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The 3,000-year history of the hoodie | {0: "Paola Antonelli is on a mission to introduce -- and explain -- design to the world. With her shows at New York's Museum of Modern Art, she celebrates design's presence in every part of life."} | Small Thing Big Idea | The hoodie is an amazing object. It's one of those timeless objects that we hardly think of, because they work so well that they're part of our lives. We call them "humble masterpieces." [Small thing.] [Big idea.] [Paola Antonelli on the Hoodie] The hoodie has been — even if it was not called so — it's been an icon throughout history for good and for bad reasons. The earliest ones that we can trace are from ancient Greece and ancient Rome. The Middle Ages, you see a lot of monks that were wearing garments that were cape-like, with hoods attached, so therefore, "hoodies." Ladies in the 17th century would wear hoodies to kind of hide themselves when they were going to meet their lovers. And then, of course, there's the legend, there's fantasy. There's the image of the hoodie connected to the grim reaper. There's the image of the hoodie connected to the executioner. So there's the dark side of the hoodie. The modern incarnation of the hoodie — a garment that's made usually of cotton jersey, that has a hood attached with a drawstring; sometimes it has a marsupial pocket — was introduced in the 1930s by Knickerbocker Knitting Company. Now it's called Champion. It was meant to keep athletes warm. Of course, though, it was such a functional, comfortable garment that it was very rapidly adopted by workmen everywhere. And then, around the 1980s, it also gets adopted by hip-hop and B-boys, skateboarders, and it takes on this kind of youth street culture. It was, at the same time, super-comfortable, perfect for the streets and also had that added value of anonymity when you needed it. And then we have Mark Zuckerberg, who defies convention of respectable attire for businesspeople. But interestingly, it's also a way to show how power has changed. If you're wearing a two-piece suit, you might be the bodyguard. The real powerful person is wearing a hoodie with a T-shirt and jeans. It's easy to think of the physical aspects of the hoodie. You can immediately think of wearing the hood up, and you feel this warmth and this protection, but at the same time, you can also feel the psychological aspects of it. I mean, think of donning a hoodie, all of a sudden, you feel more protected, you feel that you are in your own shell. We know very well what the hoodie has come to signify in the past few years in the United States. When Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African-American kid, was shot by a neighborhood vigilante, and Million Hoodie Marches happened all over the United States, in which people wore hoodies with the hood up and marched in the streets against this kind of prejudice. It doesn't happen that often for a garment to have so much symbolism and history and that encompasses so many different universes as the hoodie. So, like all garments, especially all truly utilitarian garments, it is very basic in its design. But at the same time, it has a whole universe of possibilities attached. |
The hidden ways stairs shape your life | {0: 'Architect David Rockwell draws on his love of drama and spectacle to create fantastic, high-impact restaurants, cultural facilities, airline terminals, theater sets -- and playgrounds. '} | Small Thing Big Idea | I think stairs may be one of the most emotionally malleable physical elements that an architect has to work with. [Small thing. Big idea.] [David Rockwell on the Stairs] At its most basic, a stair is a way to get from point A to point B at different elevations. Stairs have a common language. Treads, which is the thing that you walk on. Riser, which is the vertical element that separates the two treads. A lot of stairs have nosings that create a kind of edge. And then, the connected piece is a stringer. Those pieces, in different forms, make up all stairs. I assume stairs came to be from the first time someone said, "I want to get to this higher rock from the lower rock." People climbed using whatever was available: stepped logs, ladders and natural pathways that were worn over time. Some of the earliest staircases, like the pyramids in Chichén Itzá or the roads to Mount Tai in China, were a means of getting to a higher elevation, which people sought for worship or for protection. As engineering has evolved, so has what's practical. Stairs can be made from all kinds of material. There are linear stairs, there are spiraled stairs. Stairs can be indoors, they can be outdoors. They clearly help us in an emergency. But they're also a form of art in and of themselves. As we move across a stairway, the form dictates our pacing, our feeling, our safety and our relationship and engagement with the space around us. So for a second, think about stepping down a gradual, monumental staircase like the one in front of the New York Public Library. From those steps, you have a view of the street and all the people around you, and your walk is slow and steady because the tread is so wide. That's a totally different experience than going down the narrow staircase to, say, an old pub, where you spill into the room. There, you encounter tall risers, so you move more quickly. Stairs add enormous drama. Think about how stairs signaled a grand entrance and were the star of that moment. Stairs can even be heroic. The staircase that remained standing after September 11th and the attack on the World Trade Center was dubbed the "Survivors' Staircase," because it played such a central role in leading hundreds of people to safety. But small stairs can have a huge impact, too. The stoop is a place that invites neighbors to gather, blast music, and watch the city in motion. It's fascinating to me that you see people wanting to hang out on the stairs. I think they fill a deeply human need we have to inhabit a space more than just on the ground plane. And so if you're able to sit halfway up there, you're in a kind of magical place. |
How the hyperlink changed everything | {0: "At Facebook (and previously at YouTube), Margaret Gould Stewart designs experiences that touch the lives of a large percentage of the world's population."} | Small Thing Big Idea | I remember thinking to myself, "This is going to change everything about how we communicate." [Small thing.] [Big idea.] [Margaret Gould Stewart on the Hyperlink] A hyperlink is an interface element, and what I mean by that is, when you're using software on your phone or your computer, there's a lot of code behind the interface that's giving all the instructions for the computer on how to manage it, but that interface is the thing that humans interact with: when we press on this, then something happens. When they first came around, they were pretty simple and not particularly glamorous. Designers today have a huge range of options. The hyperlink uses what's called a markup language — HTML. There's a little string of code. And then you put the address of where you want to send the person. It's actually remarkably easy to learn how to do. And so, the whole range of references to information elsewhere on the internet is the domain of the hyperlink. Back when I was in school — this is before people had wide access to the internet — if I was going to do a research paper, I would have to physically walk to the library, and if they had the book that you needed, great. You sometimes had to send out for it, so the process could take weeks. And it's kind of crazy to think about that now, because, like all great innovations, it's not long after we get access to something that we start to take it for granted. Back in 1945, there was this guy, Vannevar Bush. He was working for the US government, and one of the ideas that he put forth was, "Wow, humans are creating so much information, and we can't keep track of all the books that we've read or the connections between important ideas." And he had this idea called the "memex," where you could put together a personal library of all of the books and articles that you have access to. And that idea of connecting sources captured people's imaginations. Later, in the 1960s, Ted Nelson launches Project Xanadu, and he said, "Well, what if it wasn't just limited to the things that I have? What if I could connect ideas across a larger body of work?" In 1982, researchers at the University of Maryland developed a system they called HyperTIES. They were the first to use text itself as a link marker. They figured out that this blue link on a gray background was going to work really well in terms of contrast, and people would be able to see it. Apple invented HyperCard in 1987. You had these stacks of cards, and you could create links in between the cards. HyperCard actually created the ability to jump around in a story. These kinds of notions of nonlinear storytelling got a huge boost when the hyperlink came along, because it gave people the opportunity to influence the narrative. These ideas and inventions, among others, inspired Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. The hyperlink almost feels like a LEGO block, this very basic building block to a very complex web of connections that exists all around the world. Because of the way that hyperlinks were first constructed, they were intended to be not only used by many people, but created by many people. To me, it's one of the most democratic designs ever created. |
The Great Migration and the power of a single decision | {0: 'The author of "The Warmth of Other Suns," the story of the Great Migration, Isabel Wilkerson is a Pulitzer-winning journalist who uses narrative history to bring to light our shared humanity.'} | TEDWomen 2017 | Imagine with me this scene. It's a scene that played out in nearly all of our families. It's a scene in which a young person, somewhere in our family tree, somewhere in our lineage had a heartbreaking decision to make. It was a decision to leave all that they had known. And all of the people that they had loved and to set out for a place far, far away that they had never seen in hopes that life might be better. Migration is usually a young person's endeavor. It's the kind of thing that you do when you're on the cusp of life. And so, there is, in all of our families, this young person somewhere in our background. That person is standing at a dock, about to board a ship that will cross the Atlantic or the Pacific Ocean. That person is loading up a truck that will cross the Rio Grande. Or that person is standing at a railroad platform about to board a train that will cross rivers and mountains out of the Jim Crow South to what they hope will be freedom in the North. And there, with this young person as they are about to board that ship, that boat, that truck, that train, are the people who raised them. Their mother, their father, their aunt, their uncle, their grandparents, whoever it might have been who had gotten them to this point. Those older people were not going to be able to make the crossing with them. And as they looked into the eyes of the people who had raised them, there was no guarantee that they would ever see them alive again. Remember, there was no Skype, no e-mail, no cell phones not even reliable long-distance telephone service. And even if there had been, many of the people that they were leaving did not even have telephones. This was going to be a complete break from all that they knew and all of the people that they loved. And the very next time that they might hear anything about the people who had raised them might be a telegram saying, "Your father has passed away." Or, "Your mother is very, very ill. You must return home quickly if you are to see her alive again." That is the magnitude of the sacrifice that had to have happened in nearly all of our families just for us to be here. A single decision that changed the course of families and lineages and countries and history to the current day. One of these migration streams stands out in ways that we may not realize. It was called the Great Migration. It was the outpouring of six million African Americans from the Jim Crow South to the cities of the North and West, from the time of World War I until the 1970s. It stands out because this was the first time in American history that American citizens had to flee the land of their birth just to be recognized as the citizens that they had always been. No other group of Americans has had to act like immigrants in order to be recognized as citizens. So this great migration was not a move. It was actually a seeking of political asylum within the borders of one's own country. They were defecting a caste system known as Jim Crow. It was an artificial hierarchy in which everything that you could and could not do was based upon what you looked like. This caste system was so arcane that it was actually against the law for a black person and a white person to merely play checkers together in Birmingham. You could go to jail if you were caught playing checkers with a person of a different race. Someone must have seen a black person and a white person playing checkers with someone in some town square. And maybe the wrong person was winning or they were having too good of a time, but whatever it was that this person saw, with this black person and this white person playing checkers, they felt the entire foundation of Southern civilization was in peril. And decided that it was worth taking the time to write this down as a law. This caste system was so arcane that in courtrooms throughout the South there was actually a black Bible and an altogether separate white Bible to swear to tell the truth on in court. The very word of God was segregated in the caste system of the Jim Crow South. The same sacred object could not be touched by hands of different races. This artificial hierarchy, because it goes against human desires to be free, required a tremendous amount of violence to maintain. Such that every four days, somewhere in the American South, every four days an African American was lynched for some perceived breach of protocol in this caste system in the decades leading up to the start of the Great Migration. This caste system had been put in place for many, many reasons. But one of them was to maintain the economic order of the South, which required not just a supply of cheap labor but an oversupply of cheap labor to work at the will of the land. This Great Migration began when the North had a labor problem. The North had a labor problem because it had been relying on cheap labor from Europe — immigrants from Europe — to work the factories and the foundries and the steel mills. But during World War I, migration from Europe came to a virtual halt. And so the North had a labor problem. And so the North decided to go and find the cheapest labor in the land which meant African Americans in the South, many of whom were not even being paid for their hard work. Many of them were working for the right to live on the land that they were farming. They were sharecroppers and not even being paid. So they were ripe for recruitment. But it turned out that the South did not take kindly to this poaching of its cheap labor. The South actually did everything it could to keep the people from leaving. They would arrest people from the railroad platforms. Remember, putatively free American citizens. They would arrest them from their train seats. And when there were too many people to arrest, they would wave the train on through so that people who had been hoping and saving and praying for the chance to get to freedom had to figure out: How now will we get out? And as they made their way out of the South, away from Jim Crow, they followed three beautifully predictable streams as is the case in any migration throughout human history. In this particular case, there were three streams. One was the migration along the East Coast from Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia to Washington DC, to Philadelphia, New Jersey, New York and on up the East coast. There was the Midwest stream, which carried people from Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and Arkansas to Chicago, to Detroit, to Cleveland and the entire Midwest. And then there was the West Coast stream, which carried people from Louisiana and Texas out to California. And when they really wanted to get away, they went to Seattle. And when they really, really wanted to get away, they went to Alaska, the farthest possible point within the borders of the United States from Jim Crow South. Before the Great Migration began, 90 percent of all African Americans were living in the South. Nearly held captive in the South. But by the time this Great Migration was over, nearly half were living all over the rest of the country. So this ended up being nearly a complete redistribution of part of an entire people. This Great Migration was the first time in American history that the lowest caste people signaled that they had options and were willing to take them. That had not happened in the three centuries in which African Americans had been on that soil at that time. It had not happened in 12 generations of enslavement that preceded nearly a century of Jim Crow. How many "greats" do you have to add to the word "grandparent" to begin to imagine how long enslavement lasted in the United States? Secondly, this Great Migration was the first time in American history that the lowest caste people actually had a chance to choose for themselves what they would do with their God-given talents and where they would pursue them. Think about those cotton fields and those rice plantations and those tobacco fields and those sugar plantations. On those sugar plantations, and on those tobacco fields, and on those rice plantations, and on those cotton fields were opera singers, jazz musicians, playwrights, novelists, surgeons, attorneys, accountants, professors, journalists. And how do we know that? We know that because that is what they and their children and now their grandchildren and even great-grandchildren have often chosen to become once they had the chance to choose for themselves what they would do with their God-given talents. Without the Great Migration, there might not have been a Toni Morrison as we now know her to be. Her parents were from Alabama and from Georgia. They migrated to Ohio, where their daughter would get to do something that we all take for granted at this point, but which was against the law and against protocol for African Americans at the time that she would have been growing up in the South, had they stayed. And that is just to walk into a library and take out a library book. Merely by making the single decision to leave, her parents assured that their daughter would get access to books. And if you're going to become a Nobel laureate, it helps to get a book now and then. You know, it helps. Music as we know it was reshaped by the Great Migration. As they came North, they brought with them, on their hearts and in their memories, the music that had sustained the ancestors — the blues music, the spirituals and the gospel music that had sustained them through the generations. And they converted this music into whole new genres of music. And got the chance to record this music, this new music that they were creating, and to spread it throughout the world. Without the Great Migration, "Motown" would not have existed. The founder, Berry Gordy, his parents were from Georgia. They migrated to Detroit. And when he got to be a grown man, he decided he wanted to go into music. But he didn't have the wherewithal to go all over the country looking for the best talent, and it turned out he didn't have to. It turned out that there he was, surrounded by children of the Great Migration whose parents had brought this music up with them during the journey. And among those children were these three girls, there was Mary Wilson, Florence Ballard and there was a third one: Diana Ross. We might not know Diana Ross' name had there been no Great Migration. Because like a lot of Americans and a lot of human beings in general, she might not have existed because her parents might not have met. Her mother was from Alabama, father from West Virginia, they migrated to Detroit, different years, met, married, had her and her siblings, and thus a legend was born. Jazz was a creation of the Great Migration. And one of the greatest gifts of the Great Migration. Starting with Louis Armstrong, who was born in Louisiana and migrated on the Illinois Central Railroad to Chicago, where he got the chance to build on the talent that was within him all along. Miles Davis. His parents were from Arkansas. They migrated to southern Illinois, where he would get the chance to build on the talents that were within him all along but which could have gone fallow in the cotton country of Arkansas. John Coltrane. He migrated at the age of 16 from North Carolina to Philadelphia, where, upon arrival in Philadelphia, he got his first alto sax. And there are lovers of jazz who cannot imagine a world without John Coltrane having gotten a hold of a saxophone. Thelonious Monk. Michael Jackson. Jesse Owens. Prince. August Wilson. Richard Wright. Ralph Ellison. Michelle Obama. These are all a few of the millions of people who were products of the single decision to migrate. The people of the Great Migration met with tremendous resistance in the North. And they were not able to defeat all social injustice. But one person added to another person, added to another person, multiplied by millions, were able to become the advance guard of the civil rights movement. One person added to another person, added to another person, multiplied by millions, acting on a single decision, were able to change the region that they had been forced to flee. They had more power in leaving than by staying. By their actions, these people who had absolutely nothing were able to do what a president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, was not able to do. These people, by their actions, were able to do what the Emancipation Proclamation could not do. These people, by their actions, were able to do what the powers that be, North and South, could not or would not do. They freed themselves. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
Cómo darle credibilidad a tu voz | {0: 'Emma lleva más de 20 años investigando y enseñando cómo utilizar la voz para hablar en público. Es periodista y profesora titular en el Departamento de Comunicación de la UPF, doctora en Comunicación y doctora en Psicología. Es autora de más de 12 libros y 70 artículos científicos sobre la voz y el habla, y tiene una dilatada experiencia trabajando en la radio.'} | TEDxMalagueta | (Pre-recorded voice) In order to get a job, convince a client, win over our partner, in short, to persuade, the voice is a decisive factor. Well, I think this way of speaking wouldn't have been credible or very convincing, right? And that's because I haven't correctly combined the qualities of the voice. What a mess! Meaning, I haven't played the right piano keys. The voice has a very powerful influence in our day to day. Basically, because it's the vehicle conveying the message. But what happens, since the problem arises if we don't use it correctly, what can happen is what's happening here: the goods don't get there. Meaning, in the end, the message doesn't arrive. That's why it's important to know it, that's why it's important to exercise it. And that's my goal today here. explaining how you need to manipulate it in order to achieve your goal. That is, for the message to arrive, to persuade. And I'll give you some strategies for being credible. So, let's start at the beginning. We'll get help from our voice box over here. The voice has four qualities, which are: the intensity, the tone, the timbre, and the duration. Let's start with the first, which is the simplest: the intensity. What is intensity? Well, it's the volume of our voice. Meaning whether I speak more quietly or whether I speak more loudly. It's simple to understand. On what does the intensity depend? Very simply, it depends on our breathing. Yes, I said that right, it depends on our breathing. Breathing is the foundation of our voice. And intensity is nothing more than the force with which we push air towards the vocal cords. It's as simple as that. And who's responsible for pushing that air, for creating that force? Well, it's an organ we have here in the abdominal area, called the diaphragm. And what are you going to see in action right now, in this short video? You are going to see, this is an exhalation. And when we inhale, the lungs fill up and the diaphragm goes down. Afterwards, the diaphragm is responsible for expelling that air out of the lungs. So that's what exerts the force in the end. For you to understand that force, or for you to feel that force, let's all do an exercise together. First, I'll explain it to you and then we'll see if we can all do it. The idea is that we're going to put our hands on the abdominal area, here, where the diaphragm is. And we are going to take a deep breath. Trying to carry the air to the lower part of the lungs. Let's take a breath in a moment and I'll count to three, we'll blow out. Just like that. Okay, are you ready? Let's do it. It's easy. Let's place our hands on the abdominal area like this, everyone. We're going to take a breath in a moment. Good, pause. I count three... One, two, three. Well done! You did it perfectly, without practicing. That force that you've felt, is the strength of the diaphragm towards the vocal cords. So, if that force is low, it's small, then we are going to lower our intensity to down here. What we'll have as a result is low intensity. (Pre-recorded voice, low intensity) The voice has a powerful influence. If we lift the circuit board up and go to high intensity... (Pre-recorded voice, high intensity) The voice has a powerful influence. There is a small difference, right? We've gone from 43 decibels to 79. Intensity is measured in decibels, no more than the volume of the voice. With which there is a perceptible difference. Here comes the question: If I want to appear credible, what will I have to use? Low intensity, or high intensity? Well, if we think about the voice reflecting our personality, if we think about the voice reflecting our state of mind, and we think that, of course, if I suddenly feel sad, very sad, I'm going to use low intensity. If I'm bored, too. And people who are introverted use low intensity. So of course, if I want to seem credible, of course that won't be the intensity that I have to use. I have to use an energetic intensity. It has to sound loud and clear. I'm not saying shout. I'm saying an energetic intensity, more or less this, what I'm doing now. Therefore, this would be the first tip: energetic intensity. Let's go to the second of our qualities. The second quality is the tone. The tone of the voice is difficult to manage, but it's simple to understand. Once the diaphragm pushes the lungs, as you have seen, what it does is expel the air. Well, that air comes up here, to the neck. Inside the neck is the larynx, and inside the larynx are the vocal cords, which vibrate to the passage of that air. Oh, my God! Those are vocal cords? If the image impresses you a little, I can swear to you that you all have ones like these in your body, that vibrate like this. Alright. What does having a deeper tone or a more high-pitched tone depend on? Easy to understand. I have two ropes here. If I move them with the same force, that is, with the same intensity, which one moves faster? This one, right? It moves faster because it is shorter and because it's thinner. So, what does you having an average tone of voice or another depend? Well, it's simply the length and thickness of your vocal cords. When they're shorter, they will vibrate faster, so, you'll have a higher pitched tone. And for larger ones, men generally have a deeper tone, they will speak more deeply. It's as simple as that. But of course, we don't speak in just one tone. This is our middle tone, let's say it's the one we use in our day to day, most frequently. But of course, we use a range of tones when we speak. There are differences between them. We'll see what happens if I lower the tone. Let's see what it sounds like. (Pre-recorded voice, low tone) The voice has a powerful influence. On the other hand, if I raise it up... (Pre-recorded voice, high tone) The voice has a powerful influence. There is also a perceptible difference. We have gone from 100 to 190 Hz. It's simple to understand. It's simply that the vocal cords vibrate more slowly if it's deep, or more quickly if it's high-pitched. So, what do you think? If we want to sound credible, what kind of tone do we have to use? Low, or high-pitched? Well, all the studies we've done indicate that, in order to be perceived as attractive and credible, we have to use, as you see in the graph, a low tone rather than a high-pitched tone. And because of that, many professionals and many politicians train their voice specifically to lower their voice, to use that lower tessitura of your voice. I've brought to you the case of Margaret Thatcher, who trained her voice for a long time, to achieve that goal. Margaret Thatcher: (high-pitched tone) Oh, very much so. I've done a good deal, but speaking in the House of Commons is quite different. It's a unique experience. Margaret Thatcher: (low tone) I think we shall have to make up our minds about the Cabinet very quickly because, otherwise, the press will discuss it all for me. Because of course, an Iron Lady talking like this— It wouldn't make much sense. And this is what she did, trained her voice for this. Whenever we train the voice, we must use an expert, because if we don't, we can damage the vocal cords. So, we have a range of tones, we have a piano, we have to play them in different ways. When we talk, we use that combination of tones, and that combination of tones is what we know as intonation. Intonation is relatively complicated to understand, but I'll give you two tips. The first is that you can't be monotonous when you speak, because if you're monotonous, then no one will listen to you. Basically. In order to try to modify that monotony, let's try to start the phrase in a high-pitched tone and end in a low tone. As you can hear in this example. (Pre-recorded voice, high-pitched to low tone) The voice has a powerful influence. Good. It's a way of changing the tones. What we can never do when we speak in public, when we have a presentation, is sing, because if I sing, I leave everything up, and that doesn't sound credible. It's simple to understand. And you'll see it in this example. (Pre-recorded voice, higher intonation) The voice has a powerful influence. It's as if something is missing! Why are you staying up there? We always have to lower the message down, to be credible. (Pre-recorded voice, lower intonation) The voice has a powerful influence. And here is where it is competent, it is credible, sounds sure, right? Let there be no doubt about this. So, always remember not to be monotonous, let's try going up to the higher pitch at the beginning, going down to the low pitch at the end. And of course, the idea is not to sing. Well, when it comes to tone, what happens is many people say, "Having a low tone, I'm already perceived as credible." And I'm not sure that's true. (Low pitch, closed timbre) It must have been making you sleepy. I believe that this is not an attractive voice. But it is a voice in a low tone. And that's because Marge Simpson lacks our third quality: timbre. The timbre of the voice is very easy to understand. It is the combination of the sound that comes out of the vocal cords, plus the one that comes out from our sound box. What is this sound box? The face, for hearing ourselves, this face we have. Having a bigger nose, a smaller mouth, etc. That, in the end, gives a specific result in your voice. And that's why your voice is unique. The sound of your voice is unique. It's like your fingerprint, in a way. So, if my voice is unique, I'm not going to change my nose, so this is the way my voice is. And no, obviously not. Because if I modify the resonance organs, meaning my lips, my mouth, my tongue, etc. I'm going to get a completely different sound. Let's focus on that. Let's do a closed timbre, meaning that the speaker closes his mouth a lot. (Low pitch, closed timbre) The voice has a powerful influence. And we're just going to open it later. (Pre-recorded voice, open timbre) The voice has a powerful influence. Only the width of the mouth has been modified. And that already influences the sound. What do we need to have to be credible? Obviously, open our mouths enough, so that our voice resonates well. So, what can we do? Well, we can do some exercises. Let's see. First, let's inflate the cheeks... Right. Left. Very good. Now, let's make another! More fun, more optimistic. Let's make a big smile, pulling the corners of or mouths backwards. Let's smile. And let's close. You're very handsome. Just like that, perfect. We can also pull on the corners directly. Like this. And this is how we stretch. It's important to warm up these facial muscles for speaking. They're the ones that have to move in the end. So think about it. And the last and most complicated, please do this at home, alone, so that no one sees you. I'm going to put four fingers in my mouth. Yes, I'm sorry, the fingers, in the mouth. Vertically, like this. And we are going count from 1 to 10. Count with me: One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Very good. Perfect. You're all lovely, really, but don't do it with anybody around. Do it at home. Try it before and after. You'll see, really, I promise, that, just before, the voice is very muffled, very closed. And then suddenly, you hear everything great. So, quite simply, do this before placing yourself in front of an audience, making a presentation, or speaking publicly, in general. Perfect! Let's go with our last quality, which is the duration. Duration is not an acoustic quality, but an expressive one. It's important that I speak slowly or that I speak fast. And if not, let's test it. I'll lower the terminal here to the slow one. (Pre-recorded voice, slow duration) The voice has a powerful influence. And we'll raise it to the fast one. (Pre-recorded voice, fast duration) The voice has a powerful influence. What do you think? To be credible, what do we need? Well, we think that a person talks slowly when they're bored. On the other hand, if I'm super excited, I speak quickly. Okay, you get the idea. The studies we've done, and many others worldwide, indicate that a person, in order to be perceived as credible, has to use a speed tending toward fast. People who speak a little faster than usual are perceived as more intelligent, more dynamic, more extroverted. And note that I said a little faster than usual. I didn't say very fast. If you talk very fast, I don't understand you, you make me nervous. I didn't say very fast. I said tending to fast, or a little bit faster, which is what I am doing now. Maybe the best advice I can give you, in this context, is that you alter your speed when you speak. The most important thing is said slowly. What is unimportant is said fast. That contrast is what makes listeners pay more attention and also helps them understand. So that is important. Okay, we now have our four qualities. Let's assume now, and this is an important point, because the voice is not just one, as I've been saying, it's a set, it's a combination. Let's suppose that we we would like to express joy. Actually, you see here that we have the perfect combination. We have a high intensity, we have a sharp tone, we have an open timbre, meaning we smiled. The smile is very perceptible, and a quick duration. And this would be the result. (Pre-recorded voice) The voice has a powerful influence. Let's suppose now, that we would like to express sadness, which is the complete opposite. In this case what we would do to begin with, would be to lower the intensity. We had to lower the tone to deep. We'd have to close our mouths. And moreover, we would have to talk slowly. And this would be the result. (Pre-recorded voice) The voice has a powerful influence. You're already wondering, this is the crux of the issue: What do I have to do to be credible? We have already seen it. We must have an energetic intensity, like we said. We must have a rather serious tone with modulated intonation. We need an open timbre, and also a speed tending toward fast. The result could be more or less this. (Pre-recorded voice) The voice has a powerful influence. Once we've already established that we have the credibility combination, let's see if we can fix that bad start we had in this presentation. (Pre-recorded voice) In order to get a job, convince a client, win over our partner, in short, to persuade, the voice is a decisive factor. I hope we've achieved it. The voice is the most important instrument that you have for communicating. It's the one that has the most influence on your being perceived as competent and credible. Today, I hope that you know how to do that a little bit better. Thanks so much for your time. (Applause) |
Why must artists be poor? | {0: 'TED Resident Hadi Eldebek is a musician, educator and entrepreneur who creates artistic, cultural, and educational projects around the world.'} | TED Residency | I come from a family of five brothers, all scientists and engineers. A few years ago, I sent them the following email: "Dear brothers, I hope this message finds you well. I am emailing to let you know that I'm dropping out of my master's program in engineering to pursue a career as a full-time musician. All that I ask from you is not to worry about me." Brother number one replied. He was encouraging but a bit skeptical. He said, "I wish you the best of luck. You're going to need it." (Laughter) Brother number two was a little bit more skeptical. He said, "Don't do it! This will be the worst mistake of your life. Find a real career." (Laughter) Well, the rest of my brothers were so enthusiastic about my decision, they didn't even respond. (Laughter) I know that the skepticism coming from my brothers is out of care and concern for me. They were worried. They thought it would be difficult to make it as an artist, that it will be a challenge. And you know what? They were right. It is such a challenge to be a full-time artist. I have so many friends who need to have a second job as a plan B in order to pay for the bills, except that plan B sometimes becomes their plan A. And it's not just my friends and I who experience this. The US Census Bureau states that only 10 percent of art school graduates end up working as full-time artists. The other 90 percent, they change careers, they work in marketing, sales, education and other fields. But this is not news, right? We almost expect the artist to be a struggling artist. But why should we expect that? I read an article in the "Huffington Post" saying that four years ago, the European Union began the world's largest ever arts funding initiative. Creative Europe will give 2.4 billion dollars to over 300,000 artists. In contrast, the US budget for our National Endowment for the Arts, the largest single funder for the arts across the United States, is merely 146 million dollars. To put things into perspective, the US budget for the military marching bands alone is almost twice as much as the entire NEA. Another striking image comes from Brendan McMahon for the "Huffington Post," saying that out of the one trillion dollar budget for military and defense-related spending, if only 0.05 percent were allocated to the arts, we would be able to pay for 20 full-time symphony orchestras at 20 million dollars apiece, and give over 80,000 artists an annual salary of 50,000 dollars each. If that's only 0.05 percent, imagine what a full one percent could do. Now, I know we live in a capitalist society, and profits matter a lot. So let's look at it from a financial angle, shall we? The US nonprofit arts industry generates more than 166 billion dollars in economic activity, it employs 5.7 million people and it returns 12.6 billion dollars in tax revenue. But this is only a financial angle, right? We all know that the arts is way more than just an economic value. The arts brings meaning to life. It's the spirit of our culture. It brings people together and it supports creativity and social cohesion. But if the arts contributes this much to our economy, why then do we still invest so little in arts and artists? Why do more than 80 percent of our schools nationwide still experience budget cuts in arts education programs? What is it about the value of arts and artists that we still don't understand? I believe the system is flawed and far from being fair, and I want to help change that. I want to live in a society where artists are more valued and have more cultural and financial support so they can focus on creating arts instead of being forced to drive Ubers or take corporate jobs they'd rather not have. There are other sources of income for artists, however. There are private foundations, grants and patrons who give money, except a vast majority of artists don't know about these opportunities. On one side you have institutions and people with money. On the other side you have artists seeking funding, but the artists don't know about the people with the money, and the people with the money don't necessarily know about the artists out there. This is why I am very excited to share "Grantpa," an online platform that uses technology to match artists with grants and funding opportunities in a way that is easy, fast and less intimidating. Grantpa is only one step towards solving an existing problem of funding inequality, but we need to work collectively on multiple fronts to reevaluate how we view the artists in our society. Do we think of arts as a luxury or a necessity? Do we understand what goes on in the day-to-day life of an artist, or do we still believe that artists, no matter how struggling they are, are happy simply because they're following their passion? In a few years, I plan to send my brothers the following email: "Dear brothers, I hope this message finds you well. I am emailing to let you know that I am doing great and so are hundreds of thousands of artists who are being valued more culturally and financially and getting enough funding to focus on their crafts and create more art. I appreciate all of your support. Couldn't have done it without you." Thank you. (Applause) |
"my mama" / "BLACK BANANA" | {0: "Born in Japan's Hyogo prefecture, Rei spent her childhood years in New York and now sings her unique, self-penned lyrics in both Japanese and English. "} | TED Salon Brightline Initiative | (Guitar music starts) I've been looking Several days now Where did they go? Where did they go? My mama told me long ago I've lost so many precious things, I know They won't be back Where did they go? My mama told me long ago Ain't nobody's ever gonna tell me to abandon my old friend Happy days, walking on the shore Happy days, walking on the shore Happy days, walking on the shore Ain't nobody's ever gonna tell me to abandon my good memories at all I've seen so many pretty things They don't mean a thing now Listen to the song My mama told me long ago Ain't nobody's ever gonna tell me to doubt my good old days Happy days, walking on the shore Happy days, walking on the shore Happy days, walking on the shore Ain't nobody's ever gonna tell me to abandon my good memories at all Abandon my good memories at all Abandon my good memories at all (Music ends) (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you for giving me the opportunity to perform tonight at TED New York. I've been a dedicated TED fan and viewer, and also, I actually used to live in Manhattan when I was younger, so New York is like a second home to me, and it's great to be back. The song I just performed was called "my mama," and the next song I'm going to perform is another original song of mine called "BLACK BANANA." This song I wrote about the importance of being patient with your dreams. Because I think commitment will always be rewarded. Just like fruit ripens when the time is right. So it's my interpretation of building the future. (Guitar music starts) Clap your hands. One! Two! One, two, one, two, three, four. Sitting here, killing time, I've been doing it all day I've been always smart when it comes to gettin' away Got a soda pop fizzin' hard in my empty brain When the time is right I'll move alright so don't get too uptight Silly girls in bathing suits cleaning cars on Sundays They're living a lie don't make as fool of yourself too soon Lining my bananas on the window sill to ripen When the time is right I'll move alright so don't get too uptight Bananananana sekasanaide Bananananana-ri yuki makase Bananananana mō ato chotto dake jukusu made Black Banana Black Banana Banananananana Remember last December when we went to get some pizza Was a brat, was running fast to get home by my curfew Silly me, tripping quick, I was almost killed by a honker When the time is right I'll move alright so don't get too uptight Bananananana isoganaide Bananananana-ri yuki makase Bananananana mō ato chotto dake jukusu made Black Banana Black Banana Banananananana Bananananana Don't push me baby Bananananana All I want is leeway Bananananana You gotta be patient for the fruit to ripen Black Banana Black Banana Banananana Bananananana isoganaide Bananananana-naru yoni nare Bananananana wagamamana mi ga jukusu made Black Banana Black Banana Bananananana Bananananana Banananananana (Music ends) Thank you. (Applause) (Guitar music) (Music ends) (Applause) |
What we can do about the culture of hate | {0: 'Sally Kohn searches for common ground among political foes by focusing on the compassion and humanity in everyone.\r\n'} | TEDWomen 2017 | So people tell me I'm a nice person ... to the point where it's part of my personal and professional identity that I'm so nice and able to get along with anyone, even my most fierce opponents. It's like my "thing," it's what I'm known for. (Laughter) But what no one knows ... is that I was a bully. Honestly, I didn't think about it much myself. I buried the memories for years, and even still, a lot of it's really hazy. Denial, by the way, apparently is also one of my things. (Laughter) But the more people started to praise me for being a liberal who could get along with conservatives, and the more I wrote articles about being nice and gave talks about being nice, the more I felt this hypocrisy creeping up inside me. What if I was actually really mean? When I was 10 years old, there was a girl in my class at school named Vicky. (Sigh) And I tormented her ... mercilessly. I mean, everyone did. Even the teachers picked on her. It doesn't make it any better, does it? Vicky was clearly a troubled kid. She would hit herself and give herself bloody noses and she had hygiene problems — she had big hygiene problems. But instead of helping this girl, who was plainly suffering from hardships in her life ... we called her "Sticky Vicky." I called her "Sticky Vicky." My clearest memory is standing in the empty hallway outside the fifth grade classrooms waiting for Vicky to come out of the bathroom, and I have a clipboard and a pen and a survey I've made up, asking about shampoo preferences, like I'm doing a study for science class or something. And when Vicky comes out of the bathroom, I pounce on her and I ask her what shampoo she uses. Now, to put this in perspective, I can't remember the names of my teachers, I can't remember the names of any of the books I read that year, I pretty much can't remember anything from fifth grade, but I remember that Vicky told me she used White Rain shampoo. Clear as yesterday, like it just happened. And as classes let out, I ran down the hall shouting at all the other kids, "Sticky Vicky uses White Rain shampoo. Don't use White Rain shampoo or you'll smell like Sticky Vicky." I forgot about this memory for a long time. When I finally started remembering it, I immediately needed to know more. I reached out to friends and eventually social media, and I did everything I could to try to find Vicky. I needed to know that she was OK, and that I hadn't ruined her life. (Sigh) But what I quickly realized was I wasn't just trying to figure out what happened to Vicky. I was trying to figure out what happened to me. When I was 10 years old, I treated another human being like some worthless other ... like I was better than her, and she was garbage. What kind of a nice person does that? I mean, I know I was only a kid, but not all kids do that. Most kids don't do that, right? So, what if I wasn't nice after all? I was really just a hateful monster. Then I started to notice myself having these mean impulses, thinking mean thoughts and wanting to say them. Admittedly, most of my mean thoughts were about conservatives. (Laughter) But not just conservatives. I also caught myself thinking mean things about mushy, centrist liberals and greedy Wall Street bankers and Islamophobes and slow drivers, because I really hate slow drivers. (Laughter) And as I'd catch myself in these moments of hypocrisy, either I was just noticing them or they were getting worse, especially in the last few years. And as I felt more hateful — rageful, really — I noticed the world around me seemed to be getting more hateful, too. Like there was this steady undercurrent of hate bubbling up all around us and increasingly overflowing. So the plus side, I guess, is that I realized that hate was not just my problem, which is like, the most selfish plus side ever — (Laughter) because now instead of just my own hate and cruelty to try to figure out, I had a whole world of hate I wanted to unravel and understand and fix. So I did what all overly intellectual people do when they have a problem that they want to understand, and I wrote a book. (Laughter) I wrote a book about hate. Spoiler alert: I'm against it. (Laughter) Now at this point, you might be thinking to yourself, "Why are y'all worried about hate? You didn't hate Vicky. Bullying isn't hate." Isn't it? Gordon Allport, the psychologist who pioneered the study of hate in the early 1900s, developed what he called a "scale of prejudice." At one end are things like genocide and other bias-motivated violence. But at the other end are things like believing that your in-group is inherently superior to some out-group, or avoiding social interaction with those others. Isn't that all hate? I mean, it wasn't an accident that I was a rich kid picking on a poor kid, or that Vicky, it turns out, would eventually end up being gay. Poor kids and gay kids are more likely to be bullied, even by kids who also end up being gay. I know there was a lot going on in my little 10-year-old mind. I'm not saying hate was the only reason I picked on Vicky or even that I was consciously hateful or anything, but the fact is, the people we discriminate against in our public policies and in our culture are also the groups of people most likely to be bullied in school. That is not just a coincidence. That's hate. I am defining hate in a broad way because I think we have a big problem. And we need to solve all of it, not just the most extremes. So for instance, we probably all agree that marching down the street, chanting about you should take away rights from some group of people because of their skin color or their gender, we'd all agree that's hate, right? OK. What if you believe that group of people is inferior, but you don't say it? Is that hate? Or what if you believe that group of people is inferior but you aren't aware that you believe it — what's known as implicit bias. Is that hate? I mean they all have the same roots, don't they? In the historic patterns of racism and sexism that have shaped our history and still infect our society today. Isn't it all hate? I'm not saying they're the same thing, just like I am not saying that being a bully is as bad as being a Nazi, just like I'm not saying that being a Nazi is the same thing as punching a Nazi ... (Laughter) But hating a Nazi is still hate, right? What about hating someone who isn't as enlightened as you? See, what I learned is that we all are against hate and we all think hate is a problem. We think it's their problem, not our problem. They're hateful. I mean, if I think the people who didn't vote like me are stupid racist monsters who don't deserve to call themselves Americans, alright, fine, I'm not being nice, I get it. (Laughter) I'm not hateful, I'm just right, right? (Laughter) Wrong. We all hate. And I do not mean that in some abstract, generic sense. I mean all of us ... me and you. That sanctimonious pedestal of superiority on which we all place ourselves, that they are hateful and we are not, is a manifestation of the essential root of hate: that we are fundamentally good and they are not, which is what needs to change. So in trying to understand and solve hate, I read every book and every research study I could find, but I also went and talked to some former Nazis and some former terrorists and some former genocidal killers, because I figured if they could figure out how to escape hate, surely the rest of us could. Let me give you just one example of the former terrorist I spent time with in the West Bank. When Bassam Aramin was 16 years old, he tried to blow up an Israeli military convoy with a grenade. He failed, fortunately, but he was still sentenced to seven years in prison. When he was in prison, they showed a film about the Holocaust. Up until that point, Bassam had thought the Holocaust was mostly a myth. He went to go watch the film because he thought he would enjoy seeing Jews get killed. But when he saw what really happened, he broke down crying. And eventually, after prison, Bassam went on to get a master's degree in Holocaust studies and he founded an organization where former Palestinian combatants and Israeli combatants come together, work together, try to find common ground. By his own account, Bassam used to hate Israelis, but through knowing Israelis and learning their stories and working together for peace, he overcame his hate. Bassam says he still doesn't hate Israelis, even after the Israeli military — shot and killed his [10]-year-old daughter, Abir, while she was walking to school. (Sigh) Bassam even forgave the soldier who killed his daughter. That soldier, he taught me, was just a product of the same hateful system as he was. If a former terrorist ... if a terrorist can learn to stop hating and still not hate when their child is killed, surely the rest of us can stop our habits of demeaning and dehumanizing each other. And I will tell you there are stories like Bassam's all over the world, plus study after study after study that says, no, we are neither designed nor destined as human beings to hate, but rather taught to hate by the world around us. I promise you, none of us pops out of the womb hating black people or Republicans. There is nothing in our DNA that makes us hate Muslims or Mexicans. For better or for worse, we are all a product of the culture around us. And the good news is, we're also the ones who shape that culture, which means we can change it. The first step is starting to recognize the hate inside ourselves. We need to catch ourselves and our hateful thoughts in all their forms in all of us ... and work to challenge our ideas and assumptions. That doesn't happen overnight, I am telling you right here, it is a lifelong journey, but it's one we all need to take. And then second: if we want to challenge the hate in our societies, we need to promote policies and institutions and practices that connect us as communities. Literally, like integrated neighborhoods and schools. That by the way is the reason to support integration. Not just because it's the right thing to do, but because integration systematically combats hate. There are studies that teenagers who participate in racially integrated classes and activities reduce their racial bias. And when little kids go to racially integrated kindergartens and elementary schools — they develop less bias to begin with. But the fact is in so many ways and in so many places around our world, we are separated from each other. In the United States, for instance, three-quarters of white people don't have any non-white friends. So in addition to promoting those proactive solutions, the other thing we need to do is upend the hate in our institutions and our policies that perpetuate dehumanization and difference and otherizing and hate, like systems of sexual harassment and sexual assault in the workplace, or our deeply racially imbalanced and deeply racially biased criminal "justice" system. We need to change that. Again, it will not happen overnight. It needs to happen. And then ... when we connect together in these connection spaces, facilitated by connection systems, we need to change the way we talk to each other and connect with one another and relate with generosity and open-mindedness and kindness and compassion and not hate. And that's it. That's it. (Applause) I have solved it all, right? That's it. That is pretty much — there's a few details — but that's pretty much all we have to do. It's not that complicated, right? But it's hard. The hate that we feel towards certain groups of people because of who they are or what they believe is so ingrained in our minds and in our society that it can feel inevitable and impossible to change. Change is possible. Just look at the terrorist who became a peace activist. Or look at the bully who learned to apologize to her victim. The entire time I was traveling around the Middle East and Rwanda and across the United States, hearing these unbelievable stories of people in communities who had left entire histories of hate behind, I was still looking for Vicky. It was so hard find her that I hired a private investigator and he found her. I mean, he sort of found her. The truth is, it became clear that the person I'm calling Vicky had gone to extraordinary lengths to hide her identity. But anyway, a year after I began my journey, I wrote Vicky an apology. And a few months later, she wrote back. (Sigh) I'm not going to lie, I wanted to be forgiven. I wasn't. (Sigh) She offered me sort of conditional forgiveness. What she wrote was ... "Messages such as yours cannot absolve you of your past actions. The only way to do that is to improve the world, prevent others from behaving in similar ways and foster compassion." And Vicky's right. Which is why I'm here. Thank you. (Applause) |
Can I have your brain? The quest for truth on concussions and CTE | {0: 'Dr. Chris Nowinski is leading a global conversation on concussions, CTE and the future of sports.'} | TEDxBeaconStreet | I'm Chris Nowinski, and odds are if you've met me in the last five years I've asked you, after a few minutes, a bit of an odd question: Can I have your brain? Now, it only seems like a strange question if you don't know my story so please let me share it with you. I grew up outside of Chicago, and I was an athlete and I was very lucky to get recruited to play football at Harvard University. So that's me. And then after graduating, like most Harvard graduates, I decided I wanted to join the WWE. So that's also me. (Laughter) Sure you remember me from Monday Night Raw in 2002 and 2003, and I had a blast playing what people affectionately like to call Chris Harvard, the Ivy League snob. (Laughter) It was perfect for me. But unfortunately, I got kicked in the head by my colleague Bubba Ray Dudley, and I suffered a severe concussion. And it led to what became permanent postconcussion symptoms: constant headaches, inability to sleep, depression, feeling in a fog. And in that first year, I tried to figure out how could I make this pain go away. And I wasn't getting the answers I needed from doctors, and so I started digging into the medical literature. And I found there's this whole story about concussions that we weren't really being told. So I decided to write a book about it, called "Head Games: Football's Concussion Crisis" that came out in 2006. But in that process, I learned it's not really just about concussions. I learned about a disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE. What we used to call punch-drunk, because we only knew about it from boxers. We knew that getting hit in the head too many times with boxers would cause their brain to essentially start to rot, to degenerate. And they'd have symptoms like memory problems and problems with cognition, depression, impulse control issues, aggression. So basically, I got ... I got injured at the right time, in which the first two NFL players were studied for this disease. And it turned out they both had it. The first was Mike Webster, 50 years old, already had dementia. The second, Terry Long, 45 years old when he took his life. The medical examiner in Pittsburgh decided to look at their brains and found this disease. I wrote a chapter about it, and I thought people would make a big deal out of it. But shockingly, even when the first two cases came in positive, there was never a national news story about this, what's going on in football with these cases of CTE. So the book comes out, not a whole lot is happening, and one day I read the newspaper — November 20, 2006. I find out that Andre Waters just took his life. Those of you who know football, Andre Waters was someone I grew up watching. Former Philadelphia Eagles strong safety, [44] years old, a Division II football coach when he decided to put a gun to his head. In the article they reminded me, his nickname was Dirty Waters. He was known for leading with his head, so I thought I'm just going to look up did he ever talk about the concussions he had. And I found a quote from 1994 where Andre Waters said, "I stopped counting my concussions at 15. I wouldn't say anything, I'd just sniff smelling salts and go back out there." And I thought, I wonder if he might have CTE, too. If that might have contributed to whatever made him choose to end his life. So I ended up calling the doctor who did the first two studies, and I said, "Hey, I think you should study Andre Waters." And he said, "I'd be happy to. The problem is, the first two cases died in the county in which I work, and I could study them as part of my job. I can't do that with Andre Waters, he died in Florida. If you want me to study him, you're going to have to figure out how to get me the brain." So I said, "OK. How does one get a brain?" (Laughter) So I racked my brain and I thought, why don't I call the medical examiner who I think has the brain right now? So I called up the medical examiner in Florida, and I said, "Hey, you don't know me, but do you still have the brain of Andre Waters?" (Laughter) And he said, "Yes, I do." I said, "OK, are you going to study him for CTE?" And he said no, in fact at that time he didn't believe that was a real disease. I said, "OK, if you're not, do you mind if I have it?" And he said, "Well, young man, I can't give you the brain. You need his family's permission. But if you do get the permission of his next of kin, I will release the brain to you." And I said, "Great!" And then I realized I had to figure out who his next of kin was and ask them, and it turned out it was Andre Waters's 88-year-old mother. And I sat there, and I took a breath and I thought, "Am I really going to cold-call an 88-year-old grieving mother who just lost her son to suicide?" And almost everything in me said, "Don't do it. It's too much to put this poor woman through, she's been through so much already." But then this other voice in my head said, "You know what? If guys are killing themselves from this disease and we could study it to maybe prevent this from happening in the future, sometimes you've just got to suck it up and do something that's very hard." So I called her. First time, nobody answered. Second time, no one answered, third... no voice mails. The fifth time, I got an answer. And thank God that Andre Waters's family was so gracious about the call and said, "You know what, we want to know what happened to Andre. We want to know why he changed so much in the last five years of his life." And so we studied the brain, and it turned out that he did have CTE. He became the third NFL player diagnosed with the disease. This is what it looks like. He was somewhere between mild and severe. OK, we have three of three NFL players here. Maybe this needs to get a little bit more serious. Maybe something's happening here. So I ended up starting the Concussion Legacy Foundation, actually formalized the work, so it wasn't just some guy calling for brains. And I searched the world. And I put together the best research team I could find. So we partnered with Boston University, we partnered with scientists at the VA here in Boston, and we started a brain bank. Turns out, if you want to know how to cure degenerative brain disease, you have to start by actually studying the brains. At this point, we were the first center in the world focused on CTE. It just had not been studied formally. And so we start this brain bank, and it's my job to get the brains for Dr. Ann McKee and her brain bank, right in the middle. We also work with Dr. Bob Stern, Dr. Robert Cantu, truly my dream team of scientists that I support. So my job is to get the brains. And I was very successful in those early years. Since 2007 I've started every day by reading the obituaries. And it's a tough way to live. And it's hard on me and it's even worse on these poor families that I've been calling for the last 10 years, to ask for their brains. And so early on in the process, as it started to really eat away at me, I decided, you know what, can I find another way to get people to donate their brains to this research? And I figured out, what if we could create a culture of brain donation in this country? What if it became normal for athletes to donate their brain after they died? And so what I started was a brain donation registry. And I started asking athletes if they would publicly pledge to donate their brain to science. And it started with, actually, a hockey player in 2009. One of my first pledges was a former Harvard hockey player, Noah Welch, who was in the NHL at the time. It was a slow start people understanding what this was about. So when the news hit the front page, "Noah Welch pledging his brain to science," he said he went to the locker room the next day, one of his teammates pulled him aside and said, "Hey, I heard you're donating your brain to science." And he said, "Yep." And he said, "Wow. How many games are you going to miss?" (Laughter) True story. (Laughter) But we've been remarkably successful — over 2,500 athletes have signed up. They get a brain-donation card they keep in their wallet. This is mine, I was obviously first, it says 01. And I will donate my brain to this. We've also been lucky to have people like Brandi Chastain, the women's soccer icon, NASCAR's Dale Earnhardt Jr. Just two weeks ago, Hall-of-Famer Nick Buoniconti who had been diagnosed with dementia, signed up to pledge his brain. So it's been wonderful, and the great thing about it is that it has worked in changing how we're able to get brains. So now, instead of me having to call, more families call us. And our phones ring off the hook. And so I can now focus on taking this information, figuring out how do we work towards a cure, how do we work towards prevention, and so my life has gotten a lot easier. This is just some of the headlines that we've able to get over the years from athletes pledging their brain. The problem has been what we learned. So when we started this, only 45 cases existed in the world of this disease that had been studied in brain banks. Since then, we have acquired 500 brains and found over 300 of them had CTE. To put that in perspective, the rest of the world has not studied 100 brains since we started this. What we've seen though is very frightening. So some of you might have seen the headline in July in the "New York Times." And a recent study we published, that of the first 111 NFL players we looked at 110 were positive for this disease. Of the first 53 college football players we looked at, 48 had this disease. That's something that's a very big concern to me. And so now, I'm very much focused on what can we do to actually treat this disease? We still can't diagnose CTE in living people, we have no treatments that are going to be coming out of the pharmaceutical industry in the next five years. This is a long, long fight. But our Concussion Legacy Foundation is here to not only facilitate this work, and that's the long game, but the short game is, hey, we can prevent this. We can prevent this disease if we just stopped hitting people in the head so much. And frankly, we need to stop hitting children in the head. Turns out, it's not a great idea to hit a five-year-old in the head 500 times each year. And it does actually open up the door to this disease. And so, we've got a lot of work ahead of us. But I have great hope that we're on our way to curing this disease. But I hope you understand my story a little more now. And now that we've gotten to know each other a little bit better, this is the time where I ask you, "Can I have your brain?" Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
How I use art to bridge misunderstanding | {0: 'Adong Judith uses art as a vehicle to drive social change and trains aspiring makers to create art that dares to ask serious questions. '} | TEDGlobal 2017 | I'm a writer-director who tells social-change stories, because I believe stories touch and move us. Stories humanize and teach us to empathize. Stories change us. When I write and direct plays, I'm amplifying voices of disadvantaged groups, I'm fighting the self-censorship that has kept many Ugandan artists away from social, political theater since the persecution of artists by former Ugandan president, Idi Amin. And most importantly, I am breaking the silence and provoking meaningful conversations on taboo issues, where often "Silence is golden" is the rule of thumb. Conversations are important because they inform and challenge our minds to think, and change starts with thinking. One of my struggles with activism is its often one-sided nature that blinds us to alternative view, that numbs our empathy, that makes us view those who see issues differently as ignorant, self-hating, brainwashed, sellout or plain stupid. I believe no one is ignorant. We are all experts, only in different fields. And this is why, for me, the saying "stay in your truth" is misleading. Because if you're staying in your truth, isn't it logical that the person you believe is wrong is also staying in their truth? So, what you have is two extremes that shut out all possible avenues of conversations. I create provocative theater and film to touch, humanize and move disagreeing parties to the conversation table to bridge misunderstandings. I know that listening to one another will not magically solve all problems. But it will give a chance to create avenues to start to work together to solve many of humanity's problems. With my first play, "Silent Voices," based on interviews with victims of the Northern Uganda war between the government and Joseph Kony's LRA rebel group, I brought together victims, political leaders, religious leaders, cultural leaders, the Amnesty Commission and transitional justice leadership for critical conversations on issues of justice for war crime victims — the first of its kind in the history of Uganda. And so many powerful things happened, that I can't even cover them all right now. Victims were given the opportunity to sit at the table with Amnesty Commission leadership, and they expressed the big injustice they suffered when the Commission ignored them and instead facilitated the resettlement of the war perpetrators. And the Amnesty Commission acknowledged the victims' pain and explained the thinking behind their flawed approaches. But one of the things that has stayed with me is when, during my Northern Uganda tour of the play, a man approached me and introduced himself as a former rebel soldier of Joseph Kony. He told me that he didn't want me to leave feeling disappointed, due to some of what I considered inappropriate laughter. He explained that his was a laughter of embarrassment and a recognition of his own embarrassment. He saw himself in the actors onstage and saw the meaninglessness of his past actions. So I say: share your truths. Listen to one another's truths. You will discover a more powerfully uniting truth in the middle ground. When I lived in the USA, many of my American friends would be shocked at my ignorance at fancy Western dishes like lasagna, for instance. (Laughter) And my question to them would be, "Well, do you know malakwang?" And then I would tell them about malakwang, a fancy vegetable dish from my culture. And they would tell me about lasagna. And we would leave richer and fuller individuals. Therefore, share your recipe truth. It makes for a better meal. Thank you. (Applause) |
What if gentrification was about healing communities instead of displacing them? | {0: 'Liz Ogbu works with/in communities in need, to use tactical, human-centered design to tackle wicked social problems and catalyze community healing.'} | TEDWomen 2017 | I grew up in a family of social scientists, but I was the weird child who drew. (Laughter) From making sketches of the models in my mom's Sears catalog ... to a bedroom so full of my craft projects that it was like my own personal art gallery, I lived to make. I don't think anyone in my family was surprised when I became an architect. But to be honest with you, the real foundation of the architect I became was not laid in that bedroom art gallery but by the conversations around my family's dinner table. There were stories of how people lived and connected to one another, from the impact of urban migration on a village in Zambia to the complex health care needs of the homeless in the streets of San Francisco. Now, it would be fair if you're looking over at your seatmate and wondering, "What the hell does that have to do with architecture?" Well, all of these stories involved space and how it did or didn't accommodate us. The fact is, we share some of our deepest connections in physical space. And our stories play out, even in this crazy age of texting and tweeting, in physical space. Unfortunately, architecture hasn't done a great job of telling all of our stories equally. Too often, we see the building of monuments like the Gherkin or even Trump Tower ... (Laughter) that tell the story of the haves rather than the have-nots. Throughout my career, I've actively resisted the practice of building monuments to certain peoples' stories — usually white, male, rich — and bulldozing other peoples' stories — usually people of color from low-income communities. I've tried to create a practice that is rooted in elevating the stories of those who have most often been silenced. That work — it's been a mission in spatial justice. (Applause) Now, spatial justice means that we understand that justice has a geography, and that the equitable distribution of resources, services and access is a basic human right. So what does spatial justice look like? Well, I'd like to share a story with you. For years, I've been working in the historically African-American neighborhood of Bayview Hunters Point in San Francisco, on a plot of land that once held a power plant. Back in the '90s, a community group led by mothers who lived in the public housing on the hill above the plant fought for its closure. They won. The utility company finally tore it down, cleaned the soil and capped most of the site with asphalt so that the clean soil wouldn't blow away. Sounds like a success story, right? Well, not so fast. You see, because of various issues like land entitlements, lease agreements, etc., the land actually couldn't be redeveloped for at least five to 10 years. What that meant is that this community that had been living near a power plant for decades, now had 30 acres of asphalt in their backyard. To put that in context for you, 30 acres is equal to about 30 football fields. Now, the utility company didn't want to be the bad guy here. Recognizing that they owed the community, they actually put out a call for designers to propose temporary uses for this site, hoping to turn it into a community benefit rather than blight. I'm part of the diverse team of designers that responded to that call, and for the last four years, we've been collaborating with those mothers and other residents, as well as local organizations and the utility company. We've been experimenting with all types of events to try and address issues of spatial justice. Everything from job training workshops to an annual circus to even a beautiful, new shoreline trail. In the four years that we've been operational, over 12,000 people have come and done something on this site that we hope has transformed their relationship to it. But lately, I'm starting to realize that events are not enough. A few months ago, there was a community meeting in this neighborhood. The utility company was finally ready to talk concretely about long-term redevelopment. That meeting was kind of a disaster. There was a lot of yelling and anger. People asked things like, "If you're going to sell it to a developer, wouldn't they just build luxury condos like everyone else?" And "Where has the city been?" "Why aren't there more jobs and resources in this neighborhood?" It was not that our events had failed to bring joy. But in spite of that, there was still pain here. Pain from a history of environmental injustice that left many industrial uses in this neighborhood, leaving residents living near toxic waste and, literally, shit. There's pain from the fact that this zip code still has one of the lowest per capita income, highest unemployment and highest incarceration rates in a city which tech giants like Twitter, Airbnb and Uber call home. And those tech companies — hm — they've actually helped to trigger a gentrification push that is rapidly redefining this neighborhood, both in terms of identity and population. Now let me pause for a moment to talk about gentrification. I suspect for a lot of us, it's kind of like a dirty word. It's become synonymous with the displacement of poor residents from their neighborhood by wealthier newcomers. If you've ever been displaced, then you know the agony of losing a place that held your story. And if you haven't experienced this, then I'm going to ask you to try and imagine your way into it right now. Think about what it would be like to find your favorite local spot, a place where you often went and hung out with the old-timers or your friends, had vanished. And then you get home, and you find a letter from your landlord, saying that your rent's been doubled. The choice to stay — it's not yours to make. You no longer belong in your home. And know that this feeling you're feeling right now, it would be the same regardless of whether or not the person who harmed you meant to do so. Developer Majora Carter once said to me, "Poor people don't hate gentrification. They just hate that they rarely get to hang around long enough to enjoy its benefits." Why is it that we treat culture erasure and economic displacement as inevitable? We could approach development with an acknowledgment of past injustices — find value not only in those new stories but the old ones, too. And make a commitment to build people's capacity to stay — to stay in their homes, to stay in their communities, to stay where they feel whole. But to do this rethink, it requires looking at those past injustices and the pain and grief that is interwoven into them. And as I started to reflect on my own work, I realized that pain and grief have been recurring themes. I heard it early on in the Bayview Hunters Point project when a man named Daryl said, "We've always been set aside like an island — a no-man's-land." I also heard it in Houston, when I was working on a project with day laborers. And as Juan told me stories of being robbed of his wages many times on the corner in which he stood every day to earn a living to support his family, he asked, "Why can't anyone see the sacredness of this site?" You know, you've seen the pain, too. From campaigns around statue removals in Charlottesville and New Orleans ... to towns that have lost their industrial lifeblood and are now dying, like Lorain, Ohio and Bolton, England. We often rush to remake these places, thinking that we can ease their pain. But in our boundless desire to do good, to get past all of our mistakes, to build places that hold possibility, we often maintain a blissful ignorance of a landscape filled with a very long trail of broken promises and squelched dreams. We are building on top of brokenness. Is it any wonder that the foundations cannot hold? Holding space for pain and grief was never part of my job description as an architect — after all, it's not expedient, focused on beauty, and hell, even requested by my clients. But I've seen what happens when there's space for pain. It can be transformational. Returning to our story, when we first started working in the neighborhood, one of the first things we did was go out and interview the activists who had led the fight to close the plant. We consistently heard and felt from them a sense of impending loss. The neighborhood was already changing, even back then. People were leaving or dying of old age, and with those departures, stories were being lost. To those activists, no one was going to know the amazing things that had happened in this community, because to everyone on the outside, it was the ghetto. At worst, a place of violence; at best, a blank slate. Neither was true, of course. So my colleagues and I, we reached out to StoryCorps. And with their support, and that of the utility company, we built a listening booth on our site. And we invited the residents to come and have their stories recorded for posterity. After a few days of recording, we held a listening party where we played clips, much like what you hear on NPR every Friday morning. That party — it was one of the most amazing community meetings I've ever been a part of. In part because we didn't just talk about joy but also pain. Two stories that I remember well — AJ talked about what it was like to grow up in the neighborhood. There was always a kid to play with. But he also spoke with sadness of what it was like to first be stopped and questioned by a police officer when he was 11. GL also talked about the kids, and the ups and downs of the experience of living in this neighborhood, but he also spoke with pride of some of the organizations that had sprung up to provide support and empowerment. He wanted to see more of that. By holding space to first express pain and grief, we were then able to brainstorm ideas for a site — amazing ideas that then became the seeds of what we did over the next four years. So why the radically different meeting now? Well ... the pain and grief woven into these spaces was not created in a day. Healing also takes time. After all, who here thinks you can go to therapy just once and be cured? (Laughter) Anyone? I didn't think so. In retrospect, I wish that we had held more listening sessions, not just joyful events. My work's taken me all over the world, and I have yet to set foot in a place where pain didn't exist and the potential for healing was absent. So while I've spent my career honing my skills as an architect, I realize that I'm now also a healer. I suppose this is the point in the talk where I should be telling you those five steps to healing, but I don't have the solution — yet. Just a path. That being said, there are a few things I have learned along the way. First — we cannot create cities for everyone unless we're first willing to listen to everyone. Not just about what they hope to see built in the future but also about what has been lost or unfulfilled. Second — healing is not just for "those people." For those of us with privilege, we have to have a reckoning with our own guilt, discomfort and complicity. As non-profit leader Anne Marks once observed, "Hurt people hurt people; healed people heal people." And third — healing is not about the erasure of pain. We often have a tendency to want to put a clean slate over our pain, much like that asphalt on the soil in Bayview Hunters Point. But it doesn't work that way. Healing is about acknowledging pain and making peace with it. One of my favorite quotes says that healing renews our faith in the process of becoming. I stand here before you as an architect-healer because I'm ready to see what I can become, what my community and those that I work with can become, and what this country, and frankly, this world can become. And I was not meant to take that journey alone. I believe that many of you are unhappy with the way that things are now. Believe that it can be different. I believe that you all are far more resilient than you think. But the first step requires courage. The courage to see each other's pain, and to be willing to stay in the presence of it, even when it gets uncomfortable. Just imagine the change that we can make together if we all committed to that. Thank you. (Applause) |
A rite of passage for late life | {0: 'Bob Stein has long been in the vanguard: immersed in radical politics as a young man, he grew into one of the founding fathers of new media. He’s wondering what sorts of new rituals and traditions might emerge as society expands to include increasing numbers of people in their eighties and nineties.'} | TED Residency | I grew up white, secular and middle class in 1950s America. That meant watching fireworks on the Fourth of July, trick-or-treating on Halloween and putting presents under a tree at Christmas. But by the time those traditions got to me, they were hollow, commercial enterprises, which just left me feeling empty. So from a relatively young age, I found myself looking to fill an existential hole, to connect with something bigger than myself. There hadn't been a bar mitzvah in my family in over a century, so I thought I'd take a shot at that — (Laughter) only to be devastated when my one encounter with the rabbi, a really tall, godlike figure with flowing white hair, consisted of him asking me for my middle name so we could fill out a form. Yep, that was it. (Laughter) So I got the fountain pen, but I didn't get the sense of belonging and confidence I was searching for. Many years later, I couldn't bear the thought of my son turning 13 without some kind of rite of passage. So I came up with the idea of a 13th birthday trip, and I offered to take Murphy anywhere in the world that had meaning for him. A budding young naturalist who loved turtles, he immediately settled on the Galapagos. And when my daughter, Katie, turned 13, she and I spent two weeks at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, where Katie learned for the first time that she was powerful and brave. Since then, my partner, Ashton, and lots of our friends and relatives have taken their kids on 13th birthday trips, with everyone finding it transformative for both the child and the parent. I wasn't brought up saying grace. But for the last 20 years, we've been holding hands before every meal. It's a beautiful bit of shared silence that brings us all together in the moment. Ashton tells everyone to "pass the squeeze," while she assures them it's not religious. (Laughter) So recently, when my family asked me if I could please do something with the more than 250 boxes of stuff that I've collected over a lifetime, my ritual-making impulse kicked in. I started wondering if I could go further than simple death cleaning. "Death cleaning" is the Swedish term for clearing out your closets, your basement and your attic before you die, so your kids don't have to do it later. (Laughter) I pictured my children opening up box after box and wondering why I'd kept any of that stuff. (Laughter) And then I imagined them looking at a specific picture of me with a beautiful young woman, and asking, "Who on earth is that with Dad?" (Laughter) And that was the aha moment. It wasn't the things I'd saved that were important; it was the stories that went with them that gave them meaning. Could using the objects to tell the stories be the seed of a new ritual, a rite of passage — not for a 13-year-old, but for someone much further down the road? So I started experimenting. I got a few dozen things out of the boxes, I put them about in a room, and I invited people to come in and ask me about anything that they found interesting. The results were terrific. A good story became a launching pad for a much deeper discussion, in which my visitors made meaningful connections to their own lives. Derrius [Quarles] asked me about a Leonard Peltier T-shirt that I'd worn a lot in the '80s, that, sadly, is still relevant today. Our conversation moved quickly, from a large number of political prisoners in American jails, to Derrius wondering about the legacy of the Black Liberation Movement of the '60s, and how his life might be different if he'd come of age then, instead of 30-odd years later. At the end of our conversation, Derrius asked me if he could have the T-shirt. And giving it to him felt just about perfect. As these conversations established common ground, especially across generations, I realized I was opening a space for people to talk about things that really mattered to them. And I started seeing myself with a renewed sense of purpose — not as the old guy on the way out, but as someone with a role to play going forward. When I was growing up, life ended for most people in their 70s. People are living far longer now, and for the first time in human history, it's common for four generations to be living side by side. I'm 71, and with a bit of luck, I've got 20 or 30 more years ahead of me. Giving away my stuff now and sharing it with friends, family, and I hope strangers, too, seems like the perfect way to enter this next stage of my life. Turns out to be just what I was looking for: a ritual that's less about dying and more about opening the door to whatever comes next. Thank you. (Applause) Onward! (Applause) |
For survivors of Ebola, the crisis isn't over | {0: 'Dr. James Soka Moses began his fight against Ebola by treating patients, moved on to survivor treatment and studies and now advocates for an enlightened global approach to pandemic prevention and response.'} | TEDMED 2017 | June 13, 2014 started as a routine Friday in Redemption Hospital in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. Redemption is the largest free public health hospital in the city. We are called upon to serve hundreds of thousands of people. In the best of times it puts strain on our resources. Monthly supplies run out within weeks, and patients without beds would be seated in chairs. That summer, we had a nurse who had been sick for a while. Sick enough to be admitted in our hospital. But our treatment didn't seem to be helping her; her symptoms were getting worse: diarrhea, severe abdominal pain, fever and weakness. On that particular Friday, she developed severe respiratory distress, and her eyes were menacingly red. One of my fellow doctors, a general surgeon, became suspicious of her condition. He said her symptoms were suggestive of Ebola. We kept a close watch on her, we tried to help her. We were treating her for malaria, typhoid and gastroenteritis. We didn't know it, but by then it was too late. The next morning I walked in to check on my patient. I could tell by the look in her eyes that she was filled with fear. I gave her reassurance, but shortly after ... she died of Ebola. For me, her death was very personal. But this was just the beginning. A virtual biological bomb had exploded. But the word spread faster than the virus, and panic spread across the hospital. All the patients ran away. Then, all the nurses and doctors ran away. This was the beginning of our medical tsunami — the devastating Ebola virus that left an indelible scar in our country's history. I was not trained for this. I had just graduated from medical school two years before. At this time, my total knowledge about Ebola came from a one-page article I had read in medical school. I perceived the disease as so dangerous, this one page in essence had convinced me to run out of the hospital, too, the moment I heard of a case of Ebola. But when it finally happened, I stayed on and decided to help. And so did several other brave health care professionals. But we would pay a heavy price. Many persons and health professionals had become high-risk contacts. This actually meant 21 days counting to potentially disease or death. Our health systems were fragile, our health workers lacked skills and training. So in the weeks and months that followed, health workers were disproportionately affected by the Ebola virus disease. More than 400 nurses, doctors and other health professionals became infected. Unfortunately, my friend, the general surgeon who correctly identified the symptoms in that first case became one of the casualties. On July 27, the president of Liberia imposed quarantine on the worst-affected areas. She closed all the schools and universities and shut down many public events. Four days later, the United States Peace Corps pulled out of Liberia, out of Sierra Leone and Guinea due to Ebola. In August, six weeks after the nurse died, hundreds of people were dying of the disease each week. People were dying in the streets. Over the months that followed, West Africa would lose thousands of people to Ebola virus disease. In August, I joined a team to set up the Ebola treatment unit at JFK hospital in Monrovia. I was charged with running the second Ebola treatment unit in the city. Our unit provided hope for thousands of patients, families and communities. I not only provided care, I came face to face with Ebola. Living every day as a high-risk Ebola virus disease contact during the worst of the outbreak was one of my worst experiences. I started counting 21 days every day. I lived every moment anticipating the onset of symptoms of the disease. I measured my body temperature several times. I showered with chlorinated water, more concentrated than actually recommended. I chlorinated my phones, my pants, my hands, my car. My clothes became bleached. Those days you were alone, people were so afraid of touching anybody. Everyone was counted as a potential contact. Touching would make them sick. I was stigmatized. But if that was what it was for me, who was symptom-free, imagine what it was for someone who actually had symptoms, someone who had Ebola. We learned that to treat Ebola successfully, we had to suspend some of the normal rules of society. Our president declared a state of emergency in August and suspended certain rights. And the national police even supported our work during the Ebola response. In February 2015, gang members came in for isolation in our Ebola isolation unit. They were also know as the VIP Boys of Monrovia, terrifying small-time drug addicts whose presence could instill a tremendous amount of fear, although they could not legally carry guns. They underwent quarantine for 21 days in our unit and were not arrested. We told the police, "If you arrest them here, they will stop coming, they won't get treated. And the Ebola virus will continue to spread." The police agreed, and we were able to treat the VIP Boys, and they did not have to worry about being arrested while in the unit. Over the course of the outbreak, West Africa had almost 29,000 cases. More than 11,000 people died. And that included 12 of my fine colleagues at John F. Kennedy hospital in Monrovia. In June 2016, exactly 23 months after my first Ebola patient died, Liberia declared its Ebola outbreak ended. We thought that once the outbreak ended, so did the problems. We hoped that life would go back to normal. Today, there are more than 17,000 survivors in West Africa. People who actually had Ebola virus disease, lived through it and survived. We counted survival rate as a success: the end of suffering for the patient and fulfilling joy for families. Every discharge from the unit was a moment of jubilation. At least so we thought. The best description of the moment of discharge and a rare glimpse into the moment that defines our life post-Ebola was vividly expressed in the words of my best friend and fellow doctor, Philip Ireland, in an interview with "The Times." He said at the time of his release, "There were a lot of people there from JFK hospital: my family, my elder brother, my wife was there. A lot of other doctors were there, too, and members of the media were there. And I felt like Nelson Mandela, it felt like the 'Long Walk to Freedom,' and I walked and raised my hands to the heaven, thanking God for saving my life." And Philip said, "Then I saw something else. There were a lot of crying people, people happy to see me. But when I got close to anybody, they backed away." For many Ebola survivors, society still seems to be backing away, even as they struggle to lead a normal life. For these survivors, life can be compared to another health emergency. They may suffer debilitating joint and body pain. The suffering gradually decays over time for most. However, many continue to bear intermittent pain. Some survivors are blind, others have neurological disabilities. Some survivors experience stigmatization every day, in many ways. A lot of children are orphans. Some survivors experience post-traumatic stress disorder. And some survivors lack opportunity for education. Even families can be split apart by fear of Ebola, too. There's no definitive cure for transmitting Ebola virus through sex. However, there are successful interventions for prevention. We have worked hard on semen testing, behavioral counseling, safe sex promotion and research. For the past year, there have been no cases of sexual transmission. But some male survivors have lost their spouses out of fear they will be infected with Ebola. That's how families are torn apart. Another tremendous challenge for Ebola survivors is obtaining adequate health care. In theory, Liberia's public health services are free of charge. In practice, our health system lacks the funding and capacity to expand care to all at the point of need. Many survivors have waited many months to undergo surgery to heal their blinding cataracts. Few had to relive the traumatic experience, when their blood was retested for Ebola at the point of admission. Some survivors experienced delayed or deferred admission due to limited bed capacity. No bed available for one more patient. This is neither national policy nor officially condoned, but many people are still afraid of the sporadic resurgence of Ebola virus. The results can be tragic. I have seen Beatrice, an Ebola survivor, several times now. She's 26 years old. Many of her family members became infected, she luckily survived. But since that day in 2014 she was discharged to cheering health workers, her life has never been the same. She became blind as the result of Ebola. In 2014, the baby of a dear friend of mine was only two months old, when both parents and child were admitted in an Ebola treatment unit in Monrovia. Luckily, they survived. My friend's baby is almost three years old now, but cannot stand, cannot walk, cannot speak. He has failure to thrive. There are many more hidden experiences and many stories are yet untold. The survivors of Ebola deserve our attention and support. The only way we can defeat this pandemic is when we ensure that we win this final battle. Our best opportunity is to ensure that every survivor receives adequate care at the point of need without any form of stigma and at no cost to them personally. How can a society consider itself healed when a person's entire identity is defined by the fact that they recovered from Ebola? Should a previous disease that a person no longer has become the sum total of their identity, the identifier in their passport that deters you from traveling to seek medical care abroad? Simply the ID that denies you health care. Or prevents you from having a relationship with your spouse. Or denies you of family, of friend or home. Or prevents you from carrying on your normal job, so you can put food on the table or have a roof over your family's head. What is the meaning of the right to life when our life is clouded by stigma and barriers that fuel that stigma? Until we have much better answers to those questions in West Africa, our work is not over yet. Liberians are a resilient people. And we know how to rise to a challenge, even a devastating one. My best memories of the outbreak center on those many people who survived the disease, but I cannot forget the hard-working nurses, doctors, volunteers and staff who risked their own safety in service of humanity. And some even losing their lives in the process. During the worst of the contagion, one thing kept us making those perilous daily journeys into the Ebola wards. We had a passion to save lives. Was I afraid during the Ebola outbreak? Of course I was. But for me, the opportunity to protect our global health security and keep communities safe at home and abroad was an honor. So as the dangers became greater, our humanity became stronger. We faced our fears. The global health community working together defeated Ebola, and that ... that is how I know that we can defeat its aftermath in our hearts, in our minds and in our communities. Thank you. (Applause) |
Need a new idea? Start at the edge of what is known | {0: 'Vittorio Loreto is passionate about the complexity of the world around us in all its forms and he actively tries to decode it.'} | TED@BCG Milan | We have all probably wondered how great minds achieved what they achieved, right? And the more astonishing their achievements are, the more we call them geniuses, perhaps aliens coming from a different planet, definitely not someone like us. But is that true? So let me start with an example. You all know the story of Newton's apple, right? OK. Is that true? Probably not. Still, it's difficult to think that no apple at all was there. I mean some stepping stone, some specific conditions that made universal gravitation not impossible to conceive. And definitely this was not impossible, at least for Newton. It was possible, and for some reason, it was also there, available at some point, easy to pick as an apple. Here is the apple. And what about Einstein? Was relativity theory another big leap in the history of ideas no one else could even conceive? Or rather, was it again something adjacent and possible, to Einstein of course, and he got there by small steps and his very peculiar scientific path? Of course we cannot conceive this path, but this doesn't mean that the path was not there. So all of this seems very evocative, but I would say hardly concrete if we really want to grasp the origin of great ideas and more generally the way in which the new enters our lives. As a physicist, as a scientist, I have learned that posing the right questions is half of the solution. But I think now we start having a great conceptual framework to conceive and address the right questions. So let me drive you to the edge of what is known, or at least, what I know, and let me show you that what is known could be a powerful and fascinating starting point to grasp the deep meaning of words like novelty, innovation, creativity perhaps. So we are discussing the "new," and of course, the science behind it. The new can enter our lives in many different ways, can be very personal, like I meet a new person, I read a new book, or I listen to a new song. Or it could be global, I mean, something we call innovation. It could be a new theory, a new technology, but it could also be a new book if you're the writer, or it could be a new song if you're the composer. In all of these global cases, the new is for everyone, but experiencing the new can be also frightening, so the new can also frighten us. But still, experiencing the new means exploring a very peculiar space, the space of what could be, the space of the possible, the space of possibilities. It's a very weird space, so I'll try to get you through this space. So it could be a physical space. So in this case, for instance, novelty could be climbing Machu Picchu for the first time, as I did in 2016. It could be a conceptual space, so acquiring new information, making sense of it, in a word, learning. It could be a biological space. I mean, think about the never-ending fight of viruses and bacteria with our immune system. And now comes the bad news. We are very, very bad at grasping this space. Think of it. Let's make an experiment. Try to think about all the possible things you could do in the next, say, 24 hours. Here the key word is "all." Of course you can conceive a few options, like having a drink, writing a letter, also sleeping during this boring talk, if you can. But not all of them. So think about an alien invasion, now, here, in Milan, or me — I stopped thinking for 15 minutes. So it's very difficult to conceive this space, but actually we have an excuse. So it's not so easy to conceive this space because we are trying to conceive the occurrence of something brand new, so something that never occurred before, so we don't have clues. A typical solution could be looking at the future with the eyes of the past, so relying on all the time series of past events and hoping that this is enough to predict the future. But we know this is not working. For instance, this was the first attempt for weather forecasts, and it failed. And it failed because of the great complexity of the underlying phenomenon. So now we know that predictions had to be based on modeling, which means creating a synthetic model of the system, simulating this model and then projecting the system into the future through this model. And now we can do this in a lot of cases with the help of a lot of data. Looking at the future with the eye of the past could be misleading also for machines. Think about it. Now picture yourself for a second in the middle of the Australian Outback. You stand there under the sun. So you see something weird happening. The car suddenly stops very, very far from a kangaroo crossing the street. You look closer and you realize that the car has no driver. It is not restarting, even after the kangaroo is not there anymore. So for some reasons, the algorithms driving the car cannot make sense of this strange beast jumping here and there on the street. So it just stops. Now, I should tell you, this is a true story. It happened a few months ago to Volvo's self-driving cars in the middle of the Australian Outback. (Laughter) It is a general problem, and I guess this will affect more and more in the near future artificial intelligence and machine learning. It's also a very old problem, I would say 17th century, but I guess now we have new tools and new clues to start solving it. So let me take a step back, five years back. Italy. Rome. Winter. So the winter of 2012 was very special in Rome. Rome witnessed one of the greatest snowfalls of its history. That winter was special also for me and my colleagues, because we had an insight about the possible mathematical scheme — again, possible, possible mathematical scheme, to conceive the occurrence of the new. I remember that day because it was snowing, so due to the snowfall, we were blocked, stuck in my department, and we couldn't go home, so we got another coffee, we relaxed and we kept discussing. But at some point — maybe not that date, precisely — at some point we made the connection between the problem of the new and a beautiful concept proposed years before by Stuart Kauffman, the adjacent possible. So the adjacent possible consists of all those things. It could be ideas, it could be molecules, it could be technological products that are one step away from what actually exists, and you can achieve them through incremental modifications and recombinations of the existing material. So for instance, if I speak about the space of my friends, my adjacent possible would be the set of all friends of my friends not already my friends. I hope that's clear. But now if I meet a new person, say Briar, all her friends would immediately enter my adjacent possible, pushing its boundaries further. So if you really want to look from the mathematical point of view — I'm sure you want — you can actually look at this picture. So suppose now this is your universe. I know I'm asking a lot. I mean, this is your universe. Now you are the red spot. And the green spot is the adjacent possible for you, so something you've never touched before. So you do your normal life. You move. You move in the space. You have a drink. You meet friends. You read a book. At some point, you end up on the green spot, so you meet Briar for the first time. And what happens? So what happens is there is a new part, a brand new part of the space, becoming possible for you in this very moment, even without any possibility for you to foresee this before touching that point. And behind this there will be a huge set of points that could become possible at some later stages. So you see the space of the possible is very peculiar, because it's not predefined. It's not something we can predefine. It's something that gets continuously shaped and reshaped by our actions and our choices. So we were so fascinated by these connections we made — scientists are like this. And based on this, we conceived our mathematical formulation for the adjacent possible, 20 years after the original Kauffman proposals. In our theory — this is a key point — I mean, it's crucially based on a complex interplay between the way in which this space of possibilities expands and gets restructured, and the way in which we explore it. After the epiphany of 2012, we got back to work, real work, because we had to work out this theory, and we came up with a certain number of predictions to be tested in real life. Of course, we need a testable framework to study innovation. So let me drive you across a few predictions we made. The first one concerns the pace of innovation, so the rate at which you observe novelties in very different systems. So our theory predicts that the rate of innovation should follow a universal curve, like this one. This is the rate of innovation versus time in very different conditions. And somehow, we predict that the rate of innovation should decrease steadily over time. So somehow, innovation is predicted to become more difficult as your progress over time. It's neat. It's interesting. It's beautiful. We were happy. But the question is, is that true? Of course we should check with reality. So we went back to reality and we collected a lot of data, terabytes of data, tracking innovation in Wikipedia, Twitter, the way in which we write free software, even the way we listen to music. I cannot tell you, we were so amazed and pleased and thrilled to discover that the same predictions we made in the theory were actually satisfied in real systems, many different real systems. We were so excited. Of course, apparently, we were on the right track, but of course, we couldn't stop, so we didn't stop. So we kept going on, and at some point we made another discovery that we dubbed "correlated novelties." It's very simple. So I guess we all experience this. So you listen to "Suzanne" by Leonard Cohen, and this experience triggers your passion for Cohen so that you start frantically listening to his whole production. And then you realize that Fabrizio De André here recorded an Italian version of "Suzanne," and so on and so forth. So somehow for some reason, the very notion of adjacent possible is already encoding the common belief that one thing leads to another in many different systems. But the reason why we were thrilled is because actually we could give, for the first time, a scientific substance to this intuition and start making predictions about the way in which we experience the new. So novelties are correlated. They are not occurring randomly. And this is good news, because it implies that impossible missions might not be so impossible after all, if we are guided by our intuition, somehow leading us to trigger a positive chain reaction. But there is a third consequence of the existence of the adjacent possible that we named "waves of novelties." So just to make this simple, so in music, without waves of novelties, we would still be listening all the time to Mozart or Beethoven, which is great, but we don't do this all the time. We also listen to the Pet Shop Boys or Justin Bieber — well, some of us do. (Laughter) So we could see very clearly all of these patterns in the huge amounts of data we collected and analyzed. For instance, we discovered that popular hits in music are continuously born, you know that, and then they disappear, still leaving room for evergreens. So somehow waves of novelties ebb and flow while the tides always hold the classics. There is this coexistence between evergreens and new hits. Not only our theory predicts these waves of novelties. This would be trivial. But it also explains why they are there, and they are there for a specific reason, because we as humans display different strategies in the space of the possible. So some of us tend to retrace already known paths. So we say they exploit. Some of us always launch into new adventures. We say they explore. And what we discovered is all the systems we investigated are right at the edge between these two strategies, something like 80 percent exploiting, 20 percent exploring, something like blade runners of innovation. So it seems that the wise balance, you could also say a conservative balance, between past and future, between exploitation and exploration, is already in place and perhaps needed in our system. But again the good news is now we have scientific tools to investigate this equilibrium, perhaps pushing it further in the near future. So as you can imagine, I was really fascinated by all this. Our mathematical scheme is already providing cues and hints to investigate the space of possibilities and the way in which all of us create it and explore it. But there is more. This, I guess, is a starting point of something that has the potential to become a wonderful journey for a scientific investigation of the new, but also I would say a personal investigation of the new. And I guess this can have a lot of consequences and a huge impact in key activities like learning, education, research, business. So for instance, if you think about artificial intelligence, I am sure — I mean, artificial intelligence, we need to rely in the near future more and more on the structure of the adjacent possible, to restructure it, to change it, but also to cope with the unknowns of the future. In parallel, we have a lot of tools, new tools now, to investigate how creativity works and what triggers innovation. And the aim of all this is to raise a generation of people able to come up with new ideas to face the challenges in front of us. We all know. I think it's a long way to go, but the questions, and the tools, are now there, adjacent and possible. Thank you. (Applause) |
