Machines continue to become more capable, encroaching ever deeper on tasks performed by human beings, strengthening the force of machine substitution, weakening the force of machine complementarity. And at some point, that balance falls in favor of machines rather than human beings. This is the path we're currently on. I say "path" deliberately, because I don't think we're there yet, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this is our direction of travel. That's the troubling part. Let me say now why I think actually this is a good problem to have. For most of human history, one economic problem has dominated: how to make the economic pie large enough for everyone to live on. Go back to the turn of the first century AD, and if you took the global economic pie and divided it up into equal slices for everyone in the world, everyone would get a few hundred dollars. Almost everyone lived on or around the poverty line. And if you roll forward a thousand years, roughly the same is true. But in the last few hundred years, economic growth has taken off. Those economic pies have exploded in size. Global GDP per head, the value of those individual slices of the pie today, they're about 10,150 dollars. If economic growth continues at two percent, our children will be twice as rich as us. If it continues at a more measly one percent, our grandchildren will be twice as rich as us. By and large, we've solved that traditional economic problem. Now, technological unemployment, if it does happen, in a strange way will be a symptom of that success, will have solved one problem — how to make the pie bigger — but replaced it with another — how to make sure that everyone gets a slice. As other economists have noted, solving this problem won't be easy. Today, for most people, their job is their seat at the economic dinner table, and in a world with less work or even without work, it won't be clear how they get their slice. There's a great deal of discussion, for instance, about various forms of universal basic income as one possible approach, and there's trials underway in the United States and in Finland and in Kenya. And this is the collective challenge that's right in front of us, to figure out how this material prosperity generated by our economic system can be enjoyed by everyone in a world in which our traditional mechanism for slicing up the pie, the work that people do, withers away and perhaps disappears. Solving this problem is going to require us to think in very different ways. There's going to be a lot of disagreement about what ought to be done, but it's important to remember that this is a far better problem to have than the one that haunted our ancestors for centuries: how to make that pie big enough in the first place. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How the button changed fashion | {0: 'Fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi mixes high fashion and the mass market, with a line of haute couture and a line for Target. Plus a talk show, a cabaret act, a movie, a new book ...'} | Small Thing Big Idea | There are no bad buttons, there are only bad people. How does that sound? OK? [Small thing.] [Big idea.] [Isaac Mizrahi on the Button] No one knows who invented the button. It might have shown up as early as 2000 BCE. It was decorative when it first started, just something pretty sewn onto your clothes. Then about 3,000 years later, someone finally invented the buttonhole, and buttons were suddenly useful. The button and the buttonhole is such a great invention. Not only does it slip through the buttonhole, but then it kind of falls into place, and so you're completely secure, like it's never going to open. The design of a button hasn't changed much since the Middle Ages. It's one of the most enduring designs in history. For me, the best buttons are usually round. There's either a dome button with a little shank, or there's just this sort of round thing with either a rim or not a rim, either two holes or four holes. Almost more important than the button is the buttonhole. And the way you figure that out is: the diameter of the button plus the width of the button, plus a little bit of ease. Before buttons, clothes were bigger — they were more kind of amorphous, and people, like, wriggled into them or just kind of wrapped themselves in things. But then fashion moved closer to the body as we discovered uses for the button. At one time, it was the one way to make clothes fit against the body. I think the reason buttons have endured for so long, historically, is because they actually work to keep our clothes shut. Zippers break; Velcro makes a lot of noise, and it wears out after a while. If a button falls off, you just literally sew that thing on. A button is kind of there for the long run. It's not just the most elemental design ever, it's also such a crazy fashion statement. When I was a kid, my mom knit me this beautiful sweater. I didn't like it. And then I found these buttons, and the minute the buttons were on the sweater, I loved it. If you don't have good taste and you can't pick out a button, then let someone else do it, you know? I mean that. |
The genius of the London Tube Map | {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.'} | Small Thing Big Idea | The history of civilization, in some ways, is a history of maps: How have we come to understand the world around us? One of the most famous maps works because it really isn't a map at all. [Small thing. Big idea.] [Michael Bierut on the London Tube Map] The London Underground came together in 1908, when eight different independent railways merged to create a single system. They needed a map to represent that system so people would know where to ride. The map they made is complicated. You can see rivers, bodies of water, trees and parks — the stations were all crammed together at the center of the map, and out in the periphery, there were some that couldn't even fit on the map. So the map was geographically accurate, but maybe not so useful. Enter Harry Beck. Harry Beck was a 29-year-old engineering draftsman who had been working on and off for the London Underground. And he had a key insight, and that was that people riding underground in trains don't really care what's happening aboveground. They just want to get from station to