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Comics belong in the classroom | {0: 'Gene Luen Yang writes, and sometimes draws, comic books and graphic novels.'} | TEDxManhattanBeach | When I was in the fifth grade, I bought an issue of "DC Comics Presents #57" off of a spinner rack at my local bookstore, and that comic book changed my life. The combination of words and pictures did something inside my head that had never been done before, and I immediately fell in love with the medium of comics. I became a voracious comic book reader, but I never brought them to school. Instinctively, I knew that comic books didn't belong in the classroom. My parents definitely were not fans, and I was certain that my teachers wouldn't be either. After all, they never used them to teach, comic books and graphic novels were never allowed during silent sustained reading, and they were never sold at our annual book fair. Even so, I kept reading comics, and I even started making them. Eventually I became a published cartoonist, writing and drawing comic books for a living. I also became a high school teacher. This is where I taught: Bishop O'Dowd High School in Oakland, California. I taught a little bit of math and a little bit of art, but mostly computer science, and I was there for 17 years. When I was a brand new teacher, I tried bringing comic books into my classroom. I remember telling my students on the first day of every class that I was also a cartoonist. It wasn't so much that I was planning to teach them with comics, it was more that I was hoping comics would make them think that I was cool. (Laughter) I was wrong. This was the '90s, so comic books didn't have the cultural cachet that they do today. My students didn't think I was cool. They thought I was kind of a dork. And even worse, when stuff got hard in my class, they would use comic books as a way of distracting me. They would raise their hands and ask me questions like, "Mr. Yang, who do you think would win in a fight, Superman or the Hulk?" (Laughter) I very quickly realized I had to keep my teaching and my cartooning separate. It seemed like my instincts in fifth grade were correct. Comic books didn't belong in the classroom. But again, I was wrong. A few years into my teaching career, I learned firsthand the educational potential of comics. One semester, I was asked to sub for this Algebra 2 class. I was asked to long-term sub it, and I said yes, but there was a problem. At the time, I was also the school's educational technologist, which meant every couple of weeks I had to miss one or two periods of this Algebra 2 class because I was in another classroom helping another teacher with a computer-related activity. For these Algebra 2 students, that was terrible. I mean, having a long-term sub is bad enough, but having a sub for your sub? That's the worst. In an effort to provide some sort of consistency for my students, I began videotaping myself giving lectures. I'd then give these videos to my sub to play for my students. I tried to make these videos as engaging as possible. I even included these little special effects. For instance, after I finished a problem on the board, I'd clap my hands, and the board would magically erase. (Laughter) I thought it was pretty awesome. I was pretty certain that my students would love it, but I was wrong. (Laughter) These video lectures were a disaster. I had students coming up to me and saying things like, "Mr. Yang, we thought you were boring in person, but on video, you are just unbearable." (Laughter) So as a desperate second attempt, I began drawing these lectures as comics. I'd do these very quickly with very little planning. I'd just take a sharpie, draw one panel after the other, figuring out what I wanted to say as I went. These comics lectures would come out to anywhere between four and six pages long, I'd xerox these, give them to my sub to hand to my students. And much to my surprise, these comics lectures were a hit. My students would ask me to make these for them even when I could be there in person. It was like they liked cartoon me more than actual me. (Laughter) This surprised me, because my students are part of a generation that was raised on screens, so I thought for sure they would like learning from a screen better than learning from a page. But when I talked to my students about why they liked these comics lectures so much, I began to understand the educational potential of comics. First, unlike their math textbooks, these comics lectures taught visually. Our students grow up in a visual culture, so they're used to taking in information that way. But unlike other visual narratives, like film or television or animation or video, comics are what I call permanent. In a comic, past, present and future all sit side by side on the same page. This means that the rate of information flow is firmly in the hands of the reader. When my students didn't understand something in my comics lecture, they could just reread that passage as quickly or as slowly as they needed. It was like I was giving them a remote control over the information. The same was not true of my video lectures, and it wasn't even true of my in-person lectures. When I speak, I deliver the information as quickly or slowly as I want. So for certain students and certain kinds of information, these two aspects of the comics medium, its visual nature and its permanence, make it an incredibly powerful educational tool. When I was teaching this Algebra 2 class, I was also working on my master's in education at Cal State East Bay. And I was so intrigued by this experience that I had with these comics lectures that I decided to focus my final master's project on comics. I wanted to figure out why American educators have historically been so reluctant to use comic books in their classrooms. Here's what I discovered. Comic books first became a mass medium in the 1940s, with millions of copies selling every month, and educators back then took notice. A lot of innovative teachers began bringing comics into their classrooms to experiment. In 1944, the "Journal of Educational Sociology" even devoted an entire issue to this topic. Things seemed to be progressing. Teachers were starting to figure things out. But then along comes this guy. This is child psychologist Dr. Fredric Wertham, and in 1954, he wrote a book called "Seduction of the Innocent," where he argues that comic books cause juvenile delinquency. (Laughter) He was wrong. Now, Dr. Wertham was actually a pretty decent guy. He spent most of his career working with juvenile delinquents, and in his work he noticed that most of his clients read comic books. What Dr. Wertham failed to realize was in the 1940s and '50s, almost every kid in America read comic books. Dr. Wertham does a pretty dubious job of proving his case, but his book does inspire the Senate of the United States to hold a series of hearings to see if in fact comic books caused juvenile delinquency. These hearings lasted for almost two months. They ended inconclusively, but not before doing tremendous damage to the reputation of comic books in the eyes of the American public. After this, respectable American educators all backed away, and they stayed away for decades. It wasn't until the 1970s that a few brave souls started making their way back in. And it really wasn't until pretty recently, maybe the last decade or so, that comics have seen more widespread acceptance among American educators. Comic books and graphic novels are now finally making their way back into American classrooms and this is even happening at Bishop O'Dowd, where I used to teach. Mr. Smith, one of my former colleagues, uses Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics" in his literature and film class, because that book gives his students the language with which to discuss the relationship between words and images. Mr. Burns assigns a comics essay to his students every year. By asking his students to process a prose novel using images, Mr. Burns asks them to think deeply not just about the story but also about how that story is told. And Ms. Murrock uses my own "American Born Chinese" with her English 1 students. For her, graphic novels are a great way of fulfilling a Common Core Standard. The Standard states that students ought to be able to analyze how visual elements contribute to the meaning, tone and beauty of a text. Over in the library, Ms. Counts has built a pretty impressive graphic novel collection for Bishop O'Dowd. Now, Ms. Counts and all of her librarian colleagues have really been at the forefront of comics advocacy, really since the early '80s, when a school library journal article stated that the mere presence of graphic novels in the library increased usage by about 80 percent and increased the circulation of noncomics material by about 30 percent. Inspired by this renewed interest from American educators, American cartoonists are now producing more explicitly educational content for the K-12 market than ever before. A lot of this is directed at language arts, but more and more comics and graphic novels are starting to tackle math and science topics. STEM comics graphics novels really are like this uncharted territory, ready to be explored. America is finally waking up to the fact that comic books do not cause juvenile delinquency. (Laughter) That they really do belong in every educator's toolkit. There's no good reason to keep comic books and graphic novels out of K-12 education. They teach visually, they give our students that remote control. The educational potential is there just waiting to be tapped by creative people like you. Thank you. (Applause) |
Do we really own our bodies? | {0: "Gaspard Koenig runs the liberal think-tank Generation Libre and teaches philosophy at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris."} | TEDxParis | I'd like to start by showing you someone who is dressed even worse than I am. [Who is this?] You may notice, aside from the color harmony, a tattoo saying: "My body belongs to me." But who is this person? Is it a punk, who borrowed clothes from their grandmother's wardrobe? Is it a teenager, from the 16th arrondissement of Paris, who feels like rebelling? No. This is our Minister of Health, Marisol Touraine, standing on the steps of the Élysée. And this was last year, to celebrate the 40th year of the Veil Abortion Act, which enables women to take control of their bodies, through a voluntary interruption of their pregnancy. "My body belongs to me" has become banal — everyone says it. By the way, for once, the entire National Assembly has voted in favor of a symbolic law in order to reapprove the Veil Law. It's a banality, even ministers have it tattooed on their arm. However, it's not entirely true. I would like to give you a few examples, that are a little extreme, honestly even shocking, which will demonstrate that for many people and in a lot of cases, well, my body doesn't belong to me. Firstly, it doesn't belong to me as long as I'm alive. I am not allowed to rent my belly. I am not allowed in many countries to sell my sexuality. I am not allowed to define the gender that I belong to, since I have to face a doctor or be in front of a judge, and declare to the civil registrar whether I am a man, woman, or other. I am also not allowed to do whatever I want with my body. For instance, I can't do this. [Dwarf-tossing] So, You might recognize Leonardo Di Caprio, in this great dwarf-tossing scene. But some versions of it exist that are a little less chic, notably the one that was practiced by the great community of Morsang-sur-Orge from l'Essonne, in the beginning of the 90s. The mayor of Morsang-sur-Orge said: "This can't go on — we can't toss dwarfs." And so he prohibited dwarf-tossing. And who was to protest? Dwarf-tossers found other activities to do on Sundays. They probably went back to fishing. It's the dwarves themselves who protested, because they had a breadwinner, and a certain renown, apparently a certain success with women. And the Morsang-sur-Orges Council of State's decision, which jurists know well, said: "No, this is forbidden." I also cannot do whatever I want with my body in order to die. I am not allowed to be euthanized, but I am also not allowed to be eaten. In 2001, a charming German engineer posted an announcement saying: "I am looking for a volunteer to eat." He received several candidates, made a selection, conducted a few final interviews, and in the end finally found Bernt, who agreed wholeheartedly. So they began by cutting off Bernt's genital and eating it together, probably by candlelight. (Laughter) Obviously satisfied by this first course, they chose to proceed — and by the way this all on video so you can watch it. I recommend it to you, it's really nice — "Armine ate Bernt." But be aware that this is prohibited. It's crazy, considering they haven't hurt anyone. But it is indeed prohibited to be eaten. Well, even after my death I can't do whatever I want with my body. For instance, I am not allowed to practice sea-immersion whereas diving is allowed while I am alive. I am also not allowed to be embalmed, unless my name is Lenin, Mao, or Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. (Laughter) (Applause) And I am also not allowed — and this is even worse — to be cryogenized. You know, some people — have themselves frozen, hoping that in 10 years, 100 years, or a million years, we would defrost them, as by then we will have already found ways to resuscitate them, or found cures to the illnesses that have killed them. This has been somewhat a success. In Russia and the United States, there are some cryogenic sites, where one can see the coffins. Some put their entire body, while others only their head — it's cheaper. (laughter) And in France, a doctor named Martineau, felt that it was a great idea to freeze his wife first. (Laughter) And as it seemed to be going well, he decided to follow her with the freezing. Forever united in a frozen sleep, inside a castle. And then someone found out and filed a complaint: There are some people frozen in the village, do you realize that? (Laughter) Their son was delighted. He would go to see them from time to time. It's better than gathering around a grave. And the Council of State, that same one, said: "This can't be happening. You need to defrost and burn them! Put it all on fire. Then there was a trial, and Martineau's son was forced to burn his parents. Can you imagine, this poor couple who imagined being united for millions of years and resuscitate in a future where sexuality is completely open, completely vivified and rejuvenated. Well, unfortunately, there is only a heap of ashes left. (Laughter) So behind these tragedies — they don't concern us all if we don't wish to be eaten, frozen, or tossed — who cares. But the problem is that it actually applies to each one of us. It's the Civil Code via the bioethics law of 1994 that says so. The conventions — as you can read — are that there is no private ownership or patrimoniality over the body, because we say that the person is unavailable under law. And so the body itself isn't patrimonial. You don't have an ownership of your body. And so you might tell me: "So what, everything in France is forbidden anyway." (Laughter) But even in the US, a country supposedly liberal, it's the same story. It has, by the way, been declared very clearly at a trial in the Supreme Court of California. The John Moore case. John Moore was a patient suffering from leukemia, in the 80s, and the doctors had to remove his spleen. They discovered that his cells had extraordinary properties for producing certain kind of proteins. So the doctors extracted, without telling John Moore, many of his cells. They extracted blood, sperm, and parts of the spinal cord. They apparently told him that in order to treat his leukemia they had to remove some sperm — that's apparently what happened. (Laughter) And they made a cell line out of it. John Moore's cell line. Which they then sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars to big pharmaceutical institutions. And John Moore, upon realizing what has happened, said: "Wait a minute, I don't get to have a say? These are my cells, if you don't mind." And so there was a big trial, and the judge concluded that, no, they aren't his cells in fact, given that he doesn't have ownership over his cells. So, where does all of this come from? There are good reasons to think that it came from a monotheistic heritage. This idea — as Saint Paul put it: "The body is for the Lord and the Lord is for the body." — is that in the big monotheism, particularly within Judeo-Christian religions, my body doesn't belong to me because it belongs to God. My body is the expression of the soul, as per Thomas d'Aquin. The body is the reflection of my soul, my soul is immortal. It joins the kingdom of heaven. By the way, I can even be resuscitated if the Council of State hasn't burned me first. (Laughter) Pope Pie XII has claimed it very explicitly — this is the first time I'm quoting Pope Pie XII publicly. In 1954, at a medical congress, he explained that Man is merely a usufructuary of his body, not its full owner. So within our secular law system, a secularized system, it is not a matter of God anymore, well the concept of God has been replaced by the concept of dignity. Going back to that trial in Morsang-sur-Orge, this is the reason why the Council of State has prohibited dwarf-tossing, because a human being's dignity is viewed as being part of the public order. It means that today, this transcendence we have abolished, this divine transcendence, is being retaken by the State, or by society if you prefer, defining everyone's dignity. So dignity is sacredness without God. It's the idea that, nonetheless, the body is sacred. We cannot do whatever we want with it. I suggest that you try and go to the end of the modernity logic. And if we are really, completely within immanence, to whom does the body belong, if not to me? Who can define its dignity, if not me? That's what John Lock did, not John Moore, but John Locke. Indeed, there are many Johns. He was the first person to have written, to my knowledge, that each person has ownership over their own personhood. It's not a coincidence that he is the one who wrote that, He was a doctor, and well-acquainted with flesh, the body's reactions. And also because he was in the midst of the glorious British revolution, the Bill of Rights Revolution. So this whole theory about social contract rights, about elementary, fundamental rights, about civil disobedience, also means that one has natural rights that are predetermined among which, the right of ownership of oneself. He went even further by saying: "If can have ownership over exterior things, if I can acquire the world by working on it, by adding value to it," — this idea of property was first born out of the appropriation of myself. And think about it, if we have ownership over the body, we have, according to classical themes, the usus, fructus and abusus. Usus means — it's always nice using Latin terms — usus means usage. So if I have usus over the body, the dwarfs can do their work with dignity. Then, fructus, we have it fructified and so John Moore can have access to his cell money. And then you have abusus, I can abuse it and do whatever I want with it, and if I want to have it cryogenized, that's my problem. It appears to me that this new generation is a generation that rejects predetermined structures, one that wants to define their own career, that wants to define their life by traveling, and to build themselves, their own self, be their own creator. And we can see, anecdotally, sociologically, to what extent this generation who appropriates their own body with tattoos for instance, It's also a way to define one's sexuality in a much more fluid way. There is a study that came out which showed that generation Z - it's not even Y anymore, it's Z — Generation Z is post-gender. It's not even bi anymore, everyone defines their own sexuality by adding a little bit of this or that. So this results in many things. For instance, one can be half-sexual, Grey-sexual, gyno-sexual, pan-sexual, Strauss-Kahn sexual — No, not that. Anyway, there are many versions. I don't know all of them, and can't describe them on stage. But it's interesting, you should look them up. And more importantly, it will allow us to tackle the three big themes of the future: The subject of human augmentation, the enhancement of oneself, the theme of transhumanism, and the theme of data. If tomorrow I can, and I already can enhance myself, that's to say building my own artificial arms, enhancing my limbs, enhancing my brain abilities, even modifying my own DNA. If I modify my own DNA, I must be its owner. If tomorrow I want to test, I want to explore immortality, be it through cryogenisation — here is that nice example again. Or for instance, as Ray Kurzweil, the Pope of transhumanism, envisions it, by transferring my consciousness onto a USB key. Well, similarly, I am going to define, even contractually, the way in which my body relates to the world. And then there is a third question that might seem a little marginal, the question of data. We produce, a large amount of data, and its value is humongous. as in Europe, it's estimated be worth a thousand billion euros by 2020. However, this data, which is worth so much money and with which some companies make so much money, well, your personal data doesn't belong to you. In the same way there isn't a patrimoniality of the body, there isn't a patrimoniality of data. For the exact same reasons, because data is considered to be an expression of your personality, and as we saw, within the law, the personality is inalienable and the body isn't patrimonial. If tomorrow we find, that we are able to build a private property for data, which will be to the digital age what intellectual property was to the industrial revolution, you will then become an owner, in truly legal and financial terms, of your own data, which you will be able to negotiate. In other words: you will finally get paid for using Facebook. So, "my body belongs to me" isn't a platitude. It's a tattoo we would finally all wear. Because this brand new generation will have to confront all these problems. Transhumanism is coming, bioethical committees are already outdated. And in order for everyone to able to choose their own values, in this complex universe, we must first own our own bodies. Thank you! |
This simple test can help kids hear better | {0: 'TED Fellow Susan Emmett studies global hearing health disparities in 15 countries and Indigenous groups around the world, in an effort to fight preventable hearing loss.'} | TEDGlobal 2017 | Listen to the sounds of why hearing matters to the Alaskan Native people. Hearing loss makes it hard to fish on the open water, hunt caribou and harvest berries, activities central to Alaskan Native culture. Hearing loss isn't unique to rural Alaska. It's global. The Global Burden of Disease Project estimates there are 1.1 billion people living with hearing loss worldwide. That's more people than the entire population here in sub-Saharan Africa. Over 80 percent are in low- and middle-income countries, and many have no access to hearing care. The impact on people's lives is tremendous. Anuk is a three-year-old boy I treated in Alaska. Ear infections started when he was barely four months old. His parents brought him into clinic, worried he didn't say much compared to his brothers. Sure enough, many rounds of infections had resulted in hearing loss. Without treatment, Anuk's speech will continue to lag behind. He's more likely to do worse in school, have worse job prospects and experience social isolation. But it doesn't have to be this way. The World Health Organization estimates that half of all global hearing loss can be prevented. If Anuk's hearing loss is identified and treated promptly, his life and the opportunities he has as he grows up could look vastly different. I'm an ear surgeon working with partners around the world on new pathways for hearing loss prevention. This solution comes from my collaboration with a tribal health organization called the Norton Sound Health Corporation. Hearing loss evaluation traditionally requires testing by an audiologist in a soundproof room, with a lot of permanent equipment. An ear surgeon then examines Anuk's ears under a microscope and decides a treatment plan. These resources simply aren't available in remote settings. In a state where 75 percent of communities aren't connected to a hospital by road, an expensive flight is required. To overcome these barriers, Alaska has developed a state-of-the-art telemedicine system that connects over 250 village health clinics with specialists who triage all types of health concerns. My colleagues have validated that ear-related telemedicine consults are equivalent to an in-person exam. In 2016, travel was prevented for 91 percent of patients receiving specialty telemedicine in the Norton Sound region. Telemedicine has saved over 18 million in travel costs in this single region over the past 15 years. Our team is taking the power of telemedicine to a new level, through a project funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute. For the first time, we are merging telemedicine with mobile screening technology that extends the reach of expert triage beyond health care settings. This cell-based screen, developed in South Africa, costs over 10 times less than traditional equipment and does not require advanced training. If I were screening Anuk at school, sound-attenuating headphones and noise monitoring would take the place of a sound booth, and I would use a phone adapter instead of a microscope to examine his ears. In a matter of minutes, screening and images are done. We then apply Alaska telemedicine technology to transmit the data to specialists, who connect Anuk to the treatment he needs. Our team is launching a randomized trial in 15 communities along the Bering Sea to study how well this intervention works. Our goal is to prevent childhood hearing loss across the state of Alaska. But the concept is bigger than a single state. The impact is global. Mobile telemedicine can revolutionize access to care. In Malawi, for example, there are only two ear surgeons and 11 audiologists for a population of 17 million. This technology could empower teachers and community health workers to provide access to care to children in places like Malawi. Scaling up globally could change children's lives who have never had access to hearing care before, using just the power of a cell phone. It's time to change the course of preventable hearing loss. Anuk and countless children like him are depending on us. Thank you. (Applause) |