The human stories behind mass incarceration | {0: 'Eve Abrams makes radio stories, mostly about her adopted hometown, New Orleans.'} | TEDWomen 2017 | I have never been arrested, never spent a night in jail, never had a loved one thrown into the back of a squad car or behind bars, or be at the mercy of a scary, confusing system that at best sees them with indifference, and at worst as monstrous. The United States of America locks up more people than any other nation on the planet, and Louisiana is our biggest incarcerator. Most of you are probably like me — lucky. The closest we get to crime and punishment is likely what we see on TV. While making "Unprisoned," I met a woman who used to be like us — Sheila Phipps. (Recording) Sheila Phipps: Before my son went to jail, I used to see people be on television, fighting, saying, "Oh, this person didn't do it and this person is innocent." And you know, you snub them or you dismiss them, and like, "Yeah, whatever." Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of people who deserve to be in prison. There's a lot of criminals out here. But there are a lot of innocent people that's in jail. EA: Sheila's son, McKinley, is one of those innocent people. He served 17 years of a 30-year sentence on a manslaughter charge. He had no previous convictions, there was no forensic evidence in the case. He was convicted solely on the basis of eyewitness testimony, and decades of research have shown that eyewitness testimony isn't as reliable as we once believed it to be. Scientists say that memory isn't precise. It's less like playing back a video, and more like putting together a puzzle. Since 1989, when DNA testing was first used to free innocent people, over 70 percent of overturned convictions were based on eyewitness testimony. Last year, the district attorney whose office prosecuted McKinley's case was convicted of unrelated corruption charges. When this district attorney of 30 years stepped down, the eyewitnesses from McKinley's case came forward and said that they had been pressured into testifying by the district attorneys, pressure which included the threat of jail time. Despite this, McKinley is still in prison. (Recording) SP: Before this happened, I never would've thought it. And well, I guess it's hard for me to imagine that these things is going on, you know, until this happened to my son. It really opened my eyes. It really, really opened my eyes. I ain't gonna lie to you. EA: Estimates of how many innocent people are locked up range between one and four percent, which maybe doesn't sound like a lot, except that it amounts to around 87,000 people: mothers, fathers, sons locked up, often for decades, for crimes they did not commit. And that's not even counting the roughly half a million people who have been convicted of nothing — those presumed innocent, but who are too poor to bail out of jail and therefore sit behind bars for weeks upon months, waiting for their case to come to trial — or much more likely, waiting to take a plea just to get out. All of those people have family on the outside. (Recording) Kortney Williams: My brother missed my high school graduation because the night before, he went to jail. My brother missed my birthday dinner because that day, actually, he went to jail. My brother missed his own birthday dinner because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. (Recording) EA: So all these times when he ended up going to jail, were charges pressed or did he just get taken to jail? KW: The charges would be pressed and it would have a bond posted, then the charges will get dropped ... because there was no evidence. EA: I met Kortney Williams when I went to her college classroom to talk about "Unprisoned." She ended up interviewing her aunt, Troylynn Robertson, for an episode. (Recording) KW: With everything that you went through with your children, what is any advice that you would give me if I had any kids? (Recording) Troylynn Roberston: I would tell you when you have them, you know the first thing that will initially come to mind is love and protection, but I would tell you, even much with the protection to raise them with knowledge of the judicial system — you know, we always tell our kids about the boogeyman, the bad people, who to watch out for, but we don't teach them how to watch out for the judicial system. EA: Because of the way our criminal legal system disproportionately targets people of color, it's not uncommon for young people like Kortney to know about it. When I started going into high schools to talk to students about "Unprisoned," I found that roughly one-third of the young people I spoke with had a loved one behind bars. (Recording) Girl: The hardest part is like finding out where he's at, or like, when his court date is. Girl: Yeah, he went to jail on my first birthday. Girl: My dad works as a guard. He saw my uncle in jail. He's in there for life. EA: According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the number of young people with a father incarcerated rose 500 percent between 1980 and 2000. Over five million of today's children will see a parent incarcerated at some point in their childhoods. But this number disproportionately affects African American children. By the time they reach the age of 14, one in four black children will see their dad go off to prison. That's compared to a rate of one in 30 for white children. One key factor determining the future success of both inmates and their children is whether they can maintain ties during the parent's incarceration, but prisoners' phone calls home can cost 20 to 30 times more than regular phone calls, so many families keep in touch through letters. (Recording: Letter being unfolded) Anissa Christmas: Dear big brother, I'm making that big 16 this year, LOL. Guess I'm not a baby anymore. You still taking me to prom? I really miss you. You're the only guy that kept it real with me. I wish you were here so I can vent to you. So much has happened since the last time I seen you. (Voice breaking up) I have some good news. I won first place in the science fair. I'm a geek. We're going to regionals, can't you believe it? High school is going by super fast. In less than two years, I hope you'll be able to see me walk across the stage. I thought to write to you because I know it's boring in there. I want to put a smile on your face. Anissa wrote these letters to her brother when she was a sophomore in high school. She keeps the letters he writes to her tucked into the frame of her bedroom mirror, and reads them over and over again. I'd like to think that there's a good reason why Anissa's brother is locked up. We all want the wheels of justice to properly turn, but we're coming to understand that the lofty ideals we learned in school look really different in our nation's prisons and jails and courtrooms. (Recording) Danny Engelberg: You walk into that courtroom and you're just — I've been doing this for a quite a while, and it still catches your breath. You're like, "There are so many people of color here," and yet I know that the city is not made up of 90 percent African Americans, so why is it that 90 percent of the people who are in orange are African American? (Recording) EA: Public defender Danny Engelberg isn't the only one noticing how many black people are in municipal court — or in any court. It's hard to miss. Who's sitting in court waiting to see the judge? What do they look like? (Recording) Man: Mostly African-Americans, like me. Man: It's mostly, I could say, 85 percent black. That's all you see in the orange, in the box back there, who locked up. Man: Who's waiting? Mostly black. I mean, there was a couple of white people in there. Woman: I think it was about 85 percent African-American that was sitting there. EA: How does a young black person growing up in America today come to understand justice? Another "Unprisoned" story was about a troupe of dancers who choreographed a piece called "Hoods Up," which they performed in front of city council. Dawonta White was in the seventh grade for that performance. (Recording) Dawonta White: We was wearing black with hoodies because Trayvon Martin, when he was wearing his hoodie, he was killed. So we looked upon that, and we said we're going to wear hoodies like Trayvon Martin. (Recording) EA: Who came up with that idea? DW: The group. We all agreed on it. I was a little nervous, but I had stick through it though, but I felt like it was a good thing so they could notice what we do. (Recording) EA: Shraivell Brown was another choreographer and dancer in "Hoods Up." He says the police criticize people who look like him. He feels judged based on things other black people may have done. How would you want the police to look at you, and what would you want them to think? SB: That I'm not no threat. EA: Why would they think you're threatening? What did you say, you're 14? SB: Yes, I'm 14, but because he said a lot of black males are thugs or gangsters and all that, but I don't want them thinking that about me. EA: For folks who look like me, the easiest and most comfortable thing to do is to not pay attention — to assume our criminal legal system is working. But if it's not our responsibility to question those assumptions, whose responsibility is it? There's a synagogue here that's taken on learning about mass incarceration, and many congregants have concluded that because mass incarceration throws so many lives into chaos, it actually creates more crime — makes people less safe. Congregant Teri Hunter says the first step towards action has to be understanding. She says it's crucial for all of us to understand our connection to this issue even if it's not immediately obvious. (Recording) Teri Hunter: It's on our shoulders to make sure that we're not just closing that door and saying, "Well, it's not us." And I think as Jews, you know, we've lived that history: "It's not us." And so if a society closes their back on one section, we've seen what happens. And so it is our responsibility as Jews and as members of this community to educate our community — at least our congregation — to the extent that we're able. EA: I've been using the pronouns "us" and "we" because this is our criminal legal system and our children. We elect the district attorneys, the judges and the legislators who operate these systems for we the people. As a society, we are more willing to risk locking up innocent people than we are to let guilty people go free. We elect politicians who fear being labeled "soft on crime," encouraging them to pass harsh legislation and allocate enormous resources toward locking people up. When a crime is committed, our hunger for swift retribution has fed a police culture bent on finding culprits fast, often without adequate resources to conduct thorough investigations or strict scrutiny of those investigations. We don't put checks on prosecutors. Across the country, over the last couple of decades, as property and violent crimes have both fell, the number of prosecutors employed and cases they have filed has risen. Prosecutors decide whether or not to take legal action against the people police arrest and they decide what charges to file, directly impacting how much time a defendant potentially faces behind bars. One check we do have on prosecutors is defense. Imagine Lady Liberty: the blindfolded woman holding the scale meant to symbolize the balance in our judicial system. Unfortunately, that scale is tipped. The majority of defendants in our country are represented by government-appointed attorneys. These public defenders receive around 30 percent less funding than district attorneys do, and they often have caseloads far outnumbering what the American Bar Association recommends. As Sheila Phipps said, there are people who belong in prison, but it's hard to tell the guilty from the innocent when everyone's outcomes are so similar. We all want justice. But with the process weighed so heavily against defendants, justice is hard to come by. Our criminal legal system operates for we the people. If we don't like what's going on, it is up to us to change it. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The rhythm of Afrobeat | {0: 'Sauti Sol blends warm resonant pop with traditional Kenyan influences. Their mélange of energetic rhythms has promoted the group to become one of Africa’s most celebrated.'} | TEDGlobal 2017 | (Music) (Singing) Ooh ooh She wants to be rich She wants to be famous She wants to have lots and lots of money Soar above the clouds She wanna be free Like Nelson Mandela Stand tall like a pyramid So, so courageous No place she'd rather be Oh na na na, oh na na na And there's no place she'd rather be Oh na na na, oh na na na Live and die in Afrika She wanna live and die in Afrika Oh lo lo lo lo Live and die in Afrika Live and die in Afrika I wanna feel love I wanna be remembered I wanna go down in history And make my mama proud The darker the berry The sweeter the juice Na sitoki nyumbani wacha mila ni mtumwa No place I'd rather go Oh na na na, oh na na na No place I'd rather go yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Live and die in Afrika Oh lo lo lo lo lo lo Live and die in Afrika Oh yeah yeah Live and die in Afrika Live and die in Afrika Live and die in Afrika (Applause) Bien-Aimé Baraza: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It's a pleasure and honor to be here today. Onstage is the group called Sauti Sol. (Cheering) We have a couple of people paid in the audience to make some noise for us. (Laughter) The four of us met in high school, 15 years ago, and at the time, we were famous for singing Boyz II Men covers, because they were our biggest inspiration. (Laughter) And I remember, in a very pervy way, in my room, I had a Mariah Carey poster and a Britney Spears poster, too. (Laughter) And I can't help but feel that times have changed. Because what used to be Mariah Carey in my room now, in a 15-year-old boy's room, is Tiwa Savage. What used to be 50 Cent in my room then, to a 15-year-old boy's room now is Sauti Sol. (Cheering) (Applause) The role of Afrobeats in emancipating and getting over the colonial mindset of the youth cannot be ignored. Afrobeats has played the strongest role so far, if you ask me, as far as emancipating the youth is concerned. We are now the superstars of our generation, for our people. We are the solution to their musical problems. (Applause) And people our age are no longer looking for entertainment from America, from the West. We are the entertainment, and they're priming us above any other form of art. In 2015, President Obama came to Kenya, and we had the pleasure of being the entertainment for the state dinner that happened at state house, Nairobi. And as we were performing, he jumped onstage with us, and together, we did a cultural dance to a song that I want to share with you guys right now. And wherever you are, if you feel the music, dance. Ladies and gentleman, "Sura Yako." (Cheering) (Music) Nimekuchagua wewe, nikupende Mama, sitaki mwingine Aushi usiniache, usinitende Mama, usipende mwingine Moyo wangu ni mwepesi Umenikalia chapati Nafanya vituko kama chizi Kukupenda sitasizi Moyo wangu ni mwepesi Umenikalia chapati Nafanya vituko kama chizi Kukupenda sitasizi Sura yako mzuri mama Mzuri mama Mzuri mama Mzuri mama Na tabasamu lako maua Mzuri mama Mzuri mama Mzuri mama Sura yako mzuri mama Mzuri mama Mzuri mama Mzuri mama Mzuri mama Mzuri mama Piga dansi kidogo Piga da ... piga dansi kidogo Dansi kidogo Piga da ... piga dansi kidogo … Dansi kidogo Piga da ... piga dansi kidogo … Dansi kidogo Sura yako mzuri mama Mzuri mama Mzuri mama Mzuri mama Na tabasamu lako maua Mzuri mama Mzuri mama Mzuri mama Na sura yako mzuri mama Mzuri mama You're so, so beautiful Mzuri mama Mzuri mama Mzuri mama You're so, so Mzuri mama Mzuri mama Mzuri mama Mzuri mama Mzuri mama Mzuri mama Mzuri mama Mzuri mama Mzuri mama Mzuri mama Mzuri mama (Applause) Savara Mudigi: Wow. Thank you, thank you so much. (Applause) So, afrobeats, afrobeats. Afrobeat is a force, it's a force in the world right now. Just last year, in the last year alone, Africa had songs in the Billboard charts. "One Dance," written by Wizkid, performed by Wizkid and Drake. "Unforgettable" by French Montana. For those who know or don't know, French Montana is Moroccan. Artists who the world has normally considered as mainstream are now realizing they're late to the party. And they are knocking on the door, and because we are good people, we are going to let them in. (Laughter) (Applause) When we look at an artist, Queen B herself — in brackets, Beyoncé — (Laughter) Beyoncé has African influence in her music. A couple of years ago, in 2011, through YouTube, she saw these dancers called Tofo Tofo dancers, from Mozambique, and she flew them all the way from Mozambique to Los Angeles to teach her and her dancers the now signature dance moves that you see in her song, "Run the World (Girls)." Yeah. (Laughs) So, with social media and a vibrant, vibrant African diaspora, more and more the world is dancing to our rhythm and talking our pidgin. Yeah? (Laughs) Thanks, Nigeria, we'll use that for across the board. (Laughter) Our next song, "Kuliko Jana," had a viral video that was posted by Snoop Dogg, Ne-Yo, Talib Kweli. And the general feedback of this song, especially in the black community in the United States, was that this song gave them a feeling or a sense of spiritual repatriation. So, ladies and gentlemen, "Kuliko Jana." (Cheering) (Vocalizing) (Vocalizing ends) Bwana ni mwokozi wangu Tena ni kiongozi wangu Ananipenda leo kuliko jana Baraka zake hazikwishi Si kama binadamu habadiliki Ananipenda leo kuliko jana Kuliko jana Kuliko jana Yesu nipende leo kuliko jana Kuliko jana Kuliko jana Yesu nipende leo kuliko jana Wewe ndio nategemea Kufa kupona Baba nakutegemea Chochote kitanikatsia Kuingia mbinguni utaniondolea Wewe ndio nategemea Kufa kupona Baba nakutegemea Chochote kitanikatsia Kuingia mbinguni utaniondolea Wewe ndio nategemea Kufa kupona Baba nakutegemea Chochote kitanikatsia Kuingia mbinguni utaniondolea Wewe ndio nategemea Kufa kupona Baba nakutegemea Nakutegemea Na Bwana ni mwokozi wangu Na tena ni kiongozi wangu Ananipenda leo kuliko jana Baraka zake hazikwishi Si kama binadamu habadiliki Ananipenda leo kuliko jana Kuliko jana Kuliko jana Yesu nipende leo kuliko jana Kuliko jana Kuliko jana Yesu nipende leo kuliko jana Na Bwana ni mwokozi wangu Na tena ni mkombozi wangu Ananipenda leo kuliko jana Amen Baraka zake hazikwishi Amen Si kama binadamu habadiliki Amen Ananipenda leo kuliko jana (Music ends) Thank you very much. (Cheering) (Applause) |
How to tame your wandering mind | {0: 'As a neuroscientist specializing in the brain mechanisms of attention, Amishi Jha researches mindfulness techniques to optimize focus, even under high stress.'} | TEDxCoconutGrove | Consider the following statement: human beings only use 10 percent of their brain capacity. Well, as a neuroscientist, I can tell you that while Morgan Freeman delivered this line with the gravitas that makes him a great actor, this statement is entirely false. (Laughter) The truth is, human beings use 100 percent of their brain capacity. The brain is a highly efficient, energy-demanding organ that gets fully utilized and even though it is at full capacity being used, it suffers from a problem of information overload. There's far too much in the environment than it can fully process. So to solve this problem of overload, evolution devised a solution, which is the brain's attention system. Attention allows us to notice, select and direct the brain's computational resources to a subset of all that's available. We can think of attention as the leader of the brain. Wherever attention goes, the rest of the brain follows. In some sense, it's your brain's boss. And over the last 15 years, I've been studying the human brain's attention system. In all of our studies, I've been very interested in one question. If it is indeed the case that our attention is the brain's boss, is it a good boss? Does it actually guide us well? And to dig in on this big question, I wanted to know three things. First, how does attention control our perception? Second, why does it fail us, often leaving us feeling foggy and distracted? And third, can we do anything about this fogginess, can we train our brain to pay better attention? To have more strong and stable attention in the work that we do in our lives. So I wanted to give you a brief glimpse into how we're going to look at this. A very poignant example of how our attention ends up getting utilized. And I want to do it using the example of somebody that I know quite well. He ends up being part of a very large group of people that we work with, for whom attention is a matter of life and death. Think of medical professionals or firefighters or soldiers or marines. This is the story of a marine captain, Captain Jeff Davis. And the scene that I'm going to share with you, as you can see, is not about his time in the battlefield. He was actually on a bridge, in Florida. But instead of looking at the scenery around him, seeing the beautiful vistas and noticing the cool ocean breezes, he was driving fast and contemplating driving off that bridge. And he would later tell me that it took all of everything he had not to do so. You see, he'd just returned from Iraq. And while his body was on that bridge, his mind, his attention, was thousands of miles away. He was gripped with suffering. His mind was worried and preoccupied and had stressful memories and, really, dread for his future. And I'm really glad that he didn't take his life. Because he, as a leader, knew that he wasn't the only one that was probably suffering; many of his fellow marines probably were, too. And in the year 2008, he partnered with me in the first-of-its-kind project that actually allowed us to test and offer something called mindfulness training to active-duty military personnel. But before I tell you about what mindfulness training is, or the results of that study, I think it's important to understand how attention works in the brain. So what we do in the laboratory is that many of our studies of attention involve brain-wave recordings. In these brain wave recordings, people wear funny-looking caps that are sort of like swimming caps, that have electrodes embedded in them. These electrodes pick up the ongoing brain electrical activity. And they do it with millisecond temporal precision. So we can see these small yet detectable voltage fluctuations over time. And doing this, we can very precisely plot the timing of the brain's activity. About 170 milliseconds after we show our research participants a face on the screen, we see a very reliable, detectable brain signature. It happens right at the back of the scalp, above the regions of the brain that are involved in face processing. Now, this happens so reliably and so on cue, as the brain's face detector, that we've even given this brain-wave component a name. We call it the N170 component. And we use this component in many of our studies. It allows us to see the impact that attention may have on our perception. I'm going to give you a sense of the kind of experiments that we actually do in the lab. We would show participants images like this one. You should see a face and a scene overlaid on each other. And what we do is we ask our participants as they're viewing a series of these types of overlaid images, to do something with their attention. On some trials, we'll ask them to pay attention to the face. And to make sure they're doing that, we ask them to tell us, by pressing a button, if the face appeared to be male or female. On other trials, we ask them to tell what the scene was — was it indoor or outdoor? And in this way, we can manipulate attention and confirm that the participants were actually doing what we said. Our hypotheses about attention were as follows: if attention is indeed doing its job and affecting perception, maybe it works like an amplifier. And what I mean by this is that when we direct attention to the face, it becomes clearer and more salient, it's easier to see. But when we direct it to the scene, the face becomes barely perceptible as we process the scene information. So what we wanted to do is look at this brain-wave component of face detection, the N170, and see if it changed at all as a function of where our participants were paying attention — to the scene or the face. And here's what we found. We found that when they paid attention to the face, the N170 was larger. And when they paid attention to the scene, as you can see in red, it was smaller. And that gap you see between the blue and red lines is pretty powerful. What it tells us is that attention, which is really the only thing that changed, since the images they viewed were identical in both cases — attention changes perception. And it does so very fast. Within 170 milliseconds of actually seeing a face. In our follow-up studies, we wanted to see what would happen, how could we perturb or diminish this effect. And our hunch was that if you put people in a very stressful environment, if you distract them with disturbing, negative images, images of suffering and violence — sort of like what you might see on the news, unfortunately — that doing this might actually affect their attention. And that's indeed what we found. If we present stressful images while they're doing this experiment, this gap of attention shrinks, its power diminishes. So in some of our other studies, we wanted to see, OK, great — not great, actually, bad news that stress does this to the brain — but if it is the case that stress has this powerful influence on attention through external distraction, what if we don't need external distraction, what if we distract ourselves? And to do this, we had to basically come up with an experiment in which we could have people generate their own mind-wandering. This is having off-task thoughts while we're engaged in an ongoing task of some sort. And the trick to mind-wandering is that essentially, you bore people. So hopefully there's not a lot of mind-wandering happening right now. When we bore people, people happily generate all kinds of internal content to occupy themselves. So we devised what might be considered one of the world's most boring experiments. All the participants saw were a series of faces on the screen, one after another. They pressed the button every time they saw the face. That was pretty much it. Well, one trick was that sometimes, the face would be upside down, and it would happen very infrequently. On those trials they were told just to withhold the response. Pretty soon, we could tell that they were successfully mind-wandering, because they pressed the button when that face was upside down. Even though it's quite plain to see that it was upside down. So we wanted to know what happens when people have mind-wandering. And what we found was that, very similar to external stress and external distraction in the environment, internal distraction, our own mind wandering, also shrinks the gap of attention. It diminishes attention's power. So what do all of these studies tell us? They tell us that attention is very powerful in terms of affecting our perception. Even though it's so powerful, it's also fragile and vulnerable. And things like stress and mind-wandering diminish its power. But that's all in the context of these very controlled laboratory settings. What about in the real world? What about in our actual day-to-day life? What about now? Where is your attention right now? To kind of bring it back, I'd like to make a prediction about your attention for the remainder of my talk. Are you up for it? Here's the prediction. You will be unaware of what I'm saying for four out of the next eight minutes. (Laughter) It's a challenge, so pay attention, please. Now, why am I saying this? I'm surely going to assume that you're going to remain seated and, you know, graciously keep your eyes on me as I speak. But a growing body of literature suggests that we mind-wander, we take our mind away from the task at hand, about 50 percent of our waking moments. These might be small, little trips that we take away, private thoughts that we have. And when this mind-wandering happens, it can be problematic. Now I don't think there will be any dire consequences with you all sitting here today, but imagine a military leader missing four minutes of a military briefing, or a judge missing four minutes of testimony. Or a surgeon or firefighter missing any time. The consequences in those cases could be dire. So we might ask why do we do this? Why do we mind-wander so much? Well, part of the answer is that our mind is an exquisite time-traveling master. It can actually time travel very easily. If we think of the mind as the metaphor of the music player, we see this. We can rewind the mind to the past to reflect on events that have already happened, right? Or we can go and fast-future, to plan for the next thing that we want to do. And we land in this mental time-travel mode of the past or the future very frequently. And we land there often without our awareness, most times without our awareness, even if we want to be paying attention. Think of just the last time you were trying to read a book, got to the bottom of the page with no idea what the words were saying. This happens to us. And when this happens, when we mind-wander without an awareness that we're doing it, there are consequences. We make errors. We miss critical information, sometimes. And we have difficulty making decisions. What's worse is when we experience stress. When we're in a moment of overwhelm. We don't just reflect on the past when we rewind, we end up being in the past ruminating, reliving or regretting events that have already happened. Or under stress, we fast-forward the mind. Not just to productively plan. But we end up catastrophizing or worrying about events that haven't happened yet and frankly may never happen. So at this point, you might be thinking to yourself, OK, mind-wandering's happening a lot. Often, it happens without our awareness. And under stress, it's even worse — we mind-wander more powerfully and more often. Is there anything we can possibly do about this? And I'm happy to say the answer is yes. From our work, we're learning that the opposite of a stressed and wandering mind is a mindful one. Mindfulness has to do with paying attention to our present-moment experience with awareness. And without any kind of emotional reactivity of what's happening. It's about keeping that button right on play to experience the moment-to-moment unfolding of our lives. And mindfulness is not just a concept. It's more like practice, you have to embody this mindful mode of being to have any benefits. And a lot of the work that we're doing, we're offering people programs that give our participants a suite of exercises that they should do daily in order to cultivate more moments of mindfulness in their life. And for many of the groups that we work with, high-stress groups, like I said — soldiers, medical professionals — for them, as we know, mind-wandering can be really dire. So we want to make sure we offer them very accessible, low time constraints to optimize the training, so they can benefit from it. And when we do this, what we can do is track to see what happens, not just in their regular lives but in the most demanding circumstances that they may have. Why do we want to do this? Well, we want to, for example, give it to students right around finals season. Or we want to give the training to accountants during tax season. Or soldiers and marines while they're deploying. Why is that? Because those are the moments in which their attention is most likely to be vulnerable, because of stress and mind-wandering. And those are also the moments in which we want their attention to be in peak shape so they can perform well. So what we do in our research is we have them take a series of attention tests. We track their attention at the beginning of some kind of high-stress interval, and then two months later, we track them again, and we want to see if there's a difference. Is there any benefit of offering them mindfulness training? Can we protect against the lapses in attention that might arise over high stress? So here's what we find. Over a high-stress interval, unfortunately, the reality is if we don't do anything at all, attention declines, people are worse at the end of this high-stress interval than before. But if we offer mindfulness training, we can protect against this. They stay stable, even though just like the other groups, they were experiencing high stress. And perhaps even more impressive is that if people take our training programs over, let's say, eight weeks, and they fully commit to doing the daily mindfulness exercises that allow them to learn how to be in the present moment, well, they actually get better over time, even though they're in high stress. And this last point is actually important to realize, because of what it suggests to us is that mindfulness exercises are very much like physical exercise: if you don't do it, you don't benefit. But if you do engage in mindfulness practice, the more you do, the more you benefit. And I want to just bring it back to Captain Jeff Davis. As I mentioned to you at the beginning, his marines were involved in the very first project that we ever did, offering mindfulness training. And they showed this exact pattern, which was very heartening. We had offered them the mindfulness training right before they were deployed to Iraq. And upon their return, Captain Davis shared with us what he was feeling was the benefit of this program. He said that unlike last time, after this deployment, they were much more present. They were discerning. They were not as reactive. And in some cases, they were really more compassionate with the people they were engaging with and each other. He said in many ways, he felt that the mindfulness training program we offered gave them a really important tool to protect against developing post-traumatic stress disorder and even allowing it to turn into post-traumatic growth. To us, this was very compelling. And it ended up that Captain Davis and I — you know, this was about a decade ago, in 2008 — we've kept in touch all these years. And he himself has gone on to continue practicing mindfulness in a daily way. He was promoted to major, he actually then ended up retiring from the Marine Corps. He went on to get a divorce, to get remarried, to have a child, to get an MBA. And through all of these challenges and transitions and joys of his life, he kept up with his mindfulness practice. And as fate would have it, just a few months ago, Captain Davis suffered a massive heart attack, at the age of 46. And he ended up calling me a few weeks ago. And he said, "I want to tell you something. I know that the doctors who worked on me, they saved my heart, but mindfulness saved my life. The presence of mind I had to stop the ambulance that ended up taking me to the hospital," — himself, the clarity of mind he had to notice when there was fear and anxiety happening but not be gripped by it — he said, "For me, these were the gifts of mindfulness." And I was so relieved to hear that he was OK. But really heartened to see that he had transformed his own attention. He went from having a really bad boss — an attention system that nearly drove him off a bridge — to one that was an exquisite leader and guide, and saved his life. So I want to actually end by sharing my call to action to all of you. And here it is. Pay attention to your attention. Alright? Pay attention to your attention and incorporate mindfulness training as part of your daily wellness toolkit, in order to tame your own wandering mind and to allow your attention to be a trusted guide in your own life. Thank you. (Applause) |
What if we paid doctors to keep people healthy? | {0: 'As the Biopharma director for licensing and business development at Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, Matthias Müllenbeck is responsible for leading strategic partnering initiatives in the field of oncology and immuno-oncology.'} | TED@Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany | It's 4am in the morning. I'm waking up in a Boston hotel room and can only think of one thing: tooth pain. One of my ceramic inlays fell off the evening before. Five hours later, I'm sitting in a dentist's chair. But instead of having a repair of my inlay so that I can get rid of my pain, the dentist pitches me on the advantages of a titanium implant surgery. Ever heard of that? (Laughter) It essentially means to replace a damaged tooth by an artificial one, that is screwed into your jaw. Estimated costs for the implant surgery may add up to 10,000 US dollars. Replacing the ceramic inlay I had before would come in at 100 US dollars. Was it my health or the money that could be earned with me that was the biggest concern for my dentist? As it turned out, my experience wasn't an isolated case. A study by a US national newspaper estimated that in the United States, up to 30 percent of all surgical procedures — including stent and pacemaker implantations, hip replacements and uterus removals — were conducted although other nonsurgical treatment options had not been fully exploited by the physician in charge. Isn't that figure shocking? Numbers may be slightly different in other countries, but what it means is that if you go to a doctor in the US, you have a not-insignificant chance to be subjected to a surgical intervention without there being an immediate need for it. Why is this? Why are some practitioners incentivized to run such unnecessary procedures? Well, perhaps it is because health care systems themselves incentivize in a nonideal way towards applying or not applying certain procedures or treatments. As most health care systems reimburse practitioners in a fee-for-service-based fashion on the number and kind of treatments performed, it may be this economic incentive that tempts some practitioners to rather perform high-profit surgical treatments instead of exploring other treatment options. Although certain countries started to implement performance-based reimbursement, anchored on a quality and efficacy matrix, overall, there's very little in today's health care systems' architecture to incentivize practitioners broadly to actively prevent the appearance of a disease in the first place and to limit the procedures applied to a patient to the most effective options. So how do we fix this? What it may take is a fundamental redesign of our health care system's architecture — a complete rethinking of the incentive structure. What we may need is a health care system that reimburses practitioners for keeping their customers healthy instead of almost only paying for services once people are already sick. What we may need is a transformation from today's system that largely cares for the sick, to a system that cares for the healthy. To change our current "sick care" approach into a true "health care" approach. It is a paradigm shift from treating people once they have become sick to preserving the health of the healthy before they get sick. This shift may move the focus of all those involved — from doctors, to hospitals, to pharmaceutical and medical companies — on the product that this industry ultimately sells: health. Imagine the following. What if we redesign our health care system into one that does not reimburse practitioners for the actual procedures performed on a patient but rather reimburses doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical and medical companies for every day a single individual is kept healthy and doesn't develop a disease? In practical terms, we could, for example, use public money to pay a health fee to an insurance company for every day a single individual is kept healthy and doesn't develop a disease or doesn't require any other form of acute medical intervention. If the individual becomes sick, the insurance company will not receive any further monetary compensation for the medical interventions required to treat the disease of that individual, but they would be obliged to pay for every evidence-based treatment option to return the customer back to health. Once the customer's healthy again, the health fee for that individual will be paid again. In effect, all players in the system are now responsible for keeping their customers healthy, and they're incentivized to avoid any unnecessary medical interventions by simply reducing the number of people that eventually become sick. The more healthy people there are, the less the cost to treat the sick will be, and the higher the economic benefit for all parties being involved in keeping these individuals healthy is. This change of the incentive structure shifts, now, the attention of the complete health care system away from providing isolated and singular treatment options, towards a holistic view of what is useful for an individual to stay healthy and live long. Now, to effectively preserve health, people will need to be willing to share their health data on a constant basis, so that the health care system understands early enough if any assistance with regard to their health is needed. Physical examination, monitoring of lifetime health data as well as genetic sequencing, cardiometabolic profiling and imaging-based technologies will allow customers to make, together with health coaches and general practitioners, optimal and science-guided decisions — for their diet, their medication and their physical activity — to diminish their unique probability to fall sick of an identified, individual high-risk disease. Artificial intelligence-based data analysis and the miniaturization of sensor technologies are already starting to make monitoring of the individual health status possible. Measuring cardiometabolic parameters by devices like this or the detection of circulating tumor DNA in your bloodstream early on after cancer disease onset are only two examples for such monitoring technologies. Take cancer. One of the biggest problems in certain oncological diseases is that a large number of patients is diagnosed too late to allow them to be cured, although the drugs and treatments that could potentially have cured them are already existing today, if the disease had only been detected earlier. New technologies allow now, based on a few milliliters of blood, to detect the presence of circulating tumor DNA and thus, the presence of cancer, early on in a really convenient manner. The impact that this early-stage detection can have may be dramatic. The five-year survival rate for non-small cell lung cancer when diagnosed at stage one, which is early, is 49 percent. The same, when diagnosed at stage four, which is late, is below one percent. Being potentially able to prevent a large number of deaths by something as simple as a blood test for circulating tumor DNA could make certain cancer types a manageable disease, as disease onset can be detected earlier and positive treatment outcomes can likely be increased. In 2012, 50 percent of all Americans had a single chronic disease, resulting in 86 percent of the $3 trillion US health care budget being spent for treating such chronic diseases. Eighty-six percent. If new technologies allow now to reduce this 86 percent, why have health care systems not reacted and changed already? Well, a redesign of what today is a sick care system into a true health care system that focuses on prevention and behavioral changes requires every actor in the system to change. It requires the political willingness to shift budgets and policies towards prevention and health education to design a new set of financial and non-financial incentives. It requires creating a regulatory framework for the gathering, using and sharing of personal health data that's at the same time stringent and sensible. It needs doctors, hospitals, insurers, pharmaceutical and medical companies to reframe their approach and, most important, it can't happen without the willingness and motivation of individuals to change their lifestyle in a sustained way, to prioritize staying healthy, in addition to opening up for sharing the health data on a constant basis. This change may not come overnight. But by refocusing the incentives within the health care industry today to actively keep people healthy, we may not only be able to prevent more diseases in the first place but we may also be able to detect the onset of certain preventable diseases earlier than we do today, which will lead to longer and healthier lives for more people. Most of the technologies that we need to initiate that change are already existing today. But this is not a technology question. It is primarily a question of vision and will. Thanks a lot. (Applause) |
How fungi recognize (and infect) plants | {0: 'Mennat El Ghalid research aims to understand the molecular mechanisms underlying fungal biology and pathogenicity.'} | TEDGlobal 2017 | "Will the blight end the chestnut? The farmers rather guess not. It keeps smouldering at the roots And sending up new shoots Till another parasite Shall come to end the blight." At the beginning of the 20th century, the eastern American chestnut population, counting nearly four billion trees, was completely decimated by a fungal infection. Fungi are the most destructive pathogens of plants, including crops of major economic importance. Can you imagine that today, crop losses associated with fungal infection are estimated at billions of dollars per year, worldwide? That represents enough food calories to feed half a billion people. And this leads to severe repercussions, including episodes of famine in developing countries, large reduction of income for farmers and distributors, high prices for consumers and risk of exposure to mycotoxin, poison produced by fungi. The problems that we face is that the current method used to prevent and treat those dreadful diseases, such as genetic control, exploiting natural sources of resistance, crop rotation or seed treatment, among others, are still limited or ephemeral. They have to be constantly renewed. Therefore, we urgently need to develop more efficient strategies and for this, research is required to identify biological mechanisms that can be targeted by novel antifungal treatments. One feature of fungi is that they cannot move and only grow by extension to form a sophisticated network, the mycelium. In 1884, Anton de Bary, the father of plant pathology, was the first to presume that fungi are guided by signals sent out from the host plant, meaning a plant upon which it can lodge and subsist, so signals act as a lighthouse for fungi to locate, grow toward, reach and finally invade and colonize a plant. He knew that the identification of such signals would unlock a great knowledge that then serves to elaborate strategy to block the interaction between the fungus and the plant. However, the lack of an appropriate method at that moment prevented him from identifying this mechanism at the molecular level. Using purification and mutational genomic approaches, as well as a technique allowing the measurement of directed hyphal growth, today I'm glad to tell you that after 130 years, my former team and I could finally identify such plant signals by studying the interaction between a pathogenic fungus called Fusarium oxysporum and one of its host plants, the tomato plant. As well, we could characterize the fungal receptor receiving those signals and part of the underlying reaction occurring within the fungus and leading to its direct growth toward the plant. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) The understanding of such molecular processes offers a panel of potential molecules that can be used to create novel antifungal treatments. And those treatments would disrupt the interaction between the fungus and the plant either by blocking the plant signal or the fungal reception system which receives those signals. Fungal infections have devastated agriculture crops. Moreover, we are now in an era where the demand of crop production is increasing significantly. And this is due to population growth, economic development, climate change and demand for bio fuels. Our understanding of the molecular mechanism of interaction between a fungus and its host plant, such as the tomato plant, potentially represents a major step towards developing more efficient strategy to combat plant fungal diseases and therefore solving of problems that affect people's lives, food security and economic growth. Thank you. (Applause) |
How quantum physics can make encryption stronger | {0: 'Vikram Sharma uses quantum technology to strengthen cryptographic key management and encryption.'} | TED@Westpac | Recently, we've seen the effects of cyber attacks on the business world. Data breaches at companies like JP Morgan, Yahoo, Home Depot and Target have caused losses of hundreds of millions and in some cases, billions of dollars. It wouldn't take many large attacks to ravage the world economy. And the public sector has not been immune, either. In 2012 to 2014, there was a significant data breach at the US Office of Personnel Management. Security clearance and fingerprint data was compromised, affecting 22 million employees. And you may have heard of the attempt by state-sponsored hackers to use stolen data to influence election outcomes in a number of countries. Two recent examples are the compromise of a large amount of data from the Bundestag, the national Parliament of Germany, and the theft of emails from the US Democratic National Committee. The cyber threat is now affecting our democratic processes. And it's likely to get worse. As computer technology is becoming more powerful, the systems we use to protect our data are becoming more vulnerable. Adding to the concern is a new type of computing technology, called quantum computing, which leverages microscopic properties of nature to deliver unimaginable increases in computational power. It's so powerful that it will crack many of the encryption systems that we use today. So is the situation hopeless? Should we start packing our digital survival gear and prepare for an upcoming data apocalypse? I would say, not yet. Quantum computing is still in the labs, and it will take a few years until it's put to practical applications. More important, there have been major breakthroughs in the field of encryption. For me, this is a particularly exciting time in the history of secure communications. About 15 years ago, when I learned of our new-found ability to create quantum effects that don't exist in nature, I was excited. The idea of applying the fundamental laws of physics to make encryption stronger really intrigued me. Today, a select groups of companies and labs around the world, including mine, are maturing this technology for practical applications. That's right. We are now preparing to fight quantum with quantum. So how does this all work? Well, first, let's take a quick tour of the world of encryption. For that, you'll need a briefcase, some important documents that you want to send your friend, James Bond, and a lock to keep it all safe. Because the documents are top secret, we're going to use an advanced briefcase. It has a special combination lock which, when closed, converts all the text in the documents to random numbers. So you put your documents inside, close the lock — at which point in time the documents get converted to random numbers — and you send the briefcase to James. While it's on its way, you call him to give him the code. When he gets the briefcase, he enters the code, the documents get unscrambled, and voilà, you've just sent an encoded message to James Bond. (Laughter) A fun example, but it does illustrate three things important for encryption. The code — we call this an encryption key. You can think of it as a password. The call to James to give him the code for the combination lock. We call this key exchange. This is how you ensure you get the encryption key securely to the right place. And the lock, which encodes and decodes the document. We call this an encryption algorithm. Using the key, it encodes the text in the documents to random numbers. A good algorithm will encode in such a way that without the key it's very difficult to unscramble. What makes encryption so important is that if someone were to capture the briefcase and cut it open without the encryption key and the encryption algorithm, they wouldn't be able to read the documents. They would look like nothing more than a bunch of random numbers. Most security systems rely on a secure method for key exchange to communicate the encryption key to the right place. However, rapid increases in computational power are putting at risk a number of the key exchange methods we have today. Consider one of the very widely used systems today — RSA. When it was invented, in 1977, it was estimated that it would take 40 quadrillion years to break a 426-bit RSA key. In 1994, just 17 years later, the code was broken. As computers have become more and more powerful, we've had to use larger and larger codes. Today we routinely use 2048 or 4096 bits. As you can see, code makers and breakers are engaged in an ongoing battle to outwit each other. And when quantum computers arrive in the next 10 to 15 years, they will even more rapidly crack the complex mathematics that underlies many of our encryption systems today. Indeed, the quantum computer is likely to turn our present security castle into a mere house of cards. We have to find a way to defend our castle. There's been a growing body of research in recent years looking at using quantum effects to make encryption stronger. And there have been some exciting breakthroughs. Remember those three things important for encryption — high-quality keys, secure key exchange and a strong algorithm? Well, advances in science and engineering are putting two of those three elements at risk. First of all, those keys. Random numbers are the foundational building blocks of encryption keys. But today, they're not truly random. Currently, we construct encryption keys from sequences of random numbers generated from software, so-called pseudo-random numbers. Numbers generated by a program or a mathematical recipe will have some, perhaps subtle, pattern to them. The less random the numbers are, or in scientific terms, the less entropy they contain, the easier they are to predict. Recently, several casinos have been victims of a creative attack. The output of slot machines was recorded over a period of time and then analyzed. This allowed the cyber criminals to reverse engineer the pseudo-random number generator behind the spinning wheels. And allowed them, with high accuracy, to predict the spins of the wheels, enabling them to make big financial gains. Similar risks apply to encryption keys. So having a true random number generator is essential for secure encryption. For years, researchers have been looking at building true random number generators. But most designs to date are either not random enough, fast enough or aren't easily repeatable. But the quantum world is truly random. So it makes sense to take advantage of this intrinsic randomness. Devices that can measure quantum effects can produce an endless stream of random numbers at high speed. Foiling all those would-be casino criminals. A select group of universities and companies around the world are focused on building true random number generators. At my company, our quantum random number generator started life on a two meter by one meter optic table. We were then able to reduce it to a server-size box. Today, it's miniaturized into a PCI card that plugs into a standard computer. This is the world's fastest true random number generator. It measures quantum effects to produce a billion random numbers per second. And it's in use today to improve security at cloud providers, banks and government agencies around the world. (Applause) But even with a true random number generator, we've still got the second big cyber threat: the problem of secure key exchange. Current key exchange techniques will not stand up to a quantum computer. The quantum solution to this problem is called quantum key distribution or QKD, which leverages a fundamental, counterintuitive characteristic of quantum mechanics. The very act of looking at a quantum particle changes it. Let me give you an example of how this works. Consider again exchanging the code for the lock with James Bond. Except this time, instead of a call to give James the code, we're going to use quantum effects on a laser to carry the code and send it over standard optic fiber to James. We assume that Dr. No is trying to hack the exchange. Luckily, Dr. No's attempt to intercept the quantum keys while in transit will leave fingerprints that James and you can detect. This allows those intercepted keys to be discarded. The keys which are then retained can be used to provide very strong data protection. And because the security is based on the fundamental laws of physics, a quantum computer, or indeed any future supercomputer will not be able to break it. My team and I are collaborating with leading universities and the defense sector to mature this exciting technology into the next generation of security products. The internet of things is heralding a hyperconnected era with 25 to 30 billion connected devices forecast by 2020. For the correct functioning of our society in an IoT world, trust in the systems that support these connected devices is vital. We're betting that quantum technologies will be essential in providing this trust, enabling us to fully benefit from the amazing innovations that are going to so enrich our lives. Thank you. (Applause) |
Academic research is publicly funded -- why isn't it publicly available? | {0: 'Erica Stone works at the intersection of writing, teaching, and community organizing.'} | TEDxMileHighWomen | Do you ever find yourself referencing a study in conversation that you didn't actually read? (Laughter) I was having coffee with a friend of mine the other day, and I said, "You know, I read a new study that says coffee reduces the risk of depression in women." But really, what I read was a tweet. (Laughter) That said — (Laughter) "A new study says drinking coffee may decrease depression risk in women." (Laughter) And that tweet had a link to the "New York Times" blog, where a guest blogger translated the study findings from a "Live Science" article, which got its original information from the Harvard School of Public Health news site, which cited the actual study abstract, which summarized the actual study published in an academic journal. (Laughter) It's like the six degrees of separation, but with research. (Laughter) So, when I said I read a study, what I actually read was 59 characters that summarized 10 years of research. (Laughter) So, when I said I read a study, I was reading fractions of the study that were put together by four different writers that were not the author, before it got to me. That doesn't seem right. But accessing original research is difficult, because academics aren't regularly engaging with popular media. And you might be asking yourself, why aren't academics engaging with popular media? It seems like they'd be a more legitimate source of information than the media pundits. Right? (Laughter) In a country with over 4,100 colleges and universities, it feels like this should be the norm. But it's not. So, how did we get here? To understand why scholars aren't engaging with popular media, you first have to understand how universities work. Now, in the last six years, I've taught at seven different colleges and universities in four different states. I'm a bit of an adjunct extraordinaire. (Laughter) And at the same time, I'm pursuing my PhD. In all of these different institutions, the research and publication process works the same way. First, scholars produce research in their fields. To fund their research, they apply for public and private grants and after the research is finished, they write a paper about their findings. Then they submit that paper to relevant academic journals. Then it goes through a process called peer review, which essentially means that other experts are checking it for accuracy and credibility. And then, once it's published, for-profit companies resell that information back to universities and public libraries through journal and database subscriptions. So, that's the system. Research, write, peer-review, publish, repeat. My friends and I call it feeding the monster. And you can see how this might create some problems. The first problem is that most academic research is publicly funded but privately distributed. Every year, the federal government spends 60 billion dollars on research. According to the National Science Foundation, 29 percent of that goes to public research universities. So, if you're quick at math, that's 17.4 billion dollars. Tax dollars. And just five corporations are responsible for distributing most publicly funded research. In 2014, just one of those companies made 1.5 billion dollars in profit. It's a big business. And I bet you can see the irony here. If the public is funding academics' research, but then we have to pay again to access the results, it's like we're paying for it twice. And the other major problem is that most academics don't have a whole lot of incentive to publish outside of these prestigious subscription-based journals. Universities build their tenure and promotion systems around the number of times scholars publish. So, books and journal articles are kind of like a form of currency for scholars. Publishing articles helps you get tenure and more research grants down the road. But academics are not rewarded for publishing with popular media. So, this is the status quo. The current academic ecosystem. But I don't think it has to be this way. We can make some simple changes to flip the script. So, first, let's start by discussing access. Universities can begin to challenge the status quo by rewarding scholars for publishing not just in these subscription-based journals but in open-access journals as well as on popular media. Now, the open-access movement is starting to make some progress in many disciplines, and fortunately, some other big players have started to notice. Google Scholar has made open-access research searchable and easier to find. Congress, last year, introduced a bill that suggests that academic research projects with over 100 million or more in funding should develop an open-access policy. And this year, NASA opened up its entire research library to the public. So, you can see this idea is beginning to catch on. But access isn't just about being able to get your hands on a document or a study. It's also about making sure that that document or study is easily understood. So, let's talk about translation. I don't envision this translation to look like the six degrees of separation that I illustrated earlier. Instead, what if scholars were able to take the research that they're doing and translate it on popular media and be able to engage with the public? If scholars did this, the degrees of separation between the public and research would shrink by a lot. So, you see, I'm not suggesting a dumbing-down of the research. I'm just suggesting that we give the public access to that research and that we shift the venue and focus on using plain language so that the public who's paying for the research can also consume it. And there are some other benefits to this approach. By showing the public how their tax dollars are being used to fund research, they can begin to redefine universities' identities so that universities' identities are not just based on a football team or the degrees they grant but on the research that's being produced there. And when there's a healthy relationship between the public and scholars, it encourages public participation in research. Can you imagine what that might look like? What if social scientists helped local police redesign their sensitivity trainings and then collaboratively wrote a manual to model future trainings? Or what if our education professors consulted with our local public schools to decide how we're going to intervene with our at-risk students and then wrote about it in a local newspaper? Because a functioning democracy requires that the public be well-educated and well-informed. Instead of research happening behind paywalls and bureaucracy, wouldn't it be better if it was unfolding right in front of us? Now, as a PhD student, I realize I'm critiquing the club I want to join. (Laughter) Which is a dangerous thing to do, since I'm going to be on the academic job market in a couple of years. But if the status quo in academic research is to publish in the echo chambers of for-profit journals that never reach the public, you better believe my answer is going to be "nope." I believe in inclusive, democratic research that works in the community and talks with the public. I want to work in research and in an academic culture where the public is not only seen as a valuable audience, but a constituent, a participant. And in some cases even the expert. And this isn't just about giving you guys access to information. It's about shifting academic culture from publishing to practice and from talking to doing. And you should know that this idea, this hope — it doesn't just belong to me. I'm standing on the shoulders of many scholars, teachers, librarians and community members who also advocate for including more people in the conversation. I hope you join our conversation, too. Thank you. (Applause) |
What makes you special? | {0: 'Mariana Atencio is a Peabody Award-winning correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC.'} | TEDxUniversityofNevada | Thank you so much. I am a journalist. My job is to talk to people from all walks of life, all over the world. Today, I want to tell you why I decided to do this with my life and what I've learned. My story begins in Caracas, Venezuela, in South America, where I grew up; a place that to me was, and always will be, filled with magic and wonder. Frоm a very young age, my parents wanted me to have a wider view of the world. I remember one time when I was around seven years old, my dad came up to me and said, "Mariana, I'm going to send you and your little sister..." - who was six at the time - "...to a place where nobody speaks Spanish. I want you to experience different cultures." He went on and on about the benefits of spending an entire summer in this summer camp in the United States, stressing a little phrase that I didn't pay too much attention to at the time: "You never know what the future holds." Meanwhile, in my seven-year-old mind, I was thinking, we were going to get to summer camp in Miami. (Laughter) Maybe it was going to be even better, and we were going to go a little further north, to Orlando, where Mickey Mouse lived. (Laughter) I got really excited. My dad, however, had a slightly different plan. Frоm Caracas, he he sent us to Brainerd, Minnesota. (Laughter) Mickey Mouse was not up there, (Laughter) and with no cell phone, no Snapchat, or Instagram, I couldn't look up any information. We got there, and one of the first things I noticed was that the other kids' hair was several shades of blonde, and most of them had blue eyes. Meanwhile, this is what we looked like. The first night, the camp director gathered everyone around the campfire and said, "Kids, we have a very international camp this year; the Atencios are here from Venezuela." (Laughter) The other kids looked at us as if we were from another planet. They would ask us things like, "Do you know what a hamburger is?" Or, "Do you go to school on a donkey or a canoe?" (Laughter) I would try to answer in my broken English, and they would just laugh. I know they were not trying to be mean; they were just trying to understand who we were, and make a correlation with the world they knew. We could either be like them, or like characters out of a book filled with adventures, like Aladdin or the Jungle Book. We certainly didn't look like them, we didn't speak their language, we were different. When you're seven years old, that hurts. But I had my little sister to take care of, and she cried every day at summer camp. So I decided to put on a brave face, and embrace everything I could about the American way of life. We later did what we called "the summer camp experiment," for eight years in different cities that many Americans haven't even heard of. What I remember most about these moments was when I finally clicked with someone. Making a friend was a special reward. Everybody wants to feel valued and accepted, and we think it should happen spontaneously, but it doesn't. When you're different, you have to work at belonging. You have to be either really helpful, smart, funny, anything to be cool for the crowd you want to hang out with. Later on, when I was in high school, my dad expanded on his summer plan, and from Caracas he sent me to Wallingford, Connecticut, for the senior year of high school. This time, I remember daydreaming on the plane about "the American high school experience" - with a locker. It was going to be perfect, just like in my favorite TV show: "Saved by the Bell." (Laughter) I get there, and they tell me that my assigned roommate is eagerly waiting. I opened the door, and there she was, sitting on the bed, with a headscarf. Her name was Fatima, and she was Muslim from Bahrain, and she was not what I expected. She probably sensed my disappointment when I looked at her because I didn't do too much to hide it. See, as a teenager, I wanted to fit in even more, I wanted to be popular, maybe have a boyfriend for prom, and I felt that Fatima just got in the way with her shyness and her strict dress code. I didn't realize that I was making her feel like the kids at summer camp made me feel. This was the high school equivalent of asking her, "Do you know what a hamburger is?" I was consumed by my own selfishness and unable to put myself in her shoes. I have to be honest with you, we only lasted a couple of months together, because she was later sent to live with a counselor instead of other students. I remember thinking, "Ah, she'll be okay. She's just different." You see, when we label someone as different, it dehumanizes them in a way. They become "the other." They're not worthy of our time, not our problem, and in fact, they, "the other," are probably the cause of our problems. So, how do we recognize our blind spots? It begins by understanding what makes you different, by embracing those traits. Only then can you begin to appreciate what makes others special. I remember when this hit me. It was a couple months after that. I had found that boyfriend for prom, made a group of friends, and practically forgotten about Fatima, until everybody signed on to participate in this talent show for charity. You needed to offer a talent for auction. It seemed like everybody had something special to offer. Some kids were going to play the violin, others were going to recite a theater monologue, and I remember thinking, "We don't practice talents like these back home." But I was determined to find something of value. The day of the talent show comes, and I get up on stage with my little boom box, and put it on the side and press "Play," and a song by my favorite emerging artist, Shakira, comes up. And I go, "Whenever, wherever, we're meant to be together," and I said, "My name is Mariana, and I'm going to auction a dance class." It seemed like the whole school raised their hand to bid. My dance class really stood out from, like, the 10th violin class offered that day. Going back to my dorm room, I didn't feel different. I felt really special. That's when I started thinking about Fatima, a person that I had failed to see as special, when I first met her. She was from the Middle East, just like Shakira's family was from the Middle East. She could have probably taught me a thing or two about belly dancing, had I been open to it. Now, I want you all to take that sticker that was given to you at the beginning of our session today, where you wrote down what makes you special, and I want you to look at it. If you're watching at home, take a piece of paper, and write down what makes you different. You may feel guarded when you look at it, maybe even a little ashamed, maybe even proud. But you need to begin to embrace it. Remember, it is the first step in appreciating what makes others special. When I went back home to Venezuela, I began to understand how these experiences were changing me. Being able to speak different languages, to navigate all these different people and places, it gave me a unique sensibility. I was finally beginning to understand the importance of putting myself in other people's shoes. That is a big part of the reason why I decided to become a journalist. Especially being from a part of the world that is often labeled "the backyard," "the illegal aliens," "third-world," "the others," I wanted to do something to change that. It was right around the time, however, when the Venezuelan government shut down the biggest television station in our country. Censorship was growing, and my dad came up to me once again and said, "How are you going to be a journalist here? You have to leave." That's when it hit me. That's what he had been preparing me for. That is what the future held for me. So in 2008, I packed my bags, and I came to the United States, without a return ticket this time. I was painfully aware that, at 24 years old, I was becoming a refugee of sorts, an immigrant, the other, once again, and now for good. I was able to come on a scholarship to study journalism. I remember when they gave me my first assignment to cover the historic election of President Barack Obama. I felt so lucky, so hopeful. I was, like, "Yes, this is it. I've come to post-racial America, where the notion of us and them is being eroded, and will probably be eradicated in my lifetime." Boy, was I wrong, right? Why didn't Barack Obama's presidency alleviate racial tensions in our country? Why do some people still feel threatened by immigrants, LGBTQ, and minority groups who are just trying to find a space in this United States that should be for all of us? I didn't have the answers back then, but on November 8th, 2016, when Donald Trump became our president, it became clear that a large part of the electorate sees them as "the others." Some see people coming to take their jobs, or potential terrorists who speak a different language. Meanwhile, minority groups oftentimes just see hatred, intolerance, and narrow-mindedness on the other side. It's like we're stuck in these bubbles that nobody wants to burst. The only way to do it, the only way to get out of it is to realize that being different also means thinking differently. It takes courage to show respect. In the words of Voltaire: "I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will fight to the death to defend your right to say it." Failing to see anything good on the other side makes a dialogue impossible. Without a dialogue, we will keep repeating the same mistakes, because we will not learn anything new. I covered the 2016 election for NBC News. It was my first big assignment in this mainstream network, where I had crossed over from Spanish television. And I wanted to do something different. I watched election results with undocumented families. Few thought of sharing that moment with people who weren't citizens, but actually stood the most to lose that night. When it became apparent that Donald Trump was winning, this eight-year-old girl named Angelina rushed up to me in tears. She sobbed, and she asked me if her mom was going to be deported now. I hugged her back and I said, "It's going to be okay," but I really didn't know. This was the photo we took that night, forever ingrained in my heart. Here was this little girl who was around the same age I was when I went to camp in Brainerd. She already knows she is "the other." She walks home from school in fear, every day, that her mom can be taken away. So, how do we put ourselves in Angelina's shoes? How do we make her understand she is special, and not simply unworthy of having her family together? By giving camera time to her and families like hers, I tried to make people see them as human beings, and not simply "illegal aliens." Yes, they broke a law, and they should pay a penalty for it, but they've also given everything for this country, like many other immigrants before them have. I've already told you how my path to personal growth started. To end, I want to tell you how I hit the worst bump in the road yet, one that shook me to my very core. The day, April 10th, 2014, I was driving to the studio, and I got a call from my parents. "Are you on the air?" they asked. I immediately knew something was wrong. "What happened?" I said. "It's your sister; she's been in a car accident." It was as if my heart stopped. My hands gripped the steering wheel, and I remember hearing the words: "It is unlikely she will ever walk again." They say your life can change in a split second. Mine did at that moment. My sister went from being my successful other half, only a year apart in age, to not being able to move her legs, sit up, or get dressed by herself. This wasn't like summer camp, where I could magically make it better. This was terrifying. Throughout the course of two years, my sister underwent 15 surgeries, and she spent the most of that time in a wheelchair. But that wasn't even the worst of it. The worst was something so painful, it's hard to put into words, even now. It was the way people looked at her, looked at us, changed. People were unable to see a successful lawyer or a millennial with a sharp wit and a kind heart. Everywhere we went, I realized that people just saw a poor girl in a wheelchair. They were unable to see anything beyond that. After fighting like a warrior, I can thankfully tell you that today my sister is walking, and has recovered beyond anyone's expectations. (Applause) Thank you. But during that traumatic ordeal, I learned there are differences that simply suck, and it's hard to find positive in them. My sister's not better off because of what happened. But she taught me: you can't let those differences define you. Being able to reimagine yourself beyond what other people see, that is the toughest task of all, but it's also the most beautiful. You see, we all come to this world in a body. People with physical or neurological difficulties, environmentally impacted communities, immigrants, boys, girls, boys who want to dress as girls, girls with veils, women who have been sexually assaulted, athletes who bend their knee as a sign of protest, black, white, Asian, Native American, my sister, you, or me. We all want what everyone wants: to dream and to achieve. But sometimes, society tells us, and we tell ourselves, we don't fit the mold. Well, if you look at my story, from being born somewhere different, to belly dancing in high school, to telling stories you wouldn't normally see on TV, what makes me different is what has made me stand out and be successful. I have traveled the world, and talked to people from all walks of life. You know what I've learned? The single thing every one of us has in common is being human. So take a stand to defend your race, the human race. Let's appeal to it. Let's be humanists, before and after everything else. To end, I want you to take that sticker, that piece of paper where you wrote down what makes you different, and I want you to celebrate it today and every day, shout it from the rooftops. I also encourage you to be curious and ask, "What is on other people's pieces of paper?" "What makes them different?" Let's celebrate those imperfections that make us special. I hope that it teaches you that nobody has a claim on the word "normal." We are all different. We are all quirky, and unique, and that is what makes us wonderfully human. Thank you so much. (Applause) |
How to stop screwing yourself over | {0: 'Mel Robbins is a bestselling author, life coach, TV host and CNN commentator.'} | TEDxSF | Bigger welcome! Hello, San Francisco! TEDx – oh my God, blinding light! Hi, everybody! How are you? (Audience cheering) Fine?! Oh my gosh! Okay, so... My name is Mel Robbins, and for the last seventeen years, I have done nothing but help people get everything that they want. Within reason! My husband's here. So, I've done it in the courtroom, in the boardroom, in the bedroom, in people's living room, whatever room you want to be in, if I'm there, I will help you get whatever you want by any means necessary. For the last three years – I host a syndicated radio show. Five days a week, I go live in forty cities and I talk to men and women across America who feel stuck. Do you know that a third of Americans feel dissatisfied with their lives right now? That is a hundred million people! That's insane! And I've come face to face with it in this new show that I'm doing, which is also insane, it's called "In-laws". I move in with families across America – (Laughter) You guessed it! – who are at war with their in-laws. We move them into the same house, I verbally assassinate everybody, we open up Pandora's box, and I get people to stop arguing about the donuts and who is hosting Thanksgiving dinner, and talk about the real stuff. And that's what I want to talk to you about. I'm here for you. I'm going to tell you everything I know in less than eighteen minutes about how to get what you want. So I want you to take a millisecond right now and think about what you want. You! And I want you to be selfish. Screw Simon and the "We" thing. This is about me, right now! (Laughter) (Applause) Sorry, Simon. What do you want? And here's the deal. I don't want it to sound good to other people. Being healthy will not get your ass on a treadmill. Losing your manboobs, so you can hook up with somebody, now that's motivation. (Laughter) So, I want to know: What do you want? Do you want to lose weight? Do you want to triple your income? Do you want to start a nonprofit? Do you want to find love? What is it? Get it, right here. You know what it is, don't analyze it to death, just pick something. That's part of the problem. You won't pick. So, we're going to be talking about how you get what you want. And frankly, getting what you want is simple. But notice I didn't say it was easy. It's very simple. In fact, if you think about it, we live in the most amazing moment in time. So that thing that you have up here, whatever it may be, you want to use healthy eating to cure your diabetes, you want to figure out how to take care of the elders and start a new hospice center, you want to move to Africa and build a school... Guess what? You can walk into a book store – right now! – and buy at least ten books written by credentialed experts on how the hell you do it. You could Google it. And you could probably find at least, I don't know - a thousand blogs documenting the step, by step, by step transformation that somebody else is already doing. You can find anybody online and cyber-stalk them! (Laughter) You can just walk in their footsteps – just use the science of drafting. Follow what everyone else has done, because somebody is already doing it! So why don't you have what you want, when you have all the information that you need, you have the contacts that you need, there are probably free tools online that allow you to start a business, or join a group, or do whatever the heck you want!? It all comes down to one word: F*©#. Shut the front door, you know what I'm talking about? The f-bomb. It's everywhere! You hear it all the time! I honestly don't understand what the appeal is of the word. I mean, you don't sound smart when you say it. And it's really not expressing how you really feel. It's sort of a cheap shot to take. And of course you know I'm talking about the word "fine". "How you doing?" "Oh, I'm fine." Oh, really? You are? Dragging around those extra forty pounds, you're fine? Feeling like roommates with your spouse, and you're fine? You haven't had sex in four months, you're fine? Really?! I don't think so! But see, here's the deal with saying that you're fine: It's actually genius. Because if you're fine, you don't have to do anything about it. But when you think about this word "fine", it just makes me so angry. Here we are at a conference about being alive and you're going to describe the experience of being alive as "fine"?! What a flimsy and feeble word! If you're crappy, say you're crappy! If you're amazing say you're amazing! Tell the truth! And this not only goes for the social construct: "Oh, I don't want to burden you with the fact that I hate my life", or: "Hey, I'm amazing! But that would make you feel terrible." The bigger issue – The bigger issue with "fine" is that you say it to yourself. That thing that you want, I guarantee you, you've convinced yourself that you're fine not having it. That's why you're not pushing yourself. It's the areas in your life where you've given up. Where you've said, "Oh, I'm fine. My mom's never going to change, so I just can't have that conversation." "I'm fine. We've got to wait until the kids graduate, before we get divorced, so we'll just sleep in separate bedrooms." "I'm fine. I lost my job, I can barely pay my bills, but whatever – It's hard to get a job." One of the reasons why this word also just annoys me so much is, scientists have calculated – Oh yeah, I'm coming down! (Laughter) Scientists have calculated the odds of you being born. That's right. They've crunched the numbers. I see you up there. They've crunched the numbers on you – Yeah, you guys standing up, you want to sit down for this. They've crunched the numbers on you being born. And they took into account all of the wars, and the natural disasters, and the dinosaurs, and everything else. And do you realize that the odds, the odds of you, yeah, right here, put your computer away, stand up for me, Doug! (Laughter) So the odds of Doug here, turn around, say "hi" to everybody – the odds of Doug being born at the moment in time he was born, to the parents you were born to, with the DNA structure that you have, one in four hundred trillion! Isn't that amazing? Doug: I'm so lucky! Mel: Yes! You're not fine, you're fantastic! You have life-changing ideas for a reason, and it's not to torture yourself. Thank you. Thank you, Doug. (Applause) Christine was right when she said all of you could be on stage. Because all of you – we're all in this category. One in four hundred trillion. All day long you have ideas that could change your life, that could change the world, that could change the way that you feel, and what do you do with them? Nothing! (Grunts) Hopefully I won't moon you. (Laughter) You didn't pay for that. (Laughter) And I want you to just think for a minute, because we all have – I love to use the analogy "the inner snooze button" – you have these amazing ideas that bubble up. You've been watching people all day and I guarantee you, like ping pong balls – bam-bam-bam and everytime you have an idea, what do you do? – Hit the snooze! What's the first decision you made this morning? I bet it was to go back to bed. "Yeah, first decision today, I'm one in four hundred trillion, I'm going to go back to sleep." And I get it! Your bed is comfortable! It's cosy, it's warm! If you're lucky, you've got somebody that you love next to you, or in my case, I've got my husband and my two kids and possibly the dog. And the reason why I'm bringing up this first decision that you made today, and the inner snooze alarm, is because in any area of your life that you want to change, any – there's one fact that you need to know. This one: You are never going to feel like it. Ever. No one's coming, motivation isn't happening, you're never going to feel like it. Scientists call it activation energy. That's what they call the force required to get you to change from what you're doing on autopilot to do something new. So try this test tomorrow. You think you're so fancy, I know, you're attending TED. (Laughter) Try this. Tomorrow morning, set your alarm for thirty minutes earlier. And then when it goes off, take those sheets, throw them off, and stand up and start your day. No snooze, no delay, no, "I'll just wait here for five seconds because Mel's not standing here" – Do it. And the reason why I want you to do it is because you will come face to face with the physical, and I mean physical force that's required to change your behavior. Do you think that somebody who needs to lose weight ever feels like going on a diet? Of course not! You think they ever feel like eating boiled chicken and peas instead of a croissant? I don't think so! The activation energy required to get your ass away from your computer and out the front door, to go on the walk, you said that you were going to go on, is the exact same amount of force that it takes you to push yourself out of a warm bed and into a cold room. What's interesting about being an adult is that when you become eighteen, nobody tells you that it's now going to be your job to parent yourself. And by "parent yourself", I mean it's your job to make yourself do the crap you don't want to do, so you can be everything that you're supposed to be. And you're so damn busy waiting to feel like it. And you're never going to! My son never feels like getting off his DS. That's my job! Get off the damn DS! Kendall, clean up the Barbies! If you're going to have a nude party in my bathroom, at least clean it up! (Laughter) God, chew with your mouth closed! We're not a barn, for crying out loud! Alright, dinner is coming, get out of the pantry. As parents, and you were a kid, your parents make you do the things you don't feel like doing. Because you won't. Ever. Not now, not then, not ever! And even when you get good at something, you'll figure out something else you don't want to do. And then you'll plateau out, get bored, "I hate this job. Blah blah boring." But will you look for a new one? No! You'll just bitch about that one. It's very, very simple to get what you want. But it's not easy. You have to force yourself. And I mean force. And the reason why I use the word "force" – when Roz was up here and talking about the emotion tracking, and she had the picture of two sides of the brain – I look at the brain the exact same way. Only I describe one side of your brain as autopilot and the other side as emergency brake. That's the only two speeds you get: autopilot, emergency brake. And guess which one your brain likes better: autopilot. You've had the experience where you've driven to work and you get there and you're like, "Oh my God, I don't remember ever driving here." (Laughter) You weren't drunk! That was your brain on autopilot. It was functioning just at this level. And the problem with your mind is that anytime you do anything that's different from your normal routine, guess what your brain does — emergency brake! And it has that reaction for everything. Everything! You walk into the kitchen and see everybody's left their breakfast dishes for you. And you think for the hundredth time, "I'm going to kill them. In fact I'm gonna leave it here and I'm going to make them do it." But that's not your normal routine, is it? So your mind goes: emergency brake! And you go right into autopilot. "I'll just load it, and be pissed, and then not have sex. That's what I'm going to do." (Laughter) (Applause) So, when I say "force", anything that's a break from your routine is going to require force. And if you think about your life, it's kind of funny because we are kids and then we become adults, and we spend so much time trying to push our life into some sort of stable routine, and then we grow bored of it! You wake up at the same time every day, you have largely the same breakfast, you drive to work the same way, show up at work, look busy, avoid making calls, update Facebook, you attend a meeting and doodle the whole time, go back and update Facebook, make plans for the evening, you look busy some more, then drive home the same way, you eat largely the same dinner or a variety of it, you watch the same kind of media, and then you go to bed, and do the same thing all over again! No wonder you're bored out of your mind! It's the routine that's killing you. I have this theory about why people get stuck in life. So, most of you've probably taken your Basic Psych 101 class, and you've bumped into Abraham Maslow's "Hierarchy of Needs"? Well, your body is kinda cool. Because you have these basic needs. And your body is wired to send you signals. If you need food, what do you feel? If you need water, what do you feel? If you need sex, what do you feel? (Laughter) Thank you. I think when you feel stuck or dissatisfied in your life, it's a signal. And it's not a signal that your life is broken. It's a signal that one of your most basic needs are not being met. Your need for exploration. Everything about your life, about your body, grows! Your cells regenerate, your hair, your nails, everything grows for your entire life. And your soul needs exploration and growth. And the only way you'll get it is by forcing yourself to be uncomfortable. Forcing yourself to get outside, out of your head. Thank you. If you're in your head, you're behind enemy lines. That is not God talking, okay? It's not! In fact, if I put a speaker on it and we broadcast what you say to yourself, we would institutionalize you. (Laughter) You would not hang out with people that talk to you the way you talk to yourself. So get out of your head! Your feelings! Your feelings are screwing you! I don't care how you feel! I care about what you want! And if you listen to how you feel, when it comes to what you want – you will not get it. Because you will never feel like it. And you need to get outside your comfort zone. It's not about taking risks, it's about getting outside your comfort zone. Those first three seconds when you push yourself out of bed, they blow. But once you're up, it's great. Those first three seconds when you're sitting here in a stadium like this and somebody says, "Get up and come dance," and you think, "Oh, I should do that," and then you're like, "Uhmm." That experience that you had when you had the impulse to do it and then you didn't do the activation energy required to force yourself, your emergency brake got pulled – "I'm sitting right here. I'm not going up with those crazy people, I don't like to dance..." What happened for me is I came up, and I bumped into Rachel, and then we started talking, and next thing you know, she's tweeting. And we're friends. And – boom! Get outside. That's where the magic is. That's where the one in four hundred trillion exists. So everything I do – oh, OK, this is the last part. Sorry. So one more thing that you can use, I call it the five-second-rule. Your mind can process a facial expression in 33 milliseconds. It can move pretty damn quick. The other thing that it does very quickly is if you have one of those little impulses that are pulling you, if you don't marry it with an action within five seconds, you pull the emergency brake and kill the idea. Kill it! If you have the impulse to get up and come dance while the band is playing, if you don't stand up in five seconds, you're going to pull the emergency brake. If you have an impulse about, you were inspired by somebody's speech today, and you don't do something within five seconds – write a note, send yourself a text – anything physical to marry it with the idea, you will pull the emergency brake and kill the idea. Your problem isn't ideas. Your problem is you don't act on them. You kill them. It's not my fault. It's not anybody's fault. You're doing it to yourself. Stop it! I'm counting on you. One in four hundred trillion. You got stuff to do! And it's not going to happen in your head. So I want you to practice this today. When we go off to party, thank God it's coming soon, because I think we all could use a cocktail, I want you to practice the five-second-rule. You see somebody and you think you have an impulse, they look interesting? Walk over there! You were inspired by somebody and you have a request? Make it! That's why you're here! Experiment with it, and I think you'll be shocked about what happens. And one more thing, I want you to know that everything that I do, whether it's the radio show, or the television show, or the book that I wrote, or the column, it's for you. And if there is anything that I can do, if I can do anything to make you do the things you don't want to do, so you can have what you want, I will do it. But you need to walk over, you need to open your mouth, and you need to make the request. You got it? Good. Go do it. (Applause) Thank you! Thank you, yes! Stand up! You have the impulse, stand up! Thank you! |
Why you should quit social media | {0: 'An Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University, Cal Newport has also written multiple books about improving performance at school and in the workplace.'} | TEDxTysons | You probably don't realize that right now, you're actually looking at something quite rare. Because I am a millennial computer scientist book author standing on a TEDx stage, and yet, I've never had a social media account. How this happened was actually somewhat random. Social media first came onto my radar when I was at college, my sophomore year of college, this is when Facebook arrived at our campus. And at the time, which was right after the first dotcom bust, I had had a dorm room business, I'd had to shut it down in the bust, and then, suddenly, this other kid from Harvard, named Mark, had this product called Facebook and people being excited about it. So in sort of a fit of somewhat immature professional jealousy, I said, "I'm not going to use this thing. I won't help this kid's business; whatever's going to amount to." As I go along my life, I look up not long later, and I see everyone I know is hooked on this thing. And from the clarity you can get when you have some objectivity, some perspective on it, I realized this seems a little bit dangerous. So I never signed up. I've never had a social media account since. So I'm here for two reasons; I want to deliver two messages. The first message I want to deliver is that even though I've never had a social media account, I'm OK, you don't have to worry. It turns out I still have friends, I still know what's going on in the world; as a computer scientist I still collaborate with people all around the world, I'm still regularly exposed serendipitously to interesting ideas, and I rarely describe myself as lacking entertainment options. So I've been OK, but I'd go even farther and say not only I am OK without social media but I think I'm actually better off. I think I'm happier, I think I find more sustainability in my life, and I think I've been more successful professionally because I don't use social media. So my second goal here on stage is try to convince more of you to believe the same thing. Let's see if I could actually convince more of you that you too would be better off if you quit social media. So, if the theme of this TEDx event is "Future Tense," I guess, in other words, this would be my vision of the future, would be one in which fewer people actually use social media. That's a big claim, I think I need to back it up. So I thought, what I would do is take the three most common objections I hear when I suggest to people that they quit social media, and then for each of these objections, I'll try to defuse the hype and see if I can actually push in some more reality. This is the first most common objection I hear. That's not a hermit, that's actually a hipster web developer down from 8th Street; I'm not sure. Hipster or hermit? Sometimes it's hard to tell. This first objection goes as follows, "Cal, social media is one of the fundamental technologies of the 21st century. To reject social media would be an act of extreme [bloodism]. It would be like riding to work on a horse or using a rotary phone. I can't take such a big stance in my life." My reaction to that objection is I think that is nonsense. Social media is not a fundamental technology. It leverages some fundamental technologies, but it's better understood as this. Which is to say, it's a source of entertainment, it's an entertainment product. The way that technologist Jaron Lanier puts it is that these companies offer you shiny treats in exchange for minutes of your attention and bites of your personal data, which can then be packaged up and sold. So to say that you don't use social media should not be a large social stance, it's just rejecting one form of entertainment for others. There should be no more controversial than saying, "I don't like newspapers, I like to get my news from magazines," or "I prefer to watch cable series, as opposed to network television series." It's not a major political or social stance to say you don't use this product. My use of the slot machine image up here also is not accidental because if you look a little bit closer at these technologies, it's not just that they're a source of entertainment but they're a somewhat unsavory source of entertainment. We now know that many of the major social media companies hire individuals called attention engineers, who borrow principles from Las Vegas casino gambling, among other places, to try to make these products as addictive as possible. That is the desired use case of these products: is that you use it in an addictive fashion because that maximizes the profit that can be extracted from your attention and data. So it's not a fundamental technology, it's just a source of entertainment, one among many, and it's somewhat unsavory if you look a little bit closer. Here's the second common objection I hear when I suggest that people quit social media. The objection goes as follows, "Cal, I can't quit social media because it is vital to my success in the 21st century economy. If I do not have a well-cultivated social media brand, people won't know who I am, people won't be able to find me, opportunities won't come my way, and I will effectively disappear from the economy." Again my reaction is once again: this objection also is nonsense. I recently published this book that draws on multiple different strands of evidence to make the point that, in a competitive 21st century economy, what the market values is the ability to produce things that are rare and are valuable. If you produce something that's rare and valuable, the market will value that. What the market dismisses, for the most part, are activities that are easy to replicate and produce a small amount of value. Well, social media use is the epitome of an easy to replicate activity that doesn't produce a lot of value; it's something that any six-year-old with a smartphone can do. By definition, the market is not going to give a lot of value to those behaviors. It's instead going to reward the deep, concentrated work required to build real skills and to apply those skills to produce things - like a craftsman - that are rare and that are valuable. To put it another way: if you can write an elegant algorithm, if you can write a legal brief that can change a case, if you can write a thousand words of prose that's going to fixate a reader right to the end; if you can look at a sea of ambiguous data and apply statistics, and pull out insights that could transform a business strategy, if you can do these type of activities which require deep work, that produce outcomes that are rare and valuable, people will find you. You will be able to write your own ticket, and build the foundation of a meaningful and successful professional life, regardless of how many Instagram followers you have. This is the third comment objection I hear when I suggest to people that they quit social media; in some sense, I think it might be one of the most important. This objection goes as follows, "Cal, maybe I agree, maybe you're right; it's not a fundamental technology. Maybe using social media is not at the core of my professional success. But, you know what? It's harmless, I have some fun on it - weird: Twitter's funny - I don't even use it that much, I'm a first adopter, it's kind of interesting to try it out, and maybe I might miss out something if I don't use it. What's the harm?" Again, I look back and I say: this objection also is nonsense. In this case, what it misses is what I think is a very important reality that we need to talk about more frankly, which is that social media brings with it multiple, well-documented, and significant harms. We actually have to confront these harms head-on when trying to make decisions about whether or not we embrace this technology and let it into our lives. One of these harms that we know this technology brings has to do with your professional success. I just argued before that the ability to focus intensely, to produce things that are rare and valuable, to hone skills the market place value on, that this is what will matter in our economy. But right before that, I argued that social media tools are designed to be addictive. The actual designed desired-use case of these tools is that you fragment your attention as much as possible throughout your waking hours; that's how these tools are designed to use. We have a growing amount of research which tells us that if you spend large portions of your day in a state of fragmented attention - large portions of your day, breaking up your attention, to take a quick glance, to just check, - "Let me quickly look at Instagram" - that this can permanently reduce your capacity for concentration. In other words, you could permanently reduce your capacity to do exactly the type of deep effort that we're finding to be more and more necessary in an increasingly competitive economy. So social media use is not harmless, it can actually have a significant negative impact on your ability to thrive in the economy. I'm especially worried about this when we look at the younger generation, which is the most saturated in this technology. If you lose your ability to sustain concentration, you're going to become less and less relevant to this economy. There's also psychological harms that are well documented that social media brings, that we do need to address. We know from the research literature that the more you use social media, the more likely you are to feel lonely or isolated. We know that the constant exposure to your friends carefully curated, positive portrayals of their life can leave you to feel inadequate, and can increase rates of depression. And something I think we're going to be hearing more about in the near future is that there's a fundamental mismatch between the way our brains are wired and this behavior of exposing yourself to stimuli with intermittent rewards throughout all of your waking hours. It's one thing to spend a couple of hours at a slot machine in Las Vegas, but if you bring one with you, and you pull that handle all day long, from when you wake up to when you go to bed: we're not wired from it. It short-circuits the brain, and we're starting to find it has actual cognitive consequences, one of them being this sort of pervasive background hum of anxiety. The canary in the coal mine for this issue is actually college campuses. If you talk to mental health experts on college campuses, they'll tell you that along with the rise of ubiquitous smartphone use and social media use among the students on the campus, came an explosion of anxiety-related disorders on those campuses. That's the canary in the coal mine. This type of behavior is a mismatch for our brain wiring and can make you feel miserable. So there's real cost to social media use; which means when you're trying to decide, "Should I use this or not?", saying it's harmless is not enough. You actually have to identify a significantly positive, clear benefit that can outweigh these potential, completely non-trivial harms. People often ask, "OK, but what is life like without social media?" That can actually be a little bit scary to think about. According to people who went through this process, there can be a few difficult weeks. It actually is like a true detox process. The first two weeks can be uncomfortable: you feel a little bit anxious, you feel like you're missing a limb. But after that, things settle down, and actually, life after social media can be quite positive. There's two things I can report back from the world of no social media use. First, it can be quite productive. I'm a professor at a research institution, I've written five books, I rarely work past 5 pm on a weekday. Part of the way I'm trying to able to pull that off is because it turns out, if you treat your attention with respect, - so you don't fragment it; you allow it to stay whole, you preserve your concentration - when it comes time to work you can do one thing after another, and do it with intensity, and intensity can be traded for time. It's surprising how much you can get done in a eight-hour day if you're able to give each thing intense concentration after another. Something else I can report back from life without social media is that outside of work, things can be quite peaceful. I often joke I'd be very comfortable being a 1930s farmer, because if you look at my leisure time, I read the newspaper while the sun comes up; I listen to baseball on the radio; I honest-to-god sit in a leather chair and read hardcover books at night after my kids go to bed. It sounds old-fashioned, but they were onto something back then. It's actually a restorative, peaceful way to actually spend your time out of work. You don't have the constant hum of stimuli, and the background hum of anxiety that comes along with that. So life without social media is really not so bad. If you pull together these threads, you see my full argument that not everyone, but certainly much more people than right now, much more people should not be using social media. That's because we can first, to summarize, discard with the main concerns that it's a fundamental technology you have to use. Nonsense: it's a slot machine in your phone. We can discard with this notion that you won't get a job without it. Nonsense: anything a six-year-old with a smartphone can do is not going to be what the market rewards. And then I emphasized the point that there's real harms with it. So it's not just harmless. You really would have to have a significant benefit before you would say this trade-off is worth it. Finally I noted, that life without social media: there's real positives associated with it. So I'm hoping that when many of you actually go through this same calculus, you'll at least consider the perspective I'm making right now, which is: many more people would be much better off if they didn't use this technology. Some of you might disagree, some of you might have scathing but accurate critiques of me and my points, and of course, I welcome all negative feedback. I just ask that you direct your comments towards Twitter. Thank you. (Applause) |