station — "Where do I get on? Where do I get off?" It's the system that's important, not the geography. He's taken this complicated mess of spaghetti, and he's simplified it. The lines only go in three directions: they're horizontal, they're vertical, or they're 45 degrees. Likewise, he spaced the stations equally, he's made every station color correspond to the color of the line, and he's fixed it all so that it's not really a map anymore. What it is is a diagram, just like circuitry, except the circuitry here isn't wires conducting electrons, it's tubes containing trains conducting people from place to place. In 1933, the Underground decided, at last, to give Harry Beck's map a try. The Underground did a test run of a thousand of these maps, pocket-size. They were gone in one hour. They realized they were onto something, they printed 750,000 more, and this is the map that you see today. Beck's design really became the template for the way we think of metro maps today. Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, São Paulo, Sydney, Washington, D.C. — all of them convert complex geography into crisp geometry. All of them use different colors to distinguish between lines, all of them use simple symbols to distinguish between types of stations. They all are part of a universal language, seemingly. I bet Harry Beck wouldn't have known what a user interface was, but that's really what he designed and he really took that challenge and broke it down to three principles that I think can be applied in nearly any design problem. First one is focus. Focus on who you're doing this for. The second principle is simplicity. What's the shortest way to deliver that need? Finally, the last thing is: Thinking in a cross-disciplinary way. Who would've thought that an electrical engineer would be the person to hold the key to unlock what was then one of the most complicated systems in the world — all started by one guy with a pencil and an idea. |
Why the pencil is perfect | {0: 'Caroline Weaver owns CW Pencil Enterprise, a wood-cased pencil specialty shop in New York City.'} | Small Thing Big Idea | The sound is a really big part, I think, of the experience of using a pencil, and it has this really audible scratchiness. (Scratching) [Small thing. Big idea.] [Caroline Weaver on the Pencil] The pencil is a very simple object. It's made of wood with some layers of paint an eraser and a core, which is made out of graphite, clay and water. Yeah, it took hundreds of people over centuries to come to this design. And it's that long history of collaboration that, to me, makes it a very perfect object. The story of the pencil starts with graphite. People started finding really useful applications for this new substance. They cut it into small sticks and wrapped it in string or sheepskin or paper and sold it on the streets of London to be used for writing or for drawing or, a lot of times, by farmers and shepherds, who used it to mark their animals. Over in France, Nicolas-Jacques Conté figured out a method of grinding the graphite, mixing it with powdered clay and water to make a paste. From there, this paste was filled into a mold and fired in a kiln, and the result was a really strong graphite core that wasn't breakable, that was smooth, usable — it was so much better than anything else that existed at the time, and to this day, that's the method that's still used in making pencils. Meanwhile, over in America, in Concord, Massachusetts, it was Henry David Thoreau who came up with the grading scale for different hardnesses of pencil. It was graded one through four, number two being the ideal hardness for general use. The softer the pencil, the more graphite it had in it, and the darker and smoother the line will be. The firmer the pencil, the more clay it had in it and the lighter and finer it will be. Originally, when pencils were handmade, they were made round. There was no easy way to make them, and it was the Americans who really mechanized the craft. A lot of people credit Joseph Dixon for being one of the first people to start developing actual machines to do things like cut wood slats, cut grooves into the wood, apply glue to them ... And they figured out it was easier and less wasteful to do a hexagonal pencil, and so that became the standard. Since the early days of pencils, people have loved that they can be erased. Originally, it was bread crumbs that were used to scratch away pencil marks and later, rubber and pumice. The attached eraser happened in 1858, when American stationer Hymen Lipman patented the first pencil with an attached eraser, which really changed the pencil game. The world's first yellow pencil was the KOH-I-NOOR 1500. KOH-I-NOOR did this crazy thing where they painted this pencil with 14 coats of yellow paint and dipped the end in 14-carat gold. There is a pencil for everyone, and every pencil has a story. The Blackwing 602 is famous for being used by a lot of writers, especially John Steinbeck and Vladimir Nabokov. And then, you have the Dixon pencil company. They're responsible for the Dixon Ticonderoga. It's an icon, it's what people think of when they think of a pencil and what they think of when they think of school. And the pencil's really a thing that, I think, the average user has never thought twice about, how it's made or why it's made the way it is, because it's just always been that way. In my opinion, there's nothing that can be done to make the pencil better than it is. It's perfect. |