A teen scientist's invention to help wounds heal | {0: 'In 2016, at age 13, Anushka Naiknaware was the youngest winner of the Google Science Fair, with her invention of a clever new bandage that tells caregivers when it needs to be changed.'} | TEDWomen 2017 | Ever since I was a young girl, I was always fascinated — (Laughter) Oh! (Laughter) OK, I meant younger and more short. (Laughter) If that's possible to imagine. But ever since I was a young girl, I was always fascinated with how the world worked exactly how it did. So this, very early on, led me to the fields of mathematics and chemistry. I would keep going further and further, and as I kept going, I realized that all the fields of science are interconnected. And without one, the others have little or no value. So, inspired by Marie Curie and my local science museum, I decided to start asking these questions myself and engage in my own independent research, whether it be out of my garage or my bedroom. I started reading journal papers, started doing science competitions, started participating in science fairs, doing anything I could to get the knowledge that I so desperately wanted. So while I was studying anatomy for a competition, I came across the topic of something called chronic wounds. And one thing that stood out to me was a statistic that said that the number of people in the United States with chronic wounds exceeds the number of people with breast cancer, colon cancer, lung cancer and leukemia, combined. Hold up. So what is a chronic wound? (Laughter) And why haven't I heard about a 5K walk for chronic wounds, why haven't I even heard about a chronic wound in general? (Laughter) So after I got past those preliminary questions, and one that I will clarify for you, a chronic wound is essentially when someone gets a normal wound, except it fails to heal normally because the patient has some kind of preexisting condition, which in most cases is diabetes. So more staggering statistics were to be found as I kept going on in this research. In the year 2010 alone, 50 billion dollars were spent worldwide to treat chronic wounds. In addition, it's estimated that about two percent of the population will get a chronic wound at some point in their lifetime. This was absurd. So as I started doing more research, I found that there was a correlation between the moisture level inside a wound dressing and the stage of healing that the chronic wound would be at. So I decided, why don't I design something to measure the moisture level within the wound so this can help doctors and patients treat their wounds better. And essentially, expedite the healing process. So that's exactly what I set out to do. Being a 14-year-old working out of her garage-turned-lab, I had a lot of constraints. Most being that I wasn't given a grant, I wasn't given a lot of money, and I wasn't given a lot of resources. In addition, I had a lot of criteria, as well. Since this product would be readily interacting with the body, it had to be biocompatible, it also had to be low-cost, as I was designing it and paying for it myself. It also had to be mass-manufacturable, because I wanted it to be made anywhere, for anyone. Thus, I drafted up a schematic. What you see on the left hand-side is the early schematics in my design, showing both a bird's-eye view and also one stacking variant. A stacking variant means that the entire product is consisted of different individual parts that have to work in unison. And what's shown there is one possible arrangement. So what exactly is this? So I had gone on to testing my sensors and as all scientists have stumbles along their work, I also had a couple of problems in my first generation of sensors. First of all, I couldn't figure out how to get a nanoparticle ink into a printcheck cartridge without spilling it all over my carpet. That was problem number one. Problem number two was, I couldn't exactly control the sensitivity of my sensors. I couldn't scale them up or down, I couldn't really do anything of that sort. So I wanted something to solve it. Problem one was easily solved by some scouting on eBay and Amazon for syringes that I could use. Problem two, however, required a lot more thought. So this is where this factors in. So what a space-filling curve does is it aims to take up all the area it can within one unit square. And by writing a computer program, you can have different iterations of the different curve, which increasingly get close to one unit square, but never quite reaches there. So now I could control the thickness, the size, I could do whatever I want with it, and I could predict my results. So I started constructing my sensors and testing them more rigorously, using money that I had gotten from previous science fair awards. Lastly, I had to connect this data in order to be read. So I interfaced it with a Bluetooth chip, which you can see here by the app screenshots on the right. And what this does is that anyone can monitor the progress of their wound, and it can be transmitted over a wireless connection to the doctor, the patient or whoever needs it. [Continued Testing and Refinement] So in conclusion, my design was successful — however, science never ends. There's always something to be done, something to be refined. So that's what I'm currently in the process of doing. However, what I learned was what's more important than the actual thing I designed is an attitude that I had taken on while doing this. And that attitude was, even though I'm a 14-year-old working in her garage on something that she doesn't completely understand, I could still make a difference and contribute to the field. And that's what inspired me to keep going, and I hope it inspires many others to also do work like this even though they're not very sure about it. So I hope that's a message that you all take on today. Thank you. (Applause) |
How we'll become cyborgs and extend human potential | {0: 'At MIT, Hugh Herr builds prosthetic knees, legs and ankles that fuse biomechanics with microprocessors to restore (and perhaps enhance) normal gait, balance and speed.'} | TED2018 | I'm an MIT professor, but I do not design buildings or computer systems. Rather, I build body parts, bionic legs that augment human walking and running. In 1982, I was in a mountain-climbing accident, and both of my legs had to be amputated due to tissue damage from frostbite. Here, you can see my legs: 24 sensors, six microprocessors and muscle-tendon-like actuators. I'm basically a bunch of nuts and bolts from the knee down. But with this advanced bionic technology, I can skip, dance and run. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) I'm a bionic man, but I'm not yet a cyborg. When I think about moving my legs, neural signals from my central nervous system pass through my nerves and activate muscles within my residual limbs. Artificial electrodes sense these signals, and small computers in the bionic limb decode my nerve pulses into my intended movement patterns. Stated simply, when I think about moving, that command is communicated to the synthetic part of my body. However, those computers can't input information into my nervous system. When I touch and move my synthetic limbs, I do not experience normal touch and movement sensations. If I were a cyborg and could feel my legs via small computers inputting information into my nervous system, it would fundamentally change, I believe, my relationship to my synthetic body. Today, I can't feel my legs, and because of that, my legs are separate tools from my mind and my body. They're not part of me. I believe that if I were a cyborg and could feel my legs, they would become part of me, part of self. At MIT, we're thinking about NeuroEmbodied Design. In this design process, the designer designs human flesh and bone, the biological body itself, along with synthetics to enhance the bidirectional communication between the nervous system and the built world. NeuroEmbodied Design is a methodology to create cyborg function. In this design process, designers contemplate a future in which technology no longer compromises separate, lifeless tools from our minds and our bodies, a future in which technology has been carefully integrated within our nature, a world in which what is biological and what is not, what is human and what is not, what is nature and what is not will be forever blurred. That future will provide humanity new bodies. NeuroEmbodied Design will extend our nervous systems into the synthetic world, and the synthetic world into us, fundamentally changing who we are. By designing the biological body to better communicate with the built design world, humanity will end disability in this 21st century and establish the scientific and technological basis for human augmentation, extending human capability beyond innate, physiological levels, cognitively, emotionally and physically. There are many ways in which to build new bodies across scale, from the biomolecular to the scale of tissues and organs. Today, I want to talk about one area of NeuroEmbodied Design, in which the body's tissues are manipulated and sculpted using surgical and regenerative processes. The current amputation paradigm hasn't changed fundamentally since the US Civil War and has grown obsolete in light of dramatic advancements in actuators, control systems and neural interfacing technologies. A major deficiency is the lack of dynamic muscle interactions for control and proprioception. What is proprioception? When you flex your ankle, muscles in the front of your leg contract, simultaneously stretching muscles in the back of your leg. The opposite happens when you extend your ankle. Here, muscles in the back of your leg contract, stretching muscles in the front. When these muscles flex and extend, biological sensors within the muscle tendons send information through nerves to the brain. This is how we're able to feel where our feet are without seeing them with our eyes. The current amputation paradigm breaks these dynamic muscle relationships, and in so doing eliminates normal proprioceptive sensations. Consequently, a standard artificial limb cannot feed back information into the nervous system about where the prosthesis is in space. The patient therefore cannot sense and feel the positions and movements of the prosthetic joint without seeing it with their eyes. My legs were amputated using this Civil War-era methodology. I can feel my feet, I can feel them right now as a phantom awareness. But when I try to move them, I cannot. It feels like they're stuck inside rigid ski boots. To solve these problems, at MIT, we invented the agonist-antagonist myoneural interface, or AMI, for short. The AMI is a method to connect nerves within the residuum to an external, bionic prosthesis. How is the AMI designed, and how does it work? The AMI comprises two muscles that are surgically connected, an agonist linked to an antagonist. When the agonist contracts upon electrical activation, it stretches the antagonist. This muscle dynamic interaction causes biological sensors within the muscle tendon to send information through the nerve to the central nervous system, relating information on the muscle tendon's length, speed and force. This is how muscle tendon proprioception works, and it's the primary way we, as humans, can feel and sense the positions, movements and forces on our limbs. When a limb is amputated, the surgeon connects these opposing muscles within the residuum to create an AMI. Now, multiple AMI constructs can be created for the control and sensation of multiple prosthetic joints. Artificial electrodes are then placed on each AMI muscle, and small computers within the bionic limb decode those signals to control powerful motors on the bionic limb. When the bionic limb moves, the AMI muscles move back and forth, sending signals through the nerve to the brain, enabling a person wearing the prosthesis to experience natural sensations of positions and movements of the prosthesis. Can these tissue-design principles be used in an actual human being? A few years ago, my good friend Jim Ewing — of 34 years — reached out to me for help. Jim was in an a terrible climbing accident. He fell 50 feet in the Cayman Islands when his rope failed to catch him hitting the ground's surface. He suffered many, many injuries: punctured lungs and many broken bones. After his accident, he dreamed of returning to his chosen sport of mountain climbing, but how might this be possible? The answer was Team Cyborg, a team of surgeons, scientists and engineers assembled at MIT to rebuild Jim back to his former climbing prowess. Team member Dr. Matthew Carty amputated Jim's badly damaged leg at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, using the AMI surgical procedure. Tendon pulleys were created and attached to Jim's tibia bone to reconnect the opposing muscles. The AMI procedure reestablished the neural link between Jim's ankle-foot muscles and his brain. When Jim moves his phantom limb, the reconnected muscles move in dynamic pairs, causing signals of proprioception to pass through nerves to the brain, so Jim experiences normal sensations with ankle-foot positions and movements, even when blindfolded. Here's Jim at the MIT laboratory after his surgeries. We electrically linked Jim's AMI muscles, via the electrodes, to a bionic limb, and Jim quickly learned how to move the bionic limb in four distinct ankle-foot movement directions. We were excited by these results, but then Jim stood up, and what occurred was truly remarkable. All the natural biomechanics mediated by the central nervous system emerged via the synthetic limb as an involuntary, reflexive action. All the intricacies of foot placement during stair ascent — (Applause) emerged before our eyes. Here's Jim descending steps, reaching with his bionic toe to the next stair tread, automatically exhibiting natural motions without him even trying to move his limb. Because Jim's central nervous system is receiving the proprioceptive signals, it knows exactly how to control the synthetic limb in a natural way. Now, Jim moves and behaves as if the synthetic limb is part of him. For example, one day in the lab, he accidentally stepped on a roll of electrical tape. Now, what do you do when something's stuck to your shoe? You don't reach down like this; it's way too awkward. Instead, you shake it off, and that's exactly what Jim did after being neurally connected to the limb for just a few hours. What was most interesting to me is what Jim was telling us he was experiencing. He said, "The robot became part of me." Jim Ewing: The morning after the first time I was attached to the robot, my daughter came downstairs and asked me how it felt to be a cyborg, and my answer was that I didn't feel like a cyborg. I felt like I had my leg, and it wasn't that I was attached to the robot so much as the robot was attached to me, and the robot became part of me. It became my leg pretty quickly. Hugh Herr: Thank you. (Applause) By connecting Jim's nervous system bidirectionally to his synthetic limb, neurological embodiment was achieved. I hypothesized that because Jim can think and move his synthetic limb, and because he can feel those movements within his nervous system, the prosthesis is no longer a separate tool, but an integral part of Jim, an integral part of his body. Because of this neurological embodiment, Jim doesn't feel like a cyborg. He feels like he just has his leg back, that he has his body back. Now I'm often asked when I'm going to be neurally linked to my synthetic limbs bidirectionally, when I'm going to become a cyborg. The truth is, I'm hesitant to become a cyborg. Before my legs were amputated, I was a terrible student. I got D's and often F's in school. Then, after my limbs were amputated, I suddenly became an MIT professor. (Laughter) (Applause) Now I'm worried that once I'm neurally connected to my limbs once again, my brain will remap back to its not-so-bright self. (Laughter) But you know what, that's OK, because at MIT, I already have tenure. (Laughter) (Applause) I believe the reach of NeuroEmbodied Design will extend far beyond limb replacement and will carry humanity into realms that fundamentally redefine human potential. In this 21st century, designers will extend the nervous system into powerfully strong exoskeletons that humans can control and feel with their minds. Muscles within the body can be reconfigured for the control of powerful motors, and to feel and sense exoskeletal movements, augmenting humans' strength, jumping height and running speed. In this 21st century, I believe humans will become superheroes. Humans may also extend their bodies into non-anthropomorphic structures, such as wings, controlling and feeling each wing movement within the nervous system. Leonardo da Vinci said, "When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return." During the twilight years of this century, I believe humans will be unrecognizable in morphology and dynamics from what we are today. Humanity will take flight and soar. Jim Ewing fell to earth and was badly broken, but his eyes turned skyward, where he always longed to return. After his accident, he not only dreamed to walk again, but also to return to his chosen sport of mountain climbing. At MIT, Team Cyborg built Jim a specialized limb for the vertical world, a brain-controlled leg with full position and movement sensations. Using this technology, Jim returned to the Cayman Islands, the site of his accident, rebuilt as a cyborg to climb skyward once again. (Crashing waves) (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Ladies and gentlemen, Jim Ewing, the first cyborg rock climber. (Applause) |
What gardening taught me about life | {0: 'TED Resident tobacco brown is a social artist working at the public intersection of environmental art and restorative justice.'} | TED Residency | At age four, I found a garden, living underneath the kitchen floor. It was hiding behind leftover patches of linoleum on the worn-out floor my mother was having removed. The workman was busy when the garden caught my attention. My eyes became glued to the patterns of embroidered roses blooming across my childhood landscape. I saw them and felt a sense of joy and adventure. This excitement felt like a feeling to go forward into something I knew nothing about. My passion and connection to garden started at that exact moment. When spring arrived, I ran so fast through the house, speeding ahead of my mother's voice. I pulled on my red corduroy jumper and my grey plaid wool hat before my mother could get her jacket on. I catapulted out of the front screen door and threw myself on a fresh carpet of grass. Excited, I bounced to my feet and flipped three more cartwheels before landing by her side. Mother dear was in the garden busy breaking up the soil, and I sat beside her, playing with mud pies in the flower bed. When her work was done, she rewarded me with an ice-cold glass of bittersweet lemonade and then lined my shoes with sprigs of mint to cool off my feet. My mother cooked with the colors and textures of her garden. She baked yams and squash and heirloom tomatoes and carrots. She fed love to a generation of people with purple hull peas and greens. It seems that during my childhood, the blooms from my mother's gardens have healed all the way from her halo to the roots on the soles of our feet. In our last conversation before her death, she encouraged me to go anywhere in the world that would make me happy. Since then, I have planted her gardens through art installations throughout the world, in countries of the people that I meet. Now they are lining parks and courtyards, painted on walls and even in blighted lots off the street. If you were in Berlin, Germany, you would have seen my garden at Stilwerk Design Center, where rosemary and lavender, hydrangea and lemon balm trailed up the glass elevators to all six floors. In 2009, I planted "Philosophers Garden," a garden mural, blooming at the historic Frederick Douglass High School in Memphis, Tennessee. This school’s garden fed an entire community and was honored by Eleanor Roosevelt during the Great Depression. Again, in 2011, I planted at Court Square Park — six entry gardens with 80 varieties of deliciously fragrant floribunda and hybrid tea roses. Gardening has taught me that planting and growing a garden is the same process as creating our lives. This process of creation begins in the spring, when you break up the soil and start anew. Then it's time to clear out the dead leaves, debris and roots of the winter. The gardener must then make sure that a good disposition and the proper nutrients are correctly mixed in the soil. Then it's important to aerate the topsoil and leave it loosely packed on the surface. You won't get those beautiful blooms in life until you first do the work just right. When our gardens are balanced with care, we can harvest the beauty of living a life of grace. In the forests, when trees realize through their roots that another tree is sick, they will send a portion of their nutrients to that tree to help them to heal. They never think about what will happen to them or feel vulnerable when they do. When a tree is dying, it releases all of its nutrients to other trees that need it the most. Below the surface, we are all connected by our roots and sharing nutrients with each other. It's only when we come together that we can honestly grow. It's the same for humans in the garden of hardship. In this garden, when the caterpillar transforms into a chrysalis, this involves some struggle. But it's a challenge with a purpose. Without this painful fight to break free from the confines of the cocoon, the newly formed butterfly can't strengthen its wings. Without the battle, the butterfly dies without ever taking flight. My life's work is to illustrate how to integrate human connectivity into the garden. Gardens are full of magical wisdom for this transformation. Mother Nature is creative energy waiting to be born. Gardens are a mirror that cast their own reflection into our waking lives. So nurture your talents and strengths while you appreciate all you've been given. Remain humble to healing. And maintain compassion for others. Cultivate your garden for giving and plant those seeds for the future. The garden is the world living deep inside of you. Thank you. (Applause) (Cheers) (Applause) |
How vultures can help solve crimes | {0: 'Lauren Pharr promotes the role of vultures in forensic science.'} | TEDxLSU | [This talk contains graphic images] My parents always wanted me to be a doctor. But a doctor that studies how vultures eat dead things is probably not the type of doctor my parents had in mind. (Laughter) I study vulture scavenging behavior and how vultures affect crime scenes. I'm here to talk to you about how we take vultures for granted in forensic science. Before we do that, I want to tell you a story. So we're going to take a trip, all 1,000 of us. It's May 2014 and we're standing in a park in Nashville, Tennessee, because we've been at a horse race. As we wait for the porta potty, we see two ladies in their Sunday best: heels, pearls and lovely, floppy derby hats. At any moment, we expect them to start talking about their grandma's fine china. But they don't. Instead, we hear them say, "Oh, look. Something must be dead." We look up and to the left and see vultures circling round and round. It occurred to me at this very moment that if these ladies at the derby are aware of vulture's connection to death, then why aren't we talking more about these birds at crime scenes? People know that vultures are connected to death. But they don't really understand how. For example, here's an email I received from a detective in Louisiana: "Lauren, there's been a kidnapping. What buzzards or vultures do we have in Louisiana?" Before we address the kidnapping, I'll first address this buzzard/vulture question I get all the time. Buzzards don't live in the United States. They are hawks that live in Europe. The big black birds you see circling in the sky within the US are vultures. The two types of vultures that live in Louisiana are the turkey vulture and black vulture. To fully understand the role of vultures in forensic science, I'll walk you through this forensic case. From the email, certain things become apparent. We can assume the detective thinks the individual is dead. And he wants to use the birds to try to find the body. Like the ladies in Nashville, the detective thinks that vultures circling in the sky will lead him to the body. It's not that simple. I don't know if you've ever seen a vulture up close or spent much time with them, but they're huge, huge. Six-foot wingspan. Vultures circle in the air because they are too big to flap their wings and fly, so they soar. They soar in thermals, which are vortexes or little tornadoes caused by pressure differences in the air that form throughout the day as the sun heats up the ground. Therefore, when you see a circling vulture, the bird is usually traveling from point A to B, rather than circling above something dead. Actually, if you want to use a vulture to try to find a body, look for a vulture in a tree or on a fence post. Vultures are too big and slow to hunt. So they have to scavenge. In fact, vultures are the only animals in the world that depend upon death as a food source. The turkey vulture that you see here is super cool, because it's one of the few bird species that can actually smell. It hones in on the deceased by sensing a chemical that's coming off the body during decay. The evolutionary role of the vulture is to rid the earth of harmful toxins produced following death. Once death has been detected, the turkey vulture lands and quickly scavenges. Vultures usually remove the eyes first, then tear the skin, start pulling the tissues, and leave you with a skeleton. Therefore, the importance of vultures is not in the air, but on the ground. Vulture scavenging is somewhat gruesome. If you're ever on a bad first date, just reference this talk, and I don't think you'll have to worry about your potential suitor giving you another call. (Laughter) Although gruesome, vultures are key forensic players, and here's why. Vultures will consume a dead human just like they will consume roadkill. But you don't ever hear about that, and it's because vultures are so good at what they do. If vultures depend on death for survival and if they scavenge humans, then how can vultures be absent from forensic textbooks and training manuals? The answer: the tradition has been for researchers to exclude animal scavengers from decomposition studies by placing a cage over the decaying subject matter. Why? Because researchers were afraid an animal would run away with their subject matter and they wouldn't have any data to report — consequently excluding animals' results in a lengthy skeletonization process, and this information is currently what detectives use during investigations. A lot of times at a crime scene when people see a skeletonized body, they think, "Wow, this has been here for a really long time undiscovered." Oh, no, no, no, no. Vultures accelerate decay. And the skeletonized body could have been there for as little as five days if scavenged by vultures. The failure to account for vulture scavenging can result in forensic scientists inaccurately estimating how long someone has been dead and then searching through the wrong missing person's files. Therefore, the goal is to get forensic scientists to focus on