My philosophy for a happy life | {0: 'Before his death in 2014, Sam Berns was a musician, Eagle Scout and junior at Foxboro High School in Massachusetts. Diagnosed at the age of two with a rare rapid-aging disease called progeria, he spent much of his life raising awareness about the condition, eventually doing so on a national stage in the HBO documentary, "Life According to Sam."'} | TEDxMidAtlantic 2013 | Hello everyone. I'm Sam, and I just turned 17. A few years ago, before my freshman year in High School, I wanted to play snare drum in the Foxboro High School Marching Band, and it was a dream that I just had to accomplish. But each snare drum and harness weighed about 40 pounds each, and I have a disease called Progeria. So just to give you an idea, I weigh only about 50 pounds. So, logistically, I really couldn't carry a regular sized snare drum, and because of this the band director assigned me to play pit percussion during the halftime show. Now pit percussion was fun. It involved some really cool auxiliary percussion instruments, like the bongos, timpani, and timbales, and cowbell. So it was fun, but it involved no marching, and I was just so devastated. However, nothing was going to stop me from playing snare drum with the marching band in the halftime show. So my family and I worked with an engineer to design a snare drum harness that would be lighter, and easier for me to carry. So after continuous work, we made a snare drum apparatus that weighs only about 6 pounds. (Applause) I just want to give you some more information about Progeria. It affects only about 350 kids today, worldwide. So it's pretty rare, and the effects of Progeria include: tight skin, lack of weight gain, stunted growth, and heart disease. Last year my Mom and her team of scientists published the first successful Progeria Treatment Study, and because of this I was interviewed on NPR, and John Hamilton asked me the question: "What is the most important thing that people should know about you?" And my answer was simply that I have a very happy life. (Applause) So even though there are many obstacles in my life, with a lot of them being created by Progeria, I don't want people to feel bad for me. I don't think about these obstacles all the time, and I'm able to overcome most of them anyway. So I’m here today, to share with you my philosophy for a happy life. So, for me, there are 3 aspects to this philosophy. So this is a quote from the famous Ferris Bueller. The first aspect to my philosophy is that I’m okay with what I ultimately can’t do because there is so much I can do. Now people sometimes ask me questions like, "Isn’t it hard living with Progeria?" or "What daily challenges of Progeria do you face?" And I’d like to say that, even though I have Progeria, most of my time is spent thinking about things that have nothing to do with Progeria at all. Now this doesn’t mean that I ignore the negative aspects of these obstacles. When I can’t do something like run a long distance, or go on an intense roller coaster, I know what I’m missing out on. But instead, I choose to focus on the activities that I can do through things that I’m passionate about, like scouting, or music, or comic books, or any of my favorite Boston sports teams. Yeah, so — (Laughter) However, sometimes I need to find a different way to do something by making adjustments, and I want to put those things in the "can do" category. Kind of like you saw with the drum earlier. So here’s a clip with me playing Spider-Man with the Foxboro High School Marching Band at halftime a couple of years ago. (Video) ♫ Spider-Man theme song ♫ (Applause) Thank you. All right, all right, so — That was pretty cool, and so I was able to accomplish my dream of playing snare drum with the marching band, as I believe I can do for all of my dreams. So hopefully, you can accomplish your dreams as well, with this outlook. The next aspect to my philosophy is that I surround myself with people I want to be with, people of high quality. I’m extremely lucky to have an amazing family, who have always supported me throughout my entire life. And I’m also really fortunate to have a really close group of friends at school. Now we’re kind of goofy, a lot of us are band geeks, but we really enjoy each other’s company, and we help each other out when we need to. We see each other for who we are on the inside. So this is us goofing off a little bit. So we’re juniors in High School now, and we can now mentor younger band members, as a single collective unit. What I love about being in a group like the band, is that the music that we make together, is true, is genuine, and it supersedes Progeria. So I don’t have to worry about that when I’m feeling so good about making music. But even having made a documentary, going on TV a couple of times, I feel like I’m at my highest point when I’m with the people that surround me every day. They provide the real positive influences in my life, as I hope I can provide a positive influence in theirs as well. (Applause) Thank you. So the bottom line here, is that I hope you appreciate and love your family, love your friends, for you guys, love you Bro’s and acknowledge your mentors, and your community, because they are a very real aspect of everyday life, they can make a truly significant, positive impact. The third aspect to the philosophy is, Keep moving forward. Here’s a quote by a man you may know, named Walt Disney, and it’s one of my favorite quotes. I always try to have something to look forward to. Something to strive for to make my life richer. It doesn’t have to be big. It could be anything from looking forward to the next comic book to come out, or going on a large family vacation, or hanging out with my friends, to going to the next High School football game. However, all of these things keep me focused, and know that there’s a bright future ahead, and may get me through some difficult times that I may be having. Now this mentality includes staying in a forward thinking state of mind. I try hard not to waste energy feeling badly for myself, because when I do, I get stuck in a paradox, where there’s no room for any happiness or any other emotion. Now, it’s not that I ignore when I’m feeling badly, I kind of accept it, I let it in, so that I can acknowledge it, and do what I need to do to move past it. When I was younger, I wanted to be an engineer. I wanted to be an inventor, who would catapult the world into a better future. Maybe this came from my love of Legos, and the freedom of expression that I felt when I was building with them. And this was also derived from my family and my mentors, who always make me feel whole, and good about myself. Now today my ambitions have changed a little bit, I’d like to go into the field of Biology, maybe cell biology, or genetics, or biochemistry, or really anything. This is a friend of mine, who I look up to, Francis Collins, the director of the NIH, and this is us at TEDMED last year, chatting away. I feel that no matter what I choose to become, I believe that I can change the world. And as I’m striving to change the world, I will be happy. About four years ago, HBO began to film a documentary about my family and me called “Life According to Sam”. That was a pretty great experience, but it was also four years ago. And like anyone, my views on many things have changed, and hopefully matured, like my potential career choice. However, some things have stayed the same throughout that time. Like my mentality, and philosophy towards life. So I would like to show you a clip of my younger self from the film, that I feel embodies that philosophy. (Video) I know more about it genetically. So it’s less of an embodiment now. It used to be like this thing that prevents me from doing all this stuff, that causes other kids to die, that causes everybody to be stressed, and now it’s a protein that is abnormal, that weakens the structure of cells. So, and it takes a burden off of me because now I don’t have to think about Progeria as an entity. Okay, pretty good, huh? (Applause) Thank you. So, as you can see I’ve been thinking this way for many years. But I’d never really had to apply all of these aspects of my philosophy to the test at one time, until last January. I was pretty sick, I had a chest cold, and I was in the hospital for a few days, and I was secluded from all of the aspects of my life that I felt made me, me, that kind of gave me my identity. But knowing that I was going to get better, and looking forward to a time that I would feel good again, helped me to keep moving forward. And sometimes I had to be brave, and it wasn’t always easy. Sometimes I faltered, I had bad days, but I realized that being brave isn’t supposed to be easy. And for me, I feel it’s the key way to keep moving forward. So, all in all, I don’t waste energy feeling bad for myself. I surround myself with people that I want to be with, and I keep moving forward. So with this philosophy, I hope that all of you, regardless of your obstacles, can have a very happy life as well. Oh, wait, hang on a second, one more piece of advice –- (Laughter) Never miss a party if you can help it. My school’s homecoming dance is tomorrow night, and I will be there. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Plus-size? More like my size | {0: 'Ashley Graham is a body activist and model. '} | TEDxBerkleeValencia | You are bold, you are brilliant, and you are beautiful. There is no other woman like you. You are capable. Back fat, I see you popping over my bra today, but that's alright. I'm going to choose to love you. And thick thighs, you are just so sexy, you can't stop rubbing each other. (Laughter) That's alright. I'm going to keep you. And cellulite, I have not forgotten about you. I'm going to choose to love you even though you want to take over my whole bottom half, but you're a part of me. I love you. It's true, honestly. I felt free once I realized I was never going to fit the narrow mold that society wanted me to fit in. I was never going to be perfect enough for an industry that defines perfection from the outside in. And that's OK. Rolls, curves, cellulite, all of it. I love every part of me. My name is Ashley Graham, and I'm a model and body activist. Over the last 15 years, I've come to the conclusion that there is no one perfect body. Because I, like you, possess a wonderfully unique and diverse physique. Now, the fashion industry may persist to label me as "plus size", but I like to think of it as 'my size'. In fact, did you know that the plus size fashion industry actually starts at a US size 8? And it goes up to a US size 16. So basically what I'm saying is that the majority of this room right now is considered plus size. How does it make you feel to be labeled? I really feel like we need to start looking beyond the plus size model paradigms to what it actually means to be a model in 2015. My journey begins in Lincoln, Nebraska. I was 12 years old and scouted in a mall. At 13, I signed with a major modeling agency and was traveling the world. I was shooting big campaigns, and before I even graduated high school, I had been to multiple different countries. At 17, I graduated and moved to New York, and while most kids are going through their self-discovery stage in college, my self discovery stage was in the midst of catwalks, catalogs, and casting calls. I was working as a full time plus size model. Back in Nebraska, I was known as the "Fat Model". The girl who is pretty for a big girl. I always hated answering that question: "What do you do for a living?" I would see that person's eyebrow raise as I would reply: "I'm a model!" I'd have to quickly qualify with: "Well, I'm a plus size model." In fact, here is my very first editorial for YM Magazine. And, you are reading it correctly, "cantaloupes-large breasts". I was helping women across America at the age of 15 dress their big boobs. But you know what the first thing that someone in middle school pointed out to me besides— well, besides the obvious? Was that fold above my knee. That fat fold above my knee. As a young model, my confidence was tugged at and pulled in all different directions. I struggled to achieve true confidence. I would go home and look in front of the mirror and only hate what I saw. And to fill the void on the inside, I began to cave to all the vices being thrown my way. Between the parties, the men, the alcohol, I was looking for self love, for affirmation from somebody, when in reality, I didn't love who I was, and I couldn't seem to get a handle on regulating my own weight. I began to face my insecurities head on. And instead, I was filling my life with temporary fixes. I, like so many young women, have struggled to love who I am. And Dove's global report on attitudes towards beauty actually did a survey with thousands of women in ten different countries. And you know what the most striking result was? That only 2% of women find themselves beautiful. 2%! We need to work together to redefine the global vision of beauty. And it starts with becoming your own role model. As a curvy woman it was the assumption that I should look up to Marilyn Monroe or Jennifer Lopez mainly because they were two of the most notable curvy women in the public eye that were being praised for their curves. But these weren't my role models. In reality, the woman I looked up to the most was my mother. She told me I was beautiful, and she never devalued herself. So why would I? She told me and taught me that true beauty comes from within and that validation and self worth must also come from within. In my lowest moments of insecurity this is when I realized that I had to reclaim my body and its image as my own. Plus-size fashion is an 18-billion-dollar industry. And now IMG, the world's number one modeling agency, has signed me and other models that are not defined by their size. My body, like my confidence, has been picked apart, manipulated, and controlled by others who didn't necessarily understand it. I had to learn to reclaim my body as my own. And in reclaiming my body as my own, I understood as a woman that I had a greater purpose. I had a greater purpose to redefine beauty. The feminine beauty. Curvy models are becoming more and more vocal about the isolating nature of the term plus size. We are calling ourselves what we want to be called: women with shapes that are our own. I believe beauty is beyond size. With so much emphasis on the body and external, it's no wonder that we all suffer so much internally. But you know, people in the fashion industry actually told me that I would never be in magazines let alone the covers of them. Well, I guess we've proven them wrong. Five covers in a little over a year. And I was one of the very first curvy models to be featured in Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. (Applause) Thank you. Never let anybody tell you that you can't. I have achieved, and I'm still achieving what was seemingly impossible. My goal is to give a voice to young women. To give a voice to young women who struggle to find someone they can look up to. For girls who struggle to look inside the mirror and say, I love you. For women who feel uncomfortable expressing their confidence they've locked away inside themselves. For women who have relinquished their rights to someone else. It is critical that both men and women create a body positive environment. Uplift the important women in your lives. Create a safe space for them to express their body and their beauty for who they are not because of who they're not. Be you. Be real. Be authentic. Be your favorite kind of woman. Don't let anybody else take that job. And remember this is the generation of body diversity. The current is changing. I now invite all of you to #TEDxBV15 with your own self-affirming words. There may not be a full-length mirror in front of each of you today, but I want to challenge you to think about what you would want to say to yourself in the mirror with your own self-affirming words. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why people believe they can't draw | {0: 'Graham specialises in the art of communication and has helped thousands of people to make important presentations. He is perhaps best known for his use of fast cartoon drawings to communicate ideas and is the author of ‘The Art of Business Communication’.'} | TEDxHull | Hi. I've got a question for you: how many people here would say they can draw? (Laughter) I think we've got about one or two percent of the hands going up, and it's interesting, isn't it? It's a little bit like people think of spelling or singing. They think,"You can either do it, or you can't." But I think you can. Because when people say they can't draw, I think it's more to do with beliefs rather than talent and ability. So I think when you say you can't draw, that's just an illusion, and today I'd like to prove that to you. When I say "draw", I'm not saying we're all going to draw like Michelangelo. We are not going to be painting the Sistine Chapel's ceiling. But would you be happy if, by the end of this session, you could draw pictures a little bit like this? (Audience murmuring) Oh, yes! (Laughter) Or even a little bit like this? (Laughter) Actually, there are only two things you need to do to be able to achieve this. One is have an open mind. Are you up for that? (Audience) Yes! And two, just be prepared to have a go. So grab a pen and a piece of paper. OK, so here's how it's going to work: I’ll show you the first cartoon we're going to do, so just watch to begin with. Here we go. Just watching. That's going to be our first cartoon. It's a character called Spike. I'd like you to draw along with me. I'll draw the first line, you draw, and when you've done that, look up, and I'll know you're ready for the next line. Okay, here we go. Start with the nose. Now the eyes. They're like 66s or speech marks. That's it. Next, the mouth. Nice, big smile. Now, over here, the ear. Next, some spiky hair. Next, put the pen to the left to the mouth, little line like that. Pen under the ear, drop a line like that. Pen to the left of the neck, top of the T-shirt. Line to the left, line to the right. Just hold your drawings up and show everyone. (Laughter) How are we all doing? (Laughter) OK. OK, fantastic. So, it looks like you've just learned to draw one cartoon, but you've actually learned more than that; you've learned a sequence that would enable you to draw hundreds and thousands of different cartoons, because we're just going to do little variations on that sequence. Have a go at this. Draw along with me. Nose. Eyes. Smile. That's it. Now some hair. Pen to the left of the mouth, under the hair, little V-shape for the top, line to the left, line to the right. So we've got another character. Let's call her Thelma. (Laughter) So, we've got Spike and Thelma. Let's try another one. Here we go. Another little variation. You're getting the idea. Starting with the nose. But this time we'll change the eyes slightly. Look, two circles together like that. That's it. Then, two little dots in for the eyes. And this time we'll change the mouth slightly. Watch. Little circle colored in there. Have a go at that. Next, the ear. Now, we'll have some fun with the hair, watch. Nice curly hair. Then same thing: pen to the left to the mouth, little line like that. Under the ear, drop a line. Top of the T-shirt. Line to the left, line to the right. I think we'll call him Jeff. (Laughter) We'll do one more. One more go. Here we go. You're getting the idea. (Laughter) So we'll start with a nose again. Notice we're doing little variations. Now we'll change the eyes, so we've got them apart. We'll put some little dots in like that. Next, the mouth slightly different. Let's put a little V-shape like that. Triangle. And a little line across, and we'll just color this a little bit in. Now, watch this bit carefully; some hair, watch. Here we go, little line like that. Next, a bit more there. And watch, a couple of triangles to make a little bow. Triangle at the bottom, rest of the hair. Pen to the left of the mouth again. You get the idea. Drop a line for the neck. Now the V-shape. Line to the left, line to the right. There we go. Let's call her Pam. (Laughter) So you've done... (Laughter) So you've done four cartoons. You can have a little rest now. (Laughter) Take a rest. You're getting the idea. All we're doing is little variations. I'll just demonstrate a couple to you. We could go on all day, couldn't we? You could do someone looking unhappy, a bit like that, or you could experiment with, perhaps, someone who is… just draw a straight line, someone looking a bit fed up. Or perhaps, you could do anything you like, really, just try things out. Look at this. Little squiggle. There we are. So, all sorts of things we could do. Actually, one more I'll let you do, one more idea. This is a great little technique. Have a go at this: people with glasses on. Just draw a nose a bit like Spike's. Next, draw some frames, so two circles like that with a little bit in between. Now, just put some dots inside for the eyes like that. Next, the ear. So it's little bit like we did before, but this time we'll join up the frames. That's it. Watch this bit. (Laughter) And this bit I really like. Watch. (Laughter) And then, little bit there. Pencil under the mustache, line down, top of the shirt, left and right. So there we have it. We could carry on, couldn't we? Hopefully, we've done enough to convince you that in fact we can all draw. And not just people here. I've worked with… I'm going to give you three examples of other people who've learned to draw, and that actually surprised them, too. I'm going to save what I think is my favorite, most surprising example until last. The first example is: I've worked a lot with children and students in schools. Actually the little ones, they just draw fine, but when they get to about 15 or 16, most of them think they can't draw. But I worked with them. I worked this week in a school where I was coaching them on using pictures for memory. A girl was trying to remember what red blood cells do, and she drew this little picture of a red blood cell carrying a handbag with O2 on it to remind her that the red blood cells carry oxygen to all parts of the body. That was a great one. The other people I worked with are many adults in all walks of life, and particularly in business, and they often will want to make presentations memorable. So again, a quick cartoon or sketch could be really good for that. And again, most people think they can't draw, but take this example. Couple of wavy lines, little boat could be a metaphor to represent we're all in this together. So that, if that was just drawn in the presentation, would really stay in the memory, wouldn't it? Yeah. But the third example is - you shouldn't have favorites, should you? This is my favorite. Have you ever been at the party when someone asks you what you do? It gets a little bit skeptical when people ask me that. This lady said to me, well - I said, "I do a little bit of training, and I teach people to draw," and she said, "Would you come along and do some for our group?" She said, "I work with some people" - she was a volunteer - a group of people who have suffered strokes. So I said, "Sure, I could spare some time for that." So I said I would, and I booked the time in. Have you ever done that? You get near of that time and you think, "What have I let myself in for here?" "Will I be able to do it?" I thought, "What could I do with them?" you see. "I know. I'll do my cartoon drawing. They'll like that." But then, as I got near of the time, I got more apprehensive, because then I was thinking, "I've worked with children, with all sorts of adults; I've never worked with a group like this." It turns out it was all part of a charity called TALK. This TALK charity is a wonderful charity that helps people who've suffered strokes, but have a particular condition known as aphasia. You might have heard of aphasia, sometimes called dysphasia. The key thing is it affects their ability to communicate. So, for example, they might have trouble reading, writing, speaking, or understanding. It can be quite an isolating condition; it can be very, very frustrating and can lead to a loss of confidence. Anyway, so I prepared all this stuff, what to do for this session - for a couple of hours, tea break in the middle - and I got more apprehensive. But actually, I needn't have worried, because I'm going to show you now the work that they did. It was one of the best things I've ever done. I'm going to show you the first slide. I taught them Spike, just like I did for you, and I want you to see the reaction on their faces when they did this. (Audience) Oh. What you can see here are two of the stroke recoverers on the left and right, and one of the volunteer helpers in the center. Each stroke recoverer, there are about 36 in the room with volunteers as well, there's one-to-one helpers. You can just see the delight on their faces, can't you? Let's look at another picture. This is a gentleman called David, and he's holding up his picture, and you can tell it was the picture of Spike, can't you? In fact, I think he's drawn Spike even better there. But what I didn't realize until even after the session was that the number of the people in this session, including David, were drawing with their wrong hand. David's stroke meant that it affected the right side of his body, and he drew with his left hand, as many did. Nobody mentioned it to me, nobody complained. They just got on with it. It was an inspirational session for me. It was quite a humbling session, one of the best things I felt I've ever done. At the end of it, I had a lovely email from doctor Mike Jordan, and he's the chair of the TALK group; happens to be a medical doctor, but he's the chair of the group. He wrote to me, and I'm quoting, he said, "Our recoverers learned today that they can draw. It's a bit more than that; this sort of activity really builds their confidence." So I was happy, he was happy, everyone was happy, they've invited me back again, and I go in there now about every three or four months. So it's great. I thought that was a lovely example to share. Fancy one more drawing? (Audience) Yes. Here we go. Grab your pens. Here we go. Right. I'm going to get you to draw someone that you would recognize. So start with a big nose, a bit like Spike's. Next, we'll do some eyes, and you might be thinking, "This is also a bit like Spike." Watch the next bit. You're getting warm. There you go. Little line down there. Down here. Little V-shape, line to the left, line to the right. And you've got Albert Einstein. (Laughter) So you've got the pens with you, you've proved that you can draw. You're very welcome to take the pens with you and have a practice at home, even show somebody else. But actually, I'd like to leave you with a final thought. When you walked in here today, many of you didn't believe you could draw. I've got a question for you about that. How many other beliefs and limiting thoughts do we all carry around with us every day? Beliefs that we could perhaps potentially challenge and think differently about. If we did challenge those beliefs and think differently about them, apart from drawing, what else would be possible for us all? Thank you very much. (Applause) |
My descent into America's neo-Nazi movement -- and how I got out | {0: 'Christian Picciolini is dedicated to helping others counter racism and extremism.'} | TEDxMileHigh | My journey away from violent extremism began 22 years ago, when I denounced racism and left the American white supremacist skinhead movement that I had helped build. (Cheers and applause) I was just 22 years old at the time, but I had already spent eight years, from the time I was 14 years old, as one of the earliest and youngest members and an eventual leader within America's most violent hate movement. But I wasn't born into hate; in fact, it was quite the opposite. I had a relatively normal childhood. My parents are Italian immigrants who came to the United States in the mid-1960s and settled on the South Side of Chicago, where they eventually met, and opened a small beauty shop. Right after I was born, things got a little bit more difficult. They struggled to survive with raising a young family and a new business, often working seven days a week, 14 hours a day, taking on second and third jobs just to earn a meager living. And quality time with my parents was pretty nonexistent. Even though I knew they loved me very much, growing up, I felt abandoned. I was lonely, and I started to withdraw, and then I started to resent my parents and become very angry. And as I was growing up, through my teenage years, I started to act out to try and get attention from my parents. And one day, when I was 14, I was standing in an alley, and I was smoking a joint, and a man who was twice my age, with a shaved head and tall black boots, came up to me, and he snatched the joint from my lips. Then he put his hand on my shoulder and he looked me in the eyes, and he said, "That's what the communists and the Jews want you to do to keep you docile." I was 14 years old, I'd been trading baseball cards and watching "Happy Days" — I didn't really know what a Jew was. (Laughter) It's true. And the only communist that I knew was the bad Russian guy in my favorite Rocky movie. (Laughter) And since I'm here baring my soul with you, I can reveal that I did not even know what the word "docile" meant. (Laughter) Dead serious. But it was as if this man in this alley had offered me a lifeline. For 14 years, I'd felt marginalized and bullied. I had low self-esteem. And frankly, I didn't know who I was, where I belonged, or what my purpose was. I was lost. And overnight, because this man had pulled me in, and I had grabbed onto that lifeline with every fiber of my being, I had gone from "Joanie Loves Chachi" to full-blown Nazi. Overnight. I started to listen to the rhetoric and believe it. I started to watch very closely as the leaders of this organization would target vulnerable young people who felt marginalized and then draw them in with promises of paradise that were broken. And then I started to recruit myself. I started to do that by making white-power music. And soon, I became the leader of that infamous organization that was led by that man in that alley who recruited me that day, who was America's first neo-Nazi skinhead and who had radicalized me. For the next eight years, I believed the lies that I had been fed. And though I saw no evidence of it whatsoever, I didn't hesitate to blame every Jewish person in the world for what I thought was a white, European genocide being promoted by them through a multiculturalist agenda. I blamed people of color for the crime and violence and the drugs in the city, completely neglecting the fact that I was committing acts of violence on a daily basis, and that in many cases, it was white supremacists who were funneling drugs into the inner cities. And I blamed immigrants for taking jobs from white Americans, completely neglecting the fact that my parents were hardworking immigrants who struggled to survive, despite not getting help from anybody else. For the next eight years, I saw friends die, I saw others go to prison and inflict untold pain on countless victims and their families' lives. I heard horrific stories from young women in the movement, who'd been brutally raped by the very men they were conditioned to trust, and I myself committed acts of violence against people, solely for the color of their skin, who they loved, or the god that they prayed to. I stockpiled weapons for what I thought was an upcoming race war. I went to six high schools; I was kicked out of four of them, one of them, twice. And 25 years ago, I wrote and performed racist music that found its way to the internet decades later and partially inspired a young white nationalist to walk into a sacred Charleston, South Carolina, church and senselessly massacre nine innocent people. But then my life changed. At 19 years old, I met a girl who was not in the movement, who didn't have a racist bone in her body, and I fell in love with her. And at 19, we got married, and we had our first son. And when I held my son in my arms in the delivery room that day, not only did I reconnect with some of the innocence that I had lost at 14 years old, but it also began to challenge the very important things that drew me to the movement to begin with: identity, community and purpose — things that I had been struggling with as a young boy. And now, I struggled with the concept of who I was again. Was I this neo-Nazi hatemonger, or was I a caring father and husband? Was my community the one that I had manufactured around me to boost my own ego, because I felt self-hatred for myself and I wanted to project it onto others, or was it the one that I had physically given life to? Was my purpose to scorch the earth or was it to make it a better place for my family? And suddenly, like a ton of bricks hit me, I became very confused with who I'd been for the last eight years. And if only I'd been brave enough to walk away at that moment, to understand what the struggle was that was happening inside of me, then maybe tragedy could have been averted. Instead, I did compromise. I took myself off the streets for the benefit of my family, because I was nervous that maybe I could go to jail or end up dead, and they would have to fend for themselves. So I stepped back as a leader, and instead I opened a record store that I was going to sell white-power music in, of course, because I was importing it in from Europe. But I knew that if I was just a racist store selling racist music the community would not allow me to be there. So I decided I was going to also stock the shelves with other music, like punk rock and heavy metal and hip-hop. And while the white-power music that I was selling was 75 percent of my gross revenue, because people were driving in from all over the country to buy it from the only store that was selling it, I also had customers come in to buy the other music. And eventually, they started to talk to me. One day, a young black teen came in, and he was visibly upset. And I decided to ask him what was wrong. And he told me that his mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer. And suddenly, this young black teenager, who I'd never had a meaningful conversation or interaction with, I was able to connect with, because my own mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer, and I could feel his pain. On another occasion, a gay couple came in with their son, and it was undeniable to me that they loved their son in the same profound ways that I loved mine. And suddenly, I couldn't rationalize or justify the prejudice that I had in my head. I decided to pull the white-power music from the inventory when I became too embarrassed to sell it in front of my new friends. And of course, the store couldn't sustain itself, so I had to close it. At that same time, I lost nearly everything in my life. I used it as an opportunity to walk away from the movement that I'd been a part of for eight years, the only identity, community and purpose that I'd really known for most of my life. So I had nobody. I lost my livelihood because I closed the store. I didn't have a great relationship with my parents, even though they tried. And my wife and children left me, because I hadn't left the movement and disengaged quickly enough. And suddenly, I didn't know who I was again, or where I fit in or what my purpose was supposed to be. I was miserable inside, and I often woke up in the morning wishing that I hadn't. About five years in, one of the few friends that I had was concerned about my well-being, and she came to me and she said, "You need to do something, because I don't want to see you die." And she suggested that I go apply for a job where she worked, at a company called IBM. Yeah, I thought she was crazy, too. (Laughter) Here I was, a closeted ex-Nazi covered in hate tattoos. I didn't go to college. I'd been kicked out of multiple high schools multiple times. I didn't even own a computer. But I went in, and somehow, miraculously, I got the job. I was thrilled. And then I became terrified to learn that they'd actually be putting me back at my old high school, the same one I got kicked out of twice, to install their computers. This was a high school where I had committed acts of violence against students, against faculty; where I had protested out in front of the school for equal rights for whites and even had a sit-in in the cafeteria to try and demand a white student union. And of course, as karma would have it, within the first couple of hours, who walks right by me but Mr. Johnny Holmes, the tough black security guard I had gotten in a fistfight with, that got me kicked out the second time and led out in handcuffs from the school. He didn't recognize me, but I saw him, and I didn't know what to do. I was frozen; I was this grown man now, years out of the movement, and I was sweating and I was trembling. But I decided I had to do something. And I decided I needed to suffer under the weight of my past, because for five years I had tried to outrun it. I'd tried to make new friends and cover my tattoos with long sleeves, and I wouldn't admit it because I was afraid of being judged the same way I had judged other people. Well, I decided I was going to chase Mr. Holmes out to the parking lot — probably not the smartest decision that I made. (Laughter) But when I found him, he was getting into his car, and I tapped him on the shoulder. And when he turned around and he recognized me, he took a step back because he was afraid. And I didn't know what to say. Finally, the words came out of my mouth, and all I could think to say was, "I'm sorry." And he embraced me, and he forgave me. And he encouraged me to forgive myself. He recognized that it wasn't the story of some broken go-nowhere kid who was going to just join a gang and go to prison. He knew that this was the story of every young person who was vulnerable, who was searching for identity, community and purpose, and then hit a wall and was unable to find it and went down a dark path. And he made me promise one thing, that I would tell my story to whoever would listen. That was 18 years ago, and I've been doing it ever since. (Applause) You might be asking yourself right now: How does a good kid from a hardworking immigrant family end up going down such a dark path? One word: potholes. That's right. Potholes. I had a lot of potholes when I was kid. We all had them — you know, the things in life that we hit that invariably just kind of nudge us off our path, and if they remain unresolved or untreated or not dealt with, sometimes we can get dangerously lost down pretty dark corridors. Potholes can be things like trauma, abuse, unemployment, neglect, untreated mental health conditions, even privilege. And if we hit enough potholes on our journey in life, and we don't have the resources or the help to navigate around them or to pull us out, well, sometimes good people end up doing bad things. One such person who had potholes is Darrell. Darrell is from upstate New York. He had read my memoir, and he was really upset about the ending. You see, I'd gotten out of the movement and he was still in. And he emailed me and he said, "I didn't really like the way that turned out." And I said, "Well, I'm sorry." (Laughter) "But if you want to talk about it, we could certainly do that." And after a couple of weeks of going back and forth with Darrell, I learned he was a 31-year-old military veteran who had been injured and was really angry about not being able to go to Afghanistan to kill Muslims. And one day on the phone, he told me that he had seen a Muslim man in the park praying, and that all he wanted to do was kick him in the face. I flew to Buffalo the next day, and I sat down with Darrell, and I asked him, "Have you ever met a Muslim person before?" And he said, "No! Why the hell would I want to do that? They're evil. I don't want anything to do with them." I said, "OK." So I excused myself, and I went into the bathroom and I took my phone out in the bathroom, and I Googled the local mosque, and I called them very quietly from the bathroom, and I said, "Excuse me, imam, I need a favor. I have a Christian man who would really love to learn more about your religion." (Laughter) "Do you mind if we stop by?" Well, it took some convincing for Darrell to go, but finally we got there, and when I knocked on the door, the imam said he only had 15 minutes left for us, because he was preparing for a prayer service. I said, "We'll take it." We went in, and two and a half hours later, we came out after hugging and crying and, very strangely, bonding over Chuck Norris for some reason. (Laughter) I don't know what it was about that, but that's what happened. And I'm happy to say now that Darrell and the imam, you can often find them at the local falafel stand, having lunch together. (Applause) You see, it's our disconnection from each other. Hatred is born of ignorance. Fear is its father, and isolation is its mother. When we don't understand something, we tend to be afraid of it, and if we keep ourselves from it, that fear grows, and sometimes, it turns into hatred. Since I've left the movement, I've helped over a hundred people disengage from extremist movements, from white supremacist groups — (Applause) to even jihadist groups. And the way I do that is not by arguing with them, not by debating them, not by even telling them they're wrong, even though, boy, I want to sometimes. I don't do that. Instead, I don't push them away. I draw them in closer, and I listen very closely for their potholes, and then I begin to fill them in. I try to make people more resilient, more self-confident, more able to have skills to compete in the marketplace so that they don't have to blame the other, the other that they've never met. I'd like to just leave you with one last thing before I go. Of all the people I've worked with, they will all tell you the same thing. One, they became extremists because they wanted to belong, not because of ideology or dogma. And second, what brought them out was receiving compassion from the people they least deserved it from, when they least deserved it. (Applause) So I would like to leave you with a challenge: go out there today, tomorrow — hopefully every day — find somebody that you think is undeserving of your compassion and give it to them, because I guarantee you, they're the ones who need it the most. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The role of faith and belief in modern Africa | {0: 'Through her work in food and agriculture, and as a leadership development mentor, Ndidi Okonkwo Nwuneli is building economies in West Africa.'} | TEDGlobal 2017 | I was born to two amazing professors who were not religious. In fact, my father's regular response to the question about why we didn't go to church on Sundays was, "When others go to pray, I go to play." Tennis, in case you're wondering. Faith found me and my siblings when university students came to our house to invite us to Sunday school. I was drawn by their sense of personal conviction and their life of service, and opted for baptism into the Christian faith as my 10th birthday present. My faith has shaped my work as a social entrepreneur, attempting to address Africa's most pressing challenges over the last 17 years, and my work training youth as leaders and promoting ethics across Africa. Twenty-nine years later, as a Sunday school teacher myself, my faith was challenged by a young nine-year-old who asked a series of questions. He asked, "Ms. Ndidi, does God hate Africans?" To which I quickly retorted, "Of course not. God loves all his children equally." Then he asked, "So why do so many young African children die?" I stumbled and mumbled as I responded. "There are many reasons why young African children die. Most of them are man-made, and we cannot blame God." So he asked, "Why does he let it happen? He could stop it." And I said ... "Yes he could, yes he could, but he sent us here as change agents, light of the world, salt of the earth, and we are failing." Africa has had a mixed affair with organized religion, with both positive and negative consequences. The Christian missionaries educated most of our political elite, like Senghor and Nkrumah, built many of our first hospitals and schools. Similarly, Islam has introduced commerce and mathematics across the continent. Today, we have over a billion Africans who profess a strong faith. What is the net effect of this on our continent? A recent "Economist" article said that the face of the future of the world's most popular religion is African. Now, both Islam and Christianity underscore the importance of social impact as critical tenets of our faith. Muhammad is noted for stating that he is not a believer who goes to bed on a full stomach when his neighbor to his side is hungry. And all through the New Testament, Jesus Christ talks about loving your neighbors as yourselves, giving to the poor, caring for the sick, and James, too, says that "faith without works is dead." So I strongly believe that faith-based organizations have a critical role to play in driving social impact in Africa. But for this to occur, we need three critical changes. The first is that we need to change our mindsets. Both as people of faith and of those who are not religious, their perceptions of those of us who are people of faith. Now, for people of faith and those of us who are religious, we often say, "If God wills, I'll do this; inshallah, I'll do that — by God's grace, I'll do this." Now there are many things, I believe, that we can control — some we cannot. I believe that God is all-powerful, but he's not a micromanager. (Laughter) He has sent us here as his change agents, and we must stop making excuses and using him. That means that if you're a teacher, go to school and give your students the best. If you're a public-sector official, release the funds meant for that school or public health-care center instead of stealing it for your personal purposes. By claiming that we have no power over our past, present and future, we give too much authority to the wicked who steal funds and beg God for forgiveness. Now for those of you who are not religious, you also have to change your mindsets about us. There are many of us who are hardworking, ethical and intellectual. It might surprise you. (Laughter) Now the second step is that we have to utilize our resources and assets for social impact. In England, 1,900 churches have been shut down since 1969, due to shrinking congregations, while in Africa, every single day, a church or mosque is being built. In some communities, you might not find a public health center, a post office or even a school, but you'll find a church or mosque. Some of these churches and mosques are world-class, with excellent audio-visual systems, wonderful meeting spaces, and they organize events that rival international concerts. The sad reality is that many of them are empty during the week. I live in the Lekki area of Lagos, and in my community, there are at least 50 really nice churches, but there's no adult literacy center, no homeless shelter and very few public schools and hospitals. Many of these spaces could be utilized for social change. Imagine if every single church in Lekki opened its doors to the homeless at night, gave them a sleeping bag, a warm meal and a voucher in the morning to learn a vocational course, offered by the unemployed youth who attend that church. That would demonstrate what we preach and what we speak about as people of faith, and what led me to Christianity in the first place. Similarly, we have to utilize our resources for social change. The 2016 "why give" survey conducted in Kenya reveals that close to 60 percent of adults give to faith-based organizations — even more than they give their extended families. This is not unique to Kenya. It's quite prevalent across Africa. Many of our faith-based organizations have tremendous amounts of wealth that can be utilized for social change. We have to check the sources of uses of these funds and curb the excesses by our faith-based organizations. Now, this will require courage on the part of members, who will have to put their imams and priests on straight salaries, require audited financial statements that will be published and even reject contributions from unethical sources. But it's possible. We're already seeing positive examples in South Africa and Kenya, and the organizations, such as the Africa Council for Accreditation and Accountability that's checking faith-based organizations and ensuring that they comply with biblical standards of stewardship. Now, the third step is that we have to partner with all stakeholders, and this is especially relevant for the non-religious in the audience. Recognizing the power and potential of faith-based organizations, leveraging their assets, their scale, the public trust and credibility they have, their lower operating costs, their access to the grassroots and their presence abroad. Politicians recognize this, and campaign seasons are always filled with stops and picture opportunities with leading faith leaders. Sadly, once elected, many of these faith-based organizations are ignored. And in fact, a World Bank survey revealed that 30 to 70 percent of assets owned by medical organizations in Africa are actually owned by faith-based organizations, but that there's very little collaboration between the faith community and public health-care systems. One positive example is from Ghana, where the Ghana Catholic Health Service partnered with a range of stakeholders and was able to realize a 31 percent reduction in mortality. I believe there's so much potential that can be realized when we walk across the divide of faith and, hand in hand, try to solve many of our problems. Similarly, faith-based organizations can support the transfer of critical skills and knowledge. Many of you in the NGO community or in the private sectors realize how difficult it is to even attract 150 to 200 people to your conferences, sometimes even offering stipends, reimbursements of transportation costs. Meanwhile, faith-based organizations draw thousands and millions every Sunday or Friday ... with the promise of a good sermon. The truth is we cannot address issues around family planning without faith-based organizations in Africa. Issues such as democratic rights and voter registration, ensuring that every member of a congregation has a voter registration card, understands their democratic rights and can exercise that. I really think it's critical that we consider partnering with faith-based organizations to deliver social impact. It's also important to note that African faith-based organizations have a strong presence globally. There are over 2,000 African nuns and priests in leadership positions in Europe, with more influence than some of our diplomatic envoys, operating at a fraction of the cost. They can serve as influencers and supporters. Similarly, some African churches have a presence in countries across the globe, and the Redeemed Christian Church of God has a presence in 196 countries, serving as a bridge to the diaspora and providing support. If our public-sector organizations could partner with these institutions, we could unlock the potential of our diaspora populations. I know some of you are still struggling with this topic, but I challenge you to think about it. A wise man once said, "Faith is a risk, but it's a risk that I cannot afford not to take." I would suggest that partnerships with faith-based organizations are a risk, but one that all stakeholders that are committed to social impact in Africa cannot afford not to take. I often reflect on my conversation with that young boy, and I believe I should have ended it a little differently. First, I should have commended him for asking tough questions. Africa needs more young people who challenge the status quo, even in the faith communities. Secondly, I should have given him a little more hope. Not hope in the afterlife, but hope in Africa today, because the faithful are powerful. Not just because of their beliefs but because of their assets, their resources, their army of volunteers, and because working together, across the divide, we can live as positive examples for what our children — my children, your children — deserve to see. An Africa that demonstrates that God loves Africans and that we are just as capable as any other world region in solving our problems in peace ... and love. I love this quote that says, "Hope is the ability to hear the melody of the future. Faith is the willingness and the courage to dance to it today." I hope that we, as people of faith, can truly live up to the promise of social impact that we have been called to do as change agents in society. And I believe that working with you, all stakeholders, we can truly solve Africa's most pressing challenges. I have that hope ... and I have the faith, and I've started to dance. Won't you join me? Thank you. (Applause) |
Why I choose humanism over faith | {0: 'Leo Igwe works to end a variety of human rights violations that are rooted in superstition, including witchcraft accusations, anti-gay hate, caste discrimination and ritual killing.\r\n\r\n\r\n'} | TEDGlobal 2017 | Something happened while I was studying in the seminary and training to be a priest. I came in contact with a different idea of life. An idea of life that contradicted the main teachings of religion — humanism. Some of you may be wondering, what on earth is humanism? Humanism is a way of thinking and living that emphasizes the agency of human beings. Humanism stresses the fact that we, human beings, are capable of changing the world. That we have the power to make a difference in our lives, both individually and collectively, without recourse to some outside force. It may interest you to know that the best humanist lessons I learned were not from reading philosophy books or from poring over humanist manifestos and declarations. No, not at all. The best humanist lesson I learned was from the life of my own parents. My parents come from a poor family background in Mbaise, in southeastern Nigeria. They had limited opportunities. But my parents did not allow the circumstances of their bad upbringing to determine the ambition and dreams for themselves and for their children. My father worked part-time, trained as a teacher, and rose to become a headmaster at a local primary school. My mother dropped out of school quite early, because her mother, my grandmother, could not afford her education. As a parent, my mother worked very hard, combining farming, petty trading and taking care of my siblings and me. By the time I was born — that was shortly after the Nigerian civil war — life was very difficult, a struggle day by day. My family was living in a hut. With the eye of a child, I can still see water dripping from the thatched roof of our house when it rained. My father reared goats to supplement the family income. And part of my duty after school hours or during vacation was to feed these goats. There was no electricity, no pipe with water. We trekked to fetch water from the nearby streams. That was an easy work in the wet season, but kilometers when it was hot and dry. Through hard work and perseverance, my parents were able to erect a block apartment and send my siblings and me to school. They made it possible for us to enjoy a standard of living which they never did and to attain educational levels which they only imagined when they were growing up. My parents' life, their story, is my best lesson in humanism. So as a humanist, I believe that human beings are challengers, not prisoners of faith. Our destinies are in our hands, not predetermined. And it's left for us to shape our lives and destinies to reflect our best hopes and aspirations. I believe that human beings have the power to turn situations of poverty into those of wealth and prosperity. We have the capacity to alleviate suffering, extend life, prevent diseases, cure debilitating ailments, reduce infant mortality and preserve our planet. But we cannot accomplish all these goals by wishful thinking with our eyes closed or by armchair speculation or by expecting salvation from empty sky. In contrast, millions of Africans imagine that their religious faith will help their dream come true, and they spend so much time praying for miracles and for divine intervention in their lives. In 2009, a Gallup survey in 114 countries revealed that religiosity was highest in the world's poorest nations. In fact, six of the 10 countries where 95 percent of the population said that religion was an important part of their daily lives, were African. In some cases, religion drives many Africans to extraordinary length: to attack other human beings, to commit ritual killing, targeting those living with albinism, those with a humpback, and as I recently learned, those with a bald head. In Africa, superstition is widespread, with so many people believing in witchcraft, something that has no basis in reason or in science. Yet alleged witches, usually women, children and elderly persons are still routinely attacked, banished and killed. And I've made it part of my life's mission to end witchcraft accusation and witch persecution in Africa. So as a humanist, I believe in a proactive approach to life. The changes that we want cannot be achieved only by dreaming but require doing as well. The challenges that we face cannot go away if we recoil and retreat into our shells, wishing and imagining that those problems will somehow magically disappear. The good life that we desire will not fall like manna from heaven. My parents did not erect a block apartment by wishing and dreaming. They worked hard, they failed, they tried again. They toiled with rolled-up sleeves, with their hands deep in debt, they plowed ahead, growing their dreams into reality. So as a humanist, I believe we must be adventurous and even daring. The path of success is paved with risk and uncertainties. We have to muster the will and courage to do what people have never done. To think what people have never thought. Envisage what people have never imagined. Go to places human beings have not been to. And succeed where people have tried but failed. We must be ready to explore new frontiers of knowledge and understanding and attempt doing not just what is possible but also what is seemingly impossible. But I realize that at the end of the day, our efforts do not always yield our desires. We fail, we suffer disappointments and setbacks. Some problems, such as wars and conflict, poverty and diseases and other natural and human-made disasters seem as if they may never go away. Solutions to old problems have led to new dangers, new cures to diseases have resulted in new health risks. But the fact that these problems persist and that solutions sometimes create their own problems is not a reason for us to give up or to resign. It's not a reason for us to think that our efforts are of no consequence. In fact, there is fulfillment in striving, and trying to provide answers and solutions to the problem humanity faces even when the likely outcome is failure. So as a humanist, I believe we must not despair for humanity. Even in the face of overwhelming difficulties and in the bleakest of circumstances. Human beings are creative beings. We have the power to generate new ideas, new solutions and new cures. So why despair when the unexpected knocks on the horizon? It is in our nature to create anew, to be inventive and innovative, so why languish in idle expectation of a savior from above? So it is time for us Africans to take our destiny in our hands and realize we have agency in the scheme of life. We need to put an end to this game of blame that has prevented us from taking full responsibility for our own lives. For too long, we have been prisoners of our past. We have allowed despair and pessimism to drain us, drain our energies, limit our imaginations and dim our vision for a better and brighter future. We have let this continent flounder. Why passing the buck like a Frisbee? We've blamed slavery, colonialism and the new colonialism for the woes we experience, including our own self-inflicted wounds. We have conducted ourselves in ways that seem as if Africa is damned and doomed. And that all these experiences in history have irreversibly, irreparably foreclosed the chances and possibility for Africa to emerge, thrive and flourish. We must realize that there is no part of the world that has not been colonized or enslaved in the past. And if other parts of the world have moved on, why can't we, now? So as a humanist, I believe that the past is gone; we cannot change it, we cannot alter it. But the future beckons us on with limitless possibilities to recreate, reshape and remake our destinies. So let's all of us seize this opportunity. And as my parents did, begin the urgent task of rebuilding Africa, brick by brick. Let's give free reign to our ideas and imaginations, as demonstrated at this TEDGlobal 2017. Let's open our hearts and minds. And exert our energy, intelligence and ingenuity and begin the urgent task of rebuilding Africa and of transforming this continent into a citadel of unrivaled prosperity and civilization. This is what I believe as a humanist, as an African humanist. Thank you. (Applause) |
Our fight for disability rights -- and why we're not done yet | {0: 'Judith Heumann is a lifelong advocate for the rights of disabled people. '} | TEDxMidAtlantic | I was born in 1947, a long time ago, and when I was 18 months old, I had polio. I was in an iron lung for three months and in and out of the hospital for three years. Now, we had lots of neighbors in our Brooklyn neighborhood, and some of them were really very helpful for my parents. Some of them were really afraid of contagion, and they wouldn't even walk in front of our house. They would literally walk across the street. I think this was a time when my family really began to realize what disability meant to some people: fear. And it wasn't even a sure thing that I would live at home, although I didn't learn about this until I was 36 years old. I was having a discussion with my father one night, and he said, "You know, when you were two years old, one of the doctors suggested to your mom and I that you live in an institution, that they could just go ahead with their lives and raise their kids and kind of be done with having to deal with all the disability-related things. I didn't believe my father, not because he was a liar, but I'd never heard this story, and my mother in fact validated that. She never wanted to tell me. But in reality, I don't know why I was really surprised by this story, because when I was five years old, and my mother, like mothers and fathers all across the United States, was taking me to school to enroll, she pushed my wheelchair to the school in walking distance to our house, pulled the wheelchair up the steps into the school, and we were greeted by the principal. Not really greeted. But the principal said, no, I couldn't come to that school because it wasn't accessible. But he told us not to worry, because the Board of Education in fact would send a teacher to my house. And they did for a total of two and a half hours a week. (Audience murmurs) But for good behavior, they threw in an occupational therapist who taught me that very essential skill of cross-stitching. (Laughter) I don't cross-stitch today. (Laughter) I didn't actually get to go to school in a real building until I was nine years old, and then I was in classes only with disabled children in a school that had mainly nondisabled children. And in my classes, there were students up to the age of 21. And then, after 21, they went to something called sheltered workshops with menial work and earning either nothing or below minimum wage. So I understood discrimination. My parents understood discrimination. My parents came from Germany. They were German Jews who left in the 1930s, escaping the Holocaust. My parents lost family and they lost parents. Both my parents lost their parents in the Holocaust. And so they realized that they could not be silent as things were going wrong for me in my life. Not me personally, but what was going on around me. They learned that because I used a wheelchair, none of the high schools in New York City, in the entire city, were wheelchair accessible, so what was supposed to happen is I was supposed to go back onto home instruction along with many other students. So my parents banded together with other parents. They went to the Board of Education and they demanded that the Board of Ed make some of the high schools accessible. And they did. And so I and many others were finally able to go to high school, a regular high school, and take regular classes. So what happened next? I was learning more and more about what discrimination was, and equally important, I was learning that I needed to become my own advocate. I was entering college, Long Island University, and I had always wanted to be a teacher, and so I minored in education and I took all the appropriate courses, and then when it was time for me to go for my license, I had to take a written exam, an oral exam and a medical exam. At that time, all three of those exams were given in completely inaccessible buildings, so I had friends who carried me up and down the steps for these exams, not in a motorized wheelchair. (Laughter) In a manual wheelchair. But I passed my oral exam. I passed my written exam. My medical exam was something completely different. One of the first questions the doctor asked me was, could I please show her how I went to the bathroom. I was 22 years old and you know when you go for any kind of an interview, you think about all the kinds of questions that people could ask you? (Laughter) That was not one of them. And I was freaked out in the first place because I had heard that there were actually no disabled people using wheelchairs who were teachers in New York, so each step along the way I was expecting something bad. So I said to her, is it a requirement that teachers show their students how to go to the bathroom? If it is, I can do that. So no surprise, I was failed because I didn't pass the medical. The official reason that I was denied my job was paralysis of poliomyelitis sequelae of — I'm sorry. Paralysis of both lower limbs, sequelae of poliomyelitis. Honestly, I didn't know what the word "sequelae" meant, so I went to the dictionary, and it meant "because of." So I'd been denied my license because I couldn't walk. So what was I going to do? This is a really important time in my life, because it would be the first time that I really would be challenging the system, me, and although I was working with a lot of other friends who had disabilities who were encouraging me to move forward with this, it was nonetheless quite frightening. But I was really very lucky. I had a friend who was a disabled student at Long Island University and was also a stringer at the "New York Times," and he was able to get a reporter to write a really good piece about what had happened and why he thought what had happened was wrong. The next day there was an editorial in the "New York Times" with the title of "Heumann v. The Board of Education" and the "New York Times" came out in support of my getting my teaching license. (Applause) And then the same day, I got a call from an attorney who was writing a book about civil rights. And he was calling me to interview me, and I was interviewing him. He didn't know that. And at the end of our discussion, I said, "Would you be willing to represent me? I want to sue the Board of Education." And he said yes. Now, sometimes I say that the stars were aligned around this court case, because we had an amazing judge: the first African American female federal judge — (Laughter) Constance Baker Motley. (Applause) And she knew discrimination when she saw it. (Laughter) So she strongly encouraged the Board of Ed to give me another medical exam, which they did. And then I got my license, and while it took a number of months for me to actually get a principal to offer me a job, I finally did get a job and I started teaching that fall in the same school that I had gone to, second grade. So — (Applause) That's a whole other TED Talk. (Laughter) But I was learning as my friends were, and people I didn't know around the country, that we had to be our own advocates, that we needed to fight back people's view that if you had a disability, you needed to be cured, that equality was not part of the equation. And we were learning from the Civil Rights Movement and from the Women's Rights Movement. We were learning from them about their activism and their ability to come together, not only to discuss problems but to discuss solutions. And what was born is what we call today the Disability Rights Movement. So I'd like to tell you a couple of riddles. How many people do you think it takes to stop traffic on Madison Avenue during rush hour in New York City? Do you have a guess? How many? (Audience members shout out answers) Fifty. One would be too little. Fifty people. And there were no accessible paddy wagons, so they had to just kind of deal with us. (Laughter) (Applause) But let me tell you another riddle. How many people does it take to stop a bus in New York City when they refuse to let you on because you're in a wheelchair? One. That is the right answer. So what you have to do though is take your wheelchair — (Laughter) Sidle in the right place right in front of the steps and give it a little push underneath, and then their bus can't move. (Laughter) Any of you who want to learn how to do that, talk to me after this. (Laughter) In 1972, President Nixon vetoed the Rehabilitation Act. We protested. He signed it. Then the regulations that needed to be promulgated to implement that law had not in fact been signed. We demonstrated. They were signed. And when the Americans With Disabilities Act, the ADA, our Emancipation Proclamation Act, looked as though it might not in fact be passed in the House or Senate, disabled people from all across the United States came together and they crawled up the Capitol steps. That was an amazing day, and the House and Senate passed the ADA. And then President Bush signed the ADA. It's a great picture. President Bush signed the ADA on the lawn of the White House. It was an amazing day, and there are about 2,000 people there. It was July 26, 1990. And one of the most famous statements he had in his speech was, "Let the shameful walls of exclusion finally come tumbling down." For any of you in the room who are 50 or older, or maybe or even 40 or older, you remember a time when there were no ramps on the streets, when buses were not accessible, when trains were not accessible, where there were no wheelchair-accessible bathrooms in shopping malls, where you certainly did not have a sign language interpreter, or captioning, or braille or other kinds of supports. These things have changed, and they have inspired the world. And disabled people around the world want laws like we have, and they want those laws enforced. And so what we've seen is something called the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. It is a treaty that was adopted in 2006. It's celebrating is 10-year anniversary. More than 165 countries have joined this treaty. It is the first international human rights treaty fully focused on disabled people. But I am sad to say that our US Senate has failed to recommend to our president that we ratify the treaty. We signed it in 2009, but it doesn't come into force until ratification, and the president — no president can ratify a treaty without the consent of the Senate. So we feel really strongly that our US Senate needs to do its job, that our Senate needs to enable us as Americans not only to be able to assist disabled people and governments around the world to learn about the good work that we've been doing, but it's equally important that disabled people have the same opportunities to travel, study and work abroad as anyone else in our country. And as long as many countries don't have the same laws as we do and don't enforce them if they have them, opportunities for disabled people are more limited. When I travel abroad, I am always meeting with disabled women, and those women tell me stories about how they experience violence and rape and how in many cases these forms of violence occur from family members and people that they know, who in fact may be working for them. And frequently these cases are not adjudicated. I meet disabled people who have been offered jobs by businesses because they live in a country where there's a quota system, and in order to avoid a fine, they will hire you and then tell you, "You don't need to come to work because we really don't need you in the facility." I have visited institutions where the stench of urine is so strong that before you open the door of your vehicle, you're kind of pushed back, and then gone into those institutions where people should be living in the community with appropriate supports and seen people almost naked, people who are chemically drugged and people who are living lives of despair. These are some of the things that the US needs to be doing more to correct. We know discrimination when we see it, and we need to be fighting it together. So what is it that we can be doing together? I encourage you all to recognize that disability is a family you can join at any point in your life. I'd like to see by a show of hands how many of you have ever broken a bone? And then, when you leave today, I'd like you to maybe write a couple of sentences about what that period of time has been like for you, because frequently I hear from people, "You know, I couldn't do this, I couldn't do that. People talked to me differently. They acted differently towards me." And that's what I see and other disabled people see in flashing letters. But we — you in this room, people listening and watching this TED Talk — together we can make a difference. Together we can speak up for justice. Together we can help change the world. Thank you. I have to go catch my bus. (Applause) |
How we can teach computers to make sense of our emotions | {0: "IBM's Raphael Arar creates art and designs experiences that examine the complexities of our increasingly technocentric lives. "} | TED@IBM | I consider myself one part artist and one part designer. And I work at an artificial intelligence research lab. We're trying to create technology that you'll want to interact with in the far future. Not just six months from now, but try years and decades from now. And we're taking a moonshot that we'll want to be interacting with computers in deeply emotional ways. So in order to do that, the technology has to be just as much human as it is artificial. It has to get you. You know, like that inside joke that'll have you and your best friend on the floor, cracking up. Or that look of disappointment that you can just smell from miles away. I view art as the gateway to help us bridge this gap between human and machine: to figure out what it means to get each other so that we can train AI to get us. See, to me, art is a way to put tangible experiences to intangible ideas, feelings and emotions. And I think it's one of the most human things about us. See, we're a complicated and complex bunch. We have what feels like an infinite range of emotions, and to top it off, we're all different. We have different family backgrounds, different experiences and different psychologies. And this is what makes life really interesting. But this is also what makes working on intelligent technology extremely difficult. And right now, AI research, well, it's a bit lopsided on the tech side. And that makes a lot of sense. See, for every qualitative thing about us — you know, those parts of us that are emotional, dynamic and subjective — we have to convert it to a quantitative metric: something that can be represented with facts, figures and computer code. The issue is, there are many qualitative things that we just can't put our finger on. So, think about hearing your favorite song for the first time. What were you doing? How did you feel? Did you get goosebumps? Or did you get fired up? Hard to describe, right? See, parts of us feel so simple, but under the surface, there's really a ton of complexity. And translating that complexity to machines is what makes them modern-day moonshots. And I'm not convinced that we can answer these deeper questions with just ones and zeros alone. So, in the lab, I've been creating art as a way to help me design better experiences for bleeding-edge technology. And it's been serving as a catalyst to beef up the more human ways that computers can relate to us. Through art, we're tacking some of the hardest questions, like what does it really mean to feel? Or how do we engage and know how to be present with each other? And how does intuition affect the way that we interact? So, take for example human emotion. Right now, computers can make sense of our most basic ones, like joy, sadness, anger, fear and disgust, by converting those characteristics to math. But what about the more complex emotions? You know, those emotions that we have a hard time describing to each other? Like nostalgia. So, to explore this, I created a piece of art, an experience, that asked people to share a memory, and I teamed up with some data scientists to figure out how to take an emotion that's so highly subjective and convert it into something mathematically precise. So, we created what we call a nostalgia score and it's the heart of this installation. To do that, the installation asks you to share a story, the computer then analyzes it for its simpler emotions, it checks for your tendency to use past-tense wording and also looks for words that we tend to associate with nostalgia, like "home," "childhood" and "the past." It then creates a nostalgia score to indicate how nostalgic your story is. And that score is the driving force behind these light-based sculptures that serve as physical embodiments of your contribution. And the higher the score, the rosier the hue. You know, like looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. So, when you see your score and the physical representation of it, sometimes you'd agree and sometimes you wouldn't. It's as if it really understood how that experience made you feel. But other times it gets tripped up and has you thinking it doesn't understand you at all. But the piece really serves to show that if we have a hard time explaining the emotions that we have to each other, how can we teach a computer to make sense of them? So, even the more objective parts about being human are hard to describe. Like, conversation. Have you ever really tried to break down the steps? So think about sitting with your friend at a coffee shop and just having small talk. How do you know when to take a turn? How do you know when to shift topics? And how do you even know what topics to discuss? See, most of us don't really think about it, because it's almost second nature. And when we get to know someone, we learn more about what makes them tick, and then we learn what topics we can discuss. But when it comes to teaching AI systems how to interact with people, we have to teach them step by step what to do. And right now, it feels clunky. If you've ever tried to talk with Alexa, Siri or Google Assistant, you can tell that it or they can still sound cold. And have you ever gotten annoyed when they didn't understand what you were saying and you had to rephrase what you wanted 20 times just to play a song? Alright, to the credit of the designers, realistic communication is really hard. And there's a whole branch of sociology, called conversation analysis, that tries to make blueprints for different types of conversation. Types like customer service or counseling, teaching and others. I've been collaborating with a conversation analyst at the lab to try to help our AI systems hold more human-sounding conversations. This way, when you have an interaction with a chatbot on your phone or a voice-based system in the car, it sounds a little more human and less cold and disjointed. So I created a piece of art that tries to highlight the robotic, clunky interaction to help us understand, as designers, why it doesn't sound human yet and, well, what we can do about it. The piece is called Bot to Bot and it puts one conversational system against another and then exposes it to the general public. And what ends up happening is that you get something that tries to mimic human conversation, but falls short. Sometimes it works and sometimes it gets into these, well, loops of misunderstanding. So even though the machine-to-machine conversation can make sense, grammatically and colloquially, it can still end up feeling cold and robotic. And despite checking all the boxes, the dialogue lacks soul and those one-off quirks that make each of us who we are. So while it might be grammatically correct and uses all the right hashtags and emojis, it can end up sounding mechanical and, well, a little creepy. And we call this the uncanny valley. You know, that creepiness factor of tech where it's close to human but just slightly off. And the piece will start being one way that we test for the humanness of a conversation and the parts that get lost in translation. So there are other things that get lost in translation, too, like human intuition. Right now, computers are gaining more autonomy. They can take care of things for us, like change the temperature of our houses based on our preferences and even help us drive on the freeway. But there are things that you and I do in person that are really difficult to translate to AI. So think about the last time that you saw an old classmate or coworker. Did you give them a hug or go in for a handshake? You probably didn't think twice because you've had so many built up experiences that had you do one or the other. And as an artist, I feel that access to one's intuition, your unconscious knowing, is what helps us create amazing things. Big ideas, from that abstract, nonlinear place in our consciousness that is the culmination of all of our experiences. And if we want computers to relate to us and help amplify our creative abilities, I feel that we'll need to start thinking about how to make computers be intuitive. So I wanted to explore how something like human intuition could be directly translated to artificial intelligence. And I created a piece that explores computer-based intuition in a physical space. The piece is called Wayfinding, and it's set up as a symbolic compass that has four kinetic sculptures. Each one represents a direction, north, east, south and west. And there are sensors set up on the top of each sculpture that capture how far away you are from them. And the data that gets collected ends up changing the way that sculptures move and the direction of the compass. The thing is, the piece doesn't work like the automatic door sensor that just opens when you walk in front of it. See, your contribution is only a part of its collection of lived experiences. And all of those experiences affect the way that it moves. So when you walk in front of it, it starts to use all of the data that it's captured throughout its exhibition history — or its intuition — to mechanically respond to you based on what it's learned from others. And what ends up happening is that as participants we start to learn the level of detail that we need in order to manage expectations from both humans and machines. We can almost see our intuition being played out on the computer, picturing all of that data being processed in our mind's eye. My hope is that this type of art will help us think differently about intuition and how to apply that to AI in the future. So these are just a few examples of how I'm using art to feed into my work as a designer and researcher of artificial intelligence. And I see it as a crucial way to move innovation forward. Because right now, there are a lot of extremes when it comes to AI. Popular movies show it as this destructive force while commercials are showing it as a savior to solve some of the world's most complex problems. But regardless of where you stand, it's hard to deny that we're living in a world that's becoming more and more digital by the second. Our lives revolve around our devices, smart appliances and more. And I don't think this will let up any time soon. So, I'm trying to embed more humanness from the start. And I have a hunch that bringing art into an AI research process is a way to do just that. Thank you. (Applause) |
Undocumented lives, inside out | {0: 'With a camera, a dedicated wheatpasting crew and the help of whole villages and favelas, 2011 TED Prize winner JR shows the world its true face.'} | Torchbearers | JR: Art is not supposed to change the world. But art can change the way we see the world. (Music) So now my wish is ... for you to stand up for what you care about by participating in a global art project. And together, we'll turn the world inside out. [Great big story in partnership with TED] Narrator: They had a big idea to change the world. But they couldn't do it alone. (Voices overlapping) So, my wish ... My wish ... I wish ... And now, here's my wish. [Torchbearers] [Ideas in action] (Camera clicking) JR: My name is JR, I like to call myself an artist. There are two ways of thinking about my work. The easy way is just — I'm papering black-and-white images on walls. But I believe my work is about connecting people. For me, it's the power of bringing people together. I went there to do art projects with the community. Now I realize that the community wanted to do art projects even more than I wanted. And I started thinking: Why I don't take myself out of the equation and let them do it? So the wish was pretty simple: we just put up a website and you can send us your photo for whatever you believe in or whatever you want to fight for; we'll send you back your photo in large format, wherever you are in the world. Every day, I see rolls leaving around the world. The project went much further than the places I've been, and that shows the power of art. And the Photobooths truck is the magic of it. (Music) Luana: We're a team of four traveling in the Photobooths truck: Josh, Basel, Jamie and I. Jamie: To pose, they should look like this. (Laughter) We are using two of these trucks to cover 30 cities around America. Luana: We're just a tool for people that want to send a positive message. Jamie: Step inside and take a seat over here. Once the truck is ready and running, anyone can come. Wait for the flash. (Music) (Camera clicking) Touch the screen, take your picture, type in information. In a matter of a minute or so, we print on the side, three by four feet. No one is used to seeing their face so big. Woman: Oh yeah, there's my funny face for you. Jamie: The truck has this magic about bringing photography back to the print. Then the posters go to the wall. We use wallpaper glue, put them up and that's it. We printed more than 300,000 faces already. And we sent them to more than 130 countries. (Music) Luana: It's the people's art project. We don't decide the message. It can be political, to bring attention to issues. Jamie: I love the idea of using photography to promote change. This specific project is to raise awareness about the DREAMers situation. Karina Ruiz: INSIDE OUT is bringing the opportunity for DREAMers like myself, a person that came here at young age to have a better future, to come out and give a face to the issue. Vianey Perez: When people drive by and they see a lot of faces, they're going to get curious and they're going to wonder who they are. That's the face to the issue. To humanize it. (Music) JR: You do think that just pasting an image up there might have no impact, but it does have an impact. You cannot know when and how, but it's worth trying. Jamie: It all starts with believing. Right? And so, if you don't believe that you can make change, change will never happen. Even if it's a very small change in one person, that's a positive change. This is not about JR anymore. It's about everyone who believes that art can change the world. JR: I think that definitely art can change the perception we have about the world. And if we start seeing the world differently, maybe it's a good path to start changing the world. [Be a part of INSIDE OUT InsideOutProject.net] |
Passion for compassion | {0: 'Karen Armstrong -- winner of the 2008 TED Prize -- is a provocative, original thinker on the role of religion in the modern world.'} | Torchbearers | As a result of my studies, I found a thread, that the essence of religion was compassion. That every single one of the major world religions — Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism ... they all insisted on what's often known as the Golden Rule: never treat others as you would not like to be treated yourself. My wish was that you would get a panel of activists and together, we would craft a charter, a brief statement reminding the world that this is what religion is about. [Great big story in partnership with TED] Narrator: They had a big idea to change the world. But they couldn't do it alone. (Voices overlapping) So, my wish ... My wish ... I wish ... And now, here's my wish. [Torchbearers] [Ideas in action] (Shouting, fire crackling) KA: Our nations seem to be crumbling by the day. And this should make us uncomfortable. We've all got huge problems in our cities. Problems of inequity and cruelty and violence. So, what can we do? What can we do to change things? Every city has to be compassionate. And people often ask me, what should a compassionate city be like? And I said, "Well, a compassionate city should be an uncomfortable city." One is Louisville, Kentucky, where the mayor, Greg Fischer, actually campaigned on the idea of compassion. [Greg Fischer, mayor of Louisville, KY] Greg Fischer: When I announced compassion as a city value, it got a lot of attention. A city is a platform for human potential to come alive. Compassion makes individuals stronger and makes our city stronger. KA: People just can't call themselves a compassionate city, unless they've got a practical course of action. GF: So the questions then is, how do you bring compassion to life? How do you change the culture of your city? What if you could start at the beginning of a young child's life? (Clock ticking) My name is Megan Clem Mattingly. I am the Compassionate Schools Project teacher. Compassion is a very teachable thing. OK, I see a lot of friends who are looking ready. Every CSP class begins with calming and focusing. And then we have some sort of core practice that we're doing whether we're talking about self-awareness or empathy-building skills. We are starting at the ground level, we're building that foundation for our students at age five and up, to be more compassionate citizens. Kid: Leave me alone! MCM: Jeremy. Look at Miss Madeleine, Jeremy. Jeremiah: Just go, count me out. MCM: Jeremiah, we're going to try harder to get our self-regulation back, sir. Jeremiah: This is the second reason I hate my life. MCM: Jeremiah, come here, I need you to tell me more about that. MCM: Anger or frustration, which feeling was bringing — Anger, I can tell. Look at your hands. So, before we talk about it, can you calm yourself down? No? it's hard to, isn't it? Can you try to make your hands look like mine? Look. Can you try to let go of that? Look at your face, I see a smile there. You're trying real hard to hang on to that anger. I see every day these changes happening in these students. And I have all the hope in the world that this project will change our education. GF: We define compassion as respect for each and every one of our citizens so that their human potential is flourishing, thriving. (Many voices) Grant me the serenity to accept the things that I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can and the wisdom to know the difference, just for today. Keep coming back, it works. GF: Hotel Louisville is a great example of how to think about a whole system of getting a person back on track. So it's a shelter for women and their families, but it's also an operating hotel. Cynthia Brown: Hotel Louisville was not just a women's rehab facility, it is a workforce program. We run the hotel, we do all the jobs here. Every job that one of us has has their own individual skills. It gets us a sense of responsibility, because we can put this on our resumes when we leave. I think the compassion really comes from the girls that are in the rehab because we depend on each other a lot. We need each other. (Overlapping voices) If I was not here at Hotel Louisville, I would be sitting in jail, doing my time. I was given that chance. And I just — I want to live, I want to live life. [Remind yourself: You can do this You are a good person] GF: It lifts us all up to say, this is the kind of city we are, and this is the kind of city we aspire to be. And that any way we can help other cities and take us to even greater heights is what we want to do. It's this ripple effect; we're not perfect as a city, but boy, we're working to be better every day. KA: Here you have a city which is doing great things with compassion. Cities and mayors are going to play an important role as leaders of the future. I'd like to see a thousand compassionate cities in the next decade that remind the rest of the world what our duty is. Always treat all others as you'd like to be treated yourself. [Share and sign the Charter for Compassion] [CharterForCompassion.org] |
Food revolutionaries | {0: "Jamie Oliver is transforming the way we feed ourselves, and our children. The winner of the 2010 TED Prize, he's on a mission to teach every family about eating better and living healthier lives. "} | Torchbearers | Jamie Oliver: My wish ... is for you to help a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food. (Music) To inspire families to cook again and to empower people everywhere to fight obesity. I came here to start a food revolution that I profoundly believe in. (Applause) [Great Big Story in partnership with TED] Narrator: They had a big idea to change the world. But they couldn't do it alone. (Voices overlapping) So, my wish ... My wish ... I wish ... And now here's my wish. [Torchbearers] [Ideas in action] (Knife chop) (Music) JO: Food is simple. It's just raw ingredients. But it's the most powerful killer on the planet. Every child has the human right to be taught about food: where it comes from, how it affects their body. And they should be shown at school, because it's at the front line of the fight against obesity. [London, England] [Charlton Manor Primary School] What happens at Charlton Manor is that incredible head teacher took it to the next level. [Timothy Baker Head teacher] Timothy Baker: In the past, the children weren't eating the right things. I've been inspired by Jamie to educate this school about the fact that we're feeding the children the wrong food. And I thought, well, the timetable is an already crowded place — there are so many lessons in the primary curriculum. How can you introduce another subject for teachers to teach? So we looked at English, we looked at maths, science, history, geography and we saw how we could put that around food. (Children laugh) Elizabeth: When you incorporate cooking, it's something everyone looks forward to. Male teacher: Today we're doing a little bit of science in the kitchen. Female teacher: We are going to combine our lessons on Diwali, but also our lessons on shape and symmetry. Male teacher: Is this a physical change or a chemical change? Children: Physical! Male teacher: You're right. TB: For history topics, we talk about the history of chocolate, and so we can do a whole topic around that. Male teacher: And the Aztecs have been cooking with chocolate — TB: And it's interesting because it's not made as they think, with all the milk in that they would have had — and the taste is very, very different. Some children like it; some children don't. (Laughter) For maths, simple weighing and measuring. Female teacher: We're going to be doing a lot of measuring because we have to measure out some liquids, which we did last term, we did some measuring. JO: What he's done is he's put food at the heart of the school, and he's fed the stomach and the mind. (Children yell excitedly) TB: Charlton Manor is a state school. About 80 percent of children come from areas that are identified as in poverty. The children had very little experience of being outside in the countryside, knowing about food-growing. Over a period of time, we were able to build a garden. (Children shout) Students: Welcome to the Secret Garden! Kehinde: This is our greenhouse. This is our compost bin. This is our wormery. (Music) This is our vegetable patch. And these are our chickens. Sean: The chickens come out, and they try and chase you. I had to run for my life. TB: Up at the community garden, we've got two polytunnels so we can grow year-round. Sean: I will pick onions, broccoli and carrots because they're all healthy, they make you stronger — obviously — and they just make me happy. So, yeah. (Birds chirp) TB: 12 or 13 years ago, there was a reluctance to engage in this sort of curriculum. There were many people that couldn't see what we were aiming for and what we were trying to do. Obesity hadn't reached the epidemic proportions it has reached now. We're getting children that look and appear more healthy. Concentration is so much higher. Behavior issues are incredibly lower than they have been in the past. Elizabeth: One the of the great things they've done is introduce us to worlds of healthy food. Kehinde: Before, I was a really picky eater. Sean: I feel better when I eat healthier food. TB: When you fail your maths A level, that's not going to shorten your life by 10 years. JO: You don't die young because you didn't do your geography homework. These kids die young if they don't know how to feed themselves. I think Tim and the team would inspire head teachers across the world — and parents. Any teacher has the same capacity to be as brilliant as he is. His story, we want to replicate, but the truth is we've got so much more to do. TB: Jamie really revolutionized our school dinners, and it really has hugely impacted all the children, but so many in a deep way which is going to stick with them for the rest of their lives. When you change a life like that, it makes it all worthwhile. From all of us at the Charlton Manor, thank you, Jamie. Student: Thank you, Jamie. Student: Thank you, Jamie. [Join the food revolution JamiesFoodRevolution.org] |
Math can help uncover cancer's secrets | {0: 'Irina Kareva is looking for answers to biological questions using mathematical modeling.'} | TED@Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany | I am a translator. I translate from biology into mathematics and vice versa. I write mathematical models which, in my case, are systems of differential equations, to describe biological mechanisms, such as cell growth. Essentially, it works like this. First, I identify the key elements that I believe may be driving behavior over time of a particular mechanism. Then, I formulate assumptions about how these elements interact with each other and with their environment. It may look something like this. Then, I translate these assumptions into equations, which may look something like this. Finally, I analyze my equations and translate the results back into the language of biology. A key aspect of mathematical modeling is that we, as modelers, do not think about what things are; we think about what they do. We think about relationships between individuals, whether they be cells, animals or people, and how they interact with each other and with their environment. Let me give you an example. What do foxes and immune cells have in common? They're both predators, except foxes feed on rabbits, and immune cells feed on invaders, such as cancer cells. But from a mathematical point of view, a qualitatively same system of predator-prey type equations will describe interactions between foxes and rabbits and cancer and immune cells. Predator-prey type systems have been studied extensively in scientific literature, describing interactions of two populations, where survival of one depends on consuming the other. And these same equations provide a framework for understanding cancer-immune interactions, where cancer is the prey, and the immune system is the predator. And the prey employs all sorts of tricks to prevent the predator from killing it, ranging from camouflaging itself to stealing the predator's food. This can have some very interesting implications. For example, despite enormous successes in the field of immunotherapy, there still remains somewhat limited efficacy when it comes solid tumors. But if you think about it ecologically, both cancer and immune cells — the prey and the predator — require nutrients such as glucose to survive. If cancer cells outcompete the immune cells for shared nutrients in the tumor microenvironment, then the immune cells will physically not be able to do their job. This predator-prey-shared resource type model is something I've worked on in my own research. And it was recently shown experimentally that restoring the metabolic balance in the tumor microenvironment — that is, making sure immune cells get their food — can give them, the predators, back their edge in fighting cancer, the prey. This means that if you abstract a bit, you can think about cancer itself as an ecosystem, where heterogeneous populations of cells compete and cooperate for space and nutrients, interact with predators — the immune system — migrate — metastases — all within the ecosystem of the human body. And what do we know about most ecosystems from conservation biology? That one of the best ways to extinguish species is not to target them directly but to target their environment. And so, once we have identified the key components of the tumor environment, we can propose hypotheses and simulate scenarios and therapeutic interventions all in a completely safe and affordable way and target different components of the microenvironment in such a way as to kill the cancer without harming the host, such as me or you. And so while the immediate goal of my research is to advance research and innovation and to reduce its cost, the real intent, of course, is to save lives. And that's what I try to do through mathematical modeling applied to biology, and in particular, to the development of drugs. It's a field that until relatively recently has remained somewhat marginal, but it has matured. And there are now very well-developed mathematical methods, a lot of preprogrammed tools, including free ones, and an ever-increasing amount of computational power available to us. The power and beauty of mathematical modeling lies in the fact that it makes you formalize, in a very rigorous way, what we think we know. We make assumptions, translate them into equations, run simulations, all to answer the question: In a world where my assumptions are true, what do I expect to see? It's a pretty simple conceptual framework. It's all about asking the right questions. But it can unleash numerous opportunities for testing biological hypotheses. If our predictions match our observations, great! — we got it right, so we can make further predictions by changing this or that aspect of the model. If, however, our predictions do not match our observations, that means that some of our assumptions are wrong, and so our understanding of the key mechanisms of underlying biology is still incomplete. Luckily, since this is a model, we control all the assumptions. So we can go through them, one by one, identifying which one or ones are causing the discrepancy. And then we can fill this newly identified gap in knowledge using both experimental and theoretical approaches. Of course, any ecosystem is extremely complex, and trying to describe all the moving parts is not only very difficult, but also not very informative. There's also the issue of timescales, because some processes take place on a scale of seconds, some minutes, some days, months and years. It may not always be possible to separate those out experimentally. And some things happen so quickly or so slowly that you may physically never be able to measure them. But as mathematicians, we have the power to zoom in on any subsystem in any timescale and simulate effects of interventions that take place in any timescale. Of course, this isn't the work of a modeler alone. It has to happen in close collaboration with biologists. And it does demand some capacity of translation on both sides. But starting with a theoretical formulation of a problem can unleash numerous opportunities for testing hypotheses and simulating scenarios and therapeutic interventions, all in a completely safe way. It can identify gaps in knowledge and logical inconsistencies and can help guide us as to where we should keep looking and where there may be a dead end. In other words: mathematical modeling can help us answer questions that directly affect people's health — that affect each person's health, actually — because mathematical modeling will be key to propelling personalized medicine. And it all comes down to asking the right question and translating it to the right equation ... and back. Thank you. (Applause) |
My $500 house in Detroit -- and the neighbors who helped me rebuild it | {0: 'Drew Philp is the author of "A $500 House in Detroit: Rebuilding an Abandoned Home and an American City," a memoir of rebuilding a former abandoned home while finding his place in his city, country, race and generation.'} | TEDNYC | In 2009, I bought a house in Detroit for 500 dollars. It had no windows, no plumbing, no electricity and it was filled with trash. The first floor held nearly 10,000 pounds of garbage, and that included the better part of a Dodge Caravan, cut into chunks with a reciprocating saw. (Laughter) I lived nearly two years without heat, woke up out of a dead sleep multiple times to gunshots, was attacked by a pack of wild dogs and ripped my kitchen cabinets from an abandoned school as they were actively tearing that school down. This, of course, is the Detroit that your hear about. Make no mistake, it's real. But there's another Detroit, too. Another Detroit that's more hopeful, more innovative, and may just provide some of the answers to cities struggling to reinvent themselves everywhere. These answers, however, do not necessarily adhere to conventional wisdom about good development. I think Detroit's real strength boils down to two words: radical neighborliness. And I wasn't able to see it myself until I lived there. About a decade ago, I moved to Detroit with no friends, no job and no money, at a time when it seemed like everyone else was moving out. Between 2000 and 2010, 25 percent of the city's population left. This included about half of the elementary-aged children. This was after six decades of decline. A city built for almost two million was down to less than 800,000. What you usually don't hear is that people didn't go very far. The population of the Detroit metro area itself has largely remained steady since the '70s. Most people who left Detroit just went to the suburbs, while the 139 square miles of the city deteriorated, leaving some estimates as high as 40 square miles of abandoned land — about the size of San Francisco. Aside from platitudes such as the vague and agentless "deindustrialization," Detroit's exodus can be summed up with two structures: freeways and walls. The freeways, coupled with massive governmental subsidies for the suburbs via infrastructure and home loans, allowed people to leave the city at will, taking with it tax base, jobs and education dollars. The walls made sure only certain people could leave. In multiple places, brick and concrete walls separate city and suburbs, white and black, running directly across municipal streets and through neighborhoods. They're mere physical manifestations of racist housing practices such as redlining, [Denying services to people of color] restrictive covenants and outright terror. In 1971, the Ku Klux Klan bombed 10 school buses rather than have them transport integrated students. All these have made Detroit the most racially segregated metro area in the United States. I grew up in a small town in Michigan, the son of a relatively blue-collar family. And after university, I wanted to do something — probably naïvely — to help. I didn't want to be one of the almost 50 percent of college graduates leaving the state at the time, and I thought I might use my fancy college education at home for something positive. I'd been reading this great American philosopher named Grace Lee Boggs who happened to live in Detroit, and she said something I can't forget. "The most radical thing that I ever did was to stay put." I thought buying a house might indelibly tie me to the city while acting as a physical protest to these walls and freeways. Because grants and loans weren't available to everyone, I decided I was going to do this without them and that I would wage my personal fight against the city that had loomed over my childhood with power tools. I eventually found an abandoned house in a neighborhood called Poletown. It looked like the apocalypse had descended. The neighborhood was prairie land. A huge, open expanse of waist-high grass cluttered only by a handful of crippled, abandoned structures and a few brave holdouts with well-kept homes. Just a 15-minute bike ride from the baseball stadium downtown, the neighborhood was positively rural. What houses were left looked like cardboard boxes left in the rain; two-story monstrosities with wide-open shells and melted porches. One of the most striking things I remember were the rosebushes, forgotten and running wild over tumbled-down fences, no longer cared for by anyone. This was my house on the day I boarded it up to protect it from the elements and further decay. I eventually purchased it from the county in a live auction. I'd assumed the neighborhood was dead. That I was some kind of pioneer. Well, I couldn't have been more wrong. I was in no way a pioneer, and would come to understand how offensive that is. One of the first things I learned was to add my voice to the chorus, not overwrite what was already happening. (Voice breaking) Because the neighborhood hadn't died. It had just transformed in a way that was difficult to see if you didn't live there. Poletown was home to an incredibly resourceful, incredibly intelligent and incredibly resilient community. It was there I first experienced the power of radical neighborliness. During the year I worked on my house before moving in, I lived in a microcommunity inside Poletown, founded by a wild and virtuous farmer named Paul Weertz. Paul was a teacher in a Detroit public school for pregnant and parenting mothers, and his idea was to teach the young women to raise their children by first raising plants and animals. While the national average graduation rate for pregnant teens is about 40 percent, at Catherine Ferguson Academy it was often above 90, in part due to Paul's ingenuity. Paul brought much of this innovation to his block in Poletown, which he'd stewarded for more than 30 years, purchasing houses when they were abandoned, convincing his friends to move in and neighbors to stay and helping those who wanted to buy their own and fix them up. In a neighborhood where many blocks now only hold one or two houses, all the homes on Paul's block stand. It's an incredible testament to the power of community, to staying in one place and to taking ownership of one's own surroundings — of simply doing it yourself. It's the kind of place where black doctors live next to white hipsters next to immigrant mothers from Hungary or talented writers from the jungles of Belize, showing me Detroit wasn't just black and white, and diversity could flourish when it's encouraged. Each year, neighbors assemble to bale hay for the farm animals on the block, teaching me just how much a small group of people can get done when they work together, and the magnetism of fantastical yet practical ideas. Radical neighborliness is every house behind Paul's block burning down, and instead of letting it fill up with trash and despair, Paul and the surrounding community creating a giant circular garden ringed with dozens of fruit trees, beehives and garden plots for anyone that wants one, helping me see that our challenges can often be assets. It's where residents are experimenting with renewable energy and urban farming and offering their skills and discoveries to others, illustrating we don't necessarily have to beg the government to provide solutions. We can start ourselves. It's where, for months, one of my neighbors left her front door unlocked in one of the most violent and dangerous cities in America so I could have a shower whenever I needed to go to work, as I didn't yet have one. It was when it came time to raise the beam on my own house that holds the structure aloft — a beam that I cut out of an abandoned recycling factory down the street when not a single wall was left standing — a dozen residents of Poletown showed up to help lift it, Amish style. Radical neighborliness is a zygote that grows into a worldview that ends up in homes and communities rebuilt in ways that respect humanity and the environment. It's realizing we have the power to create the world anew together and to do it ourselves when our governments refuse. This is the Detroit that you don't hear much about. The Detroit between the ruin porn on one hand and the hipster coffee shops and billionaires saving the city on the other. There's a third way to rebuild, and it declines to make the same mistakes of the past. While building my house, I found something I didn't know I was looking for — what a lot of millennials and people who are moving back to cities are looking for. Radical neighborliness is just another word for true community, the kind bound by memory and history, mutual trust and familiarity built over years and irreplaceable. And now, as you may have heard, Detroit is having a renaissance and pulling itself up from the ashes of despair, and the children and grandchildren of those who fled are returning, which is true. What isn't true is that this renaissance is reaching most Detroiters, or even more than a small fraction of them that don't live in the central areas of the city. These are the kind of people that have been in Detroit for generations and are mostly black. In 2016 alone, just last year, (Voice breaking) one in six houses in Detroit had their water shut off. Excuse me. The United Nations has called this a violation of human rights. And since 2005, one in three houses — think about this, please — one in every three houses has been foreclosed in the city, representing a population about the size of Buffalo, New York. (Sniffles) One in three houses foreclosed is not a crisis of personal responsibility; it is systemic. Many Detroiters, myself included, are worried segregation is now returning to the city itself on the coattails of this renaissance. Ten years ago, it was not possible to go anywhere in Detroit and be in a crowd completely made of white people. Now, troublingly, that is possible. This is the price that we're paying for conventional economic resurgence. We're creating two Detroits, two classes of citizens, cracking the community apart. For all the money and subsidies, for all the streetlights installed, the dollars for new stadiums and slick advertisements and positive buzz, we're shutting off water to tens of thousands of people living right on the Great Lakes, the world's largest source of it. Separate has always meant unequal. This is a grave mistake for all of us. When economic development comes at the cost of community, it's not just those who have lost their homes or access to water who are harmed, but it breaks little pieces of our own humanity as well. None of us can truly be free, none of us can truly be comfortable, until our neighbors are, too. For those of us coming in, it means we must make sure we aren't inadvertently contributing to the destruction of community again, and to follow the lead of those who have been working on these problems for years. In Detroit, that means average citizens deputizing themselves to create water stations and deliveries for those who have lost access to it. Or clergy and teachers engaging in civil disobedience to block water shutoff trucks. It's organizations buying back foreclosed homes for their inhabitants or fighting misinformation on forced sales through social media and volunteer-run hotlines. For me, it means helping others to raise the beams on their own formerly abandoned houses, or helping to educate those with privilege, now increasingly moving into cities, how we might come in and support rather than stress existing communities. It's chipping in when a small group of neighbors decides to buy back a foreclosed home and return the deeds to the occupants. And for you, for all of us, it means finding a role to play in our own communities. It means living your life as a reflection of the world that you want to live in. It means trusting those who know the problems best — the people who live them — with solutions. I know a third way is possible because I have lived it. I live it right now in a neighborhood called Poletown in one of the most maligned cities in the world. If we can do it in Detroit, you can do it wherever you're from, too. What I've learned over the last decade, building my house, wasn't so much about wiring or plumbing or carpentry — although I did learn these things — is that true change, real change, starts first with community, with a radical sense of what it means to be a neighbor. It turned at least one abandoned house into a home. Thank you. (Applause) |