How the progress bar keeps you sane | {0: 'Daniel Engber explores science and culture as an award-winning journalist for Radiolab, the New York Times, Slate and Wired, among others.'} | Small Thing Big Idea | How many people are bored at their desk for how many hours every day and how many days a week and how many weeks a year for how many years in their life? [Small thing. Big idea.] [Daniel Engber on the Progress Bar] The progress bar is just an indicator on a computer that something's happening inside the device. The classic one that's been used for years is a horizontal bar. I mean, this goes back to pre-computer versions of this on ledgers, where people would fill in a horizontal bar from left to right to show how much of a task they had completed at a factory. This is just the same thing on a screen. Something happened in the 70s that is sometimes referred to as "the software crisis," where suddenly, computers were getting more complicated more quickly than anyone had been prepared for, from a design perspective. People were using percent-done indicators in different ways. So you might have a graphical countdown clock, or they would have a line of asterisks that would fill out from left to right on a screen. But no one had done a systematic survey of these things and tried to figure out: How do they actually affect the user's experience of sitting at the computer? This graduate student named Brad Myers, in 1985, decided he would study this. He found that it didn't really matter if the percent-done indicator was giving you the accurate percent done. What mattered was that it was there at all. Just seeing it there made people feel better, and that was the most surprising thing. He has all these ideas about what this thing could do. Maybe it could make people relax effectively. Maybe it would allow people to turn away from their machine and do something else of exactly the right duration. They would look and say, "Oh, the progress bar is half done. That took five minutes. So now I have five minutes to send this fax," or whatever people were doing in 1985. Both of those things are wrong. Like, when you see that progress bar, it sort of locks your attention in a tractor beam, and it turns the experience of waiting into this exciting narrative that you're seeing unfold in front of you: that somehow, this time you've spent waiting in frustration for the computer to do something, has been reconceptualized as: "Progress! Oh! Great stuff is happening!" [Progress...] But once you start thinking about the progress bar as something that's more about dulling the pain of waiting, well, then you can start fiddling around with the psychology. So if you have a progress bar that just moves at a constant rate — let's say, that's really what's happening in the computer — that will feel to people like it's slowing down. We get bored. Well, now you can start trying to enhance it and make it appear to move more quickly than it really is, make it move faster at the beginning, like a burst of speed. That's exciting, people feel like, "Oh! Something's really happening!" Then you can move back into a more naturalistic growth of the progress bar as you go along. You're assuming that people are focusing on the passage of time — they're trying to watch grass grow, they're trying to watch a pot of water, waiting for it to boil, and you're just trying to make that less boring, less painful and less frustrating than it was before. So the progress bar at least gives you the vision of a beginning and an end, and you're working towards a goal. I think in some ways, it mitigates the fear of death. Too much? |
How the jump rope got its rhythm | {0: 'A member of the inaugural TED Fellows class, Dr. Kyra Gaunt is an ethnomusicologist, singer-songwriter, and a social media researcher on faculty at University at Albany, SUNY. '} | Small Thing Big Idea | If you do it right, it should sound like: TICK-tat, TICK-tat, TICK-tat, TICK-tat, TICK-tat, TICK-tat. If you do it wrong, it sounds like: Tick-TAT, tick-TAT, tick-TAT. [Small thing. Big idea.] [Kyra Gaunt on the Jump Rope] The jump rope is such a simple object. It can be made out of rope, a clothesline, twine. It has, like, a twirl on it. (Laughs) I'm not sure how to describe that. What's important is that it has a certain weight, and that they have that kind of whip sound. It's not clear what the origin of the jump rope is. There's some evidence that it began in ancient Egypt, Phoenicia, and then it most likely traveled to North America with Dutch settlers. The rope became a big thing when women's clothes became more fitted and the pantaloon came into being. And so, girls were able to jump rope because their skirts wouldn't catch the ropes. Governesses used it to train their wards to jump rope. Even formerly enslaved African children in the antebellum South jumped rope, too. In the 1950s, in Harlem, Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, you could see on the sidewalk, lots of girls playing with ropes. Sometimes they would take two ropes and turn them as a single rope together, but you could separate them and turn them in like an eggbeater on each other. The skipping rope was like a steady timeline — tick, tick, tick, tick — upon which you can add rhymes and rhythms and chants. Those ropes created a space where we were able to contribute to something that was far greater than the neighborhood. Double Dutch jump rope remains a powerful symbol of culture and identity for black women. Back from the 1950s to the 1970s, girls weren't supposed to play sports. Boys played baseball, basketball and football, and girls weren't allowed. A lot has changed, but in that era, girls would rule the playground. They'd make sure that boys weren't a part of that. It's their space, it's a girl-power space. It's where they get to shine. But I also think it's for boys, because boys overheard those, which is why, I think, so many hip-hop artists sampled from things that they heard in black girls' game songs. (Chanting) ... cold, thick shake, act like you know how to flip, Filet-O-Fish, Quarter Pounder, french fries, ice cold, thick shake, act like you know how to jump. Why "Country Grammar" by Nelly became a Grammy Award-winning single was because people already knew "We're going down down baby your street in a Range Rover ... " That's the beginning of "Down down, baby, down down the roller coaster, sweet, sweet baby, I'll never let you go." All people who grew up in any black urban community would know that music. And so, it was a ready-made hit. The Double Dutch rope playing helped maintain these songs and helped maintain the chants and the gestures that go along with it, which is very natural to what I call "kinetic orality" — word of mouth and word of body. It's the thing that gets passed down over generations. In some ways, the rope is the thing that helps carry it. You need some object to carry memory through. So, a jump rope, you can use it for all different kinds of things. It crosses cultures. And I think it lasted because people need to move. And I think sometimes the simplest objects can make the most creative uses. |
Subsets and Splits