vulture evidence and to get law enforcement to consider vulture scavenging and a possible recent death when skeletal remains are found. Let's get back to the importance of the kidnapping case. I responded to the detectives and told them that vultures like areas with water. They like areas with white-tailed deer, they typically arrive within the first five days following death, they're going to leave an intact spinal column and feathers. The detectives write back and say, "We found the body buried in a shallow grave. We also found the feathers you mentioned." But there appeared to be a problem because the feathers were located 40 yards from where the body was found. The feathers were next to a bloody pine cone. Vultures aren't attracted to blood, and they typically don't wander. They might wander 40 feet, but they're not going to wander 40 yards. That would be a waste of energy for a bird that doesn't know when it will get its next meal. So my first job here was to determine if vultures were at the scene. Indeed, the feather by the pine cone was consistent with the turkey vulture. So why in the world would a vulture wander 40 yards? One of the reasons I love vultures is because they tend to operate in a manner that can be explained by biology and physics. I started mentally going through the numerous bating experiments I had conducted at a body farm in Texas. A body farm is a place where you can donate your body to science. I also went through my experiences with trapping and GPS tagging vultures. And then the year-long process of monitoring vultures via remote GPS technology. Next, I brought up my field notes and had an "Aha!" moment. I knew of two things that would lure a vulture 40 yards from a body. Guts and brain matter. I presented this information to the detectives and learned that they suspected the victim had been incapacitated by blunt force trauma to the head. The blow to the head was thought to have occurred in the area where the pine cone was found, and then the victim was drug 40 yards and buried in a shallow grave. This suggested that brain matter was the lure for the vulture and illustrates how studying vulture behavior can help piece together some of the evidence. The detectives also sent me this photo. The victim's arm is sticking up out of the grave. As a forensic scientist, you have to think about the whole picture. The feather by the pine cone indicated that vultures were at the scene. This crime scene photo also depicts characteristic vulture scavenging behavior. We zoom in, we see a white down feather, which is characteristic of the turkey vulture. Also note that the skin has a cut-like tear near the wrist. The turkey vulture smells the decay, lands. It can get through the pine needles, pull out the hand, it's going to tear the skin with its beak and then start pulling the soft tissues away from the bone. Just tear and pull, tear and pull, tear and pull. This photo illustrates the scavenging efficiency of vultures. This is important because it helps support the time line the detectives are putting together for the murder. There's not a whole lot of evidence. You're not likely going to see the vultures at the crime scene. Instead, vultures just leave these very subtle clues. Rather than looking for the vulture, look for the feathers and pristine bones. Vultures are important because they are so good and fast at what they do. They're like tornadoes. If you blink, you will miss them. I provided my opinion about the vulture evidence to the detective. And he presented the vulture evidence in court. The kidnapping case was a death penalty case. And the defendant was found guilty. This case illustrates how studying vulture behavior helps innovate forensic science. Someone who has been murdered deserves the most thorough investigation possible. When we include vultures in forensic studies, we paint a more thorough picture of what happened, when it happened and who it happened to. So, the next time you're at a crime scene with a dead body — (Laughter) look to the ground to find the clues vultures have left. And if anyone ever brings up vultures on a date, you'll know they're a keeper. Thank you. (Applause) |
How we can turn the cold of outer space into a renewable resource | {0: 'Aaswath Raman is a scientist passionate about harnessing new sources of energy, mitigating climate change and more intelligently understanding the world around us -- by better manipulating light and heat using nanoscale materials. '} | TED2018 | Every summer when I was growing up, I would fly from my home in Canada to visit my grandparents, who lived in Mumbai, India. Now, Canadian summers are pretty mild at best — about 22 degrees Celsius or 72 degrees Fahrenheit is a typical summer's day, and not too hot. Mumbai, on the other hand, is a hot and humid place well into the 30s Celsius or 90s Fahrenheit. As soon as I'd reach it, I'd ask, "How could anyone live, work or sleep in such weather?" To make things worse, my grandparents didn't have an air conditioner. And while I tried my very, very best, I was never able to persuade them to get one. But this is changing, and fast. Cooling systems today collectively account for 17 percent of the electricity we use worldwide. This includes everything from the air conditioners I so desperately wanted during my summer vacations, to the refrigeration systems that keep our food safe and cold for us in our supermarkets, to the industrial scale systems that keep our data centers operational. Collectively, these systems account for eight percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. But what keeps me up at night is that our energy use for cooling might grow sixfold by the year 2050, primarily driven by increasing usage in Asian and African countries. I've seen this firsthand. Nearly every apartment in and around my grandmother's place now has an air conditioner. And that is, emphatically, a good thing for the health, well-being and productivity of people living in warmer climates. However, one of the most alarming things about climate change is that the warmer our planet gets, the more we're going to need cooling systems — systems that are themselves large emitters of greenhouse gas emissions. This then has the potential to cause a feedback loop, where cooling systems alone could become one of our biggest sources of greenhouse gases later this century. In the worst case, we might need more than 10 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity every year, just for cooling, by the year 2100. That's half our electricity supply today. Just for cooling. But this also point us to an amazing opportunity. A 10 or 20 percent improvement in the efficiency of every cooling system could actually have an enormous impact on our greenhouse gas emissions, both today and later this century. And it could help us avert that worst-case feedback loop. I'm a scientist who thinks a lot about light and heat. In particular, how new materials allow us to alter the flow of these basic elements of nature in ways we might have once thought impossible. So, while I always understood the value of cooling during my summer vacations, I actually wound up working on this problem because of an intellectual puzzle that I came across about six years ago. How were ancient peoples able to make ice in desert climates? This is a picture of an ice house, also called a Yakhchal, located in the southwest of Iran. There are ruins of dozens of such structures throughout Iran, with evidence of similar such buildings throughout the rest of the Middle East and all the way to China. The people who operated this ice house many centuries ago, would pour water in the pool you see on the left in the early evening hours, as the sun set. And then something amazing happened. Even though the air temperature might be above freezing, say five degrees Celsius or 41 degrees Fahrenheit, the water would freeze. The ice generated would then be collected in the early morning hours and stored for use in the building you see on the right, all the way through the summer months. You've actually likely seen something very similar at play if you've ever noticed frost form on the ground on a clear night, even when the air temperature is well above freezing. But wait. How did the water freeze if the air temperature is above freezing? Evaporation could have played an effect, but that's not enough to actually cause the water to become ice. Something else must have cooled it down. Think about a pie cooling on a window sill. For it to be able to cool down, its heat needs to flow somewhere cooler. Namely, the air that surrounds it. As implausible as it may sound, for that pool of water, its heat is actually flowing to the cold of space. How is this possible? Well, that pool of water, like most natural materials, sends out its heat as light. This is a concept known as thermal radiation. In fact, we're all sending out our heat as infrared light right now, to each other and our surroundings. We can actually visualize this with thermal cameras and the images they produce, like the ones I'm showing you right now. So that pool of water is sending out its heat upward towards the atmosphere. The atmosphere and the molecules in it absorb some of that heat and send it back. That's actually the greenhouse effect that's responsible for climate change. But here's the critical thing to understand. Our atmosphere doesn't absorb all of that heat. If it did, we'd be on a much warmer planet. At certain wavelengths, in particular between eight and 13 microns, our atmosphere has what's known as a transmission window. This window allows some of the heat that goes up as infrared light to effectively escape, carrying away that pool's heat. And it can escape to a place that is much, much colder. The cold of this upper atmosphere and all the way out to outer space, which can be as cold as minus 270 degrees Celsius, or minus 454 degrees Fahrenheit. So that pool of water is able to send out more heat to the sky than the sky sends back to it. And because of that, the pool will cool down below its surroundings' temperature. This is an effect known as night-sky cooling or radiative cooling. And it's always been understood by climate scientists and meteorologists as a very important natural phenomenon. When I came across all of this, it was towards the end of my PhD at Stanford. And I was amazed by its apparent simplicity as a cooling method, yet really puzzled. Why aren't we making use of this? Now, scientists and engineers had investigated this idea in previous decades. But there turned out to be at least one big problem. It was called night-sky cooling for a reason. Why? Well, it's a little thing called the sun. So, for the surface that's doing the cooling, it needs to be able to face the sky. And during the middle of the day, when we might want something cold the most, unfortunately, that means you're going to look up to the sun. And the sun heats most materials up enough to completely counteract this cooling effect. My colleagues and I spend a lot of our time thinking about how we can structure materials at very small length scales such that they can do new and useful things with light — length scales smaller than the wavelength of light itself. Using insights from this field, known as nanophotonics or metamaterials research, we realized that there might be a way to make this possible during the day for the first time. To do this, I designed a multilayer optical material shown here in a microscope image. It's more than 40 times thinner than a typical human hair. And it's able to do two things simultaneously. First, it sends its heat out precisely where our atmosphere lets that heat out the best. We targeted the window to space. The second thing it does is it avoids getting heated up by the sun. It's a very good mirror to sunlight. The first time I tested this was on a rooftop in Stanford that I'm showing you right here. I left the device out for a little while, and I walked up to it after a few minutes, and within seconds, I knew it was working. How? I touched it, and it felt cold. (Applause) Just to emphasize how weird and counterintuitive this is: this material and others like it will get colder when we take them out of the shade, even though the sun is shining on it. I'm showing you data here from our very first experiment, where that material stayed more than five degrees Celsius, or nine degrees Fahrenheit, colder than the air temperature, even though the sun was shining directly on it. The manufacturing method we used to actually make this material already exists at large volume scales. So I was really excited, because not only do we make something cool, but we might actually have the opportunity to do something real and make it useful. That brings me to the next big question. How do you actually save energy with this idea? Well, we believe the most direct way to save energy with this technology is as an efficiency boost for today's air-conditioning and refrigeration systems. To do this, we've built fluid cooling panels, like the ones shown right here. These panels have a similar shape to solar water heaters, except they do the opposite — they cool the water, passively, using our specialized material. These panels can then be integrated with a component almost every cooling system has, called a condenser, to improve the system's underlying efficiency. Our start-up, SkyCool Systems, has recently completed a field trial in Davis, California, shown right here. In that demonstration, we showed that we could actually improve the efficiency of that cooling system as much as 12 percent in the field. Over the next year or two, I'm super excited to see this go to its first commercial-scale pilots in both the air conditioning and refrigeration space. In the future, we might be able to integrate these kinds of panels with higher efficiency building cooling systems to reduce their energy usage by two-thirds. And eventually, we might actually be able to build a cooling system that requires no electricity input at all. As a first step towards that, my colleagues at Stanford and I have shown that you could actually maintain something more than 42 degrees Celsius below the air temperature with better engineering. Thank you. (Applause) So just imagine that — something that is below freezing on a hot summer's day. So, while I'm very excited about all we can do for cooling, and I think there's a lot yet to be done, as a scientist, I'm also drawn to a more profound opportunity that I believe this work highlights. We can use the cold darkness of space to improve the efficiency of every energy-related process here on earth. One such process I'd like to highlight are solar cells. They heat up under the sun and become less efficient the hotter they are. In 2015, we showed that with deliberate kinds of microstructures on top of a solar cell, we could take better advantage of this cooling effect to maintain a solar cell passively at a lower temperature. This allows the cell to operate more efficiently. We're probing these kinds of opportunities further. We're asking whether we can use the cold of space to help us with water conservation. Or perhaps with off-grid scenarios. Perhaps we could even directly generate power with this cold. There's a large temperature difference between us here on earth and the cold of space. That difference, at least conceptually, could be used to drive something called a heat engine to generate electricity. Could we then make a nighttime power-generation device that generates useful amounts of electricity when solar cells don't work? Could we generate light from darkness? Central to this ability is being able to manage the thermal radiation that's all around us. We're constantly bathed in infrared light; if we could bend it to our will, we could profoundly change the flows of heat and energy that permeate around us every single day. This ability, coupled with the cold darkness of space, points us to a future where we, as a civilization, might be able to more intelligently manage our thermal energy footprint at the very largest scales. As we confront climate change, I believe having this ability in our toolkit will prove to be essential. So, the next time you're walking around outside, yes, do marvel at how the sun is essential to life on earth itself, but don't forget that the rest of the sky has something to offer us as well. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why theater is essential to democracy | {0: "As the artistic director of New York's legendary Public Theater, Oskar Eustis nurtures new, groundbreaking works that shift the cultural conversation."} | TED2018 | Theater matters because democracy matters. Theater is the essential art form of democracy, and we know this because they were born in the same city. In the late 6th century BC, the idea of Western democracy was born. It was, of course, a very partial and flawed democracy, but the idea that power should stem from the consent of the governed, that power should flow from below to above, not the other way around, was born in that decade. And in that same decade, somebody — legend has it, somebody named Thespis — invented the idea of dialogue. What does that mean, to invent dialogue? Well, we know that the Festival of Dionysus gathered the entire citizenry of Athens on the side of the Acropolis, and they would listen to music, they would watch dancing, and they would have stories told as part of the Festival of Dionysus. And storytelling is much like what's happening right now: I'm standing up here, the unitary authority, and I am talking to you. And you are sitting back, and you are receiving what I have to say. And you may disagree with it, you may think I'm an insufferable fool, you may be bored to death, but that dialogue is mostly taking place inside your own head. But what happens if, instead of me talking to you — and Thespis thought of this — I just shift 90 degrees to the left, and I talk to another person onstage with me? Everything changes, because at that moment, I'm not the possessor of truth; I'm a guy with an opinion. And I'm talking to somebody else. And you know what? That other person has an opinion too, and it's drama, remember, conflict — they disagree with me. There's a conflict between two points of view. And the thesis of that is that the truth can only emerge in the conflict of different points of view. It's not the possession of any one person. And if you believe in democracy, you have to believe that. If you don't believe that, you're an autocrat who is putting up with democracy. But that's the basic thesis of democracy, that the conflict of different points of views leads to the truth. What's the other thing that's happening? I'm not asking you to sit back and listen to me. I'm asking you to lean forward and imagine my point of view — what this looks like and feels like to me as a character. And then I'm asking you to switch your mind and imagine what it feels like to the other person talking. I'm asking you to exercise empathy. And the idea that truth comes from the collision of different ideas and the emotional muscle of empathy are the necessary tools for democratic citizenship. What else happens? The third thing really is you, is the community itself, is the audience. And you know from personal experience that when you go to the movies, you walk into a movie theater, and if it's empty, you're delighted, because nothing's going to be between you and the movie. You can spread out, put your legs over the top of the stadium seats, eat your popcorn and just enjoy it. But if you walk into a live theater and you see that the theater is half full, your heart sinks. You're disappointed immediately, because whether you knew it or not, you were coming to that theater to be part of an audience. You were coming to have the collective experience of laughing together, crying together, holding your breath together to see what's going to happen next. You may have walked into that theater as an individual consumer, but if the theater does its job, you've walked out with a sense of yourself as part of a whole, as part of a community. That's built into the DNA of my art form. Twenty-five hundred years later, Joe Papp decided that the culture should belong to everybody in the United States of America, and that it was his job to try to deliver on that promise. He created Free Shakespeare in the Park. And Free Shakespeare in the Park is based on a very simple idea, the idea that the best theater, the best art that we can produce, should go to everybody and belong to everybody, and to this day, every summer night in Central Park, 2,000 people are lining up to see the best theater we can provide for free. It's not a commercial transaction. In 1967, 13 years after he figured that out, he figured out something else, which is that the democratic circle was not complete by just giving the people the classics. We had to actually let the people create their own classics and take the stage. And so in 1967, Joe opened the Public Theater downtown on Astor Place, and the first show he ever produced was the world premiere of "Hair." That's the first thing he ever did that wasn't Shakespeare. Clive Barnes in The Times said that it was as if Mr. Papp took a broom and swept up all the refuse from the East Village streets onto the stage at the Public. (Laughter) He didn't mean it complimentarily, but Joe put it up in the lobby, he was so proud of it. (Laughter) (Applause) And what the Public Theater did over the next years with amazing shows like "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf," "A Chorus Line," and — here's the most extraordinary example I can think of: Larry Kramer's savage cry of rage about the AIDS crisis, "The Normal Heart." Because when Joe produced that play in 1985, there was more information about AIDS in Frank Rich's review in the New York Times than the New York Times had published in the previous four years. Larry was actually changing the dialogue about AIDS through writing this play, and Joe was by producing it. I was blessed to commission and work on Tony Kushner's "Angels in America," and when doing that play and along with "Normal Heart," we could see that the culture was actually shifting, and it wasn't caused by the theater, but the theater was doing its part to change what it meant to be gay in the United States. And I'm incredibly proud of that. (Applause) When I took over Joe's old job at the Public in 2005, I realized one of the problems we had was a victim of our own success, which is: Shakespeare in the Park had been founded as a program for access, and it was now the hardest ticket to get in New York City. People slept out for two nights to get those tickets. What was that doing? That was eliminating 98 percent of the population from even considering going to it. So we refounded the mobile unit and took Shakespeare to prisons, to homeless shelters, to community centers in all five boroughs and even in New Jersey and Westchester County. And that program proved something to us that we knew intuitively: people's need for theater is as powerful as their desire for food or for drink. It's been an extraordinary success, and we've continued it. And then there was yet another barrier that we realized we weren't crossing, which is a barrier of participation. And the idea, we said, is: How can we turn theater from being a commodity, an object, back into what it really is — a set of relationships among people? And under the guidance of the amazing Lear deBessonet, we started the Public Works program, which now every summer produces these immense Shakespearean musical pageants, where Tony Award-winning actors and musicians are side by side with nannies and domestic workers and military veterans and recently incarcerated prisoners, amateurs and professionals, performing together on the same stage. And it's not just a great social program, it's the best art that we do. And the thesis of it is that artistry is not something that is the possession of a few. Artistry is inherent in being a human being. Some of us just get to spend a lot more of our lives practicing it. And then occasionally — (Applause) you get a miracle like "Hamilton," Lin-Manuel's extraordinary retelling of the foundational story of this country through the eyes of the only Founding Father who was a bastard immigrant orphan from the West Indies. And what Lin was doing is exactly what Shakespeare was doing. He was taking the voice of the people, the language of the people, elevating it into verse, and by doing so, ennobling the language and ennobling the people who spoke the language. And by casting that show entirely with a cast of black and brown people, what Lin was saying to us, he was reviving in us our greatest aspirations for the United States, our better angels of America, our sense of what this country could be, the inclusion that was at the heart of the American Dream. And it unleashed a wave of patriotism in me and in our audience, the appetite for which is proving to be insatiable. But there was another side to that, and it's where I want to end, and it's the last story I want to talk about. Some of you may have heard that Vice President-elect Pence came to see "Hamilton" in New York. And when he came in, some of my fellow New Yorkers booed him. And beautifully, he said, "That's what freedom sounds like." And at the end of the show, we read what I feel was a very respectful statement from the stage, and Vice President-elect Pence listened to it, but it sparked a certain amount of outrage, a tweetstorm, and also an internet boycott of "Hamilton" from outraged people who had felt we had treated him with disrespect. I looked at that boycott and I said, we're getting something wrong here. All of these people who have signed this boycott petition, they were never going to see "Hamilton" anyway. It was never going to come to a city near them. If it could come, they couldn't afford a ticket, and if they could afford a ticket, they didn't have the connections to get that ticket. They weren't boycotting us; we had boycotted them. And if you look at the red and blue electoral map of the United States, and if I were to tell you, "Oh, the blue is what designates all of the major nonprofit cultural institutions," I'd be telling you the truth. You'd believe me. We in the culture have done exactly what the economy, what the educational system, what technology has done, which is turn our back on a large part of the country. So this idea of inclusion, it has to keep going. Next fall, we are sending out on tour a production of Lynn Nottage's brilliant, Pulitzer Prize-winning play "Sweat." Years of research in Redding, Pennsylvania led her to write this play about the deindustrialization of Pennsylvania: what happened when steel left, the rage that was unleashed, the tensions that were unleashed, the racism that was unleashed by the loss of jobs. We're taking that play and we're touring it to rural counties in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin. We're partnering with community organizations there to try and make sure not only that we reach the people that we're trying to reach, but that we find ways to listen to them back and say, "The culture is here for you, too." Because — (Applause) we in the culture industry, we in the theater, have no right to say that we don't know what our job is. It's in the DNA of our art form. Our job "... is to hold up, as 'twere, a mirror to nature; to show scorn her image, to show virtue her appearance, and the very age its form and pressure." Our job is to try to hold up a vision to America that shows not only who all of us are individually, but that welds us back into the commonality that we need to be, the sense of unity, the sense of whole, the sense of who we are as a country. That's what the theater is supposed to do, and that's what we need to try to do as well as we can. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The critical role librarians play in the opioid crisis | {0: 'Chera Kowalski is championing the transformation of her library into a safe, responsive space for the community it serves.'} | TEDMED 2017 | When you walk into your neighborhood public library, you expect the librarian to help you find your next favorite book or some accurate information on a topic at interest. You don't probably expect the librarian to come running out from behind the reference desk with Narcan, ready to revive someone overdosing on heroin or fentanyl. But this is happening at some libraries. Public libraries have always been about community support with all kinds of services and programs from assisting with job seeking efforts to locating resources for voter rights to providing free meals to kids and teens even. But what we think of as community support takes on new urgency when you're in the middle of an opioid and overdose crisis. I work at the McPherson Square Library of the Free Library of Philadelphia. It's located in Kensington, one of the lowest income communities in Philadelphia, with a long history of being isolated from resources and opportunity. And because of that, it has been the center to the city's drug trade and drug use for decades. And so inside the neighborhood, our library is nestled inside of a park, which has unfortunately garnered a reputation for being a place to find and use drugs, especially heroin, out in the open, putting us and the community in direct contact with the drug trade and use on a daily basis. And so inside the library, it is routine to see people visibly intoxicated on opioids: eyes closing, body swaying slowly. It is routine for me to ask them if they are OK, but at the same time remind them if they can't keep their eyes open, they have to go. It is routine for our volunteer, Teddy, to pick up dozens of discarded needles on our property and throughout the park. And it is normal for kids to come into the library to tell me or our guard, Sterling, that someone is outside using, which typically means finding someone injecting on our front steps, benches or near the building, then asking them to move along because kids see them. And it is normal for the community to see people in various states of intoxication and withdrawal, to see people buying and selling, and to see people act and react violently. I'm not sharing this to sensationalize Kensington. I'm sharing this because this is the reality of a community that is constantly striving to move forward, but due to factors like structural racism, urban segregation, the cyclical nature of poverty, of trauma — the community has inequitable access to education, health care, employment and more. And this is also what it's like when the drug trade and use affects every aspect of life in the neighborhood. And the opioid epidemic has only amplified that stress. When I was hired by the Free Library in 2013, I specifically chose to work at McPherson because I understand what it's like to grow up in an environment where substance use disorder shapes the everyday, and I wanted to use those personal experiences as a guide for my work. But before I get to that, I want to share what it was like to witness this epidemic grow in Kensington. Like many other communities, we were just not prepared. We began to take notice of IDs we were seeing: addresses from nearby and upstate counties and then slowly out-of-state ones. People from Arkansas, Ohio, South Carolina, Alabama coming to Philadelphia for cheap heroin. People began to linger longer and longer in our public restroom, causing us to pay more attention to the restroom than to our daily responsibilities because it was an accessible place to use drugs just purchased. One day our toilet clogged so badly in the restroom, we were forced to close our library for two days because the culprit of the clog was discarded needles. For a while prior to that incident, we had been asking for a sharps container for the restroom, and after that, the library administration quickly approved installing one along with hiring bathroom monitors. And as the weather warmed, we struggled to respond. People began camping out in the park for days, weeks. You could walk outside on a sunny, warm day to find multiple groups of people in various states of intoxication and children playing in between them. The amount of needles collected by Teddy on a monthly basis skyrocketed from 100 to 300 to 500 to 800, to over 1,000, with many found on our front steps and the playground. Then there were the overdoses. So many occurred outside in the park, some inside the library. Sterling, our guard, would spend his time walking in and out of the building and throughout the park, constantly making sure everyone was safe, because at times, our fear of having someone overdose and die came close. One overdose in particular occurred after school, so the library was full of kids, noise and commotion. And in all of that, we heard the thud from inside the public restroom. When we opened the door, we found a man on the floor, unresponsive. He was pulled out in plain sight of everyone — kids, teens, adults, families. Someone on staff called 911, someone else escorted the kids and teens downstairs, somebody went to flag down the ambulance in the park. And the rest of us — we just waited. This had become our overdose drill because at the time, it was all we could do. So we waited and we watched this man lose air — seize up. He was dying. I don't know how many of you have witnessed an overdose on opioids, but it's horrific because you know the gasping for air, the loss of color in someone's face, is a timer running down on the chances of this person surviving. But luckily for this man, the ambulance arrived and he received a dose of naloxone through injection. And I remember he jolted like he was electrocuted, and he pulled the needle out, and he told the paramedics to back off. And then he stood up, and he walked out. And we — we went back to work because people were still asking for time on the computers, kids still needed help with their homework and this was our job — our purpose. I think that incident stays with me because of the waiting. It made me feel helpless. And it was that feeling of helplessness that reminded me so well of my childhood. Before I was born, both of my parents began using heroin. It made our lives chaotic and unstable: promises being made and constantly broken, their fighting, the weight of their secret — the weight of our secret kept so much so-called "normal" out of our lives. Every time we'd be dropped off at our grandparent's house, I'd be stuck on the thought that I was never going to see them again. Every time we'd be left in a car, at a house, at a store, I'd cry. And every time I saw those El tracks — the same ones I take to work now to McPherson — from the backseat of a car, I'd be angry, because even kids know when their parents are trying to score drugs. There was so little I could do to control what was going on around me, that that feeling of helplessness was overwhelming. I struggled in school, struggled to read, I was prone to anger and depression. When I was 11 years old, I started smoking, which shortly after led to my own experiences with drugs and alcohol. I convinced myself that my parents' past would be my future. But eventually both of my parents entered recovery and maintained recovery from opioid use. And their strength and their commitment provided support and stability for me and my siblings, and it was those personal experiences that brought me to McPherson. Choosing to be a librarian and choosing to be at McPherson was me letting go of that feeling of helplessness and finding ways to be supportive to others. And one way to provide support was learning how to administer Narcan. Public libraries respond to the needs of their communities, and not knowing how to utilize Narcan was a disservice to the needs of our community. We were on the frontlines and desperately needed access to this lifesaving tool. So finally in late February of 2017, after much advocating, we finally received training from Prevention Point Philadelphia and about a month of so later, I utilized Narcan for the first time to save someone's life. It was after school again, and Teddy came into the library and said someone was overdosing on a front bench. Someone on staff called 911 again, and I grabbed the Narcan kit. The woman was barely in her 20s and barely breathing. Her friend was frantically slapping her in the face in hopes of reviving her. I administered the Narcan nasally, and thankfully she came to. But before the ambulance arrived, she and her friend ran off. And when I finally turned around, I saw the kids — kids that come into the library on a daily basis, some that I have known for years — standing on the steps of the building. They saw everything. And they didn't seem like they were visibly upset or in shock, and so I walked into the building, right into our workroom, and I cried. I cried partly from the shock of what just happened because I never thought I'd be saving anybody's life ever, but I mostly cried because of the kids. This is their normal. This is the community's normal. This is a catastrophic normal, and in that moment, I was forced to confront once again that this should never be normal, and as with my childhood, when you're in it, you just accept it. The opioid epidemic is not just about those living with opioid use disorder because the reach of the epidemic goes well beyond those living with this and their families. It impacts the entire community. Kensington was a community in crisis before this for reasons that are endemic and intertwined, and anyone familiar with the neighborhood can think of why: racial disparities, failure of local and federal government to properly fund schools, lack of economic opportunity. And what we're trying to do at McPherson is find ways to support this community out of crisis. And perhaps now, because of the epidemic, more people are paying attention to Kensington. But regardless of that, at McPherson, we will continue to do what we can with the resources we have and we will continue to provide whatever help we can in hopes of keeping our community safe and healthy because public libraries have always been more than just books. We are physical shelter, a classroom, a safe haven, a lunch room, a resource hub and yes, even a lifeline. Thank you. (Applause) |
What if we replaced politicians with randomly selected people? | {0: 'Brett Hennig co-founded and directs the Sortition Foundation, which campaigns to institute the use of stratified, random selection (also called sortition) in government.'} | TEDxDanubia | I want to talk about one of the big questions, perhaps the biggest question: How should we live together? How should a group of people, who perhaps live in a city or in the continent or even the whole globe, share and manage common resources? How should we make the rules that govern us? This has always been an important question. And today, I think it's even more important than ever if we want to address rising inequality, climate change, the refugee crisis, just to name a few major issues. It's also a very old question. Humans have been asking themselves this question ever since we lived in organized societies. Like this guy, Plato. He thought we needed benevolent guardians who could make decisions for the greater good of everyone. Kings and queens thought they could be those guardians, but during various revolutions, they tended to lose their heads. And this guy, you probably know. Here in Hungary, you lived for many years under one attempt to implement his answer of how to live together. His answer was brutal, cruel and inhumane. But a different answer, a different kind of answer, which went more or less into hibernation for 2,000 years, has had profound recent success. That answer is, of course, democracy. If we take a quick look at the modern history of democracy, it goes something like this. Along here, we're going to put the last 200 years. Up here, we're going to put the number of democracies. And the graph does this, the important point of which, is this extraordinary increase over time, which is why the 20th century has been called the century of democracy's triumph, and why, as Francis Fukuyama said in 1989, some believe that we have reached the end of history, that the question of how to live together has been answered, and that answer is liberal democracy. Let's explore that assertion, though. I want to find out what you think. So I'm going to ask you two questions, and I want you to put your hands up if you agree. The first question is: Who thinks living in a democracy is a good thing? Who likes democracy? If you can think of a better system, keep your hands down. Don't worry about those who didn't raise their hands, I'm sure they mean very well. The second question is: Who thinks our democracies are functioning well? Come on, there must be one politician in the audience somewhere. (Laughter) No. But my point is, if liberal democracy is the end of history, then there's a massive paradox or contradiction here. Why is that? Well, the first question is about the ideal of democracy, and all these qualities are very appealing. But in practice, it's not working. And that's the second question. Our politics is broken, our politicians aren't trusted, and the political system is distorted by powerful vested interests. I think there's two ways to resolve this paradox. One is to give up on democracy; it doesn't work. Let's elect a populist demagogue who will ignore democratic norms, trample on liberal freedoms and just get things done. The other option, I think, is to fix this broken system, to bring the practice closer to the ideal and put the diverse voices of society in our parliaments and get them to make considered, evidence-based laws for the long-term good of everyone. Which brings me to my epiphany, my moment of enlightenment. And I want you to get critical. I want you to ask yourselves, "Why wouldn't this work?" And then come and talk to me afterwards about it. Its technical name is "sortition." But its common name is "random selection." And the idea is actually very simple: we randomly select people and put them in parliament. (Laughter) Let's think about that for a few more minutes, shall we? Imagine we chose you and you and you and you and you down there and a bunch of other random people, and we put you in our parliament for the next couple of years. Of course, we could stratify the selection to make sure that it matched the socioeconomic and demographic profile of the country and was a truly representative sample of people. Fifty percent of them would be women. Many of them would be young, some would be old, a few would be rich, but most of them would be ordinary people like you and me. This would be a microcosm of society. And this microcosm would simulate how we would all think, if we had the time, the information and a good process to come to the moral crux of political decisions. And although you may not be in that group, someone of your age, someone of your gender, someone from your location and someone with your background would be in that room. The decisions made by these people would build on the wisdom of crowds. They would become more than the sum of their parts. They would become critical thinkers with access to experts, who would be on tap but not on top. And they could prove that diversity can trump ability when confronting the wide array of societal questions and problems. It would not be government by public opinion poll. It would not be government by referendum. These informed, deliberating people would move beyond public opinion to the making of public judgments. However, there would be one major side effect: if we replaced elections with sortition and made our parliament truly representative of society, it would mean the end of politicians. And I'm sure we'd all be pretty sad to see that. (Laughter) Very interestingly, random selection was a key part of how democracy was done in ancient Athens. This machine, this device, is called a kleroteria. It's an ancient Athenian random-selection device. The ancient Athenians randomly selected citizens to fill the vast majority of their political posts. They knew that elections were aristocratic devices. They knew that career politicians were a thing to be avoided. And I think we know these things as well. But more interesting than the ancient use of random selection is its modern resurgence. The rediscovery of the legitimacy of random selection in politics has become so common lately, that there's simply too many examples to talk about. Of course, I'm very aware that it's going to be difficult to institute this in our parliaments. Try this — say to your friend, "I think we should populate our parliament with randomly selected people." "Are you joking? What if my neighbor gets chosen? The fool can't even separate his recycling." But the perhaps surprising but overwhelming and compelling evidence from all these modern examples is that it does work. If you give people responsibility, they act responsibly. Don't get me wrong — it's not a panacea. The question is not: Would this be perfect? Of course not. People are fallibly human, and distorting influences will continue to exist. The question is: Would it be better? And the answer to that question, to me at least, is obviously yes. Which gets us back to our original question: How should we live together? And now we have an answer: with a parliament that uses sortition. But how would we get from here to there? How could we fix our broken system and remake democracy for the 21st century? Well, there are several things that we can do, and that are, in fact, happening right now. We can experiment with sortition. We can introduce it to schools and workplaces and other institutions, like Democracy In Practice is doing in Bolivia. We can hold policy juries and citizens' assemblies, like the newDemocracy Foundation is doing in Australia, like the Jefferson Center is doing in the US and like the Irish government is doing right now. We could build a social movement demanding change, which is what the Sortition Foundation is doing in the UK. And at some point, we should institute it. Perhaps the first step would be a second chamber in our parliament, full of randomly selected people — a citizens' senate, if you will. There's a campaign for a citizens' senate in France and another campaign in Scotland, and it could, of course, be done right here in Hungary. That would be kind of like a Trojan horse right into the heart of government. And then, when it becomes impossible to patch over the cracks in the current system, we must step up and replace elections with sortition. I have hope. Here in Hungary, systems have been created, and systems have been torn down and replaced in the past. Change can and does happen. It's just a matter of when and how. Thank you. (Hungarian) Thank you. (Applause) |
Let's turn the high seas into the world's largest nature reserve | {0: 'Dr. Enric Sala is a former university professor who saw himself writing the obituary of ocean life and quit academia to become a full-time conservationist as a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence.'} | TED2018 | If you were to jump into any random spot in the ocean, you would probably see something like this. Empty of large animals. Because we have taken them out of the water faster than they can reproduce. Today I want to propose a strategy to save ocean life, and the solution has a lot to do with economics. In 1999, a little place called Cabo Pulmo in Mexico was an underwater desert. The fishermen were so upset not having enough fish to catch that they did something that no one expected. Instead of spending more time at sea, trying to catch the few fish left, they stopped fishing completely. They created a national park in the sea. A no-take marine reserve. When we returned, 10 years later, this is what we saw. What had been an underwater barren was now a kaleidoscope of life and color. We saw it back to pristine in only 10 years. Including the return of the large predators, like the groupers, the sharks, the jacks. And those visionary fishermen are making much more money now, from tourism. Now, when we can align economic needs with conservation, miracles can happen. And we have seen similar recoveries all over the world. I spent 20 years studying human impacts in the ocean. But when I saw firsthand the regeneration of places like Cabo Pulmo, that gave me hope. So I decided to quit my job as a university professor to dedicate my life to save more ocean places like this. In the last 10 years, our team at National Geographic Pristine Seas has explored, surveyed and documented some of the wildest places left in the ocean and worked with governments to protect them. These are all now protected, covering a total area half the size of Canada. (Applause) These places are the Yellowstones and the Serengetis of the sea. These are places where you jump in the water and are immediately surrounded by sharks. (Laughter) And this is good, because the sharks are a good indicator of the health of the ecosystem. These places are time machines that take us to the ocean of 1,000 years ago. But they also show us what the future ocean could be like. Because the ocean has extraordinary regenerative power, we have seen great recovery in just a few years. We just need to protect many more places at risk so they can become wild and full of life again. But today, only two percent of the ocean is fully protected from fishing and other activities. And that's not enough. Studies suggest that we need at least 30 percent of the ocean under protection not just to save marine life, but to save us, too. Because the ocean gives us more than half of the oxygen we breathe, food, it absorbs much of the carbon pollution that we throw in the atmosphere. We need a healthy ocean to survive. Now, is there a way to accelerate ocean protection? I think so. And it involves us looking at the high seas. Now, what are the high seas? Now coastal countries have authority over 200 nautical miles from shore. Everything beyond those areas are called the high seas. In dark blue on this map. No country owns the high seas, no country is responsible for them, but they all are, so it's a little like the Wild West. And there are two main types of fishing in the high seas. At the bottom and near the surface. Bottom trawling is the most destructive practice in the world. Super trawlers, the largest fishing vessels in the ocean, have nets so large that they can hold a dozen 747 jets. These huge nets destroy everything in their paths — including deep corals that grow on sea mounds, which can be thousands of years old. And fishing near the surface targets mostly species that migrate between the high seas and country's waters, like tuna and sharks. And many of these species are threatened because of too much fishing and bad management. Now, who fishes in the high seas? Until now, it was difficult to know exactly, because countries have been very secretive about the long-distance fishing. But now, satellite technology allows us to track individual boats. This is a game-changer. And this is the first time we are presenting the data that you are going to see. I'm going to show you the tracks of two boats over the course of a year, using a satellite automated identification system. This is a long-liner, fishing around the southern coast of Africa. After a few months fishing there, the boat goes to Japan to resupply, and shortly after, here it is, fishing around Madagascar. This is a Russian trawler fishing, probably, for cod, in Russian waters, and then across the high seas of the north Atlantic. Thanks to Global Fishing Watch, we have been able to track over 3,600 boats from more than 20 countries, fishing in the high seas. They use satellite positioning and machine-learning technology to automatically identify if a boat is just sailing or fishing, which are the white spots here. So with an international group of colleagues, we decided to investigate not only who fishes in the high seas, but who benefits from it. My colleague, Juan Mayorga, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has produced detailed maps of fishing effort, which means how much time and fuel is spent fishing in every pixel in the ocean. We have a map for every country. China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea and Spain alone account for almost 80 percent of the fishing in the high seas. When we put all of the countries together, this is what we get. Because we know the identity of every boat in the database, we know its size, its tonnage, the power of its engines, how many crew are on board. With this information, we can calculate fuel costs, labor costs, etc. So for the first time, we have been able to map the costs of fishing in the high seas. The darker the red, the higher the costs. Thanks to our colleagues at the University of British Columbia, we know how much every country is actually fishing. And we know the price of the fish as it comes off the vessel. Combined with the data on effort, we have been able to map the revenue of fishing the high seas. The darker the blue, the higher the revenue. We have costs, and we have revenue. So for the first time, we have been able to map the profitability of fishing in the high seas. Now I'm going to show you a map. Red colors mean we are losing money by fishing in that part of the ocean. Blue colors mean it's profitable. Here it is. It seems mostly profitable. But there are two more factors we have to take into account. First, recent investigations reveal the use of forced labor, or slave labor, in high seas fishing. Companies use it to cut costs, to generate profits. And second, every year, governments subsidize high seas fishing with more than four billion dollars. Let's go back to the map of profits. If we assume fair wages, which means not slave labor, and we remove the subsidies from our calculation, the map turns into this. Fishing is truly profitable in only half of the high seas fishing grounds. In fact, on aggregate, subsidies are four times larger than the profits. So we have five countries doing most of the fishing in the high seas and the economics are dependent on huge government subsidies, and for some countries, on human rights violations. What this economic analysis reveals, is that practically the entire high seas fishing proposition is misguided. What sane government would subsidize an industry anchored in exploitation and fundamentally destructive? And not so profitable, anyway. So, why don't we close all of the high seas to fishing? Let's create a giant high seas reserve, two-thirds of the ocean. A modeling study from — (Applause) A modeling study from colleagues at UC Santa Barbara, suggests that such reserve would help migratory species like tuna recover in the high seas. And part of that increased abundance would spill over into the countries' waters, helping to replenish them. That would also increase the catch in these waters, and so would the profits, because the cost of fishing would be lowered. And the ecological benefits would be huge, because these species of large predators, like tuna and sharks, are key to the health of the entire ecosystem. Therefore, protecting the high seas would have ecological, economic and social benefits. But the truth is that most fishing companies don't care about the environment. But they would make more money by not fishing in the high seas. And this would not affect our ability to feed our growing population, because the high seas provide only five percent of the global marine catch, because the high seas are not as productive as near-shore waters. And most of the catch of the high seas is sold as upscale food items, like tuna sashimi or shark fin soup. The high seas catch does not contribute to global food security. So how are we going to do it? How are we going to protect the high seas? As we speak, negotiators at the United Nations are beginning discussions on a new agreement to do just that. But this cannot happen behind closed doors. This is our greatest opportunity. And we all should ensure that our countries will support the protection of the high seas and get rid of subsidies to industrial fishing. In 2016, 24 countries and the European Union agreed to protect the Ross Sea, the wildest places in Antarctica, full of wildlife like killer whales, leopard seals, penguins. And this included fishing nations, like China, Japan, Spain, Russia. But they decided that protecting such a unique environment would be worth more than exploiting it for relatively little benefit. And this is exactly the type of cooperation and willingness to set aside differences that we are going to need. We can do it again. If 20 years from now, our children were to jump into any random spot in the ocean, what would they see? A barren landscape, like much of our seas today, or an abundance of life, our legacy to the future? Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