Armchair archaeologist | {0: 'Like a modern-day Indiana Jones, Sarah Parcak uses satellite images to locate lost ancient sites. The winner of the 2016 TED Prize, her wish is to protect the world’s shared cultural heritage.'} | Torchbearers | Sarah Parcak: A hundred years ago, archaeology was for the rich, fifty years ago it was for men. But we are expanding it to the world. I wish for us to discover the millions of unknown archaeological sites around the world. By creating a 21st-century army of global explorers, we'll find and protect the world's hidden heritage. So how are we going to do this? [Great Big Story in partnership with TED] Narrator: They had a big idea to change the world. But they couldn't do it alone. (Voices overlapping) So, my wish ... My wish ... I wish ... And now, here's my wish ... [Torchbearers] [Ideas in action] SP: I am an archaeologist, and I specialize in using satellite imagery to map ancient landscapes. The really fun title is space archaeology. You of course want to record maybe how thick something is, which you can't measure from space, whether that's soil or snow. When I won the prize, I had to present this completely crazy wish. I had to present the case for archaeology to the world. Why does it matter, so what? The reality is, there aren't enough of us scientists, we've got to give more people opportunities to become explorers. GlobalXplorer is an online crowdsourcing platform that allows anyone in the world to help map ancient sites by looking at satellite imagery. And it's this idea that everyone in the world can make a contribution to science. It can be anyone. (Music) Doris Jones: I'm Doris Jones, I'm 90 years old, I live alone except for my two kitties. And I need something to do. I play games, I like sudoku. And I play mahjong with friends on Friday. (Music) And I'm an armchair archaeologist. Why don't you want to work? Down. Down, let's work. SP: Doris is one of our top contributors; she's a space archaeologist. She's looked at many, many thousands of tiles. People like her are just a gift to GlobalXplorer. DJ: Right now, I'm looking at a tile, but ... Well, it has a wall, probably for animals. But it has a number of what look more like trails and roads. I'll go to the next one. SP: All you have to do is look at an image and look carefully, and you see that there could potentially be a new site there. Doris just has this passion and energy, an excitement for exploration. She's able to give back and really contribute in a meaningful way. (Skype dial tone) SP: Doris! DJ: Hi. SP: I'm actually crying right now, because I'm overwhelmed with emotion. DJ: Well, thank you. SP: I just had to see your face and say, "Thank you." DJ: I really admire what you're doing. And I really enjoy the program. SP: When did your love for archaeology and paleontology and science start? DJ: Well, in the middle 50s my husband and I were in the backyard digging a garden. It was late fall, and we were getting ready for next spring. And I saw a strange-looking white rock on the ground. I picked it up and he said, "Let me see that." I showed it to him and he said, "You know what this is?" I told him I didn't. He said, "This is a fossil." And we took out to the creek and started looking for fossils. From then on, there was no turning back. SP: That's wonderful. DJ: So then I collected for years. And after all those years, of course I've got all those memories. But that's a type of thing ... It's not just hunting the fossils but the experiences. And you just learn and really live and enjoy. And I think the fun is in the hunt. You know, it's like ... Well, like the rainbow — at the end of the rainbow is a pot of gold. So GlobalXplorer was kind of my rainbow. And even at my age I can continue to hunt for lost civilizations. SP: I want to tell you about some of the incredible things that happened as a result of your discoveries. We're now beginning to take thousands of features that people like you have found and we're sharing them with archaeologists who work in Peru. They're beginning to confirm the things the crowd has found. So, in other words, the platform works. Ultimately, this technology is helping us to rewrite our history. DJ: We need to know our history. We're all one peoples. It's all our history, we're all here on this little ball of dirt. SP: I believe we have barely scratched the surface in terms of what's left to discover. And the greatest story ever told is the story of our shared human journey. But the only way that we're going to be able to write it is if we do it together. [Become a GlobalXplorer GlobalXplorer.org] |
A simple way to tell insects apart | null | TED-Ed | A whip-like straw. Powerful, crushing blades. A pointed, piercing tube. There are nearly a million known insect species in the world, but most have one of just five common types of mouthparts. And that’s extremely useful to scientists because when they encounter an unfamiliar insect in the wild, they can learn a lot about it just by examining how it eats. Scientific classification, or taxonomy, is used to organize all living things into seven levels: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. The features of an insect’s mouthparts can help identify which order it belongs to, while also providing clues about how it evolved and what it feeds on. The chewing mouthpart is the most common. It’s also the most primitive— all other mouthparts are thought to have started out looking like this one before evolving into something different. It features a pair of jaws called mandibles with toothed inner edges that cut up and crush solid foods, like leaves or other insects. You can find this mouthpart on ants from the Hymenoptera order, grasshoppers and crickets of the Orthoptera order, dragonflies of the Odonata order, and beetles of the Coleoptera order. The piercing-sucking mouthpart consists of a long, tube-like structure called a beak. This beak can pierce plant or animal tissue to suck up liquids like sap or blood. It can also secrete saliva with digestive enzymes that liquefy food for easier sucking. Insects in the Hemiptera order have piercing-sucking mouthparts and include bed bugs, cicadas, aphids, and leafhoppers. The siphoning mouthpart, a friendlier version of the piercing and sucking beak, also consists of a long, tube-like structure called a proboscis that works like a straw to suck up nectar from flowers. Insects of the Lepidoptera order— butterflies and moths— keep their proboscises rolled up tightly beneath their heads when they’re not feeding and unfurl them when they come across some sweet nectar. With the sponging mouthpart, there’s yet another tube, this time ending in two spongy lobes that contain many finer tubes called pseudotracheae. The pseudotracheae secrete enzyme-filled saliva and soak up fluids and dissolved foods by capillary action. House flies, fruit flies, and the other non-biting members of the Diptera order are the only insects that use this technique. But, there’s a catch. Biting flies within Diptera, like mosquitoes, horse flies, and deer flies, have a piercing-sucking mouthpart instead of the sponging mouthpart. And finally, the chewing-lapping mouthpart is a combination of mandibles and a proboscis with a tongue-like structure at its tip for lapping up nectar. On this type of mouthpart, the mandibles themselves are not actually used for eating. For bees and wasps, members of the Hymenoptera order, they serve instead as tools for pollen-collecting and wax-molding. Of course, in nature, there are always exceptions to the rules. The juvenile stages of some insects, for example, have completely different kinds of mouths than their adult versions, like caterpillars, which use chewing mouthparts to devour leaves before metamorphosing into butterflies and moths with siphoning mouthparts. Still, mouthpart identification can, for the most part, help scientists—and you —categorize insects. So why not break out a magnifying lens and learn a little more about who’s nibbling your vegetable garden, biting your arm, or just flying by your ear. |
Community health heroes | {0: 'A billion people around the world lack access to health care because they live too far from a clinic. 2017 TED Prize winner Raj Panjabi aims to extend health services to the last mile.'} | Torchbearers | (Music) Raj Panjabi: Illness is universal, access to care is not, and realizing this lit a fire in my soul. No one should die because they live too far from a doctor or clinic. I wish that you would help us recruit the largest army of community health workers the world has ever known by creating the Community Health Academy, a global platform to train, connect and empower. [Great Big Story in partnership with TED] Narrator: They had a big idea to change the world. But they couldn't do it alone. (Voices overlapping) So, my wish ... My wish ... I wish ... And now, here's my wish ... [Torchbearers] [Ideas in action] RP: Epidemic diseases like Ebola, HIV, Zika, emerge from remote, rural communities including the rain forests of West and Central Africa. These are the hotspots of disease. They're the hotspots of infections. They're the hotspots of death that are located in the blindspots of the global health system. The idea that disease anywhere can be a threat to people everywhere is very real. So how do we stop this? Well, it's to enable community health workers to prevent, detect and respond to outbreaks at their very source. (Music) There are a billion people who live in the world's most remote communities. And while we've made great advances in medicine and in technology, our innovations are not reaching the last mile. They're not reaching these remote communities. We launched a nonprofit called Last Mile Health, and Last Mile Health's mission is to bring a health care worker within reach of everyone everywhere. Woman: Hello. How are you? RP: A community health worker is someone who lives in one of these communities that's cut off, several days away from the nearest clinic, and they may not have had a chance to finish even high school. Woman: I'm just listening to her lungs. RP: They're trained to perform medical skills that can save lives. Their job is to go door to door to provide health care. Serrena Kun: When I was little, I had a passion of becoming a nurse. I loved taking care of children. So when the community came here to find people, I put my hand up. I said I wanted to help little children. RP: What these community health workers like Serrena are doing is trying to bring the kind of health care your family doctor may provide but in places your family doctor may never go. Prince Pailey: When I wake up in the morning, I put my bag on my bike. The distances that I work is sometimes two hours, three hours in a forest. Some areas, some creeks, they drown with the ocean, so that every crossing you find it so difficult. RP: Community health workers are trained to address the health problems of their own community. In a country like Liberia, it could mean helping a mother get treatment for her child suffering from malaria. Man: This is paracetamol. This is ACT. So the only time you're going to give it is in the evening time. PP: In Liberia, the children die more than the adults, because we have some people in the villages, they don't sleep under a mosquito net. RP: We already know community health workers can help health care systems save more lives. Their ability to do that is strengthened when they're enabled with modern technology. Woman: Now, she's saying that the child has improved and went to school today. RP: If community health workers were equipped with smartphones, this would increase their ability to prevent, detect and respond to outbreaks and epidemics. It's time for technology to help reinvent health care on a game-changing scale. We are building the world's first education platform for community health workers that allows them to see the condition. There's instruction on the phone to help the worker decide what treatment to give. But equipping 50,000 community health workers with smartphones is an extraordinarily ambitious effort, larger than what our organization alone could take on. It required collaboration. We realized that working together with other partners like Living Goods would help us truly solve that problem. (Child crying) And then we learned about The Audacious Project, a new opportunity that TED and a group of visionary philanthropists had been working on to fund some of the boldest, most audacious ideas in the world. So that's all very exciting, because many, many more millions of children and families are now going to have a chance of getting it, and they're going to get it from their own neighbors. Man: They say a health worker for everyone, everywhere, every day. Thank you. RP: Community health workers become the very people who can make a difference. SK: I love children, I love my community, and my community loves me. PP: I have love and passion for the job, so I will continue to work for my people. RP: We could by 2030 save 30 million lives by training these workers to do 30 services. We as people are not defined by the conditions we face, no matter how hopeless they seem. We're defined by how we respond to them. And our response has to demand a health worker for everyone everywhere. [Support the big ideas of the Audacious Project] [AudaciousProject.org] |
To eliminate waste, we need to rediscover thrift | {0: 'A leading expert on sustainable materials, Andrew Dent has played an important part in creating a new generation of more sustainable products.'} | TEDNYC | Let's talk about thrift. Thrift is a concept where you reduce, reuse and recycle, but yet with an economic aspect I think has a real potential for change. My grandmother, she knew about thrift. This is her string jar. She never bought any string. Basically, she would collect string. It would come from the butcher's, it would come from presents. She would put it in the jar and then use it when it was needed. When it was finished, whether it was tying up the roses or a part of my bike, once finished with that, it'd go back into the jar. This is a perfect idea of thrift; you use what you need, you don't actually purchase anything, so you save money. Kids also inherently know this idea. When you want to throw out a cardboard box, the average kid will say, "Don't! I want to use it for a robot head or for a canoe to paddle down a river." They understand the value of the second life of products. So, I think thrift is a perfect counterpoint to the current age which we live in. All of our current products are replaceable. When we get that bright, new, shiny toy, it's because, basically, we got rid of the old one. The idea of that is, of course, it's great in the moment, but the challenge is, as we keep doing this, we're going to cause a problem. That problem is that there is really no way. When you throw something away, it typically goes into a landfill. Now, a landfill is basically something which is not going to go away, and it's increasing. At the moment, we have about 1.3 billion tons of material every year going into landfills. By 2100, it's going to be about four billion tons. See, instead, I'd prefer if we started thrifting. What that means is, we consider materials when they go into products and also when they get used, and, at the end of their life: When can they be used again? It's the idea of completely changing the way we think about waste, so waste is no longer a dirty word — we almost remove the word "waste" completely. All we're looking to is resources. Resource goes into a product and then can basically go into another product. We used to be good at thrifting. My grandmother, again, used to use old seed packets to paper the bathroom walls. I think, though, there are companies out there who understand this value and are promoting it. And a lot of the technologies that have been developed for the smart age can also be adapted to reduce, reuse and also thrift more proficiently. And as a materials scientist, what I've been tracking over the last couple of decades is how companies are getting smart at thrifting, how they're able to understand this concept and profit from it. I'm going to give you two examples. The first one, a good one; the second one, not so good. The first is the automotive industry. Not always known as the most innovative or creative of industries, but it turns out, they're really, really good at recycling their products. Ninety-five percent of every single car that goes on the road gets recycled here. And of that car, about 75 percent of the entire car actually gets used again. That includes, of course, the old steel and aluminum but then also the plastics from the fender and the interiors, glass from the windows and the windshield and also the tires. There's a mature and successful industry that deals with these old cars and basically recycles them and puts them back into use as new cars or other new products. Even as we move towards battery-powered cars, there are companies that claim they can recycle up to 90 percent of the 11 million tons of batteries that are going to be with us in 2020. That, I think, is not perfect, but it's certainly good, and it's getting better. The industry that's not doing so well is the architecture industry. One of the challenges with architecture has always been when we build up, we don't think about taking down. We don't dismantle, we don't disassemble, we demolish. That's a challenge, because it ends up that about a third of all landfill waste in the US is architecture. We need to think differently about this. There are programs that can actually reduce some of this material. A good example is this. These are actually bricks that are made from old demolition waste, which includes the glass, the rubble, the concrete. You put up a grinder, put it all together, heat it up and make these bricks we can basically build more buildings from. But it's only a fraction of what we need. My hope is that with big data and geotagging, we can actually change that, and be more thrifty when it comes to buildings. If there's a building down the block which is being demolished, are there materials there that the new building being built here can use? Can we use that, the ability to understand that all the materials available in that building are still usable? Can we then basically put them into a new building, without actually losing any value in the process? So now let's think about other industries. What are other industries doing to create thrift? Well, it turns out that there are plenty of industries that are also thinking about their own waste and what we can do with it. A simple example is the waste that they basically belch out as part of industrial processes. Most metal smelters give off an awful lot of carbon dioxide. Turns out, there's a company called Land Detector that's actually working in China and also soon in South Africa, that's able to take that waste gas — about 700,000 tons per smelter — and then turn it into about 400,000 tons of ethanol, which is equivalent to basically powering 250,000, or quarter of a million, cars for a year. That's a very effective use of waste. How about products more close to home? This is a simple solution. And it, again, takes the idea of reducing, reusing, but then also with economic advantage. So it's a simple process of changing from a cut and sew, where typically between 20 and 30 materials are used which are cut from a large cloth and then sewn together or even sometimes glued, they changed it and said that they just knitted the shoe. The advantage with this is not just a simplification of the process, it's also, "I've got one material. I have zero waste," and then also, "I'm able to potentially recycle that at the end of its life." Digital manufacturing is also allowing us to do this more effectively. In this case, it's actually creating the theoretical limit of strength for a material: you cannot get any stronger for the amount of material than this shape. So it's a basic simple block, but the idea is, I can extrapolate this, I can make it into large formats, I can make it into buildings, bridges, but also airplane wings and shoes. The idea here is, I'm minimizing the amount of material. Here's a good example from architecture. Typically, these sorts of metal nodes are used to hold up large tent structures. In this case, it in was in the Hague, along a shopping center. They used 1600 of the materials on the left. The difference is, by using the solution on the right, they cut down the number of steps from seven to one, because the one on the left is currently welded, the one on the right is simply just printed. And it was able to reduce waste to zero, cost less money and also, because it's made out of steel, can be eventually recycled at the end of its life. Nature also is very effective at thrift. Think about it: nature has zero waste. Everything is useful for another process. So, in this case, nanocellulose, which is basically one of the very fine building blocks of cellulose, which is one of the materials that makes trees strong, you can isolate it, and it works very much like carbon fiber. So, take that from a tree, form it into fibers, and then those fibers can strengthen things, such as airplanes, buildings, cars. The advantage of this, though, is it's not just bioderived, comes from a renewable resource, but also that it is transparent, so it can be used in consumer electronics, as well as food packaging. Not bad for something that basically comes from the backyard. Another one from the biosource is synthetic spider silk. Now, it's very hard to actually create spider silk naturally. You can basically get it from spiders, but in large numbers, they tend to kill each other, eat each other, so you've got a problem with creating it, in the same way you do with regular silk. So what you can do is instead take the DNA from the spider, and put it into various different things. You can put it into bacteria, you can put it into yeast, you can put it into milk. And what you can do then is, the milk or the bacteria produce in much larger volumes and then from that, spin a yarn and then create a fabric or a rope. Again, bioderived, has incredible strength — about the same as Kevlar — so they're using it in things like bulletproof vests and helmets and outdoor jackets. It has a great performance. But again, it's bioderived, and at the end of its life, it potentially can go back into the soil and get composted to again be potentially used as a new material. I'd like to leave you with one last form which is biobased, but this, I think, is like the ultimate thrift. Think about the poster child for conspicuous consumption. It's the water bottle. We have too many of them, they're basically going everywhere, they're a problem in the ocean. What do we do with them? This process is able not just to recycle them, but to recycle them infinitely. Why is that interesting? Because when we think about reusing and recycling, metals, glass, things like that, can be recycled as many times as you like. There's metal in your car that may well have come from a 1950s Oldsmobile, because you can recycle it infinitely with no loss of performance. Plastics offer about once or twice of recycling, whether it's a bottle, whether it's a chair — whatever it is, if it's carpet — after two times of recycling, whether it goes back into another chair, etc, it tends to lose strength, it's no longer of any use. This, though, just using a few enzymes, is able to recycle it infinitely. I take a bottle or a chair or some other plastic product, I basically put it in with a few enzymes, they break it apart, they basically put it back into its original molecules. And then from those molecules, you can build another chair or carpet or bottle. So, the cycle is infinite. The advantage with that, of course, is that you have potentially zero loss of material resources. Again, the perfect idea of thrift. So in conclusion, I just want to have you think about — if you make anything, if you're any part of a design firm, if you basically are refurbishing your house — any aspect where you make something, think about how that product could potentially be used as a second life, or third life or fourth life. Design in the ability for it to be taken apart. That, to me, is the ultimate thrift, and I think that's basically what my grandmother would love. (Applause) |
Should we create a solar shade to cool the earth? | {0: 'Inventor, scientist, author, engineer -- over his broad career, Danny Hillis has turned his ever-searching brain on an array of subjects, with surprising results.'} | TED2017 | [A provocation from Danny Hillis:] [It's time to start talking about engineering our climate] What if there was a way to build a thermostat that allowed you to turn down the temperature of the earth anytime you wanted? Now, you would think if somebody had a plausible idea about how to do that, everybody would be very excited about it, and there would be lots of research on how to do it. But in fact, a lot of people do understand how to do that. But there's not much support for research in this area. And I think part of it is because there are some real misunderstandings about it. So I'm not going to try to convince you today that this is a good idea. But I am going to try to get your curiosity going about it and clear up some of the misunderstandings. So, the basic idea of solar geoengineering is that we can cool things down just by reflecting a little bit more sunlight back into space. And ideas about how to do this have been around literally for decades. Clouds are a great way to do that, these low-lying clouds. Everybody knows it's cooler under a cloud. I like this cloud because it has exactly the same water content as the transparent air around it. And it just shows that even a little bit of a change in the flow of the air can cause a cloud to form. We make artificial clouds all the time. These are contrails, which are artificial water clouds that are made by the passing of a jet engine. And so, we're already changing the clouds on earth. By accident. Or, if you like to believe it, by supersecret government conspiracy. (Laughter) But we are already doing this quite a lot. This is a NASA picture of shipping lanes. Passing ships actually cause clouds to form, and this is a big enough effect that it actually helps reduce global warming already by about a degree. So we already are doing solar engineering. There's lots of ideas about how to do this. People have looked at everything, from building giant parasols out into space to fizzing bubble waters in the ocean. And some of these are actually very plausible ideas. One that was published recently by David Keith at Harvard is to take chalk and put dust up into the stratosphere, where it reflects off sunlight. And that's a really neat idea, because chalk is one of the most common minerals on earth, and it's very safe — it's so safe, we put it into baby food. And basically, if you throw chalk up into the stratosphere, it comes down in a couple of years all by itself, dissolved in rainwater. Now, before you start worrying about all this chalk in your rainwater, let me explain to you how little of it it actually takes. And that turns out to be very easy to calculate. This is a back-of-the-envelope calculation I made. (Laughter) (Applause) I assure you, people have done much more careful calculations, and it comes out with the same answer, which is that you have to put chalk up at the rate of about 10 teragrams a year to undo the effects of the CO2 that we've already done — just in terms of temperature, not all the effects, but the temperature. So what does that look like? I can't visualize 10 teragrams per year. So I asked the Cambridge Fire Department and Taylor Milsal to lend me a hand. This is a hose pumping water at 10 teragrams a year. And that is how much you would have to pump into the stratosphere to cool the earth back down to pre-industrial levels. And it's amazingly little; it's like one hose for the entire earth. Now of course, you wouldn't really use a hose, you'd fly it up in airplanes or something like that. But it's so little, it would be like putting a handful of chalk into every Olympic swimming pool full of rain. It's almost nothing. So why don't people like this idea? Why isn't it taken more seriously? And there are some very good reasons for that. A lot of people really don't think we should be talking about this at all. And, in fact, I have some very good friends in the audience who I respect a lot, who really don't think I should be talking about this. And the reason is that they're concerned that if people imagine there's some easy way out, that we won't give up our addiction to fossil fuels. And I do worry about that. I think it's actually a serious problem. But there's also, I think, a deeper problem, which is: nobody likes the idea of messing with the entire earth — I certainly don't. I love this planet, I really do. And I don't want to mess with it. But we're already changing our atmosphere, we're already messing with it. And so I think it makes sense for us to look for ways to mitigate that impact. And we need to do research to do that. We need to understand the science behind that. I've noticed that there's a theme that's kind of developed at TED, which is kind of, "fear versus hope," or "creativity versus caution." And of course, we need both of those. So there aren't any silver bullets. This is certainly not a silver bullet. But we need science to tell us what our options are; that informs both our creativity and our caution. So I am an optimist about our future selves, but I'm not an optimist because I think our problems are small. I'm an optimist because I think our capacity to deal with our problems is much greater than we imagine. Thank you very much. (Applause) This talk sparked a lot of controversy at TED2017, and we encourage you to look at discussions online to see other points of view. |
How I use the drum to tell my story | {0: 'Kasiva Mutua is working to elevate the place of the African woman in music.'} | TEDGlobal 2017 | "Listen. Do you hear that?" my grandmother asked me. "Listen. Listen to what the beetle is saying." I would spend hours and hours listening to the little beetle rolling a huge ball of dung, and while at it, I heard a variety of environmental sounds. With the keenest of ears, I would hear family chatter, laughter, the wind howling and even crickets chirping. All these sounds crisscrossed into each other, and I would hear rhythm in between. Then I would beat my plate with a spoon and my chest with my tiny hands trying to recreate what I was hearing. I have been beating the same plates, shakers, drums, pans and so much more ever since to become a professional drummer and percussionist. (Applause) As I grew up, subconsciously, I felt a strong urge to hide my newfound hobby. Even without it being said out loud, I knew that somehow it was wrong to do what I was doing. In most of the ceremonies, I noticed that most of the women and girls were not in sight, but when they were, I noticed that they would wear their dancing skirts and shake their waists off, singing, clapping, ululating, while the men filled up the rhythm section. A few years later, I came to understand what tradition and culture meant, and what was considered taboo or otherwise. In the majority of African cultures, women have been forbidden to play drums and percussion for a very long time. I believe this taboo stems from the psychological and traditional belief that the woman is an inferior being. I grew up hearing that the place of the woman is in the kitchen or in the other room. Mhm? (Laughter) Women had been brainwashed and led on for so long until we had fallen victim and actually started believing in this ourselves. This, coupled with the lack of interest to educate women, played a major, major role in etching this into our minds. The sounds of the drum provoke emotion and movement. Essentially, the drum is a very sensual instrument. Once at a festival, a man asked me how I dared put a drum in between my legs. I have been considered loose and dirty for playing an instrument. I have repeatedly been questioned why I would choose to play drums instead of practicing journalism, which I studied for my undergraduate, which has been termed "more decent." The sight of a woman playing drums enfeebles her, makes her less feminine, less desirable, but all this optimally puts her on a lower social stand. Drumming has essentially represented the strong African heritage, and its importance can be seen in the many aspects of the African tradition. Many communities encompass drumming in their day-to-day activities, and still do up to date, from childbirths to initiation ceremonies, welcoming ceremonies, marriages and even burials. However, this same drum is disappearing very fast from the music scene, and the traditional genre is losing its popularity very quickly amongst the people. Inspired by the need to preserve this culture, I am teaching the significance and the importance of the drum to young boys, women and girls. In my journey as a percussion teacher, I have realized that very many women actually want to play the drum, but at the same time, they fear it. Some fear how society will perceive them. Others fear the physical pain that comes with playing. Oh yes, it's not that easy. Some, because their spouses don't approve of them, and others generally fear the responsibility of being a bearer of culture. I believe, or I think that all these fears are etched in the collective feminine cautiousness because when we learn of the atrocities that have happened to women, continentally especially, it serves as a constant reminder that one step out of our designated place may end up in very serious consequences. Well, I use my drum to tell my story and my people's stories. My roots shaped me and my culture is here to stay with me. Women can be custodians of culture, too. We are born to bring forth life, to nurture it. We can definitely preserve our traditions very, very excellently. My drum and I, we are here to stay. (Applause) We are definitely here to stay. If women have led countries, women have gone to space, women have won Grammys, then the same, same women can play the drum and play it — to a five-star rating? No, to a million-star rating. Thank you. (Applause) (Chiming) (Metallic drumming) (Chiming) (Rattling) (Drumming) (Applause) |
The Standing Rock resistance and our fight for indigenous rights | {0: 'Tara Houska is an attorney who fights for indigenous rights and justice. '} | TEDWomen 2017 | [Ojibwe: Hello. My English name is Tara; my Native name is Zhaabowekwe. I am of Couchiching First Nation; my clan is bear. I was born under the Maple Sapping Moon.] My name is Tara Houska, I'm bear clan from Couchiching First Nation, I was born under the Maple Sapping Moon in International Falls, Minnesota, and I'm happy to be here with all of you. (Applause) Trauma of indigenous peoples has trickled through the generations. Centuries of oppression, of isolation, of invisibility, have led to a muddled understanding of who we are today. In 2017, we face this mixture of Indians in headdresses going across the plains but also the drunk sitting on a porch somewhere you never heard of, living off government handouts and casino money. (Sighs) It's really, really hard. It's very, very difficult to be in these shoes, to stand here as a product of genocide survival, of genocide. We face this constant barrage of unteaching the accepted narrative. 87 percent of references in textbooks, children's textbooks, to Native Americans are pre-1900s. Only half of the US states mention more than a single tribe, and just four states mention the boarding-school era, the era that was responsible for my grandmother and her brothers and sisters having their language and culture beaten out of them. When you aren't viewed as real people, it's a lot easier to run over your rights. Four years ago, I moved to Washington, DC. I had finished school and I was there to be a tribal attorney and represent tribes across the nation, representing on the Hill, and I saw immediately why racist imagery matters. I moved there during football season, of all times. And so it was the daily slew of Indian heads and this "redskin" slur everywhere, while my job was going up on the Hill and trying to lobby for hospitals, for funding for schools, for basic government services, and being told again and again that Indian people were incapable of managing our own affairs. When you aren't viewed as real people, it's a lot easier to run over your rights. And last August, I went out to Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. I saw resistance happening. We were standing up. There were youth that had run 2,000 miles from Cannonball, North Dakota all the way out to Washington, DC, with a message for President Obama: "Please intervene. Please do something. Help us." And I went out, and I heard the call, and so did thousands of people around the world. Why did this resonate with so many people? Indigenous peoples are impacted first and worst by climate change. We are impacted first and worst by the fossil-fuel industry. Here in Louisiana, the first US climate change refugees exist. They are Native people being pushed off their homelands from rising sea levels. That's our reality, that's what we live. And with these projects comes a slew of human costs that people don't think about: thousands of workers influxing to build these pipelines, to build and extract from the earth, bringing crime and sex trafficking and violence with them. Missing and murdered indigenous women in Canada has become so significant it's spawned a movement and a national inquiry. Thousands of Native women who have disappeared, who have been murdered. And here in the US, we don't even track that. We are instead left with an understanding that our Supreme Court, the United States Supreme Court, stripped us, in 1978, of the right to prosecute at the same rate as anywhere else in the United States. So as a non-Native person you can walk onto a reservation and rape someone and that tribe is without the same level of prosecutorial ability as everywhere else, and the Federal Government declines these cases 40 percent of the time. It used to be 76 percent of the time. One in three Native women are raped in her lifetime. One in three. But in Standing Rock, you could feel the energy in the air. You could feel the resistance happening. People were standing and saying, "No more. Enough is enough. We will put our bodies in front of the machines to stop this project from happening. Our lives matter. Our children's lives matter." And thousands of allies came to stand with us from around the world. It was incredible, it was incredible to stand together, united as one. (Applause) In my time there, I saw Natives being chased on horseback by police officers shooting at them, history playing out in front of my eyes. I myself was put into a dog kennel when I was arrested. But funny story, actually, of being put into a dog kennel. So we're in this big wire kennel with all these people, and the police officers are there and we're there, and we start howling like dogs. You're going to treat us like dogs? We're going to act like dogs. But that's the resilience we have. All these horrific images playing out in front of us, being an indigenous person pushed off of Native lands again in 2017. But there was such beauty. On one of the days that we faced a line of hundreds of police officers pushing us back, pushing us off indigenous lands, there were those teenagers out on horseback across the plains. They were herding hundreds of buffalo towards us, and we were crying out, calling, "Please turn, please turn." And we watched the buffalo come towards us, and for a moment, everything stopped. The police stopped, we stopped, and we just saw this beautiful, amazing moment of remembrance. And we were empowered. We were so empowered. I interviewed a woman who had, on one day — September 2nd, the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation had told the courts — there's an ongoing lawsuit right now — they told the courts, "Here is a sacred site that's in the direct path of the pipeline." On September 3rd, the following day, Dakota Access, LLC skipped 25 miles ahead in its construction, to destroy that site. And when that happened, the people in camp rushed up to stop this, and they were met with attack dogs, people, private security officers, wielding attack dogs in [2016]. But I interviewed one of the women, who had been bitten on the breast by one of these dogs, and the ferocity and strength of her was incredible, and she's out right now in another resistance camp, the same resistance camp I'm part of, fighting Line 3, another pipeline project in my people's homelands, wanting 900,000 barrels of tar sands per day through the headwaters of the Mississippi to the shore of Lake Superior and through all the Treaty territories along the way. But this woman's out there and we're all out there standing together, because we are resilient, we are fierce, and we are teaching people how to reconnect to the earth, remembering where we come from. So much of society has forgotten this. (Applause) That food you eat comes from somewhere. The tap water you drink comes from somewhere. We're trying to remember, teach, because we know, we still remember. It's in our plants, in our medicines, in our lives, every single day. I brought this out to show. (Rattling) This is cultural survival. This is from a time that it was illegal to practice indigenous cultures in the United States. This was cultural survival hidden in plain sight. This was a baby's rattle. That's what they told the Indian agents when they came in. It was a baby's rattle. But it's incredible what you can do when you stand together. It's incredible, the power that we have when we stand together, human resistance, people having this power, some of the most oppressed people you can possibly imagine costing this company hundreds of millions of dollars, and now our divestment efforts, focusing on the banks behind these projects, costing them billions of dollars. Five billion dollars we've cost them so far, hanging out with banks. (Applause) So what can you do? How can you help? How can you change the conversation for extremely oppressed and forgotten people? Education is foundational. Education shapes our children. It shapes the way we teach. It shapes the way we learn. In Washington State, they've made the teaching of treaties and modern Native people mandatory in school curriculum. That is systems change. (Applause) When your elected officials are appropriating their budgets, ask them: Are you fulfilling treaty obligations? Treaties have been broken since the day they were signed. Are you meeting those requirements? That would change our lives, if treaties were actually upheld. Those documents were signed. Somehow, we live in this world where, in 2017, the US Constitution is held up as the supreme law of the land, right? But when I talk about treaty rights, I'm crazy. That's crazy. Treaties are the supreme law of the land, and that would change so much, if you actually asked your representative officials to appropriate those budgets. And take your money out of the banks. That's huge. It makes a huge difference. Stand with us, empathize, learn, grow, change the conversation. Forty percent of Native people are under the age of 24. We are the fastest-growing demographic in the United States. We are doctors, we are lawyers, we are teachers, we are scientists, we are engineers. We are medicine men, we are medicine women, we are sun dancers, we are pipe carriers, we are traditional language speakers. And we are still here. Miigwech. (Applause) |
How a team of chefs fed Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria | {0: 'José Andrés is a committed advocate of food and hunger issues and is known for championing the role of chefs in the national debate on food policy.'} | TEDxMidAtlantic | All right, let's get ready for the worst TED Talk ever. (Laughter) I mean it. We prepared 30 minutes ago. I want to have it clear — I love to be here with you all, but I wanted to be here not to tell my story but to tell the story of the amazing people of Puerto Rico that came together to feed the people of Puerto Rico. My name is José Andrés, and you know I love to feed the few, but even more, I love to feed the many. Here, right after the hurricane, like we'd done many times before after an earthquake in Haiti or Sandy or others, I had this sense of urgency to be there and to try to feed one person, and always, you have crazy friends that want to join you in those impossible endeavors. I'm always surrounded by amazing friends that only help me to be better. Nate came next to me. This was a Monday, and this is what we found. The destruction you saw on TV, one more hurricane, but this destruction was real. More than 95 percent of the electricity in the island was gone. Every single electric post was gone. All the cell towers were gone. You couldn't communicate with anybody. You couldn't find anybody the moment you moved away from San Juan. Even in San Juan, we had issues trying to use our cell phones. And what I found was that the island was hungry, and the people didn't have money, because ATMs were not working, or their cards, which are electronic, for food stamps, they couldn't use it in their supermarkets, or there was no food or gas or clean water to cook. The need and the urgency of now was real, and I was just able to get into a meeting at FEMA, where many of the main NGO partners were having a conversation about how to feed the island in the weeks to come, but the urgency was right now, in this minute, in this second, and we almost had three million people that needed to be fed. So we began doing what we do best. We went to see the sources of food, and I was able to see that the private industry actually was ready and prepared and thriving, but somebody at FEMA was not able even to be aware of that. And what we did was use fine kitchens. José Enrique, one of my favorite men in the whole world, one of the great restaurants in San Juan, where before landing, I began calling all the chefs of Puerto Rico, and everybody was like, "Let's not plan, let's not meet, let's start cooking." (Laughter) And that's what we did. We began feeding the people of Puerto Rico, on a Monday. On a Monday, we did a thousand meals, sancocho, an amazing stew with corn and yucca and pork. By Sunday, we were doing 25,000. By Sunday, we already didn't only use the restaurant, but we rented the parking lot right across. We began bringing food trucks, and a rice and chicken paella operation, and refrigerators, and volunteers began coming. Why? Because everybody wants to find a place to help, a place to do something. This is how we began our first delivery. The hospitals — nobody was feeding the nurses and the doctors, and we began feeding our first project, Hospital Carolina. All of a sudden, every single hospital was calling us. "We need food so we can feed our 24/7 employees taking care of the sick and the elderly and the people in need." And then the place was too small. We were receiving orders. Every time we got one guest, one customer, we never stopped serving them, because we wanted to make sure that we were able to be stabilizing any place we were joining, any city, any hospital, any elderly home. Every time we made contact with them, we kept serving them food, day after day, so we needed to grow. We moved into the big coliseum. 25,000 meals became 50,000 meals, became, all of a sudden, the biggest restaurant in the world. We were making close to 70,000 meals a day from one location alone. (Applause) Volunteers began showing up by the hundreds. At one point, we got more than 7,000 volunteers that were at least one hour or more with us, at any given moment, more than 700 people at once. You saw that we began creating a movement, a movement that had a very simple idea everybody could rally behind: let's feed the hungry. And we began making food that people could recognize, not things that come from a faraway place in plastic bags that you open and you cannot even smell. (Laughter) We began making the foods that people feel home. People in these moments, they had this urgency of feeling they are alive, that somebody cares. One meal at a time, it didn't only become something used to bring calories to their bodies, calories that they needed, but they needed something else. They wanted to make sure that you and you and you and you, that you were caring, that we were sending the message that we are with you. Give us time, we are trying to fix this. That's what we found every time we began joining the communities. Fresh fruit began coming, even when in FEMA, they were asking me, "José, how are you able to get the food?" Simple: by calling and paying and getting. (Laughter) (Applause) We began feeding people in San Juan. Before you knew, we were feeding the 78 municipalities all across the island. We needed a plan. One kitchen alone was not going to feed the island. I went to FEMA. They kicked me out with eight armored guards and AK-47s. I told them, "I want 18 kitchens around the island." Guess what? Three days ago, we reached our 18th kitchen around Puerto Rico. (Applause) People began being fed. Volunteers kept showing up. We never had any system to deliver the food, people would tell me. Sure, we had the system. The entire island of Puerto Rico was the perfect delivery system. Anybody with a truck wanted to help. Anybody going from A to B was for us the way to be bringing hope and a plate and a whole meal to anybody. We began finding amazing systems to do these food trucks, 10 amazing food trucks. We began learning not to use the place that needed the food, but the number, the number of the apartment: Lolo, a 92-year-old veteran that was surrounded by water. We began giving not only hope to people, but knowing their names, checking day after day, making sure that those elderly people will never, ever again feel alone in a moment of disrepair. And we began going to the deeper areas, places that all of a sudden, the bridges were broken, but we had to go, because it was easy to stay in San Juan. We had to go to those places that actually, they really needed us. And we kept going, and people kept waiting for us, because they knew that we will always show up, because we will never leave them alone. (Applause) The food trucks became our angels, and the food trucks kept sending hope, but we saw we needed more: Vieques and Culebra, two islands far away from the island — somebody had to be feeding them. We didn't only bring food and make a hotel kitchen operation in Vieques and bring daily food to Culebra. We brought the first water purification system to the island of Vieques, where we could be filtering one gallon per minute. All of a sudden, big problems become very simple, low-hanging fruit solutions, only by doing, not planning and meeting in a very big building. (Laughter) And then we found creative ways. We needed helicopters. We asked. We got. We needed planes. We asked, we paid, and we got. We kept sending food to those places that really were in need. And the simple ideas just become powerful. Volunteers will go to the edges of the island. All of a sudden, it was a movement. The teams of World Central Kitchen will be received with prayers, with songs, with claps, with hugs, with smiles. We were able to connect in so many corners. When I tell you that even the National Guard began calling us because our national poor guy's guards, big heroes in a moment of chaos, they couldn't get a simple humble plate of hot food. And partnerships show up. Mercy Corps, HSI from Homeland Security, partnerships that they didn't happen calling the top. They happened in the hotel room, in the middle of the street, in the middle of the mountains. We saw that by working together, we can even reach more people. Partnerships that happen by logic, and the urgency of now is put to the service of the people. When we have emergency relief organizations, we cannot be planning about how to give aid a month from now. We have to be ready to start giving help the second after something happens. And children were fed, and all of a sudden, the island, while still in a very special moment where everything is fragile, we saw that an NGO like ours — we didn't want to break the private sector — that already, small restaurants were being opened, that somehow, normalcy, whatever normalcy means today in Puerto Rico, was happening. We began trying to be sending the message: we need to start moving away from the places that are already stabilized and keep concentrating in the areas that really need help. (Video): People of Puerto Rico, two million meals! José Andrés OK, let me translate this to you. (Laughter) Almost 28 days later, more than 10 food trucks, more than 7,000 volunteers, 18 kitchens ... we served more than two million meals. (Applause) (Applause ends) And you guys coming here to TED, you should be proud, because we know many of you, you are part of the change. But the change is only going to happen if after we leave this amazing conference, we put the amazing ideas and inspiration that we get, and we believe that nothing is impossible, and we put our know-how to the service of those in need. I arrived to an island trying to feed a few people, and I saw a big problem, and all of a sudden, the people of Puerto Rico saw the same problem as me, and only we did one thing: we began cooking. And so the people of Puerto Rico and the chefs of Puerto Rico, in a moment of disrepair, began bringing hope, not by meeting, not by planning, but with only one simple idea: let's start cooking and let's start feeding the people of Puerto Rico. Thank you. (Applause) Dave Troy: Go back out. (Laughter) DT: The public loves you. (Applause) Nate Mook: A couple of quick questions, because I think some folks would be interested to hear. So as you said, you came the first time, got on the ground, went to the government command center, started to have some meetings with people, and they weren't very receptive. José Andrés: This is great. This is how good my talk was. (Laughter) It's the first talk with a follow-up in the history of TED. I feel so good. (Laughter) NM: So tell us why, what were some of the challenges, and then when you noticed, they started coming to you to ask you. JA: We cannot be asking everything from Red Cross or Salvation Army. But the idea is, I donated before to those organizations, and they are the big organizations, and maybe the problem is that we're expecting too much from them. It's not like they didn't do what they were supposed to do. It's that the perception is that that's what they do. But all of a sudden, you cannot get into a moment like this and wash your hands, and you say somebody else is going to be picking it up. We had a simple problem that had a very simple solution. This was not a faraway country or the Green Zone in Baghdad. This was American soil, a beautiful place called Puerto Rico, with hundreds, thousands of restaurants and people willing to help, but all of a sudden, we had people hungry, and we didn't have a plan how to feed them in the short term. So yes, FEMA, to a degree, was thinking about how to feed the people. Red Cross didn't have the right answers, because Southern Baptist Church, the biggest food organization in America, my heroes, they were never called to Puerto Rico. When you see the Red Cross delivering food in America after a hurricane, it's Southern Baptist Church doing it. We didn't have that in Puerto Rico. Salvation Army came and asked me for 420 meals on a Wednesday rainy night for a local elderly shop. I love to help the Salvation Army, but in my world, they are the ones who are supposed to be helping us to answer those calls of help. Thursday morning is when I wake up super worried that actually we didn't have the plan to feed the island. And some people will say maybe you are making the problem bigger than it was. Well, we had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of organizations knocking on our door, asking for a tray of food, so if that's not proof that the need was real ... We cannot be feeding people in America anymore with MREs or something like you open and, you know, I was giving to this little cat a little bit of those same foods — (Laughter) and then I gave them the chicken and rice we made, and they went for the chicken and rice. (Laughter) (Applause) They don't even eat that themselves. We can feed humanity for a day or two or five, but those MREs cost, like, 12, 14, 15, 20 dollars to the American taxpayer. It's OK for certain moments, during battle, but not to be feeding Americans for weeks and weeks and weeks, when actually, you can be hiring the local private business community to do the same job better, creating local jobs, helping the local economy to come back, and in the process making sure that everything was going to go back as normal as quick as possible. That's where we began cooking. You were there with me, and that's why we spent every single dollar we had in our credit cards. If AmEx is listening to this, please, a discount would be appreciated. (Laughter) Or Visa. NM: So what's the situation now? You know, it's been a month. You said there's been some improvements in San Juan and focus on the areas outside, but obviously there are still major challenges, and what's next? JA: There are. So what's next is we slowly began going down after, more or less, FEMA let us know that they thought they had everything under control and we were no longer needed, but you only believe everything so much. We moved from the big place you saw, 60,000 meals a day, to another one, as big, but more strategically located, also cheaper, where we are going to be making 20-25,000 meals a day, and then we are leaving four, five, six kitchens strategically located around the island, very high up in the mountains, in the poor areas. We got a lot of data. We know who is using SNAPs, who is using food stamps, the cards. We know who has them and we know who is using them. So in the parts of the island where nobody is using them, those are the parts of the island where we are going to be focusing our efforts. So it's amazing how sometimes simple data can give you a clue of who are the people in need. So we went to a town called Morovis. Beautiful. The best chicken restaurant in the history of mankind. You should all travel to Morovis. DT: Sounds good. JA: So I saw the chicken. We were bringing sandwiches. I stopped. I was with these Homeland Security officers. We ate the chicken. I left to drop these sandwiches in this other place called San Lorenzo. San Lorenzo was critical, because the bridge was broken, and so it was an island inside the island, a little community surrounded by water. Everybody told us, "It's a disaster down there." We dropped the sandwiches. I went back to Morovis, and I thought, you know, if it's a disaster, sandwiches is not enough. I brought 120 chickens, with yucca and with rice, and we went back to that broken bridge, we crossed the river, water up to everywhere. We arrived with the 120 chickens, we dropped the food, and the community were very thankful, but they told us, "We're OK, we don't need more food. We have gas, we have money, we have good food and our water is clean. Take care of the other communities around us that are in more need." You see, communication is key. In these scenarios, we can be relying on fake news or we can be having the real information that we can make smart decisions to really take care of the true issues. That's what we are doing. (Applause) NM: It was an amazing operation, and to witness it firsthand and to play a small role — JA: You made it happen. NM: At its peak, I think you were up to about 150,000 meals per day, across the island, which is pretty incredible. And I think, at the same time, really sort of setting a model for how this can be done, hopefully, moving forward. I mean, I think that's one of the big learnings out of this — DT: This is possible. You know, people can replicate this. JA: But I'm going to stop coming to watch TED Talks, because you've got ideas that anything can happen. (Laughter) And then my wife told me, "Man, you told me you were going to cook a thousand meals a day. I cannot leave you alone for a day." (Laughter) But I hope that World Central Kitchen — you know, one thing we did I didn't say: I picked up the phone and I began calling people, people that I thought had expertise that could help us. So I picked up the phone and I called a company called Bon Appétit, Fedele. Bon Appétit's one of the big catering companies. They do food for Google and for arenas. They're out of California. They belong to a bigger group called Compass. And I told them, "You know what? I need cooks, and I need cooks that can do volume and that can do good, quality volume." In less than 24 hours, I began getting people and chefs. At one point, we got 16 of the best chefs that America can offer. You see, America is an amazing heart country that always is sending their best. What we've been learning over the years is that those chefs of America are going to be playing a role in how we are going to be feeding America and maybe other parts of the world in times of need. What we need to start is bringing the right expertise where the expertise is needed. Sometimes I have a feeling, like with FEMA, we are bringing the wrong expertise in the areas that it's not even needed. The people of FEMA are great people. The men and women are smart, they are prepared, but they live under this amazing hierarchy pyramidal organizational chart that everybody falls out of their own weight. We need to be empowering people to be successful. What we did was a flatter organizational chart where everybody was owning the situation and we all made quick decisions to solve the problems on the spot. (Applause) DT: Absolutely. (Applause) Another round of applause for José Andrés. (Applause) (Cheering) |
How language shapes the way we think | {0: 'Lera Boroditsky is trying to figure out how humans get so smart.'} | TEDWomen 2017 | So, I'll be speaking to you using language ... because I can. This is one these magical abilities that we humans have. We can transmit really complicated thoughts to one another. So what I'm doing right now is, I'm making sounds with my mouth as I'm exhaling. I'm making tones and hisses and puffs, and those are creating air vibrations in the air. Those air vibrations are traveling to you, they're hitting your eardrums, and then your brain takes those vibrations from your eardrums and transforms them into thoughts. I hope. (Laughter) I hope that's happening. So because of this ability, we humans are able to transmit our ideas across vast reaches of space and time. We're able to transmit knowledge across minds. I can put a bizarre new idea in your mind right now. I could say, "Imagine a jellyfish waltzing in a library while thinking about quantum mechanics." (Laughter) Now, if everything has gone relatively well in your life so far, you probably haven't had that thought before. (Laughter) But now I've just made you think it, through language. Now of course, there isn't just one language in the world, there are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world. And all the languages differ from one another in all kinds of ways. Some languages have different sounds, they have different vocabularies, and they also have different structures — very importantly, different structures. That begs the question: Does the language we speak shape the way we think? Now, this is an ancient question. People have been speculating about this question forever. Charlemagne, Holy Roman emperor, said, "To have a second language is to have a second soul" — strong statement that language crafts reality. But on the other hand, Shakespeare has Juliet say, "What's in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." Well, that suggests that maybe language doesn't craft reality. These arguments have gone back and forth for thousands of years. But until recently, there hasn't been any data to help us decide either way. Recently, in my lab and other labs around the world, we've started doing research, and now we have actual scientific data to weigh in on this question. So let me tell you about some of my favorite examples. I'll start with an example from an Aboriginal community in Australia that I had the chance to work with. These are the Kuuk Thaayorre people. They live in Pormpuraaw at the very west edge of Cape York. What's cool about Kuuk Thaayorre is, in Kuuk Thaayorre, they don't use words like "left" and "right," and instead, everything is in cardinal directions: north, south, east and west. And when I say everything, I really mean everything. You would say something like, "Oh, there's an ant on your southwest leg." Or, "Move your cup to the north-northeast a little bit." In fact, the way that you say "hello" in Kuuk Thaayorre is you say, "Which way are you going?" And the answer should be, "North-northeast in the far distance. How about you?" So imagine as you're walking around your day, every person you greet, you have to report your heading direction. (Laughter) But that would actually get you oriented pretty fast, right? Because you literally couldn't get past "hello," if you didn't know which way you were going. In fact, people who speak languages like this stay oriented really well. They stay oriented better than we used to think humans could. We used to think that humans were worse than other creatures because of some biological excuse: "Oh, we don't have magnets in our beaks or in our scales." No; if your language and your culture trains you to do it, actually, you can do it. There are humans around the world who stay oriented really well. And just to get us in agreement about how different this is from the way we do it, I want you all to close your eyes for a second and point southeast. (Laughter) Keep your eyes closed. Point. OK, so you can open your eyes. I see you guys pointing there, there, there, there, there ... I don't know which way it is myself — (Laughter) You have not been a lot of help. (Laughter) So let's just say the accuracy in this room was not very high. This is a big difference in cognitive ability across languages, right? Where one group — very distinguished group like you guys — doesn't know which way is which, but in another group, I could ask a five-year-old and they would know. (Laughter) There are also really big differences in how people think about time. So here I have pictures of my grandfather at different ages. And if I ask an English speaker to organize time, they might lay it out this way, from left to right. This has to do with writing direction. If you were a speaker of Hebrew or Arabic, you might do it going in the opposite direction, from right to left. But how would the Kuuk Thaayorre, this Aboriginal group I just told you about, do it? They don't use words like "left" and "right." Let me give you hint. When we sat people facing south, they organized time from left to right. When we sat them facing north, they organized time from right to left. When we sat them facing east, time came towards the body. What's the pattern? East to west, right? So for them, time doesn't actually get locked on the body at all, it gets locked on the landscape. So for me, if I'm facing this way, then time goes this way, and if I'm facing this way, then time goes this way. I'm facing this way, time goes this way — very egocentric of me to have the direction of time chase me around every time I turn my body. For the Kuuk Thaayorre, time is locked on the landscape. It's a dramatically different way of thinking about time. Here's another really smart human trick. Suppose I ask you how many penguins are there. Well, I bet I know how you'd solve that problem if you solved it. You went, "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight." You counted them. You named each one with a number, and the last number you said was the number of penguins. This is a little trick that you're taught to use as kids. You learn the number list and you learn how to apply it. A little linguistic trick. Well, some languages don't do this, because some languages don't have exact number words. They're languages that don't have a word like "seven" or a word like "eight." In fact, people who speak these languages don't count, and they have trouble keeping track of exact quantities. So, for example, if I ask you to match this number of penguins to the same number of ducks, you would be able to do that by counting. But folks who don't have that linguistic trick can't do that. Languages also differ in how they divide up the color spectrum — the visual world. Some languages have lots of words for colors, some have only a couple words, "light" and "dark." And languages differ in where they put boundaries between colors. So, for example, in English, there's a word for blue that covers all of the colors that you can see on the screen, but in Russian, there isn't a single word. Instead, Russian speakers have to differentiate between light blue, "goluboy," and dark blue, "siniy." So Russians have this lifetime of experience of, in language, distinguishing these two colors. When we test people's ability to perceptually discriminate these colors, what we find is that Russian speakers are faster across this linguistic boundary. They're faster to be able to tell the difference between a light and dark blue. And when you look at people's brains as they're looking at colors — say you have colors shifting slowly from light to dark blue — the brains of people who use different words for light and dark blue will give a surprised reaction as the colors shift from light to dark, as if, "Ooh, something has categorically changed," whereas the brains of English speakers, for example, that don't make this categorical distinction, don't give that surprise, because nothing is categorically changing. Languages have all kinds of structural quirks. This is one of my favorites. Lots of languages have grammatical gender; every noun gets assigned a gender, often masculine or feminine. And these genders differ across languages. So, for example, the sun is feminine in German but masculine in Spanish, and the moon, the reverse. Could this actually have any consequence for how people think? Do German speakers think of the sun as somehow more female-like, and the moon somehow more male-like? Actually, it turns out that's the case. So if you ask German and Spanish speakers to, say, describe a bridge, like the one here — "bridge" happens to be grammatically feminine in German, grammatically masculine in Spanish — German speakers are more likely to say bridges are "beautiful," "elegant" and stereotypically feminine words. Whereas Spanish speakers will be more likely to say they're "strong" or "long," these masculine words. (Laughter) Languages also differ in how they describe events, right? You take an event like this, an accident. In English, it's fine to say, "He broke the vase." In a language like Spanish, you might be more likely to say, "The vase broke," or, "The vase broke itself." If it's an accident, you wouldn't say that someone did it. In English, quite weirdly, we can even say things like, "I broke my arm." Now, in lots of languages, you couldn't use that construction unless you are a lunatic and you went out looking to break your arm — (Laughter) and you succeeded. If it was an accident, you would use a different construction. Now, this has consequences. So, people who speak different languages will pay attention to different things, depending on what their language usually requires them to do. So we show the same accident to English speakers and Spanish speakers, English speakers will remember who did it, because English requires you to say, "He did it; he broke the vase." Whereas Spanish speakers might be less likely to remember who did it if it's an accident, but they're more likely to remember that it was an accident. They're more likely to remember the intention. So, two people watch the same event, witness the same crime, but end up remembering different things about that event. This has implications, of course, for eyewitness testimony. It also has implications for blame and punishment. So if you take English speakers and I just show you someone breaking a vase, and I say, "He broke the vase," as opposed to "The vase broke," even though you can witness it yourself, you can watch the video, you can watch the crime against the vase, you will punish someone more, you will blame someone more if I just said, "He broke it," as opposed to, "It broke." The language guides our reasoning about events. Now, I've given you a few examples of how language can profoundly shape the way we think, and it does so in a variety of ways. So language can have big effects, like we saw with space and time, where people can lay out space and time in completely different coordinate frames from each other. Language can also have really deep effects — that's what we saw with the case of number. Having count words in your language, having number words, opens up the whole world of mathematics. Of course, if you don't count, you can't do algebra, you can't do any of the things that would be required to build a room like this or make this broadcast, right? This little trick of number words gives you a stepping stone into a whole cognitive realm. Language can also have really early effects, what we saw in the case of color. These are really simple, basic, perceptual decisions. We make thousands of them all the time, and yet, language is getting in there and fussing even with these tiny little perceptual decisions that we make. Language can have really broad effects. So the case of grammatical gender may be a little silly, but at the same time, grammatical gender applies to all nouns. That means language can shape how you're thinking about anything that can be named by a noun. That's a lot of stuff. And finally, I gave you an example of how language can shape things that have personal weight to us — ideas like blame and punishment or eyewitness memory. These are important things in our daily lives. Now, the beauty of linguistic diversity is that it reveals to us just how ingenious and how flexible the human mind is. Human minds have invented not one cognitive universe, but 7,000 — there are 7,000 languages spoken around the world. And we can create many more — languages, of course, are living things, things that we can hone and change to suit our needs. The tragic thing is that we're losing so much of this linguistic diversity all the time. We're losing about one language a week, and by some estimates, half of the world's languages will be gone in the next hundred years. And the even worse news is that right now, almost everything we know about the human mind and human brain is based on studies of usually American English-speaking undergraduates at universities. That excludes almost all humans. Right? So what we know about the human mind is actually incredibly narrow and biased, and our science has to do better. I want to leave you with this final thought. I've told you about how speakers of different languages think differently, but of course, that's not about how people elsewhere think. It's about how you think. It's how the language that you speak shapes the way that you think. And that gives you the opportunity to ask, "Why do I think the way that I do?" "How could I think differently?" And also, "What thoughts do I wish to create?" Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How the arts help homeless youth heal and build | {0: 'Malika Whitley is an arts curator and activist in Atlanta, Georgia.'} | TED Residency | Don't you love a good nap? (Laughter) Just stealing away that small block of time to curl up on your couch for that sweet moment of escape. It's one of my favorite things, but something I took for granted before I began experiencing homelessness as a teenager. The ability to take a nap is only reserved for stability and sureness, something you can't find when you're carrying everything you own in your book bag and carefully counting the amount of time you're allowed to sit in any given place before being asked to leave. I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, bouncing from house to house with a loving, close-knit family as we struggled to find stability in our finances. But when my mom temporarily lost herself to mania and when that mania chose me as its primary scapegoat through both emotional and physical abuse, I fled for my safety. I had come to the conclusion that homelessness was safer for me than being at home. I was 16. During my homelessness, I joined Atlanta's 3,300 homeless youth in feeling uncared for, left out and invisible each night. There wasn't and still is not any place for a homeless minor to walk off the street to access a bed. I realized that most people thought of homelessness as some kind of lazy, drug-induced squalor and inconvenience, but that didn't represent my book bag full of clothes and schoolbooks, or my A+ grade point average. I would sit on my favorite bench downtown and watch as the hours passed by until I could sneak in a few hours of sleep on couches, in cars, in buildings or in storage units. I, like thousands of other homeless youth, disappeared into the shadows of the city while the whole world kept spinning as if nothing at all had gone terribly wrong. The invisibility alone almost completely broke my spirit. But when I had nothing else, I had the arts, something that didn't demand material wealth from me in exchange for refuge. A few hours of singing, writing poetry or saving up enough money to disappear into another world at a play kept me going and jolting me back to life when I felt at my lowest. I would go to church services on Wednesday evenings and, desperate for the relief the arts gave me, I would go a few hours early, slip downstairs and into a part of the world where the only thing that mattered was whether or not I could hit the right note in the song I was perfecting that week. I would sing for hours. It gave me so much strength to give myself permission to just block it all out and sing. Five years later, I started my organization, ChopArt, which is a multidisciplinary arts organization for homeless minors. ChopArt uses the arts as a tool for trauma recovery by taking what we know about building community and restoring dignity and applying that to the creative process. ChopArt is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, with additional programs in Hyderabad, India, and Accra, Ghana, and since our start in 2010, we've served over 40,000 teens worldwide. Our teens take refuge in the transformative elements of the arts, and they depend on the safe space ChopArt provides for them to do that. An often invisible population uses the arts to step into their light, but that journey out of invisibility is not an easy one. We have a sibling pair, Jeremy and Kelly, who have been with our program for over three years. They come to the ChopArt classes every Wednesday evening. But about a year ago, Jeremy and Kelly witnessed their mom seize and die right in front of them. They watched as the paramedics failed to revive her. They cried as their father signed over temporary custody to their ChopArt mentor, Erin, without even allowing them to take an extra pair of clothes on their way out. This series of events broke my heart, but Jeremy and Kelly's faith and resolve in ChopArt is what keeps me grounded in this work. Kelly calling Erin in her lowest moment, knowing that Erin would do whatever she could to make them feel loved and cared for, is proof to me that by using the arts as the entry point, we can heal and build our homeless youth population. And we continue to build. We build with Devin, who became homeless with his family when his mom had to choose between medical bills or the rent. He discovered his love of painting through ChopArt. We build with Liz, who has been on the streets most of her teenage years but turns to music to return to herself when her traumas feel too heavy for her young shoulders. We build for Maria, who uses poetry to heal after her grandfather died in the van she's living in with the rest of her family. And so to the youth out there experiencing homelessness, let me tell you, you have the power to build within you. You have a voice through the arts that doesn't judge what you've been through. So never stop fighting to stand in your light because even in your darkest times, we see you. Thank you. (Applause) |
What if we eliminated one of the world's oldest diseases? | {0: 'At Sightsavers, an international NGO, Caroline Harper leads efforts to eliminate avoidable blindness around the world and fight for equal rights.'} | TED2018 | I'd like you to imagine, just for a moment, that your eyelashes grew inwards instead of outwards, so that every time you blinked, they would scrape the front of your eyeballs, damaging the corneas, so that slowly and painfully, you went blind. Well, that's what happens to a person who has trachoma. Now, this little boy here, Pamelo, from Zambia, he has trachoma. And if we don't do anything, he's going to go blind. Trachoma is a curious disease. It's a bacterial infection that's passed from person to person and by flies. The repeated infection will scar your eyelids so that they contract and they turn inside out. It particularly affects women, because they have the contact with children. So what you'll often see in places like Ethiopia are girls who have tweezers like this around their necks, and they use them to pluck out their eyelashes. But of course, that only gives them temporary respite, because they just grow back more vicious than before. There are around two million people in the world who are blind or visually impaired because of trachoma. And we believe there may be as many as 200 million people who are at risk. Now, it's a very old disease. What you can see is a photo of a wall of a tomb in Northern Sudan. A colleague and I were traveling in a very remote village, and we asked an old man to take us down into a little tomb. Now, on the wall, we saw two eyes. One is crying, and you can see there are tweezers next to it. Simon said to me, "My God, do you think that's trachoma?" So we sent this picture to the British Museum, and they confirmed that, yes, this is trachoma. So, thousands of years ago, the ancient Nubians were painting pictures of trachoma on the walls of their tomb. And the tragedy is that disease is still rampant in that area today. And the crazy thing is, we know how to stop it. And what's great is that the trachoma community have all come together to pool their efforts. We don't compete; we collaborate. I have to tell you, that's not always the case in my experience in the NGO world. We've created something called the International Coalition for Trachoma Control. And together, we've developed a strategy to fight it. This strategy is called the SAFE strategy, and it's been approved by the World Health Organization. The "S" stands for "surgery." It's very straightforward procedure to turn the eyelids back the right way. We train nurses to do it, and they use local anesthetics. And as you can see, you can do it in somebody's front porch, if need be. Then "A" stands for "antibiotics." These are donated by Pfizer, who also pay for those drugs to be transported to the port in-country. From there, they're taken to the villages, where hundreds of thousands of community volunteers will distribute those drugs to the people. Now, we train those volunteers, and we also help the ministries with all that complex logistics. And every one of those volunteers has a pole like this. It's called a "dose pole." This one's from Cameroon. And you can see it's marked different colors, and you can tell how many pills you should give somebody, based on how tall they are. "F" stands for "face washing." Now, we used to have trachoma in the UK and in the US. In fact, President Carter, he talks about how trachoma was a real problem in Georgia when he was a little boy. And in the UK, the famous eye hospital, Moorfields, was originally a trachoma hospital. What we do is teach kids like this how important it is to wash their faces. And finally, "E" stands for "environment," where we help the communities build latrines, and we teach them to separate their animals from their living quarters in order to reduce the fly population. So we know how to tackle the disease. But we need to know where it is. And we do, because a few years ago, Sightsavers led an incredible program called the Global Trachoma Mapping Project. It took us three years, but we went through 29 countries, and we taught local health workers to go district by district, and they examined the eyelids of over two and a half million people. And they used Android phones in order to download the data. And from that, we were able to build a map that showed us where the disease was. Now, this is a very high-level map that shows you which countries had a problem with trachoma. And you may ask me, "Well, does this strategy actually work?" Yes, it does. This map shows you the progress that we've made to date. The green countries believe they've already eliminated trachoma, and they have either been through or are in the process of having that validated by the WHO. Countries in yellow have the money they need, they have the resources to eliminate trachoma. And some of them are really nearly there. But the red countries, they don't have enough funding. They cannot eliminate trachoma unless they get more. And we're quite concerned, though, that the progress to date may stall. So when we were talking to the Audacious ideas guys, we asked ourselves: If we really, really pushed ourselves over the next four or five years and we had the money, what do we think we could achieve? Well, we believe that we can eliminate trachoma in 12 African countries and across the Americas and all across the Pacific. And we can make significant progress in two countries which have the highest burden of the disease, which is Ethiopia and Nigeria. And in doing all of that, we can leverage more than two billion dollars' worth of donated drugs. (Applause) Now, this map here shows you the impact that we'll have — look how many countries are going green. And there, you can see progress in Ethiopia and Nigeria. Now, yes, there are some countries that are still red. These are mainly countries which are in conflict — places like Yemen, South Sudan — where it's very difficult to work. So, we have the team, the strategy and the map. And we also have the relationships with the governments so that we can make sure that our program is coordinated with other disease-control programs, so that we can be efficient. Wouldn't it be amazing if we could do this? We'd have trachoma on the run. We would be on the home straight to eliminate this disease from the whole world. But before I finish, I just want to share with you some words from the founder of Sightsavers, a guy called Sir John Wilson. Now, he was blinded at the age of 12. And he said, "People don't go blind by the million. They go blind one by one." And in the excitement of being able to say we've got rid of trachoma for the whole country, let's not forget that, actually, this is a devastating disease that destroys the lives of individual people. People like Twiba. Now, I met Twiba last year in Tanzania. She had had trachoma for as long as she could remember. And a couple of months before I met her, she'd had the operation. It's no exaggeration to say that this had totally transformed her life. We'd saved the sight that she had left, and she was free of pain. She could sleep. She could work, she could socialize. And she said to me, "I have my life back." And it was impossible not to be moved by her story. But there are so many Twibas. I want to find all the Twibas, and I don't want anyone to go blind in agony anymore. Now, you know, there are so many intractable problems in this world. But this is not one of them. This is something that we can solve. And we can ensure that kids like this can grow up free from the fear of trachoma. So, for the sake of kids like this, and for the sake of people like Twiba, let's get rid of trachoma. Do you think we can? Well, yeah, if we really, really want to. Yes, we can. So thank you. (Applause) |
The discoveries awaiting us in the ocean's twilight zone | {0: 'Heidi M. Sosik is an ocean scientist who uses tools like lasers and robotic cameras to figure out how tiny organisms in the ocean affect our whole planet.'} | TED2018 | I bet all of you are familiar with this view of the ocean, but the thing is, most of the ocean looks nothing like this. Below the sunlit surface waters, there's an otherworldly realm known as the twilight zone. At 200 to 1,000 meters below the surface, sunlight is barely a glimmer. Tiny particles swirl down through the darkness while flashes of bioluminescence give us a clue that these waters teem with life: microbes, plankton, fish. Everything that lives here has amazing adaptations for the challenges of such an extreme environment. These animals help support top predators such as whales, tuna, swordfish and sharks. There could be 10 times more fish biomass here than previously thought. In fact, maybe more than all the rest of the ocean combined. There are countless undiscovered species in deep waters, and life in the twilight zone is intertwined with earth's climate. Yet the twilight zone is virtually unexplored. There are so many things we still don't know about it. I think we can change that. I was drawn to oceanography by just this kind of challenge. To me it represents the perfect intersection of science, technology and the unknown, the spark for so many breakthrough discoveries about life on our planet. As a college student, I went on an expedition across the Atlantic with a team of scientists using a high-powered laser to measure microscopic algae. The wild thing that happened on that trip is that we discovered what everyone who looked before had completely missed: photosynthetic cells smaller than anyone thought possible. We now know those tiny cells are the most abundant photosynthetic organisms on earth. This amazing discovery happened because we used new technology to see life in the ocean in a new way. I am convinced that the discoveries awaiting us in the twilight zone will be just as breathtaking. We know so little about the twilight zone because it's difficult to study. It's exceedingly large, spanning from the Arctic to the Southern Ocean and around the globe. It's different from place to place. It changes quickly as the water and animals move. And it's deep and dark and cold, and the pressures there are enormous. What we do know is fascinating. You may be imagining huge monsters lurking in the deep sea, but most of the animals are very small, like this lantern fish. And this fierce-looking fish is called a bristlemouth. Believe it or not, these are the most abundant vertebrates on earth and many are so small that a dozen could fit in this one tube. It gets even more interesting, because small size does not stop them from being powerful through sheer number. Deep, penetrating sonar shows us that the animals form dense layers. You can see what I mean by the red and yellow colors around 400 meters in these data. So much sound bounces off this layer, it's been mistaken for the ocean bottom. But if we look, it can't be, because the layer is deep during the day, it rises up at night and the pattern repeats day after day. This is actually the largest animal migration on earth. It happens around the globe every day, sweeping through the world's oceans in a massive living wave as twilight zone inhabitants travel hundreds of meters to surface waters to feed at night and return to the relative safety of deeper, darker waters during the day. These animals and their movements help connect the surface and deep ocean in important ways. The animals feed near the surface, they bring carbon in their food into the deep waters, where some of that carbon can stay behind and remain isolated from the atmosphere for hundreds or even thousands of years. In this way, the migration may help keep carbon dioxide out of our atmosphere and limit the effects of global warming on our climate. But we still have many questions. We don't know which species are migrating, what they're finding to eat, who is trying to eat them or how much carbon they are able to transport. So I'm a scientist who studies life in the ocean. For me, curiosity about these things is a powerful driver, but there's more to the motivation here. We need to answer these questions and answer them quickly, because the twilight zone is under threat. Factory ships in the open ocean have been vacuuming up hundreds of thousands of tons of small, shrimp-like animals called krill. The animals are ground into fish meal to support increasing demands for aquaculture and for nutraceuticals such as krill oil. Industry is on the brink of deepening fisheries such as these into the mid-water in what could start a kind of twilight zone gold rush operating outside the reach of national fishing regulations. This could have irreversible global-scale impacts on marine life and food webs. We need to get out ahead of fishing impacts and work to understand this critical part of the ocean. At Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, I'm really fortunate to be surrounded by colleagues who share this passion. Together, we are ready to launch a large-scale exploration of the twilight zone. We have a plan to begin right away with expeditions in the North Atlantic, where we'll tackle the big challenges of observing and studying the twilight zone's remarkable diversity. This kind of multiscale, multidimensional exploration means we need to integrate new technologies. Let me show you a recent example that has changed our thinking. Satellite tracking devices on animals such as sharks are now showing us that many top predators regularly dive deep into the twilight zone to feed. And when we map their swimming patterns and compare them to satellite data, we find that their feeding hot spots are linked to ocean currents and other features. We used to think these animals found all of their food in surface waters. We now believe they depend on the twilight zone. But we still need to figure out how they find the best areas to feed, what they're eating there and how much their diets depend on twilight zone species. We will also need new technologies to explore the links with climate. Remember these particles? Some of them are produced by gelatinous animals called salps. Salps are like superefficient vacuum cleaners, slurping up plankton and producing fast-sinking pellets of poop — try saying that 10 times fast — pellets of poop that carry carbon deep into the ocean. We sometimes find salps in enormous swarms. We need to know where and when and why and whether this kind of carbon sink has a big impact on earth's climate. To meet these challenges, we will need to push the limits of technology. We will deploy cameras and samplers on smart robots to patrol the depths and help us track the secret lives of animals like salps. We will use advanced sonar to figure out how many fish and other animals are down there. We will sequence DNA from the environment in a kind of forensic analysis to figure out which species are there and what they are eating. With so much that's still unknown about the twilight zone, there's an almost unlimited opportunity for new discovery. Just look at these beautiful, fascinating creatures. We barely know them. And imagine how many more are just down there waiting for our new technologies to see them. The excitement level about this could not be higher on our team of ocean scientists, engineers and communicators. There is also a deep sense of urgency. We can't turn back the clock on decades of overfishing in countless regions of the ocean that once seemed inexhaustible. How amazing would it be to take a different path this time? The twilight zone is truly a global commons. We need to first know and understand it before we can be responsible stewards and hope to fish it sustainably. This is not just a journey for scientists, it is for all of us, because the decisions we collectively make over the next decade will affect what the ocean looks like for centuries to come. Thank you. (Applause) |
What if we ended the injustice of bail? | {0: 'Robin Steinberg is the CEO of The Bail Project, a new organization designed to combat mass incarceration in the United States by disrupting the money bail system -- one person at a time. As she says: "I hate injustice and simply can\'t sit still when I see it."'} | TED2018 | I will never forget the first time I visited a client in jail. The heavy, metal door slammed behind me, and I heard the key turn in the lock. The cement floor underneath me had a sticky film on it that made a ripping sound, like tape being pulled off a box, every time I moved my foot. The only connection to the outside world was a small window placed too high to see. There was a small, square table bolted to the floor and two metal chairs, one on either side. That was the first time I understood viscerally — just for a fleeting moment — what incarceration might feel like. And I promised myself all those years ago as a young, public defender that I would never, ever forget that feeling. And I never have. It inspired me to fight for each and every one of my clients' freedom as if it was my own. Freedom. A concept so fundamental to the American psyche that it is enshrined in our constitution. And yet, America is addicted to imprisonment. From slavery through mass incarceration, it always has been. Look, we all know the shocking numbers. The United States incarcerates more people per capita than almost any nation on the planet. But what you may not know is that on any given night in America, almost half a million people go to sleep in those concrete jail cells who have not been convicted of anything. These mothers and fathers and sons and daughters are there for one reason and one reason only: they cannot afford to pay the price of their freedom. And that price is called bail. Now, bail was actually created as a form of conditional release. The theory was simple: set bail at an amount that somebody could afford to pay — they would pay it — it would give them an incentive to come back to court; it would give them some skin in the game. Bail was never intended to be used as punishment. Bail was never intended to hold people in jail cells. And bail was never, ever intended to create a two-tier system of justice: one for the rich and one for everybody else. But that is precisely what it has done. Seventy-five percent of people in American local jails are there because they cannot pay bail. People like Ramel. On a chilly October afternoon, Ramel was riding his bicycle in his South Bronx neighborhood on his way to a market to pick up a quart of milk. He was stopped by the police. And when he demanded to know why he was being stopped, an argument ensued, and the next thing he knew, he was on the ground in handcuffs, being charged with "riding your bicycle on the sidewalk and resisting arrest." He was taken to court, where a judge set 500 dollars bail. But Ramel — he didn't have 500 dollars. So this 32-year-old father was sent to "The Boat" — a floating jail barge that sits on the East River between a sewage plant and a fish market. That's right, you heard me. In New York City, in 2018, we have a floating prison barge that sits out there and houses primarily black and brown men who cannot pay their bail. Let's talk for a moment about what it means to be in jail even for a few days. Well, it can mean losing your job, losing your home, jeopardizing your immigration status. It may even mean losing custody of your children. A third of sexual victimization by jail staff happens in the first three days in jail, and almost half of all jail deaths, including suicides, happen in that first week. What's more, if you're held in jail on bail, you're four times more likely to get a jail sentence than if you had been free, and that jail sentence will be three times longer. And if you are black or Latino and cash bail has been set, you are two times more likely to remain stuck in that jail cell than if you were white. Jail in America is a terrifying, dehumanizing and violent experience. Now imagine for just one moment that it's you stuck in that jail cell, and you don't have the 500 dollars to get out. And someone comes along and offers you a way out. "Just plead guilty," they say. "You can go home back to your job. Just plead guilty. You can kiss your kids goodnight tonight." So you do what anybody would do in that situation. You plead guilty whether you did it or not. But now you have a criminal record that's going to follow you for the rest of your life. Jailing people because they don't have enough money to pay bail is one of the most unfair, immoral things we do as a society. But it is also expensive and counterproductive. American taxpayers — they spend 14 billion dollars annually holding people in jail cells who haven't been convicted of anything. That's 40 million dollars a day. What's perhaps more confounding is it doesn't make us any safer. Research is clear that holding somebody in jail makes you significantly more likely to commit a crime when you get out than if you had been free all along. Freedom makes all the difference. Low-income communities and communities of color have known that for generations. Together, they have pooled their resources to buy their loved ones freedom for as long as bondage and jail cells existed. But the reach of the criminal legal system has grown too enormous, and the numbers have just too large. Ninety-nine percent of jail growth in America has been the result — over the last 20 years — of pre-trial incarceration. I have been a public defender for over half my life, and I have stood by and watched thousands of clients as they were dragged into those jail cells because they didn't have enough money to pay bail. I have watched as questions of justice were subsumed by questions of money, calling into question the legitimacy of the entire American legal system. I am here to say something simple — something obvious, but something urgent. Freedom makes all the difference, and freedom should be free. (Applause) But how are we going to make that happen? Well, that's the question I was wrestling with over a decade ago when I was sitting at a kitchen table with my husband, David, who is also a public defender. We were eating our Chinese takeout and venting about the injustice of it all when David looked up and said, "Why don't we just start a bail fund, and just start bailing our clients out of jail?" And in that unexpected moment, the idea for the Bronx Freedom Fund was born. Look, we didn't know what to expect. There were plenty of people that told us we were crazy and we were going to lose all of the money. People wouldn't come back because they didn't have any stake in it. But what if clients did come back? We knew that bail money comes back at the end of a criminal case, so it could come back into the fund, and we could use it over and over again for more and more bail. That was our big bet, and that bet paid off. Over the past 10 years, we have been paying bails for low-income residents of New York City, and what we have learned has exploded our ideas of why people come back to court and how the criminal legal system itself is operated. Turns out money isn't what makes people come back to court. We know this because when the Bronx Freedom Fund pays bail, 96 percent of clients return for every court appearance, laying waste to the myth that it's money that mattered. It's powerful evidence that we don't need cash or ankle bracelets or unnecessary systems of surveillance and supervision. We simply need court reminders — simple court reminders about when to come back to court. Next, we learned that if you're held in jail on a misdemeanor, 90 percent of people will plead guilty. But when the fund pays bail, over half the cases are dismissed. And in the entire history of the Bronx Freedom Fund, fewer than two percent of our clients have ever received a jail sentence of any kind. (Applause) Ramel, a week later — he was still on the boat, locked in that jail cell. He was on the cusp of losing everything, and he was about to plead guilty, and the Bronx Freedom Fund intervened and paid his bail. Now, reunited with his daughter, he was able to fight his case from outside. Look, it took some time — two years, to be exact — but at the end of that, his case was dismissed in its entirety. For Ramel — (Applause) For Ramel, the Bronx Freedom Fund was a lifeline, but for countless other Americans locked in jail cells, there is no freedom fund coming. It's time to do something about that. It's time to do something big. It's time to do something bold. It's time to do something, maybe, audacious? (Laughter) We want to take our proven, revolving bail-fund model that we built in the Bronx and spread it across America, attacking the front end of the legal system before incarceration begins. (Applause) (Cheers) (Applause) Here's the plan. (Applause) We're going to bail out as many people as we can as quickly as we can. Over the next five years, partnering with public defenders and local community organizations, we're going to set up 40 sites in high-need jurisdictions. The goal is to bail out 160,000 people. Our strategy leverages the fact that bail money comes back at the end of a case. Data from the Bronx shows that a dollar can be used two or three times a year, creating a massive force multiplier. So a dollar donated today can be used to pay bail for up to 15 people over the next five years. Our strategy also relies on the experience and the wisdom and the leadership of those who have experienced this injustice firsthand. (Applause) Each bail project site will be staffed by a team of bail disrupters. These are passionate, dedicated advocates from local communities, many of whom were formerly incarcerated themselves, who will pay bails and support clients while their cases are going through the legal system, providing them with whatever resources and support they may need. Our first two sites are up and running. One in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and one in St. Louis, Missouri. And Ramel? He's training right now to be a bail disrupter in Queens County, New York. (Applause) Our next three sites are ready to launch in Dallas, Detroit and Louisville, Kentucky. The Bail Project will attack the money bail system on an unprecedented scale. We will also listen, collect and elevate and honor the stories of our clients so that we can change hearts and minds, and we will collect critical, national data that we need so we can chart a better path forward so that we do not recreate this system of oppression in just another form. The Bail Project, by bailing out 160,000 people over the next five years, will become one of the largest non-governmental decarcerations of Americans in history. So look — (Applause) the criminal legal system, as it exists — it needs to be dismantled. But here's the thing I know from decades in the system: real, systemic change takes time, and it takes a variety of strategies. So it's going to take all of us. It's going to take the civil rights litigators, the community organizers, the academics, the media, the philanthropists, the students, the singers, the poets, and, of course, the voices and efforts of those who are impacted by this system. But here's what I also know: together, I believe we can end mass incarceration. But one last thing: those people, sitting in America, in those jail cells, in every corner of the country, who are held in jail on bail bondage, right now — they need a lifeline today. That's where The Bail Project comes in. We have a proven model, a plan of action, and a growing network of bail disrupters who are audacious enough to dream big and fight hard, one bail at a time, for as long it takes, until true freedom and equal justice are a reality in America. Thank you. (Applause) |
How we need to remake the internet | {0: 'Jaron Lanier is a scientist, musician and writer best known for his work in virtual reality and his advocacy of humanism and sustainable economics in a digital context.'} | TED2018 | Back in the 1980s, actually, I gave my first talk at TED, and I brought some of the very, very first public demonstrations of virtual reality ever to the TED stage. And at that time, we knew that we were facing a knife-edge future where the technology we needed, the technology we loved, could also be our undoing. We knew that if we thought of our technology as a means to ever more power, if it was just a power trip, we'd eventually destroy ourselves. That's what happens when you're on a power trip and nothing else. So the idealism of digital culture back then was all about starting with that recognition of the possible darkness and trying to imagine a way to transcend it with beauty and creativity. I always used to end my early TED Talks with a rather horrifying line, which is, "We have a challenge. We have to create a culture around technology that is so beautiful, so meaningful, so deep, so endlessly creative, so filled with infinite potential that it draws us away from committing mass suicide." So we talked about extinction as being one and the same as the need to create an alluring, infinitely creative future. And I still believe that that alternative of creativity as an alternative to death is very real and true, maybe the most true thing there is. In the case of virtual reality — well, the way I used to talk about it is that it would be something like what happened when people discovered language. With language came new adventures, new depth, new meaning, new ways to connect, new ways to coordinate, new ways to imagine, new ways to raise children, and I imagined, with virtual reality, we'd have this new thing that would be like a conversation but also like waking-state intentional dreaming. We called it post-symbolic communication, because it would be like just directly making the thing you experienced instead of indirectly making symbols to refer to things. It was a beautiful vision, and it's one I still believe in, and yet, haunting that beautiful vision was the dark side of how it could also turn out. And I suppose I could mention from one of the very earliest computer scientists, whose name was Norbert Wiener, and he wrote a book back in the '50s, from before I was even born, called "The Human Use of Human Beings." And in the book, he described the potential to create a computer system that would be gathering data from people and providing feedback to those people in real time in order to put them kind of partially, statistically, in a Skinner box, in a behaviorist system, and he has this amazing line where he says, one could imagine, as a thought experiment — and I'm paraphrasing, this isn't a quote — one could imagine a global computer system where everybody has devices on them all the time, and the devices are giving them feedback based on what they did, and the whole population is subject to a degree of behavior modification. And such a society would be insane, could not survive, could not face its problems. And then he says, but this is only a thought experiment, and such a future is technologically infeasible. (Laughter) And yet, of course, it's what we have created, and it's what we must undo if we are to survive. So — (Applause) I believe that we made a very particular mistake, and it happened early on, and by understanding the mistake we made, we can undo it. It happened in the '90s, and going into the turn of the century, and here's what happened. Early digital culture, and indeed, digital culture to this day, had a sense of, I would say, lefty, socialist mission about it, that unlike other things that have been done, like the invention of books, everything on the internet must be purely public, must be available for free, because if even one person cannot afford it, then that would create this terrible inequity. Now of course, there's other ways to deal with that. If books cost money, you can have public libraries. And so forth. But we were thinking, no, no, no, this is an exception. This must be pure public commons, that's what we want. And so that spirit lives on. You can experience it in designs like the Wikipedia, for instance, many others. But at the same time, we also believed, with equal fervor, in this other thing that was completely incompatible, which is we loved our tech entrepreneurs. We loved Steve Jobs; we loved this Nietzschean myth of the techie who could dent the universe. Right? And that mythical power still has a hold on us, as well. So you have these two different passions, for making everything free and for the almost supernatural power of the tech entrepreneur. How do you celebrate entrepreneurship when everything's free? Well, there was only one solution back then, which was the advertising model. And so therefore, Google was born free, with ads, Facebook was born free, with ads. Now in the beginning, it was cute, like with the very earliest Google. (Laughter) The ads really were kind of ads. They would be, like, your local dentist or something. But there's thing called Moore's law that makes the computers more and more efficient and cheaper. Their algorithms get better. We actually have universities where people study them, and they get better and better. And the customers and other entities who use these systems just got more and more experienced and got cleverer and cleverer. And what started out as advertising really can't be called advertising anymore. It turned into behavior modification, just as Norbert Wiener had worried it might. And so I can't call these things social networks anymore. I call them behavior modification empires. (Applause) And I refuse to vilify the individuals. I have dear friends at these companies, sold a company to Google, even though I think it's one of these empires. I don't think this is a matter of bad people who've done a bad thing. I think this is a matter of a globally tragic, astoundingly ridiculous mistake, rather than a wave of evil. Let me give you just another layer of detail into how this particular mistake functions. So with behaviorism, you give the creature, whether it's a rat or a dog or a person, little treats and sometimes little punishments as feedback to what they do. So if you have an animal in a cage, it might be candy and electric shocks. But if you have a smartphone, it's not those things, it's symbolic punishment and reward. Pavlov, one of the early behaviorists, demonstrated the famous principle. You could train a dog to salivate just with the bell, just with the symbol. So on social networks, social punishment and social reward function as the punishment and reward. And we all know the feeling of these things. You get this little thrill — "Somebody liked my stuff and it's being repeated." Or the punishment: "Oh my God, they don't like me, maybe somebody else is more popular, oh my God." So you have those two very common feelings, and they're doled out in such a way that you get caught in this loop. As has been publicly acknowledged by many of the founders of the system, everybody knew this is what was going on. But here's the thing: traditionally, in the academic study of the methods of behaviorism, there have been comparisons of positive and negative stimuli. In this setting, a commercial setting, there's a new kind of difference that has kind of evaded the academic world for a while, and that difference is that whether positive stimuli are more effective than negative ones in different circumstances, the negative ones are cheaper. They're the bargain stimuli. So what I mean by that is it's much easier to lose trust than to build trust. It takes a long time to build love. It takes a short time to ruin love. Now the customers of these behavior modification empires are on a very fast loop. They're almost like high-frequency traders. They're getting feedbacks from their spends or whatever their activities are if they're not spending, and they see what's working, and then they do more of that. And so they're getting the quick feedback, which means they're responding more to the negative emotions, because those are the ones that rise faster, right? And so therefore, even well-intentioned players who think all they're doing is advertising toothpaste end up advancing the cause of the negative people, the negative emotions, the cranks, the paranoids, the cynics, the nihilists. Those are the ones who get amplified by the system. And you can't pay one of these companies to make the world suddenly nice and improve democracy nearly as easily as you can pay to ruin those things. And so this is the dilemma we've gotten ourselves into. The alternative is to turn back the clock, with great difficulty, and remake that decision. Remaking it would mean two things. It would mean first that many people, those who could afford to, would actually pay for these things. You'd pay for search, you'd pay for social networking. How would you pay? Maybe with a subscription fee, maybe with micro-payments as you use them. There's a lot of options. If some of you are recoiling, and you're thinking, "Oh my God, I would never pay for these things. How could you ever get anyone to pay?" I want to remind you of something that just happened. Around this same time that companies like Google and Facebook were formulating their free idea, a lot of cyber culture also believed that in the future, televisions and movies would be created in the same way, kind of like the Wikipedia. But then, companies like Netflix, Amazon, HBO, said, "Actually, you know, subscribe. We'll give you give you great TV." And it worked! We now are in this period called "peak TV," right? So sometimes when you pay for stuff, things get better. We can imagine a hypothetical — (Applause) We can imagine a hypothetical world of "peak social media." What would that be like? It would mean when you get on, you can get really useful, authoritative medical advice instead of cranks. It could mean when you want to get factual information, there's not a bunch of weird, paranoid conspiracy theories. We can imagine this wonderful other possibility. Ah. I dream of it. I believe it's possible. I'm certain it's possible. And I'm certain that the companies, the Googles and the Facebooks, would actually do better in this world. I don't believe we need to punish Silicon Valley. We just need to remake the decision. Of the big tech companies, it's really only two that depend on behavior modification and spying as their business plan. It's Google and Facebook. (Laughter) And I love you guys. Really, I do. Like, the people are fantastic. I want to point out, if I may, if you look at Google, they can propagate cost centers endlessly with all of these companies, but they cannot propagate profit centers. They cannot diversify, because they're hooked. They're hooked on this model, just like their own users. They're in the same trap as their users, and you can't run a big corporation that way. So this is ultimately totally in the benefit of the shareholders and other stakeholders of these companies. It's a win-win solution. It'll just take some time to figure it out. A lot of details to work out, totally doable. (Laughter) I don't believe our species can survive unless we fix this. We cannot have a society in which, if two people wish to communicate, the only way that can happen is if it's financed by a third person who wishes to manipulate them. (Applause) (Applause ends) In the meantime, if the companies won't change, delete your accounts, OK? (Laughter) (Applause) That's enough for now. Thank you so much. (Applause) |
The most powerful woman you've never heard of | {0: 'T. Morgan Dixon is the cofounder and CEO of GirlTrek, inspiring more than 100,000 neighborhood walkers.', 1: 'As COO of GirlTrek, Vanessa Garrison mobilizes African-American women and girls to reclaim their health and communities through walking.'} | TED2018 | T. Morgan Dixon: I would like to tell you about the most powerful woman you've never heard of. This is Septima Clark. Remember her name: Septima Clark. Dr. King called her the "the architect of the civil rights movement," because she created something called Citizenship Schools. And in those schools, she taught ordinary women the practical skills to go back into their communities and teach people to read. Because if they could read, they could vote. Well, these women took those organizing skills, and they became some of the most legendary civil rights activists this country has ever seen. Women like Diane Nash. You may know her. She orchestrated the entire walk from Selma to Montgomery. She was a cofounder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and they integrated lunch counters, and they created the Freedom Rides. Or you may remember Fannie Lou Hamer, who sat on the floor of the Democratic National Convention and talked about being beaten in jail cells as she registered people to vote in Mississippi. And her most famous student, Rosa Parks. She said Septima Clark was the one who taught her the peaceful act of resistance. And when she sat down, she inspired a nation to stand. These were just three of her 10,000 students. These women stood on the front lines of change, and by doing so, they taught people to read in her Citizenship School model and empowered 700,000 new voters. And that's not it. She created a new culture of social activism. Pete Seeger said it was Septima Clark who changed the lyrics to the old gospel song and made the anthem we all know: "We Shall Overcome." Vanessa Garrison: Now, many of you may know us. We are the cofounders of GirlTrek, the largest health organization for Black women in America. Our mission is simple: ask Black women, 80 percent of whom are over a healthy body weight, to walk outside of their front door every day to establish a lifesaving habit of walking; in doing so, ignite a radical movement in which Black women reverse the devastating impacts of chronic disease, reclaim the streets of their neighborhoods, create a new culture of health for their families and stand on the front lines for justice. Today, all across America, more than 100,000 Black women are wearing this GirlTrek blue shirt as they move through their communities — a heroic force. We walk in the footsteps of Septima Clark. She gave us a blueprint for change-making. One, to have a bold idea, bigger than anyone is comfortable with. To two: root down in the cultural traditions of your community and lean heavily on what has come before. To three: name it — that one thing that everyone is willing to work hard for; a ridiculously simple goal that doesn't just benefit the individual but the village around them. And to, lastly: never ask permission to save your own life. It is our fundamental right as human beings to solve our own problems. TMD: So to the women all out there gathered in your living rooms, rooting for us, acting crazy on social media right now — we see you. (Laughter) We see you every day. We love you. You are not alone, and our bigger work starts now. VG: You got us onto this stage — your leadership; auditing blighted streets in Detroit; working with hospitals and health care systems in Harlem; praying over the streets of Sacramento, Charlotte, Brooklyn, Flint and every community that has seen trauma; changing traffic patterns, making your streets safer; and most importantly, standing as role models. And it all started with your commitment to start walking, your agreement to organize your friends and family and your belief in our broader mission. TMD: It's important to me that everyone in this room understands exactly how change-making works in GirlTrek. One well-trained organizer has the power to change the behavior of 100 of her friends. We know that is true, because the [1,000] women blowing up social media right now have already inspired over 100,000 women to walk. (Applause) But that is not nearly enough. And so our goal is to create critical mass. And in order to do that, we have an audacious plan to scale our intervention. A thousand organizers is not enough. GirlTrek is going to create the next Citizenship School. And in doing so, we will train 10,000 frontline health activists and deploy them into the highest-need communities in America. Because when we do, we will disrupt disease; we will create a new culture of health. And what we will do is create a support system for one million Black women to walk to save their own lives. (Applause) And our training is unparalleled. I just want you to imagine. It's like a revival, tent-like festival, not unlike the civil rights movement teach-ins. And we're going to go all across the country. It is the biggest announcement this week: Vanessa and I and a team of masterful teachers, all to culminate next year, on sacred ground, in Selma, Alabama, to create a new annual tradition that we are calling "Summer of Selma." VG: Summer of Selma will be an annual pilgrimage that will include a walk — 54 miles, the sacred route from Selma to Montgomery. It will also include rigorous training. Picture it, as women come to learn organizing and recruitment strategies, to study exercise science, to take nutrition classes, to learn storytelling, to become certified as outdoor trip leaders and community advocates. TMD: This is going to be unprecedented. It's going to be a moment in time like a cultural institution, and in fact, it's going to be the Woodstock of Black Girl Healing. (Laughter) (Applause) VG: And the need — it's more urgent than ever. We are losing our communities' greatest resource. Black women are dying in plain sight. And not only is no one talking about it, but we refuse to acknowledge that the source of this crisis is rooted in the same injustice that first propelled the civil rights movement. On December 30 of 2017, Erica Garner, the daughter of Eric Garner, a Black man who died on the streets of New York from a police choke hold, passed away of a heart attack. Erica was just 27 years old, the mother of two children. She would be one of 137 Black women that day — more than 50,000 in the last year — to die from a heart-related issue, many of their hearts broken from trauma. The impacts of stress on Black women who send their children and spouses out the door each day, unsure if they will come home alive; who work jobs where they are paid 63 cents to every dollar paid to white men; who live in communities with crumbling infrastructure with no access to fresh fruits or vegetables; with little to no walkable or green spaces — the impact of this inequality is killing Black women at higher and faster rates than any other group in the country. But that is about to change. It has to. TMD: So let me tell you a story. About three weeks ago — many of you may have watched — Vanessa and I and a team of 10 women walked 100 miles on the actual Underground Railroad. We did it in five days — five long and beautiful days. And the world watched. Three million people watched the live stream. Some of you in here, the influencers, shared the story. Urban Radio blasted it across the country. VG: Even the E! News channel interrupted a story about the Kardashians — which, if you asked us, is just a little bit of justice — (Laughter) to report that GirlTrek had made it safely on our hundred-mile journey. (Applause) TMD: People were rooting for us. And they were rooting for us because in this time of confusion and contention, this journey allowed us all to reflect on what it meant to be American. We saw America up close and personal as we walked. We walked through historic towns, through dense forest, past former plantations. And one day, we walked into a gas station that was also a café, and it was filled with men. They were wearing camo and had hunting supplies. And out front were all of their trucks, and one had a Confederate flag. And so we left the establishment. And as we were walking along this narrow strip of road, a few of the trucks reared by us so close, and out of their tailpipe was the specter of mob violence. It was unnerving. But then it happened. Right on the border of Maryland and Delaware, we saw a man standing by his truck. The tailgate was down. He had on a brown jacket. He was standing there awkwardly. The first two girls in our group, Jewel and Sandria, they walked by because he looked suspicious. (Laughter) But the bigger group, we stopped to give him a chance. And he walked up to us and he said, "Hi, my name is Jake Green. I heard you on Christian radio this morning, and God told me to bring you supplies." He brought us water, he brought us granola, and he brought us tissue. And we needed tissue because we had just walked through a nor'easter; it was 29 degrees, it was sleeting on our faces. Our sneakers and our socks were frozen and wet and frozen again. We needed that tissue more than he could have possibly understood. So on that day, in that moment, Jake Green renewed my faith in God for sure, but he renewed my faith in humanity. We have a choice to make. In America, we can fall further into the darkness of discord, or not. And I am here to tell you that the women of GirlTrek are walking through the streets with a light that cannot be extinguished. VG: They are also walking through the streets with a mission as clear and as powerful as the women who marched in Montgomery: that disease stops here, that trauma stops here. And with your support and in our ancestors' footsteps, these 10,000 newly trained activists will launch the largest health revolution this country has ever seen. And they will return to their communities and model the best of human flourishing. And we — we will all celebrate. Because like Jake Green understood, our fates are intertwined. Septima Clark once said, "The air has finally gotten to a place where we can breathe it together." And yet, the haunting last words of Eric Garner were: "I can't breathe." And his daughter Erica died at 27 years old, still seeking justice. So we — we're going to keep doing Septima's work until her words become reality, until Black women are no longer dying, until we can all breathe the air together. Thank you. (Applause) |
Let's launch a satellite to track a threatening greenhouse gas | {0: 'Fred Krupp is a leading voice on climate change, energy and sustainability, and a champion for harnessing the power of the marketplace to protect our environment.'} | TED2018 | We've got a big problem on our hands with global warming. A lot of you, a lot of people have been watching the floods, the droughts, the storms, the fires. When I leave this stage today, I don't want you to have hope. I want you to have certainty, real certainty that we can make a dent in this problem and live to see it. I want to give you a vision of what that would look like. This is the first time we've shared this publicly. You're the first audience to hear it. We are going to launch a rocket. And on that rocket will be a satellite. And that satellite will collect data about pollution that is warming the planet. We will put that data in the hands of people who can make simple fixes that will change the course of global warming in our lifetime. That's a lot to take in, maybe I should back up. First, let me introduce myself, I'm Fred, I've been an environmentalist since I was a kid, when I watched the fish and the frogs in my neighborhood pond die from a chemical spill. That bothered me. Later, a professor inspired me to think about environmentalism differently. How the best solutions come from answering people's aspirations for prosperity, things like being safe and healthy and thriving in this world. So I joined the Environmental Defense Fund to build those kind of solutions. And I've worked my whole career for a moment like this — the moment, when we can stop fighting headwinds and start to have the wind at our backs. Because of the power of information, information from technology that is coming down in price and going up in precision. You see, there's something about climate change that we didn't grasp just a decade ago. The world was so focused on carbon dioxide that we overlooked another important gas. We didn't appreciate methane. Methane pollution causes one quarter of the global warming that we're experiencing right now. Pound for pound, its immediate impact is far greater than carbon dioxide. Eighty four times greater over a 20-year period. One of the largest sources of methane pollution is the oil and gas industry. But that's not obvious, because methane is invisible. Let's take a look at this natural gas storage facility outside of Los Angeles. Can you see the methane? Neither can I. How about now? We shot this using an infrared camera, at the same spot, exposing one of the worst methane leaks in the history of the United States. That's a very different picture. It turns out that natural gas is displacing our dependence on coal, which emits far more carbon dioxide. But natural gas is mostly methane. So, as it's produced and processed and transported to homes and businesses across America, it escapes from wells and pipes and other equipment. It gets up into the sky and contributes to the disasters that we're now experiencing. That does not have to happen. But nobody had paid much attention to it until we launched a nationwide study to understand the problem. We used drones, planes, helicopters, even Google Street View cars. It turns out there's far more of this methane pollution than what the government is reporting. It also turns out that when we find where the gas is being vented and leaked, most of those sources can be fixed easily and inexpensively, saving the gas that would have otherwise been wasted. And finally, we learn that when you put information like that into people's hands, they act. Leading companies replaced valves and tightened loose-fitting pipes. Colorado became the first state in the nation to limit methane pollution; California followed suit, and the public joined in. Tweets started flying — #cutmethane. And everybody's paying more attention now. We're doing this because we can't wait for Washington, especially not now. In fact, we have to take what we've done so far and go higher, to the sky. The United Stated represents about 10 percent of this pollution. To find the rest, we have to go global. Remember that rocket I mentioned? It will launch a compact satellite, called MethaneSAT, to do what no one has been able to do until now: measure methane pollution from oil and gas facilities worldwide, with exacting precision. Its data stream will allow us to map that pollution, so that everyone can see it. Then it's all about turning data into action, just as we did in the United States. We've seen that when we present companies with data, many of them will cut the pollution. Citizens will be empowered to take action; governments will tighten the regulations. And because all of our data will be free and public, there will be transparency — we'll all be able to see how much progress is being made and where. Which brings me to our goal: to cut this methane pollution by 45 percent by 2025. (Applause) That will have the same near-term impact as shutting down 1,300 coal-fired power plants. That's one third of all the coal-fired power plants in the world. Nothing else can have this sort of near-term impact at such a low cost. The fact that a single satellite can help us put the brakes on global warming is truly remarkable. This is our chance to create change in our lifetimes, and we can do it now. Thanks to the generous giving of the Audacious Project, we are on a path toward liftoff. But my time is running short, and I promised you a vision of what a critical piece of the solution would look like. Can you see it? Can you see how this satellite leverages the best of science and data and technology? Can you see we're entering a whole new era of innovation that is supercharging progress? Can you see that it's in our hands? We've set an aggressive goal of three years till liftoff, and when that satellite is ready, we'll have a launch party. A literal launch party. So imagine a blue-sky day, crowds of people, television cameras, kids staring up toward the sky at a thing that will change their future. What an amazing day that will be. What a big opportunity we have. I can't wait. Thank you. (Applause) |
"Illusions for a better society" | {0: 'Aaron Duffy began employing visual tricks into his early directing work for the launch of Google Chrome, convincing viewers that there is another way to imagine what your browser can be, garnering numerous awards at Cannes Lions and induction into the MoMA\'s Archive for the Art and Technique of the American Commercial. He co-directed OKGO\'s "Writings on the Wall," which won an MTV Moon Man for its visual technique. Duffy is also the co-founder of SpecialGuest, a creative communications SWAT team for the smartest brands in the world.', 1: 'Lake Buckley’s fascination with perception began while completing her graduate degree at Rhode Island School of Design where she was a student and a professor. Her work has been featured by AIGA and the Sundance Film Festival. She has been interviewed by Youtube and Google about the art of storytelling with film in six seconds or less and enjoys creating a peculiar form of ordinary magic that moves between the mundane and dreams.', 2: 'Jack Foster loves chopping things up, from carrots to film. His first collaborators were his sisters and mom, and since then has worked with Facebook, MoMa PSI, The Fader, Soundcloud, Highsnobiety, & Rag & Bone. He once studied journalism in Chicago and sometimes likes to make documentaries on grandmas (including his own). You can find him wearing a few different hats, you can call him an art director or director or editor, or Jack.'} | TED2018 | Narrator: We have you here today specifically to try and learn a little bit about how the brain processes visual illusions. Wei Ji Ma: My name is Wei Ji Ma. I'm a professor of neuroscience and psychology at New York University. N: Great. WJM: Our research focuses mostly on perception and decision-making. What's out there in the world, the brain has no idea, but it's trying to do its best to figure it out. And even though that process is pretty sophisticated, sometimes it goes wrong. (Glass breaks) The first step is that light enters your eyes. Just from the table or from the coffee cup, you get an image in your eye, but the hard work only starts after that. Very often, the incoming signals are not complete and they're not perfect, and your brain has to make sense of them. There are cases where this inference process goes wrong, and that's when you have a visual illusion. N: Can visual illusions be proof that our brains make similar mistakes about other things, for example, in the areas of politics, economics or religion? WJM: I probably don't want to go that far, but there's a metaphor there. It's good to consider other points of view. It's good to consider your own certainty. Illusions are merely a window in this kind of processing that's going on all the time, where our brain builds beliefs of what might be happening in the world. N: What if we looked at a different illusion every day as a reminder that our brains can be wrong about the things we are most certain about? WJM: As a scientist, I wouldn't be able to tell you that that's going to work, but it sounds like an interesting idea. You should try it and let me know how it goes. (Music) Sorry, can I do that again? |
What's missing in the global debate over refugees | {0: 'Yasin Kakande is exposing the human rights abuses of migrant workers in the Middle East.'} | TED2018 | I am an immigrant from Uganda living in the United States while waiting for my asylum application to go through. Migrants do not enjoy much freedom of movement in our world today. This certainly applies to those who are desperate enough to navigate choppy and stormy seas in boats. These are the risks my cousins from West Africa and North Africa face while trying to cross over to Europe. Indeed, it is a rare but fortunate opportunity for a migrant to address a gathering like this. But this also signifies what often is missing in the global debate over refugees, migrants and immigrants, voices of the disenfranchised. Citizens of many host countries, even those that previously welcomed newcomers, are uneasy about the rising numbers of individuals coming into their countries. The immediate criticism is that the newcomers upend the stability of social welfare and employment in their countries. Uncertain and skeptical citizens look towards politicians who are competing against each other to see who can claim the prize of the loudest voice of populism and nationalism. It is a contest of who is the toughest on migrants, the most willing to impose travel bans and the most eager to propose projects in building walls. All these restrictions simply address symptoms of the problem, not the causes. Why are they coming? Migrants can share perspectives, if only politicians would be willing to listen. In Dubai, I chronicled injustices and inequalities inflicted regularly on the migrant labor force. As a result, pressures from the governments of the respective countries led to me being forced out of my career as a journalist in the Middle East. I was deported to Uganda, where economic deprivation puts everyone at the risk of starvation. I fled Uganda to come to the United States in the hope of sustaining a voice for my brothers and sisters who experience a more serious plight as migrants. My father told me he was not happy about me writing a book that risked deportation and unemployment. He had been diabetic for many years when I still worked in Dubai, and my salary was always sufficient to pay for his treatments. After I was expelled, I could not afford to sustain his treatment, and even in the last days of his life, I could not afford to take him to a hospital. As I carried his body in my hands to lay it in the ground in June of last year, I realized I had paid a profound price for amplifying my voice. The act of speaking up against injustices that are multilayered is never easy, because the problems require more than just rhetoric. So long as gold mines, oilfields and large farms in Africa continue to be owned by foreign investors and those vital resources are shipped to the West, the stream of African migrants will flow continuously. There are no restrictions that could ever be so rigorous to stop the wave of migration that has determined our human history. Before border controls can be tightened and new visa restrictions imposed, countries that have long received migrants should engage in a more open discussion. That is the only practical start for reconciling, finally, a legacy of exploitation, slavery, colonialism and imperialism, so that together, we can move forward in creating a more just global economy in the 21st century — one that benefits all. |
A printable, flexible, organic solar cell | {0: 'Hannah Bürckstümmer has a vision for sustainable buildings and how organic solar cells can make it real.'} | TED@Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany | You may have noticed that I'm wearing two different shoes. It probably looks funny — it definitely feels funny — but I wanted to make a point. Let's say my left shoe corresponds to a sustainable footprint, meaning we humans consume less natural resources than our planet can regenerate, and emit less carbon dioxide than our forests and oceans can reabsorb. That's a stable and healthy condition. Today's situation is more like my other shoe. It's way oversized. At the second of August in 2017, we had already consumed all resources our planet can regenerate this year. This is like spending all your money until the 18th of a month and then needing a credit from the bank for the rest of the time. For sure, you can do this for some months in a row, but if you don't change your behavior, sooner or later, you will run into big problems. We all know the devastating effects of this excessive exploitation: global warming, rising of the sea levels, melting of the glaciers and polar ice, increasingly extreme climate patterns and more. The enormity of this problem really frustrates me. What frustrates me even more is that there are solutions to this, but we keep doing things like we always did. Today I want to share with you how a new solar technology can contribute to a sustainable future of buildings. Buildings consume about 40 percent of our total energy demand, so tackling this consumption would significantly reduce our climate emissions. A building designed along sustainable principles can produce all the power it needs by itself. To achieve this, you first have to reduce the consumption as much as possible, by using well-insulated walls or windows, for instance. These technologies are commercially available. Then you need energy for warm water and heating. You can get this in a renewable way from the sun through solar-thermal installations or from the ground and air, with heat pumps. All of these technologies are available. Then you are left with the need for electricity. In principle, there are several ways to get renewable electricity, but how many buildings do you know which have a windmill on the roof or a water power plant in the garden? Probably not so many, because usually, it doesn't make sense. But the sun provides abundant energy to our roofs and facades. The potential to harvest this energy at our buildings' surfaces is enormous. Let's take Europe as an example. If you would utilize all areas which have a nice orientation to the sun and they're not overly shaded, the power generated by photovoltaics would correspond to about 30 percent of our total energy demand. But today's photovoltaics have some issues. They do offer a good cost-performance ratio, but they aren't really flexible in terms of their design, and this makes aesthetics a challenge. People often imagine pictures like this when thinking about solar cells on buildings. This may work for solar farms, but when you think of buildings, of streets, of architecture, aesthetics does matter. This is the reason why we don't see many solar cells on buildings today. They just don't match. Our team is working on a totally different solar-cell technology, which is called organic photovoltaics or OPV. The term organic describes that the material used for light absorption and charge transport are mainly based on the element carbon, and not on metals. We utilize the mixture of a polymer which is set up by different repeating units, like the pearls in a pearl chain, and a small molecule which has the shape of a football and is called fullerene. These two compounds are mixed and dissolved to become an ink. And like ink, they can be printed with simple printing techniques like slot-die coating in a continuous roll-to-roll process on flexible substrates. The resulting thin layer is the active layer, absorbing the energy of the sun. This active layer is extremely effective. You only need a layer thickness of 0.2 micrometers to absorb the energy of the sun. This is 100 times thinner than a human hair. To give you another example, take one kilogram of the basic polymer and use it to formulate the active ink. With this amount of ink, you can print a solar cell the size of a complete football field. So OPV is extremely material efficient, which I think is a crucial thing when talking about sustainability. After the printing process, you can have a solar module which could look like this ... It looks a bit like a plastic foil and actually has many of its features. It's lightweight ... it's bendable ... and it's semi-transparent. But it can harvest the energy of the sun outdoors and also of this indoor light, as you can see with this small, illuminated LED. You can use it in its plastic form and take advantage of its low weight and its bendability. The first is important when thinking about buildings in warmer regions. Here, the roofs are not designed to bear additionally heavy loads. They aren't designed for snow in winter, for instance, so heavy silicon solar cells cannot be used for light harvesting, but these lightweight solar foils are very well suited. The bendability is important if you want to combine the solar cell with membrane architecture. Imagine the sails of the Sydney Opera as power plants. Alternatively, you can combine the solar foils with conventional construction materials like glass. Many glass facade elements contain a foil anyway, to create laminated safety glass. It's not a big deal to add a second foil in the production process, but then the facade element contains the solar cell and can produce electricity. Besides looking nice, these integrated solar cells come along with two more important benefits. Do you remember the solar cell attached to a roof I showed before? In this case, we install the roof first, and as a second layer, the solar cell. This is adding on the installation costs. In the case of integrated solar cells, at the site of construction, only one element is installed, being at the same time the envelope of the building and the solar cell. Besides saving on the installation costs, this also saves resources, because the two functions are combined into one element. Earlier, I've talked about optics. I really like this solar panel — maybe you have different taste or different design needs ... No problem. With the printing process, the solar cell can change its shape and design very easily. This will give the flexibility to architects, to planners and building owners, to integrate this electricity-producing technology as they wish. I want to stress that this is not just happening in the labs. It will take several more years to get to mass adoption, but we are at the edge of commercialization, meaning there are several companies out there with production lines. They are scaling up their capacities, and so are we, with the inks. (Shoe drops) This smaller footprint is much more comfortable. (Laughter) It is the right size, the right scale. We have to come back to the right scale when it comes to energy consumption. And making buildings carbon-neutral is an important part here. In Europe, we have the goal to decarbonize our building stock [by] 2050. I hope organic photovoltaics will be a big part of this. Here are a couple of examples. This is the first commercial installation of fully printed organic solar cells. "Commercial" means that the solar cells were printed on industrial equipment. The so-called "solar trees" were part of the German pavilion at the World Expo in Milan in 2015. They provided shading during the day and electricity for the lighting in the evening. You may wonder why this hexagonal shape was chosen for the solar cells. Easy answer: the architects wanted to have a specific shading pattern on the floor and asked for it, and then it was printed as requested. Being far from a real product, this free-form installation hooked the imagination of the visiting architects much more than we expected. This other application is closer to the projects and applications we are targeting. In an office building in São Paulo, Brazil, semitransparent OPV panels are integrated into the glass facade, serving different needs. First, they provided shading for the meeting rooms behind. Second, the logo of the company is displayed in an innovative way. And of course, electricity is produced, reducing the energy footprint of the building. This is pointing towards a future where buildings are no longer energy consumers, but energy providers. I want to see solar cells seamlessly integrated into our building shells to be both resource-efficient and a pleasure to look at. For roofs, silicon solar cells will often continue to be a good solution. But to exploit the potential of all facades and other areas, such as semitransparent areas, curved surfaces and shadings, I believe organic photovoltaics can offer a significant contribution, and they can be made in any form architects and planners will want them to. Thank you. (Applause) |
The harm reduction model of drug addiction treatment | {0: 'Mark Tyndall has dedicated his career to studying HIV, poverty and drug use in multiple places around the world, starting with Nairobi, and now in Vancouver.'} | TEDMED 2017 | I remember the first time that I saw people injecting drugs. I had just arrived in Vancouver to lead a research project in HIV prevention in the infamous Downtown East Side. It was in the lobby of the Portland Hotel, a supportive housing project that gave rooms to the most marginalized people in the city, the so-called "difficult to house." I'll never forget the young woman standing on the stairs repeatedly jabbing herself with a needle, and screaming, "I can't find a vein," as blood splattered on the wall. In response to the desperate state of affairs, the drug use, the poverty, the violence, the soaring rates of HIV, Vancouver declared a public health emergency in 1997. This opened the door to expanding harm reduction services, distributing more needles, increasing access to methadone, and, finally, opening a supervised injection site. Things that make injecting drugs less hazardous. But today, 20 years later, harm reduction is still viewed as some sort of radical concept. In some places, it's still illegal to carry a clean needle. Drug users are far more likely to be arrested than to be offered methadone therapy. Recent proposals for supervised injection sites in cities like Seattle, Baltimore and New York have been met with stiff opposition: opposition that goes against everything we know about addiction. Why is that? Why are we still stuck on the idea that the only option is to stop using — that any drug use will not be tolerated? Why do we ignore countless personal stories and overwhelming scientific evidence that harm reduction works? Critics say that harm reduction doesn't stop people from using illegal drugs. Well, actually, that is the whole point. After every criminal and societal sanction that we can come up with, people still use drugs, and far too many die. Critics also say that we are giving up on people by not focusing our attention on treatment and recovery. In fact, it is just the opposite. We are not giving up on people. We know that if recovery is ever going to happen we must keep people alive. Offering someone a clean needle or a safe place to inject is the first step to treatment and recovery. Critics also claim that harm reduction gives the wrong message to our children about drug users. The last time I looked, these drug users are our children. The message of harm reduction is that while drugs can hurt you, we still must reach out to people who are addicted. A needle exchange is not an advertisement for drug use. Neither is a methadone clinic or a supervised injection site. What you see there are people sick and hurting, hardly an endorsement for drug use. Let's take supervised injection sites, for example. Probably the most misunderstood health intervention ever. All we are saying is that allowing people to inject in a clean, dry space with fresh needles, surrounded by people who care is a lot better than injecting in a dingy alley, sharing contaminated needles and hiding out from police. It's better for everybody. The first supervised injection site in Vancouver was at 327 Carol Street, a narrow room with a concrete floor, a few chairs and a box of clean needles. The police would often lock it down, but somehow it always mysteriously reopened, often with the aid of a crowbar. I would go down there some evenings to provide medical care for people who were injecting drugs. I was always struck with the commitment and compassion of the people who operated and used the site. No judgment, no hassles, no fear, lots of profound conversation. I learned that despite unimaginable trauma, physical pain and mental illness, that everyone there thought that things would get better. Most were convinced that, someday, they'd stop using drugs altogether. That room was the forerunner to North America's first government-sanctioned supervised injection site, called INSITE. It opened in September of 2003 as a three-year research project. The conservative government was intent on closing it down at the end of the study. After eight years, the battle to close INSITE went all the way up to Canada's Supreme Court. It pitted the government of Canada against two people with a long history of drug use who knew the benefits of INSITE firsthand: Dean Wilson and Shelley Tomic. The court ruled in favor of keeping INSITE open by nine to zero. The justices were scathing in their response to the government's case. And I quote: "The effect of denying the services of INSITE to the population that it serves and the correlative increase in the risk of death and disease to injection drug users is grossly disproportionate to any benefit that Canada might derive from presenting a uniform stance on the possession of narcotics." This was a hopeful moment for harm reduction. Yet, despite this strong message from the Supreme Court, it was, until very recently, impossible to open up any new sites in Canada. There was one interesting thing that happened in December of 2016, when due to the overdose crisis, the government of British Columbia allowed the opening of overdose prevention sites. Essentially ignoring the federal approval process, community groups opened up about 22 of these de facto illegal supervised injection sites across the province. Virtually overnight, thousands of people could use drugs under supervision. Hundreds of overdoses were reversed by Naloxone, and nobody died. In fact, this is what's happened at INSITE over the last 14 years: 75,000 different individuals have injected illegal drugs more than three and a half million times, and not one person has died. Nobody has ever died at INSITE. So there you have it. We have scientific evidence and successes from needle exchanges methadone and supervised injection sites. These are common-sense, compassionate approaches to drug use that improve health, bring connection and greatly reduce suffering and death. So why haven't harm reduction programs taken off? Why do we still think that drug use is law enforcement issue? Our disdain for drugs and drug users goes very deep. We are bombarded with images and media stories about the horrible impacts of drugs. We have stigmatized entire communities. We applaud military-inspired operations that bring down drug dealers. And we appear unfazed by building more jails to incarcerate people whose only crime is using drugs. Virtually millions of people are caught up in a hopeless cycle of incarceration, violence and poverty that has been created by our drug laws and not the drugs themselves. How do I explain to people that drug users deserve care and support and the freedom to live their lives when all we see are images of guns and handcuffs and jail cells? Let's be clear: criminalization is just a way to institutionalize stigma. Making drugs illegal does nothing to stop people from using them. Our paralysis to see things differently is also based on an entirely false narrative about drug use. We have been led to believe that drug users are irresponsible people who just want to get high, and then through their own personal failings spiral down into a life of crime and poverty, losing their jobs, their families and, ultimately, their lives. In reality, most drug users have a story, whether it's childhood trauma, sexual abuse, mental illness or a personal tragedy. The drugs are used to numb the pain. We must understand that as we approach people with so much trauma. At its core, our drug policies are really a social justice issue. While the media may focus on overdose deaths like Prince and Michael Jackson, the majority of the suffering happens to people who are living on the margins, the poor and the dispossessed. They don't vote; they are often alone. They are society's disposable people. Even within health care, drug use is highly stigmatized. People using drugs avoid the health care system. They know that once engaged in clinical care or admitted to hospital, they will be treated poorly. And their supply line, be it heroin, cocaine or crystal meth will be interrupted. On top of that, they will be asked a barrage of questions that only serve to expose their losses and shame. "What drugs do you use?" "How long have you been living on the street?" "Where are your children?" "When were you last in jail?" Essentially: "Why the hell don't you stop using drugs?" In fact, our entire medical approach to drug use is upside down. For some reason, we have decided that abstinence is the best way to treat this. If you're lucky enough, you may get into a detox program. If you live in a community with Suboxone or methadone, you may get on a substitution program. Hardly ever would we offer people what they desperately need to survive: a safe prescription for opioids. Starting with abstinence is like asking a new diabetic to quit sugar or a severe asthmatic to start running marathons or a depressed person to just be happy. For any other medical condition, we would never start with the most extreme option. What makes us think that strategy would work for something as complex as addiction? While unintentional overdoses are not new, the scale of the current crisis is unprecedented. The Center for Disease Control estimated that 64,000 Americans died of a drug overdose in 2016, far exceeding car crashes or homicides. Drug-related mortality is now the leading cause of death among men and women between 20 and 50 years old in North America Think about that. How did we get to this point, and why now? There is a kind of perfect storm around opioids. Drugs like Oxycontin, Percocet and Dilaudid have been liberally distributed for decades for all kinds of pain. It is estimated that two million Americans are daily opioid users, and over 60 million people received at least one prescription for opioids last year. This massive dump of prescription drugs into communities has provided a steady source for people wanting to self-medicate. In response to this prescription epidemic, people have been cut off, and this has greatly reduced the street supply The unintended but predictable consequence is an overdose epidemic. Many people who were reliant on a steady supply of prescription drugs turned to heroin. And now the illegal drug market has tragically switched to synthetic drugs, mainly fentanyl. These new drugs are cheap, potent and extremely hard to dose. People are literally being poisoned. Can you imagine if this was any other kind of poisoning epidemic? What if thousands of people started dying from poisoned meat or baby formula or coffee? We would be treating this as a true emergency. We would immediately be supplying safer alternatives. There would be changes in legislation, and we would be supporting the victims and their families. But for the drug overdose epidemic, we have done none of that. We continue to demonize the drugs and the people who use them and blindly pour even more resources into law enforcement. So where should we go from here? First, we should fully embrace, fund and scale up harm reduction programs across North America. I know that in places like Vancouver, harm reduction has been a lifeline to care and treatment. I know that the number of overdose deaths would be far higher without harm reduction. And I personally know hundreds of people who are alive today because of harm reduction. But harm reduction is just the start. If we truly want to make an impact on this drug crisis, we need to have a serious conversation about prohibition and criminal punishment. We need to recognize that drug use is first and foremost a public health issue and turn to comprehensive social and health solutions. We already have a model for how this can work. In 2001, Portugal was having its own drug crisis. Lots of people using drugs, high crime rates and an overdose epidemic. They defied global conventions and decriminalized all drug possession. Money that was spent on drug enforcement was redirected to health and rehabilitation programs. The results are in. Overall drug use is down dramatically. Overdoses are uncommon. Many more people are in treatment. And people have been given their lives back. We have come so far down the road of prohibition, punishment and prejudice that we have become indifferent to the suffering that we have inflicted on the most vulnerable people in our society. This year even more people will get caught up in the illegal drug trade. Thousands of children will learn that their mother or father has been sent to jail for using drugs. And far too many parents will be notified that their son or daughter has died of a drug overdose. It doesn't have to be this way. Thank you. (Applause) |
The "dead zone" of the Gulf of Mexico | {0: 'Nancy Rabalais has studied coastal marine ecosystems for more than 40 years now and loves to share that knowledge.'} | TEDWomen 2017 | Good evening, welcome to New Orleans. I don't know if you knew this, but you are sitting within 15 minutes of one of the largest rivers in the world: the Mississippi river. Old Man River, Big Muddy. And it goes as far north as the state of Minnesota, as far east as the state of New York, as far west as Montana. And 100 miles from here, river miles, it empties its fresh water and sediments into the Gulf of Mexico. That's the end of Geography 101. (Laughter) Now we're going to go to what is in that water. Besides the sediment, there are dissolved molecules, nitrogen and phosphorus. And those, through a biological process, lead to the formation of areas called dead zones. Now, dead zone is a quite ominous word if you're a fish or a crab. (Laughter) Even a little worm in the sediments. Which means that there's not enough oxygen for those animals to survive. So, how does this happen? The nitrogen and the phosphorus stimulate the growth of microscopic plants called phytoplankton. And small animals called zooplankton eat the phytoplankton, small fish eat the zooplankton, large fish eat the small fish and it goes on up into the food web. The problem is that there's just too much nitrogen and phosphorus right now, too much phytoplankton falling to the bottom and decomposed by bacteria that use up the oxygen. That's the biology. Now, you can't see it from the surface of the water, you can't see it in satellite images, so how do we know it's there? Well, a trawler can tell you, when she puts her net over the side and drags for 20 minutes and comes up empty, that she knows she's in the dead zone. And she has to go somewhere else. But where else do you go if this area is 8,000 square miles big? About the size of the state of New Jersey. Well, you either make a decision to go further, without much economic return, or go back to the dock. As a scientist, I have access to high-tech equipment that we can put over the side of the research vessel, and it measures oxygen and many more things. We start at the Mississippi River, we crisscross the Gulf of Mexico all the way to Texas, and even I sneak into Texas every now and then and test their waters. And you can tell by the bottom oxygen — you can draw a map of everything that's less than two, which is the magic number for when the fish start to leave the area. I also dive in this dead zone. We have oxygen meters that we have to deploy offshore that tell us continuous measurements of low oxygen or high oxygen. And when you get into the water, there's a lot of fish. Tons of fish, all kinds of fish, including my buddy here, the barracuda that I saw one day. Everybody else swam this way and I went this way with my camera. (Laughter) And then, down at 30 feet you start to see fewer fish. And then you get to the bottom. And you don't see any fish. There's no life on the platform, there's no life swimming around. And you know you're in the dead zone. So, what's the connection between the middle of the United States and the Gulf of Mexico? Well, most of the watershed is farmland. And in particular, corn-soybean rotation. The nitrogen that is put in fertilizers and the phosphorus goes on the land and drains off into the Mississippi River and ends up in the Gulf of Mexico. There's three times more nitrogen in the water in the Mississippi now, than there was in the 1950s. Three times. And phosphorus has doubled. And what that means is more phytoplankton and more sinking sails and lower oxygen. This is not a natural feature of the Gulf; it's been caused by human activities. The landscape is not what it used to be. It used to be prairies and forests and prairie potholes and duck areas and all kinds of stuff. But not anymore — it's row crops. And there are ways that we can address this type of agriculture by using less fertilizer, maybe precision fertilizing. And trying some sustainable agriculture such as perennial wheatgrass, which has much longer roots than the six inches of a corn plant, that can keep the nitrogen on the soil and keep the soil from running off. And how do we convince our neighbors to the north, maybe 1,000 miles away or more, that their activities are causing problems with water quality in the Gulf of Mexico? First of all, we can take them to their own backyard. If you want to go swimming in Wisconsin in the summer in your favorite watering hole, you might find something like this which looks like spilled green paint and smells like it, growing on the surface of the water. This is a toxic blue-green algal bloom and it is not good for you. Similarly, in Lake Erie, couple of summers ago there was hundreds of miles of this blue-green algae and the city of Toledo, Ohio, couldn't use it for their drinking water for several days on end. And if you watch the news, you know that lots of communities are having trouble with drinking water. I'm a scientist. I don't know if you could tell that. (Laughter) And I do solid science, I publish my results, my colleagues read them, I get citations of my work. But I truly believe that, as a scientist, using mostly federal funds to do the research, I owe it to the public, to agency heads and congressional people to share my knowledge with them so they can use it, hopefully to make better decisions about our environmental policy. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) One of the ways that I was able to do this is I brought in the media. And Joby Warrick from the "Washington Post" put this picture in an article on the front page, Sunday morning, two inches above the fold. That's a big deal. And Senator John Breaux, from Louisiana, said, "Oh my gosh, that's what they think the Gulf of Mexico looks like?" And I said, "Well, you know, there's the proof." And we've go to do something about it. At the same time, Senator Olympia Snowe from Maine was having trouble with harmful algal blooms in the Gulf of Maine. They joined forces — it was bipartisan — (Laughter) (Applause) And invited me to give congressional testimony, and I said, "Oh, all I've done is chase crabs around south Texas, I don't know how to do that." (Laughter) But I did it. (Cheers) And eventually, the bill passed. And it was called — yeah, yay! It was called The Harmful Algal Bloom and Hypoxia Research and Control Act of 1998. (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. Which is why we call it the Snowe-Breaux Bill. (Laughter) The other thing is that we had a conference in 2001 that was put on by the National Academy of Sciences that looked at fertilizers, nitrogen and poor water quality. Our plenary speaker was the former governor of the state of New Jersey. And she ... There was no thinking she wasn't serious when she peered at the audience, and I thought, "Surely she's looking at me." "You know, I'm really tired of this thing being called New Jersey. Pick another state, any state, I just don't want to hear it anymore." But she was able to move the action plan across President George H.W. Bush's desk so that we had environmental goals and that we were working to solve them. The Midwest does not feed the world. It feeds a lot of chickens, hogs, cattle and it generates ethanol to put into our gasoline, which is regulated by federal policy. We can do better than this. We need to make decisions that make us less consumptive and reduce our reliance on nitrogen. It's like a carbon footprint. But you can reduce your nitrogen footprint. I do it by not eating much meat — I still like a little every now and then — not using corn oil, driving a car that I can put nonethanol gas in and get better gas mileage. Just things like that that can make a difference. So I'm challenging, not just you, but I challenge a lot of people, especially in the Midwest — think about how you're treating your land and how you can make a difference. So my steps are very small steps. To change the type of agriculture in the US is going to be many big steps. And it's going to take political and social will for that to happen. But we can do it. I strongly believe we can translate the science, bridge it to policy and make a difference in our environment. We all want a clean environment. And we can work together to do this so that we no longer have these dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why it's worth listening to people you disagree with | {0: 'As the head of a student group called Uncomfortable Learning, Zachary R. Wood made a point of engaging in conversation with people he disagreed with.'} | TED2018 | In 1994, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein coauthored "The Bell Curve," an extremely controversial book which claims that on average, some races are smarter and more likely to succeed than others. Murray and Herrnstein also suggest that a lack of critical intelligence explains the prominence of violent crime in poor African-American communities. But Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein are not the only people who think this. In 2012, a writer, journalist and political commentator named John Derbyshire wrote an article that was supposed to be a non-black version of the talk that many black parents feel they have to give their kids today: advice on how to stay safe. In it, he offered suggestions such as: "Do not attend events likely to draw a lot of blacks," "Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods" and "Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in distress." And yet, in 2016, I invited John Derbyshire as well as Charles Murray to speak at my school, knowing full well that I would be giving them a platform and attention for ideas that I despised and rejected. But this is just a further evolution of a journey of uncomfortable learning throughout my life. When I was 10 years old, my mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia, a mental illness characterized by mood swings and paranoid delusions. Throughout my life, my mother's rage would turn our small house into a minefield. Yet, though I feared her rage on a daily basis, I also learned so much from her. Our relationship was complicated and challenging, and at the age of 14, it was decided that I needed to live apart from her. But over the years, I've come to appreciate some of the important lessons my mother taught me about life. She was the first person who spoke to me about learning from the other side. And she, like me, was born and raised in a family of committed liberal democrats. Yet, she encouraged me to see the world and the issues our world faces as complex, controversial and ever-changing. One day, I came across the phrase "affirmative action" in a book I was reading. And when I asked her what the term meant, she spent what felt like an hour giving me a thorough and thoughtful explanation that would make sense to a small child. She even made the topic sound at least as interesting as any of my professors have. She explained the many reasons why people of various political views challenge and support affirmative action, stressing that, while she strongly supported it herself, it was important for me to view the issue as a controversial one with a long history, a questionable future and a host of complicating factors. While affirmative action can increase the presence of minorities at elite educational institutions, she felt that it could also disadvantage hardworking people of different races from more affluent backgrounds. My mom wanted me to understand that I should never just write off opinions that I disagreed with or disliked, because there was always something to learn from the perspectives of others, even when doing so might be difficult. But life at home with my mom was not the only aspect of my journey that has been formative and uncomfortable. In fourth grade, she decided that I should attend a private school in order to receive the best education possible. As a black student attending predominantly white private schools, I've encountered attitudes and behaviors that reflected racial stereotypes. Several of my friends' parents assumed within minutes of meeting me that my best skill was playing basketball. And it really upset me to think that my race made it harder for them to see me as a student who loved reading, writing and speaking. Experiences like this motivated me to work tirelessly to disprove what I knew people had assumed. My mother even said that, in order to put my best foot forward, I had to be patient, alert and excruciatingly well-mannered. To prove that I belonged, I had to show poise and confidence, the ability to speak well and listen closely. Only then would my peers see that I deserved to be there as much as they did. Despite this racial stereotyping and the discomfort I often felt, the learning I gained from other aspects of being at an elite private school were incredibly valuable. I was encouraged by my teachers to explore my curiosity, to challenge myself in new ways and to deepen my understanding of subjects that fascinated me the most. And going to college was the next step. I was excited to take my intellectual drive and interest in the world of ideas to the next level. I was eager to engage in lively debate with peers and professors and with outside speakers; to listen, to learn and gain a deeper understanding of myself and of others. While I was fortunate to meet peers and professors who were interested in doing the same thing, my desire to engage with difficult ideas was also met with resistance. To prepare myself to engage with controversy in the real world, I joined a group that brought controversial speakers to campus. But many people fiercely opposed this group, and I received significant pushback from students, faculty and my administration. For many, it was difficult to see how bringing controversial speakers to campus could be valuable, when they caused harm. And it was disappointing to me facing personal attacks, having my administration cancel speakers and hearing my intentions distorted by those around me. My work also hurt the feelings of many, and I understood that. Of course, no one likes being offended, and I certainly don't like hearing controversial speakers argue that feminism has become a war against men or that blacks have lower IQs than whites. I also understand that some people have experienced traumatic experiences in their lives. And for some, listening to offensive views can be like reliving the very traumas that they've worked so hard to overcome. Many argue that by giving these people a platform, you're doing more harm than good, and I'm reminded of this every time I listen to these points of view and feel my stomach turn. Yet, tuning out opposing viewpoints doesn't make them go away, because millions of people agree with them. In order to understand the potential of society to progress forward, we need to understand the counterforces. By engaging with controversial and offensive ideas, I believe that we can find common ground, if not with the speakers themselves, then with the audiences they may attract or indoctrinate. Through engaging, I believe that we may reach a better understanding, a deeper understanding, of our own beliefs and preserve the ability to solve problems, which we can't do if we don't talk to each other and make an effort to be good listeners. But soon after I announced that John Derbyshire would be speaking on campus, student backlash erupted on social media. The tide of resistance, in fact, was so intense, that my college president rescinded the invitation. I was deeply disappointed by this because, as I saw it, there would be nothing that any of my peers or I could do to silence someone who agreed with him in the office environment of our future employers. I look out at what's happening on college campuses, and I see the anger. And I get it. But what I wish I could tell people is that it's worth the discomfort, it's worth listening, and that we're stronger, not weaker, because of it. When I think about my experiences with uncomfortable learning, and I reflect upon them, I've found that it's been very difficult to change the values of the intellectual community that I've been a part of. But I do feel a sense of hope when I think about the individual interactions that I've been able to have with students who both support the work that I'm doing and who feel challenged by it and who do not support it. What I've found is that, while it can be difficult to change the values of a community, we can gain a lot from individual interactions. While I didn't get to engage with John Derbyshire due to my president's disinvitation, I was able to have dinner with Charles Murray before his talk. I knew the conversation would be difficult. And I didn't expect it to be pleasant. But it was cordial, and I did gain a deeper understanding of his arguments. I found that he, like me, believed in creating a more just society. The thing is, his understanding of what justice entailed was very different from my own. The way in which he wanted to understand the issue, the way in which he wanted to approach the issue of inequality also differed from my own. And I found that his understanding of issues like welfare and affirmative action was tied and deeply rooted in his understanding of various libertarian and conservative beliefs, what diminishes and increases their presence in our society. While he expressed his viewpoints eloquently, I remained thoroughly unconvinced. But I did walk away with a deeper understanding. It's my belief that to achieve progress in the face of adversity, we need a genuine commitment to gaining a deeper understanding of humanity. I'd like to see a world with more leaders who are familiar with the depths of the views of those they deeply disagree with, so that they can understand the nuances of everyone they're representing. I see this as an ongoing process involving constant learning, and I'm confident that I'll be able to add value down the line if I continue building empathy and understanding through engaging with unfamiliar perspectives. Thank you. (Applause) |
A Parkland teacher's homework for us all | {0: 'Diane Wolk-Rogers has been a Florida public school teacher for more than three decades.'} | TED2018 | I teach history at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. On February 14, 2018, my school experienced one of the worst mass school shootings in American history. People want to know what we saw, what I felt. I don't remember everything, but I do remember I went into crisis mode, mother mode. There was no emotion. I lined up the kids, I held up a sign so they could follow me through the hall, just like a fire drill. I heard shots from one direction. Luckily, we were already moving in the opposite direction. We made it outside. We made it to safety. I called my mother. "I'm OK." I called my husband. "I'm OK." Then my daughter called, my voice cracked, and I knew I had to pull myself together. I sat alone in my thoughts, worried about my colleagues and students. We sat there, only understanding that somehow, Valentine's Day — We sat there, only understanding that somehow, Valentine's Day had ended up with our babies dead, and we didn't know what to do next. It's been two months, and every day I still hear the echoes of the "pop, pop" sound of the gunfire. I remember the fearful faces of my students when we knew it wasn't a drill. Still, there's no constant emotion, except for flashes of pain, grief and anger triggered by the news, or an insensitive comment, or just silence. Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School lost 17 precious lives on that horrible day. After, students asked us, the adults the hardest question: How can we stop the senseless violence? This was the most difficult question I've been asked. But it was not the first time I've been humbled by a student's question. I've been teaching in the public schools for 33 years, so I know you have to admit what you don't know before you can share what you do know. In fact, there's a method to being an engaged student, teacher, citizen. First, listen closely to the person asking you a question. Second, admit your vulnerability. Admit what you don't know. Third, do your homework. Fourth, humbly share your knowledge. I know all about this process. My students ask really thoughtful questions all the time. They're eager to learn, and sometimes they're eager to prove their smarts. And believe me, they know when I have no idea of the answer, so in those instances, I say to them, "That's a great question. Let me research that and get back to you." So when my students asked, "How do we stop this senseless violence?" I listened, and then I admitted, "I don't know." And like I always do when I don't know the answer to one of my questions, I began doing my homework. And as a history teacher, I knew I needed to start with the Second Amendment and the NRA. In case it's been a while since you've been sitting in a history class, here is what the Second Amendment actually says: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Meaning, the federal government could not infringe on the rights of citizens to participate in well-regulated militias. The Second Amendment was ratified 226 years ago. It was written in a time before the federal government's armed forces were among the most powerful in the world and when state militias were viewed as necessary to protect the states. Fast-forward 80 years, to 1871. The American Civil War had ended a few years prior, but a couple of Union officers had witnessed some pretty shoddy marksmanship on the battlefield. So in an attempt to prepare their men for any future conflicts, they founded the National Rifle Association to promote rifle practice. In short, the Second Amendment was written to ensure that our newly formed and fragile country had access to organized state militias. And the NRA's original mission was to ensure future soldiers had good aim. Someone could teach an entire course on how the next 150 years influenced the gun regulation conversations we're having in the United States and our interpretation of the Second Amendment. Almost every pivotal moment in our nation's history in one way or another influenced how we as a people manufacture, debate, regulate and feel about guns. A lot of change has occurred. As a matter of fact, it wasn't until 2008 that the Supreme Court ruled for the first time the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home. Within the home. This change over time is striking to me, because it reminds us that the interpretation of the Second Amendment and cultural attitudes about guns have changed over time. Which gives me hope they could change again. (Applause) It's an incredibly complex and dynamic history lesson, but it's not the lesson I'm here to teach today, because we don't have time. I'm not talking about time, the time that I have here to stand and speak. I'm talking about the fact we don't have time to lose. According to the CDC, over the last five years, on average, each day 96 people are killed by guns in the United States, and if we don't figure out how to answer my students' question soon, one of us could be next. So, if the question is, how do we stop this senseless violence, the best way I can think to answer is to look at multiple choice. You remember multiple-choice questions in high school, don't you? Let's start. Choice A: this will end when we hold gun manufacturers responsible for the deadliness of their products. It might surprise you to learn that we've actually thought about this before. Between 1998 and 2000, 30 counties and cities sued gun manufacturers, saying they should make their products safer and do a better job of tracking where their products are sold. In response, manufacturers argued that they had no direct liability for how their products were used. They said the stores who sold the guns and the owners who bought them were responsible should anything bad happen. In response to this and many other lawsuits, the NRA lobbied for the passage of the PLCAA, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. The PLCAA passed with bipartisan support in 2005 and entrusts gun manufacturers to design guns safely, stores to sell those guns responsibly and someone to own and use the gun responsibly. And so when 17 students and faculty die at my school, no one in this chain will assume responsibility. Let's take a look at another option, Choice B: this will end when we hold ourselves accountable and regulate the estimated 300 million guns available in America. Yes, voting is one of the best ways to take personal responsibility for gun violence. Making sure that our lawmakers are willing to pass commonsense gun reform is one of the most effective ways to get those 300 million guns under control. And also, gun owners can take personal initiative. If you own a gun, ask yourself: Do I have an extra gun I don't need? Could it fall into the wrong hands? Have I attended the latest training? Perhaps as a gun owner, you should also ask whether you have been taking care of your mental health? When it comes to gun violence, the mental health argument falls flat if we don't acknowledge our own personal vulnerabilities to mental illness. One in six Americans will struggle with mental illness. If we own a gun, we should be rigorously engaged in the upkeep of our emotional well-being so we don't pull a trigger in times of illness. Otherwise, we should seriously ask ourselves whether we really have the time and attention to own a gun. Perhaps for some of us it's time to lay down our arms. Then we have Choice C: this will end when we do a better job of taking care of each other. Many social issues affect why people buy and use guns. Sixty-two percent of US gun fatalities between 2012 and 2016 were suicides, yet we call people maniacs and psychos, shaming them. We are creating barriers for people that need help. Why are we embarrassing each other? Let's make it easier, not harder, for people to access better mental health care. What else? Sexism, racism and poverty affect gun ownership and gun-related fatalities. On average, it's estimated that 50 women were fatally shot each month between 2010 and 2014 due to domestic violence, and women are still dying in their homes. Let's empower women and give our young boys a chance to learn how to work out their conflicts and emotions with words, not weapons. And the "Washington Post" reported that last year, nearly 1,000 people were fatally wounded by on-duty police officers. Talk to Black Lives Matter and the police union about that. We need to tackle this. (Applause) At the end of the day, perhaps people won't feel the need to buy and use a gun when they all equally feel safe, healthy, respected and cared for. All right, discussion time is over. It's now time to answer the question. How do we stop this senseless violence? Is it Choice A, Choice B, Choice C? Now, I know what you're all thinking. You remember that multiple-choice questions almost never end with just three possibilities. There's always that fourth, Choice D: all of the above. Maybe that's the answer here. Or maybe "all of the above" is too easy, and this is not an easy problem. It requires deep analytical thinking by all of us. So instead, I'm asking you to do your homework, write your own Choice D using supporting detail. And if you're not sure where to start, look to my students as role models. They are armed with incredible communication skills and a sense of citizenship that I find so inspiring. (Applause) These are public school kids engaged in the issue of gun regulation, and their endeavor has moved our hearts. And they shouldn't have to do this on their own. They're asking you, they're asking all of us, to get involved. This isn't a spectator sport. So what's the right answer? I don't know. Listen, I'm no gun control expert. I teach the humanities. To be human is to learn, and to be part of a civilization is to share your knowledge. This kind of honest, brave and sincere engagement is what I ask of my students, what I expect of myself as a teacher and what I demand of you now. Every one of you needs to do your homework. And then what? Humbly share your knowledge with each other. Please teach your family, teach your community, your city council, your state legislature. Teach Congress a lesson. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) |
SpaceX's plan to fly you across the globe in 30 minutes | {0: 'As president and COO of SpaceX, Gwynne Shotwell is responsible for day-to-day operations and for managing all customer and strategic relations.', 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.'} | TED2018 | Chris Anderson: So two months ago, something crazy happened. Can you talk us through this, because this caught so many people's attention? Gwynne Shotwell: I'll stay quiet for the beginning, and then I'll start talking. (Video) Voices: Five, four, three, two, one. (Cheering) Woman: Liftoff. Go Falcon Heavy. GS: So this was such an important moment for SpaceX. With the Falcon 9 and now the Falcon Heavy, we can launch into orbit any payload that has previously been conceived or is conceived right now. We've got a couple of launches of Falcon Heavy later this year, so this had to go right. It was the first time we flew it, and the star of the show, of course, brother and sister side boosters landing. I was excited. (Laughter) Thanking my team. By the way, there's maybe a thousand people standing around me right there. And Starman. Starman did not steal the show, though — the boosters did. CA: (Laughter) CA: There had to be some payload — why not put a Tesla into space? GS: Exactly. It was perfect. CA: Gwynne, let's wind the clock back. I mean, how did you end up an engineer and President of SpaceX? Were you supernerdy as a girl? GS: I don't think I was nerdy, but I was definitely doing the things that the girls weren't doing. I asked my mom, who was an artist, when I was in third grade, how a car worked, so she had no idea so she gave me a book, and I read it, and sure enough, my first job out of my mechanical engineering degree was with Chrysler Motors in the automotive industry. But I actually got into engineering not because of that book but because my mom took me to a Society of Women Engineers event, and I fell in love with the mechanical engineer that spoke. She was doing really critical work, and I loved her suit. (Laughter) And that's what a 15-year-old girl connects with. And I used to shy away from telling that story, but if that's what caused me to be an engineer — hey, I think we should talk about that. CA: Sixteen years ago, you became employee number seven at SpaceX, and then over the next years, you somehow built a multi-billion-dollar relationship with NASA, despite the fact that SpaceX's first three launches blew up. I mean, how on earth did you do that? GS: So actually, selling rockets is all about relationships and making a connection with these customers. When you don't have a rocket to sell, what's really important is selling your team, selling the business savvy of your CEO — that's not really hard to sell these days — and basically, making sure that any technical issue that they have or any concern, you can address right away. So I think it was helpful for me to be an engineer. I think it was helpful to my role of running sales for Elon. CA: And currently, a big focus of the company is, I guess, kind of a race with Boeing to be the first to provide the service to NASA of actually putting humans into orbit. Safety considerations obviously come to the fore, here. How are you sleeping? GS: I actually sleep really well. I'm a good sleeper, that's my best thing. But I think the days leading up to our flying crew will probably be a little sleepless. But really, fundamentally, safety comes in the design of the system that you're going to fly people on, and so we've been working for years, actually, almost a decade, on this technology. We're taking the Dragon cargo spaceship and we're upgrading it to be able to carry crew. And as I said, we've been engineering in these safety systems for quite some time. CA: So isn't it that there's one system that actually allows instant escape if there's a problem. GS: That's right. It's called the launch escape system. CA: I think we have that. Let's show that. GS: We've got a video of a test that we ran in 2015. So this simulated having a really bad day on the pad. Basically, you want the capsule to get out of Dodge. You want it to get away from the rocket that had a bad day right below it. This is if there was an issue on the pad. We also will be doing another demonstration later this year on if we have an issue with the rocket during flight. CA: And those rockets have another potential function as well, eventually. GS: Yeah, so the launch escape system for Dragon is pretty unique. It's an integrated launch escape system. It's basically a pusher, so the propellant system and the thrusters are integrated into the capsule, and so if it detects a rocket problem, it pushes the capsule away. Capsule safety systems in the past have been like tractor pullers, and the reason we didn't want to do that is that puller needs to come off before you can safely reenter that capsule, so we wanted to eliminate, in design, that possibility of failure. CA: I mean, SpaceX has made the regular reusability of rockets seem almost routine, which means you've done something that no national space program, for example, has been able to achieve. How was that possible? GS: I think there's a couple of things — there's a million things, actually — that have allowed SpaceX to be successful. The first is that we're kind of standing on the shoulders of giants. Right? We got to look at the rocket industry and the developments to date, and we got to pick the best ideas, leverage them. We also didn't have technology that we had to include in our vehicle systems. So we didn't have to design around legacy components that maybe weren't the most reliable or were particularly expensive, so we really were able to let physics drive the design of these systems. CA: I mean, there are other programs started from scratch. That last phrase you said there, you let physics drive the design, what's an example of that? GS: There's hundreds of examples, actually, of that, but basically, we got to construct the vehicle design from, really, a clean sheet of paper, and we got to make decisions that we wanted to make. The tank architecture — it's a common dome design. Basically it's like two beer cans stacked together, one full of liquid oxygen, one full of RP, and that basically saved weight. It allowed us to basically take more payload for the same design. One of the other elements of the vehicle that we're flying right now is we do use densified liquid oxygen and densified RP, so it's ultracold, and it allows you to pack more propellent into the vehicle. It is done elsewhere, probably not to the degree that we do it, but it adds a lot of margin to the vehicle, which obviously adds reliability. CA: Gwynne, you became President of SpaceX 10 years ago, I think. What's it been like to work so closely with Elon Musk? GS: So I love working for Elon. I've been doing it for 16 years this year, actually. I don't think I'm dumb enough to do something for 16 years that I don't like doing. He's funny and fundamentally without him saying anything he drives you to do your best work. He doesn't have to say a word. You just want to do great work. CA: You might be the person best placed to answer this question, which has puzzled me, which is to shed light on this strange unit of time called "Elon time." For example, last year, I asked Elon, you know, when Tesla would auto-drive across America, and he said by last December, which is definitely true, if you take Elon time into account. So what's the conversion ratio between Elon time and real time? (Laughter) GS: You put me in a unique position, Chris. Thanks for that. There's no question that Elon is very aggressive on his timelines, but frankly, that drives us to do things better and faster. I think all the time and all the money in the world does not yield the best solution, and so putting that pressure on the team to move quickly is really important. CA: It feels like you play kind of a key intermediary role here. I mean, he sets these crazy goals that have their impact, but, in other circumstances, might blow up a team or set impossible expectations. It feels like you've found a way of saying, "Yes, Elon," and then making it happen in a way that is acceptable both to him and to your company, to your employees. GS: There is two really important realizations for that. First of all, when Elon says something, you have to pause and not immediately blurt out, "Well, that's impossible," or, "There's no way we're going to do that. I don't know how." So you zip it, and you think about it, and you find ways to get that done. And the other thing I realized, and it made my job satisfaction substantially harder. So I always felt like my job was to take these ideas and kind of turn them into company goals, make them achievable, and kind of roll the company over from this steep slope, get it comfortable. And I noticed every time I felt like we were there, we were rolling over, people were getting comfortable, Elon would throw something out there, and all of a sudden, we're not comfortable and we're climbing that steep slope again. But then once I realized that that's his job, and my job is to get the company close to comfortable so he can push again and put us back on that slope, then I started liking my job a lot more, instead of always being frustrated. CA: So if I estimated that the conversation ratio for Elon time to your time is about 2x, am I a long way out there? GS: That's not terrible, and you said it, I didn't. (Laughter) CA: You know, looking ahead, one huge initiative SpaceX is believed to be, rumored to be working on, is a massive network of literally thousands of low earth orbit satellites to provide high-bandwidth, low-cost internet connection to every square foot of planet earth. Is there anything you can tell us about this? GS: We actually don't chat very much about this particular project, not because we're hiding anything, but this is probably one of the most challenging if not the most challenging project we've undertaken. No one has been successful deploying a huge constellation for internet broadband, or basically for satellite internet, and I don't think physics is the difficulty here. I think we can come up with the right technology solution, but we need to make a business out of it, and it'll cost the company about 10 billion dollars or more to deploy this system. And so we're marching steadily along but we're certainly not claiming victory yet. CA: I mean, the impact of that, obviously, if that happened to the world, of connectivity everywhere, would be pretty radical, and perhaps mainly for good — I mean, it changes a lot if suddenly everyone can connect cheaply. GS: Yeah, there's no question it'll change the world. CA: How much of a worry is it, and how much of a drag on the planning is it, are concerns just about space junk? People worry a lot about this. This would a huge increase in the total number of satellites in orbit. Is that a concern? GS: So space debris is a concern, there's no question — not because it's so likely to happen, but the consequences of it happening are pretty devastating. You could basically spew a bunch of particles in orbit that could take out that orbit from being useful for decades or longer. So as a matter of fact, we are required to bring down our second stage after every mission so it doesn't end up being a rocket carcass orbiting earth. So you really need to be a good steward of that. CA: So despite the remarkable success there of that Falcon Heavy rocket, you're actually not focusing on that as your future development plan. You're doubling down to a much bigger rocket called the BFR, which stands for ... GS: It's the Big Falcon Rocket. CA: The Big Falcon Rocket, that's right. (Laughter) What's the business logic of doing this when you invested all that in that incredible technology, and now you're just going to something much bigger. Why? GS: Actually, we've learned some lessons over the duration where we've been developing these launch systems. What we want to do is not introduce a new product before we've been able to convince the customers that this is the product that they should move to, so we're working on the Big Falcon Rocket now, but we're going to continue flying Falcon 9s and Falcon Heavies until there is absolute widespread acceptance of BFR. But we are working on it right now, we're just not going to cancel Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy and just put in place BFR. CA: The logic is that BFR is what you need to take humanity to Mars? GS: That's correct. CA: But somehow, you've also found other business ideas for this. GS: Yes. BFR can take the satellites that we're currently taking to orbit to many orbits. It allows for even a new class of satellites to be delivered to orbit. Basically, the width, the diameter of the fairing is eight meters, so you can think about what giant telescopes you can put in that fairing, in that cargo bay, and see really incredible things and discover incredible things in space. But then there are some residual capabilities that we have out of BFR as well. CA: A residual capability? GS: It's a residual capability. CA: Is that what you call this? Talk about what the heck this is. Oh wait a sec — GS: That's Falcon Heavy. That's worth pointing out, by the way. What a beautiful rocket, and that hangar could just fit the Statue of Liberty in it, so you get a sense of size of that Falcon Heavy Rocket. CA: And the fact that there are 27 engines there. That's part of the design principle that you, rather than just inventing ever bigger rockets, you team them up. GS: It's exactly this residual capability. We developed the Merlin engine for the Falcon 1 launch vehicle. We could have tossed that engine and built an entirely new engine for the Falcon 9. It would have been called something different, because Falcon 9 is nine Merlin engines, but instead of spending a billion dollars on a brand new engine, we put nine of them together on the back end of Falcon 9. Residual capability: glue three Falcon 9s together and you have the largest operational rocket flying. And so it was expensive to do, but it was a much more efficient path than starting from scratch. CA: And the BFR is the equivalent of how much bigger than that, in terms of its power? GS: BFR is about, I believe, two and half times the size of this. CA: Right, and so that allows you — I mean, I still don't really believe this video that we're about to play here. What on earth is this? GS: So it currently is on earth, but this is basically space travel for earthlings. I can't wait for this residual capability. Basically, what we're going to do is we're going to fly BFR like an aircraft and do point-to-point travel on earth, so you can take off from New York City or Vancouver and fly halfway across the globe. You'll be on the BFR for roughly half an hour or 40 minutes, and the longest part — yeah, it's so awesome. (Applause) The longest part of that flight is actually the boat out and back. (Laughter) CA: I mean. Gwynne, come on, this is awesome, but it's crazy, right? This is never going to actually happen. GS: Oh no, it's definitely going to happen. This is definitely going to happen. CA: How? (Applause) So first of all, countries are going to accept this incoming missile — (Laughter) GS: Chris, so can you imagine us trying to convince a federal range, Air Force bases to take the incomers? Because we're doing it now, regularly, right? We're bringing the first stages back, and we're landing them on federal property on an Air Force base. So I think doing it, I don't know, 10 kilometers out from a city, maybe it's only five kilometers out from a city. CA: So how many passengers can possibly afford the fortune of flying by space? GS: So the first BFR is going to have roughly a hundred passengers. And let's talk a little bit about the business. Everyone thinks rockets are really expensive, and to a large degree they are, and how could we possibly compete with airline tickets here? But if you think about it, if I can do this trip in half an hour to an hour, I can do dozens of these a day, right? And yet, a long-haul aircraft can only make one of those flights a day. So even if my rocket was slightly more expensive and the fuel is a little bit more expensive, I can run 10x at least what they're running in a day, and really make the revenue that I need to out of that system. CA: So you really believe this is going to be deployed at some point in our amazing future. When? GS: Within a decade, for sure. CA: And this is Gwynne time or Elon time? GS: That's Gwynne time. I'm sure Elon will want us to go faster. (Laughter) CA: OK, that's certainly amazing. (Laughter) GS: I'm personally invested in this one, because I travel a lot and I do not love to travel, and I would love to get to see my customers in Riyadh, leave in the morning and be back in time to make dinner. CA: So we're going to test this out. So within 10 years, an economy price ticket, or, like, a couple thousand dollars per person to fly New York to Shanghai. GS: Yeah, I think it'll be between economy and business, but you do it in an hour. CA: Yeah, well, OK, that is definitely something. (Laughter) And meanwhile, the other use of BFR is being developed to go a little bit further than Shanghai. Talk about this. You guys have actually developed quite a detailed, sort of, picture of how humans might fly to Mars, and what that would look like. GS: Yeah. So we've got a video, this is a cropped video from others we've shown, and then there's a couple of new bits to it. But basically, you're going to lift off from a pad, you've got a booster as well as the BFS, the Big Falcon Spaceship. It's going to take off. The booster is going to drop the spaceship off in orbit, low earth orbit, and then return just like we're returning boosters right now. So it sounds incredible, but we're working on the pieces, and you can see us achieve these pieces. So booster comes back. The new thing here is that we're going to actually land on the pad that we launched from. Currently, we land on a separate pad, or we land out on a boat. Fast, quick connect. You take a cargo ship full of fuel, or a fuel depot, put it on that booster, get that in orbit, do a docking maneuver, refuel the spaceship, and head on to your destination, and this one is Mars. CA: So, like, a hundred people go to Mars at one time, taking, what, six months? Two months? GS: It ends up depending on how big the rocket is. I think this first version, and we'll continue to make even bigger BFRs, I think it's a three-month trip. Right now, the average is six to eight, but we're going to try to do it faster. CA: When do you believe SpaceX will land the first human on Mars? GS: It's a very similar time frame from the point-to-point. It's the same capability. It will be within a decade — not this decade. CA: In real time, again, within a decade. Well, that would also be amazing. (Laughter) Why, though? Seriously, why? I mean, you've got a company where this is the official stated mission. Has everyone actually bought into that mission, given that, I mean, there's a lot of people around who think, come on, you've got so much talent, so much technology capability. There are so many things on earth that need urgent attention. Why would you have this escape trip off to another planet? (Applause) GS: So I am glad you asked that, but I think we need to expand our minds a little bit. There are plenty of things to do on earth, but there are lots of companies working on that. I think we're working on one of the most important things we possibly can, and that's to find another place for humans to live and survive and thrive. If something happened on earth, you need humans living somewhere else. (Applause) It's the fundamental risk reduction for the human species. And this does not subvert making our planet here better and doing a better job taking care of it, but I think you need multiple paths to survival, and this is one of them. And let's not talk about the downer piece, like, you go to Mars to make sure all earthlings don't die. That's terrible, actually, that's a terrible reason to go do it. Fundamentally, it's another place to explore, and that's what makes humans different from animals, it's our sense of exploration and sense of wonderment and learning something new. And then I also have to say, this is the first step in us moving to other solar systems and potentially other galaxies, and I think this is the only time I ever out-vision Elon, because I want to meet other people in other solar systems. Mars is fine, but it is a fixer-upper planet. There's work to do there to make it habitable. (Laughter) I want to find people, or whatever they call themselves, in another solar system. CA: That is a big vision. Gwynne Shotwell, thank you. You have one of the most amazing jobs on the planet. GS: Thank you very much. Thanks, Chris. |
War and what comes after | {0: 'In her work, Clemantine Wamariya is learning and sharing how remembering our life experiences in story form guides us to make sense and appreciate our present moments.'} | TEDWomen 2017 | Words matter. They can heal and they can kill ... yet, they have a limit. When I was in eighth grade, my teacher gave me a vocabulary sheet with the word "genocide." I hated it. The word genocide is clinical ... overgeneral ... bloodless ... dehumanizing. No word can describe what this does to a nation. You need to know, in this kind of war, husbands kills wives, wives kill husbands, neighbors and friends kill each other. Someone in power says, "Those over there ... they don't belong. They're not human." And people believe it. I don't want words to describe this kind of behavior. I want words to stop it. But where are the words to stop this? And how do we find the words? But I believe, truly, we have to keep trying. I was born in Kigali, Rwanda. I felt loved by my entire family and my neighbors. I was constantly being teased by everybody, especially my two older siblings. When I lost my front tooth, my brother looked at me and said, "Oh, it has happened to you, too? It will never grow back." (Laughter) I enjoyed playing everywhere, especially my mother's garden and my neighbor's. I loved my kindergarten. We sang songs, we played everywhere and ate lunch. I had a childhood that I would wish for anyone. But when I was six, the adults in my family began to speak in whispers and shushed me any time that I asked a question. One night, my mom and dad came. They had this strange look when they woke us. They sent my older sister Claire and I to our grandparent's, hoping whatever was happening would blow away. Soon we had to escape from there, too. We hid, we crawled, we sometimes ran. Sometimes I heard laughter and then screaming and crying and then noise that I had never heard. You see, I did not know what those noises were. They were neither human — and also at the same time, they were human. I saw people who were not breathing. I thought they were asleep. I still didn't understand what death was, or killing in itself. When we would stop to rest for a little bit or search for food, I would close my eyes, hoping when I opened them, I would be awake. I had no idea which direction was home. Days were for hiding and night for walking. You go from a person who's away from home to a person with no home. The place that is supposed to want you has pushed you out, and no one takes you in. You are unwanted by anyone. You are a refugee. From age six to 12, I lived in seven different countries, moving from one refugee camp to another, hoping we would be wanted. My older sister Claire, she became a young mother ... and a master at getting things done. When I was 12, I came to America with Claire and her family on refugee status. And that's only the beginning, because even though I was 12 years old, sometimes I felt like three years old and sometimes 50 years old. My past receded, grew jumbled, distorted. Everything was too much and nothing. Time seemed like pages torn out of a book and scattered everywhere. This still happens to me standing right here. After I got to America, Claire and I did not talk about our past. In 2006, after 12 years being separated away from my family, and then seven years knowing that they were dead and them thinking that we were dead, we reunited ... in the most dramatic, American way possible. Live, on television — (Laughter) on "The Oprah Show." (Laughter) (Applause) I told you, I told you. (Laughter) But after the show, as I spent time with my mom and dad and my little sister and my two new siblings that I never met, I felt anger. I felt every deep pain in me. And I know that there is absolutely nothing, nothing, that could restore the time we lost with each other and the relationship we could've had. Soon, my parents moved to the United States, but like Claire, they don't talk about our past. They live in never-ending present. Not asking too many questions, not allowing themselves to feel — moving in small steps. None of us, of course, can make sense of what happened to us. Though my family is alive — yes, we were broken, and yes, we are numb and we were silenced by our own experience. It's not just my family. Rwanda is not the only country where people have turned on each other and murdered each other. The entire human race, in many ways, is like my family. Not dead; yes, broken, numb and silenced by the violence of the world that has taken over. You see, the chaos of the violence continues inside in the words we use and the stories we create every single day. But also on the labels that we impose on ourselves and each other. Once we call someone "other," "less than," "one of them" or "better than," believe me ... under the right condition, it's a short path to more destruction. More chaos and more noise that we will not understand. Words will never be enough to quantify and qualify the many magnitudes of human-caused destruction. In order for us to stop the violence that goes on in the world, I hope — at least I beg you — to pause. Let's ask ourselves: Who are we without words? Who are we without labels? Who are we in our breath? Who are we in our heartbeat? (Applause) |
Visions of Africa's future, from African filmmakers | {0: 'As an entrepreneur and investor in film, media and technology, Dayo Ogunyemi reconstructs the image and reality of Africa.'} | TEDGlobal 2017 | As a child growing up in Nigeria, books sparked my earliest imagination, but films, films transported me to magical places with flying cars, to infinite space with whole universes of worlds to discover. And my journey of discovery has led to many places and possibilities, all linked with ideas and imagination. A decade and a half ago, I moved from working in law and technology in New York to financing, producing and distributing films in Nairobi, Lagos and Johannesburg. I've been privileged to see firsthand how in Africa, film powerfully explores the marvelous and the mundane, how it conveys infinite possibilities and fundamental truths. Afrofuturist films like "Pumzi," Wanuri Kahiu's superb sci-fi flick, paint brilliant pictures of Africa's future, while Rungano Nyoni's "I Am Not A Witch" and Akin Omotoso's "Vaya" show us and catalogue our present. These filmmakers offer nuanced snapshots of Africa's imagined and lived reality, in contrast to some of the images of Africa that come from outside, and the perspectives that accompany all of these images, whether sympathetic or dismissive, shape or distort how people see Africa. And the truth is, many people think Africa is screwed up. Images play a big part of the reason why. Many tropes about Africa persist from pictures, pictures of famine in Ethiopia 30 years ago, pictures of the Biafran war half a century ago. But on a continent where the average age is 17, these tragic events seem almost prehistoric. Their images are far removed from how people in Africa's many countries see themselves and their neighbors. For them, these images do not represent their reality. So what is Africa's reality, or rather, which of Africa's many realities do we choose to focus on? Do we accept Emmanuel Macron's imagination of Africa in 2017 as a place in which all women have seven or eight children? Or do we instead rely on the UN's account that only one of Africa's 54 countries has a fertility rate as high as seven? Do we focus on the fact that infant mortality and life expectancy in Africa today is roughly comparable to the US a hundred years ago, or do we focus on progress, the fact that Africa has cut infant mortality in half in the last four decades and has raised life expectancy by 10 years since the year 2000? These dueling perspectives are all accurate. Well, aside from Macron's. He's just wrong. (Laughter) But one version makes it easy to dismiss Africa as hopeless, while the other fuels hope that a billion people can continue to make progress towards prosperity. The fact that Africans do not have the luxury of turning their gaze elsewhere, the fact that we must make progress or live with the consequence of failure, are the reason we must continue to tell our own stories and show our own images, with honesty and primarily to an African audience, because the image that matters most is the image of Africa in African imaginations. Now, honesty requires that we acknowledge that Africa is behind the rest of the world and needs to move swiftly to catch up. But thinking of a way forward, I'd like us to engage in a thought exercise. What if we could go back a hundred years, say to the US in 1917, but we could take with us all the modern ideas, innovations, inventions that we have today? What could we achieve with this knowledge? How richly could we improve quality of life and living conditions for people? How widely could we spread prosperity? Imagine if a hundred years ago, the education system had all the knowledge we have today, including how best to teach. And doctors and scientists knew all we do about public health measures, surgery techniques, DNA sequencing, cancer research and treatment? If we had access then to modern semiconductors, computers, mobile devices, the internet? Just imagine. If we did, we could take a quantum leap forward, couldn't we. Well, Africa can take a leap of that magnitude today. There's enough untapped innovation to move Africa a century forward in living conditions if the will and commitment is there. This is not just a possibility; it's an imperative for Africa's future, a future that will see Africa's population double to two and a half billion people in just three decades, a future that will see Africa have the world's largest workforce, just as the idea of work itself is being radically reconsidered. Now taking the leap forward isn't that far-fetched. There are tons of examples that demonstrate the potential for change in Africa. Just 20 years ago, Nigeria had fewer than half a million working phone lines. Today it has a hundred million mobile phone subscriptions, and this mobile miracle is mirrored in every African country. There are over three quarters of a billion mobile phones in use in Africa today, and this has spurred justified excitement about leapfrogging, about bringing the sharing economy, artificial intelligence, autonomous machines to Africa. And this is all promising, but we need to think about sequencing. Forget putting the cart before the horse. You can't put the self-driving car before the roads. (Applause) There's a whole infrastructural and logical layer to innovation that we take for granted, but we have to triage for Africa, because some of the biggest infrastructure gaps are for things that are so basic that Westerners rarely have to think about them. So let's explore this. Imagine your internet access went off for a day, and when it came back, it only stayed on for three hours at a time, with random 15-hour outages? How would your life change? Now replace internet access with electricity. Think of your fridges, your TVs, your microwaves, just sitting idly for days. Now extend this nightmare to government offices, to businesses, to schools, to hospitals. This, or worse, is the type of access that hundreds of millions of Africans have to electricity, and to water, and to healthcare, and to sanitation, and to education. We must fix this. We must fix this because ensuring widespread and affordable access to decent infrastructure and services isn't just low-hanging fruit: it's fundamental to achieving the hundred-year leap. And when we fix it, we might find some unexpected benefits. One unexpected benefit of the mobile miracle was that it led to what is perhaps the greatest cultural resurgence that Africa has seen in a generation: the rebirth of African popular music. For musicians like P-Square, Bongo Maffin and Wizkid, mobile phones paved the path to local dominance and global stardom. And the impact isn't limited just to music. It extends to film, too. Beautiful, engaging films like these stills of "Pumzi," "Vaya," and "I Am Not A Witch" show. For while its external image might be dated, Africa continues to evolve, as does African film. Now, every now and again, the rest of the world catches on, perhaps with Djo Munga's hard-hitting "Viva Riva!" with Newton Aduaka's intense "Ezra," or with Abderrahmane Sissako's poetic "Timbuktu." With mobile, Africans are discovering more and more of these films, and what that means is that it really matters less in Kinshasa or Cotonou what Cannes thinks of African film, or if those opinions are informed or fair. Who really cares what the "New York Times" thinks? What matters is that Africans are validating African art and ideas, both critically and commercially, that they are watching what they want, and that African filmmakers are connecting with their core audiences. And this is important. It's important because film can illuminate and inspire. Film can bring visions of the future to us here in the present. Films can serve as a conveyor belt for hope. And film can change perspectives faster than we can build roads. In just over a decade, Nigeria's film industry, Africa's largest, has taken the country's words and languages into the vocabulary and imaginations of millions in many other African countries. It has torn down borders, perhaps in the most effective way since the Berlin Conference sowed linguistic and geographic division across Africa. Film does speak a universal language, and boy, Nigerian film speaks it loudly. Making Africa's hundred-year leap will require that Africans summon the creativity to generate ideas and find the openness to accept and adapt ideas from anywhere else in the world to solve our pervasive problems. With focus on investment, films can help drive that change in Africa's people, a change that is necessary to make the hundred-year leap, a change that will help create a prosperous Africa, an Africa that is dramatically better than it is today. Thank you. Asante sana. (Applause) |