How technology can fight extremism and online harassment | {0: 'Yasmin Green is the director of research and development for Jigsaw, a unit within Alphabet Inc. focused on solving global security challenges through technology.'} | TED2018 | My relationship with the internet reminds me of the setup to a clichéd horror movie. You know, the blissfully happy family moves in to their perfect new home, excited about their perfect future, and it's sunny outside and the birds are chirping ... And then it gets dark. And there are noises from the attic. And we realize that that perfect new house isn't so perfect. When I started working at Google in 2006, Facebook was just a two-year-old, and Twitter hadn't yet been born. And I was in absolute awe of the internet and all of its promise to make us closer and smarter and more free. But as we were doing the inspiring work of building search engines and video-sharing sites and social networks, criminals, dictators and terrorists were figuring out how to use those same platforms against us. And we didn't have the foresight to stop them. Over the last few years, geopolitical forces have come online to wreak havoc. And in response, Google supported a few colleagues and me to set up a new group called Jigsaw, with a mandate to make people safer from threats like violent extremism, censorship, persecution — threats that feel very personal to me because I was born in Iran, and I left in the aftermath of a violent revolution. But I've come to realize that even if we had all of the resources of all of the technology companies in the world, we'd still fail if we overlooked one critical ingredient: the human experiences of the victims and perpetrators of those threats. There are many challenges I could talk to you about today. I'm going to focus on just two. The first is terrorism. So in order to understand the radicalization process, we met with dozens of former members of violent extremist groups. One was a British schoolgirl, who had been taken off of a plane at London Heathrow as she was trying to make her way to Syria to join ISIS. And she was 13 years old. So I sat down with her and her father, and I said, "Why?" And she said, "I was looking at pictures of what life is like in Syria, and I thought I was going to go and live in the Islamic Disney World." That's what she saw in ISIS. She thought she'd meet and marry a jihadi Brad Pitt and go shopping in the mall all day and live happily ever after. ISIS understands what drives people, and they carefully craft a message for each audience. Just look at how many languages they translate their marketing material into. They make pamphlets, radio shows and videos in not just English and Arabic, but German, Russian, French, Turkish, Kurdish, Hebrew, Mandarin Chinese. I've even seen an ISIS-produced video in sign language. Just think about that for a second: ISIS took the time and made the effort to ensure their message is reaching the deaf and hard of hearing. It's actually not tech-savviness that is the reason why ISIS wins hearts and minds. It's their insight into the prejudices, the vulnerabilities, the desires of the people they're trying to reach that does that. That's why it's not enough for the online platforms to focus on removing recruiting material. If we want to have a shot at building meaningful technology that's going to counter radicalization, we have to start with the human journey at its core. So we went to Iraq to speak to young men who'd bought into ISIS's promise of heroism and righteousness, who'd taken up arms to fight for them and then who'd defected after they witnessed the brutality of ISIS's rule. And I'm sitting there in this makeshift prison in the north of Iraq with this 23-year-old who had actually trained as a suicide bomber before defecting. And he says, "I arrived in Syria full of hope, and immediately, I had two of my prized possessions confiscated: my passport and my mobile phone." The symbols of his physical and digital liberty were taken away from him on arrival. And then this is the way he described that moment of loss to me. He said, "You know in 'Tom and Jerry,' when Jerry wants to escape, and then Tom locks the door and swallows the key and you see it bulging out of his throat as it travels down?" And of course, I really could see the image that he was describing, and I really did connect with the feeling that he was trying to convey, which was one of doom, when you know there's no way out. And I was wondering: What, if anything, could have changed his mind the day that he left home? So I asked, "If you knew everything that you know now about the suffering and the corruption, the brutality — that day you left home, would you still have gone?" And he said, "Yes." And I thought, "Holy crap, he said 'Yes.'" And then he said, "At that point, I was so brainwashed, I wasn't taking in any contradictory information. I couldn't have been swayed." "Well, what if you knew everything that you know now six months before the day that you left?" "At that point, I think it probably would have changed my mind." Radicalization isn't this yes-or-no choice. It's a process, during which people have questions — about ideology, religion, the living conditions. And they're coming online for answers, which is an opportunity to reach them. And there are videos online from people who have answers — defectors, for example, telling the story of their journey into and out of violence; stories like the one from that man I met in the Iraqi prison. There are locals who've uploaded cell phone footage of what life is really like in the caliphate under ISIS's rule. There are clerics who are sharing peaceful interpretations of Islam. But you know what? These people don't generally have the marketing prowess of ISIS. They risk their lives to speak up and confront terrorist propaganda, and then they tragically don't reach the people who most need to hear from them. And we wanted to see if technology could change that. So in 2016, we partnered with Moonshot CVE to pilot a new approach to countering radicalization called the "Redirect Method." It uses the power of online advertising to bridge the gap between those susceptible to ISIS's messaging and those credible voices that are debunking that messaging. And it works like this: someone looking for extremist material — say they search for "How do I join ISIS?" — will see an ad appear that invites them to watch a YouTube video of a cleric, of a defector — someone who has an authentic answer. And that targeting is based not on a profile of who they are, but of determining something that's directly relevant to their query or question. During our eight-week pilot in English and Arabic, we reached over 300,000 people who had expressed an interest in or sympathy towards a jihadi group. These people were now watching videos that could prevent them from making devastating choices. And because violent extremism isn't confined to any one language, religion or ideology, the Redirect Method is now being deployed globally to protect people being courted online by violent ideologues, whether they're Islamists, white supremacists or other violent extremists, with the goal of giving them the chance to hear from someone on the other side of that journey; to give them the chance to choose a different path. It turns out that often the bad guys are good at exploiting the internet, not because they're some kind of technological geniuses, but because they understand what makes people tick. I want to give you a second example: online harassment. Online harassers also work to figure out what will resonate with another human being. But not to recruit them like ISIS does, but to cause them pain. Imagine this: you're a woman, you're married, you have a kid. You post something on social media, and in a reply, you're told that you'll be raped, that your son will be watching, details of when and where. In fact, your home address is put online for everyone to see. That feels like a pretty real threat. Do you think you'd go home? Do you think you'd continue doing the thing that you were doing? Would you continue doing that thing that's irritating your attacker? Online abuse has been this perverse art of figuring out what makes people angry, what makes people afraid, what makes people insecure, and then pushing those pressure points until they're silenced. When online harassment goes unchecked, free speech is stifled. And even the people hosting the conversation throw up their arms and call it quits, closing their comment sections and their forums altogether. That means we're actually losing spaces online to meet and exchange ideas. And where online spaces remain, we descend into echo chambers with people who think just like us. But that enables the spread of disinformation; that facilitates polarization. What if technology instead could enable empathy at scale? This was the question that motivated our partnership with Google's Counter Abuse team, Wikipedia and newspapers like the New York Times. We wanted to see if we could build machine-learning models that could understand the emotional impact of language. Could we predict which comments were likely to make someone else leave the online conversation? And that's no mean feat. That's no trivial accomplishment for AI to be able to do something like that. I mean, just consider these two examples of messages that could have been sent to me last week. "Break a leg at TED!" ... and "I'll break your legs at TED." (Laughter) You are human, that's why that's an obvious difference to you, even though the words are pretty much the same. But for AI, it takes some training to teach the models to recognize that difference. The beauty of building AI that can tell the difference is that AI can then scale to the size of the online toxicity phenomenon, and that was our goal in building our technology called Perspective. With the help of Perspective, the New York Times, for example, has increased spaces online for conversation. Before our collaboration, they only had comments enabled on just 10 percent of their articles. With the help of machine learning, they have that number up to 30 percent. So they've tripled it, and we're still just getting started. But this is about way more than just making moderators more efficient. Right now I can see you, and I can gauge how what I'm saying is landing with you. You don't have that opportunity online. Imagine if machine learning could give commenters, as they're typing, real-time feedback about how their words might land, just like facial expressions do in a face-to-face conversation. Machine learning isn't perfect, and it still makes plenty of mistakes. But if we can build technology that understands the emotional impact of language, we can build empathy. That means that we can have dialogue between people with different politics, different worldviews, different values. And we can reinvigorate the spaces online that most of us have given up on. When people use technology to exploit and harm others, they're preying on our human fears and vulnerabilities. If we ever thought that we could build an internet insulated from the dark side of humanity, we were wrong. If we want today to build technology that can overcome the challenges that we face, we have to throw our entire selves into understanding the issues and into building solutions that are as human as the problems they aim to solve. Let's make that happen. Thank you. (Applause) |
Por qué necesitamos proteger el alta mar | {0: 'Dr. Enric Sala is a former university professor who saw himself writing the obituary of ocean life and quit academia to become a full-time conservationist as a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence.'} | TED en Español en NYC | If you randomly jumped in any point of the sea today, surely you would see something like this. No big fishes, no fishes at all because we have fished them quicker than they reproduce. Today, I want to propose a strategy to save sea life and the idea has a lot to do with economics. In 1999, there was a little place called Cabo Pulmo in Baja California, in Mexico which was an underwater desert. Fishermen were frustrated by not having enough fishing. So, they decided to do something nobody expected. Instead of spending more time at sea searching for the last fish, they decided to stop fishing completely. They created a national park at sea, a marine reserve. When we came back to Cabo Pulmo ten years later, this is what we saw. What had been an underwater wasteland had become a kaleidoscope of color and life. We saw it come back to its pristine state in just ten years including the return of the biggest predators such as groupers, sharks, horse mackerel... Wow! It's an extraordinary place. If you scuba dive, go to Cabo Pulmo. Those visionary fishermen are now earning more money through tourism. When we can align economic needs with conservation miracles can happen. And we have seen similar recoveries throughout the world. I spent 20 years studying human impact on the sea. But seeing with my own eyes the regeneration of places like Cabo Pulmo gave me hope, so I decided, ten years ago, to abandon my position as a university professor to dedicate my life to protecting more places at sea, like these. In the past ten years our National Geographic, Pristine Seas team have been exploring, studying, documenting the wildest places at sea and working with government to protect them. All these places are already protected, and they cover a total surface of the size of half Canada. These places are the Yellowstones and the Serengetis of the sea. They are places where you jump into the water and immediately are surrounded by sharks. And that's good, it's good! Because sharks are a sign of a healthy ecosystem. These places are time machines that show us the sea from 500 years ago, from 1,000 years ago. But they also show us how the sea of the future could be. Because the sea has an extraordinary regenerative capacity. We have seen incredible recoveries in just a few years. What we have to do is protect more endangered places so they can be wild and full of life again. So, the question is: "Is there any way of accelerating sea protection?" Because today just the 2 percent of the sea is protected and that's not enough. Studies suggest that we need to protect at least 30 percent of the sea, not just to save sea life, but ourselves, too. Because the sea gives us food, and it gives us over the half of the oxygen we breathe. It absorbs much of the carbon pollution we release into the atmosphere. We need a healthy sea to survive. So, is there a way to accelerate protecting the sea? I think there is. And one of the solutions involves looking at international waters. Coastal countries have the authority over 200 nautical miles from the coast. Everything beyond that is called international waters or the high seas, too, shown in dark blue on this map. It's two-thirds of the ocean. No country is in charge of the high seas, but everyone is. Since it's a bit like the wild west, a lot of stuff happens there, and nobody controls anything. There are two kinds of fishing, mainly, at the high seas: at the bottom and at the surface. Bottom trawling is the most destructive practice on the planet. Supertrawlers, the biggest ships on the sea, have nets so large they can hold a dozen 747 planes. Those huge nets destroy everything in their path including deep-sea coral, which lives in submarine mountains and can be thousands of years old. Surface fishing focuses mostly on species that migrate from the high seas to the coastal waters, to the water of countries, such as tunas and sharks. Many of those are endangered species because they have been fished too much. But who fishes them? Who fishes at the high seas? Until now, it was difficult to know it exactly. Countries have not been transparent concerning long-distance fishing. Today, however, satellite technology allows us to track ships individually. And this is a revolution. This is the first time we are presenting the data you're about to see. I'm going to show you the routes of two ships fishing throughout a year using an automatic satellite positioning system. This is a ship fishing tunas and sharks for months around the south coast of the African continent. A few months later, the ship goes to Japan to replenish supplies and a while after, it's fishing around Madagascar. This other ship is a Russian trawler that fishes cod in Russian waters and also in international waters in the North Atlantic. Thanks to Global Fishing Watch we have been able to track more than 3,600 ships from more than 20 countries that were fishing at the high seas. Global Fishing Watch uses satellite positioning and artificial intelligence to automatically detect whether a ship is fishing or navigating. Depending on the kind of moves, we also know what kind of fishing it is. So, along with a group of international colleagues, scientists and economists, we decided to investigate who is fishing at the high seas and who benefits from it. My colleague Juan Mayorga from the University of California in Santa Barbara has produced detailed maps of fishing effort. Effort means how much time and fuel it takes to fish in each point of the sea. We have maps for each country that fishes in the high seas: China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea and Spain represent almost 80 percent of the fishing effort in the high seas. When we join all the countries, this is what we get: the global map of fishing effort. We know the identity of each ship on the database — that's how we know the length of the ship, the tonnage, the engine power, how many crew members are on board... With this, we can calculate the staff cost, the fuel cost, etc. This is why, for the first time, we were able to calculate the costs of fishing on the high seas. The darker the red, the higher the cost. Colleagues from the University of British Columbia have illustrated how much each country is fishing. We also know the price of the fish when it leaves the ship. Combined with the effort data, we have been able to calculate, also for the first time, the profit, the income from fishing on the high seas. We have cost and we have income, thus, for the first time, too, we were able to calculate the profitability of fishing on the high seas, the net economic profit. I'm going to show you another map. The red color means that we are losing money by fishing in that area of the ocean. The blue color means that fishing is profitable there. There it is. It seems pretty profitable, right? But there are two important factors that we have to take into account. The first is: recent researches have revealed the use of forced labor or modern slavery on the high seas. Companies use modern slavery to reduce cost and get more profit. Secondly: each year, governments subsidize fishing on the high seas with over 4000 million dollars. Let's go back to the profits map. If we pretend that there is no slavery, that people are paid minimum wage, and deduct the government subsidies from our calculation, the map becomes this. Half of fishing on the high seas is not profitable. In fact, subsidies are four times bigger than the benefits. What this economic analysis reveals is that, practically, the entirety of fishing on the high seas makes no sense. What country, what government in its right mind would subsidize and support an industry cling to exploitation and fundamentally destructive? And it's not that profitable either. So... Why don't we close all international waters to fishing? Let's create a gigantic marine reserve on the high seas. Two thirds of the global ocean. Studies from the University of California suggest that such reserve would help the species in the high seas that migrate, such as tuna, and part of that growth in abundance would help to repopulate the coastal waters of the countries and the catch of those species would also rise, as well as the benefits, because the cost of fishing would decrease and the fish that large countries are now fishing in the wild west would be fished by the coastal countries. And well, the ecological benefits would be huge: to provide a refuge of two-thirds of the ocean for species of predators, such as tunas and sharks, which are essential to the health of the ecosystem. So, protecting the high seas, the international waters, would have ecological, economic and social benefits. But, the truth is that most fishing companies don't care about the environment. They would earn more money if they didn't fish on the high seas. Moreover, this would not affect our ability to feed our growing population, because fishing on the high seas represents only 5 percent of global marine catch since the high seas are not as productive as the coastal waters. And the high seas catch is sold as high-standing products, such as the tuna sashimi and shark fin soup. The high seas catch does not contribute to global food security. So, how are we going to do this? How are we going to protect the international waters? Right now, negotiators in the United Nations are starting discussions for a new treaty for the conservation in international waters. But this should not happen at closed doors. This is our big opportunity, and we all must ensure that our countries will support the conservation of international waters. There is a precedent. In 2016, 24 countries and the European Union agreed to protect the Ross Sea, the wildest place in the waters surrounding Antarctica, full of wildlife such as orcas, leopard seals, penguins, and those included fishing countries like China, Russia, Spain and Japan, but they decided that protecting that unique place was more beneficial than exploiting it for little profit. That is exactly the kind of international cooperation we will need. We can do it again. If in 20 years our children randomly jumped in any place of the sea, what would they see? An underwater desert, like most of our ocean today, or an abundance of life? Our legacy for the future. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
Inside the fight against Russia's fake news empire | {0: 'TED Fellow Olga Yurkova is a journalist and cofounder of StopFake.org, an independent Ukrainian organization that trains an international cohort of fact-checkers in an effort to curb propaganda and misinformation in the media.'} | TED2018 | 2014, July 5, the Ukrainian army entered Sloviansk city in eastern Ukraine. They gathered all the locals in Lenin Square. Then, they organized the public crucifixion of the son of a pro-Russia militant. He was only three years old. Refugee Galina Pyshnyak told this story to Russia's First TV channel. In fact, this incident never happened. I visited Sloviansk. There is no Lenin Square. In reality, Galina's husband was an active pro-Russia militant in Donbass. This is just one of many examples. Ukraine has been suffering from Russian propaganda and fake news for four years now, but Russia is not the only player in this space. Fake news is happening all around the world. We all know about fake news. We see it and read it all the time. But the thing about fake news is that we don't always know what is fake and what is real, but we base our decisions on facts we get from the press and social media. When facts are false, decisions are wrong. A lot of people stop believing anyone at all and this is even more dangerous. They easily become prey to populists in elections, or even take up arms. Fake news is not only bad for journalism. It's a threat for democracy and society. Four years ago, unmarked soldiers entered the Crimean Peninsula, and at the same time, Russian media was going crazy with fake news about Ukraine. So a group of journalists, including me, started a website to investigate this fake news. We called it StopFake. The idea was simple: take a piece of news, check it with verifiable proof like photos, videos and other strong evidence. If it turns out to be fake, we put it on our website. Now, StopFake is an informational hub which analyzes propaganda in all its phases. We have 11 language versions, we have millions of views, We have taught more than 10,000 people how to distinguish true from false. And we teach fact checkers all around the world. StopFake has uncovered more than 1,000 fakes about Ukraine. We've identified 18 narratives created using this fake news, such as Ukraine is a fascist state, a failed state, a state run by a junta who came to power as a result of a coup d'état. We proved that it's not bad journalism; it's a deliberate act of misinformation. Fake news is a powerful weapon in information warfare, but there is something we can do about it. We all have smartphones. When we see something interesting, it's often automatic. We just click and pass it along. But how can you not be a part of fake news? First, if it's too dramatic, too emotional, too clickbait, then it's very likely that it isn't true. The truth is boring sometimes. (Laughter) Manipulations are always sexy. They are designed to captivate you. Do your research. This is the second point, very simple. Look at other sites. Check out alternative news sources. Google names, addresses, license plates, experts and authors. Don't just believe, check. It's the only way to stop this culture of fake news. This information warfare is not only about fake news. Our society depends on trust: trust in our institutions, in science, trust in our leaders, trust in our news outlets. And it's on us to find a way to rebuild trust, because fake news destroys it. So ask yourself, what have you lost your faith in? Where has trust been ruined for you? And what are you going to do about it? Thank you. (Applause) |
Why we should take laughter more seriously | {0: 'While exploring the neuroscience of speech and vocal behavior, Sophie Scott stumbled upon a surprising second vocation: making audiences laugh as a stand-up comic.'} | TEDxExeter | Good afternoon. I'd like to talk to you about laughter and the importance of laughter as a skill. And to do so, I'm going to start by discussing some American foreign policy because that's always - (Laughter) absolutely hilarious. (Laughter) Back in 1995, towards the end of the war in the former Yugoslavia, they'd been a very ill-tempered speech given by Boris Yeltsin at the UN about the involvement of the Russian Federation in NATO, and then he had a meeting with Bill Clinton, in which some of these same issues were coming up, and it was considered to be, likely to be a bit of a row. So, what actually happened when these two men came out? They gave a press conference about their summit. And can we learn anything about laughter if we watch this? (Video) Host: Good afternoon. Bill Clinton: Mr. President. (On stage) Sophie Scott: Watch Bill Clinton. (Video) Boris Yeltsin: (In Russian) Ladies and gentlemen, SS: Yeltsin - (Video) BY: (In Russian) dear journalists, SS: ... doesn't sound very happy. (Video) BY: (In Russian) First of all, I have to say that I was coming to this meeting at the invitation of the President of the United States, Bill Clinton, not with the same optimism as I am feeling right now. Interpreter: I want to say, first of all, that when I came here to the United States for this visit at the invitation of the President of the United States, Bill Clinton, I did not, at that time, have the degree of optimism with which I now am departing. BY: And this is all because of you - SS: (Laughter) (Video) BY: because even in all today's newspapers, based on my yesterday's statement at the United Nations, you predicted that our meeting today would be a failure. Interpreter: And this is all due to you, because coming from my statement yesterday in the United Nations, and if you looked at the press reports, one could see that what you were writing was that today's meeting with President Bill Clinton was going to be a disaster. (Laughter) SS: A big laugh. (Video) BY: And now, for the first time, I'm telling you that you have failed. Interpreter: But now, for the first time, I can tell you that you're a disaster. (Laughter) SS: Enormous laugh. (Laughter) Helpless with the laughter. (Laughter) (Video) BC: Be sure you get the right attribution there. (Laughter) SS: Boris Yeltsin now starts laughing. (Laughter) (Laughter) No one's able to get anything done for a while now. That tends to happen with laughter. (Laughter) (Laughter) These guys. (Laughter) So what is laughter? Clearly, that was quite an enjoyable thing in a rather surprising setting. Laughter, actually, is a very interesting behaviour. We tend to associate it with comedy and humour, but laughter is primarily a social behaviour. You're 30 times more likely to laugh with somebody else than if you're on your own. And frequently, this means your laughter happens when you're in conversation, because that tends to be what happens when you're with other people. And very often, that laughter is simply contagious laughter. You laugh just because other people are laughing. You just catch a laugh. You're much more likely to catch a laugh from someone you know than someone you don't know, and in conversations. We're still currently not laughing at jokes and humour with punchlines necessarily. We're laughing to show agreement. We're laughing to show understanding. We're laughing to show that we agree and we see where somebody's coming from. We share that experience. We laugh much more with people we know and people we feel comfortable around. We laugh - we don't laugh rather if we're feeling exposed or we're feeling awkward. When we're comfortable, when we can relax, when we're with people familiar to us, people we like, people with whom we share affection, we laugh even more. When we're children, we learn to laugh, and we learn to laugh primarily in play. And play is a very important behaviour, and we frequently use laughter to indicate that we are playing. The same behaviour could simply be pure aggression (Laughter) where not for the marking of it as play. And this is done with laughter primarily. We will use laughter, not just to show that we're part of the same group of somebody - we like them, we understand them, we agree with them. We will also use laughter to sort of show we understand that they may be trying to make us laugh; we pick up on their intentions. And we'll also use laughter to try and control situations. We'll use laughter to try and make ourselves feel better. And it only works if everybody joins in. If one person's going, "Hahahahaha," and no one else is laughing, that tends not to make anybody feel better at all. (Laughter) If everybody joins in, laughter is actually an effective way of improving the positive mood of a group of people. And people can use laughter because of this link, with sort of de-escalation from stress. People will use laughter to show that they're OK. "I'm angry that you've poured yellow paint all over me. I'm delighted. This is exactly how I hoped my day would go." (Laughter) Charles Darwin, very interestingly, got a lot of stuff right about the sort of how we started to look at emotions in the study of psychology over the next 150 years after his writing. He wrote about things like anger and disgust and fear, but he also wrote a lot about laughter, and we largely ignored that. There's actually very, very little scientific research into laughter. But Charles Darwin thought that laughter was really important, and he thought that at its heart, it was an expression of joy; it's a joyful emotion. And it's joy in play, it's joy in company, it's joy in the company of those we love. I think it's really important to think about that when we think about laughter. We also think about how that could go wrong. Because we learn to laugh. Babies will laugh when they're tickled or somebody plays peek-a-boo with them. But it's a behaviour we can encourage. We learn what laughter means. We learn to understand laughter. And we can see that going wrong. So this is a study that I did with my colleague Essi Viding at UCL last year, where we were studying teenage boys who are at risk of psychopathy. They have conduct disorders, and they have high inputs called callous-unemotional traits. So they're not behaving well, and they don't care if they hurt people. And what we find, when they listen to laughter compared to control teenage boys, who are normally developing, is that behaviourally, they don't find laughter contagious. They don't join in when somebody else laughs, and they don't want to join in when somebody else laughs. If we look at their brain where normally, when people hear laughter, you can see this priming response, you can see people getting ready to join in, they show a significantly reduced effect. Now, we don't know, in this context, if we're seeing this because those boys have always had a problem learning to laugh because of these conduct disorders and these callous-unemotional traits that they have, has that affected how they engage with laughter, or have they never had the opportunity to learn to laugh? Had they not been laughed with? Have they not been played with? Of course, we need a lot more research to look into this. There's an even more extreme condition called "gelotophobia," where people not only don't want to join in when they hear laughter, they are actively frightened and respond aggressively to laughter. They're the kind of person who's walking down the streets, hears laughter, think they're being laughed at and they punch that person. And you never find gelotophobia outside of the most profound psychological disturbances. So in fact, we can see laughter and the reaction to laughter spanning a huge different quality and properties of human experience, and kind of lives that we can live. It can be an incredibly positive social tool, or it can be something that you fear depending on your experiences. So, thinking about that, can we go back to that bit of film and think about why on earth Bill Clinton was laughing. Well, from the start, he's watching Boris Yeltsin like a hawk. All his attention is on him. And he looks like - actually, he's waiting for a reason to laugh. And then he gets his reason, because Boris Yeltsin says his name, Bill Clinton, and he laughs then. It's pure laugh of recognition: "Yes, ha ha ha, my name is Bill Clinton." (Laughter) Don't knock it, if it gets a laugh, it gets a laugh. So that's his reason. He's got going. And then Boris Yeltsin says the line about that you thought it would be a disaster but you're the disaster. Actually, that's a mistranslation; he used the word "failure," and it's mistranslated by the Russian-American interpreter. People have said that Bill Clinton is laughing at this mistranslation. I don't know if that's giving, but possibly he is. Most people probably didn't pick up on that. It's likely that he's now just using that as a reason both to escalate the laughter and also to reframe what is quite an insulting comment by Boris Yeltsin as a joke. He's de-escalating the situation and he's re-presenting it to us as: This guy is hilarious. (Laughter) It completely changes our perception and importantly Boris Yeltsin's perception of what's going on. Boris Yeltsin, "So yeah, I am killing it here." (Laughter) "This is very funny." (Laughter) And he carries on; he now gets a smile out of Yeltsin who cracks, and then he gets his laugh. Boris Yeltsin starts to laugh, and he is laughing primarily here through pure contagion. For a while, they're both incapacitated by the laughter, and that happens with laughter; it will stop you doing anything else for a short amount of time. And then they go back. OK, they're doing OK. So why - why was Bill Clinton laughing? Well, we've got the recognition, and then we've got the the kind of comment, the joke of reframing, and that's actually really important. He is de-escalating and reframes the whole thing. The atmosphere was tense, and he turns that into a positive situation. So he's de-escalating the stress, and he's just reframing everything as "This is great fun we're having, and this is just hilarious. This guy's so funny." He's also showing that he is quite comfortable in that situation. We don't laugh when we feel exposed or awkward. So Clinton's showing he's confident: "This is fine. You guys might have been worried about this. I know we're golden. This guy's hilarious." And that really matters to us. We learn, when we are very, very young, to use our parents laughter as a way of working out whether a situation is serious or not. Children of 12 months old will use their parents laughter, or their absence of laughter, to work out if an unfamiliar situation is something they should worry about. We continue doing that, so it matters that Bill Clinton is doing this. And he's also showing that he's affiliated with Yeltsin. He's showing that he feels affection towards him. And Yeltsin does the same thing. We don't catch laughs off people we don't like. We don't catch laughs off people we don't know. So actually, they're marking their bond there. And the final point that I think is really intriguing is Bill Clinton, at no stage, makes it look like he's laughing at Boris Yeltsin. He goes to great pains to include him. He's not going, "This guy is an idiot. Let's laugh at him." It would mean something very, very different if he did. In fact, I think generally, in American foreign policy, anybody's foreign policy, don't laugh in the face of a premier state from another country. It's probably eight-o'clock day-one of a rule. He includes him in that laughter. And this is a really important factor about laughter. Because laughter is about making and maintaining social bonds, people are very cautious about working out where they are in relation to that. And this does mean you can't just take a difficult situation and throw a squirt of laughter at it; you've got to make sure people feel included in that laughter. They're not feeling excluded or offended by that laughter. And this leads us back to perhaps a more important aspect of laughter. It's an important social skill that we learn to do. We learn about the social use of laughter throughout our entire early adult life, and it's probably one of the more important social skills that we acquire. And we should probably take this a lot more seriously. We should think about the things that can affect our laughter. We can think about the things that we could do to encourage our understanding of our laughter. And perhaps the takeaway message is take laughter seriously. Think about your laughter. Don't undervalue or trivialise your laughter. It matters. It matters a lot. It can sound like friendship. It can sometimes sound a lot like love. Thank you. (Applause) |
How sound can hack your memory while you sleep | {0: 'TED Fellow Greg Gage helps kids investigate the neuroscience in their own backyards.'} | DIY Neuroscience | Greg Gage: Who wouldn't love acing a geography exam, remembering all the locations of the countries on a map or avoiding embarrassing situations of suddenly forgetting the person's name standing right in front of you. It turns out that memory, like other muscles in the body, can be strengthened and enhanced. But instead of practicing with flash cards, there may be an interesting way that we can hack our memory while we sleep. (Music) Why do we sleep? This has been a question asked since the early days of civilization. And while we may not know the exact answer, there are a number of really good theories about why we need it. Sleep is when the brain transfers short-term memories experienced throughout the day into long-term memories. This process is called memory consolidation, and it's the memory consolidation theory that has scientists wondering if we can enhance certain memories over others. There was a paper recently in the journal "Science" by Ken Paller and his colleagues at Northwestern that seemed to show that this may be true, and that piqued our curiosity. Joud has been working on a DIY version of this task to see if we can improve memories through the use of sound in sleep. So Joud, how do you test if we can improve our memories with sleep? Joud Mar’i: We need a human subject. [Step 1: Play a game] We have a memory game that we have on an iPad, and then we make our subject play this game and remember the images and where they appear on the screen. GG: So this is like a memory game you used to play as a child, which picture was where. And we tie each picture with a sound that represents it. JM: So, if you can see a picture of a car, for example, and you would hear the car engine. (Car engine starting) GG: Just before you go to sleep we're going to test you. We're going to see how well you remember where the pictures are. Every time you see the picture, you're going to hear the sound. And now comes the experiment. You're going to go take a nap. [Step 2: Take a nap] And while you're sleeping, we're going to be recording your EEG. JM: And then we wait for them to go into what's called the slow-wave sleep, which is the deepest phase of your sleep where it's really hard for you to wake up. GG: OK, pause. So, here's some information on sleep. There are four stages: we have lighter stages of sleep and REM, but what we're interested in is called slow-wave sleep. And it gets its name from the electrical signals called Delta waves that we record from the brain. This is the part of sleep where scientists believe that memory consolidation can happen. In this deep period of sleep, we're going to do something that you don't know we're going to do. JM: Here's where the tricky part comes, and we start playing our cues. (Car engine starting) GG: Do you play all the cues? JM: No. We only want to play half of them to see if there's a difference. GG: So your hypothesis is the one that they were listening to while they're sleeping they're going to do better at. JM: Yes, exactly. GG: When you wake back up and play the game again, do you do better or worse than before a nap? What we found is that if we played you a cue during your sleep, for example, a car — You would remember the position of that car when you woke back up again. But if we didn't play you the cue during the sleep, for example, a guitar, you'd be less likely to remember that guitar when you woke up. The memories that were cued they remembered better than the ones they weren't, even though they don't remember hearing those sounds? JM: Yes, we ask them. GG: We know they're sleeping, they can't hear it, they wake up, they do better on those than the ones you didn't play. GG: That's amazing. JM: It's like magic. GG: Joud ran this experiment on 12 people and the results were significant. It's not that you remember things better; it's that you forget them less. I was a huge skeptic when I first heard that you could do better at a memory test just by playing sounds during sleep. But we replicated these experiments. The facts and memories we collect throughout the day are very fragile, and they are easily lost and forgotten. But by reactivating them during sleep, even without us being aware, it seems like we could make them more stable and less prone to forgetting. That's pretty incredible. Our brains are still active even when we're not. So if you're like me and a bit forgetful, perhaps a solution is a pair of headphones and a soft couch. |
Why the secret to success is setting the right goals | {0: 'John Doerr is an engineer, acclaimed venture capitalist and the chairman of Kleiner Perkins.'} | TED2018 | We're at a critical moment. Our leaders, some of our great institutions are failing us. Why? In some cases, it's because they're bad or unethical, but often, they've taken us to the wrong objectives. And this is unacceptable. This has to stop. How are we going to correct these wrongs? How are we going to choose the right course? It's not going to be easy. For years, I've worked with talented teams and they've chosen the right objectives and the wrong objectives. Many have succeeded, others of them have failed. And today I'm going to share with you what really makes a difference — that's what's crucial, how and why they set meaningful and audacious goals, the right goals for the right reasons. Let's go back to 1975. Yep, this is me. I've got a lot to learn, I'm a computer engineer, I've got long hair, but I'm working under Andy Grove, who's been called the greatest manager of his or any other era. Andy was a superb leader and also a teacher, and he said to me, "John, it almost doesn't matter what you know. Execution is what matters the most." And so Andy invented a system called "Objectives and Key Results." It kind of rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? And it's all about excellent execution. So here's a classic video from the 1970s of professor Andy Grove. (Video) Andy Grove: The two key phrases of the management by objective systems are the objectives and the key results, and they match the two purposes. The objective is the direction. The key results have to be measured, but at the end you can look and without any argument say, "Did I do that, or did I not do that?" Yes. No. Simple. John Doerr: That's Andy. Yes. No. Simple. Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs, are a simple goal-setting system and they work for organizations, they work for teams, they even work for individuals. The objectives are what you want to have accomplished. The key results are how I'm going to get that done. Objectives. Key results. What and how. But here's the truth: many of us are setting goals wrong, and most of us are not setting goals at all. A lot of organizations set objectives and meet them. They ship their sales, they introduce their new products, they make their numbers, but they lack a sense of purpose to inspire their teams. So how do you set these goals the right way? First, you must answer the question, "Why?" Why? Because truly transformational teams combine their ambitions to their passion and to their purpose, and they develop a clear and compelling sense of why. I want to tell you a story. I work with a remarkable entrepreneur. Her name is Jini Kim. She runs a company called Nuna. Nuna is a health care data company. And when Nuna was founded, they used data to serve the health needs of lots of workers at large companies. And then two years into the company's life, the federal government issued a proposal to build the first ever cloud database for Medicaid. Now, you'll remember that Medicaid is that program that serves 70 million Americans, our poor, our children and people with disabilities. Nuna at the time was just 15 people and this database had to be built in one year, and they had a whole set of commitments that they had to honor, and frankly, they weren't going to make very much money on the project. This was a bet-your-company moment, and Jini seized it. She jumped at the opportunity. She did not flinch. Why? Well, it's a personal why. Jini's younger brother Kimong has autism. And when he was seven, he had his first grand mal seizure at Disneyland. He fell to the ground. He stopped breathing. Jini's parents are Korean immigrants. They came to the country with limited resources speaking little English, so it was up to Jini to enroll her family in Medicaid. She was nine years old. That moment defined her mission, and that mission became her company, and that company bid on, won and delivered on that contract. Here's Jini to tell you why. (Video) Jini Kim: Medicaid saved my family from bankruptcy, and today it provides for Kimong's health and for millions of others. Nuna is my love letter to Medicaid. Every row of data is a life whose story deserves to be told with dignity. JD: And Jini's story tells us that a compelling sense of why can be the launchpad for our objectives. Remember, that's what we want to have accomplished. And objectives are significant, they're action-oriented, they are inspiring, and they're a kind of vaccine against fuzzy thinking. You think a rockstar would be an unlikely user of Objectives and Key Results, but for years, Bono has used OKRs to wage a global war against poverty and disease, and his ONE organization has focused on two really gorgeous, audacious objectives. The first is debt relief for the poorest countries in the world. The next is universal access to anti-HIV drugs. Now, why are these good objectives? Let's go back to our checklist. Significant? Check. Concrete? Yes. Action-oriented? Yes. Inspirational? Well, let's just listen to Bono. (Video) Bono: So you're passionate? How passionate? What actions does your passion lead you to do? If the heart doesn't find a perfect rhyme with the head, then your passion means nothing. The OKR framework cultivates the madness, the chemistry contained inside it. It gives us an environment for risk, for trust, where failing is not a fireable offense. And when you have that sort of structure and environment and the right people, magic is around the corner. JD: I love that. OKRs cultivate the madness, and magic is right around the corner. This is perfect. So with Jini we've covered the whys, with Bono the whats of goal-setting. Let's turn our attention to the hows. Remember, the hows are the key results. That's how we meet our objectives. And good results are specific and time-bound. They're aggressive but realistic. They're measurable, and they're verifiable. Those are good key results. In 1999, I introduced OKRs to Google's cofounders, Larry and Sergey. Here they are, 24 years old in their garage. And Sergey enthusiastically said he'd adopt them. Well, not quite. What he really said was, "We don't have any other way to manage this company, so we'll give it a go." (Laughter) And I took that as a kind of endorsement. But every quarter since then, every Googler has written down her objectives and her key results. They've graded them, and they've published them for everyone to see. And these are not used for bonuses or for promotions. They're set aside. They're used for a higher purpose, and that's to get collective commitment to truly stretch goals. In 2008, a Googler, Sundar Pichai, took on an objective which was to build the next generation client platform for the future of web applications — in other words, build the best browser. He was very thoughtful about how he chose his key results. How do you measure the best browser? It could be ad clicks or engagement. No. He said: numbers of users, because users are going to decide if Chrome is a great browser or not. So he had this one three-year-long objective: build the best browser. And then every year he stuck to the same key results, numbers of users, but he upped the ante. In the first year, his goal was 20 million users and he missed it. He got less than 10. Second year, he raised the bar to 50 million. He got to 37 million users. Somewhat better. In the third year, he upped the ante once more to a hundred million. He launched an aggressive marketing campaign, broader distribution, improved the technology, and kaboom! He got 111 million users. Here's why I like this story, not so much for the happy ending, but it shows someone carefully choosing the right objective and then sticking to it year after year after year. It's a perfect story for a nerd like me. Now, I think of OKRs as transparent vessels that are made from the whats and hows of our ambitions. What really matters is the why that we pour into those vessels. That's why we do our work. OKRs are not a silver bullet. They're not going to be a substitute for a strong culture or for stronger leadership, but when those fundamentals are in place, they can take you to the mountaintop. I want you to think about your life for a moment. Do you have the right metrics? Take time to write down your values, your objectives and your key results. Do it today. If you'd like some feedback on them, you can send them to me. I'm [email protected]. If we think of the world-changing goals of an Intel, of a Nuna, of Bono, of Google, they're remarkable: ubiquitous computing, affordable health care, high-quality for everyone, ending global poverty, access to all the world's information. Here's the deal: every one of those goals is powered today by OKRs. Now, I've been called the Johnny Appleseed of OKRs for spreading the good gospel according to Andy Grove, but I want you to join me in this movement. Let's fight for what it is that really matters, because we can take OKRs beyond our businesses. We can take them to our families, to our schools, even to our governments. We can hold those governments accountable. We can transform those informations. We can get back on the right track if we can and do measure what really matters. Thank you. (Applause) |