A woman's fury holds lifetimes of wisdom | {0: 'Tracee Ellis Ross is the star of the ABC comedy series “Black-ish” and an influential voice in the modern conversation around equality, respect, beauty and feeling empowered in your skin.'} | TED2018 | So, I have a friend. She's an actress, she's in her 60s. She's super bright, badass, emotionally intelligent. And a couple of days before Christmas, she was at the post office. It was really crowded, as it is around the holidays, and she was filling out some forms and she was really focused. And out of nowhere, someone moved her out of the way — just physically put their hands on her and moved her out of the way. He apparently needed something that she was blocking, so he moved her. Maybe he had said something to her, maybe he didn't, she didn't hear it ... Either way, she was focused, she was filling out the form. And the next thing you know, there were hands on her, and she was being moved out of the way. He then got what he was reaching for, whatever she was blocking, and went on his merry way. She said that she was shocked at first — yeah. And then a fury rose up in her that she could not explain: not annoyance, not frustration, but "fury" was the word that she used. And she went on to say, "I mean, I wanted to get physical. I don't know — I was furious. And I don't know why. I mean, he didn't hit me. He didn't hurt me, he didn't violate me. He moved me, and I wanted to hurt him, or at the very least, run after him and yell in his face." So later, I was left pondering this fury, and looking for an explanation as to why, even in her telling of it, I felt fury, too, and why this was a word and a feeling that I was hearing a lot about lately. I feel like this is the point in the room where all the men are getting a little bit uncomfortable. (Laughter) It's OK. Stay with me. This fury is something that I have been chomping on since the last US presidential election. And it seems that many women have. This fury was not my friend's alone. Her fury was ignited by lifetimes of men helping themselves to women's bodies without consent. There's a culture of men helping themselves to women, and in this case, in a seemingly innocuous way, where a woman's body is like a saltshaker: "Get out of the way so I can get to the fries" — (Laughter) to the most egregious, violent and horrific situations. I imagine that some of you are wondering what the connection is between the innocuous and the horrific, two things that seem to be on opposite ends of the spectrum. Well, the common thread is the spectrum. The innocuous makes space for the horrific. And women have to live with the effects of both and everything in between. Fellas, can you imagine you're just on your phone, and someone walks up to you and just takes it out of your hand? And they're like, "OK dude, I don't know why you're getting so upset, I want to make a phone call. I'm going to give it back to you as soon as I'm done. Whatever." And then imagine if someone takes that cell phone out of your hands — I don't know — once a day, twice a day, random times. And the explanation is, "Yeah, well, I mean, you got a fancy case," or "You shouldn't have taken it out of your pocket," or "Yep. Yeah. That's just the way it is." But somehow, no one ever talks about the person who took the cell phone. Overly simplified, I get it, but you see where I'm going. Men are so used to helping themselves, that it's like ... they can't help themselves. And not because men are fundamentally less moral, but because this is a very big blind spot for most men. When someone helps themselves to a woman, it not only triggers discomfort and distress, but the unspoken experiences of our mothers' lives, sisters' lives and generations of women before us. That's lifetimes of women dealing with men who assume they know better for us than we know for ourselves, being the property of husbands, landowners, and having old, white men tell us the fate of our lady parts; lifetimes of having our bodies used for love and objects of desire, instead of bodies that we get to wield and use as we choose; lifetimes of knowing that whether we play by their rules or not, we still have to tolerate harassment, assault and even worse; lifetimes of our bodies being used as property that can be hit and hurt, manipulated and moved and like objects that are not deserving of respect; lifetimes of not being able to express the anger of our bodies. It's no wonder we feel this fury. And if you add in the history of race — which is a whole other talk — it gets exponentially more complicated. When women get manhandled, we start to rationalize, try to figure out the ways that it was — "It was probably our fault. You know what? He probably said something, and I didn't hear him. I'm just overreacting. I'm totally overreacting." No. No. No. No, no, no, no, no. Women have been trained to think that we are overreacting or that we're being too sensitive or unreasonable. We try to make sense of nonsense, and we swallow the furious feelings. We try to put them into some hidden place in our minds, but they don't go away. That fury sits deep inside as we practice our smiles — (Giggling) "Yes, of course" — and try to be pleasant. "I know —" (Giggling) "Yes, yes, of course," because apparently, women aren't supposed to get angry. That fury that my friend felt holds centuries of never being able to directly address or express our indignation, our frustration and our rage. When someone thinks they can help themselves to our bodies, it not only ignites the current fury, but it lights up the past. What seems like a benign moment at the post office is actually an anger grenade. Well, kaboom! Today, the global collection of women's experiences can no longer be ignored. Time's up on thinking that we're overreacting or "This is just the way it is." Time's up on women being held responsible for men's bad behavior. It is men's responsibility to change men's bad behavior. (Applause) Our culture is shifting, and it's time. So my fellow women and our gentle men, as we are here together within this particular window of this large-scale movement towards women's equality, and as we envision a future that does not yet exist, we both have different invitations. Men, I call you in as allies, as we work together towards change. May you be accountable and self-reflective, compassionate and open. May you ask how you can support a woman and be of service to change. And may you get help if you need it. And women, I encourage you to acknowledge your fury. Give it language. Share it in safe places of identification and in safe ways. Your fury is not something to be afraid of. It holds lifetimes of wisdom. Let it breathe and listen. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
What I've learned about parenting as a stay-at-home dad | {0: 'Glen "Beleaf" Henry is a father documenting all the mistakes and joys of parenting.'} | TEDxMidAtlantic | Alright, I want to tell you how I got my superpowers through fatherhood. I was working a job I hated, OK? And I don't know if anyone here ever worked a job they hated. Has anyone here ever worked a job they hated? (Laughter) OK, good, because I'm not alone and I have something to confess; I don't want you guys to judge me. This feels like a safe space, is it a safe space? Audience: Yes. Glen Henry: OK, I was working the job I hated, my manager and I were not getting along. I was sitting in my car, looking in the rearview mirror, trying to figure out which friend I could call to call in a bomb threat, so I didn't have to go back in the building. (Laughter) OK, this was having a lot of issues for me, I was having a lot of issues at my job and I'd come home every day from work and my wife would ask me the same question. And when you hate your job, this is the worst question anyone could ask you. She'd say, "Hey babe, how was your day?" (Laughter) And I'd say, "Why you bringing up old stuff?" (Laughter) I just left it, I don't want to think about that place again. See, we were spending about 40 percent of my income on childcare. We had one child. And we were pregnant with our second child. And we were trying to figure out how we were going to fix this whole thing of this money situation, and she said, "Hey, babe, I've got a great idea." I said, "What's up?" She said, "I think you'd be a great stay-at-home dad." (Laughter) I was like, "Why would you say something like that?" (Laughter) She said, "Because babies like you." (Laughter) I was like, "No, they don't." She was like, "No, they do like you. And I think it would be great for our children to see what love looks like, coming from a father." I was like, OK. (Laughter) So, I had issues with this, because I haven't seen a lot of stay-at-home dads before and I thought men would judge me, so get this, I said this — please don't be offended — I said, "Uh, you know, that sounds boring. And what do stay-at-home moms do all day, anyway?" Audience: Ooh! She smiled at me a smile only a woman full of knowledge can smile (Laughter) and said, "Well, this should be easy for you. And it will save us some money, it seems like a no-brainer." (Laughter) Fast-forward six months, I'd been a stay-at-home dad for about a week. (Laughter) I was standing in my bathroom, looking into the mirror (Laughter) crying, tears — (Laughter) running all down my face. (Laughter) My one-and-a-half-year-old was banging on the bathroom door — because I locked them out, you know — (Laughter) crying, tears running down his face. And my newborn was in the bassinet, crying, tears running down his face. I looked at myself in the mirror, and I said ... "Which friend can you call to call in a bomb threat? We've got to get out of here." (Laughter) See, I had traded my manager for my children. I didn't know what I got myself into. I thought I knew everything about being a stay-at-home parent, and in fact, I knew nothing at all. Because even though my manager was — well, at least my children were a lot cuter than my manager, they were just as demanding. (Video) Child: Wipe my butt. Papa, wipe my butt. (Laughter) Wipe my butt. (Laughter) GH: What had I gotten myself into? I thought I knew everything about being a stay-at-home parent — in fact, I knew nothing. I thought that all I had to do was feed them, change their diapers, and they'd be fine. Like, I really thought that's it. "Sesame Street" on TV, keep them distracted, apple sauce in a bowl, milk in a bottle, they'd be fine. But if you leave children alone, they'll get into just a little bit of mischief. (Video) Child: Hi. GH: Where is the powder? Child: I don't know. GH: Well, where did you put it, where did it — Who did it? Child 1: No, you did it! Child 2: No, you did it! Child 1: No, you did it! Child 2: No, you did it! (Laughter) GH: You know what else I thought I knew about being a stay-at-home parent? I thought that all I had to do was take them to the park once a week, because if I took them to the park once a week, they'd be fine. In fact, I knew nothing at all. OK. If you take kids to park every day then that means they get dirty every day. If they got dirty every day, they need baths every day, if they got baths every day — I just don't think you understand, see, having two kids under two, you end up changing over 20 dirty diapers a day, OK. And if you give them a bath, that's just more nakedness. (Laughter) And a higher probability of getting peed on, and no one likes getting peed on, even if it's from a baby. (Laughter) But I read this article by Father Lee which cites a survey done by two detergent companies, Omo and Persil. And they did this study and it said, that at two hours a day, prisoners get more outside time than children. That convicted me and so we went outside. (Video) (Music) (Laughter) GH: See, I knew nothing about being a stay-at-home parent, and once I embraced the fact that I knew nothing, I began to learn from my new managers. And I always was told that as a stay-at-home parent, you get no sleep. Or as a parent in general, you get no sleep. But that's not true, because if you sleep when they do, you actually can get some sleep. (Laughter) You know what else I thought as a stay-at-home parent? I though I knew that the best way to teach kids right from wrong was to discipline them, because that would make sure they understood right from wrong, the pain, the fear — that would teach them. But the truth is, the best way to teach my children right from wrong is to teach them. Take out a whiteboard and draw pictures and make connections that they can understand. That was the best way. A lot of these images you're seeing are coming from my YouTube channel, "Beleaf in Fatherhood." I document the misadventures of being a stay-at-home dad. And it's not perfect, it's just showing that I'm trying. And I'm not trying to be an example but just proof that it's possible for whoever else is doing this. You know what I also knew about being a stay-at-home parent? I knew that children needed love, but I just didn't know what love looked like. (Video) (Music) GH: It turns out putting diapers on your head and play-fighting until the kids fall asleep is a great way to love your kids. So, I was learning a lot, but it's not all fun and boogers, is it? (Laughter) I asked a group of stay-at-home parents what's the hardest thing, the thing they underestimated most about being stay-at-home parents, and they said that the loneliness was one of those things. Not having someone else to talk to, feeling inadequate, feeling selfish for wanting me-time. And nursery rhymes suck. (Laughter) Like, really, "Mary Had a Little Lamb" is cool the first couple of times, but after all these years on repeat, you wonder why Mary just ain't make herself a wool skirt and have lamb chops, you know what I'm saying? (Laughter) The one thing I underestimated most was the emotional fatigue. See, I was an artist, so I'd write songs for other artists. Because that's how I made money from home. But when you're with your kids all day, you become emotionally tired. And that means all your creativity comes from your emotions, so you’re just tapped out, you're done. So you become done with time. Nap time, time-tables, time-out, time like to cook, with all types of time, you're just done. You had no time for anything. And some people are done with their spouse as a stay-at-home parent. Because the spouse just doesn't get it. I was talking to a friend of mine, he said, "Man, I come home from work, drawers are open, clothes hanging outside the drawers, the kids are still in their pajamas ... And it can't be that hard to have dinner ready when I get home, right?" (Laughter) Start to freak out, you know what I'm saying? (Laughter) He was trying to confide in me — (Laughter) I said, "You have no idea what you're talking about." (Laughter) She wakes up every morning, tired from the night before, baby attached to her breast, dropping this kid off at school, and taking this one to the park. Laundry piles up to the skies, he has a conversation on the phone for an hour with your mom about God knows what, takes the dog you wanted for a walk ... (Laughter) And nobody died, bro. She kept your kids alive all day, that's hard." (Laughter) I have become an advocate for stay-at-home parents. Why? Because finally, I was standing in their shoes. Because when you're standing in someone else's shoes, you see the world from a different perspective. And when you start to take steps, it feels like baby steps, wobbling. But then they turn into stomps. And you start making footprints for the next generation to walk in. See, we're walking on a certain path, as parents. We're all in this together. No one can deny that family is one of the biggest foundations in anyone's life. And we're all walking on this path, and we're pulling these thickets out of the way, and these thorns, making it easier for the ones coming after us. It turns out, parenting has a lot more to do with landscaping. And learning. More than teaching. And the best thing to do is to show up for class. Be present is what I learned as a stay-at-home dad. And let your presence be a gift. (Video) Shh. (Door unlocking) Hi! (Children giggling) (Laughter) GH: This was me, coming home from tour one day. I thought that the father was supposed to pursue the child. But it turns out the father makes himself present. And the children run after him. And that right there is a superpower. And that right there, my friends, is everything. Thank you. (Applause) |
How work kept me going during my cancer treatment | {0: "Westpac's Sarah Donnelly wants to encourage more open conversations about why and how an individual might continue to work while undergoing treatment for serious illnesses."} | TED@Westpac | It was June 2014. I was 30 years old, and I received a call from my doctor's office to say my test results were in. So I walked up to see her in my lunch break, and my doctor said she was very sorry to tell me that I had breast cancer. I didn't want to believe her and at first, I didn't. You see, I'm a lawyer and I needed some evidence. So I'm very embarrassed to tell you all that I stood up and I walked around to where she was sitting so that I could look over her shoulder and verify what was written on the page in front of her. (Laughter) Malignant carcinoma. But still not wanting to believe it, I said, "Now, malignant carcinoma, you're sure that means cancer?" (Laughter) She told me she was sure. Back at work, I handed over the urgent things that needed to be done while I was having more tests to see if my cancer had spread. But at that moment, work wasn't my priority. I was thinking about how I was going to tell my family and friends that I had cancer. How I was going to answer their questions about how bad it was and whether I was going to be OK, when I didn't know that myself. I was wondering if my partner and I would ever have an opportunity to start a family. And I was figuring out how I was going to tell my mother, who had herself had breast cancer when she was pregnant with me. She would know how I was feeling and have an idea of what lay ahead for me. But I also didn't want her to have to relive her cancer experience. What I didn't appreciate at the time was that work was about to play a huge role in my treatment and recovery. That it would be my coworkers and my job that would make me feel valuable and human at times when I would have otherwise felt like a statistic. That it would be my job that would give me routine and stability when I was dealing with so many difficult personal decisions and so much uncertainty. Like, what sort of breast reconstruction I was going to have. And at a time like that, you would think that I would turn to my family and friends for support. And yes, of course I did that. But it would ultimately be my colleagues who would play a huge role in my day-to-day life. And they would be the ones to make me laugh. You see, we were a pretty close team, and we shared a couple of really good in-jokes, like this time they overheard someone ask me how I got my hair so shiny and perfect — without knowing that it was, of course, a wig, and you know, it was a very good wig and it did make getting ready in the mornings very easy. (Laughter) But in little moments like this, I appreciated what their support meant, and I wondered what I would have done without that network. I've spoken with so many people, women in particular, who haven't had the chance to have that network because they haven't been given the opportunity to work through treatment. And there are several reasons for this. But I think it mostly comes down to overly paternalistic employers. These employers want you to go away and focus on yourself. And come back when you're better. And they use those kinds of phrases. And while these responses are well-meaning, knowing the benefits it brought me, it makes me incredibly frustrated when people are told that they couldn’t or shouldn't work, when it's something that they want to do and physically can do. So I started to look into what an employer is required to do when someone presents with a cancer diagnosis. I discovered that under Australian law, cancer is considered a disability. So if you are unable to perform your usual work duties, your employer is obligated by the Disability Discrimination Act to make reasonable adjustments to your working arrangements, so that you can continue to work. What would reasonable adjustments look like for me? I knew the obvious impacts my diagnosis was going to have on work. Medical appointments would be scheduled during business hours, and I knew that I would need time off to recover from surgical procedures. Again, being a typical lawyer, I had done my due diligence on what to expect from treatment. Admittedly, a lot of that was through Doctor Google, perhaps not my best move and I wouldn't recommend that. (Laughter) But while I was ready for all the physical side effects, what really scared me was this thing called chemo brain. Chemo brain presents itself through memory loss, an inability to concentrate and an inability to solve problems. And if this happened to me, I wondered how I was going to do my job as a lawyer. Would I be forced to leave work? And how could I possibly have a discussion with my manager about reasonable adjustments to my working arrangements when I didn't know how I was going to be impacted? I was fortunate to have a supportive manager who was happy to see how things went as we went along, rather than requiring a concrete plan up front. I was lucky that while he may not have even known about this concept of reasonable adjustments, to him, it was just common sense. But I've learned that it's not common sense to everyone. Everyone going through treatment will learn how it impacts them and what their limitations are. And they'll learn to adjust for that. So for me, there were the tips and tricks that I learned about the treatment itself, like, before you go to chemo, you need to make sure you're really well hydrated and that you're warm, because it helps the nurses to find your veins. And make sure that you don't eat any of your favorite food, either before or after chemo, because you're going to be throwing that up and you won't ever want to look at it again. (Laughter) I learned that one the hard way. And then there were the tricks for managing my workflow. I scheduled chemo for first thing on a Monday morning. I knew that from the time I left the cancer care unit, I had about four hours before this fog screen would come down and I would start to be sick. So I would use that time to clean my inbox and make any urgent calls. The worst of the sickness would be gone within about 48 hours. And then I would log back into work from home. This treatment continued and I knew what to expect. I was able to set reasonable expectations with my business partners about what I could do and the time frames that I could do it in. But I still remember the hesitation in their voices when it came to asking for things. And asking me to do things by a certain time. And trust me, these were people that were not afraid of setting a good deadline. (Laughter) I got the impression they didn't want to put any extra pressure on me while I was going through treatment. And while I appreciated the sentiment, I actually needed the deadlines. To me, that was something within my control and something that could stay in my control when there were so many things that couldn't. And as I was working from home, I was thinking about how employers should be applying this concept of reasonable adjustments in our current age, where one in two Australian men and women will be diagnosed with cancer by the age of 85. So, as we continue to work longer and longer into older age, the chances of having a serious illness while we're in the workforce are increasing. And with technology enabling us to work anywhere, any time, reasonable adjustments are no longer contingent upon whether or not you can continue to physically make it into the physical office. Reasonable adjustments are also not about just offering a longer break or a comfier chair to sit in, although those things might be good, too. At the very least, we need to be applying the flexibility policies and strategies we've developed for other scenarios, like for people with family responsibilities. But how can we ensure that people are even having a conversation about what reasonable adjustments might look like for them if a manager's first response is to say, "Oh no, don't come back to work until you're better." And a light went on for me. It must be compulsory for managers to have to have these conversations with their employees. And lessons from people like me, that have really benefited from working through treatment, need to be more widely shared. And I thought about what could be done to guide these conversations, and then an amazing colleague of mine, Camilla Gunn, developed a "Working with Cancer" toolkit. The toolkit provides a framework for those diagnosed, their managers, their carers and their coworkers to have conversations about cancer and the work support available. Camilla and I have now been to other organizations to talk about the toolkit and how it can help to guide through what, quite frankly, are otherwise some pretty awkward conversations. And I'm pleased to say that the uptake of the toolkit is increasing. So what should be a manager's first response when somebody says that they're sick and they don't know how it's going to impact their work? It must be this: "To the extent that you are able, and want to, we would love to work out an arrangement for you to continue to work through treatment." We need to start positively engaging people with serious illness to keep them in the workforce, rather than paternalistically pushing them away. I've told you my story because I want you to know the benefits that working through treatment brought me. And I also want to change your perceptions if you think that somebody going through treatment is just bored, frail and vomiting a lot. And yes, these things were true some of the time, if not a lot of the time, but I was also determined to push myself at work as much as I had always done. And I was able to do that because my employer gave me the choice. Most importantly, I'm telling you because while it's a seemingly obvious choice to give someone, it's not one that is always offered or encouraged. And it must be. Thank you. (Applause) |
Empathy is not endorsement | {0: 'Dylan Marron takes complicated social issues and finds accessible ways to talk about them through interviews, short-form videos and satire.'} | TED2018 | Hi. I've received hate online. A lot of it. And it comes with the territory of my work. I'm a digital creator, I make things specifically for the internet. Like, a few years ago, I made a video series called "Every Single Word" where I edited down popular films to only the words spoken by people of color, as a way to empirically and accessibly talk about the issue of representation in Hollywood. Then, later, as transphobic bathroom bill started gaining media attention around the United States, I hosted and produced an interview series called "Sitting in Bathrooms with Trans People" where I did exactly that. (Laughter) And then — Sure, I'll take applause. (Applause) Thank you. And then, are you familiar with those unboxing videos on YouTube where YouTubers open up the latest electronic gadgets? Great, so I satirized those in a weekly series, where instead I unboxed intangible ideologies like police brutality, masculinity and the mistreatment of Native Americans. (Laughter) My work — Thanks. One person applauding, God bless. (Laughter) Mom, hi. (Laughter) So, my work became popular. Very popular. I got millions of views, a ton of great press and a slew of new followers. But the flip side of success on the internet is internet hate. I was called everything. From "beta" to "snowflake" and, of course, the ever-popular "cuck." Don't worry, I will break these terms down for you. (Laughter) So, "beta," for those of you unfamiliar, is shorthand online lingo for "beta male." But let's be real, I wear pearl earrings and my fashion aesthetic is rich-white-woman-running-errands, so I'm not angling to be an alpha. (Applause) Doesn't totally work. (Laughter) Now, "snowflake" is a put-down for people who are sensitive and believe themselves to be unique, and I'm a millennial and an only child, so, duh! (Laughter) But my favorite, favorite, favorite is "cuck." It's a slur, short for "cuckold," for men who have been cheated on by their wives. But friends, I am so gay, that if I had a wife, I would encourage her to cheat on me. (Laughter) Thank you. Let's take a look at some of this negativity in action. Sometimes it's direct. Like Marcos, who wrote, "You're everything I hate in a human being." Thank you, Marcos. Others are more concise. Like Donovan, who wrote, "gaywad fagggggg." Now, I do need to point out, Donovan is not wrong, OK? In fact, he's right on both counts, so credit where credit is due. Thank you, Donovan. Others write to me with questions, like Brian, who asked, "Were you born a bitch or did you just learn to be one over time?" But my favorite thing about this is that once Brian was done typing, his finger must have slipped because then he sent me the thumbs-up emoji. (Laughter) So, babe, thumbs up to you, too. (Laughter) It's fun to talk about these messages now. Right? And it's cathartic to laugh at them. But I can tell you that it really does not feel good to receive them. At first, I would screenshot their comments and make fun of their typos, but this soon felt elitist and ultimately unhelpful. So over time, I developed an unexpected coping mechanism. Because most of these messages I received were through social media, I could often click on the profile picture of the person who sent them and learn everything about them. I could see pictures they were tagged in, posts they'd written, memes they'd shared, and somehow, seeing that it was a human on the other side of the screen made me feel a little better. Not to justify what they wrote, right? But just to provide context. Still, that didn't feel like enough. So, I called some of them — only the ones I felt safe talking to — with a simple opening question: "Why did you write that?" The first person I spoke to was Josh. He had written to tell me that I was a moron, I was a reason this country was dividing itself, and he added at the end that being gay was a sin. I was so nervous for our first conversation. This wasn't a comments section. So I couldn't use tools like muting or blocking. Of course, I guess, I could have hung up on him. But I didn't want to. Because I liked talking to him. Because I liked him. Here's a clip of one of our conversations. (Audio) Dylan Marron: Josh, you said you're about to graduate high school, right? Josh: Mmm-hmm. DM: How is high school for you? Josh: Am I allowed to use the H-E-double-hockey-stick word? DM: Oh, yeah. You're allowed to. Josh: It was hell. DM: Really? Josh: And it's still hell right now, even though it's only two weeks left. I'm a little bit bigger — I don't like to use the word "fat," but I am a little bit bigger than a lot of my classmates and they seem to judge me before they even got to know me. DM: That's awful. I mean, I also just want to let you know, Josh, I was bullied in high school, too. So did our common ground of being bullied in high school erase what he wrote me? No. And did our single phone conversation radically heal a politically divided country and cure systemic injustice? No, absolutely not, right? But did our conversation humanize us to each other more than profile pictures and posts ever could? Absolutely. I didn't stop there. Because some of the hate I received was from "my side." So when Matthew, a queer liberal artist like me publicly wrote that I represented some of the worst aspects of liberalism, I wanted to ask him this. DM: You tagged me in this post. Did you want me to see it? Matthew (Laughing): I honestly didn't think that you would. DM: Have you ever been publicly dragged? Matthew: I have been. And I just said, "No, I don't care." DM: And did you not care? Matthew: But it was hard. DM: Did you not care? Matthew: Oh, I cared, yes. DM: At the end of these conversations, there's often a moment of reflection. A reconsideration. And that's exactly what happened at the end of my call with a guy named Doug who had written that I was a talentless propaganda hack. (Audio) Did the conversation we just had — does it, like, make you feel differently about how you write online? Doug: Yeah! You know, when I said this to you, when I said you were a "talentless hack," I had never conversed with you in my life, really. I didn't really know anything really about you. And I think that a lot of times, that's what the comment sections really are, it's really a way to get your anger at the world out on random profiles of strangers, pretty much. DM (Laughing): Yeah, right. Doug: But it definitely has made me rethink the way that I interact with people online. DM: So I've collected these conversations and many others for my podcast "Conversations with People Who Hate Me." (Laughter) Before I started this project, I thought that the real way to bring about change was to shut down opposing viewpoints through epically worded video essays and comments and posts, but I soon learned those were only cheered on by the people who already agreed with me. Sometimes — bless you. Sometimes, the most subversive thing you could do — yeah, clap for him. (Laughter) Sometimes, the most subversive thing you could do was to actually speak with the people you disagreed with, and not simply at them. Now in every one of my calls, I always ask my guests to tell me about themselves. And it's their answer to this question that allows me to empathize with them. And empathy, it turns out, is a key ingredient in getting these conversations off the ground, but it can feel very vulnerable to be empathizing with someone you profoundly disagree with. So I established a helpful mantra for myself. Empathy is not endorsement. Empathizing with someone you profoundly disagree with does not suddenly compromise your own deeply held beliefs and endorse theirs. Empathizing with someone who, for example, believes that being gay is a sin doesn't mean that I'm suddenly going to drop everything, pack my bags and grab my one-way ticket to hell, right? It just means that I'm acknowledging the humanity of someone who was raised to think very differently from me. I also want to be super clear about something. This is not a prescription for activism. I understand that some people don't feel safe talking to their detractors and others feel so marginalized that they justifiably don't feel that they have any empathy to give. I totally get that. This is just what I feel well-suited to do. You know, I've reached out to a lot of people for this podcast. And some have politely declined, others have read my message and ignored it, some have blocked me automatically when I sent the invitation and one guy actually agreed to do it and then, five minutes into the call, hung up on me. I'm also aware that this talk will appear on the internet. And with the internet comes comment sections, and with comment sections inevitably comes hate. So as you are watching this talk, you can feel free to call me whatever you'd like. You can call me a "gaywad," a "snowflake," a "cuck," a "beta," or "everything wrong with liberalism." But just know that if you do, I may ask you to talk. And if you refuse or block me automatically or agree and hang up on me, then maybe, babe, the snowflake is you. Thank you so much. (Applause) (Cheering) (Applause) |
Is the world getting better or worse? A look at the numbers | {0: 'Steven Pinker is a professor of cognitive science (the study of the human mind) who writes about language, mind and human nature. '} | TED2018 | Many people face the news each morning with trepidation and dread. Every day, we read of shootings, inequality, pollution, dictatorship, war and the spread of nuclear weapons. These are some of the reasons that 2016 was called the "Worst. Year. Ever." Until 2017 claimed that record — (Laughter) and left many people longing for earlier decades, when the world seemed safer, cleaner and more equal. But is this a sensible way to understand the human condition in the 21st century? As Franklin Pierce Adams pointed out, "Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory." (Laughter) You can always fool yourself into seeing a decline if you compare bleeding headlines of the present with rose-tinted images of the past. What does the trajectory of the world look like when we measure well-being over time using a constant yardstick? Let's compare the most recent data on the present with the same measures 30 years ago. Last year, Americans killed each other at a rate of 5.3 per hundred thousand, had seven percent of their citizens in poverty and emitted 21 million tons of particulate matter and four million tons of sulfur dioxide. But 30 years ago, the homicide rate was 8.5 per hundred thousand, poverty rate was 12 percent and we emitted 35 million tons of particulate matter and 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide. What about the world as a whole? Last year, the world had 12 ongoing wars, 60 autocracies, 10 percent of the world population in extreme poverty and more than 10,000 nuclear weapons. But 30 years ago, there were 23 wars, 85 autocracies, 37 percent of the world population in extreme poverty and more than 60,000 nuclear weapons. True, last year was a terrible year for terrorism in Western Europe, with 238 deaths, but 1988 was worse with 440 deaths. What's going on? Was 1988 a particularly bad year? Or are these improvements a sign that the world, for all its struggles, gets better over time? Might we even invoke the admittedly old-fashioned notion of progress? To do so is to court a certain amount of derision, because I have found that intellectuals hate progress. (Laughter) (Applause) And intellectuals who call themselves progressive really hate progress. (Laughter) Now, it's not that they hate the fruits of progress, mind you. Most academics and pundits would rather have their surgery with anesthesia than without it. It's the idea of progress that rankles the chattering class. If you believe that humans can improve their lot, I have been told, that means that you have a blind faith and a quasi-religious belief in the outmoded superstition and the false promise of the myth of the onward march of inexorable progress. You are a cheerleader for vulgar American can-doism, with the rah-rah spirit of boardroom ideology, Silicon Valley and the Chamber of Commerce. You are a practitioner of Whig history, a naive optimist, a Pollyanna and, of course, a Pangloss, alluding to the Voltaire character who declared, "All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds." Well, Professor Pangloss, as it happens, was a pessimist. A true optimist believes there can be much better worlds than the one we have today. But all of this is irrelevant, because the question of whether progress has taken place is not a matter of faith or having an optimistic temperament or seeing the glass as half full. It's a testable hypothesis. For all their differences, people largely agree on what goes into human well-being: life, health, sustenance, prosperity, peace, freedom, safety, knowledge, leisure, happiness. All of these things can be measured. If they have improved over time, that, I submit, is progress. Let's go to the data, beginning with the most precious thing of all, life. For most of human history, life expectancy at birth was around 30. Today, worldwide, it is more than 70, and in the developed parts of the world, more than 80. 250 years ago, in the richest countries of the world, a third of the children did not live to see their fifth birthday, before the risk was brought down a hundredfold. Today, that fate befalls less than six percent of children in the poorest countries of the world. Famine is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. It could bring devastation to any part of the world. Today, famine has been banished to the most remote and war-ravaged regions. 200 years ago, 90 percent of the world's population subsisted in extreme poverty. Today, fewer than 10 percent of people do. For most of human history, the powerful states and empires were pretty much always at war with each other, and peace was a mere interlude between wars. Today, they are never at war with each other. The last great power war pitted the United States against China 65 years ago. More recently, wars of all kinds have become fewer and less deadly. The annual rate of war has fallen from about 22 per hundred thousand per year in the early '50s to 1.2 today. Democracy has suffered obvious setbacks in Venezuela, in Russia, in Turkey and is threatened by the rise of authoritarian populism in Eastern Europe and the United States. Yet the world has never been more democratic than it has been in the past decade, with two-thirds of the world's people living in democracies. Homicide rates plunge whenever anarchy and the code of vendetta are replaced by the rule of law. It happened when feudal Europe was brought under the control of centralized kingdoms, so that today a Western European has 1/35th the chance of being murdered compared to his medieval ancestors. It happened again in colonial New England, in the American Wild West when the sheriffs moved to town, and in Mexico. Indeed, we've become safer in just about every way. Over the last century, we've become 96 percent less likely to be killed in a car crash, 88 percent less likely to be mowed down on the sidewalk, 99 percent less likely to die in a plane crash, 95 percent less likely to be killed on the job, 89 percent less likely to be killed by an act of God, such as a drought, flood, wildfire, storm, volcano, landslide, earthquake or meteor strike, presumably not because God has become less angry with us but because of improvements in the resilience of our infrastructure. And what about the quintessential act of God, the projectile hurled by Zeus himself? Yes, we are 97 percent less likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning. Before the 17th century, no more than 15 percent of Europeans could read or write. Europe and the United States achieved universal literacy by the middle of the 20th century, and the rest of the world is catching up. Today, more than 90 percent of the world's population under the age of 25 can read and write. In the 19th century, Westerners worked more than 60 hours per week. Today, they work fewer than 40. Thanks to the universal penetration of running water and electricity in the developed world and the widespread adoption of washing machines, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, dishwashers, stoves and microwaves, the amount of our lives that we forfeit to housework has fallen from 60 hours a week to fewer than 15 hours a week. Do all of these gains in health, wealth, safety, knowledge and leisure make us any happier? The answer is yes. In 86 percent of the world's countries, happiness has increased in recent decades. Well, I hope to have convinced you that progress is not a matter of faith or optimism, but is a fact of human history, indeed the greatest fact in human history. And how has this fact been covered in the news? (Laughter) A tabulation of positive and negative emotion words in news stories has shown that during the decades in which humanity has gotten healthier, wealthier, wiser, safer and happier, the "New York Times" has become increasingly morose and the world's broadcasts too have gotten steadily glummer. Why don't people appreciate progress? Part of the answer comes from our cognitive psychology. We estimate risk using a mental shortcut called the "availability heuristic." The easier it is to recall something from memory, the more probable we judge it to be. The other part of the answer comes from the nature of journalism, captured in this satirical headline from "The Onion," "CNN Holds Morning Meeting to Decide What Viewers Should Panic About For Rest of Day." (Laughter) (Applause) News is about stuff that happens, not stuff that doesn't happen. You never see a journalist who says, "I'm reporting live from a country that has been at peace for 40 years," or a city that has not been attacked by terrorists. Also, bad things can happen quickly, but good things aren't built in a day. The papers could have run the headline, "137,000 people escaped from extreme poverty yesterday" every day for the last 25 years. That's one and a quarter billion people leaving poverty behind, but you never read about it. Also, the news capitalizes on our morbid interest in what can go wrong, captured in the programming policy, "If it bleeds, it leads." Well, if you combine our cognitive biases with the nature of news, you can see why the world has been coming to an end for a very long time indeed. Let me address some questions about progress that no doubt have occurred to many of you. First, isn't it good to be pessimistic to safeguard against complacency, to rake the muck, to speak truth to power? Well, not exactly. It's good to be accurate. Of course we should be aware of suffering and danger wherever they occur, but we should also be aware of how they can be reduced, because there are dangers to indiscriminate pessimism. One of them is fatalism. If all our efforts at improving the world have been in vain, why throw good money after bad? The poor will always be with you. And since the world will end soon — if climate change doesn't kill us all, then runaway artificial intelligence will — a natural response is to enjoy life while we can, eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. The other danger of thoughtless pessimism is radicalism. If our institutions are all failing and beyond hope for reform, a natural response is to seek to smash the machine, drain the swamp, burn the empire to the ground, on the hope that whatever rises out of the ashes is bound to be better than what we have now. Well, if there is such a thing as progress, what causes it? Progress is not some mystical force or dialectic lifting us ever higher. It's not a mysterious arc of history bending toward justice. It's the result of human efforts governed by an idea, an idea that we associate with the 18th century Enlightenment, namely that if we apply reason and science that enhance human well-being, we can gradually succeed. Is progress inevitable? Of course not. Progress does not mean that everything becomes better for everyone everywhere all the time. That would be a miracle, and progress is not a miracle but problem-solving. Problems are inevitable and solutions create new problems which have to be solved in their turn. The unsolved problems facing the world today are gargantuan, including the risks of climate change and nuclear war, but we must see them as problems to be solved, not apocalypses in waiting, and aggressively pursue solutions like Deep Decarbonization for climate change and Global Zero for nuclear war. Finally, does the Enlightenment go against human nature? This is an acute question for me, because I'm a prominent advocate of the existence of human nature, with all its shortcomings and perversities. In my book "The Blank Slate," I argued that the human prospect is more tragic than utopian and that we are not stardust, we are not golden and there's no way we are getting back to the garden. (Laughter) But my worldview has lightened up in the 15 years since "The Blank Slate" was published. My acquaintance with the statistics of human progress, starting with violence but now encompassing every other aspect of our well-being, has fortified my belief that in understanding our tribulations and woes, human nature is the problem, but human nature, channeled by Enlightenment norms and institutions, is also the solution. Admittedly, it's not easy to replicate my own data-driven epiphany with humanity at large. Some intellectuals have responded with fury to my book "Enlightenment Now," saying first how dare he claim that intellectuals hate progress, and second, how dare he claim that there has been progress. (Laughter) With others, the idea of progress just leaves them cold. Saving the lives of billions, eradicating disease, feeding the hungry, teaching kids to read? Boring. At the same time, the most common response I have received from readers is gratitude, gratitude for changing their view of the world from a numb and helpless fatalism to something more constructive, even heroic. I believe that the ideals of the Enlightenment can be cast a stirring narrative, and I hope that people with greater artistic flare and rhetorical power than I can tell it better and spread it further. It goes something like this. We are born into a pitiless universe, facing steep odds against life-enabling order and in constant jeopardy of falling apart. We were shaped by a process that is ruthlessly competitive. We are made from crooked timber, vulnerable to illusions, self-centeredness and at times astounding stupidity. Yet human nature has also been blessed with resources that open a space for a kind of redemption. We are endowed with the power to combine ideas recursively, to have thoughts about our thoughts. We have an instinct for language, allowing us to share the fruits of our ingenuity and experience. We are deepened with the capacity for sympathy, for pity, imagination, compassion, commiseration. These endowments have found ways to magnify their own power. The scope of language has been augmented by the written, printed and electronic word. Our circle of sympathy has been expanded by history, journalism and the narrative arts. And our puny rational faculties have been multiplied by the norms and institutions of reason, intellectual curiosity, open debate, skepticism of authority and dogma and the burden of proof to verify ideas by confronting them against reality. As the spiral of recursive improvement gathers momentum, we eke out victories against the forces that grind us down, not least the darker parts of our own nature. We penetrate the mysteries of the cosmos, including life and mind. We live longer, suffer less, learn more, get smarter and enjoy more small pleasures and rich experiences. Fewer of us are killed, assaulted, enslaved, exploited or oppressed by the others. From a few oases, the territories with peace and prosperity are growing and could someday encompass the globe. Much suffering remains and tremendous peril, but ideas on how to reduce them have been voiced, and an infinite number of others are yet to be conceived. We will never have a perfect world, and it would be dangerous to seek one. But there's no limit to the betterments we can attain if we continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing. This heroic story is not just another myth. Myths are fictions, but this one is true, true to the best of our knowledge, which is the only truth we can have. As we learn more, we can show which parts of the story continue to be true and which ones false, as any of them might be and any could become. And this story belongs not to any tribe but to all of humanity, to any sentient creature with the power of reason and the urge to persist in its being, for it requires only the convictions that life is better than death, health is better than sickness, abundance is better than want, freedom is better than coercion, happiness is better than suffering and knowledge is better than ignorance and superstition. Thank you. (Applause) |
How a male contraceptive pill could work | {0: 'John Amory is leading research into novel options for male contraception, male infertility and hypergonadism.'} | TEDMED 2017 | When I tell people that I'm trying to develop a contraceptive pill for men, the response usually varies along gender lines. Women say something like, "Fantastic. It's about time. When?" (Laughter) Men have one of two responses. They either love the idea, or they look at me a little warily and wonder what exactly I have in store for their testicles. (Laughter) So why does the world need a male pill? Well, what if I told you that of the six million pregnancies annually in the United States, three million of them are unintended? That's half. That's a really surprising number. And those three million unintended pregnancies account for the vast majority of the more than one million abortions annually performed in the United States. Happily, the rate of unintended pregnancy has fallen in the last few years by about 10 percent. This is because more women are using effective, long-acting, reversible forms of contraception. But we still have a long way to go. One approach that's finally becoming a real possibility is better contraceptive options for men. Think about it. We have over a dozen methods of contraception for women: pills, patches, IUDs, shots, sponges, rings, etc. For men, we've had the same two options for more than a hundred years: condoms and vasectomy. Despite having only two options, both of which have significant drawbacks, men currently account for 30 percent of all contraceptive use, with 10 percent of couples relying on vasectomy and 20 percent of couples using condoms. Why are 20 percent of couples relying on condoms for contraception when condoms have a one-year failure rate of over 15 percent? It's because many women can't either safely take currently available female contraceptives, for reasons such as blood clots, or they can't tolerate the side effects. So if we think a male contraceptive would be useful, the next question is: How do we go about developing one? Well, there's two general approaches. The first approach is to try and interfere with the way the sperm swim towards or bind to the egg. This approach turns out to be really difficult, because it's hard to get enough medication in the small volume of the ejaculate and have it still work inside the female reproductive tract. This is why there's been a lot more work done on the second approach, which is turning off sperm production entirely. This is also challenging. Why? Turns out that men make a lot of sperm. (Laughter) Men make a thousand sperm every second and to have an effective contraceptive, you need to get that level of sperm production down to one percent of its normal value. The good news is, this is possible, almost. The most studied approach has been to use hormones to suppress sperm production. Testosterone and progesterone, when administered together, will suppress the signals from the brain to the testes to make sperm, and in about 90 percent of men, sperm production after three to four months will stop. Unfortunately, 10 percent of men don't respond to these hormonal regimens for reasons that aren't understood. For the last several years, my colleagues and I have been taking a different approach to male contraceptive development, one that doesn't involve the administration of hormones. Specifically, we are looking to block the function of vitamin A in the testes. Why? Well, for over 90 years it's been known that you need vitamin A to make sperm. Animals who are deprived of vitamin A in their diet stop making sperm and restart making sperm again when the vitamin A is reintroduced. The vitamin A that we ingest is converted by a family of enzymes to something called retinoic acid. One of these enzymes is found only in the testes. It's this enzyme that we are attempting to block. The blockade of this enzyme should deprive the testes of retinoic acid and stop sperm production without affecting vitamin A's functions elsewhere in the body. We're testing this approach in animals and hope to move to human testing soon. Obviously, the impact of such a male contraceptive would go well beyond reproductive biology. It's interesting to speculate about the effect that it would have on relationships between men and women. One intriguing possibility is that a man could monitor his contraceptive status over time. In the last several years, two groups have introduced home sperm-testing devices that are iPhone-based and that are easy to use. A man could test his sperm count and share the result with his partner. If the man's sperm count were zero, the man and his partner would feel very comfortable relying on his contraceptive. A tool like this, coupled with a male contraceptive, could greatly increase the role for men in preventing unintended pregnancy. The researchers who are working on male contraception are trying to create a better future for couples, a future where contraception is no longer considered just "a woman's issue," rather an issue for couples to decide together. So why does the world need a male pill? Well, I believe that a male pill will help reduce the stubbornly high rates of unintended pregnancy and abortion and allow men to equally participate in contraception. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why tech needs the humanities | {0: 'Eric Berridge is an entrepreneurial humanist who believes our society is overly obsessed with STEM. '} | TED@IBM | You've all been in a bar, right? (Laughter) But have you ever gone to a bar and come out with a $200 million business? That's what happened to us about 10 years ago. We'd had a terrible day. We had this huge client that was killing us. We're a software consulting firm, and we couldn't find a very specific programming skill to help this client deploy a cutting-edge cloud system. We have a bunch of engineers, but none of them could please this client. And we were about to be fired. So we go out to the bar, and we're hanging out with our bartender friend Jeff, and he's doing what all good bartenders do: he's commiserating with us, making us feel better, relating to our pain, saying, "Hey, these guys are overblowing it. Don't worry about it." And finally, he deadpans us and says, "Why don't you send me in there? I can figure it out." So the next morning, we're hanging out in our team meeting, and we're all a little hazy ... (Laughter) and I half-jokingly throw it out there. I say, "Hey, I mean, we're about to be fired." So I say, "Why don't we send in Jeff, the bartender?" (Laughter) And there's some silence, some quizzical looks. Finally, my chief of staff says, "That is a great idea." (Laughter) "Jeff is wicked smart. He's brilliant. He'll figure it out. Let's send him in there." Now, Jeff was not a programmer. In fact, he had dropped out of Penn as a philosophy major. But he was brilliant, and he could go deep on topics, and we were about to be fired. So we sent him in. After a couple days of suspense, Jeff was still there. They hadn't sent him home. I couldn't believe it. What was he doing? Here's what I learned. He had completely disarmed their fixation on the programming skill. And he had changed the conversation, even changing what we were building. The conversation was now about what we were going to build and why. And yes, Jeff figured out how to program the solution, and the client became one of our best references. Back then, we were 200 people, and half of our company was made up of computer science majors or engineers, but our experience with Jeff left us wondering: Could we repeat this through our business? So we changed the way we recruited and trained. And while we still sought after computer engineers and computer science majors, we sprinkled in artists, musicians, writers ... and Jeff's story started to multiply itself throughout our company. Our chief technology officer is an English major, and he was a bike messenger in Manhattan. And today, we're a thousand people, yet still less than a hundred have degrees in computer science or engineering. And yes, we're still a computer consulting firm. We're the number one player in our market. We work with the fastest-growing software package to ever reach 10 billion dollars in annual sales. So it's working. Meanwhile, the push for STEM-based education in this country — science, technology, engineering, mathematics — is fierce. It's in all of our faces. And this is a colossal mistake. Since 2009, STEM majors in the United States have increased by 43 percent, while the humanities have stayed flat. Our past president dedicated over a billion dollars towards STEM education at the expense of other subjects, and our current president recently redirected 200 million dollars of Department of Education funding into computer science. And CEOs are continually complaining about an engineering-starved workforce. These campaigns, coupled with the undeniable success of the tech economy — I mean, let's face it, seven out of the 10 most valuable companies in the world by market cap are technology firms — these things create an assumption that the path of our future workforce will be dominated by STEM. I get it. On paper, it makes sense. It's tempting. But it's totally overblown. It's like, the entire soccer team chases the ball into the corner, because that's where the ball is. We shouldn't overvalue STEM. We shouldn't value the sciences any more than we value the humanities. And there are a couple of reasons. Number one, today's technologies are incredibly intuitive. The reason we've been able to recruit from all disciplines and swivel into specialized skills is because modern systems can be manipulated without writing code. They're like LEGO: easy to put together, easy to learn, even easy to program, given the vast amounts of information that are available for learning. Yes, our workforce needs specialized skill, but that skill requires a far less rigorous and formalized education than it did in the past. Number two, the skills that are imperative and differentiated in a world with intuitive technology are the skills that help us to work together as humans, where the hard work is envisioning the end product and its usefulness, which requires real-world experience and judgment and historical context. What Jeff's story taught us is that the customer was focused on the wrong thing. It's the classic case: the technologist struggling to communicate with the business and the end user, and the business failing to articulate their needs. I see it every day. We are scratching the surface in our ability as humans to communicate and invent together, and while the sciences teach us how to build things, it's the humanities that teach us what to build and why to build them. And they're equally as important, and they're just as hard. It irks me ... when I hear people treat the humanities as a lesser path, as the easier path. Come on! The humanities give us the context of our world. They teach us how to think critically. They are purposely unstructured, while the sciences are purposely structured. They teach us to persuade, they give us our language, which we use to convert our emotions to thought and action. And they need to be on equal footing with the sciences. And yes, you can hire a bunch of artists and build a tech company and have an incredible outcome. Now, I'm not here today to tell you that STEM's bad. I'm not here today to tell you that girls shouldn't code. (Laughter) Please. And that next bridge I drive over or that next elevator we all jump into — let's make sure there's an engineer behind it. (Laughter) But to fall into this paranoia that our future jobs will be dominated by STEM, that's just folly. If you have friends or kids or relatives or grandchildren or nieces or nephews ... encourage them to be whatever they want to be. (Applause) The jobs will be there. Those tech CEOs that are clamoring for STEM grads, you know what they're hiring for? Google, Apple, Facebook. Sixty-five percent of their open job opportunities are non-technical: marketers, designers, project managers, program managers, product managers, lawyers, HR specialists, trainers, coaches, sellers, buyers, on and on. These are the jobs they're hiring for. And if there's one thing that our future workforce needs — and I think we can all agree on this — it's diversity. But that diversity shouldn't end with gender or race. We need a diversity of backgrounds and skills, with introverts and extroverts and leaders and followers. That is our future workforce. And the fact that the technology is getting easier and more accessible frees that workforce up to study whatever they damn well please. Thank you. (Applause) |
It's time for the law to protect victims of gender violence | {0: "TED Fellow Laura L. Dunn advances and enforces victims' rights for survivors of gender violence in campus, criminal and civil legal systems."} | TED2018 | Throughout the United States, there is growing social awareness that sexual violence and harassment are far too common occurrences within our various institutions — occurrences often without any accountability. As a result, the Me Too movement is upon us, and survivors everywhere are speaking out to demand change. Students have rallied against sexual assault on campus. Service members have demanded Congress reform the military, and workers ranging from Hollywood stars to janitorial staff have called out sexual harassment in the workplace. This is a tipping point. This is when a social movement can create lasting legal change. But only if we switch tactics. Instead of going institution by institution, fighting for reform, it's time to go to the Constitution. As it stands, the US Constitution denies fundamental protections to victims of gender violence such as sexual assault, intimate partner violence and stalking. Specifically, the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits state governments from abusing its citizens, does not require state governments to intervene when private parties abuse its citizens. So what does that mean in real life? That means that when a woman calls the police from her home, afraid that an intruder may attack her, she is not entitled to the state's protection. Not only can the police fail to respond, but she will be left without any legal remedy if preventable harm occurs as a result. How can this be? It is because the state, theoretically, acts on behalf of all citizens collectively, not any one citizen individually. The resulting constitutional flaw directly contradicts international law, which requires nation-states to intervene and protect citizens against gender violence by private parties as a human right. Instead of requiring intervention, our Constitution leaves discretion — discretion that states have used to discriminate systemically to deny countless victims any remedy. Unlike what you may have seen on "Law & Order: SVU," justice is rare for victims of gender violence. And even in those rare cases where law enforcement has chosen to act, victims have no rights during the resulting criminal process. You see, victims are not parties in a criminal case. Rather, they are witnesses; their bodies, evidence. The prosecution does not represent the interests of a victim. Rather, the prosecution represents the interests of the state. And the state has the discretion to dismiss criminal charges, enter lax plea deals and otherwise remove a victim's voice from the process, because again, a state theoretically represents the interests of all citizens collectively and not any one citizen individually. Despite this constitutional flaw, some victims of gender violence have found protections under federal Civil Rights statutes, such as Title IX. Title IX is not just about sports. Rather, it prohibits all forms of sex discrimination, including sexual violence and harassment within educational programs that accept federal funding. While initially targeting sex discrimination within admissions, Title IX has actually evolved over time to require educational institutions to intervene and address gender violence when committed by certain parties, such as when teachers, students or campus visitors commit sexual assault or harassment. So what this means is that through Title IX, those who seek access to education are protected against gender violence in a way that otherwise does not exist under the law. It is Title IX that requires educational institutions to take reports of gender violence seriously, or to suffer liability. And through campus-level proceedings, Title IX goes so far as to give victims equitable rights during the campus process, which means that victims can represent their own interests during proceedings, rather than relying on educational institutions to do so. And that's really important, because educational institutions have historically swept gender violence under the rug, much like our criminal justice system does today. So while Civil Rights protects some victims, we should want to protect all victims. Rather than going institution by institution, fighting for reform on campus, in the military, in the workplace, it's time to go to the Constitution and pass the Equal Rights Amendment. Originally proposed in 1923, the Equal Rights Amendment would guarantee gender equality under the law, and much like Title IX on campus, that constitutional amendment could require states to intervene and address gender violence as a prohibitive form of sex discrimination. While the Equal Rights Amendment did not pass in the 1970s, it actually came within three states of doing so. And within the last year, at least one of those states has ratified the amendment, because we live in different political times. From the Women's March to the Me Too movement, we have the growing political will of the people necessary to create lasting, legal change. So as a victims' rights attorney fighting to increase the prospect of justice for survivors across the country and as a survivor myself, I'm not here to say, "Time's Up." I'm here to say, "It's time." It's time for accountability to become the norm after gender violence. It's time to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, so that our legal system can become a system of justice, and #MeToo can finally become "no more." Thank you. (Applause) |
To design better tech, understand context | {0: "Tania Douglas imagines how biomedical engineering can help address some of Africa's health challenges."} | TEDGlobal 2017 | This is an equipment graveyard. It's a typical final resting place for medical equipment from hospitals in Africa. Now, why is this? Most of the medical devices used in Africa are imported, and quite often, they're not suitable for local conditions. They may require trained staff that aren't available to operate and maintain and repair them; they may not be able to withstand high temperatures and humidity; and they usually require a constant and reliable supply of electricity. An example of a medical device that may have ended up in an equipment graveyard at some point is an ultrasound monitor to track the heart rate of unborn babies. This is the standard of care in rich countries. In low-resource settings, the standard of care is often a midwife listening to the baby's heart rate through a horn. Now, this approach has been around for more than a century. It's very much dependent on the skill and the experience of the midwife. Two young inventors from Uganda visited an antenatal clinic at a local hospital a few years ago, when they were students in information technology. They noticed that quite often, the midwife was not able to hear any heart rate when trying to listen to it through this horn. So they invented their own fetal heart rate monitor. They adapted the horn and connected it to a smartphone. An app on the smartphone records the heart rate, analyzes it and provides the midwife with a range of information on the status of the baby. These inventors — (Applause) are called Aaron Tushabe and Joshua Okello. Another inventor, Tendekayi Katsiga, was working for an NGO in Botswana that manufactured hearing aids. Now, he noticed that these hearing aids needed batteries that needed replacement, very often at a cost that was not affordable for most of the users that he knew. In response, and being an engineer, Tendekayi invented a solar-powered battery charger with rechargeable batteries, that could be used in these hearing aids. He cofounded a company called Deaftronics, which now manufactures the Solar Ear, which is a hearing aid powered by his invention. My colleague, Sudesh Sivarasu, invented a smart glove for people who have suffered from leprosy. Even though their disease may have been cured, the resulting nerve damage will have left many of them without a sense of touch in their hands. This puts them at risk of injury. The glove has sensors to detect temperature and pressure and warn the user. It effectively serves as an artificial sense of touch and prevents injury. Sudesh invented this glove after observing former leprosy patients as they carried out their day-to-day activities, and he learned about the risks and the hazards in their environment. Now, the inventors that I've mentioned integrated engineering with healthcare. This is what biomedical engineers do. At the University of Cape Town, we run a course called Health Innovation and Design. It's taken by many of our graduate students in biomedical engineering. The aim of the course is to introduce these students to the philosophy of the design world. The students are encouraged to engage with communities as they search for solutions to health-related problems. One of the communities that we work with is a group of elderly people in Cape Town. A recent class project had the task of addressing hearing loss in these elderly people. The students, many of them being engineers, set out believing that they would design a better hearing aid. They spent time with the elderly, chatted to their healthcare providers and their caregivers. They soon realized that, actually, adequate hearing aids already existed, but many of the elderly who needed them and had access to them didn't have them. And many of those who had hearing aids wouldn't wear them. The students realized that many of these elderly people were in denial of their hearing loss. There's a stigma attached to wearing a hearing aid. They also discovered that the environment in which these elderly people lived did not accommodate their hearing loss. For example, their homes and their community center were filled with echoes that interfered with their hearing. So instead of developing and designing a new and better hearing aid, the students did an audit of the environment, with a view to improving the acoustics. They also devised a campaign to raise awareness of hearing loss and to counter the stigma attached to wearing a hearing aid. Now, this often happens when one pays attention to the user — in this case, the elderly — and their needs and their context. One often has to move away from the focus of technology and reformulate the problem. This approach to understanding a problem through listening and engaging is not new, but it often isn't followed by engineers, who are intent on developing technology. One of our students has a background in software engineering. He had often created products for clients that the client ultimately did not like. When a client would reject a product, it was common at his company to proclaim that the client just didn't know what they wanted. Having completed the course, the student fed back to us that he now realized that it was he who hadn't understood what the client wanted. Another student gave us feedback that she had learned to design with empathy, as opposed to designing for functionality, which is what her engineering education had taught her. So what all of this illustrates is that we're often blinded to real needs in our pursuit of technology. But we need technology. We need hearing aids. We need fetal heart rate monitors. So how do we create more medical device success stories from Africa? How do we create more inventors, rather than relying on a few exceptional individuals who are able to perceive real needs and respond in ways that work? Well, we focus on needs and people and context. "But this is obvious," you might say, "Of course context is important." But Africa is a diverse continent, with vast disparities in health and wealth and income and education. If we assume that our engineers and inventors already know enough about the different African contexts to be able to solve the problems of our different communities and our most marginalized communities, then we might get it wrong. But then, if we on the African continent don't necessarily know enough about it, then perhaps anybody with the right level of skill and commitment could fly in, spend some time listening and engaging and fly out knowing enough to invent for Africa. But understanding context is not about a superficial interaction. It's about deep engagement and an immersion in the realities and the complexities of our context. And we in Africa are already immersed. We already have a strong and rich base of knowledge from which to start finding solutions to our own problems. So let's not rely too much on others when we live on a continent that is filled with untapped talent. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why you don't like the sound of your own voice | {0: 'Rébecca Kleinberger is a voice expert pursuing research as a PhD candidate in the MIT Media Lab’s Opera of the Future group. '} | TEDxBeaconStreet | If you ask evolutionary biologists when did humans become humans, some of them will say that, well, at some point we started standing on our feet, became biped and became the masters of our environment. Others will say that because our brain started growing much bigger, that we were able to have much more complex cognitive processes. And others might argue that it's because we developed language that allowed us to evolve as a species. Interestingly, those three phenomena are all connected. We are not sure how or in which order, but they are all linked with the change of shape of a little bone in the back of your neck that changed the angle between our head and our body. That means we were able to stand upright but also for our brain to evolve in the back and for our voice box to grow from seven centimeters for primates to 11 and up to 17 centimetres for humans. And this is called the descent of the larynx. And the larynx is the site of your voice. When baby humans are born today, their larynx is not descended yet. That only happens at about three months old. So, metaphorically, each of us here has relived the evolution of our whole species. And talking about babies, when you were starting to develop in your mother's womb, the first sensation that you had coming from the outside world, at only three weeks old, when you were about the size of a shrimp, were through the tactile sensation coming from the vibrations of your mother's voice. So, as we can see, the human voice is quite meaningful and important at the level of the species, at the level of the society — this is how we communicate and create bonds, and at the personal and interpersonal levels — with our voice, we share much more than words and data, we share basically who we are. And our voice is indistinguishable from how other people see us. It is a mask that we wear in society. But our relationship with our own voice is far from obvious. We rarely use our voice for ourselves; we use it as a gift to give to others. It is how we touch each other. It's a dialectical grooming. But what do we think about our own voice? So please raise your hand if you don't like the sound of your voice when you hear it on a recording machine. (Laughter) Yeah, thank you, indeed, most people report not liking the sound of their voice recording. So what does that mean? Let's try to understand that in the next 10 minutes. I'm a researcher at the MIT Media Lab, part of the Opera of the Future group, and my research focuses on the relationship people have with their own voice and with the voices of others. I study what we can learn from listening to voices, from the various fields, from neurology to biology, cognitive sciences, linguistics. In our group we create tools and experiences to help people gain a better applied understanding of their voice in order to reduce the biases, to become better listeners, to create more healthy relationships or just to understand themselves better. And this really has to come with a holistic approach on the voice. Because, think about all the applications and implications that the voice may have, as we discover more about it. Your voice is a very complex phenomenon. It requires a synchronization of more than 100 muscles in your body. And by listening to the voice, we can understand possible failures of what happens inside. For example: listening to very specific types of turbulences and nonlinearity of the voice can help predict very early stages of Parkinson's, just through a phone call. Listening to the breathlessness of the voice can help detect heart disease. And we also know that the changes of tempo inside individual words is a very good marker of depression. Your voice is also very linked with your hormone levels. Third parties listening to female voices were able to very accurately place the speaker on their menstrual cycle. Just with acoustic information. And now with technology listening to us all the time, Alexa from Amazon Echo might be able to predict if you're pregnant even before you know it. So think about — (Laughter) Think about the ethical implications of that. Your voice is also very linked to how you create relationships. You have a different voice for every person you talk to. If I take a little snippet of your voice and I analyze it, I can know whether you're talking to your mother, to your brother, your friend or your boss. We can also use, as a predictor, the vocal posture. Meaning, how you decide to place your voice when you talk to someone. And you vocal posture, when you talk to your spouse, can help predict not only if, but also when you will divorce. So there is a lot to learn from listening to voices. And I believe this has to start with understanding that we have more than one voice. So, I'm going to talk about three voices that most of us posses, in a model of what I call the mask. So when you look at the mask, what you see is a projection of a character. Let's call that your outward voice. This is also the most classic way to think about the voice, it's a way of projecting yourself in the world. The mechanism for this projection is well understood. Your lungs contract your diaphragm and that creates a self-sustained vibration of your vocal fold, that creates a sound. And then the way you open and close the cavities in you mouth, your vocal tract is going to transform the sound. So everyone has the same mechanism. But voices are quite unique. It's because very subtle differences in size, physiology, in hormone levels are going to make very subtle differences in your outward voice. And your brain is very good at picking up those subtle differences from other people's outward voices. In our lab, we are working on teaching machines to understand those subtle differences. And we use deep learning to create a real-time speaker identification system to help raise awareness on the use of the shared vocal space — so who talks and who never talks during meetings — to increase group intelligence. And one of the difficulties with that is that your voice is also not static. We already said that it changes with every person you talk to but it also changes generally throughout your life. At the beginning and at the end of the journey, male and female voices are very similar. It's very hard to distinguish the voice of a very young girl from the voice of a very young boy. But in between, your voice becomes a marker of your fluid identity. Generally, for male voices there's a big change at puberty. And then for female voices, there is a change at each pregnancy and a big change at menopause. So all of that is the voice other people hear when you talk. So why is it that we're so unfamiliar with it? Why is it that it's not the voice that we hear? So, let's think about it. When you wear a mask, you actually don't see the mask. And when you try to observe it, what you will see is inside of the mask. And that's your inward voice. So to understand why it's different, let's try to understand the mechanism of perception of this inward voice. Because your body has many ways of filtering it differently from the outward voice. So to perceive this voice, it first has to travel to your ears. And your outward voice travels through the air while your inward voice travels through your bones. This is called bone conduction. Because of this, your inward voice is going to sound in a lower register and also more musically harmonical than your outward voice. Once it travels there, it has to access your inner ear. And there's this other mechanism taking place here. It's a mechanical filter, it's a little partition that comes and protects your inner ear each time you produce a sound. So it also reduces what you hear. And then there is a third filter, it's a biological filter. Your cochlea — it's a part of your inner ear that processes the sound — is made out of living cells. And those living cells are going to trigger differently according to how often they hear the sound. It's a habituation effect. So because of this, as your voice is the sound you hear the most in your life, you actually hear it less than other sounds. Finally, we have a fourth filter. It's a neurological filter. Neurologists found out recently that when you open your mouth to create a sound, your own auditory cortex shuts down. So you hear your voice but your brain actually never listens to the sound of your voice. Well, evolutionarily that might make sense, because we know cognitively what we are going to sound like so maybe we don't need to spend energy analyzing the signal. And this is called a corollary discharge and it happens for every motion that your body does. The exact definition of a corollary discharge is a copy of a motor command that is sent by the brain. This copy doesn't create any motion itself but instead is sent to other regions of the brain to inform them of the impending motion. And for the voice, this corollary discharge also has a different name. It is your inner voice. So let's recapitulate. We have the mask, the outward voice, the inside of the mask, your inward voice, and then you have your inner voice. And I like to see this one as the puppeteer that holds the strings of the whole system. Your inner voice is the one you hear when you read a text silently, when you rehearse for an important conversation. Sometimes is hard to turn it off, it's really hard to look at the text written in your native language, without having this inner voice read it. It's also the voice that refuse to stop singing the stupid song you have in your head. (Laughter) And for some people it's actually impossible to control it. And that's the case of schizophrenic patients, who have auditory hallucinations. Who can't distinguish at all between voices coming from inside and outside their head. So in our lab, we are also working on small devices to help those people make those distinctions and know if a voice is internal or external. You can also think about the inner voice as the voice that speaks in your dream. This inner voice can take many forms. And in your dreams, you actually unleash the potential of this inner voice. That's another work we are doing in our lab: trying to access this inner voice in dreams. So even if you can't always control it, the inner voice — you can always engage with it through dialogue, through inner dialogues. And you can even see this inner voice as the missing link between thought and actions. So I hope I've left you with a better appreciation, a new appreciation of all of your voices and the role it plays inside and outside of you — as your voice is a very critical determinant of what makes you humans and of how you interact with the world. Thank you. (Applause) |
How to build (and rebuild) trust | {0: 'Frances Frei is a professor of technology and operations management at the Harvard Business School.'} | TED2018 | I want to talk to you about how to build and rebuild trust, because it's my belief that trust is the foundation for everything we do, and that if we can learn to trust one another more, we can have unprecedented human progress. But what if trust is broken? What if your CEO is caught on video, disparaging an employee? What if your employees experience a culture of bias, exclusion and worse? What if there's a data breach, and it feels an awful lot like a cover-up than seriously addressing it? And most tragically, what if a technological fail leads to the loss of human life? If I was giving this talk six months ago, I would have been wearing an Uber T-shirt. I'm a Harvard Business School professor, but I was super attracted to going to an organization that was metaphorically and perhaps quite literally on fire. I had read everything that was written in the newspaper, and that was precisely what drew me to the organization. This was an organization that had lost trust with every constituent that mattered. But there's a word about me that I should share. My favorite trait is redemption. I believe that there is a better version of us around every corner, and I have seen firsthand how organizations and communities and individuals change at breathtaking speed. I went to Uber with the hopes that a turnaround there could give license to the rest of us who might have narrower versions of their challenges. But when I got to Uber, I made a really big mistake. I publicly committed to wearing an Uber T-shirt every day until every other employee was wearing an Uber T-shirt. I had clearly not thought that through. (Laughter) It was 250 days of wearing an Uber T-shirt. Now I am liberated from that commitment, as I am back at HBS, and what I'd like to do is share with you how far I have taken that liberty, which, it's baby steps, (Laughter) but I would just say I'm on my way. (Laughter) Now, trust, if we're going to rebuild it, we have to understand its component parts. The component parts of trust are super well understood. There's three things about trust. If you sense that I am being authentic, you are much more likely to trust me. If you sense that I have real rigor in my logic, you are far more likely to trust me. And if you believe that my empathy is directed towards you, you are far more likely to trust me. When all three of these things are working, we have great trust. But if any one of these three gets shaky, if any one of these three wobbles, trust is threatened. Now here's what I'd like to do. I want each of us to be able to engender more trust tomorrow, literally tomorrow, than we do today. And the way to do that is to understand where trust wobbles for ourselves and have a ready-made prescription to overcome it. So that's what I would like to do together. Would you give me some sense of whether or not you're here voluntarily? (Laughter) Yeah. OK. Alright. Awesome. OK. So — (Laughter) it's just super helpful feedback. (Laughter) So the most common wobble is empathy. The most common wobble is that people just don't believe that we're mostly in it for them, and they believe that we're too self-distracted. And it's no wonder. We are all so busy with so many demands on our time, it's easy to crowd out the time and space that empathy requires. For Dylan to be Dylan, that takes real time. And for us, if we have too much to do, we may not have that time. But that puts us into a vicious cycle, because without revealing empathy, it makes everything harder. Without the benefit of the doubt of trust, it makes everything harder, and then we have less and less time for empathy, and so it goes. So here's the prescription: identify where, when and to whom you are likely to offer your distraction. That should trace pretty perfectly to when, where and to whom you are likely to withhold your empathy. And if in those instances, we can come up with a trigger that gets us to look up, look at the people right in front of us, listen to them, deeply immerse ourselves in their perspectives, then we have a chance of having a sturdy leg of empathy. And if you do nothing else, please put away your cell phone. It is the largest distraction magnet yet to be made, and it is super difficult to create empathy and trust in its presence. That takes care of the empathy wobblers. Logic wobbles can come in two forms. It's either the quality of your logic or it's your ability to communicate the logic. Now if the quality of your logic is at risk, I can't really help you with that. (Laughter) It's like, not in this much time. (Laughter) But fortunately, it's often the case that our logic is sound, but it's our ability to communicate the logic that is in jeopardy. Super fortunately, there's a very easy fix to this. If we consider that there are two ways to communicate in the world, and Harvard Business School professors are known for two-by-twos — nonsense, it's the triangle that rocks. (Laughter) If we consider that there are two ways to communicate in the world, and the first one is when you take us on a journey, a magnificent journey that has twists and turns and mystery and drama, until you ultimately get to the point, and some of the best communicators in the world communicate just like this. But if you have a logic wobble, this can be super dangerous. So instead, I implore you, start with your point in a crisp half-sentence, and then give your supporting evidence. This means that people will be able to get access to our awesome ideas, and just as importantly, if you get cut off before you're done ... ladies — (Laughter) (Applause) If you get cut off before you're done, you still get credit for the idea, as opposed to someone else coming in and snatching it from you. (Applause) You just gave me goosebumps. (Laughter) The third wobble is authenticity, and I find it to be the most vexing. We as a human species can sniff out in a moment, literally in a moment, whether or not someone is being their authentic true self. So in many ways, the prescription is clear. You don't want to have an authenticity wobble? Be you. Great. And that is super easy to do when you're around people who are like you. But if you represent any sort of difference, the prescription to "be you" can be super challenging. I have been tempted at every step of my career, tempted personally and tempted by coaching of others, to mute who I am in the world. I'm a woman of super strong opinions, with really deep convictions, direct speech. I have a magnificent wife, and together, we have such crazy ambition. I prefer men's clothes and comfortable shoes. Thank you, Allbirds. (Laughter) In some contexts, this makes me different. I hope that each person here has the beautiful luxury of representing difference in some context in your life. But with that privilege comes a very sincere temptation to hold back who we are, and if we hold back who we are, we're less likely to be trusted. And if we're less likely to be trusted, we're less likely to be given stretch assignments. And without those stretch assignments, we're less likely to get promoted, and so on and so on until we are super depressed by the demographic tendencies of our senior leadership. (Laughter) And it all comes back to our being our authentic selves. So here's my advice. Wear whatever makes you feel fabulous. Pay less attention to what you think people want to hear from you and far more attention to what your authentic, awesome self needs to say. And to the leaders in the room, it is your obligation to set the conditions that not only make it safe for us to be authentic but make it welcome, make it celebrated, cherish it for exactly what it is, which is the key for us achieving greater excellence than we have ever known is possible. So let's go back to Uber. What happened at Uber? When I got there, Uber was wobbling all over the place. Empathy, logic, authenticity were all wobbling like crazy. But we were able to find super effective, super quick fixes for two of the wobbles. I'll give you an illustration of empathy. In the meetings at Uber, it was not uncommon for people to be texting one another ... about the meeting. (Laughter) I had never seen anything like it. (Laughter) It may have done many things, but it did not create a safe, empathetic environment. The solution though, super clear: technology, off and away. And that forced people to look up, to look at the people in front of them, to listen to them, to immerse themselves in their perspectives and to collaborate in unprecedented ways. Logic was equally wobbly, and this was because the hypergrowth of the organization meant that people, managers were getting promoted again and again and again. Soon, they were put in positions that they had no business being in. Their positions outstripped their capability, and it was not their fault. The solution: a massive influx of executive education that focused specifically on logic, on strategy and leadership. It gave people the rigor of the quality of their logic, and it turned a whole lot of triangles, right-side up, so people were able to communicate effectively with one another. The last one, authenticity, I'll say it's still mighty wobbly, but honestly, that doesn't make Uber very different from all of the other companies I've seen in Silicon Valley and beyond. It is still much easier to coach people to fit in. It is still much easier to reward people when they say something that you were going to say, as opposed to rewarding people when they say something entirely different than what you were going to say. But when we figure out this, when we figure out how to celebrate difference and how to let people bring the best version of themselves forward, well holy cow, is that the world I want my sons to grow up in. And with the collection of people here, it would be a privilege to lock arms with you and go ahead and rebuild trust in every corner of the globe. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Why we need to pay attention to Chinese millennials | {0: 'Growing up in China while its youth culture was transforming, then living in the US and Germany, Sebastian Guo has witnessed a diversity of burgeoning millennial cultures. He began his UPS career in Atlanta as an international marketing intern, identifying opportunities in markets around the world. Now he works in Singapore, where he develops marketing analytics and infrastructure to drive revenue growth across 14 Asian markets.'} | TED@UPS | The year is 1418. On the horizon, a shimmering vision under the blazing sun. This is not a cloud, or anything you've ever seen before. It's an enormous ship followed by dozens and dozens more. Strange men come towards you in their white robes carrying with them knowledge and treasures from a distant land. This unimaginable assemblage was led by Admiral Zheng He who established the first-ever sea route connecting the western Pacific to the Indian Ocean. The influence of this voyage was so profound that it changed the local cultures wherever it landed. With navigation skills, shipbuilding techniques, Chinese etiquette and social practices on display. Even today, the impact of Admiral Zheng's armada can be traced from Africa all the way back to Asia. I'm here to tell you that another invasion is happening 600 years later and this one will impact you. This one is also led by Chinese, but this time, it's Chinese millennials. (Laughter) I know a ton has been written and said about American millennials - it's all you guys talk about! You're trying to study them, label them, define them, and most importantly, you're trying to cater to them. (Laughter) I'd like to suggest that you might be looking at the wrong group of millennials on the wrong continent. Because whether you're ready or not, we Chinese millennials are about to take over the world! (Laughter) But luckily, I'm here to help you. (Laughter) Here are five things you must know for surviving the impending Chinese millennial invasion. (Laughter) Number one: We are many! (Laughter) Do you know how many American millennials you have today? 90 million. That's a lot. Now, imagine that times five. That's how many of us there are. With a population of around 400 million, we Chinese millennials are proud to be the third biggest country in the world. Most of the talk about American millennials is related to the workplace. With almost five times the amount of American millennials, Chinese millennials are an enormous labor pool. And we're being completely overlooked in the U.S. Who would you rather hire? A new employee who is the best out of 100 people? Or a new employee who is the best out of 500? And since there are so many of us, you'll be seeing more of us in places you never thought of. Don't believe me? This guy seems pretty popular here. (Laughter) He might look old; he's actually one of us millennials. 20 years ago, who would have imagined that a seven foot-plus tall Chinese athlete would become the only non-American player to lead the NBA in all-star voting. Number two: We're well educated and super motivated. Because of the high population density and limited resources, labor is easily replaceable in China. We are required to work harder and be more motivated just to compete with our peers. We're surely not all of the labor pool in China. I contacted Dx Consulting. Today, 57 percent of Chinese millennials have a bachelor's degree; 23 percent of us have a master's degree; and 20 percent have an associate's degree. And of course, we're not just educated in China. In the U.S. in 2014 and '15, 42 percent of Chinese students were studying STEM - science, technology, engineering, mathematics - versus 12 percent for American students. 27 percent of us were studying business and management versus 16 for all students studying in the U.S. We are choosing majors that can give us a competitive edge, and in turn, higher exposure and impact in Western society. Are you having a hard time motivating your American millennial employees? (Laughter) Well, Chinese millennials don't need you to spend a dime on a Foosball table or an in-house coffee shop. (Laughter) (Applause) We are already super motivated and qualified. (Laughter) And we're more than happy to take on the tough jobs. In fact, we've been preparing for it. Number three: We are the Bruce Lee in Levi's with a smartphone who shop online every day. Chinese millennials are multicultural. I even used chopsticks to eat Georgian barbecue when I was interning here in Atlanta. And I was more devastated at this guy's death than my best scores on my Chinese exam. We are really digital. In 2017, smartphone penetration rates is almost 100 percent for those of us who are ages 18 to 34. We are also shaping mobile payment as well as the economy. According to a 2017 survey from Labbrand, 86 percent of Chinese millennials use mobile payment in physical shops at least once a week, versus 45 percent for American millennials. And according to Dx Consulting, we spend four times what American millennials spend for mobile purchases. The U.S. is the center of the digital universe. But for how much longer? If you want to buy the best digital real estate in the virtual world of the future, I suggest that China is a prime location. The good news for foreign companies hoping to capture part of the Chinese millennial market is that my cohort is extremely mobile and adventurous. Here's my personal travel map for the last couple of years. The desire to see the world dominates our consumption habits. We aren't just spending money at home, we are also making purchases and using web services from foreign companies like Airbnb and Uber when we travel overseas. Sure, you buy things from us, and we buy things from you. (Laughter) So next time you have a meeting on how to exploit millennial markets, keep in mind that Chinese millennials - not American - are the biggest emerging consumer demographic on the planet. Number four: We're big picture people. Do you know how big China is? It's around the same size as the States. But we all know that there are four time zones across the contiguous United States. In China, we've got one. In China, everything is perceived as one. One time zone, one official language, one party, despite diverse ethnicities and cultures. Our thinking always starts from the overview to the specific. The Chinese way of writing an address is country, city, and street. And we write the date: year, month, and day. And because we are such big picture people, we focus much more on growth and the future than Americans in the workplace. We tend to look at a company as a whole and see how we fit into it. And number five: We're still Confucian individualists. Granted, we Chinese millennials are acting more and more individual nowadays, but ten years of iPhone and online dating apps cannot wipe out thousands of years of Confucian cultures. A sense of hierarchy is still deeply entrenched in our understanding and construction of social relations. In my mind, a child is supposed to show respect to his parents just like if I'm a subordinate. I'm expected to show respect to a senior manager. I don't think we should disagree with our bosses or criticize them, at least not directly or publicly. (Laughter) (Laughter) My American friends are more likely to challenge authority and power, and I think that's a good thing. We might learn a little bit from American millennials on that, but I do like our respect for hierarchy and experience, and I don't want to see that go away. In 20 years, we'll all still be millennials, but we'll be 40, we'll be in bigger positions of power, and we'll have much more opportunity to change the world like we insist we know how to do right now. And I really hope we do. Everybody knows the Great Wall of China. Even those ancient walls were crossed by Admiral Zheng He 600 years ago, and our new border, if we even had one, is far beyond the old one. Whether you're trying to build your own walls, keep out what you don't want, keep in what you do, hold in your pride, keep out competition, all those things are going to happen anyway. The world is flat. It's flat! But it's tilted toward China now. (Laughter) And I can assure you, we Chinese millennials are ready to be the explorers in this new adventure from the Far East. Thank you. (Applause) (Cheers) |
When goods cross borders, armies stay home | {0: 'Can we use trade to fight terrorism? Romaine Seguin believes that when communities are isolated from the global economy, they risk becoming breeding grounds for terrorist groups -- and trade may be a way to ward off this isolation. Seguin illuminates home grown global businesses, like the Haiti-based Deux Mains, which can provide the jobs and security that are the most impactful tools of humanitarian aid. '} | TED@UPS | Two years ago, in a small village in Nigeria, men with AK-47s stormed Chibok Government Secondary School. Men from the extremist group, Boko Haram, kidnapped 276 young, innocent schoolgirls. Today, 218 are still missing. I worked in and out of Nigeria for three years starting in 2007, and I remember seeing the kids going to school along dirt roads. They had smiles, they were polite, they were dressed neatly. They often talked about the books they were reading. That was tough on the kids, but they went to school for a safe place. They went to school for dreams of a better future. But turning those dreams into reality in Nigeria is difficult, because 61% of the people live at poverty level. Compare that to the US at 15%. The annual income is slightly below $6,000; compare that to the US, of $56,000. Now you see the problem. But I wasn't there in Nigeria trying to resolve an income disparity. I wasn't there trying to volunteer for a charity, or to set up a nonprofit organization. I was there to promote trade where it's very limited. I strongly believe when communities are isolated from the global economy, they could become the breeding grounds of groups like Boko Haram. Just the definition of "Boko Haram" stands for: "Western education is forbidden." That isolation in itself is dangerous. I ask you one question: Would those girls still be in school in Chibok if the conditions were different that gave rise to Boko Haram? You know, you have to wonder, what if Nigerian people had access to gain full employment? Or villages like Chibok were more integrated in the global economy? Or families could break that poverty cycle through jobs and education? Trade is a powerful weapon. Trade can fight against poverty and injustice. Trade is the gun to combat human trafficking. Trade provides medicine to the sick. Trade provides a roof for people in need of shelter. Trade is the answer to give dignity back to millions of unprivileged people. Trade is a humanitarian's strongest weapon. I work for a company that facilitates trade in 220 countries, and I've personally assisted trade in 46 of them. I've seen trade in action. I see trade work. But you don't have to take my word for it: economists have been studying it for years. In his book "The World Is Flat," Tom Friedman said when countries trade with each other, they're the same supply chain, and they don't inflict military damage on each other. But Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1945, said it best: "When goods do not cross borders, armies do." So what is this magical weapon I call "trade"? It's simple: I have something you want, you have something I need. We make an exchange. But the question is: How can something so simple have such a dramatic impact on poverty and security? Let's start with poverty. There's no better example than China. Before China adopted economic reform 37 years ago, it maintained policies to keep the country poor. Then in 1979, it implemented economic reform. It allowed international trade and foreign investment. And we all know what happened — China's the fastest-growing economy. But here's something: In that nation, in 1990, the annual income was only $980. Fast-forward to 2015, it's a little over $14,000. The poverty levels decreased [from] 84% from 1980 to 10% in 2013. The unemployment rate is at 4.1%, slightly below 4.9% of that in the US. Let's talk security. I started traveling in Colombia in 2010, and people were saying, "Are you scared? Are you nervous?" And that's because, 10 to 15 years earlier, the drug lords and the drug cartel would kidnap and torture people. But then the government pumped in economic resources, and they stabilized their political platform. That made a huge difference. I feel very safe going to Colombia, seeing customers. In fact, I just got back from Bogotá last week. Colombia thanks trade for improved security, reduction of poverty, and a very attractive image to the world. And I have a beautiful example of that. Colombia exported $1.3 billion of roses and flowers in 2013, with 75% coming to the US. So you see, trade clearly is a powerful weapon to fight poverty and crime. But it doesn't stop there. If I was to say "Haiti," what would pop into your mind? Earthquake, hunger, poverty. Would anyone think of fashion? In 2010, the earthquake killed 230,000 Haitians, and displaced 1.5 million. Julie Colombino from Orlando, Florida went there to help. She saw humanitarian aid pour in, but she knew it wasn't sustainable. She started a nonprofit company called "REBUILD globally," and this nonprofit taught Haitians how to make sandals out of old tires, which are very abundant there. From that nonprofit company, spun Deux Mains, a profit company, and that caught the eye of Kenneth Cole. Haiti has something the fashion world needs. They have great designs, they have top-quality craftsmanship, they have eco-friendly products. Kenneth Cole has the global brand and the distribution model to give Deux Mains shoes to the world. Trade, pure and simple. Deux Mains has made more than 2,400 pairs of sandals for Kenneth Cole, and now is in negotiation with Ron Jon, another global brand. These sandals I have on today? Yes, they've got the old tires on the bottom of them. But my purchase was made to help Haiti out of poverty. My $70 I paid wasn't a charitable contribution, it wasn't a handout. It was basic economics. It was trade at work. Julie Colombino shared with me that for every 250 pairs of shoes produced, one more Haitian is employed. So that got me thinking. In the United States, each of us buys seven and a half pairs of shoes a year. That's 2.4 billion pairs of shoes. Now just think: If one-tenth of 1% was produced in Deux Mains, that would be 2.4 million pairs of shoes. But more importantly, it would pump $120 million into the Haitian economy, and give almost 10,000 people a job. That type of employment in Haiti would have a ripple effect. And as workshop supervisor Jolina Auguste told me, the more sandals they sell, the less thieves on the street. So you see, when people have a job, security, money, they don't take other people's stuff. They don't resort to crime to survive. They don't get caught up with the drug lords like in Colombia, or terrorism that teaches them how to use AK-47s. The Global Terrorist Index report in 2015 said economic conditions play a very important part in one's decision to pursue violent extremism. The report also says Boko Haram is the most deadly terrorist organization in the world. And it recruits from the most economically marginalized regions in Nigeria. But on the other hand, if there is industrial growth, there's less domestic and international terrorism. According to a 2015 study that was published in the Oxford Economic Papers, when industrial growth increases by 1%, domestic terrorism decreases by 1%. So what does that mean? When communities gain access to the global economy through trade, they reap so many benefits. I stand here and ask you one last question: If Chibok were more connected through trade, and those young men who joined Boko Haram had an option to get a job in the formal economy, would those girls still be in school? I think so. Trade would have given them a weapon to fight terrorism. Trade would have given them hope. Thank you. (Applause) |