How a dragonfly's brain is designed to kill | {0: 'TED Fellow Greg Gage helps kids investigate the neuroscience in their own backyards.'} | DIY Neuroscience | Greg Gage: If I asked you to think of a ferocious killer animal, you'd probably think of a lion, and for all the wonderful predatory skills that a lion has, it still only has about a 20 percent success rate at catching a meal. Now, one of the most successful hunters in the entire animal kingdom is surprising: the dragonfly. Now, dragonflies are killer flies, and when they see a smaller fly, they have about a 97 percent chance of catching it for a meal. And this is in mid-flight. But how can such a small insect be so precise? In this episode, we're going to see how the dragonfly's brain is highly specialized to be a deadly killer. [DIY Neuroscience] So what makes the dragonfly one of the most successful predators in the animal kingdom? One, it's the eyes. It has near 360-degree vision. Two, the wings. With individual control of its wings, the dragonfly can move precisely in any direction. But the real secret to the dragonfly's success is how its brain coordinates this complex information between the eyes and the wings and turns hunting into a simple reflex. To study this, Jaimie's been spending a lot of time socializing with dragonflies. What do you need to do your experiments? Jaimie Spahr: First of all, you need dragonflies. Oliver: I have a mesh cage to catch the dragonflies. JS: The more I worked with them, the more terrified I got of them. They're actually very scary, especially under a microscope. They have really sharp mandibles, are generally pretty aggressive, which I guess also helps them to be really good predators. GG: In order to learn what's going on inside the dragonfly's brain when it sees a prey, we're going to eavesdrop in on a conversation between the eyes and the wings, and to do that, we need to anesthetize the dragonfly on ice and make sure we protect its wings so that we can release it afterwards. Now, the dragonfly's brain is made up of specialized cells called neurons and these neurons are what allow the dragonfly to see and move so quickly. The individual neurons form circuits by connecting to each other via long, tiny threads called axons and the neurons communicate over these axons using electricity. In the dragonfly, we're going to place little metal wires, or electrodes, along the axon tracks, and this is what's really cool. In the dragonfly, there's only 16 neurons; that's eight per eye that tell the wings exactly where the target is. We've placed the electrodes so that we can record from these neurons that connect the eyes to the wings. Whenever a message is being passed from the eye to the wing, our electrode intercepts that conversation in the form of an electrical current, and it amplifies it. Now, we can both hear it and see it in the form of a spike, which we also call an action potential. Now let's listen in. Right now, we have the dragonfly flipped upside down, so he's looking down towards the ground. We're going to take a prey, or what we sometimes call a target. In this case, the target's going to be a fake fly. We're going to move it into the dragonfly's sights. (Buzzing) Oh! Oh, look at that. Look at that, but it's only in one direction. Oh, yes! You don't see any spikes when I go forward, but they're all when I come back. In our experiments, we were able to see that the neurons of the dragonfly fired when we moved the target in one direction but not the other. Now, why is that? Remember when I said that the dragonfly had near 360-degree vision. Well, there's a section of the eye called the fovea and this is the part that has the sharpest visual acuity, and you can think of it as its crosshairs. Remember when I told you the dragonfly had individual precise control of its wings? When a dragonfly sees its prey, it trains its crosshairs on it and along its axons it sends messages only to the neurons that control the parts of the wings that are needed to keep that dragonfly on target. So if the prey is on the left of the dragonfly, only the neurons that are tugging the wings to the left are fired. And if the prey moves to the right of the dragonfly, those same neurons are not needed, so they're going to remain quiet. And the dragonfly speeds toward the prey at a fixed angle that's communicated by this crosshairs to the wings, and then boom, dinner. Now, all this happens in a split second, and it's effortless for the dragonfly. It's almost like a reflex. And this whole incredibly efficient process is called fixation. But there's one more story to this process. We saw how the neurons respond to movements, but how does the dragonfly know that something really is prey? This is where size matters. Let's show the dragonfly a series of dots. Oh, yeah! JS: Yeah, it prefers that one. GG: Out of all the sizes, we found that the dragonfly responded to smaller targets over larger ones. In other words, the dragonfly was programmed to go after smaller flies versus something much larger, like a bird. And as soon as it recognizes something as prey, that poor little fly only has seconds to live. Today we got to see how the dragonfly's brain works to make it a very efficient killer. And let's be thankful that we didn't live 300 million years ago when dragonflies were the size of cats. |
How you can make a fruit fly eat veggies | {0: 'TED Fellow Greg Gage helps kids investigate the neuroscience in their own backyards.'} | DIY Neuroscience | Greg Gage: It's an age-old pursuit of all parents, getting their kids to eat their vegetables. But getting them to eat cookies or ice cream is relatively easy, and that's because our brains prefer sweetness. Now, there's a new technology called optogenetics which may be able to trick our taste buds, for instance preferring vegetables over sweets. We're going to try this today using fruit flies. [DIY Neuroscience] The reason why we experiment with fruit flies is they have a small enough nervous system that gives us a fighting chance to really understand what's going on. And believe it or not, their taste buds are very similar to ours. But before we try to manipulate their taste preferences, we need to establish: What is the baseline of the fruit fly? What does it prefer? We call this a control experiment. Spencer's been hard at work doing this. OK, Spencer, let's do our first experiment. We want to test to see if fruit flies prefer bananas or broccoli. So what do we need? Spencer Brown: So we need the fly pad, which is basically an iPad for flies. It measures the touch. GG: You put a fly in each chamber? SB: Yeah. Inside, we'll offer them banana and broccoli to see which one they prefer. GG: In order to count how many times the fruit fly eats a banana versus the broccoli, these chambers have been outfitted with a small electrode that sends data to a computer. And so what were your findings on banana versus broccoli? SB: I found that the flies visited banana the most. GG: Both were there, but like most kids, they choose not to eat the broccoli, and they go switch to something sweeter. GG: Now a quick background on how taste works. Taste buds are made up of specialized neurons called taste receptors. When we eat something that triggers a particular taste, those taste neurons will fire a signal to the brain. This allows our brain to know what's sweet and what's bitter. So when a fruit fly eats a banana, its sweet taste neurons will fire. But when it eats broccoli, those same neurons stay pretty quiet. But what if we could force those sweet-tasting neurons to fire every time the fruit fly eats broccoli? We may be able to get the fruit fly to like broccoli as much as banana. Enter optogenetics. This is the revolutionary new tool that's taking neuroscience by storm, and in this case, "opto" means light and "genetic" refers to the fact that these fruit flies have been modified to contain a special gene that makes only certain neurons respond to light. In our case, we've added the special gene to the sweet taste receptors. Now here's the fun part. Optogenetics means that we can control these special neurons whenever they're exposed to a bright-colored light, causing them to send messages to the brain. In this experiment, we're going to have these modified fruit flies choose between banana and broccoli again, only this time, every time the fruit fly eats the broccoli, we're going to trigger a big bright red light. And when the channels see that red light, they're going to open up, and they're going to cause that neuron to fire, and the sweet taste message will be sent to the brain. How do you get them out? SB: So we're going to be using a mouth aspirator, so it's just two straws put together. GG: So it's a fancy name for a straw. SB: Basically. GG: So you're going to suck those out. Have you ever sucked up a fly before? SB: Once or twice. GG: There we go. You got all four. OK, perfect. So you're going to turn on your OptoStimmers here. You're going to park the light right on top of the chambers. So now we sit here and we wait for them to eat broccoli, and then when the light fires, they're going to think it's tasting something sweet. Come on. Oh, he's getting closer. Come on. It tastes good now. SB: It's about to. GG: Oh, he's back. All right! All right, so now we see that some of these flies are switching over from the banana to the broccoli. SB: Exactly, yeah. GG: Every time this light goes off, that means that they think they're tasting something sweet. SB: Yeah. So this guy's really going after it. GG: So we saw that we were able to rescue broccoli and make it just as appealing as banana to our fruit flies. And we're able to replicate these same results in all of our experiments. So the question is: Can we do the same thing in humans? Well, that depends on a number of items. First, do optogenetic tools even work in humans? And that looks like the answer is yes, and in fact, clinical trials are already being planned that will treat chronic pain and blindness using optogenetics. And the next question is, can we easily trigger a light source so that every time we eat vegetables, it will go off? For that, I'm afraid at least at this time, the answer is still no. But today, we got to witness just a taste of optogenetics and its amazing potential. (Music) |
This computer is learning to read your mind | {0: 'TED Fellow Greg Gage helps kids investigate the neuroscience in their own backyards.'} | DIY Neuroscience | Greg Gage: Mind-reading. You've seen this in sci-fi movies: machines that can read our thoughts. However, there are devices today that can read the electrical activity from our brains. We call this the EEG. Is there information contained in these brainwaves? And if so, could we train a computer to read our thoughts? My buddy Nathan has been working to hack the EEG to build a mind-reading machine. [DIY Neuroscience] So this is how the EEG works. Inside your head is a brain, and that brain is made out of billions of neurons. Each of those neurons sends an electrical message to each other. These small messages can combine to make an electrical wave that we can detect on a monitor. Now traditionally, the EEG can tell us large-scale things, for example if you're asleep or if you're alert. But can it tell us anything else? Can it actually read our thoughts? We're going to test this, and we're not going to start with some complex thoughts. We're going to do something very simple. Can we interpret what someone is seeing using only their brainwaves? Nathan's going to begin by placing electrodes on Christy's head. Nathan: My life is tangled. (Laughter) GG: And then he's going to show her a bunch of pictures from four different categories. Nathan: Face, house, scenery and weird pictures. GG: As we show Christy hundreds of these images, we are also capturing the electrical waves onto Nathan's computer. We want to see if we can detect any visual information about the photos contained in the brainwaves, so when we're done, we're going to see if the EEG can tell us what kind of picture Christy is looking at, and if it does, each category should trigger a different brain signal. OK, so we collected all the raw EEG data, and this is what we got. It all looks pretty messy, so let's arrange them by picture. Now, still a bit too noisy to see any differences, but if we average the EEG across all image types by aligning them to when the image first appeared, we can remove this noise, and pretty soon, we can see some dominant patterns emerge for each category. Now the signals all still look pretty similar. Let's take a closer look. About a hundred milliseconds after the image comes on, we see a positive bump in all four cases, and we call this the P100, and what we think that is is what happens in your brain when you recognize an object. But damn, look at that signal for the face. It looks different than the others. There's a negative dip about 170 milliseconds after the image comes on. What could be going on here? Research shows that our brain has a lot of neurons that are dedicated to recognizing human faces, so this N170 spike could be all those neurons firing at once in the same location, and we can detect that in the EEG. So there are two takeaways here. One, our eyes can't really detect the differences in patterns without averaging out the noise, and two, even after removing the noise, our eyes can only pick up the signals associated with faces. So this is where we turn to machine learning. Now, our eyes are not very good at picking up patterns in noisy data, but machine learning algorithms are designed to do just that, so could we take a lot of pictures and a lot of data and feed it in and train a computer to be able to interpret what Christy is looking at in real time? We're trying to code the information that's coming out of her EEG in real time and predict what it is that her eyes are looking at. And if it works, what we should see is every time that she gets a picture of scenery, it should say scenery, scenery, scenery, scenery. A face — face, face, face, face, but it's not quite working that way, is what we're discovering. (Laughter) OK. Director: So what's going on here? GG: We need a new career, I think. (Laughter) OK, so that was a massive failure. But we're still curious: How far could we push this technology? And we looked back at what we did. We noticed that the data was coming into our computer very quickly, without any timing of when the images came on, and that's the equivalent of reading a very long sentence without spaces between the words. It would be hard to read, but once we add the spaces, individual words appear and it becomes a lot more understandable. But what if we cheat a little bit? By using a sensor, we can tell the computer when the image first appears. That way, the brainwave stops being a continuous stream of information, and instead becomes individual packets of meaning. Also, we're going to cheat a little bit more, by limiting the categories to two. Let's see if we can do some real-time mind-reading. In this new experiment, we're going to constrict it a little bit more so that we know the onset of the image and we're going to limit the categories to "face" or "scenery." Nathan: Face. Correct. Scenery. Correct. GG: So right now, every time the image comes on, we're taking a picture of the onset of the image and decoding the EEG. It's getting correct. Nathan: Yes. Face. Correct. GG: So there is information in the EEG signal, which is cool. We just had to align it to the onset of the image. Nathan: Scenery. Correct. Face. Yeah. GG: This means there is some information there, so if we know at what time the picture came on, we can tell what type of picture it was, possibly, at least on average, by looking at these evoked potentials. Nathan: Exactly. GG: If you had told me at the beginning of this project this was possible, I would have said no way. I literally did not think we could do this. Did our mind-reading experiment really work? Yes, but we had to do a lot of cheating. It turns out you can find some interesting things in the EEG, for example if you're looking at someone's face, but it does have a lot of limitations. Perhaps advances in machine learning will make huge strides, and one day we will be able to decode what's going on in our thoughts. But for now, the next time a company says that they can harness your brainwaves to be able to control devices, it is your right, it is your duty to be skeptical. |
The real reason why mosquitoes buzz | {0: 'TED Fellow Greg Gage helps kids investigate the neuroscience in their own backyards.'} | DIY Neuroscience | (Mosquito buzzing) Greg Gage: We've all heard the annoying sound of a mosquito, and we will stop at nothing to make it go away. While this sound may be maddening to us, perhaps it's music to a mosquito's ears. The mosquito's nervous system has almost as many sensory auditory cells as we do. But why would they have so many in such a small body, and why would they need to be so sensitive to sounds? The answer is love. [DIY Neuroscience] (Music) As humans, we do a lot to attract each other. Some things are conscious — we put on makeup and make sure we smell nice. And some are unconscious. You may unconsciously point your body or even sit closer to someone you like. These are courtship behaviors, and a lot of animals have them. And mosquitoes are no different. So Haley's been spending her summer bravely listening to mosquitoes, and what she observed may surprise you. So we want to investigate how the mosquitoes make their song. So Haley, how do we record their wing beats? Haley Smith: We need to tether them. First, we anesthetize them in a fridge or a bed of ice. And then I transfer them to this petri dish of ice, just to get them even more anesthetized. Next, I take an insect pin, and what I do is put a tiny little dab of superglue on this pin. I want to make sure that I get it on his thorax above his wings so that when he is suspended, his wings are still free to move. So here's one down. It's really hard to catch male mosquitoes in the wild because females are the only mosquitoes that are attracted to humans. They feed on human blood. And now, we can try to get some recordings from them. So this is the stand that I use to hold them. I like to place it right over the microphone so that I can get a recording of the buzzing that you hear. That sound is generated by how fast they're beating their wings. This is a male. The males have very bushy antennae, and they look kind of feathery. And they are also much smaller. GG: So he's flying at around 600 hertz. Can we try a female mosquito? HS: Sure, here we go. (Mosquito buzzing, lower pitch) GG: Wow. HS: This is a much lower frequency than the male. GG: Yeah, it sounds completely different. (Mosquito buzzing) (Mosquito buzzing, lower pitch) So is it because they're two different mosquitoes, or because they're male and female? HS: It's because they're male and female. GG: Alright, let's verify that. Can you bring in another female and see if she sounds like mosquito A or mosquito B? HS: Yeah. (Mosquito buzzing, lower pitch) And again, she is much lower than the male. GG: Yeah, she sounds different. (Mosquito buzzing, lower pitch) Yeah, she's spot-on 400. HS: She really is. GG: That's really bizarre. HS: The females are at a much lower pitch. They were around 400 hertz. HS: And all of the females were around that, too. They were much larger than the males, so they didn't have to flap their wings as fast to stay in free flight. GG: So they have larger wings, so they're flapping slower. And you noticed that all the females have the same frequency, roughly? And the males do, too. That's kind of interesting. So that must mean something. Well, let's see what happens when we put the male and the female together. (Mosquitoes buzzing; pitch varies) HS: When I put them into the same hearing range, I noticed that they were kind of changing their tones. It was kind of more dull, almost. (Mosquitoes buzzing) And when I put it back in my spectrogram to see their interaction, they were meeting at the same tone. GG: OK, pause. The males and females are singing a duet, meaning that they adjust their wings to be able to produce a common tone. You have the male singing up here at G, and you have the female singing down here at D, and when they get together, you're saying that they change the frequency of their wings such that they come together? HS: Yeah, exactly. GG: And they sort of sing a duet. (Mosquitoes gradually adjusting to identical pitch) HS: They're communicating to let each other know that they've basically found a potential mate. GG: So in other words, the female tends to choose a male that best sings her duet. And studies have found that if she's pregnant, she doesn't even bother. So if we can understand the mosquito mating behavior, we may be able to disrupt it in the wild and prevent diseases like malaria. But for now, the next time you hear a mosquito buzzing, just pause and remember she may be in love and she may be singing her song, looking for her perfect match. (Mosquito buzzing) (Smack) |
How octopuses battle each other | {0: 'TED Fellow Greg Gage helps kids investigate the neuroscience in their own backyards.'} | DIY Neuroscience | Greg Gage: The octopus is a rather strange-looking animal that exhibits amazingly complex behaviors. They have the most impressive nervous system in the entire invertebrate world. They have about a half a billion neurons that are distributed throughout their body, such that two-thirds of the neurons are actually in its legs. Now mix this in with camouflaging cells, jet propulsion and a razor-sharp beak, and you have all the makings of a formidable predator. And then throw in the fact that the octopus is a solitary creature, and suddenly, we have ourselves a real cephalopod fight. (Bell) [DIY Neuroscience] We know that almost all animals fight — for food, for territory, for mates. The octopus is no different, and knowing their fighting behavior could help us better understand these fascinating creatures and how they interact. My friend Ilya has been observing the classic fighting behavior between California two-spot octopuses. Ilya Chugunov: Most people think that it's "octopi," but that's actually incorrect. The correct plurals are either "octopuses" or "octopodes" if you want to be very Greek about it. GG: So how do you do your experiment? IC: First, I like to set up the chamber just so it's ready, so I get a jug of water, I aerate it by shaking the jug. It seems that if the water is well-aerated, they're a lot more active. This gives the octopuses some room to breathe. I get the first octopus — Here, buddy. Here, pal. Put it in, set up my GoPro, put the second octopus in, cover it up and leave it alone. (Bell ringing) Rule 1: There's always an aggressor. There's always one octopus on defense, one on offense. Usually the one that's taking up more space, that's more boastful, definitely the aggressor, most likely the winner of the fight. The loser's pretty obvious. They get pushed around, they curl up, hide in a corner. A lot of the time, when there's initial contact, if one of them is too much on the defensive side, the second one will sort of poke at it, grab at its tentacle and see, "Hey, do you want to fight me, do you want to turn around? Do you want to start a wrestling match?" So it'll just poke and run away. Come back, poke and run away. (Bell ringing) Rule 2: Avoid eye contact. When the octopuses come towards each other to begin the fight, they don't actually face each other. They approach sideways. The defensive octopus tries to face away from the attacker until it's the critical moment it knows there's no way to avoid a fight. GG: Really, the one who's waiting to the last moment is the defensive octopus. (Bell ringing) Rule 3: Flash your colors. The aggressor in a fight will quickly and sharply flash bright black on his arms when he's about to initiate a fight. (Bell ringing) GG: Ooh, and already — IC: We're seeing some action. Looks like they've spotted each other. GG: Right. So now he's going to come — He's approaching, but not directly at him. IC: Yeah, they're like almost completely antiparallel. GG: And then right there — IC: Yeah. They contact, and then their arms clash together. (String music) GG: So we've taken the first steps in understanding fighting in the octopus. And you might be asking yourself: Why does this even matter? Well, these types of curiosity-based research questions can often lead to some unexpected insights and discoveries. We've learned a lot about ourselves from studying marine animals. Squid have taught us about how our neurons communicate, and the horseshoe crab has taught us about how our eyes work. So it's not too far of a stretch to say that some of these behaviors that we're seeing in the California two-spot octopus are similar to ours. |