The hidden messages in multiplication | {0: 'Uma Adwani is a billing supervisor at UPS’s global service center in Pune, India. She grew up a math-hater in a small town in India, at one point proposing that she was allergic to numbers. But this all changed when she was assigned to teach math as a primary school teacher in the Indian metropolis of Pune. She discovered something magical in multiplication tables, and her love story with math began.'} | TED@UPS | Namaste. I'm from India. The home of ancient mathematics. But me, I just hated math. (Laughter) Until it saved my life. I grew up in Akola, a small town 700 miles away from the capital city. In my community, we never had a culture of girls attending school beyond the age of 10 or 12 years. In fact, some women would tell me, "Why do you need education? Just learn the household work so that you can take care of your family." But I never wanted to abide myself by the "normal" rules for girls. And I would think to myself, instead of just learning the household work, why not learn how to make money so that I can actually take care of my family? (Laughter) I knew if I had to do something different, I would have to stay in school. But that was hard. As it was socially not accepted, everybody was against it. But I was a stubborn young girl. I did everything I could to continue studying, even if that meant stitching school uniforms or making festival greeting cards. I did all that. Well, I had excellent grades in all subjects. All except one. You guessed it: math. All these calculations, formulas, multiplication; I just couldn't get them right. After I finished college, I realized I had no future in Akola, so I decided to do something almost nobody in my town had ever done before: to leave my home town, by myself, a single woman. Nobody wanted me to do that. I remember when I walked up to my mom and told her, "Mama, I'm leaving." She looked at me and said, "Uma, I know how difficult it is for you and even for me, and I cannot even support you openly, but I want you to have this." And she hands me a gold bangle. That was the only jewelry left with her. She said, "I don't have much but this is for you to buy the bus ticket." You can see the bus ticket here. It's been ten years. I still have this. As a promise that I won't let my mom sacrifice anything more for me. So, on 22nd of July, 2007, I arrived in Pune, a city of four million people. I had never been out of my village before so being in the city for the first time, I was mesmerized and excited. And scared as well. I didn't even know if I could trust the taxi driver while taking the taxi for the first time in an unknown city. Life in the city was extremely hard at first. I was away from my family, didn't have any friends. I had brought very little money with me; around three and a half dollars. So I used to eat every second day - every other day - so that I can save as much as I can. Yes, good things take time, but they do happen. And finally, it happened to me. I was given an opportunity to work in a primary school, as a teacher. Wow, I was so happy. Until I got to know the subject they gave me to teach. (Laughter) Yes, it was math. (Laughter) And I'm like, "Oh God, how will I teach something I hate so much?" (Laughter) But I had no choice so I started teaching math. You know, the basics like multiplication tables. I remember I struggled every night to figure out lessons for my students. I was hating it. And I was afraid if I didn't do well, I might not make it. But the more I worked on it, trying to make it interesting, trying to make it fun, the more I realized the pattern in these numbers. As if these multiplication tables were sending me a message, I sensed as if these numbers were talking to me. And that's when I figured out the magic these odd and even numbers have; the poetry, the symmetry they have. Let me show you what I mean: Let's look at table of three for example. Feels like we are back in school? (Laughter) Three, we all know it's an odd number. And if I multiply three with another odd number, it gives me a result which is definitely an odd number. Like this one here: Three times three gives us nine. An odd number. And then I noticed something very interesting about it. If I multiply an odd number with an even number, it ultimately becomes an even number, like this one here. Three times four gives us 12. An even number. So, odd multiplied with odd, the result has to definitely be an odd number. But odd multiplied with something even, no matter how many times you do it, it will definitely give us an even number. And I'm like, this is quite me. With all the odds I was up against, if I multiply my odd situation, with my odd behavior ... (Laughter) (Applause) So what happens? I get myself into another odd situation. (Laughter) But the magic is, if I multiply my odd situations with my even behavior, with my positive behavior, it gets me to better results, to even results. And if one doesn't stop when the situations are odd like this, if one keeps pushing himself, keeps multiplying his blessings, keeps multiplying his skills, even though the beginning is, the end will never be odd. Wow, so once I got to know this, I was like, if something odd can teach me such a valuable lesson of life, I'm sure there is something interesting about the even numbers as well. (Laughter) So, let's look at table of two, for example. What I notice here is every time, right from the beginning to the end, all multiplication results are even, without any odds. And how is it possible? That's possible because the number itself which is getting multiplied, is an even number. This tells me if I am even to myself, as an individual, nothing odd will come my way. (Laughter) Now this of course doesn't mean I don't come across any odd or bad situations. I certainly do. But facing them with even attitude makes the whole difference. That's how, even though I have to struggle hard for my basic rights, instead of being upset and angry, I am happy and even to myself, because the struggle made me stronger, made me who I am today. Now I have these learnings, these secrets from all different multiplication tables. One of my favorites is table of 11. And I think most of us liked, when we were in school, because that is the easiest one to multiply. What I love about this is the perfect symmetry in it. The one and one, the two and two. Isn't that beautiful? And easy, of course. For me, the question was: How can I have my life this similarly easy and beautiful? For me these two symmetrical numbers reflect the outside me and the inside me. I can live in harmony, I can live in peace only when my outside matches my inner being. Isn't this all we're looking for? We can be anybody; maybe two, maybe three. Whoever we are, unless or until our inside personality matches our outside personality, our outside personality matches our inside personality, we cannot live in peace, we cannot live in harmony. Now, because math became my art, became my reminder, my guide of what I needed to do, and what my goal was, I started loving math. Because of this, I was not only able to keep my job, but also make it interesting for others. Now ten years down the line, I have a wonderful job in a great company. I am able to move my entire family to Pune to live with me. Now nobody says I shouldn't have done this. Rather everyone appreciates for what I stood for. As kids, we all are asked to solve math problems. But in reality, math solved many of my problems. Thank you for having me. Dhanyavaad (Thank you). (Applause) (Cheers) |
What it takes to be racially literate | {0: 'Priya Vulchi is a co-founder of CHOOSE and author of "Tell Me Who You Are" (Penguin Random House, June 2019). She will graduate from Princeton University in 2022.', 1: 'Winona Guo is a co-founder of CHOOSE and author of "Tell Me Who You Are" (Penguin Random House, June 2019). She will graduate from Harvard College in 2022.'} | TEDWomen 2017 | Priya Vulchi: Four years ago, we really thought we understood racism. Just like many of you here today, we had experienced and heard stories about race, about prejudice, discrimination and stereotyping and we were like, "We get it, racism, we got it, we got it." But we weren't even close. Winona Guo: So we decided that we had to listen and learn more. We talked to as many random people as we could and collected hundreds of personal stories about race, stories that revealed how racial injustice is a nationwide epidemic that we ourselves spread and now can't seem to recognize or get rid of. PV: We're not there yet. Today, we are here to raise our standards of racial literacy, to redefine what it means to be racially literate. WG: We want everywhere across the United States for our youngest and future generations to grow up equipped with the tools to understand, navigate and improve a world structured by racial division. We want us all to imagine the community as a place where we not only feel proud of our own backgrounds, but can also invest in others' experiences as if they were our own. PV: We just graduated from high school this past June. WG: And you'd think — (Applause) And you'd think after 12 years somebody in or out of the classroom would have helped us understand — PV: At a basic level at least — WG: The society we live in. PV: The truth for almost all our classmates is that they don't. WG: In communities around our country, so many of which are racially divided, PV: If you don't go searching for an education about race, for racial literacy — WG: You won't get it. It won't just come to you. PV: Even when we did have conversations about race, our understanding was always superficial. We realized that there are two big gaps in our racial literacy. WG: First, the heart gap: an inability to understand each of our experiences, to fiercely and unapologetically be compassionate beyond lip service. PV: And second, the mind gap: an inability to understand the larger, systemic ways in which racism operates. WG: First, the heart gap. To be fair, race did pop up a few times in school, growing up. We all defend our social justice education because we learned about Martin Luther King Jr. and Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks. But even in all of those conversations, race always felt outdated, like, "Yes, slavery, that happened once upon a time, but why does it really matter now?" As a result, we didn't really care. But what if our teacher introduced a story from the present day, for example, how Treniya told us in Pittsburgh that — PV: "My sister was scrolling through Facebook and typed in our last name. This white guy popped up, and we found out that his great-great-grandfather owned slaves and my great-great- great-grandmother was one of them. My last name — it's not who I am. We've been living under a white man's name. If slavery didn't happen, who would I even be?" WG: Now it feels relevant, immediate, because the connection to slavery's lasting legacy today is made clear, right? Or what would happen is our teacher would throw out these cold statistics. You've probably seen this one before in news headlines. PV: African-Americans are incarcerated more than five times the rate of white people. WG: Now consider Ronnie, in Seattle. PV: "My father means everything to me. He's all I've got, I don't know my mother. My father's currently being wrongly incarcerated for 12 years. I've got a daughter, and I try to be that same fatherly figure for her: always involved in everything she does, it might even be annoying at some points. But I'm afraid I'll go missing in her life just like my father did in mine." WG: Throwing out just the statistic, just the facts alone, disconnected from real humans, can lead to dangerously incomplete understanding of those facts. It fails to recognize that for many people who don't understand racism the problem is not a lack of knowledge to talk about the pain of white supremacy and oppression, it's that they don't recognize that that pain exists at all. They don't recognize the human beings that are being affected, and they don't feel enough to care. PV: Second, the mind gap. We can't ignore the stats, either. We can't truly grasp Ronnie's situation without understanding how things like unjust laws and biased policing systematic racism has created the disproportionate incarceration rates over time. Or like how in Honolulu, the large prison population of native Hawaiians like Kimmy is heavily influenced by the island's long history with US colonialization, its impact passing down through generations to today. For us, sometimes we would talk about people's personal, unique experiences in the classroom. Stuff like, how Justin once told us — WG: "I've been working on psychologically reclaiming my place in this city. Because for me, my Chicago isn't the nice architecture downtown, it's not the North Side. My Chicago is the orange line, the pink line, the working immigrant class going on the train." PV: And while we might have acknowledged his personal experience, we wouldn't have talked about how redlining and the legalized segregation of our past created the racially divided neighborhoods we live in today. We wouldn't have completely understood how racism is embedded in the framework of everything around us, because we would stay narrowly focused on people's isolated experiences. Another example, Sandra in DC once told us: WG: "When I'm with my Korean family, I know how to move with them. I know what to do in order to have them feel like I care about them. And making and sharing food is one of the most fundamental ways of showing love. When I'm with my partner who's not Korean, however, we've had to grapple with the fact that I'm very food-centric and he's just not. One time he said that he didn't want to be expected to make food for me, and I got really upset." PV: That might seem like a weird reaction, but only if we don't recognize how it's emblematic of something larger, something deeper. Intragenerational trauma. How in Sandra's family, widespread hunger and poverty existed as recently as Sandra's parents' generation and therefore impacts Sandra today. She experiences someone saying — WG: "I don't want to feed you." PV: As — WG: "I don't want to hug you." PV: And without her and her partner having that nuanced understanding of her reaction and the historical context behind it, it could easily lead to unnecessary fighting. That's why it's so important that we proactively — (Both speaking): Co-create — PV: A shared American culture that identifies and embraces the different values and norms within our diverse communities. WG: To be racially literate — PV: To understand who we are so that we can heal together — WG: We cannot neglect the heart — PV: Or the mind. So, with our hundreds of stories, we decided to publish a racial literacy textbook to bridge that gap between our hearts and minds. WG: Our last book, "The Classroom Index," shares deeply personal stories. PV: And pairs those personal stories to the brilliant research of statisticians and scholars. WG: Every day, we are still blown away by people's experiences, by the complexity of our collective racial reality. PV: So today, we ask you — WG: Are you racially literate? Are you there yet? PV: Do you really understand the people around you, their stories, stories like these? It's not just knowing that Louise from Seattle survived Japanese American internment camps. It's knowing that, meanwhile, her husband was one of an estimated 33,000 Japanese Americans who fought for our country during the war, a country that was simultaneously interning their families. For most of us, those Japanese Americans both in camps and in service, now see their bravery, their resilience, their history forgotten. They've become only victims. PV: It's not just knowing that interracial marriages like Shermaine and Paul in DC exist, it's acknowledging that our society has been programmed for them to fail. That on their very first date someone shouted, "Why are you with that black whore?" That according to a Columbia study on cis straight relationships black is often equated with masculinity and Asian with femininity, leading more men to not value black women and to fetishize Asian women. Among black-white marriages in the year 2000, 73 percent had a black husband and a white wife. Paul and Shermaine defy that statistic. Black is beautiful, but it takes a lot to believe so once society says otherwise. WG: It's not just knowing that white people like Lisa in Chicago have white privilege, it's reflecting consciously on the term whiteness and its history, knowing that whiteness can't be equated with American. It's knowing that Lisa can't forget her own personal family's history of Jewish oppression. That she can't forget how, growing up, she was called a dirty Jew with horns and tails. But Lisa knows she can pass as white so she benefits from huge systemic and interpersonal privileges, and so she spends every day grappling with ways that she can leverage that white privilege for social justice. For example, starting conversations with other people of privilege about race. Or shifting the power in her classroom to her students by learning to listen to their experiences of racism and poverty. PV: It's not just knowing that native languages are dying. It's appreciating how fluency in the Cherokee language, which really only less than 12,000 people speak today, is an act of survival, of preservation of culture and history. It's knowing how the nongendered Cherokee language enabled Ahyoka's acceptance as a trans woman in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Her grandmother told her firmly a saying in Cherokee, "I don't tell me who you are, you tell me who you are. And that is who you are." WG: These are just parts of a few stories. There are approximately 323 million people in the United States. PV: And 7.4 billion people on the planet. WG: So we have a lot to listen to. PV: And a lot to learn. WG: We need to raise the bar. PV: Elevate our standards for racial literacy. Because without investing in an education that values — WG: Both the stories — PV: And statistics — WG: The people — PV: And the numbers — WG: The interpersonal — PV: And the systemic — WG: There will always be a piece missing. PV: Today, so few of us understand each other. WG: We don't know how to communicate — PV: Live together — WG: Love one another. We need to all work together to create a new national community. PV: A new shared culture of mutual suffering and celebration. WG: We need to each begin by learning in our own local communities, bridging the gaps between our own hearts and minds to become racially literate. PV: Once we all do, we will be that much closer to living in spaces and systems that fight and care equally for all of us. WG: Then, none of us will be able to remain distant. PV: We couldn't — sorry, mom and dad, college can wait. WG: We're on a gap year before college, traveling to all 50 states collecting stories for our next book. PV: And we still have 23 states left to interview in. (Both) Let's all get to work. Thank you. (Applause) |
How Baltimore called a ceasefire | {0: 'Erricka Bridgeford intimately engages with issues related to murder and violence.'} | TEDxMidAtlantic 2017 | There is a pastor in Baltimore. His name is Michael Phillips, he is the pastor of Kingdom Life Church, and he often talks about how problems show up in our lives so arrogantly, with so much confidence, as if there is just nothing we can do about them. And the murder rate in Baltimore had been doing that. Year after year, it just kept showing up as this big thing that there was nothing any of us could do anything about. But the thing about Baltimore is that it has never been the one to just be defeated. So the story about the Baltimore Ceasefire is that Baltimore looked the murder rate in the eye and said, "What you're not going to do is snatch our greatness." So two years ago, I'm at a 300 Man March meeting. At the time, I was a leader in that movement. And this guy named Ogun — he's like a godfather of hip-hop in Baltimore — he came over to me and he said, "Yo, I have this idea about calling a ceasefire in Baltimore, and I feel like you are somebody I should talk to about that." And I was like, "I'm absolutely somebody you should talk to about that, because that's something we should do." And so we played phone tag and meeting tag, and two years went by and we never really sat down and talked about it. So now we're in May of 2017. My son Paul, he's 19 years old, he's driving me home from work one day, and he says, "Ma, did you know that the murder rate in Baltimore is higher than it's ever been?" And I said, "What you mean it's higher than it's ever been? How is that possible? Like, I mean, what about people who say they have connections to the streets? Why won't they use those connections and call a cease-fire or something?" And on and on I went from my own feelings of helplessness about what other people weren't doing. The next morning I woke up and I realized that what I was really angry about wasn't about what other people weren't doing, it was that I had heard this message years ago, and I hadn't moved on it. So it was about what I was supposed to be doing. So I got up and I'm going, "OK, if we could just have three days where everybody in the city was committing, nobody is going to kill anybody, and we're going to celebrate life instead, when can we do that?" So it's May, I look at my calendar, all right, I've got some free time the first weekend in August, we'll do it August 4th through August 6th, right? So I'm all excited, I start driving to work, and the more I drive, the scareder I get. And so I start going, "Never mind ... (Laughter) I won't say this thing out loud. Nobody will ever know I was thinking it if I don't say it." But it wouldn't let me go, because God loves to show up as us, and because I look broken and I'm always called to stand in my wholeness, there was a call on my life to say this thing out loud. And because my city looks broken and is always yearning to show up in its wholeness, there were hearts that morning calling all through my chest that people around this city wanted to do something great together. And people who had already been killed in my city were calling to me up through my gut and my chest, as a knot in my throat, "Yo, E, you cannot just let us be dead in vain when you know how to say this thing out loud." And I responded to them with my fear. "But somebody might get killed anyway that weekend." And that was the moment where I had to accept that maybe while we're out spreading this message — "Hey, nobody's going to kill anybody. We're going to celebrate life!" — maybe somebody will be plotting to take a life right then and there, but now they would have a rumbling in their spirit. And so I knew it was time for my city to have a collective rumbling in our spirit. So I got on the phone, got around to Ogun, and I said, "Yo, you said you wanted to do a cease-fire? What is it? I'm ready." So he said, "You know, when I hear about the Israelis and Palestinians at war, I'm like, that's too bad, they should stop that, but when I hear the word 'cease-fire,' that makes me pause and stop and really research what's going on." And he wanted Baltimore to get that same kind of attention from the outside, but introspection from the inside about what was going on with us. And we talked about how it couldn't belong to one person. Not one person or one organization should call a cease-fire. The whole city had to own it and do it together. So we had our first meeting in May. About 12 or 15 people show up, and this is where it gets named the Baltimore Ceasefire, because you know what that means when you hear the word "cease-fire." Just don't kill nobody. And this is where the Baltimore Peace Challenge was born. Because it's not just about not being violent. It is about being purposefully peaceful. What is going on in your thoughts? What kind of petty things are you not saying out of your mouth? How are you responding in your behaviors to conflict? I grabbed up five people who I trusted, and the six of us became the organizing squad. So let's give them props real quick. On the count of three, I want you to yell "squad." One, two, three: squad! Audience: Squad! And it's Shellers's birthday. Happy birthday, Shellers. Audience: Happy birthday! And so we put out a press release, and the media told us, this is not really a story yet, we will get with you on August 7th to see how the cease-fire went. So we went, "Oh, word? Oh, all right then." And Baltimore got to work, and not only did people send money to the PayPal account so we could buy flyers and posters, people came and got the flyers and posters and they put them all around the city, and people were having conversations with each other. What kind of resources do you need? What are you going through? What has happened to you? Because we understand the root causes of violence in this country. People who said it wouldn't work still ended their sentence with "but please keep trying. Somebody needs to do something anyway." Teenagers who would tell us about the stuff they were doing in the streets all day asked, "But can I have a poster to put it on my wall at night so I can see it on my way to bed?" Gangsters were calling, saying, "I can tell you where violence is not going to come from, because we're committing to the Peace Challenge." And they kept their word. When people said, "It's not going to work, because somebody's going to kill over West or over East," we said, "That doesn't matter. It's about self-determination, yo. You telling me you can't keep this three- or six-block radius safe?" And they would say, "Don't get it twisted. It's going to stay safe around here." And they kept their promise. (Applause) Four songs — and I know it looks like I'm holding up five fingers, but I have four fingers, so this is four for me — four songs got made about the Baltimore Ceasefire, and the one that most exemplifies it, where a bunch of artists came together and made a song, that one is currently nominated for a Grammy out here. Right? And so now what was happening was from the most beautiful corners of crack houses to the grimiest corners of politicians' offices, everybody — (Laughter) was talking about this thing Baltimore was doing together. Right? And then, the weekend came: events all over the city, people yelling "Happy Ceasefire Day!" Over 200 people got their records expunged and got jobs, and people went into drug recovery programs because of what was happening in our city that weekend. People were going, "But the air feels different in Baltimore. Nobody's mother got that phone call last night. I didn't hear any gunshots." And on Saturday, Trey went to go get a job and was excited about it. At 24 hours of no killing, we were singing Kendrick Lamar. "We gon' be alright. We gon' be alright." And then at 4:59 on Saturday, we get a message that somebody was killed. We didn't know his name, but it turned out to be Trey. So we rushed over to Sargeant Street, and we held hands in a circle and we looked at the pavement, and we said, "This is sacred ground because we make it so, because everywhere in our city where people lose their lives to violence needs to be sacred ground." And it wasn't just about upholding Trey and his transition and sending love to his family. It was about us pausing to really think about what must it feel like 20 minutes after you kill somebody? Can't we pour love into that? Because until we do, we will not heal this epidemic. Later on in the day, we get another call. Dante is murdered. So by the end of this day, we were shook. In real life, we were shook, because we had opened up our hearts together and changed the atmosphere of this city, and now our hearts were broken together. And we had to be honest about the fact that last weekend, when we lost six people to violence, it didn't feel the way it felt this weekend when we lost these two, because now we were paying attention. Now we were all hoping together that nobody got killed. And so we had to make a vow with ourselves not to be numb anymore when we lose people in our city. These two lives were going to remind us to vibrate higher and to move forward. So as we move forward into Baltimore Ceasefire 365, because there's work that needs to be done all year, and there's another cease-fire happening next weekend, November 3rd through 5th. Mark your calendar. (Applause) Right? And we expect the same thing. It was news media from all around the world, Australia and Norway and China. Everybody wanted to come get this work from Baltimore, and y'all could come get it. Right? So as we push forward, we don't need to keep asking now "What can we do?" We have seen the power of collective consciousness. Y'all were the ones who misunderstood Baltimore. Y'all thought Baltimore was just "The Wire." When we lost Freddie Gray, y'all saw the Baltimore uprising, and people around this world mischaracterized it and misunderstood it. What you failed to realize is Baltimore is the power to rise up, and that is what we continue to do. (Applause) And so as we move forward, we see you, America, with your systems of violent oppression trying to beat us into the ground, and still, we rise. We rise and stand with cities all over this country just like us who are handed, through no fault of their own, criminal conditions in which to live, and then they get labeled savages for how they live. We stand with them. We remind them we are an example of what you can do when you say, "No, I don't have to accept these conditions that you are trying to hand me. I get to decide what the greatest vision of myself looks like. And so the next time you are faced with a dilemma, with a problem, you can say, "Let me be like Baltimore, let me look it in the face, let me tell it." But what you're not going to do is snatch my greatness. Please believe it. Thank you. (Applause) |
A playful solution to the housing crisis | {0: 'Sarah Murray is building a future of democratized design and construction.'} | TED@Westpac | Hi. My name's Sarah, and I've been priced out of the housing market. In fact, I'm one of the majority of my generation who can't afford a home. And in 2017, home ownership amongst young Australians has fallen to the lowest level in recorded history. So, foolishly or otherwise, I decided to build my own home. But the prognosis wasn't good there, either. Architects cater for the one percent, builders are scarce, so service is inconsistent and prices are high. The single biggest investment in my life, and I was amazed how little self-determination, choice and, ultimately, control I had. What's more, I was doubly surprised at how vulnerable this made me feel. Frankly, I felt trapped. So, I reflected on this for quite some time. And I realized what I wanted was democratized design and construction. And that led to me asking one very simple question: What is building a house? What is it? Well, it turns out that building a house is making a series of decisions, some with physical consequences, within a defined set of parameters. Now, having worked in software applications for some time now, this all sounded very familiar to me. I also couldn't understand why we build on-site. No other major assembly in our lives is constructed like this. Your car doesn't come to you in pieces with an extra 10 percent just in case, to be assembled at the mercy of the elements. So why should your house? So I built a computer game. A game that allows you to design your home and have it delivered to you. A game that puts the home builder back at the center of the largest purchase in their life, elevating them from spectator to player. A game with full visibility of the costs and environmental impact of each new attribute you add. Using modular components, players select items from their library and drag them into their world. Each item, be it a wall, a solar battery or even an armchair, contains all of the information for the system to calculate costs, environmental impact and even a happiness tally for the player. Eighty-three percent of home builders said that next to cost, environmentally friendly features were the most important things to them. So out of the gate, homes are integrated with solar systems. Born green. Sustainable housing is often associated with wealth and affluence, but that shouldn't be the case. In fact, truly sustainable housing should be available to everyone and affordable for all. So, I had found a way to get the control back that I was craving and give it to others. But something was still bugging me, something was still keeping me up at night. What about those people who have genuinely no control over where they live? Every hour — in the space of your intermission — 4,000 new homes are needed in the world. Wrap your head around that number. That's an astonishing 35 million homes globally, every year. And in Australia alone, we have a shortfall of 250,000 dwellings. And in addition to that, we have 190,000 families on the assisted-housing wait list; families in need of a home. Between now and 2050, when the global population is set to move from today's 7.6 billion to tomorrow's 9.8 billion people, hundreds of millions of people will experience security, health and safety issues. Imagine if you can not feeling secure in your home — not from crime, not from theft, but from the fact that the building you're in — the building you're in — might not be structurally sound or built from nontoxic components or meet local natural disaster standards. It's the 21st century. And this just isn't good enough. What if — what if — we could restore control and dignity to those individuals by giving them a home, but not just any home: their home, and a home of their design. We're currently adapting our game so that when a player builds a home, they're contributing to a home for someone in need. And I know this sounds like a lofty goal, and it is ridiculously ambitious, but today, our current operating model operates at a ten-to-one ratio. So for every 10 homes we build, we can build a home for someone in need. (Applause) This is made possible because today, with design for manufacture and assembly, which uses light gauge steel frame construction, shipped and assembled on-site, we can decrease construction costs by 20 percent and environmental waste by 15 percent, saving time, money and keeping tons of waste out of landfills. The power in modular construction is that you can build year-round with confidence in your costs, in your quality, and in your delivery date, in your build date. Now, wouldn't that be crazy? Wouldn't that be great? But — that doesn't get me to my goal. My goal is one-for-one. So I've been traveling the world, looking at different alternatives of construction 3-D printing, trying to find technology that will help me deliver on my ambition. 3-D printing is so exciting and so promising, offering a 40 percent reduction in cost and near zero waste. And this is just to name a few, but some of the really exciting innovations happening all over the world are happening in Italy, France, Dubai and Australia. And they use robotic arms to print everything from solid stone to concrete, to wax. In Italy, they have developed a technique using sorel cement. Sorel cement was originally invented in 1867, and it's the beautiful chemical marriage of magnesium oxide and local sand, which they can now use to print solid stone walls. And in France, they have a regulator-approved although still experimental process where they print two parallel tracks of foam insulation and pour concrete in the middle to create solid stone. And in Dubai, sitting at the foot of those two glorious Emirates Towers, is a vision of the future in the middle of the desert. They've got their experimental office of the future, which is constructed using 3-D printed concrete which was printed in China and shipped and assembled on location in Dubai. And not to be outdone, in Australia, we've pioneered an amazing technology that allows you to print wax molds and pour concrete over the top of them, allowing you to create really intricately beautiful and cost-effective facades that you can see in person the next time you travel the London Underground. But all of these things are tools — hammer of tomorrow, if you like. And the one common thread that connects all these things is computer-aided design. We will need models to build using these techniques, models like the ones being developed by players in our game. I want to put every person that wants one in a home of their own design. And there are many more applications still. We could usher in an entirely new empowered experience of special needs or aged-care accommodation. And we could provide rapid, on-site assistance in emergency housing situations. In the words of one of my players, "I want to take matters into my own hands and live by example." Thank you. (Applause) |
Why you should make useless things | {0: 'Simone Giertz runs a YouTube channel about robotics.'} | TED2018 | Hello. My name is Simone. You know how people tell you if you get nervous when onstage, picture people in the audience naked? Like it's this thing that's supposed to make you feel better. But I was thinking — picturing all of you naked in 2018 feels kind of weird and wrong. Like, we're working really hard on moving past stuff like that, so we need a new method of dealing with if you get nervous onstage. And I realized that what I'd really like is that I can look at you as much as you're looking at me — just to even things out a little bit. So if I had way more eyeballs, then we'd all be really comfortable, right? So in preparation for this talk, I made myself a shirt. (Rattling) (Laughter) It's googly eyes. It took me 14 hours and 227 googly eyes to make this shirt. And being able to look at you as much as you're looking at me is actually only half of the reason I made this. The other half is being able to do this. (Googly eyes rattle) (Laughter) So I do a lot of things like this. I see a problem and I invent some sort of solution to it. For example, brushing your teeth. Like, it's this thing we all have to do, it's kind of boring, and nobody really likes it. If there were any seven-year-olds in the audience, they'd be like, "Yes!" So what about if you had a machine that could do it for you? (Laughter) I call it ... I call it "The Toothbrush Helmet." (Laughter) (Robot arm buzzing) (Laughter) (Applause) So my toothbrush helmet is recommended by zero out of 10 dentists, and it definitely did not revolutionize the world of dentistry, but it did completely change my life. Because I finished making this toothbrush helmet three years ago and after I finished making it, I went into my living room and I put up a camera, and I filmed a seven-second clip of it working. And by now, this is a pretty standard modern-day fairy tale of girl posting on the internet, the internet takes the girl by storm, thousands of men voyage into the comment sections to ask for her hand in marriage — (Laughter) She ignores all of them, starts a YouTube channel and keeps on building robots. Since then, I've carved out this little niche for myself on the internet as an inventor of useless machines, because as we all know, the easiest way to be at the top of your field is to choose a very small field. (Laughter) (Applause) So I run a YouTube channel about my machines, and I've done things like cutting hair with drones — (Drone buzzes) (Laughter) (Drone crashes) (Laughter) (Drone buzzes) (Laughter) (Applause) To a machine that helps me wake up in the morning — (Alarm) (Laughter) (Video) Simone: Ow! To this machine that helps me chop vegetables. (Knives chop) I'm not an engineer. I did not study engineering in school. But I was a super ambitious student growing up. In middle school and high school, I had straight A's, and I graduated at the top of my year. On the flip side of that, I struggled with very severe performance anxiety. Here's an email I sent to my brother around that time. "You won't understand how difficult it is for me to tell you, to confess this. I'm so freaking embarrassed. I don't want people to think that I'm stupid. Now I'm starting to cry too. Damn." And no, I did not accidentally burn our parents' house down. The thing I'm writing about in the email and the thing I'm so upset about is that I got a B on a math test. So something obviously happened between here and here. (Laughter) One of those things was puberty. (Laughter) Beautiful time indeed. But moreover, I got interested in building robots, and I wanted to teach myself about hardware. But building things with hardware, especially if you're teaching yourself, is something that's really difficult to do. It has a high likelihood of failure and moreover, it has a high likelihood of making you feel stupid. And that was my biggest fear at the time. So I came up with a setup that would guarantee success 100 percent of the time. With my setup, it would be nearly impossible to fail. And that was that instead of trying to succeed, I was going to try to build things that would fail. And even though I didn't realize it at the time, building stupid things was actually quite smart, because as I kept on learning about hardware, for the first time in my life, I did not have to deal with my performance anxiety. And as soon as I removed all pressure and expectations from myself, that pressure quickly got replaced by enthusiasm, and it allowed me to just play. So as an inventor, I'm interested in things that people struggle with. It can be small things or big things or medium-sized things and something like giving a TED talk presents this whole new set of problems that I can solve. And identifying a problem is the first step in my process of building a useless machine. So before I came here, I sat down and I thought of some of the potential problems I might have in giving this talk. Forgetting what to say. That people won't laugh — that's you. Or even worse, that you'll laugh at the wrong things — that was an OK part to laugh at, thank you. (Laughter) Or that when I get nervous, my hands start shaking and I'm really self-conscious about it. Or that my fly has been open this entire time and all of you noticed but I didn't, but it's closed so we're all good on that one. But one thing I'm actually really nervous about is my hands shaking. I remember when I was a kid, giving presentations in school, I would have my notes on a piece of paper, and I would put a notebook behind the paper so that people wouldn't be able to see the paper quivering. And I give a lot of talks. I know that about half of you in the audience are probably like, "Building useless machines is really fun, but how is this in any way or form a business?" And giving talks is a part of it. And the arrangers always put out a glass of water for you onstage so you have something to drink if you get thirsty, and I always so badly want to drink that water, but I don't dare to pick the glass up because then people might be able to see that my hands are shaking. So what about a machine that hands you a glass of water? Sold to the nervous girl in the googly-eye shirt. Actually, I need to take this off because I have a thing — (Googly eyes rattle) Oh. (Clanking) (Laughter) I still don't know what to call this, but I think some sort of "head orbit device," because it rotates this platform around you and you can put anything on it. You can have a camera; you can get photos of your entire head. Like it's really — it's a very versatile machine. (Laughter) OK, and I have — I mean, you can put some snacks on it, for example, if you want to. I have some popcorn here. And you just put a little bit like that. And then you want to — there's some sacrifices for science — just some popcorn falling on the floor. Let's do the long way around. (Robot buzzes) (Laughter) And then you have a little hand. You need to adjust the height of it, and you just do it by shrugging. (Laughter) (Applause) It has a little hand. (Hand thwacks) (Laughter) (Applause) I just bumped my mic off, but I think we're all good. OK, also I need to chew this popcorn, so if you guys could just clap your hands a little bit more — (Applause) OK, so it's like your own little personal solar system, because I'm a millennial, so I want everything to revolve around me. (Laughter) Back to the glass of water, that's what we're here for. So, I promise — I mean, it still has — it doesn't have any water in it, I'm sorry. But I still need to work on this machine a little bit because I still need to pick up the glass and put it on the platform, but if your hands are shaking a little bit, nobody's going to notice because you're wearing a very mesmerizing piece of equipment. So, we're all good. OK. (Robot buzzes) (Singing) Oh no, it got stuck. Isn't it comforting that even robots sometimes get stage fright? It just gets stuck a little bit. It's very human of them. Oh wait, let's go back a little bit, and then — (Glass falls) (Laughter) Isn't it a beautiful time to be alive? (Laughter) (Applause) So as much as my machines can seem like simple engineering slapstick, I realize that I stumbled on something bigger than that. It's this expression of joy and humility that often gets lost in engineering, and for me it was a way to learn about hardware without having my performance anxiety get in the way. I often get asked if I think I'm ever going to build something useful, and maybe someday I will. But the way I see it, I already have because I've built myself this job and it's something that I could never have planned for, or that I could — (Applause) It's something that I could never have planned for. Instead it happened just because I was enthusiastic about what I was doing, and I was sharing that enthusiasm with other people. To me that's the true beauty of making useless things, because it's this acknowledgment that you don't always know what the best answer is. And it turns off that voice in your head that tells you that you know exactly how the world works. And maybe a toothbrush helmet isn't the answer, but at least you're asking the question. Thank you. (Applause) |
What it's like to be a transgender dad | {0: 'LB Hannahs facilitates change by leaning into discomfort and centering authenticity.'} | TEDxUF | So the other morning I went to the grocery store and an employee greeted me with a "Good morning, sir, can I help you with anything?" I said, "No, thanks, I'm good." The person smiled and we went our separate ways. I grabbed Cheerios and I left the grocery store. And I went through the drive-through of a local coffee shop. After I placed my order, the voice on the other end said, "Thank you, ma'am. Drive right around." Now, in the span of less than an hour, I was understood both as a "sir" and as a "ma'am." But for me, neither of these people are wrong, but they're also not completely right. This cute little human is my almost-two-year-old Elliot. Yeah, alright. And over the past two years, this kid has forced me to rethink the world and how I participate in it. I identify as transgender and as a parent, that makes me a transparent. (Laughter) (Applause) (Cheering) (Applause) As you can see, I took this year's theme super literal. (Laughter) Like any good dad joke should. More specifically, I identify as genderqueer. And there are lots of ways to experience being genderqueer, but for me that means I don't really identify as a man or a woman. I feel in between and sometimes outside of this gender binary. And being outside of this gender binary means that sometimes I get "sired" and "ma'amed" in the span of less than an hour when I'm out doing everyday things like getting Cheerios. But this in between lane is where I'm most comfortable. This space where I can be both a sir and a ma'am feels the most right and the most authentic. But it doesn't mean that these interactions aren't uncomfortable. Trust me, the discomfort can range from minor annoyance to feeling physically unsafe. Like the time at a bar in college when a bouncer physically removed me by the back of the neck and threw me out of a woman's restroom. But for me, authenticity doesn't mean "comfortable." It means managing and negotiating the discomfort of everyday life, even at times when it's unsafe. And it wasn't until my experience as a trans person collided with my new identity as a parent that I understood the depth of my vulnerabilities and how they are preventing me from being my most authentic self. Now, for most people, what their child will call them is not something that they give much thought to outside of culturally specific words or variations on a gendered theme like "mama," "mommy," or "daddy," "papa." But for me, the possibility is what this child, who will grow to be a teenager and then a real-life adult, will call me for the rest of our lives, was both extremely scary and exciting. And I spent nine months wrestling with the reality that being called "mama" or something like it didn't feel like me at all. And no matter how many times or versions of "mom" I tried, it always felt forced and deeply uncomfortable. I knew being called "mom" or "mommy" would be easier to digest for most people. The idea of having two moms is not super novel, especially where we live. So I tried other words. And when I played around with "daddy," it felt better. Better, but not perfect. It felt like a pair of shoes that you really liked but you needed to wear and break in. And I knew the idea of being a female-born person being called "daddy" was going to be a harder road with a lot more uncomfortable moments. But, before I knew it, the time had come and Elliot came screaming into the world, like most babies do, and my new identity as a parent began. I decided on becoming a daddy, and our new family faced the world. Now one of the most common things that happens when people meet us is for people to "mom" me. And when I get "momed", there are several ways the interaction can go, and I've drawn this map to help illustrate my options. (Laughter) So, option one is to ignore the assumption and allow folks to continue to refer to me as "mom," which is not awkward for the other party, but is typically really awkward for us. And it usually causes me to restrict my interaction with those people. Option one. Option two is to stop and correct them and say something like, "Actually, I'm Elliot's dad" or "Elliot calls me 'daddy.'" And when I do this, one or two of the following things happen. Folks take it in stride and say something like, "Oh, OK." And move on. Or they respond by apologizing profusely because they feel bad or awkward or guilty or weird. But more often, what happens is folks get really confused and look up with an intense look and say something like, "Does this mean you want to transition? Do you want to be a man?" Or say things like, "How can she be a father? Only men can be dads." Well, option one is oftentimes the easier route. Option two is always the more authentic one. And all of these scenarios involve a level of discomfort, even in the best case. And I'll say that over time, my ability to navigate this complicated map has gotten easier. But the discomfort is still there. Now, I won't stand here and pretend like I've mastered this, it's pretty far from it. And there are days when I still allow option one to take place because option two is just too hard or too risky. There's no way to be sure of anyone's reaction, and I want to be sure that folks have good intentions, that people are good. But we live in a world where someone's opinion of my existence can be met with serious threats to me or even my family's emotional or physical safety. So I weigh the costs against the risks and sometimes the safety of my family comes before my own authenticity. But despite this risk, I know as Elliot gets older and grows into her consciousness and language skills, if I don't correct people, she will. I don't want my fears and insecurities to be placed on her, to dampen her spirit or make her question her own voice. I need to model agency, authenticity and vulnerability, and that means leaning into those uncomfortable moments of being "momed" and standing up and saying, "No, I'm a dad. And I even have the dad jokes to prove it." (Laughter) Now, there have already been plenty of uncomfortable moments and even some painful ones. But there's also been, in just two short years, validating and at times transformative moments on my journey as a dad and my path towards authenticity. When we got our first sonogram, we decided we wanted to know the sex of the baby. The technician saw a vulva and slapped the words "It's a girl" on the screen and gave us a copy and sent us on our way. We shared the photo with our families like everyone does and soon after, my mom showed up at our house with a bag filled — I'm not exaggerating, it was like this high and it was filled, overflowing with pink clothes and toys. Now I was a little annoyed to be confronted with a lot of pink things, and having studied gender and spent countless hours teaching about it in workshops and classrooms, I thought I was pretty well versed on the social construction of gender and how sexism is a devaluing of the feminine and how it manifests both explicitly and implicitly. But this situation, this aversion to a bag full of pink stuff, forced me to explore my rejection of highly feminized things in my child's world. I realized that I was reinforcing sexism and the cultural norms I teach as problematic. No matter how much I believed in gender neutrality in theory, in practice, the absence of femininity is not neutrality, it's masculinity. If I only dress my baby in greens and blues and grays, the outside world doesn't think, "Oh, that's a cute gender-neutral baby." They think, "Oh, what a cute boy." So my theoretical understanding of gender and my parenting world collided hard. Yes, I want a diversity of colors and toys for my child to experience. I want a balanced environment for her to explore and make sense of in her own way. We even picked a gender-neutral name for our female-born child. But gender neutrality is much easier as a theoretical endeavor than it is as a practice. And in my attempts to create gender neutrality, I was inadvertently privileging masculinity over femininity. So, rather than toning down or eliminating femininity in our lives, we make a concerted effort to celebrate it. We have pinks among the variety of colors, we balance out the cutes with handsomes and the prettys with strongs and smarts and work really hard not to associate any words with gender. We value femininity and masculinity while also being highly critical of it. And do our best to not make her feel limited by gender roles. And we do all this in hopes that we model a healthy and empowered relationship with gender for our kid. Now this work to develop a healthy relationship with gender for Elliot made me rethink and evaluate how I allowed sexism to manifest in my own gender identity. I began to reevaluate how I was rejecting femininity in order to live up to a masculinity that was not healthy or something I wanted to pass on. Doing this self-work meant I had to reject option one. I couldn't ignore and move on. I had to choose option two. I had to engage with some of my most uncomfortable parts to move towards my most authentic self. And that meant I had to get real about the discomfort I have with my body. It's pretty common for trans people to feel uncomfortable in their body, and this discomfort can range from debilitating to annoying and everywhere in between. And learning my body and how to be comfortable in it as a trans person has been a lifelong journey. I've always struggled with the parts of my body that can be defined as more feminine — my chest, my hips, my voice. And I've made the sometimes hard, sometimes easy decision to not take hormones or have any surgeries to change it to make myself more masculine by society's standards. And while I certainly haven't overcome all the feelings of dissatisfaction, I realized that by not engaging with that discomfort and coming to a positive and affirming place with my body, I was reinforcing sexism, transphobia and modeling body shaming. If I hate my body, in particular, the parts society deems feminine or female, I potentially damage how my kid can see the possibilities of her body and her feminine and female parts. If I hate or am uncomfortable with my body, how can I expect my kid to love hers? Now it would be easier for me to choose option one: to ignore my kid when she asks me about my body or to hide it from her. But I have to choose option two every day. I have to confront my own assumptions about what a dad's body can and should be. So I work every day to try and be more comfortable in this body and in the ways I express femininity. So I talk about it more, I explore the depths of this discomfort and find language that I feel comfortable with. And this daily discomfort helps me build both agency and authenticity in how I show up in my body and in my gender. I'm working against limiting myself. I want to show her that a dad can have hips, a dad doesn't have to have a perfectly flat chest or even be able to grow facial hair. And when she's developmentally able to, I want to talk to her about my journey with my body. I want her to see my journey towards authenticity even when it means showing her the messier parts. We have a wonderful pediatrician and have established a good relationship with our kid's doctor. And as you all know, while your doctor stays the same, your nurses and nurse practitioners change in and out. And when Elliot was first born, we took her to the pediatrician and we met our first nurse — we'll call her Sarah. Very early in in our time with Sarah, we told her how I was going to be called "dad" and my partner is "mama." Sarah was one of those folks that took it in stride, and our subsequent visits went pretty smoothly. And about a year later, Sarah switched shifts and we started working with a new nurse — we'll call her Becky. We didn't get in front of the dad conversations and it didn't actually come up until Sarah, our original nurse, walked in to say hi. Sarah's warm and bubbly and said hi to Elliot and me and my wife and when talking to Elliot said something like, "Is your daddy holding your toy?" Now out of the corner of my eye, I could see Becky swing around in her chair and make daggers at Sarah. And as the conversation shifted to our pediatrician, I saw Sarah and Becky's interaction continue, and it went something like this. Becky, shaking her head "no" and mouthing the word "mom." Sarah, shaking her head "no" and mouthing the word "no, dad." (Laughter) Awkward, right? So this went back and forth in total silence a few more times until we walked away. Now, this interaction has stuck with me. Sarah could have chosen option one, ignored Becky, and let her refer to me as mom. It would have been easier for Sarah. She could have put the responsibility back on me or not said anything at all. But in that moment, she chose option two. She chose to confront the assumptions and affirm my existence. She insisted that a person who looks and sounds like me can in fact be a dad. And in a small but meaningful way, advocated for me, my authenticity and my family. Unfortunately, we live in a world that refuses to acknowledge trans people and the diversity of trans people in general. And my hope is that when confronted with an opportunity to stand up for someone else, we all take action like Sarah, even when there's risk involved. So some days, the risk of being a genderqueer dad feels too much. And deciding to be a dad has been really hard. And I'm sure it will continue to be the hardest, yet the most rewarding experience of my life. But despite this challenge, every day has felt 100 percent worth it. So each day I affirm my promise to Elliot and that same promise to myself. To love her and myself hard with forgiveness and compassion, with tough love and with generosity. To give room for growth, to push beyond comfort in hopes of attaining and living a more meaningful life. I know in my head and in my heart that there are hard and painful and uncomfortable days ahead. My head and my heart also know that all of it will lead to a more rich, authentic life that I can look back on without regrets. Thank you. (Applause) |
"Iyeza" / "Zabalaza" | {0: 'Thandiswa Mazwai is one of the most influential South African musicians of this generation. '} | TEDGlobal 2017 | (Music) (Vocalizing) Ndicela iyeza lokuhlamba ndisuse iinkathazo. Ndicela iyeza lokuhlamba ndikhuphe iinkathazo. (Vocalizing) (Improvising) Thongo lam vuma, Thongo lam vuma, Thongo lam vuma, Thongo lam vuma. Ndicela iyeza lokuhlamba ndisuse iinkathazo ndicela iyeza iyeza lokughabha ndisuse iinkathazo ndicela iyeza lokuhlamba ndisuse iinkathazo. (Vocalizing) Thongo lam vuma, Thongo lam vuma, Thongo lam vuma, Thongo lam vuma, Thongo lam vuma, Lam vuma, Thongo lam vuma, Lam vuma, Thongo lam vuma, Lam vuma, Thongo lam vuma, Lam vuma, lam vuma. (Improvising) (Music ends) (Applause) Thandiswa Mazwai: Hello everybody. Thank you so much for having us here. My name is Thandiswa Mazwai. I am a wild woman, a rebel singer, a conduit. My music is about memory and struggling between oppresion and freedom. After over 20 years in South Africa we find ourselves as the black masses still suffering and fighting for our freedom and humanity. This first song was called "Iyeza" which means "medicine." Medicine for our madness, medicine for our rage. This song we're doing now is called "Zabalaza," and it means "rebel." I'd like to dedicate this to the valiant student movement in South Africa who came up with the #FeesMustFall. (Applause) Rhodes Must Fall. (Applause) But more importantly, the new vigor that has been brought into the feminist movement so patriarchy must fall. (Applause) (Music) Gogo bek' umthwalo Kunin' uhlupheka? Little ghetto child Ungazibulali sana Oh ... If you take my hand, I'll show you how to be free. Ayifanelang' ub' iyenzeka lento Emzini kabawo kunge kudala Sizozabalaza. Zabalaza, zabalaza. Zabalaza. Sizozabalaza. Zabalaza, zabalaza. Zabalaza. Zabalaza, zabalaza. Zabalaza. Zabalaza. Zabalaza. Zabalaza. (Vocalizing) (Improvising) It's my people in Soweto, my people in Mozambique, my people in Senegal. These are my people in the ghettos. Zabalaza, zabalaza. Zabalaza. Zabalaza. (Music ends) (Applause) (Cheering) Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The truth about unwanted arousal | {0: 'Emily Nagoski teaches women to live with confidence and joy inside their bodies.'} | TED2018 | [This talk contains mature content Viewer discretion is advised] My specialty, as a sex educator, is I bring the science. But my first and most important job is that I stay neutral when I talk about anything sex-related, no embarrassment, no titillation, no judgment, no shame, no matter where I am. No matter what question you ask me. At the end of a conference in a hotel lobby once, I'm literally on my way out the door and a colleague chases me down. "Emily, I just have a really quick question. A friend of mine — (Laughter) wants to know if it's possible to get addicted to her vibrator." The answer is no, but it is possible to get spoiled. A different conference, this one in an outdoor tropical paradise, I'm at the breakfast buffet, and a couple approaches me. "Hi, Emily, we're sorry to interrupt you but we just wanted to ask a quick question about premature ejaculation." "Sure, let me tell you about the stop/start technique." That is my life. I stay neutral when other people might "squick." Squick is an emotion that combines surprise with embarrassment plus some disgust and like, not knowing what to do with your hands. So, it's a product. The reason you experience it is because you spent the first two decades of your life learning that sex is a dangerous and disgusting source of everlasting shame and if you're not really good at it, no one will ever love you. (Laughter) So you might squick, hearing me talk about sex while you're sitting in a room full of strangers — that is normal. I invite you to breathe. Feelings are tunnels. We make our way through the darkness to get to the light at the end. And I promise it's worth it. Because I want to share with you today a piece of science that has changed how I think about everything, from the behavior of neurotransmitters in our emotional brain, to the dynamics of our interpersonal relationships. To our judicial system. And it starts with our brain. There's an area of your brain you've probably heard referred to as the "reward center." I think calling it the reward center is a little bit like calling your face your nose. That is one prominent feature, but it ignores some other parts and will leave you really confused if you're trying to understand how faces work. It's actually three intertwined but separable systems. The first system is liking. Which is like reward, so this is the opioid hotspots in your emotional brain. It assesses hedonic impact — "Does this stimulus feel good? How good? Does this stimulus feel bad? How bad?" If you drop sugar water on the tongue of a newborn infant, the opioid-liking system sets off fireworks. And then there's the wanting system. Wanting is mediated by this vast dopaminergic network in and beyond the emotional brain. It motivates us to move toward or away from a stimulus. Wanting is more like your toddler, following you around, asking for another cookie. So wanting and liking are related. They are not identical. And the third system is learning. Learning is Pavlov's dogs. You remember Pavlov? He makes dogs salivate in response to a bell. It's easy, you give a dog food, salivates automatically, and you ring a bell. Food, salivate, bell. Food, bell, salivate. Bell, salivate. Does that salivation mean that the dog wants to eat the bell? Does it mean that the dog finds the bell delicious? No. What Pavlov did was make the bell food-related. When we see this separateness of wanting, liking and learning, this is where we find an explanatory framework for understanding what researchers call arousal nonconcordance. Nonconcordance, very simply, is when there is a lack of predictive relationship between your physiological response, like salivation, and your subjective experience of pleasure and desire. That happens in every emotional and motivational system that we have, including sex. Research over the last 30 years has found that genital blood flow can increase in response to sex-related stimuli even if those sex-related stimuli are not also associated with the subjective experience of wanting and liking. In fact, the predictive relationship between genital response and subjective experience is between 10 and 50 percent. Which is an enormous range. You just can't predict necessarily how a person feels about that sex-related stimulus just by looking at their genital blood flow. When I explained this to my husband, he gave me the best possible example. He was like, "So, that could explain this one time, when I was in high school, I ... I got an erection in response to the phrase 'doughnut hole.'" (Laughter) Did he want to have sex with the doughnut? No. He was a teenage boy flooded with testosterone, which makes everything a little bit sex-related. And it can go in both directions. A person with a penis may struggle to get an erection one evening, and then wake up the very next morning with an erection, when it's nothing but a hassle. I got a phone call from a 30-something friend, a woman, she said, "So, my partner and I were in the middle of doing some things and I was like, 'I want you right now.' And he said, 'No, you're still dry, you're just being nice.' And I was so ready. So what's the matter, is it hormonal, should I talk to a doctor, what's going on?" Answer? It's arousal nonconcordance. If you're experiencing unwanted pain, talk to a medical provider. Otherwise — arousal nonconcordance. Your genital behavior just doesn't necessarily predict your subjective experience of liking and wanting. Another friend, back in college, told me about her first experiences of power play in a sexual relationship. She told me that her partner tied her up with her arms over her head like this, she's standing up and he positions her so she's straddling a bar, presses up against her clitoris, like this. So there's my friend, standing there, and the guy leaves. It's a power play. Leaves her alone. So there's my friend, and she goes, "I'm bored." (Laughter) And the guy comes back and she says, "I am bored." And he looks at her and he looks at the bar and he says, "Then why are you wet?" Why was she wet? Is it sex-related to have pressure directly against your clitoris? Yeah. Does that tell him whether she wants or likes what's happening? Nope. What does tell him whether she wants or likes what's happening? She does! She recognized and articulated what she wanted and liked. All he had to do was listen to her words. My friend on the phone — what's the solution? You tell your partner, "Listen to your words." Also, buy some lube. (Laughter) (Applause) Applause for lube, absolutely. (Applause) Everyone, everywhere. But I want to tell you a darker listen-to-her-words story. This one comes from a note that a student sent me after I gave a lecture about arousal nonconcordance. She was with a partner, a new partner, glad to be doing things, and they reached a point where that was as far as she was interested in going and so she said no. And the partner said, "No, you're wet, you're so ready, don't be shy." Shy? As if it hadn't taken all the courage and confidence she had to say no to someone she liked. Whose feelings she did not want to hurt. But she said it again. She said no. Did he listen to her words? In the age of Me Too and Time's Up, people ask me, "How do I even know what my partner wants and likes? Is all consent to be verbal and contractual now?" There are times when consent is ambiguous and we need a large-scale cultural conversation about that. But can we make sure we're noticing how clear consent is if we eliminate this myth? In every example I've described so far, one partner recognized and articulated what they wanted and liked: "I want you right now." "No." And their partner told them they were wrong. It's gaslighting. Profound and degrading. You say you feel one way, but your body proves that you feel something else. And we only do this around sexuality, because arousal nonconcordance happens with every emotional and motivational system we have. If my mouth waters when I bite into a wormy apple, does anybody say to me, "You said no, but your body said yes?" (Laughter) And it's not only our partners who get it wrong. The National Judicial Education Program published a document called "Judges Tell: What I Wish I Had Known Before I Presided in a Case of an Adult Victim of Sexual Assault." Number 13: On occasion, the victim, female or male, may experience a physical response, but this is not a sexual response in the sense of desire or mutuality." This brings me one step closer into the darkness, and then I promise we will find our way into the light. I'm thinking of a recent court case involving multiple instances of non-consensual sexual contact. Imagine you're on the jury and you learn that the victim had orgasms. Does it change how your gut responds to the case? Let me remind you, orgasm is physiological; it is a spontaneous, involuntary release of tension, generated in response to sex-related stimuli. But the perpetrator’s lawyer made sure the jury knew about those orgasms because he thought the orgasms could be construed as consent. I will also add that this was a child being abused by an adult in the family. I invite you to breathe. That kind of story can give a person all kind of feelings, from rage to shame to confused arousal because it is sex-related, even though it is appalling. But even though I know it's difficult to sit with those feelings in a room full of strangers, if we can find our way through all of the messy feelings, I believe we will find our way to the light of compassion for that child, whose relationship with her body was damaged by an adult whose job it was to protect it. And we'll find hope that there was a trustworthy adult who could say, "Genital response just means it was a sex-related stimulus; doesn't mean it was wanted or liked, certainly doesn't mean it was consented to. (Applause) That compassion and that hope are why I travel all over, talking about this to anyone who will listen. I can see it helping people, even as I say the words. I invite you to say the words. You don't have to say "clitoris" in front of 1000 strangers. But do have one brave conversation. Tell this to someone you know who has experienced sexual violence — you definitely know someone. In the US it's one in three women. One in six men. Almost half of transgender folks. Say "Genital response means it's a sex-related stimulus. It doesn't mean it was wanted or liked." Say it to a judge you know or a lawyer you know, or a cop or anyone who might sit on a jury in a sexual assault case. Say "Some people think that your body doesn't respond if you don't want or like what's happening, if only that were true. Instead, arousal nonconcordance. Say this to the confused teenager in your life who is just trying to figure out what, even, what? Say, if you bite this moldy fruit and your mouth waters, nobody would say to you, "Well, you just don't want to admit how much you like it." Same goes for down below, arousal nonconcordance. Say it to your partner. My genitals do not tell you what I want or like. I do. (Applause) The roots of this myth are deep and they are entangled with some very dark forces in our culture. But with every brave conversation we have, we make the world that little bit better, a little simpler for the confused teenager. A little easier for your friend on the phone, worried that she's broken. A little easier and safer for the survivors, one in three women. One in six men. Half of trans folks. Me too. So for every brave conversation you have, thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thanks. (Applause) Helen Walters: Emily, come up here. Thank you so much. I know that you do this all the time, and yet, still, I'm so grateful to you for having the courage to come and talk about that on this stage. It really took a lot and we're very grateful to you. So thank you. Emily Nagoski: I am grateful to be here. HW: So in your regular day job, I imagine, as you put at the top of the talk, you get asked a lot of questions. But what's the one question that you get asked all the time that you can share with everyone here so you don't have to answer it 1000 times throughout the rest of the week? EN: The question I get asked most often is actually the question underneath pretty much all the other questions, so, can you get addicted to your vibrator, please help me with my erectile dysfunction? Underneath every question is actually the question, "Am I normal?" To which my answer in my mind is, what even is normal and why is that what you want your sexuality to be? Why do we only want to be normal around sexuality? Don't we want to be extraordinary? Like, do you just want normal sex or do you want awesome sex in your life? I think, though, there's a lot of fear around being too different sexually. When people are asking me, "Is this thing I'm experiencing normal," what they're actually asking me is, "Do I belong?" Do I belong in this relationship, do I belong in this community of people, do I belong on earth as a sexual person? To which the answer is always a resounding yes. The only barrier there is, the only limit there is, there are two: one, if you're experiencing unwanted sexual pain, talk to a medical provider. And two: As along as everybody involved is free and glad to be there, and free to leave whenever they want to, you're allowed to do anything that you want to. There is no script, there is no box you have to fit into, you're allowed, as long as there is consent and no unwanted pain, you're totally free to do whatever you want. HW: Amazing. Thank you so much. EN: Thank you. HW: Thank you, you're incredible. (Applause) |
A healthy economy should be designed to thrive, not grow | {0: 'Kate Raworth is passionate about making economics fit for the 21st century.'} | TED2018 | Have you ever watched a baby learning to crawl? Because as any parent knows, it's gripping. First, they wriggle about on the floor, usually backwards, but then they drag themselves forwards, and then they pull themselves up to stand, and we all clap. And that simple motion of forwards and upwards, it's the most basic direction of progress we humans recognize. We tell it in our story of evolution as well, from our lolloping ancestors to Homo erectus, finally upright, to Homo sapiens, depicted, always a man, always mid-stride. So no wonder we so readily believe that economic progress will take this very same shape, this ever-rising line of growth. It's time to think again, to reimagine the shape of progress, because today, we have economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive, and what we need, especially in the richest countries, are economies that make us thrive whether or not they grow. Yes, it's a little flippant word hiding a profound shift in mindset, but I believe this is the shift we need to make if we, humanity, are going to thrive here together this century. So where did this obsession with growth come from? Well, GDP, gross domestic product, it's just the total cost of goods and services sold in an economy in a year. It was invented in the 1930s, but it very soon became the overriding goal of policymaking, so much so that even today, in the richest of countries, governments think that the solution to their economic problems lies in more growth. Just how that happened is best told through the 1960 classic by W.W. Rostow. I love it so much, I have a first-edition copy. "The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto." (Laughter) You can just smell the politics, huh? And Rostow tells us that all economies need to pass through five stages of growth: first, traditional society, where a nation's output is limited by its technology, its institutions and mindset; but then the preconditions for takeoff, where we get the beginnings of a banking industry, the mechanization of work and the belief that growth is necessary for something beyond itself, like national dignity or a better life for the children; then takeoff, where compound interest is built into the economy's institutions and growth becomes the normal condition; fourth is the drive to maturity where you can have any industry you want, no matter your natural resource base; and the fifth and final stage, the age of high-mass consumption where people can buy all the consumer goods they want, like bicycles and sewing machines — this was 1960, remember. Well, you can hear the implicit airplane metaphor in this story, but this plane is like no other, because it can never be allowed to land. Rostow left us flying into the sunset of mass consumerism, and he knew it. As he wrote, "And then the question beyond, where history offers us only fragments. What to do when the increase in real income itself loses its charm?" He asked that question, but he never answered it, and here's why. The year was 1960, he was an advisor to the presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, who was running for election on the promise of five-percent growth, so Rostow's job was to keep that plane flying, not to ask if, how, or when it could ever be allowed to land. So here we are, flying into the sunset of mass consumerism over half a century on, with economies that have come to expect, demand and depend upon unending growth, because we're financially, politically and socially addicted to it. We're financially addicted to growth, because today's financial system is designed to pursue the highest rate of monetary return, putting publicly traded companies under constant pressure to deliver growing sales, growing market share and growing profits, and because banks create money as debt bearing interest, which must be repaid with more. We're politically addicted to growth because politicians want to raise tax revenue without raising taxes and a growing GDP seems a sure way to do that. And no politician wants to lose their place in the G-20 family photo. (Laughter) But if their economy stops growing while the rest keep going, well, they'll be booted out by the next emerging powerhouse. And we are socially addicted to growth, because thanks to a century of consumer propaganda, which fascinatingly was created by Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, who realized that his uncle's psychotherapy could be turned into very lucrative retail therapy if we could be convinced to believe that we transform ourselves every time we buy something more. None of these addictions are insurmountable, but they all deserve far more attention than they currently get, because look where this journey has been taking us. Global GDP is 10 times bigger than it was in 1950 and that increase has brought prosperity to billions of people, but the global economy has also become incredibly divisive, with the vast share of returns to wealth now accruing to a fraction of the global one percent. And the economy has become incredibly degenerative, rapidly destabilizing this delicately balanced planet on which all of our lives depend. Our politicians know it, and so they offer new destinations for growth. You can have green growth, inclusive growth, smart, resilient, balanced growth. Choose any future you want so long as you choose growth. I think it's time to choose a higher ambition, a far bigger one, because humanity's 21st century challenge is clear: to meet the needs of all people within the means of this extraordinary, unique, living planet so that we and the rest of nature can thrive. Progress on this goal isn't going to be measured with the metric of money. We need a dashboard of indicators. And when I sat down to try and draw a picture of what that might look like, strange though this is going to sound, it came out looking like a doughnut. I know, I'm sorry, but let me introduce you to the one doughnut that might actually turn out to be good for us. So imagine humanity's resource use radiating out from the middle. That hole in the middle is a place where people are falling short on life's essentials. They don't have the food, health care, education, political voice, housing that every person needs for a life of dignity and opportunity. We want to get everybody out of the hole, over the social foundation and into that green doughnut itself. But, and it's a big but, we cannot let our collective resource use overshoot that outer circle, the ecological ceiling, because there we put so much pressure on this extraordinary planet that we begin to kick it out of kilter. We cause climate breakdown, we acidify the oceans, a hole in the ozone layer, pushing ourselves beyond the planetary boundaries of the life-supporting systems that have for the last 11,000 years made earth such a benevolent home to humanity. So this double-sided challenge to meet the needs of all within the means of the planet, it invites a new shape of progress, no longer this ever-rising line of growth, but a sweet spot for humanity, thriving in dynamic balance between the foundation and the ceiling. And I was really struck once I'd drawn this picture to realize that the symbol of well-being in many ancient cultures reflects this very same sense of dynamic balance, from the Maori Takarangi to the Taoist Yin Yang, the Buddhist endless knot, the Celtic double spiral. So can we find this dynamic balance in the 21st century? Well, that's a key question, because as these red wedges show, right now we are far from balanced, falling short and overshooting at the same time. Look in that hole, you can see that millions or billions of people worldwide still fall short on their most basic of needs. And yet, we've already overshot at least four of these planetary boundaries, risking irreversible impact of climate breakdown and ecosystem collapse. This is the state of humanity and our planetary home. We, the people of the early 21st century, this is our selfie. No economist from last century saw this picture, so why would we imagine that their theories would be up for taking on its challenges? We need ideas of our own, because we are the first generation to see this and probably the last with a real chance of turning this story around. You see, 20th century economics assured us that if growth creates inequality, don't try to redistribute, because more growth will even things up again. If growth creates pollution, don't try to regulate, because more growth will clean things up again. Except, it turns out, it doesn't, and it won't. We need to create economies that tackle this shortfall and overshoot together, by design. We need economies that are regenerative and distributive by design. You see, we've inherited degenerative industries. We take earth's materials, make them into stuff we want, use it for a while, often only once, and then throw it away, and that is pushing us over planetary boundaries, so we need to bend those arrows around, create economies that work with and within the cycles of the living world, so that resources are never used up but used again and again, economies that run on sunlight, where waste from one process is food for the next. And this kind of regenerative design is popping up everywhere. Over a hundred cities worldwide, from Quito to Oslo, from Harare to Hobart, already generate more than 70 percent of their electricity from sun, wind and waves. Cities like London, Glasgow, Amsterdam are pioneering circular city design, finding ways to turn the waste from one urban process into food for the next. And from Tigray, Ethiopia to Queensland, Australia, farmers and foresters are regenerating once-barren landscapes so that it teems with life again. But as well as being regenerative by design, our economies must be distributive by design, and we've got unprecedented opportunities for making that happen, because 20th-century centralized technologies, institutions, concentrated wealth, knowledge and power in few hands. This century, we can design our technologies and institutions to distribute wealth, knowledge and empowerment to many. Instead of fossil fuel energy and large-scale manufacturing, we've got renewable energy networks, digital platforms and 3D printing. 200 years of corporate control of intellectual property is being upended by the bottom-up, open-source, peer-to-peer knowledge commons. And corporations that still pursue maximum rate of return for their shareholders, well they suddenly look rather out of date next to social enterprises that are designed to generate multiple forms of value and share it with those throughout their networks. If we can harness today's technologies, from AI to blockchain to the Internet of Things to material science, if we can harness these in service of distributive design, we can ensure that health care, education, finance, energy, political voice reaches and empowers those people who need it most. You see, regenerative and distributive design create extraordinary opportunities for the 21st-century economy. So where does this leave Rostow's airplane ride? Well, for some it still carries the hope of endless green growth, the idea that thanks to dematerialization, exponential GDP growth can go on forever while resource use keeps falling. But look at the data. This is a flight of fancy. Yes, we need to dematerialize our economies, but this dependency on unending growth cannot be decoupled from resource use on anything like the scale required to bring us safely back within planetary boundaries. I know this way of thinking about growth is unfamiliar, because growth is good, no? We want our children to grow, our gardens to grow. Yes, look to nature and growth is a wonderful, healthy source of life. It's a phase, but many economies like Ethiopia and Nepal today may be in that phase. Their economies are growing at seven percent a year. But look again to nature, because from your children's feet to the Amazon forest, nothing in nature grows forever. Things grow, and they grow up and they mature, and it's only by doing so that they can thrive for a very long time. We already know this. If I told you my friend went to the doctor who told her she had a growth that feels very different, because we intuitively understand that when something tries to grow forever within a healthy, living, thriving system, it's a threat to the health of the whole. So why would we imagine that our economies would be the one system that could buck this trend and succeed by growing forever? We urgently need financial, political and social innovations that enable us to overcome this structural dependency on growth, so that we can instead focus on thriving and balance within the social and the ecological boundaries of the doughnut. And if the mere idea of boundaries makes you feel, well, bounded, think again. Because the world's most ingenious people turn boundaries into the source of their creativity. From Mozart on his five-octave piano Jimi Hendrix on his six-string guitar, Serena Williams on a tennis court, it's boundaries that unleash our potential. And the doughnut's boundaries unleash the potential for humanity to thrive with boundless creativity, participation, belonging and meaning. It's going to take all the ingenuity that we have got to get there, so bring it on. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why forgiveness is worth it | {0: 'Sarah Montana is a writer, playwright, and content producer.'} | TEDxLincolnSquare | In the summer of 2016, I did the sensible thing: I quit my cushy job at a hedge fund to write a play about my family's murder. (Sighs) I told my friends and family that this was about art, but in truth, I was on a spiritual vision quest. I was seeking closure to a relationship with someone that I barely knew - the kid who killed my mother and brother. He was my friend's younger brother, a kid from our neighborhood. He came over a handful of times to raid our family's snack cabinet. My mom actually used to wave to him from the van and say, "He's going through a hard time, I just want to make sure he knows that I see him." He broke into our house a couple of days before Christmas, looking for some stuff to sell for cash. When he came across my brother Jim asleep on the couch, he panicked, shot him and fled the scene. Then he realized he forgot his coat. By the time he came back, my mom had found Jim. Because he knew that she recognized him, and, to quote him, "Because she wouldn't stop screaming," he shot and killed her too. He is currently serving back-to-back life sentences in a prison in Southwestern Virginia. (Sighs) Over the course of the next seven years, I somehow managed not to hate him, but my grief and trauma did something a little bit weirder. He became a non-person to me. He wasn't a person, he was the face of all evil. He was the twister that came through and ripped up our house and threw it in some hellish version of Oz, but not a 17-year-old boy - or, I realized now, a 24-year-old man. A man who came of age in a cell, if he came of age at all. And as I set down to write the villain of my play and my life, I realized I had a name, some fractured childhood memories, a brief court document and nothing else to go on. So I went to the source of all answers, Google. I googled his prisoner ID number. That's when the internet sucker punched me in the face. Two thirds of prisoners in his penitentiary spend 23 hours a day in solitary confinement in eight-by-ten cells with slats for light. Conditions are so bad that in 2012 the entire prison went on a hunger strike. As I scrolled through case after case of human rights violations at this prison, suddenly, he became a person to me again. I remember the first time I saw mom and Jim's bodies in the funeral home, how my recoiled when I felt the small, destructive supernova that the bullet made in the back of Jim's skull. My mom's face just collapsed in on itself. Not her, just flesh and bones in that black dress we bought at Kohl's the week before. Those were my most painful memories. But when I pictured him - beaten, starving, crying out in a dark cell - yeah, that was somehow just as painful. And I realized it was because we were still connected. That steel tether of trauma that he hooked into my side when he killed them was still there, and I had been lurching against its pull and dragging him through the mud for the past seven years, whether I knew it or not. And it was with a little horror that I realized that he may have killed them, but I chose to keep us connected. So after wading through all the options - I mean, literally every option at my disposal - I realized the only way to get rid of this dude was to forgive him. That was a real bummer of a conclusion to come to. (Laughter) Because the truth was I thought that I already had forgiven him. I told my friends I forgave him; I told my family I forgave him; I even said "I forgive you" in the national news. So if saying you forgive someone is not the same thing as doing it, why was this guy still hooked into my side, dragging me around, making me do dumb things like quit my job to write a play? Turns out there is no fake it 'till you make it in forgiveness even though that's exactly what society expects us to do. So how do you forgive effectively, once and for all? That question started another Google rabbit hole, and then the theological rabbit hole, and then the Psychiatric-Journal and medical-journal rabbit hole until finally, my poor husband came home to a frantic wife, feral, just pacing the apartment, spewing statistics about forgiveness, like, "Did you know that there are 62 passages in the Bible with the word forgive and 27 with the word forgiveness? Not a single one tells you how to do it!" (Laughter) They just say how great it is! It's like the Nike of spiritual gifts: "Just do it!" (Laughter) And then there's this doctor Wayne guy over here, who says, "To forgive, we just got to let go and be like water." What does that mean? My husband approached me very cautiously. "Sweetie, what you doing?" (Laughter) "Trying to forgive the kid who killed my family, but nobody will tell me how." Oh, there are endless five-star historical Yelp reviews for forgiveness. The sales pitch is fantastic, but literally, What do I do? I think I was asking the wrong question, starting with how, when really what I needed to know was why. Why forgive? Why do it? That's when I discovered that most of us are forgiving for the wrong reasons. Some victims, like me, try to forgive right away because it's the right thing to do. But if we're honest with ourselves, there's only three reasons a victim forgives automatically. One: you think that forgiving quickly will make you a good person. That's an easy mistake to make, right? If forgiveness is good, a good person should forgive right away. But in all my research, I actually didn't find a timeline for forgiveness. Everybody was just really desperately urging us to get around to it because they knew we didn't want to. Even Jesus, when he talks about turning the other cheek, isn't talking about forgiveness. He's talking about non-violence. There has to be a middle ground between letting someone of the hook right away and going full an eye for an eye on them. Two: victims feel a lot of pressure to forgive from everyone else. It can come from your friends, from your family, from the media, from mixed up religious messaging. But the truth is, everyone wants you to forgive quickly so they can feel more comfortable, and they can move on. That's a crappy reason to do anything. Three: you think that forgiveness is a shortcut to healing. You think if you skip to the end of the story, you can bypass all the angry, vulnerable, messy healing crap. Spoiler alert: that one will come back to bite you in the butt. For me, it was all three reasons. I want to be a good person, I love pleasing other people, and I hate the vulnerable, angry, messy, healing crap. But it turns out that forgiveness is such a potent force that none of those reasons were strong enough to make it stick. Just like love. If your motivation is selfish, even a good selfish thing like healing, it will collapse in on itself like a dying star. So why do it? Why forgive? It can't heal you; it won't save you or the other person; it can't make you a good person - at least not all by itself - because that's not what forgiveness is designed to do. Forgiveness is designed to set you free. When you say, "I forgive you," what you're really saying is, "I know what you did. It's not okay, but I recognize that you are more than that. I don't want to hold us captive to this thing anymore. I can heal myself, and I don't need anything from you." After you say that, and you mean it, then it's just you. No chains, no prisoners. Just the good, the bad and the ugly of whoever that person was from the start. Our culture thinks that vengeance is freedom, but it is a total prison. Any act of violence, whether it's emotional or physical, is this weird, twisted form of intimacy. That's why the Greeks said that a death by a good man was a good death. Think about it. Every time somebody thinks about my mom and my brother, they think about the fact that they're not here, and then they think about the kid who did this. That one act of violence actually bound the three of them together in people's minds for eternity. When we choose vengeance, we're actually signing a blood oath to chain our story to our enemies for the rest of time. Forgiveness is the only real path to freedom. But to get free, you have to get super specific about what exactly it is that you're forgiving because you cannot forgive something that didn't happen to you. In my research, I came across this idea from Judaism that hit me in the chest. In Judaism, the family can't forgive murderers, because they were not killed. They can only forgive the pain, anguish and grief that the loss caused them. This was a total jackpot moment for me. I had to compartmentalize my damage: not what happened to mom and Jim, not what happened to my family, not what happened to society, what happened to me. This is why justice often feels really cold for victims. It's justice's job to assess what is owed. And it is the criminal justice system's job to assess what is owed to society. Not to victims. It is up to us to get really clear, individually, on what we are owed. You can't forgive your father for beating your mother. You can only forgive him for how sad, alienated and angry that made you feel. I couldn't forgive him for killing mom and Jim. I'm still here. I had to assess my damages. The wedding that I had without the two of them. The parts of me that my husband and kids will never get to understand without knowing the two of them. The way my life was supposed to start at 22, and he broke it. My inherent sense of safety and belonging, which, I got to be honest, I don't think are coming back. Those are my damages. Most of us avoid forgiveness like the plague because we do not want to look at our wounds. Wounds are scary, they are nasty, they are icky, it is why most of us look away when we donate blood. It is way easier to take all of that emotion and channel it into rage at another person. I got to be honest with you, I say: do it. (Laughter) You thought this would be about forgiveness, huh? It's an important part of the process. Anger is important; it is the fire that cauterizes our wounds and lets them scar over and heal. Too much anger, and yes, you'll get third-degree burns. Without a little bit of heat, you'll never scar over, and you'll never know exactly what happened to you. If you don't know what happened to you, you can't know what you're forgiving. But once you know what's happened to you, it's time for some good old-fashioned justice. Sorry, I married a Texan. (Laughter) So what in justice's name am I owed? An apology? An explanation? A front-row seat to their torture chamber? Maybe - not the last part - but maybe you are owed those things in general. Nine times out of ten, if you ask for those things, you will get them. Which is why forgiveness is not the right thing in most situations. Forgiveness is only right when waiting for what we're owed comes at too high a cost. In all those years, with that guy chained to my side, I got a lot done. I went to grad school, I married a wonderful man, I started a career that I honestly really love. But I did it all a little more slowly, and I wasn't just dragging him along, I was dragging my mother and brother in the process, twisting the three of them up together in those chains. Pretty soon, that little posse started to crowd me out of my own body and my own experience. And one day, losing myself in order to punish him and keep the two of them alive felt like too high a cost to bear. It was there, in that crossroads, when I knew what had happened to me. I knew what I was owed, and I decided than choosing myself was more important than being right. That's when I was ready to forgive. So I stepped away from Google, and I didn't ask any more questions, and I wrote him a letter. I tore unused pages out of my mom's journals, actually, and I wrote. I told him that what happened on December 19th, 2008, was not okay and would probably never be okay for either of us. But just because it wasn't okay, that didn't mean he owed me anything - not an apology, not an explanation, not his role as my villain. I told him that I hated to be reduced to one thing that happened to me one day. I yearned to be more, to be whole, and I didn't think that I could do that if I looked at another person and reduced him to one thing he did one day and made evil the sum of its parts. I told him that I wished him a lifetime full of healing and that I forgave him. Then, without thinking, I plopped that letter into a mailbox on the corner of Flatbush Avenue and Church. For the first 10 steps, there was this lightness of being, and then that lightness started to feel like a lurch in your stomach, when you hit the spiritual tripwire. My chest unwound, it burst, and suddenly, I was alone with myself. I mean, really alone, giving birth to a stranger, saying hello to a girl that I hadn't spoken to in seven years. (Sighs) Sometimes I miss him. (Laughter) Not him, the monster that I created. Things were a lot harsher and black and white, but they were a lot simpler when I had a villain to fight, and more familiar. As long as he was around, mom and Jim were never that far away. They were characters, just offstage, waiting in the wings, the rest of us on stage, talking about them. But my story was about the three of them, always. To get free, I had to get clear on exactly what contract I was shredding. Once I did that, I found myself alone, center stage, in the spotlight, with endless possibilities. Real forgiveness has to let go of all expectations. You can't expect a certain outcome. You can't accept them to reply. You can't even expect to know who you're going to be on the other side of it. Forgiveness is really tricky. It's one of those tools that is only properly wielded when we have healed just enough that we have nothing left to lose. If you're still hemorrhaging in pain, it is too soon to forgive. If you can't roll up your sleeve and show me your scars and tell me exactly what happened to you, it's still too soon to forgive. But it's never too late to let go of your villains and reclaim yourself. And if you're ready to let it all go - the grief, the pain, the anger, the trauma - and you're open to finding out who you are instead of always trying to prove yourself - I got to be honest with you - all this forgiveness hype is legit! (Laughter) Ten out of ten, five stars, would highly recommend. Thank you. (Applause) |
The doctors, nurses and aid workers rebuilding Syria | {0: 'TED Fellow Rola Hallam helps local humanitarians provide aid to their own war-devastated communities. '} | TED2018 | "Five hospitals in Aleppo have been bombed." That was a text message that I received on a dark winter night in November 2016. One of them was a children's hospital run by my Syrian colleagues at the Independent Doctors Association, IDA. It was the sixth time it had been bombed. I watched in horror heartbreaking footage of the head nurse, Malak, in the aftermath of the bombing, grabbing premature babies out of their incubators, desperate to get them to safety, before she broke down in tears. And I felt devastated. Fellow humanitarians and I have spent blood, sweat and tears rebuilding hospitals so that our patients may live, not die. And through this work, I made a discovery. The reason that people survive in crisis is because of the remarkable work of the people in crisis themselves. People survive because of the local doctors, nurses and aid workers who are from the very heart of the affected community, the people who dare to work where others can't or won't. People survive because of people like Malak, who, despite sustaining a severe burns injury in the line of duty, the first thing she did when discharged from hospital was to go back caring for small children. From the rubble of death and devastation arise the most gallant and noble human beings. Local humanitarians are the beacons of light in the darkness of war. Now, the data shows that Syrian organizations carry out 75 percent of the humanitarian work in Syria. Yet, they receive 0.3 percent of the Syria aid budget. And what's more, the same is happening across the crises of the world. I have witnessed this reality. It means those with the knowledge, skill and ability to respond on the front lines have little of the necessary tools, equipment and resources they need to save lives. It means groups like IDA don't have funds to rebuild their hospital. The humanitarian system is failing the most vulnerable communities in their darkest hours. Now, at the time of receiving that message, I was on sabbatical from my clinical work, setting up CanDo, a start-up determined to address this imbalance and enable local responders to provide health care to their war-devastated communities. We had devised a simple model: source trusted and impactful local groups, support their development through an accelerator program and connect them to you via our crowdfunding platform, where they can fund-raise for their health needs. So when IDA asked for help, I decided to launch CanDo seven months early, with very little money, and many people, including myself, thought I had finally gone mad. I wanted to do something that transformed our collective anger into something beautiful. And that's how the People's Convoy was born. It was a global crowdfunding campaign to enable IDA to rebuild a whole new children's hospital, and, if successful, we the people would take the medical equipment all the way from London to the Syria border. And we did it. Thousands of people came together from across the world to achieve a global first: we built the first-ever crowdfunded hospital. The location was carefully chosen by the local experts, IDA, where they knew it would be safe and serve the greatest number of displaced children. IDA was so moved by people's response, they named it "Hope Hospital." It's been open for exactly one year, and they have treated over 15,000 children. (Applause) We can provide lifesaving assistance in the most volatile places on earth. The system needs to change, and change starts with us all sharing a new humanitarian vision, one where you, global citizens with skills, expertise and resources, stand together with the local responders; one where we are all humanitarians, putting the necessary resources in the hands of those who need them most and are best placed to use them effectively and efficiently. We need to support the people who are not only saving lives now, but it will also be them stitching their wounded communities back together, once a conflict is over to help them heal. Local humanitarians have the courage to persist, to dust themselves off from the wreckage and to start again, risking their lives to save others. And we can match their courage by not looking away or turning our backs, by helping those who are helping themselves, and together, save more lives. Thank you. (Applause) (Cheers) (Applause) Shoham Arad: Come over here, please. Why are hospitals being bombed? Rola Hallam: Yeah, good question. So, Physicians for Human Rights have documented nearly 500 attacks on hospitals and over 800 medical personnel who have been killed — over 90 percent of it by the Syrian regime — and they say this is part of a systemic targeting and destruction of health care, using it as a weapon of war. And the thing with this is that it's not just our problem, it's yours, too, and everyone's, because A, it exacerbates the refugee situation — when you have a decimated health care system, it means the next Ebola-type epicenter of disease is going to be Syria; and unfortunately, it sets a very dangerous precedent that makes all of our hospitals anywhere in the world dangerous, and that is not how it should be. SA: So this actually isn't just about money, either, CanDo isn't just about money. Tell me what it means to you that 5,000 people all over the world contributed 350,000 dollars to build Hope Hospital. RH: I think the answer is in that word, it's in hope. I think everyone who donated, they had their faith in humanity renewed, knowing there are people like IDA and those doctors, who are exhibiting the absolute best of humanity, and it was like an absolute reciprocation. IDA and these Syrians and many people in places of conflict feel very unheard and unseen. And I think the fact that — and they see things through the prism of government, so when they see government's not acting, they assume everyone who lives in those places doesn't care. So when they see that display, it really does just renew everyone's faith in humanity. SA: Thank you, Rola. RH: Thank you. SA: Thank you for everything. (Applause) |
Scientists must be free to learn, to speak and to challenge | {0: 'Kirsty Duncan works for all Canadians to nurture science in Canada and encourages people of all ages to have inquisitive minds.'} | TED2018 | Let me tell you about rock snot. Since 1992, Dr. Max Bothwell, a Government of Canada scientist, has been studying a type of algae that grows on rocks. Now, the very unscientific term for that algae is rock snot, because as you can imagine, it looks a lot like snot. But scientists also call it Didymosphenia geminata and for decades, this algae has been sliming up riverbeds around the world. The problem with this algae is that it is a threat to salmon, to trout and the river ecosystems it invades. Now, it turns out Canada's Dr. Bothwell is actually a world expert in the field, so it was no surprise in 2014 when a reporter contacted Dr. Bothwell for a story on the algae. The problem was, Dr. Bothwell wasn't allowed to speak to the reporter, because the government of the day wouldn't let him. 110 pages of emails and 16 government communication experts stood in Dr. Bothwell's way. Why couldn't Dr. Bothwell speak? Well, we'll never know for sure, but Dr. Bothwell's research did suggest that climate change may have been responsible for the aggressive algae blooms. But who the heck would want to stifle climate change information, right? Yes, you can laugh. It's a joke, because it is laughable. We know that climate change is suppressed for all sorts of reasons. I saw it firsthand when I was a university professor. We see it when countries pull out of international climate agreements like the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Accord, and we see it when industry fails to meet its emissions reduction targets. But it's not just climate change information that's being stifled. So many other scientific issues are obscured by alternate facts, fake news and other forms of suppression. We've seen it in the United Kingdom, we've seen it in Russia, we've seen it in the United States and, until 2015, right here in Canada. In our modern technological age, when our very survival depends on discovery, innovation and science, it is critical, absolutely critical, that our scientists are free to undertake their work, free to collaborate with other scientists, free to speak to the media and free to speak to the public. Because after all, science is humanity's best effort at uncovering the truth about our world, about our very existence. Every new fact that is uncovered adds to the growing body of our collective knowledge. Scientists must be free to explore unconventional or controversial topics. They must be free to challenge the thinking of the day and they must be free to present uncomfortable or inconvenient truths, because that's how scientists push boundaries and pushing boundaries is, after all, what science is all about. And here's another point: scientists must be free to fail, because even a failed hypothesis teaches us something. And the best way I can explain that is through one of my own adventures. But first I've got to take you back in time. It's the early 1900s and Claire and Vera are roommates in southern Ontario. One evening during the height of the Spanish flu pandemic, the two attend a lecture together. The end of the evening, they head for home and for bed. In the morning, Claire calls up to Vera and says she's going out to breakfast. When she returns a short while later, Vera wasn't up. She pulls back the covers and makes the gruesome discovery. Vera was dead. When it comes to Spanish flu, those stories are common, of lightning speed deaths. Well, I was a professor in my mid-20s when I first heard those shocking facts and the scientist in me wanted to know why and how. My curiosity would lead me to a frozen land and to lead an expedition to uncover the cause of the 1918 Spanish flu. I wanted to test our current drugs against one of history's deadliest diseases. I hoped we could make a flu vaccine that would be effective against the virus and mutation of it, should it ever return. And so I led a team, a research team, of 17 men from Canada, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States to the Svalbard Islands in the Arctic Ocean. These islands are between Norway and the North Pole. We exhumed six bodies who had died of Spanish flu and were buried in the permafrost and we hoped the frozen ground would preserve the body and the virus. Now, I know what you are all waiting for, that big scientific payoff. But my science story doesn't have that spectacular Hollywood ending. Most don't. Truth is, we didn't find the virus, but we did develop new techniques to safely exhume bodies that might contain virus. We did develop new techniques to safely remove tissue that might contain virus. And we developed new safety protocols to protect our research team and the nearby community. We made important contributions to science even though the contributions we made were not the ones originally intended. In science, attempts fail, results prove inconclusive and theories don't pan out. In science, research builds upon the work and knowledge of others, or by seeing further, by standing on the shoulders of giants, to paraphrase Newton. The point is, scientists must be free to choose what they want to explore, what they are passionate about and they must be free to report their findings. You heard me say that respect for science started to improve in Canada in 2015. How did we get here? What lessons might we have to share? Well, it actually goes back to my time as a professor. I watched while agencies, governments and industries around the world suppressed information on climate change. It infuriated me. It kept me up at night. How could politicians twist scientific fact for partisan gain? So I did what anyone appalled by politics would do: I ran for office, and I won. (Applause) I thought I would use my new platform to talk about the importance of science. It quickly became a fight for the freedom of science. After all, I was a scientist, I came from the world under attack, and I had personally felt the outrage. I could be a voice for those who were being silenced. But I quickly learned that scientists were nervous, even afraid to talk to me. One government scientist, a friend of mine, we'll call him McPherson, was concerned about the impact government policies were having on his research and the state of science deteriorating in Canada. He was so concerned, he wrote to me from his wife's email account because he was afraid a phone call could be traced. He wanted me to phone his wife's cell phone so that call couldn't be traced. I only wish I were kidding. It quickly brought what was happening in Canada into sharp focus for me. How could my friend of 20 years be that afraid to talk to me? So I did what I could at the time. I listened and I shared what I learned with my friend in Parliament, a man who was interested in all things environment, science, technology, innovation. And then the 2015 election rolled around and our party won. And we formed government. And that friend of mine is now the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau. (Applause) And he asked if I would serve as his Minister of Science. Together, with the rest of the government, we are working hard to restore science to its rightful place. I will never forget that day in December 2015 when I proudly stood in Parliament and proclaimed, "The war on science is now over." (Applause) And I have worked hard to back up those words with actions. We've had many successes. There's still more work to do, because we're building this culture shift. But we want our government scientists to talk to the media, talk to the public. It'll take time, but we are committed. After all, Canada is seen as a beacon for science internationally. And we want to send a message that you do not mess with something so fundamental, so precious, as science. So, for Dr. Bothwell, for Claire and Vera, for McPherson and all those other voices, if you see that science is being stifled, suppressed or attacked, speak up. If you see that scientists are being silenced, speak up. We must hold our leaders to account. Whether that is by exercising our right to vote, whether it is by penning an op-ed in a newspaper or by starting a conversation on social media, it is our collective voice that will ensure the freedom of science. And after all, science is for everyone, and it will lead to a better, brighter, bolder future for us all. Thank you. (Applause) |
The age-old sharing economies of Africa -- and why we should scale them | {0: 'Robert Neuwirth’s writings on the street-level reality of the developing world have opened a new dialogue on development and economics.'} | TEDGlobal 2017 | So what I'm doing is a thought experiment. Now you may know of or have read this book by this guy. It's probably the first and maybe the only bestseller ever written about economics. And you probably know a bit about what it says. It talks about how nations all over the world will prosper through the individual pursuit of individual profit. Individual profit will be the mechanism for the prosperity of the world. But the funny thing about Adam Smith is that he was a stay-at-home kind of guy. He actually never went further from Edinburgh than France and Switzerland. So my thought experiment is to imagine what would have happened if Adam Smith had visited Africa. And fortunately, there's actually an easy answer, because the Arab lawyer and traveler Ibn Battuta traveled down the east coast of Africa in the 14th century, and what he found when he got to Mogadishu was a market, and he wrote about it. And basically, merchant ships came to the harbor, and they weren't even allowed to land. They had to drop anchor in the harbor, and boats came out to them, and locals picked them and said, "You are my guest, I am now your broker." And they had to do business through the local broker, and if they went around that and didn't do business through the broker, they could go to court, and the deal would be canceled, and they would be thrown out of town. And through this mechanism, everyone prospered. And so if that was Adam Smith, he might look like this guy and say, "Ah! That's a mutual aid society. That's a share-the-wealth free market." And when I put this question to Christian [Benimana], who had the stage at the beginning of this session, he responded that if Adam Smith had come to Africa, there would have been a sharing economy long before Airbnb and Uber. And that's true. So if we put this to work today, it would be very interesting. There would be a lot of money flowing into the countries. These are just figures of 10 percent of exports in these countries. So the interesting thing is that this mutual aid economy still exists, and we can find examples of it in the strangest places. So, this is Alaba International Market. It's the largest electronics market in West Africa. It's 10,000 merchants, they do about four billion dollars of turnover every year. And they say they are ardent apostles of Adam Smith: competition is great, we're all in it individually, government doesn't help us. But the interesting reality is that when I asked further, that's not what grew the market at all. There's a behind-the-scenes principle that enables this market to grow. And they do claim — you know, this is an interesting juxtaposition of the King James Bible and "How To Sell Yourself." That's what they say is their message. But in reality, this market is governed by a sharing principle. Every merchant, when you ask them, "How did you get started in global trade?" they say, "Well, when my master settled me." And when I finally got it into my head to ask, "What is this 'settling?'" it turns out that when you've done your apprenticeship with someone you work for, they are required — required — to set you up in business. That means paying your rent for two or three years and giving you a cash infusion so you can go out in the world and start trading. That's locally generated venture capital. Right? And I can say with almost certainty that the Igbo apprenticeship system that governs Alaba International Market is the largest business incubator platform in the world. And there are other sharing economies that we look for — merry-go-rounds, which are found in almost every shantytown. They have different names in other cultures; this is the Kenyan name. It's a way of generating cash. It's a kitty — people throw money into a pot once a week, and once a week, one member of the group gets the money, and they can spend it on whatever they need to. And there's also something called "acequias," and that is a Spanish word, but it comes from the North African Arabic; "saqiya" means "water wheel." And what the acequia is is a sharing system for scarce water. It's migrated from North Africa to Spain, and from Spain to the west of the United States, where it still is used. And it shares water by need rather than by who was there first. And contrary, with all due respect, to what Llew [Claasen] said when he talked about blockchains and cryptocurrencies yesterday, there is no tragedy of the commons. People in acequias have been commonly managing scarce water resources for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. So taking this thought experiment, I wanted to go a little bit further and suggest that these things are managed communally, and they are taking care of scarce capital, scarce cash and scarce resources. And it seems to me that we have actually two kinds of capitalism. We have the capitalism of the top up. And these are really interesting statistics, because three one-thousandths of one percent of the Nigerian population controls wealth equal to one-fourth of the GDP of the country. One one-hundredth of one percent of the Kenyan population controls wealth equal to 75 percent of the GDP of the country. That's the capitalism of top up. And everyone else is with this guy, selling board games and bodybuilding equipment in a go-slow on the highway in Lagos. And when you're selling board games and bodybuilding equipment in a go-slow, that traffic jam is really, really, really bad, right? Those of us in this sphere of the economy are caught in what I call "the capitalism of decay," because there's no way to rise up and get out of it, because they're lacking the resources that we talked about in those sharing economies. And they're tripped up by the thesis of cassava and capitalism, that cassava has to be processed in order not to be poisonous, and I would argue that, similarly, the market economy needs to be processed in order to be fair to everyone. So we have to look at what I call the "bottom down economy." These are these sharing models that exist out there that need to be propagated and used and scaled. OK? And if we propagate these things, we can begin to bring infrastructure to everyone, and that will ensure that communities are leading their own development, which is, I believe, what we need in the world, and, I would suggest, what we need in Africa. I wanted to quote Steve Biko, and I thought it was really important to quote Steve Biko, because next month, September 12 to be exact, is the 40th anniversary of his murder by the South African state. And you can read the quote. He basically said that we're not here to compete. And I love this quote: "... to make us a community of brothers and sisters jointly involved in the quest for a composite answer to the varied problems of life." And he also said that "the great powers of the world have done wonders in giving us an industrial and military look, ..." and we don't have to copy that military-industrialist complex, because Africa can do things differently and restore the humanity of the world. And so what I want to suggest here is that we have an opportunity, that we are all here in the mutual landscape to be able to do things, and that the journey starts now. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How Pakistani women are taking the internet back | {0: 'TED Fellow Nighat Dad heads the Digital Rights Foundation, Pakistan -- a researched based advocacy not-for-profit geared towards ICT to support human rights, democratic processes, and digital governance. '} | TEDGlobal 2017 | Imagine waking up to a stranger — sometimes multiple strangers — questioning your right to existence for something that you wrote online, waking up to an angry message, scared and worried for your safety. Welcome to the world of cyberharassment. The kind of harassment that women face in Pakistan is very serious and leads to sometimes deadly outcomes. This kind of harassment keeps women from accessing the internet — essentially, knowledge. It's a form of oppression. Pakistan is the sixth most populous country in the world, with 140 million people having access to mobile technologies, and 15 percent internet penetration. And this number doesn't seem to go down with the rise of new technologies. Pakistan is also the birthplace of the youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner, Malala Yousafzai. But that's just one aspect of Pakistan. Another aspect is where the twisted concept of honor is linked to women and their bodies; where men are allowed to disrespect women and even kill them sometimes in the name of so-called "family honor"; where women are left to die right outside their houses for speaking to a man on a mobile phone, in the name of "family honor." Let me say this very clearly: it's not honor; it's a cold-blooded murder. I come from a very small village in Punjab, Pakistan, where women are not allowed to pursue their higher education. The elders of my extended family didn't allow their women to pursue their higher education or their professional careers. However, unlike the other male guardians of my family, my father was one who really supported my ambitions. To get my law degree, of course, it was really difficult, and [there were] frowns of disapproval. But in the end, I knew it's either me or them, and I chose myself. (Applause) My family's traditions and expectations for a woman wouldn't allow me to own a mobile phone until I was married. And even when I was married, this tool became a tool for my own surveillance. When I resisted this idea of being surveilled by my ex-husband, he really didn't approve of this and threw me out of his house, along with my six-month-old son, Abdullah. And that was the time when I first asked myself, "Why? Why are women not allowed to enjoy the same equal rights enshrined in our Constitution? While the law states that a woman has the same equal access to the information, why is it always men — brothers, fathers and husbands — who are granting these rights to us, effectively making the law irrelevant?" So I decided to take a step, instead of keep questioning these patriarchal structures and societal norms. And I founded the Digital Rights Foundation in 2012 to address all the issues and women's experiences in online spaces and cyberharassment. From lobbying for free and safe internet to convincing young women that access to the safe internet is their fundamental, basic, human right, I'm trying to play my part in igniting the spark to address the questions that have bothered me all these years. With a hope in my heart, and to offer a solution to this menace, I started Pakistan's and the region's first cyberharassment help line in December 2016 — (Applause) to extend my support to the women who do not know who to turn to when they face serious threats online. I think of the women who do not have the necessary support to deal with the mental trauma when they feel unsafe in online spaces, and they go about their daily activities, thinking that there is a rape threat in their in-box. Safe access to the internet is an access to knowledge, and knowledge is freedom. When I fight for women's digital rights, I'm fighting for equality. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why fascism is so tempting -- and how your data could power it | {0: 'In his book "Homo Deus," Yuval Noah Harari explores the future of humankind: the destinies we may set for ourselves and the quests we\'ll undertake.'} | TED2018 | Hello, everyone. It's a bit funny, because I did write that humans will become digital, but I didn't think it will happen so fast and that it will happen to me. But here I am, as a digital avatar, and here you are, so let's start. And let's start with a question. How many fascists are there in the audience today? (Laughter) Well, it's a bit difficult to say, because we've forgotten what fascism is. People now use the term "fascist" as a kind of general-purpose abuse. Or they confuse fascism with nationalism. So let's take a few minutes to clarify what fascism actually is, and how it is different from nationalism. The milder forms of nationalism have been among the most benevolent of human creations. Nations are communities of millions of strangers who don't really know each other. For example, I don't know the eight million people who share my Israeli citizenship. But thanks to nationalism, we can all care about one another and cooperate effectively. This is very good. Some people, like John Lennon, imagine that without nationalism, the world will be a peaceful paradise. But far more likely, without nationalism, we would have been living in tribal chaos. If you look today at the most prosperous and peaceful countries in the world, countries like Sweden and Switzerland and Japan, you will see that they have a very strong sense of nationalism. In contrast, countries that lack a strong sense of nationalism, like Congo and Somalia and Afghanistan, tend to be violent and poor. So what is fascism, and how is it different from nationalism? Well, nationalism tells me that my nation is unique, and that I have special obligations towards my nation. Fascism, in contrast, tells me that my nation is supreme, and that I have exclusive obligations towards it. I don't need to care about anybody or anything other than my nation. Usually, of course, people have many identities and loyalties to different groups. For example, I can be a good patriot, loyal to my country, and at the same time, be loyal to my family, my neighborhood, my profession, humankind as a whole, truth and beauty. Of course, when I have different identities and loyalties, it sometimes creates conflicts and complications. But, well, who ever told you that life was easy? Life is complicated. Deal with it. Fascism is what happens when people try to ignore the complications and to make life too easy for themselves. Fascism denies all identities except the national identity and insists that I have obligations only towards my nation. If my nation demands that I sacrifice my family, then I will sacrifice my family. If the nation demands that I kill millions of people, then I will kill millions of people. And if my nation demands that I betray truth and beauty, then I should betray truth and beauty. For example, how does a fascist evaluate art? How does a fascist decide whether a movie is a good movie or a bad movie? Well, it's very, very, very simple. There is really just one yardstick: if the movie serves the interests of the nation, it's a good movie; if the movie doesn't serve the interests of the nation, it's a bad movie. That's it. Similarly, how does a fascist decide what to teach kids in school? Again, it's very simple. There is just one yardstick: you teach the kids whatever serves the interests of the nation. The truth doesn't matter at all. Now, the horrors of the Second World War and of the Holocaust remind us of the terrible consequences of this way of thinking. But usually, when we talk about the ills of fascism, we do so in an ineffective way, because we tend to depict fascism as a hideous monster, without really explaining what was so seductive about it. It's a bit like these Hollywood movies that depict the bad guys — Voldemort or Sauron or Darth Vader — as ugly and mean and cruel. They're cruel even to their own supporters. When I see these movies, I never understand — why would anybody be tempted to follow a disgusting creep like Voldemort? The problem with evil is that in real life, evil doesn't necessarily look ugly. It can look very beautiful. This is something that Christianity knew very well, which is why in Christian art, as [opposed to] Hollywood, Satan is usually depicted as a gorgeous hunk. This is why it's so difficult to resist the temptations of Satan, and why it is also difficult to resist the temptations of fascism. Fascism makes people see themselves as belonging to the most beautiful and most important thing in the world — the nation. And then people think, "Well, they taught us that fascism is ugly. But when I look in the mirror, I see something very beautiful, so I can't be a fascist, right?" Wrong. That's the problem with fascism. When you look in the fascist mirror, you see yourself as far more beautiful than you really are. In the 1930s, when Germans looked in the fascist mirror, they saw Germany as the most beautiful thing in the world. If today, Russians look in the fascist mirror, they will see Russia as the most beautiful thing in the world. And if Israelis look in the fascist mirror, they will see Israel as the most beautiful thing in the world. This does not mean that we are now facing a rerun of the 1930s. Fascism and dictatorships might come back, but they will come back in a new form, a form which is much more relevant to the new technological realities of the 21st century. In ancient times, land was the most important asset in the world. Politics, therefore, was the struggle to control land. And dictatorship meant that all the land was owned by a single ruler or by a small oligarch. And in the modern age, machines became more important than land. Politics became the struggle to control the machines. And dictatorship meant that too many of the machines became concentrated in the hands of the government or of a small elite. Now data is replacing both land and machines as the most important asset. Politics becomes the struggle to control the flows of data. And dictatorship now means that too much data is being concentrated in the hands of the government or of a small elite. The greatest danger that now faces liberal democracy is that the revolution in information technology will make dictatorships more efficient than democracies. In the 20th century, democracy and capitalism defeated fascism and communism because democracy was better at processing data and making decisions. Given 20th-century technology, it was simply inefficient to try and concentrate too much data and too much power in one place. But it is not a law of nature that centralized data processing is always less efficient than distributed data processing. With the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning, it might become feasible to process enormous amounts of information very efficiently in one place, to take all the decisions in one place, and then centralized data processing will be more efficient than distributed data processing. And then the main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the 20th century — their attempt to concentrate all the information in one place — it will become their greatest advantage. Another technological danger that threatens the future of democracy is the merger of information technology with biotechnology, which might result in the creation of algorithms that know me better than I know myself. And once you have such algorithms, an external system, like the government, cannot just predict my decisions, it can also manipulate my feelings, my emotions. A dictator may not be able to provide me with good health care, but he will be able to make me love him and to make me hate the opposition. Democracy will find it difficult to survive such a development because, in the end, democracy is not based on human rationality; it's based on human feelings. During elections and referendums, you're not being asked, "What do you think?" You're actually being asked, "How do you feel?" And if somebody can manipulate your emotions effectively, democracy will become an emotional puppet show. So what can we do to prevent the return of fascism and the rise of new dictatorships? The number one question that we face is: Who controls the data? If you are an engineer, then find ways to prevent too much data from being concentrated in too few hands. And find ways to make sure the distributed data processing is at least as efficient as centralized data processing. This will be the best safeguard for democracy. As for the rest of us who are not engineers, the number one question facing us is how not to allow ourselves to be manipulated by those who control the data. The enemies of liberal democracy, they have a method. They hack our feelings. Not our emails, not our bank accounts — they hack our feelings of fear and hate and vanity, and then use these feelings to polarize and destroy democracy from within. This is actually a method that Silicon Valley pioneered in order to sell us products. But now, the enemies of democracy are using this very method to sell us fear and hate and vanity. They cannot create these feelings out of nothing. So they get to know our own preexisting weaknesses. And then use them against us. And it is therefore the responsibility of all of us to get to know our weaknesses and make sure that they do not become a weapon in the hands of the enemies of democracy. Getting to know our own weaknesses will also help us to avoid the trap of the fascist mirror. As we explained earlier, fascism exploits our vanity. It makes us see ourselves as far more beautiful than we really are. This is the seduction. But if you really know yourself, you will not fall for this kind of flattery. If somebody puts a mirror in front of your eyes that hides all your ugly bits and makes you see yourself as far more beautiful and far more important than you really are, just break that mirror. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Yuval, thank you. Goodness me. It's so nice to see you again. So, if I understand you right, you're alerting us to two big dangers here. One is the possible resurgence of a seductive form of fascism, but close to that, dictatorships that may not exactly be fascistic, but control all the data. I wonder if there's a third concern that some people here have already expressed, which is where, not governments, but big corporations control all our data. What do you call that, and how worried should we be about that? Yuval Noah Harari: Well, in the end, there isn't such a big difference between the corporations and the governments, because, as I said, the questions is: Who controls the data? This is the real government. If you call it a corporation or a government — if it's a corporation and it really controls the data, this is our real government. So the difference is more apparent than real. CA: But somehow, at least with corporations, you can imagine market mechanisms where they can be taken down. I mean, if consumers just decide that the company is no longer operating in their interest, it does open the door to another market. It seems easier to imagine that than, say, citizens rising up and taking down a government that is in control of everything. YNH: Well, we are not there yet, but again, if a corporation really knows you better than you know yourself — at least that it can manipulate your own deepest emotions and desires, and you won't even realize — you will think this is your authentic self. So in theory, yes, in theory, you can rise against a corporation, just as, in theory, you can rise against a dictatorship. But in practice, it is extremely difficult. CA: So in "Homo Deus," you argue that this would be the century when humans kind of became gods, either through development of artificial intelligence or through genetic engineering. Has this prospect of political system shift, collapse impacted your view on that possibility? YNH: Well, I think it makes it even more likely, and more likely that it will happen faster, because in times of crisis, people are willing to take risks that they wouldn't otherwise take. And people are willing to try all kinds of high-risk, high-gain technologies. So these kinds of crises might serve the same function as the two world wars in the 20th century. The two world wars greatly accelerated the development of new and dangerous technologies. And the same thing might happen in the 21st century. I mean, you need to be a little crazy to run too fast, let's say, with genetic engineering. But now you have more and more crazy people in charge of different countries in the world, so the chances are getting higher, not lower. CA: So, putting it all together, Yuval, you've got this unique vision. Roll the clock forward 30 years. What's your guess — does humanity just somehow scrape through, look back and say, "Wow, that was a close thing. We did it!" Or not? YNH: So far, we've managed to overcome all the previous crises. And especially if you look at liberal democracy and you think things are bad now, just remember how much worse things looked in 1938 or in 1968. So this is really nothing, this is just a small crisis. But you can never know, because, as a historian, I know that you should never underestimate human stupidity. (Laughter) (Applause) It is one of the most powerful forces that shape history. CA: Yuval, it's been an absolute delight to have you with us. Thank you for making the virtual trip. Have a great evening there in Tel Aviv. Yuval Harari! YNH: Thank you very much. (Applause) |
"You Found Me" | {0: 'Jazz-based cellist, singer, composer and improviser Helen Gillet performs her own eclectic mix of French, contemporary jazz, North Indian, blues and classical styles. '} | TEDWomen 2017 | (Cello music starts) You found me, you found me under a pile of broken memories with your steady, steady love. You rocked me, you rocked me, you rocked me all through the night with your steady, steady love. (Cello music continues) (Taps rhythmically) You found me, you found me under a pile of broken memories with your steady, your steady, steady love. And you rocked me, you rocked me, you rocked me all through the night with your steady, steady, steady love. (Music ends) (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
Where joy hides and how to find it | {0: 'Ingrid Fetell Lee studies joy and reveals how we can find more of it in the world around us.'} | TED2018 | It's 2008, and I'm just finishing my first year of design school. And I'm at my first year-end review, which is a form of ritual torture for design students, where they make you take everything you made over the course of the year and lay it out on a table and stand next to it while a bunch of professors, most of whom you've never seen before, give you their unfiltered opinions of it. So it's my turn and I'm standing next to my table, everything neatly lined up, and I'm just hoping that my professors can see how much effort I've put into making my designs practical and ergonomic and sustainable. And I'm starting to get really nervous, because for a long time, no one says anything. It's just completely silent. And then one of the professors starts to speak, and he says, "Your work gives me a feeling of joy." Joy? I wanted to be a designer because I wanted to solve real problems. Joy is nice, I guess, but it's kind of light — not substantial. But I was also kind of intrigued, because joy is this intangible feeling, and how does that come from the stuff on the table next to me? I asked the professors, "How do things make us feel joy? How do tangible things make us feel intangible joy?" They hemmed and hawed and gestured a lot with their hands. "They just do," they said. I packed up my things for the summer, but I couldn't stop thinking about this question ... and this launched a journey — one that I didn't know at the time would take me 10 years — to understand the relationship between the physical world and the mysterious, quixotic emotion we call "joy." And what I discovered is that not only are they linked, but that the physical world can be a powerful resource to us in creating happier, healthier lives. After my review, I thought, "I know what joy feels like, but what is it, exactly?" And I found that even scientists don't always agree, and they sometimes use the words "joy" and "happiness" and "positivity" more or less interchangeably. But broadly speaking, when psychologists use the word joy, what they mean is an intense, momentary experience of positive emotion — one that makes us smile and laugh and feel like we want to jump up and down. And this is actually a technical thing. That feeling of wanting to jump up and down is one of the ways that scientists measure joy. It's different than happiness, which measures how good we feel over time. Joy is about feeling good in the moment, right now. And this was interesting to me because as a culture, we are obsessed with the pursuit of happiness, and yet in the process, we kind of overlook joy. So this got me thinking: Where does joy come from? I started asking everyone I knew, and even people I just met on the street, about the things that brought them joy. On the subway, in a café, on an airplane, it was, "Hi, nice to meet you. What brings you joy?" I felt like a detective. I was like, "When did you last see it? Who were you with? What color was it? Did anyone else see it?" I was the Nancy Drew of joy. (Laughter) And after a few months of this, I noticed that there were certain things that started to come up again and again and again. They were things like cherry blossoms and bubbles ... swimming pools and tree houses ... hot air balloons and googly eyes — (Laughter) and ice cream cones, especially the ones with the sprinkles. These things seemed to cut across lines of age and gender and ethnicity. I mean, if you think about it, we all stop and turn our heads to the sky when the multicolored arc of a rainbow streaks across it. And fireworks — we don't even need to know what they're for, and we feel like we're celebrating, too. These things aren't joyful for just a few people; they're joyful for nearly everyone. They're universally joyful. And seeing them all together, it gave me this indescribably hopeful feeling. The sharply divided, politically polarized world we live in sometimes has the effect of making our differences feel so vast as to be insurmountable. And yet underneath it all, there's a part of each of us that finds joy in the same things. And though we're often told that these are just passing pleasures, in fact, they're really important, because they remind us of the shared humanity we find in our common experience of the physical world. But I still needed to know: What is it about these things that makes them so joyful? I had pictures of them up on my studio wall, and every day, I would come in and try to make sense of it. And then one day, something just clicked. I saw all these patterns: round things ... pops of bright color ... symmetrical shapes ... a sense of abundance and multiplicity ... a feeling of lightness or elevation. When I saw it this way, I realized that though the feeling of joy is mysterious and elusive, we can access it through tangible, physical attributes, or what designers call aesthetics, a word that comes from the same root as the Greek word "aísthomai," which means, "I feel," "I sense," "I perceive." And since these patterns were telling me that joy begins with the senses, I began calling them "Aesthetics of Joy"; the sensations of joy. And in the wake of this discovery, I noticed something that as I walked around, I began spotting little moments of joy everywhere I went — a vintage yellow car or a clever piece of street art. It was like I had a pair of rose-colored glasses, and now that I knew what to look for, I was seeing it everywhere. It was like these little moments of joy were hidden in plain sight. And at the same time, I had another realization, that if these are the things that bring us joy, then why does so much of the world look like this? (Laughter) Why do we go to work here? Why do we send our kids to schools that look like this? Why do our cities look like this? And this is most acute for the places that house the people that are most vulnerable among us: nursing homes, hospitals, homeless shelters, housing projects. How did we end up in a world that looks like this? We all start out joyful, but as we get older, being colorful or exuberant opens us up to judgment. Adults who exhibit genuine joy are often dismissed as childish or too feminine or unserious or self-indulgent, and so we hold ourselves back from joy, and we end up in a world that looks like this. But if the aesthetics of joy can be used to help us find more joy in the world around us, then couldn't they also be used to create more joy? I spent that last two years scouring the planet, looking for different ways that people have answered this question. And this led me to the work of the artist Arakawa and the poet Madeline Gins, who believed that these kinds of environments are literally killing us. And so they set out the create an apartment building that they believed would reverse aging. And this is it. (Laughter) (Applause) It's a real place, just outside Tokyo. I spent a night there, and it's a lot. (Laughter) The floors undulate, so you don't end up walking around so much as kind of bouncing around the apartment, and there are bright colors in every direction. I'm not sure I left any younger, but it's as if, by trying to create an apartment that would make us feel youthful, they ended up creating one that was joyful. And yes, this is a bit much for everyday life, but it made me wonder: What about the rest of us? How do we bring these ideas back into the real world? So I started finding people who were doing just that. For example, this hospital, designed by the Danish artist Poul Gernes. Or these schools, transformed by the non-profit Publicolor. What's interesting is that Publicolor has heard from school administrators who say that attendance improves, graffiti disappears and kids actually say they feel safer in these painted schools. And this aligns with research conducted in four countries, which shows that people working in more colorful offices are actually more alert, more confident and friendlier than those working in drab spaces. Why would this be the case? Well, as I started to trace back our love of color, I found that some researchers see a connection to our evolution. Color, in a very primal way, is a sign of life, a sign of energy. And the same is true of abundance. We evolved in a world where scarcity is dangerous, and abundance meant survival. So, one confetto — which happens to be the singular of confetti, in case you were wondering — (Laughter) isn't very joyful, but multiply it, and you have a handful of one of the most joyful substances on the planet. The architect Emmanuelle Moureaux uses this idea in her work a lot. This is a nursing home she designed, where she uses these multicolored spheres to create a feeling of abundance. And what about all those round things I noticed? Well, it turns out neuroscientists have studied this, too. They put people into fMRI machines, and they showed them pictures of angular objects and round ones. And what they found is that the amygdala, a part of the brain associated in part with fear and anxiety, lit up when people looked at angular objects, but not when they looked at the round ones. They speculate that because angles in nature are often associated with objects that might be dangerous to us, that we evolved an unconscious sense of caution around these shapes, whereas curves set us at ease. You can see this in action in the new Sandy Hook Elementary School. After the mass shooting there in 2012, the architects Svigals + Partners knew that they needed to create a building that was secure, but they wanted to create one that was joyful, and so they filled it with curves. There are waves running along the side of the building, and these squiggly canopies over the entryway, and the whole building bends toward the entrance in a welcoming gesture. Each moment of joy is small, but over time, they add up to more than the sum of their parts. And so maybe instead of chasing after happiness, what we should be doing is embracing joy and finding ways to put ourselves in the path of it more often. Deep within us, we all have this impulse to seek out joy in our surroundings. And we have it for a reason. Joy isn't some superfluous extra. It's directly connected to our fundamental instinct for survival. On the most basic level, the drive toward joy is the drive toward life. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you, thank you. (Applause) |
The shocking danger of mountaintop removal -- and why it must end | {0: 'Michael Hendryx is focused on the impacts of uneven environmental exposures faced by socioeconomically disadvantaged groups.'} | TEDMED 2017 | Let's say that you wanted to conduct an experiment. In this experiment, you randomly assign people to live in blasting zones or in control locations without explosives going off over their heads. They live in the community for years, just downwind and downstream from sites where tons of explosives are used almost daily. And millions of gallons of water contaminated. With random assignment, you could carefully study the long-term health effects of living in these blasting communities without a bunch of annoying confounders and covariates. Random assignment does wonders. That would be a rigorous, powerful scientific inquiry into the effects of these environmental exposures. Of course, such a study could never be done. Most scientists wouldn't have the stomach for it. The institutional review board would never approve it; it would never pass human subjects review, because it would be unethical, immoral. And yet in effect, it is happening right now. In my mind, this prompts some questions. What is the ethical obligation of the scientists who believes populations are in danger? How much evidence is enough to be confident of our conclusions? Where is the line between scientific certainty and the need to act? The unplanned experiment that is happening right now is called mountaintop removal. The abbreviation for it is MTR. It is a form of surface coal mining that takes place in Appalachia, here in the United States. MTR occurs in four states: Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee. Over 1.2 million acres have been mined in this way. This is an area about the size of Delaware but it is spread over a footprint as large as Vermont and New Hampshire combined. The process involves clear-cutting ancient Appalachian forest, home to some of the richest biodiversity on the planet. The trees are typically burned or dumped into adjacent valleys. Then, to reach the buried coal seams, explosives are used to remove up to 800 feet of mountain elevation. Over 1,500 tons of explosives are used for coal mining in West Virginia alone. Every day. Rock and soil debris is dumped over the valley sides where it permanently buries headwater streams. So far, over 500 mountains have been destroyed. About 2,000 miles of streams have been permanently buried. Water emerging from the base of the valley fills is highly contaminated and remains contaminated for decades. The coal then has to be chemically treated, crushed and washed before it can be transported to power plants and burned. This cleaning takes place on-site. The process produces more air pollution and contaminates billions of gallons of water with metals, sulfates, cleaning chemicals and other impurities. All of this to produce three percent of US electricity demand — only three percent of US electricity demand. As you can appreciate, this prompts all sorts of other questions. What are the health impacts of mountaintop-removal mining? There are over a million people who live in counties where MTR takes place and millions more downstream and downwind. What has been the response of industry and government when these issues are documented? And again, what is the ethical obligation of science when faced with this disturbing situation? I began to research this issue in 2006. I had just taken a job at West Virginia University. Before then, I hadn't done any research related to coal. But I started to hear stories from people who lived in these mining communities. They said that the water they drank was not clean, that the air they breathed was polluted. They would tell me about their own illnesses or illnesses in their family. They were worried about how common cancer was in their neighborhoods. I met with many people in southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky to listen to those stories and hear their concerns. I searched the scientific literature and was surprised to learn that nothing had been published on the public health effects of coal mining in the United States. Let me say that again — nothing had been published on the public health effects of coal mining in the US. So I thought, "I can make a new contribution, no matter what I find, to either confirm these concerns or to alleviate them." I had no personal or organizational agenda. Many of my colleagues initially were skeptical that there would be any link between public health and mining. They predicted that the health problems could be explained by poverty or by lifestyle issues, like smoking and obesity. When I started, I thought maybe they would be right. We started by analyzing existing databases that allowed us to link population health to mining activity and to control statistically for age, sex, race, smoking, obesity, poverty, education, health insurance and others we could measure. We found evidence that confirmed the concerns of the residents, and we started to publish our findings. As a very brief summary, we found that people who live where mountaintop removal takes place have significantly higher levels of cardiovascular disease, kidney disease and chronic lung disease like COPD. Death rates from cancer are significantly elevated, especially for lung cancer. We've seen evidence for higher rates of birth defects and for babies born at low birth weight. The difference in total mortality equates to about 1,200 excess deaths every year in MTR areas, controlling for other risks. Twelve hundred excess deaths every year. Not only are death rates higher, but they increase as the levels of mining go up in a dose-response manner. Next, we started to conduct community door-to-door health surveys. We surveyed people living within a few miles of MTR versus similar rural communities without mining. Survey results show higher levels of personal and family illness, self-reported health status is poorer, and illness symptoms across a broad spectrum are more common. These studies are only associational. We all know that correlation does not prove causation. These studies did not include data on the actual environmental conditions in mining communities. So we started to collect and report on that. We found that violations of public drinking-water standards are seven times more common in MTR areas versus non-mining areas. We collected air samples and found that particulate matter is elevated in mining communities, especially in the ultra-fine range. The dust in mining communities contains a complex mixture, but includes high levels of silica, a known lung carcinogen, and potentially harmful organic compounds. We used the dust in laboratory experiments and found that it induced cardiovascular dysfunction in rats. The dust also promoted the development of lung cancer in human in vitro lung cells. This is just a quick summary of some of our studies. The coal industry does not like what we have to say. Neither does the government in coal country. Just like the tobacco industry paid for research to defend the safety of smoking, so the coal industry has tried to do the same by paying people to write papers claiming that MTR is safe. Lawyers have sent me harassing demands under the Freedom of Information Act, eventually denied by the courts. I'd been attacked at public testimony at a Congressional hearing by a congressman with ties to the energy industry. One governor has publicly declared that he refuses to read the research. And after a meeting with a member of Congress, in which I specifically shared my research, I later heard that representative say they knew nothing about it. I worked with scientists at the US Geological Survey on environmental sampling for more than two years. And just as they were starting to publish their findings, they were suddenly instructed by their superiors to stop work on this project. In August of this year, the National Academy of Sciences was suddenly instructed by the federal government to stop their independent review of the public health consequences of surface mining. These actions are politically motivated, in my view. But there is opposition from researchers, too. At conferences or meetings, they express skepticism. OK, we are all taught, as scientists, to be skeptical. They ask, "What about this possible explanation?" "Have you considered that alternative interpretation?" They wonder, "There must be some confounder that we missed. Some other variable we haven't accounted for." "An in vitro study, what does that prove?" "A rat study — how do we know the same effects would be found in people?" Maybe so. Technically, you have to acknowledge that they could be right, but you know, maybe these health problems are not the result of some unmeasured confound. Maybe they result from blowing up mountains over people's heads. (Laughter) (Applause) There can always be doubt, if doubt is what you seek. Because we can never do that defining experiment. Any next study must always be associational. So perhaps you can understand why I've started to wonder, how much evidence is enough? I've published over 30 papers on this topic so far. Along with my coauthors, other researchers have added to the evidence, yet government doesn't want to listen, and the industry says it's only correlational. They say Appalachians have lifestyle issues. As though it had never occurred to us to control for smoking or obesity or poverty or education or health insurance. We controlled for all of those and more. There comes a point where we don't need more research, where we can't ask people to be unwilling research subjects so we can do the next study. As scientists, we follow the data wherever it goes, but sometimes data can only take us so far and we have to decide, as thinking, feeling human beings, what it means and when it is time to act. I think that is true, not only for MTR but for other situations where evidence is strong and concerning but imperfect. And when failing to act if you're wrong means people's lives. It may seem strange that there is any controversy over the health effects of mountaintop-removal mining. But somehow, this subject has wound up in a scientific and political twilight zone alongside the debate over climate change or the argument years ago about whether or not smoking caused cancer. In this twilight zone, much of the data seems to point to one conclusion. But the economics or the politics or the prevailing public view insist on the opposite conclusion. When you're a scientist and you think you have a valid insight where the health of entire populations is at stake but you find yourself trapped in this twilight zone of denial and disbelief, what is your moral and ethical obligation? Obviously, scientists are responsible for telling the truth as they see it, based on evidence. Simply stated, we have an obligation to stand up for the data. It can be extremely frustrating to wait around for public opinion or political consensus to catch up to the scientific understanding. But the more controversial the subject and the more frustrating the debate, the more critical it is for scientists to preserve our objectivity and our reputation for integrity. Because integrity is the coin of the realm in scientific and public policy debate. In the long run, our reputation for integrity is the most powerful tool that we have, even more powerful than the data itself. Without an acknowledged integrity on the part of scientists, no amount of data will ever convince people to believe painful or difficult truths. But when we cultivate and guard our reputation for integrity, when we patiently stand up for the data and keep doing the studies and keep calmly bringing the results to the public, that's when we have our greatest impact. Eventually, scientific truth does and will win out. How many lives will be lost while we wait? Too many already. But prevail we will. Thank you. (Applause) |
What it's like to be the child of immigrants | {0: 'TED Resident Michael Rain communicates ideas through written and visual stories. '} | TED Residency | I remember one morning when I was in the third grade, my mom sent me to school with a Ghanaian staple dish called "fufu." (Laughter) Fufu is this white ball of starch made of cassava, and it's served with light soup, which is a dark orange color, and contains chicken and/or beef. It's a savory, flavorful dish that my mom thought would keep me warm on a cold day. When I got to lunch and I opened my thermos, releasing these new smells into the air, my friends did not react favorably. (Laughter) "What's that?" one of them asked. "It's fufu," I responded. (Laughter) "Ew, that smells funny. What's a fufu?" they asked. Their reaction made me lose my appetite. I begged my mother to never send me to school with fufu again. I asked her to make me sandwiches or chicken noodle soup or any of the other foods that my friends were eating. And this is one of the first times I began to notice the distinction between what was unique to my family and what was common for everyone else, what was Ghanaian and what was African and what was American. I'm a first-generation American. Both of my parents are immigrants. In fact, my father, Gabriel, came to the US almost 50 years ago. He arrived in New York from a city called Kumasi in a northern region of Ghana, in West Africa. He came for school, earning his bachelor's degree in accounting and eventually became an accountant. My mother, Georgina, joined him years later. She had a love of fashion and worked in a sewing factory in lower Manhattan, until she saved up enough to open her own women's clothing store. I consider myself an American and an African and a Ghanaian. And there's millions of people around the world who are juggling these different classifications. They might be Jamaican-Canadians or Korean-Americans or Nigerian-Brits. But what makes our stories and experiences different is that we were born and raised in a country different than our parents, and this can cause us to be misunderstood when being viewed through a narrow lens. I grew up in New York, which is home to the largest number of immigrants anywhere in the United States. And you would think growing up in a place like New York, it would be easy for a first-generation person to find their place. But all throughout my childhood, there were these moments that formed my understanding of the different worlds I belonged to. When I was in the fifth grade, a student asked me if my family was refugees. I didn't know what that word meant. He explained to me that his parents told him that refugees are people from Africa who come to the US to escape death, starvation and disease. So I asked my parents, and they laughed a bit, not because it was funny but because it was a generalization. And they assured me that they had enough to eat in Ghana and came to the US willingly. (Laughter) These questions became more complex as I got older. Junior high school was the first time I went to school with a large number of black American students, and many of them couldn't understand why I sounded differently than they did or why my parents seemed different than theirs. "Are you even black?" a student asked. I mean, I thought I was black. (Laughter) I thought my skin complexion settled that. (Laughter) I asked my father about it, and he shared his own confusion over the significance of that when he first came to the US. He explained to me that, when he was in Ghana, everyone was black, so he never thought about it. But in the US, it's a thing. (Laughter) But he would say, "But you're African. Remember that." And he would emphasize this, even though many Africans in the continent would only consider me to be just an American. These misconceptions and complex cultural issues are not just the inquiries of children. Adults don't know who immigrants are. If we look at current trends, if I asked you: What's the fastest-growing immigrant demographic in the United States, who would you think it was? Nine out of 10 people tell me it's Latinos, but it's actually African immigrants. How about in academics? What's the most educated immigrant demographic? A lot of people presume it to be Asians, but it's actually African immigrants. Even in matters of policy, did you know that three out of the eight countries in the so-called "travel ban" are African countries? A lot of people assume those targeted Muslims only live in the Middle East, but a lot of those banned people are Africans. So on these issues of education and policy and religion, a lot of things we presume about immigrants are incorrect. Even if we look at something like workplace diversity and inclusion, if I asked you what gender-ethnicity combination is least likely to be promoted to senior managerial positions, who would you think it was? The answer is not Africans this time. (Laughter) And it's not black women or men, and it's not Latin women or men. It's Asian women who are least likely to be promoted. Capturing these stories and issues is part of my work as a digital storyteller that uses tech to make it easier for people to find these stories. This year, I launched an online gallery of portraits and firsthand accounts for a project called Enodi. The goal of Enodi is to highlight first-generation immigrants just like me who carry this kinship for the countries we grew up in, for the countries of origin and for this concept called "blackness." I created this space to be a cyberhome for many of us who are misunderstood in our different home countries. There are millions of Enodis who use hyphens to connect their countries of origin with their various homes in the US or Canada or Britain or Germany. In fact, many people you might know are Enodi. Actors Issa Rae and Idris Elba are Enodi. Colin Powell, former Attorney General Eric Holder, former President of the United States, Barack Obama, are all the children of African or Caribbean immigrants. But how much do you know about us? This complicated navigation is not just the experience of first-generation folks. We're so intertwined in the lives and culture of people in North America and Europe, that you might be surprised how critical we are to your histories and future. So, engage us in conversation; discover who immigrants actually are, and see us apart from characterizations or limited media narratives or even who we might appear to be. We're walking melting pots of culture, and if something in that pot smells new or different to you — (Laughter) don't turn up your nose. Ask us to share. Thank you. (Applause) |
How I made friends with reality | {0: 'Humorist, writer and trickster Emily Levine riffs on science and the human condition.'} | TED2018 | I'm going to first tell you something that in my grandmother would've elicited a five-oy alarm: "Oy-oy-oy-oy-oy." (Laughter) And here it is ... are you ready? OK. I have stage IV lung cancer. Oh, I know, "poor me." I don't feel that way. I'm so OK with it. And granted, I have certain advantages — not everybody can take so cavalier an attitude. I don't have young children. I have a grown daughter who's brilliant and happy and wonderful. I don't have huge financial stress. My cancer isn't that aggressive. It's kind of like the Democratic leadership — (Laughter) not convinced it can win. It's basically just sitting there, waiting for Goldman Sachs to give it some money. (Laughter) (Applause) Oh, and the best thing of all — I have a major accomplishment under my belt. Yes. I didn't even know it until someone tweeted me a year ago. And here's what they said: "You are responsible for the pussification of the American male." (Laughter) (Applause) Not that I can take all the credit, but ... (Laughter) But what if you don't have my advantages? The only advice I can give you is to do what I did: make friends with reality. You couldn't have a worse relationship with reality than I did. From the get-go, I wasn't even attracted to reality. If they'd had Tinder when I met reality, I would have swiped left and the whole thing would have been over. (Laughter) And reality and I — we don't share the same values, the same goals — (Laughter) To be honest, I don't have goals; I have fantasies. They're exactly like goals but without the hard work. (Laughter) (Applause) I'm not a big fan of hard work, but you know reality — it's either push, push, push, push, push through its agent, the executive brain function — one of the "yays" of dying: my executive brain function won't have me to kick around anymore. (Laughter) But something happened that made me realize that reality may not be reality. So what happened was, because I basically wanted reality to leave me alone — but I wanted to be left alone in a nice house with a Wolf range and Sub-Zero refrigerator ... private yoga lessons — I ended up with a development deal at Disney. And one day I found myself in my new office on Two Dopey Drive — (Laughter) which reality thought I should be proud of ... (Laughter) And I'm staring at the present they sent me to celebrate my arrival — not the Lalique vase or the grand piano I've heard of other people getting, but a three-foot-tall, stuffed Mickey Mouse (Laughter) with a catalog, in case I wanted to order some more stuff that didn't jibe with my aesthetic. (Laughter) And when I looked up in the catalog to see how much this three-foot-high mouse cost, here's how it was described ... "Life-sized." (Laughter) And that's when I knew. Reality wasn't "reality." Reality was an imposter. So I dived into quantum physics and chaos theory to try to find actual reality, and I've just finished a movie — yes, finally finished — about all that, so I won't go into it here, and anyway, it wasn't until after we shot the movie, when I broke my leg and then it didn't heal, so then they had to do another surgery a year later, and then that took a year — two years in a wheelchair, and that's when I came into contact with actual reality: limits. Those very limits I'd spent my whole life denying and pushing past and ignoring were real, and I had to deal with them, and they took imagination, creativity and my entire skill set. It turned out I was great at actual reality. I didn't just come to terms with it, I fell in love. And I should've known, given my equally shaky relationship with the zeitgeist ... I'll just say, if anyone is in the market for a Betamax — (Laughter) I should have known that the moment I fell in love with reality, the rest of the country would decide to go in the opposite direction. (Laughter) But I'm not here to talk about Trump or the alt-right or climate-change deniers or even the makers of this thing, which I would have called a box, except that right here, it says, "This is not a box." (Laughter) They're gaslighting me. (Laughter) (Applause) But what I do want to talk about is a personal challenge to reality that I take personally, and I want to preface it by saying that I absolutely love science. I have this — not a scientist myself — but an uncanny ability to understand everything about science, except the actual science — (Laughter) which is math. But the most outlandish concepts make sense to me. The string theory; the idea that all of reality emanates from the vibrations of these teeny — I call it "The Big Twang." (Laughter) Wave-particle duality: the idea that one thing can manifest as two things ... you know? That a photon can manifest as a wave and a particle coincided with my deepest intuitions that people are good and bad, ideas are right and wrong. Freud was right about penis envy and he was wrong about who has it. (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) And then there's this slight variation on that, which is reality looks like two things, but it turns out to be the interaction of those two things, like space — time, mass — energy and life and death. So I don't understand — I simply just don't understand the mindset of people who are out to "defeat death" and "overcome death." How do you do that? How do you defeat death without killing off life? It doesn't make sense to me. I also have to say, I find it incredibly ungrateful. I mean, you're given this extraordinary gift — life — but it's as if you had asked Santa for a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow and you had gotten a salad spinner instead. You know, it's the beef — the beef with it is that it comes with an expiration date. Death is the deal breaker. I don't get that. I don't understand — to me, it's disrespectful. It's disrespectful to nature. The idea that we're going to dominate nature, we're going to master nature, nature is too weak to withstand our intellect — no, I don't think so. I think if you've actually read quantum physics as I have — well, I read an email from someone who'd read it, but — (Laughter) You have to understand that we don't live in Newton's clockwork universe anymore. We live in a banana peel universe, and we won't ever be able to know everything or control everything or predict everything. Nature is like a self-driving car. The best we can be is like the old woman in that joke — I don't know if you've heard it. An old woman is driving with her middle-aged daughter in the passenger seat, and the mother goes right through a red light. And the daughter doesn't want to say anything that makes it sound like, "You're too old to drive," so she didn't say anything. And then the mother goes through a second red light, and the daughter, as tactfully as possible, says, "Mom, are you aware that you just went through two red lights?" And the mother says, "Oh, am I driving?" (Laughter) (Applause) So ... and now, I'm going to take a mental leap, which is easy for me because I'm the Evel Knievel of mental leaps; my license plate says, "Cogito, ergo zoom." I hope you're willing to come with me on this, but my real problem with the mindset that is so out to defeat death is if you're anti-death, which to me translates as anti-life, which to me translates as anti-nature, it also translates to me as anti-woman, because women have long been identified with nature. And my source on this is Hannah Arendt, the German philosopher who wrote a book called "The Human Condition." And in it, she says that classically, work is associated with men. Work is what comes out of the head; it's what we invent, it's what we create, it's how we leave our mark upon the world. Whereas labor is associated with the body. It's associated with the people who perform labor or undergo labor. So to me, the mindset that denies that, that denies that we're in sync with the biorhythms, the cyclical rhythms of the universe, does not create a hospitable environment for women or for people associated with labor, which is to say, people that we associate as descendants of slaves, or people who perform manual labor. So here's how it looks from a banana-peel-universe point of view, from my mindset, which I call "Emily's universe." First of all, I am incredibly grateful for life, but I don't want to be immortal. I have no interest in having my name live on after me. In fact, I don't want it to, because it's been my observation that no matter how nice and how brilliant or how talented you are, 50 years after you die, they turn on you. (Laughter) And I have actual proof of that. A headline from the Los Angeles Times: "Anne Frank: Not so nice after all." (Laughter) Plus, I love being in sync with the cyclical rhythms of the universe. That's what's so extraordinary about life: it's a cycle of generation, degeneration, regeneration. "I" am just a collection of particles that is arranged into this pattern, then will decompose and be available, all of its constituent parts, to nature, to reorganize into another pattern. To me, that is so exciting, and it makes me even more grateful to be part of that process. You know, I look at death now from the point of view of a German biologist, Andreas Weber, who looks at it as part of the gift economy. You're given this enormous gift, life, you enrich it as best you can, and then you give it back. And, you know, Auntie Mame said, "Life is a banquet" — well, I've eaten my fill. I have had an enormous appetite for life, I've consumed life, but in death, I'm going to be consumed. I'm going into the ground just the way I am, and there, I invite every microbe and detritus-er and decomposer to have their fill. I think they'll find me delicious. (Laughter) I do. So the best thing about my attitude, I think, is that it's real. You can see it. You can observe it. It actually happens. Well, maybe not my enriching the gift, I don't know about that — but my life has certainly been enriched by other people. By TED, which introduced me to a whole network of people who have enriched my life, including Tricia McGillis, my website designer, who's working with my wonderful daughter to take my website and turn it into something where all I have to do is write a blog. I don't have to use the executive brain function ... Ha, ha, ha, I win! (Laughter) And I am so grateful to you. I don't want to say "the audience," because I don't really see it as we're two separate things. I think of it in terms of quantum physics, again. And, you know, quantum physicists are not exactly sure what happens when the wave becomes a particle. There are different theories — the collapse of the wave function, decoherence — but they're all agreed on one thing: that reality comes into being through an interaction. (Voice breaking) So do you. And every audience I've ever had, past and present. Thank you so much for making my life real. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. |
How to start a conversation about suicide | {0: 'Through his charity HALT, Jeremy Forbes aims to break through the stigma attached to mental health, raise awareness through education and empower men to open up conversations around mental health and suicide prevention.'} | TED@Westpac | In 2013, I had a life-changing epiphany. I was a painter and decorator in Castlemaine, a small country town in central Victoria. I'd gone to see Pete, who was renowned for his workmanship with steel. I'd gone to his shed to get some steel edging for the garden. This day, with hindsight, which is a wonderful gift, Pete seemed happier than usual. Two weeks later, I was painting a house down the end of Pete's street when I heard the tragic news. Pete had suicided. Pete, like myself, was a tradie, or a tradesman. We do like to shorten things in the Australian vernacular. A tradie. There was an expectation as a tradie. You're expected to be stoic. You're expected to be strong, robust, macho. You're expected to be tough physically and silent in the face of adversity. There is a pronounced ripple effect when someone suicides in your community. Pete's funeral was in July. It was winter. The mood was bleak and somber in the packed community hall. It was a grieving community who had no answers to Pete's suicide, no answers at all. As I wandered around between the tradies and the community members, I started hearing some tones of another underlying tragic level. I heard people talking in that community hall about the struggles other people were going through. The essence of the conversations was contained in two words that I heard several times: Who's next? Who's next? That was the epiphany. That was the moment where I was standing in a community hall in a place where this Castlemaine community had given me such support for 20 years, this community had backed my work, I'd played footy there, I'd done theater there, I was so grateful for what they'd given me. But I was standing there in that space, and I was looking around that hall as well, and I could tell people in that hall who were struggling with alcohol, drugs, finance, gambling, domestic abuse, bullying and harassment. Yet because of my tradie culture and that ignorant attitude that we have in the tradie community, I didn't feel confident at all. I didn't have the tools. I lacked the experience. I didn't know what to do, but I wanted to do something. I left the wake. I hugged a few tradie mates and said, "Please come and see me if you need to." But I didn't know what to say to them or what to tell them. I had no idea. I got a phone call two weeks later from Catherine Pilgrim, my cofounder, wanting to do something for the family. We talked for a while and I said, let's do something for the tradie community. We love our town, we're grateful, let's do something for the tradie community. So we talked a bit more. What could we do? An awareness-raising event. Awesome. We're talking about tradies. How do you get tradies somewhere? Can you get them to a hospital? No. To a community health center? No. There's an ingrained culture of being a tradie. I thought, where is the perfect place we can get the tradies together where they feel socially included and they feel comfortable and they can share, they can open up and talk about mental health in the building industry? Where can we have an event? A hardware store. (Laughter) Yeah, that's what I thought too. I thought it was very clever. More precisely, the timber yard of a hardware store. So there we were. OK, we've got the venue. What else do we need? What else do tradies love? Food. I know, we all do, but tradies love food. Tradies especially, and I'm a tradie myself, we love egg and bacon rolls. So we thought we'd supply the tradies with egg and bacon rolls, and there was the slogan: save your bacon. It's a bit corny, but it sort of works. And we also came up with a logo. "Hope Assistance Local Tradies." Keep in mind, "HALT," our charity, had no money to begin, nothing, not a single cent. We had conversations. This is a community issue. It starts in community. So we went around to the butcher, we went around to the baker, there was no candlestick maker, there was an egg place and there was some chocolate, there was coffee, there was fruit, but we went around and said, "Hey, we're doing this awareness-raising event. Do you want to contribute? Because we haven't got any money." Of course, nearly every person we initiated the conversation with knew someone that had anxiety, depression or thoughts of suicide or had suicided. There was that unity, that whole of community approach. So we thought, that's great, we've got some food. What else do we need? We need the support services there. A lot of tradies, and a lot of men in general, don't necessarily know where to go and get help. I myself was one of them, and this is what I talk about at the HALT events, that four years ago when I founded HALT, I didn't know I could go to the doctor about my mental health and get a mental health plan. I didn't know about community health. I certainly didn't know about Lifeline, and I've called Lifeline three times, and they've certainly potentially saved my life. I had to learn all these things. Tradies need to know them. We provided bags, bags of information, and I had quite a few tradies say to me in the first year, "Aw, this is a load of you-know-what," but those tradies I know still have those bags in their Ute or in their shed. On November 10, 2013, we had our event, and interestingly enough, when I talk about a whole of community approach, that was our first event in Castlemaine at Tonks Brothers, and there's a whole of community there. There's counselors, there's people who have gone through mental health. That first event set the scene. Since then, we've had more events. Interestingly enough, it's not only tradies that are affected by mental health or anxiety or depression or suicide. We started working with TAFEs. We started working in the farming industry, at councils, at secondary colleges. We did events for the partners of tradies, because often the tradies would not go home to their partners and say, "Guess what, we talked about mental health, and we're going to do this, this and this now." So we're doing events for the partners, who themselves may need help. TAFEs are very popular. For me, it's really crucial to get to these young, vulnerable men and women. We've done events for men's sheds, so the high rate of suicide is really high for older men. We've done events for council depot workers and tradies. Interestingly enough, nearly every single event — and we've actually done now, with very little funding, 150 events over four states. So — oh please, thank you. (Applause) And invariably at every single HALT event at a hardware store, I have one tradie come up to me, at least one come up and tell me about his suicide attempt. They're not suicidal there and then, they've worked through it, but these men have never felt they could share their vulnerabilities. They've never felt they can talk about their suicide attempt, but the HALT events, where there's no expectations for them to talk, makes them feel comfortable to start talking. And it's not just they talk to me and tell me their story, they actually now say, "We feel comfortable enough to talk with other men." I've had men stand up and say, "I've never mentioned before that I've had depression, but I have, and if anyone else here wants to come and speak to me, I'm here to talk to you." It's very empowering and cathartic to do that. We need a whole-of-community approach. We give the tradies bags of information from local and national support services. It's one of thing to tell a tradie or someone at one of these events, "You should go here, here and here," but we need the whole of community to wrap around the idea of suicide prevention. We need those services, and suicide doesn't discriminate at all. It's not a 9-to-5 thing. We need to do events before 9am, which most of our brekkies are, and after 5 PM. That's what we need to do. It's a whole-of-community approach. We need to get into businesses. We need to get into sporting clubs, community clubs. We need to get in there and train people to understand about mental health. Here's some sobering statistics just to give you an idea. In 2016, in Australia, 2,866 suicides, very close to twice the road toll. Globally, 800,000 a year suicides in the world, one every 40 seconds. We need a whole-of-community approach. We need to feel comfortable in opening up the conversations. Men I know find it really difficult to open up conversations. They certainly do. If you're going to open up conversations, I tell the guys, you need to find a comfortable place to open up and have a conversation, whether it's at the pub, it's going for a walk, it's after footy. Find that really comfortable place to have the conversation. Part of the ability to have that conversation is to understand what to say. We've all heard about, "Are you OK?" And I've seen it. I've done this. "Are you OK?" "Yes." "Are you OK?" "Yes." "Are you OK?" "Yes." "Are you OK?" "No." What do I say now? What do I say? We need to equip every single person with the ability to come forth and be able to have that conversation. We need to be able to listen. I don't know who out there is a good listener. I'm working on my listening abilities, but it's an art form to listen and not judge. Don't make fun. If someone's coming to talk to you about mental illness and anxiety and depression and thoughts of suicide, we need to respect that. They want to trust us that we're going to hold that in tight and not tell everyone. We need to do that. So we need to have conversations. We need to listen. And we need to start reducing the stigma associated with mental health. Companies are now starting to have mental health days. What a great idea. It's not just physical sick days, it's mental health days. Things are changing. We can add to that change. I'm a life preserver. I think we can all be life preservers. The pain of regret is far greater than the pain of hard work. Thank you. (Applause) |
How data brokers sell your identity | {0: 'Madhumita is a journalist, editor and speaker with expertise in the fields of science, health and technology. She is the European Technology Correspondent at The Financial Times. '} | TEDxExeter | I'm a 26-year-old British Asian woman working in media and living in a South West postcode in London. I have previously lived at two addresses in Sussex, and two others in North East London. While growing up, my family lived in a detached house in Kent and took holidays to India every year. They mostly did their shopping online at Ocado, gave money to charities and read the Financial Times. Now, I live in a recently converted flat with a private landlord, and I have a housemate. I'm interested in movies and startups, and I have taken five holidays in the past 12 months, mostly to visit friends abroad. I'm about to buy flights within 14 days. My annual salary is between 30,000 and 40,000 pounds a year. I don't own a TV or watch any scheduled programming, but I do enjoy on-demand services such as Netflix or Now TV. Last week, I passed through Upper Street in North London on Monday and Wednesday evenings at 7 p.m. I cook a little, but I tend to eat out or get takeaways often. My favourite cuisines are Thai and Mexican food. I don't own any furniture, and I don't have any children. On weeknights, I tend to spend the evenings with my university friends having dinner. I usually buy my groceries at Sainsbury's but only because it's on my way home. I don't care for cars or own one. I don't like any form of housework, and I have a cleaner who lets herself in while I'm at work. On Fridays, you'll find me at the pub after work. At home, I'm far more likely to be browsing restaurant reviews rather than managing my finances or looking at property prices online. I like the idea of living abroad someday. I prefer to work as a team than on my own. I'm ambitious, and it's important to me that my many thinks I'm doing well. I'm rarely swayed by others' views. This motley set of characteristics, attitudes, thoughts, and desires come very close to defining me as a person. It is also a precise and accurate description of what a group of companies I had never heard of, personal data trackers, had learned about me. My journey to uncover what data companies knew began in 2014, when I became curious about the murky world of data brokers, a multi-billion-pound industry of companies that collect, package, and sell detailed profiles of individuals based on their online and offline behaviours. I decided to write about it for Wired Magazine. What I found out shocked me, and reinforced my anxieties about a profit-led system designed to log behaviours every time we interact with the connected world. I already knew about my daily records being collected by services such as Google Maps, Search, Facebook, or contactless credit card transactions. But you combine that with public information such as land registry, council tax, or voter records, along with my shopping habits and real-time health and location information, and these benign data sets begin to reveal a lot, such as whether you're optimistic, political, ambitious, or a risk-taker. Even as you're listening to me, you may be sedentary, but your smartphone can reveal your exact location, and even your posture. Your life is being converted into such a data package to be sold on. Ultimately, you are the product. Ostensibly, we're all protected by data protection laws. In the UK, the law states that any personal data set has to be stripped of identifiers such as your name or your National Insurance number. Personal data is considered anything that can be traced directly back to you. without the need for additional information. This doesn't mean it can't be sold on. It only means that they need your permission. Simple examples of personal data include your full credit card number, your bank statement, or a criminal record. However, I discovered that online anonymity is a complete myth. Particulars such as your postcode, your date of birth, and your gender can be traded freely and without your permission because they're not considered personal but pseudonymous. In other words, they can't be traced back to you without the need for additional information. So why does it matter if a bunch of companies you've never heard of know your age or your postcode, you may think. Well, it matters quite a lot. About a decade ago, Latanya Sweeney, a professor of privacy at Harvard University proved that about 87% of US citizens could be uniquely identified by just three facts about them: their zip code, their date of birth, and their gender. In the UK, where we have far fewer citizens serviced by much longer postcodes, that probability is far higher. Professor Sweeney proved this in a rather cheeky way when William Weld, a former governor of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the US decided to support the commercial release of 135,000 state employee health records along with their families, including his own. These records did not contain a name or a social security number, but did contain hundreds of fields of sensitive medical information including drugs prescribed, hospitalisations, and procedures performed on these employees. For $20, Professor Sweeney purchased the voter records for Cambridge, Massachusetts, containing the names, zip codes, dates of birth, and gender for every voter in the area, and then cross-referenced this with their health records. Within minutes, she had pinpointed Governor Welds' own health records. Only six people in Cambridge shared his date of birth. Three of them were men. And he was the only one living in his zip code. Professor Sweeney sent the governor his health records in the post. (Laughter) Every day, we hear about new examples of companies digging ever deeper into our personal lives. In the November US presidential election, a little-known British company known as Cambridge Analytica was tasked with winning the election for a certain candidate: Donald Trump, using data analytics. The company employed cookies online to track people around the web, logging every website visited, every search term typed, and every video watched. They also created a viral Facebook quiz to dig into people's personalities, which was taken by over six million people. In total, they managed to amass data on 220 million voting Americans with an average of about 5,000 pieces of data on each person. They then used this data to understand people's inner feelings and then targeted adverts to them on Facebook. Researchers have called them a propaganda machine. It's not just large companies digging into your life; it's free apps and small startups as well. I realised on my phone that every time I logged fitness data into the app Endomondo, it was sharing my details including my location and gender with third-party advertisers. WebMD, a symptom checkers app, was sharing even more sensitive information including the symptoms, procedures, and drugs viewed by users within its app with its third parties. Fitbit was sharing data with Yahoo. A pregnancy tracking app was selling on information about its users' ovulation cycles and fertility cycles with people or advertisers like InMobi. As long as my phone is turned on, my location can be tracked, not just by the obvious apps like Google Maps, but a whole host of unrelated services from Uber to Twitter, Photos, Snapchat, TripAdvisor, and others. You're not even safe in your own home. In 2015, Samsung was found to be recording people in the homes in which their TVs had been sold using their voice recognition systems. They have now adapted this so they only record when the voice recognition is activated. But the creepy factor remains. Even services like Google and Facebook, trusted and used by billions around the world, have been accused of crossing the line. A few weeks ago, my husband and I were driving home from work and discussing where we should have dinner. I suggested a restaurant that I knew was somewhere on our way back and then opened up Google Maps to plot it. Turns out it was already marked on the map with a little bubble. That sinking feeling of being watched is not unique to me. There have been several anecdotal reports of people being shown adverts based on things and conversations they were having in real life, prompting concerns that Facebook and Google are eavesdropping on people via their personal devices. To piece together what all these companies knew about me, I spoke to a data profiler called Eyeota. Eyeota uses cookies to assign me to thousands of different categories, including my job, how many children I have, and whether I'm likely to buy Star Wars memorabilia. (Laughter) They don't know my name, but they know more about me than my neighbours do. Eyeota also buys information from third parties such as the credit rating agency Experian, which amasses a massive database of 15 different demographic types and 66 lifestyles, all based on people's post codes. Because Eyeota buys this information, it knows that I'm more likely to take taxis home rather than night buses late at night and that I'm very, very unlikely to ever be found in a DIY store. (Laughter) It can then sell this information on to the highest bidder. Sometimes, large data sets can be useful for the public good, for example for the use of health researchers or city and urban planners. But most of this information being collected is sustained by advertisers and traded commercially. In fact, eMarketer has predicted that the online advertising industry, which is based almost completely on data targeting and tracking, will hit an all-time high of 77 billion dollars this year. If you think you don't care about being unmasked, you may want to reconsider. Personalised browser ads may be harmless, but connecting disparate aspects of your life to predict your future behaviour could lead to unexpected consequences. For instance, decisions on whether your child gets to go to a certain university or what price you pay for your home or car insurance premiums could be made based on data given to third parties that you never intended to, such as your own lifestyle habits or family members' ailments. In 2014, Ross Anderson, a professor of Privacy and Security at Cambridge University found that the NHS had been sharing its hospitals' database, which included details of hospitalisations for every citizen in Britain with the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, a body that was researching how likely people are to develop chronic illnesses at certain ages. Of course, this resulted in an increase in health insurance premiums. As the amount of data that is collected increases exponentially, it becomes much easier to identify you. For example, your Fitbit measures our heart rate or your gait patterns and these can be used to estimate things like your height, your weight, or even your gender. These are details that are very hard to mimic or change. The data is no longer about you. It is you. Companies are also starting to predict future behaviours - for example, whether you're a trustworthy driver, a good employee, or a good credit risk, based on things like your social media activity, your health and fitness, or your home energy use. The more the companies know about you - where you live, how many children you have, what your medical ailments are, what you buy - your anonymity becomes irrelevant. What's more, you lose your right to free choice, as companies make decisions on your behalf without your knowledge. Along my journey of discovery, my first reaction was shock. I immediately wrote to my local council and asked them to make my voter records private. I made up a fake email address, and I started registering with a fake age and gender. I turned off targeted advertising, and I asked Facebook to send me all the information that they held on me, including things I had deleted, and spent hours poring over it obsessively. But after a few weeks I realised this was a pointless exercise. I couldn't be a digital hermit. It wasn't realistic for me to stop using social media, search and navigation apps, and my iPhone, all a part of modern life that I cherished and needed. Instead, I realised that the knowledge itself was empowering. Knowing all the different ways in which my data was being shared and collected made me more responsible about where I put it. For example, I stopped signing up to supposedly free services, for example, a VIP card at my local hairdresser or a discount coupon at your supermarket. Whenever I download an app, I make sure to check my settings to see what permissions it has. Anything that seems unnecessary like access to my location, I turn off. Ultimately, there is hope. As more of us begin to realise the extent of our data footprint, we will start to demand custody and control of this data. Some critics have even suggested that people be paid for their data in order to give them more control. This means it will become too expensive for companies, governments, and non-profits to recklessly mine and hold our data, and sell it on indiscriminately But until the data economy matures, and power moves back from the corporation to the individual, I have lost more than my anonymity. I have given up my right to self-determination and free choice. All I have left is my name. Thank you. (Applause) |
How to turn a group of strangers into a team | {0: 'Amy Edmondson, the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, studies people and teams seeking to make a positive difference through the work they do.'} | TED Salon Brightline Initiative | It's August 5, 2010. A massive collapse at the San José Copper Mine in Northern Chile has left 33 men trapped half a mile — that's two Empire State Buildings — below some of the hardest rock in the world. They will find their way to a small refuge designed for this purpose, where they will find intense heat, filth and about enough food for two men for 10 days. Aboveground, it doesn't take long for the experts to figure out that there is no solution. No drilling technology in the industry is capable of getting through rock that hard and that deep fast enough to save their lives. It's not exactly clear where the refuge is. It's not even clear if the miners are alive. And it's not even clear who's in charge. Yet, within 70 days, all 33 of these men will be brought to the surface alive. This remarkable story is a case study in the power of teaming. So what's "teaming"? Teaming is teamwork on the fly. It's coordinating and collaborating with people across boundaries of all kinds — expertise, distance, time zone, you name it — to get work done. Think of your favorite sports team, because this is different. Sports teams work together: that magic, those game-saving plays. Now, sports teams win because they practice. But you can only practice if you have the same members over time. And so you can think of teaming ... Sports teams embody the definition of a team, the formal definition. It's a stable, bounded, reasonably small group of people who are interdependent in achieving a shared outcome. You can think of teaming as a kind of pickup game in the park, in contrast to the formal, well-practiced team. Now, which one is going to win in a playoff? The answer is obvious. So why do I study teaming? It's because it's the way more and more of us have to work today. With 24/7 global fast-paced operations, crazy shifting schedules and ever-narrower expertise, more and more of us have to work with different people all the time to get our work done. We don't have the luxury of stable teams. Now, when you can have that luxury, by all means do it. But increasingly for a lot of the work we do today, we don't have that option. One place where this is true is hospitals. This is where I've done a lot of my research over the years. So it turns out hospitals have to be open 24/7. And patients — well, they're all different. They're all different in complicated and unique ways. The average hospitalized patient is seen by 60 or so different caregivers throughout his stay. They come from different shifts, different specialties, different areas of expertise, and they may not even know each other's name. But they have to coordinate in order for the patient to get great care. And when they don't, the results can be tragic. Of course, in teaming, the stakes aren't always life and death. Consider what it takes to create an animated film, an award-winning animated film. I had the good fortune to go to Disney Animation and study over 900 scientists, artists, storytellers, computer scientists as they teamed up in constantly changing configurations to create amazing outcomes like "Frozen." They just work together, and never the same group twice, not knowing what's going to happen next. Now, taking care of patients in the emergency room and designing an animated film are obviously very different work. Yet underneath the differences, they have a lot in common. You have to get different expertise at different times, you don't have fixed roles, you don't have fixed deliverables, you're going to be doing a lot of things that have never been done before, and you can't do it in a stable team. Now, this way of working isn't easy, but as I said, it's more and more the way many of us have to work, so we have to understand it. And I would argue that it's especially needed for work that's complex and unpredictable and for solving big problems. Paul Polman, the Unilever CEO, put this really well when he said, "The issues we face today are so big and so challenging, it becomes quite clear we can't do it alone, and so there is a certain humility in knowing you have to invite people in." Issues like food or water scarcity cannot be done by individuals, even by single companies, even by single sectors. So we're reaching out to team across big teaming, grand-scale teaming. Take the quest for smart cities. Maybe you've seen some of the rhetoric: mixed-use designs, zero net energy buildings, smart mobility, green, livable, wonderful cities. We have the vocabulary, we have the visions, not to mention the need. We have the technology. Two megatrends — urbanization, we're fast becoming a more urban planet, and climate change — have been increasingly pointing to cities as a crucial target for innovation. And now around the world in various locations, people have been teaming up to design and try to create green, livable, smart cities. It's a massive innovation challenge. To understand it better, I studied a start-up — a smart-city software start-up — as it teamed up with a real estate developer, some civil engineers, a mayor, an architect, some builders, some tech companies. Their goal was to build a demo smart city from scratch. OK. Five years into the project, not a whole lot had happened. Six years, still no ground broken. It seemed that teaming across industry boundaries was really, really hard. OK, so ... We had inadvertently discovered what I call "professional culture clash" with this project. You know, software engineers and real estate developers think differently — really differently: different values, different time frames — time frames is a big one — and different jargon, different language. And so they don't always see eye to eye. I think this is a bigger problem than most of us realize. In fact, I think professional culture clash is a major barrier to building the future that we aspire to build. And so it becomes a problem that we have to understand, a problem that we have to figure out how to crack. So how do you make sure teaming goes well, especially big teaming? This is the question I've been trying to solve for a number of years in many different workplaces with my research. Now, to begin to get just a glimpse of the answer to this question, let's go back to Chile. In Chile, we witnessed 10 weeks of teaming by hundreds of individuals from different professions, different companies, different sectors, even different nations. And as this process unfolded, they had lots of ideas, they tried many things, they experimented, they failed, they experienced devastating daily failure, but they picked up, persevered, and went on forward. And really, what we witnessed there was they were able to be humble in the face of the very real challenge ahead, curious — all of these diverse individuals, diverse expertise especially, nationality as well, were quite curious about what each other brings. And they were willing to take risks to learn fast what might work. And ultimately, 17 days into this remarkable story, ideas came from everywhere. They came from André Sougarret, who is a brilliant mining engineer who was appointed by the government to lead the rescue. They came from NASA. They came from Chilean Special Forces. They came from volunteers around the world. And while many of us, including myself, watched from afar, these folks made slow, painful progress through the rock. On the 17th day, they broke through to the refuge. It's just a remarkable moment. And with just a very small incision, they were able to find it through a bunch of experimental techniques. And then for the next 53 days, that narrow lifeline would be the path where food and medicine and communication would travel, while aboveground, for 53 more days, they continued the teaming to find a way to create a much larger hole and also to design a capsule. This is the capsule. And then on the 69th day, over 22 painstaking hours, they managed to pull the miners out one by one. So how did they overcome professional culture clash? I would say in a word, it's leadership, but let me be more specific. When teaming works, you can be sure that some leaders, leaders at all levels, have been crystal clear that they don't have the answers. Let's call this "situational humility." It's appropriate humility. We don't know how to do it. You can be sure, as I said before, people were very curious, and this situational humility combined with curiosity creates a sense of psychological safety that allows you take risks with strangers, because let's face it: it's hard to speak up, right? It's hard to ask for help. It's hard to offer an idea that might be a stupid idea if you don't know people very well. You need psychological safety to do that. They overcame what I like to call the basic human challenge: it's hard to learn if you already know. And unfortunately, we're hardwired to think we know. And so we've got to remind ourselves — and we can do it — to be curious; to be curious about what others bring. And that curiosity can also spawn a kind of generosity of interpretation. But there's another barrier, and you all know it. You wouldn't be in this room if you didn't know it. And to explain it, I'm going to quote from the movie "The Paper Chase." This, by the way, is what Hollywood thinks a Harvard professor is supposed to look like. You be the judge. The professor in this famous scene, he's welcoming the new 1L class, and he says, "Look to your left. Look to your right. one of you won't be here next year." What message did they hear? "It's me or you." For me to succeed, you must fail. Now, I don't think too many organizations welcome newcomers that way anymore, but still, many times people arrive with that message of scarcity anyway. It's me or you. It's awfully hard to team if you inadvertently see others as competitors. So we have to overcome that one as well, and when we do, the results can be awesome. Abraham Lincoln said once, "I don't like that man very much. I must get to know him better." Think about that — I don't like him, that means I don't know him well enough. It's extraordinary. This is the mindset, I have to say, this is the mindset you need for effective teaming. In our silos, we can get things done. But when we step back and reach out and reach across, miracles can happen. Miners can be rescued, patients can be saved, beautiful films can be created. To get there, I think there's no better advice than this: look to your left, look to your right. How quickly can you find the unique talents, skills and hopes of your neighbor, and how quickly, in turn, can you convey what you bring? Because for us to team up to build the future we know we can create that none of us can do alone, that's the mindset we need. Thank you. (Applause) |
The surveillance device you carry around all day | {0: 'Marta Peirano is a writer, journalist and the founder of the CryptoParty Berlin. She manages culture coverage at eldiario.es.'} | TEDxMadrid | We make three mistakes: the first is underestimating the quantity of information that we produce every day; the second is depreciating the value of that information; and the third is thinking that our principal problem is a distant and super powerful agency that is called NSA. And it is true that NSA has the major access, better resources, the best tools, but they don't need any of that to spy on us, because we have everything there; we live in glass houses. This is Malte Spitz, a member of the German Green Party. In 2009, Malte asked his telephone company to send him all the data they had on him. And the Deutsche Telekom, which was his company, told him no. Two lawsuits later, they sent him a CD with an Excel table of 30,832 lines; like "The War and the Peace", but three times larger. This endless document contains information from September of 2009 to February of 2010; it has exactly six months. This isn't accidental, it has six months because in the summer of 2008 the European Union presented the Data Retention Directive, where they demanded each telephone company with more than 10,000 clients keep the data of all their clients for a minimum of six months and a maximum of two years. They gave Malte data of 6 months, as if saying, "This is everything we have because the law forces us." They probably owe him a year and half. Malte, who couldn't process this amount of information, sent it to a weekly magazine which, in turn, contacted a data visualization agency to do something with it. They took the data from Deutsche Telekom and Malte's public information, like, for example, information from his Twitter account or his blog. And with this they created the map that you are looking at now, that is more than a map, it is more like a creepy automatic diary of Malte's life. We can see when he catches a train, which he's doing right now, when he stops, where he stays, when he goes, how he goes, how much time it takes him, when he is eating, when he is sleeping, like right now; when he takes a flight, who calls him, how long they speak, who sends him messages, what are the messages. We see everything. This is on the Internet. You can see it. The reason why this happens is because Malte has a mobile in his pocket that every five minutes makes a "ping" to the closest antenna and tells it, "Do you have something for me? Do I have mail? Do I have any WhatsApp messages? Has something happened in the world?" Raise your hand if you have a mobile in your pocket that does the same. Every five minutes our mobiles are saying, "I'm here, I'm here, now I'm here, hey, I'm here..." That's what happens. And this doesn't have precedents. We didn't have this before. The direct equivalent of that is what we have now on the screen. This is the profile of a person watched by the Stasi for years. Looks like a napkin, doesn't it? With 46 posts including his aunt, the milkman, the priest of his church — These are five minutes in the life of Malte Spitz, and this information is automatic. And the worst thing is that this is only the data on Malte, but Malte is surrounded by people like us with mobiles like his that are producing the same information; and that company sees everything. This is a photo made by my colleague Juanlu Sánchez, a photo from manifestation 15-M. But let's look at it from a telecommunications' viewpoint. This square is full with mobiles. Using those mobiles we can know exactly who is at the square, almost as if we put a cordon around; with names and surnames. And not only we know when they have come, where they come from and with whom, whom they leave with, whom they call to; we know everything about them. We even know if they are on the 4th floor or down at the square. This is how that photo is seen by an algorithm of traffic analysis. And here we begin to see some cool stuff. We see that not all the people at the square are the same. There are people more important than others, and if we have control over these telecommunications, this network, we can do things, like turning off the nodes on this square, in other words, isolate those who gather others around them from the rest. Also we can do what the Ukrainian government did about a year and half ago: send out a message saying, "Dear user, you've been registered as a participant in a massive illegal manifestation." We don't behave the same when we know that we are watched. Since Jeremy Bentham we know that the best way to watch a population is for them not to know when they are watched and when not. In Malte's case, during those 6 months, they were watching him for 78 percent of the time. And we're only talking about our mobiles. We are not talking about our computers, nor the cameras that are on the streets, in the stores and shop-windows, in the airports and trains, and wherever we are, being watched. We are not talking about the radars on the roads that register us if we overspeed. We are not talking about what we have in a wallet. How many personal identification chips do we have in a wallet? We have a lot: an ID card, a driving license or a transport ticket, credit or debit cards, reward cards. A supermarket reward card. 20 years ago, the biggest personal data base in the world was not owned by NSA, neither by the Stasi, poor thing. It was owned by Wal-Mart, the American supermarket chain. Why? Because when they give you a reward card, what you're doing is telling a company who you are, where you live, how much you earn, what you buy, what you eat, how many kids you have, when you go on vacations, when you get sick. And all this we give them hoping that in six months or in a year, if we spend a lot of money, they'll give us a Tupperware. (Laughter) And it's not different from what we do on the Internet, because Deutsche Telekom is a legit European company that has to obey the Data Protection Law, the same way as Telef贸nica. Telef贸nica, here, has to obey the data protection laws, but it's not the same with the companies that make mobiles, operative systems, offer us "free" mails, give those apps that we download and ask us for access to a bunch of strange things, and we say, "They might need it for something." They need it to sell it. Why would Angry Birds want to have access to your GPS? To make money! Our observers don't care if we are nobody, if we are unimportant, because they're algorithms, not people. And our profiles are automatic; they exist even if nobody looks at it. And the day somebody looks at it and changes your fate, your profile, your history, becomes your record. You can end up being stuck at the airport in one of the 75 countries where being homosexual is illegal. Or you could end up in a country where taking a picture of a pharmacy of mass production from the other side of the street is terrorism; this happens in the United States. Or you could end up in Syria, where people are shot on the streets; activists, especially journalists. You could end up in Mexico, D.F., where the Zetas use their access to the information of phone companies to see who contacts the police and cut their heads. There are thousands of ways to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and sometimes you don't even have to move. In Holland they had a census. It was a census that included religions with high devotion rates in the world. They wanted to know how many Protestants, Catholics, Jews they had to know how much money they had to put in each community, in each church or synagogue. What happened? When the Nazis came, they had their homework done. Only 10 percent of the Dutch Jews survived in the Second World War. If that database hadn't exist, the figures would've been very different. What I mean is that our problem isn't the NSA, neither our corrupt governments, neither ambitious companies that want to sell our data, neither bad people, and it has nothing to do with their intentions, nor with their bad intentions. The problem is that the very existence of that information makes us vulnerable in the ways that we can't anticipate right now. We have to put curtains in our houses; we can't expect that somebody will do it for us. We have to put them now. We have to start using cryptography in our mobiles, in our communications, in our computers. Start thinking twice every time someone offers us a reward card, and say, "Mmm..." Not only for us, because besides everything, this state of surveillance is one of the worst sicknesses that a democracy has. So, I invite you, upon your arrival back home, start using Tor, and if someone wants to see what you are doing, he should ask for a search warrant. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
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