Can you solve the giant cat army riddle? | null | TED-Ed | The villainous Dr. Schrödinger has developed a growth ray and intends to create an army of giant cats to terrorize the city. Your team of secret agents has tracked him to his underground lab. You burst in to find… that it’s a trap! Dr. Schrödinger has slipped into the next room to activate his device and disabled the control panel on the way out. Fortunately, your teammates are masters of spy-craft. Agent Delta has hacked into the control panel and managed to reactivate some of its functionality. Meanwhile, Agent Epsilon has searched through surveillance to find the code for the door: 2, 10, 14. All you have to do is enter those numbers and you’ll be free. But there’s a problem. The control panel has only three buttons: one which adds 5 to the display number, one which adds 7, and one which takes the square root. You need to make the display output the numbers 2, 10, and 14, in that order. It’s okay if it outputs different numbers in between, but there’s no way to reset the display, so once you get to 2, you’ll have to continue on to 10 and 14 from there. Not only that, Agent Delta explains that there are other traps built into the panel. If it ever shows the same number more than once, a number greater than 60, or a non-whole number, the room will explode. Right now, the display reads zero, and time is running out. There’s only one way to solve the puzzle, with a few small variations. How will you input the code to escape from Dr. Schrödinger’s lair and save the day? Pause the video now if you want to figure it out for yourself! Answer in: 3 2 1. You look over your options. Adding 5 or 7 increases the number, and the square root button will make it smaller. But there are only a few options where you can use that button: 4 9 16 25, 36, and 49. You’d love to make 4 or 16. Then you could hit the square root button once or twice to get 2. But you can’t make either with just the 5 and 7 buttons. What will you do? You look at the other possible options for numbers you could take the square root of. Nine you can’t reach. Twenty-five and 49 would take you back to 5 or 7, and you can already get to each of those. Thirty-six is your only option. You add 5, 7, 5, 7, 5, 7, and then hit the square root button. Why that series of 5s and 7s? It’s somewhat arbitrary, but you know that you want to avoid 10, 14, and perfect squares, since you’ll need them later. This gets you to 6. Does that help? Looking at your options, you see that 16 is now in your sights. You add 5 twice more to reach it. Then hit square root twice. That gets you to 2. You’re on your way! Now to 10. You can’t get straight there through addition alone, so you’re going to have to reach another square. Taking the square root of 9 or 25 would get you to a good place, but it turns out that 25 is unreachable from 2. So you add 7 to get to 9, then take the square root again. That gets you to 3. Adding 7 again makes 10. Finally, you need to reach 14. Thinking backwards, you imagine where you could be before 14: 7 or 9. But 9 won’t work because you’ve already used 9. However, you could get to 7 by reaching 49 first. You add your way towards it, being careful not to hit any of the numbers you’ve hit so far. You thread your way carefully, adding five 5s and two 7s. Then, square root to 7, and add 7 more. The door opens, and you’re out of the trap. Thanks to your problem-solving skills, your team gets Schrödinger’s cats out of the box in the nick of time. As for Schrödinger, you can be certain of one thing: he’ll be spending quite some time in a box of his own. |
The Irish myth of the Giant's Causeway | null | TED-Ed | On the coast of Northern Ireland, a vast plateau of basalt slabs and columns called the Giant’s Causeway stretches into the ocean. The scientific explanation for this is that it’s the result of molten lava contracting and fracturing as it cooled in the wake of a volcanic eruption. But an ancient Irish myth has a different accounting. According to legend, the giant Finn MacCool lived happily on the North Antrim coast with his wife Oonagh. Their only disturbance came from the taunts and threats of the giant Benandonner, or the red man, who lived across the sea in Scotland. The two roared insults and hurled rocks at each other in dramatic shows of strength. Once, Finn tore up a great clump of land and heaved it at his rival, but it fell short of reaching land. Instead, the clump became the Isle of Man, and the crater left from the disturbed earth filled with water to become Lough Neagh. The giants’ tough talk continued, until one day Benandonner challenged Finn to a fight, face to face. And so the Irish giant tossed enough boulders into the sea to create a bridge of stepping stones to the Scottish coast. Finn marched across in a fit of rage. When Scotland loomed before him, he made out the figure of Benandonner from afar. Finn was a substantial size, but at the sight of his colossal enemy thundering towards him, his courage faltered. With one look at Benandonner’s thick neck and crushing fists, Finn turned and ran. Back home, with Benandonner fast approaching, Finn trembled as he described his enemy’s bulk to Oonagh. They knew that if he faced Benandonner head on, he’d be crushed. And so Oonagh hatched a cunning plan - they needed to create an illusion of size, to suggest Finn was a mountain of a man whilst keeping him out of sight. As Benandonner neared the end of the bridge, Oonagh stuffed her husband in a huge cradle. Disguised as an enormous baby, Finn lay quiet as Benandonnner pounded on the door. The house shook as he stepped inside. Oonagh told the enraged visitor that her husband wasn’t home, but welcomed him to sit and eat while he waited. When Benandonner tore into the cakes placed before him, he cried out in pain for he’d shattered his teeth on the metal Oonagh had concealed inside. She told him that this was Finn’s favorite bread, sowing a seed of doubt in Benandonner’s mind that he was any match for his rival. When Finn let out a squawk, Benandonner’s attention was drawn to the gigantic baby in the corner. So hefty was the infant swaddled under piles of blankets, Benandonner shuddered at the thought of what the father would look like. He decided he’d rather not find out. As he fled, Benandonner tore up the rocks connecting the shores, breaking up the causeway. What remains are two identical rock formations: one on the North Antrim coast of Ireland and one at Fingal’s Cave in Scotland, right across the sea. |
The journey through loss and grief | {0: 'When Jason B. Rosenthal\'s wife died, he says: "as clichéd as it sounds, I started working on living each day as it comes, to get through the complexities of life."'} | TED2018 | There are three words that explain why I am here. They are "Amy Krouse Rosenthal." At the end of Amy's life, hyped up on morphine and home in hospice, the "New York Times" published an article she wrote for the "Modern Love" column on March 3, 2017. It was read worldwide by over five million people. The piece was unbearably sad, ironically funny and brutally honest. While it was certainly about our life together, the focus of the piece was me. It was called, "You May Want to Marry My Husband." It was a creative play on a personal ad for me. Amy quite literally left an empty space for me to fill with another love story. Amy was my wife for half my life. She was my partner in raising three wonderful, now grown children, and really, she was my girl, you know? We had so much in common. We loved the same art, the same documentaries, the same music. Music was a huge part of our life together. And we shared the same values. We were in love, and our love grew stronger up until her last day. Amy was a prolific author. In addition to two groundbreaking memoirs, she published over 30 children's books. Posthumously, the book she wrote with our daughter Paris, called "Dear Girl," reached the number one position on the "New York Times" bestseller list. She was a self-described tiny filmmaker. She was 5'1" and her films were not that long. (Laughter) Her films exemplified her natural ability to gather people together. She was also a terrific public speaker, talking with children and adults of all ages all over the world. Now, my story of grief is only unique in the sense of it being rather public. However, the grieving process itself was not my story alone. Amy gave me permission to move forward, and I'm so grateful for that. Now, just a little over a year into my new life, I've learned a few things. I'm here to share with you part of the process of moving forward through and with grief. But before I do that, I think it would be important to talk a little bit about the end of life, because it forms how I have been emotionally since then. Death is such a taboo subject, right? Amy ate her last meal on January 9, 2017. She somehow lived an additional two months without solid food. Her doctors told us we could do hospice at home or in the hospital. They did not tell us that Amy would shrink to half her body weight, that she would never lay with her husband again, and that walking upstairs to our bedroom would soon feel like running a marathon. Home hospice does have an aura of being a beautiful environment to die in. How great that you don't have the sounds of machines beeping and going on and off all the time, no disruptions for mandatory drug administration, home with your family to die. We did our best to make those weeks as meaningful as we could. We talked often about death. Everybody knows it's going to happen to them, like, for sure, but being able to talk openly about it was liberating. We talked about subjects like parenting. I asked Amy how I could be the best parent possible to our children in her absence. In those conversations, she gave me confidence by stressing what a great relationship I had with each one of them, and that I can do it. I know there will be many times where I wish she and I can make decisions together. We were always so in sync. May I be so audacious as to suggest that you have these conversations now, when healthy. Please don't wait. As part of our hospice experience, we organized groups of visitors. How brave of Amy to receive them, even as she began her physical decline. We had a Krouse night, her parents and three siblings. Friends and family were next. Each told beautiful stories of Amy and of us. Amy made an immense impact on her loyal friends. But home hospice is not so beautiful for the surviving family members. I want to get a little personal here and tell you that to this date, I have memories of those final weeks that haunt me. I remember walking backwards to the bathroom, assisting Amy with each step. I felt so strong. I'm not such a big guy, but my arms looked and felt so healthy compared to Amy's frail body. And that body failed in our house. On March 13 of last year, my wife died of ovarian cancer in our bed. I carried her lifeless body down our stairs, through our dining room and our living room to a waiting gurney to have her body cremated. I will never get that image out of my head. If you know someone who has been through the hospice experience, acknowledge that. Just say you heard this guy Jason talk about how tough it must be to have those memories and that you're there if they ever want to talk about it. They may not want to talk, but it's nice to connect with someone living each day with those lasting images. I know this sounds unbelievable, but I've never been asked that question. Amy's essay caused me to experience grief in a public way. Many of the readers who reached out to me wrote beautiful words of reflection. The scope of Amy's impact was deeper and richer than even us and her family knew. Some of the responses I received helped me with the intense grieving process because of their humor, like this email I received from a woman reader who read the article, declaring, "I will marry you when you are ready — (Laughter) "provided you permanently stop drinking. No other conditions. I promise to outlive you. Thank you very much." Now, I do like a good tequila, but that really is not my issue. Yet how could I say no to that proposal? (Laughter) I laughed through the tears when I read this note from a family friend: "I remember Shabbat dinners at your home and Amy teaching me how to make cornbread croutons. Only Amy could find creativity in croutons." (Laughter) On July 27, just a few months after Amy's death, my dad died of complications related to a decades-long battle with Parkinson's disease. I had to wonder: How much can the human condition handle? What makes us capable of dealing with this intense loss and yet carry on? Was this a test? Why my family and my amazing children? Looking for answers, I regret to say, is a lifelong mission, but the key to my being able to persevere is Amy's expressed and very public edict that I must go on. Throughout this year, I have done just that. I have attempted to step out and seek the joy and the beauty that I know this life is capable of providing. But here's the reality: those family gatherings, attending weddings and events honoring Amy, as loving as they are, have all been very difficult to endure. People say I'm amazing. "How do you handle yourself that way during those times?" They say, "You do it with such grace." Well, guess what? I really am sad a lot of the time. I often feel like I'm kind of a mess, and I know these feelings apply to other surviving spouses, children, parents and other family members. In Japanese Zen, there is a term "Shoji," which translates as "birth death." There is no separation between life and death other than a thin line that connects the two. Birth, or the joyous, wonderful, vital parts of life, and death, those things we want to get rid of, are said to be faced equally. In this new life that I find myself in, I am doing my best to embrace this concept as I move forward with grieving. In the early months following Amy's death, though, I was sure that the feeling of despair would be ever-present, that it would be all-consuming. Soon I was fortunate to receive some promising advice. Many members of the losing-a-spouse club reached out to me. One friend in particular who had also lost her life partner kept repeating, "Jason, you will find joy." I didn't even know what she was talking about. How was that possible? But because Amy gave me very public permission to also find happiness, I now have experienced joy from time to time. There it was, dancing the night away at an LCD Soundsystem concert, traveling with my brother and best friend or with a college buddy on a boys' trip to meet a group of great guys I never met before. From observing that my deck had sun beating down on it on a cold day, stepping out in it, laying there, the warmth consuming my body. The joy comes from my three stunning children. There was my son Justin, texting me a picture of himself with an older gentleman with a massive, strong forearm and the caption, "I just met Popeye," with a huge grin on his face. (Laughter) There was his brother Miles, walking to the train for his first day of work after graduating college, who stopped and looked back at me and asked, "What am I forgetting?" I assured him right away, "You are 100 percent ready. You got this." And my daughter Paris, walking together through Battersea Park in London, the leaves piled high, the sun glistening in the early morning on our way to yoga. I would add that beauty is also there to discover, and I mean beauty of the wabi-sabi variety but beauty nonetheless. On the one hand, when I see something in this category, I want to say, "Amy, did you see that? Did you hear that? It's too beautiful for you not to share with me." On the other hand, I now experience these moments in an entirely new way. There was the beauty I found in music, like the moment in the newest Manchester Orchestra album, when the song "The Alien" seamlessly transitions into "The Sunshine," or the haunting beauty of Luke Sital-Singh's "Killing Me," whose chorus reads, "And it's killing me that you're not here with me. I'm living happily, but I'm feeling guilty." There is beauty in the simple moments that life has to offer, a way of seeing that world that was so much a part of Amy's DNA, like on my morning commute, looking at the sun reflecting off of Lake Michigan, or stopping and truly seeing how the light shines at different times of the day in the house we built together; even after a Chicago storm, noticing the fresh buildup of snow throughout the neighborhood; or peeking into my daughter's room as she's practicing the bass guitar. Listen, I want to make it clear that I'm a very fortunate person. I have the most amazing family that loves and supports me. I have the resources for personal growth during my time of grief. But whether it's a divorce, losing a job you worked so hard at or having a family member die suddenly or of a slow-moving and painful death, I would like to offer you what I was given: a blank of sheet of paper. What will you do with your intentional empty space, with your fresh start? Thank you. (Applause) |
What we'll learn about the brain in the next century | {0: 'Sam Rodriques invents new technologies to help neuroscientists understand how the brain works.'} | TEDxBeaconStreet | I want to tell you guys something about neuroscience. I'm a physicist by training. About three years ago, I left physics to come and try to understand how the brain works. And this is what I found. Lots of people are working on depression. And that's really good, depression is something that we really want to understand. Here's how you do it: you take a jar and you fill it up, about halfway, with water. And then you take a mouse, and you put the mouse in the jar, OK? And the mouse swims around for a little while and then at some point, the mouse gets tired and decides to stop swimming. And when it stops swimming, that's depression. OK? And I'm from theoretical physics, so I'm used to people making very sophisticated mathematical models to precisely describe physical phenomena, so when I saw that this is the model for depression, I though to myself, "Oh my God, we have a lot of work to do." (Laughter) But this is a kind of general problem in neuroscience. So for example, take emotion. Lots of people want to understand emotion. But you can't study emotion in mice or monkeys because you can't ask them how they're feeling or what they're experiencing. So instead, people who want to understand emotion, typically end up studying what's called motivated behavior, which is code for "what the mouse does when it really, really wants cheese." OK, I could go on and on. I mean, the point is, the NIH spends about 5.5 billion dollars a year on neuroscience research. And yet there have been almost no significant improvements in outcomes for patients with brain diseases in the past 40 years. And I think a lot of that is basically due to the fact that mice might be OK as a model for cancer or diabetes, but the mouse brain is just not sophisticated enough to reproduce human psychology or human brain disease. OK? So if the mouse models are so bad, why are we still using them? Well, it basically boils down to this: the brain is made up of neurons which are these little cells that send electrical signals to each other. If you want to understand how the brain works, you have to be able to measure the electrical activity of these neurons. But to do that, you have to get really close to the neurons with some kind of electrical recording device or a microscope. And so you can do that in mice and you can do it in monkeys, because you can physically put things into their brain but for some reason we still can't do that in humans, OK? So instead, we've invented all these proxies. So the most popular one is probably this, functional MRI, fMRI, which allows you to make these pretty pictures like this, that show which parts of your brain light up when you're engaged in different activities. But this is a proxy. You're not actually measuring neural activity here. What you're doing is you're measuring, essentially, like, blood flow in the brain. Where there's more blood. It's actually where there's more oxygen, but you get the idea, OK? The other thing that you can do is you can do this — electroencephalography — you can put these electrodes on your head, OK? And then you can measure your brain waves. And here, you're actually measuring electrical activity. But you're not measuring the activity of neurons. You're measuring these electrical currents, sloshing back and forth in your brain. So the point is just that these technologies that we have are really measuring the wrong thing. Because, for most of the diseases that we want to understand — like, Parkinson's is the classic example. In Parkinson's, there's one particular kind of neuron deep in your brain that is responsible for the disease, and these technologies just don't have the resolution that you need to get at that. And so that's why we're still stuck with the animals. Not that anyone wants to be studying depression by putting mice into jars, right? It's just that there's this pervasive sense that it's not possible to look at the activity of neurons in healthy humans. So here's what I want to do. I want to take you into the future. To have a look at one way in which I think it could potentially be possible. And I want to preface this by saying, I don't have all the details. So I'm just going to provide you with a kind of outline. But we're going to go the year 2100. Now what does the year 2100 look like? Well, to start with, the climate is a bit warmer that what you're used to. (Laughter) And that robotic vacuum cleaner that you know and love went through a few generations, and the improvements were not always so good. (Laughter) It was not always for the better. But actually, in the year 2100 most things are surprisingly recognizable. It's just the brain is totally different. For example, in the year 2100, we understand the root causes of Alzheimer's. So we can deliver targeted genetic therapies or drugs to stop the degenerative process before it begins. So how did we do it? Well, there were essentially three steps. The first step was that we had to figure out some way to get electrical connections through the skull so we could measure the electrical activity of neurons. And not only that, it had to be easy and risk-free. Something that basically anyone would be OK with, like getting a piercing. Because back in 2017, the only way that we knew of to get through the skull was to drill these holes the size of quarters. You would never let someone do that to you. So in the 2020s, people began to experiment — rather than drilling these gigantic holes, drilling microscopic holes, no thicker than a piece of hair. And the idea here was really for diagnosis — there are lots of times in the diagnosis of brain disorders when you would like to be able to look at the neural activity beneath the skull and being able to drill these microscopic holes would make that much easier for the patient. In the end, it would be like getting a shot. You just go in and you sit down and there's a thing that comes down on your head, and a momentary sting and then it's done, and you can go back about your day. So we're eventually able to do it using lasers to drill the holes. And with the lasers, it was fast and extremely reliable, you couldn't even tell the holes were there, any more than you could tell that one of your hairs was missing. And I know it might sound crazy, using lasers to drill holes in your skull, but back in 2017, people were OK with surgeons shooting lasers into their eyes for corrective surgery So when you're already here, it's not that big of a step. OK? So the next step, that happened in the 2030s, was that it's not just about getting through the skull. To measure the activity of neurons, you have to actually make it into the brain tissue itself. And the risk, whenever you put something into the brain tissue, is essentially that of stroke. That you would hit a blood vessel and burst it, and that causes a stroke. So, by the mid 2030s, we had invented these flexible probes that were capable of going around blood vessels, rather than through them. And thus, we could put huge batteries of these probes into the brains of patients and record from thousands of their neurons without any risk to them. And what we discovered, sort of to our surprise, is that the neurons that we could identify were not responding to things like ideas or emotion, which was what we had expected. They were mostly responding to things like Jennifer Aniston or Halle Berry or Justin Trudeau. I mean — (Laughter) In hindsight, we shouldn't have been that surprised. I mean, what do your neurons spend most of their time thinking about? (Laughter) But really, the point is that this technology enabled us to begin studying neuroscience in individuals. So much like the transition to genetics, at the single cell level, we started to study neuroscience, at the single human level. But we weren't quite there yet. Because these technologies were still restricted to medical applications, which meant that we were studying sick brains, not healthy brains. Because no matter how safe your technology is, you can't stick something into someone's brain for research purposes. They have to want it. And why would they want it? Because as soon as you have an electrical connection to the brain, you can use it to hook the brain up to a computer. Oh, well, you know, the general public was very skeptical at first. I mean, who wants to hook their brain up to their computers? Well just imagine being able to send an email with a thought. (Laughter) Imagine being able to take a picture with your eyes, OK? (Laughter) Imagine never forgetting anything anymore, because anything that you choose to remember will be stored permanently on a hard drive somewhere, able to be recalled at will. (Laughter) The line here between crazy and visionary was never quite clear. But the systems were safe. So when the FDA decided to deregulate these laser-drilling systems, in 2043, commercial demand just exploded. People started signing their emails, "Please excuse any typos. Sent from my brain." (Laughter) Commercial systems popped up left and right, offering the latest and greatest in neural interfacing technology. There were 100 electrodes. A thousand electrodes. High bandwidth for only 99.99 a month. (Laughter) Soon, everyone had them. And that was the key. Because, in the 2050s, if you were a neuroscientist, you could have someone come into your lab essentially from off the street. And you could have them engaged in some emotional task or social behavior or abstract reasoning, things you could never study in mice. And you could record the activity of their neurons using the interfaces that they already had. And then you could also ask them about what they were experiencing. So this link between psychology and neuroscience that you could never make in the animals, was suddenly there. So perhaps the classic example of this was the discovery of the neural basis for insight. That "Aha!" moment, the moment it all comes together, it clicks. And this was discovered by two scientists in 2055, Barry and Late, who observed, in the dorsal prefrontal cortex, how in the brain of someone trying to understand an idea, how different populations of neurons would reorganize themselves — you're looking at neural activity here in orange — until finally their activity aligns in a way that leads to positive feedback. Right there. That is understanding. So finally, we were able to get at the things that make us human. And that's what really opened the way to major insights from medicine. Because, starting in the 2060s, with the ability to record the neural activity in the brains of patients with these different mental diseases, rather than defining the diseases on the basis of their symptoms, as we had at the beginning of the century, we started to define them on the basis of the actual pathology that we observed at the neural level. So for example, in the case of ADHD, we discovered that there are dozens of different diseases, all of which had been called ADHD at the start of the century, that actually had nothing to do with each other, except that they had similar symptoms. And they needed to be treated in different ways. So it was kind of incredible, in retrospect, that at the beginning of the century, we had been treating all those different diseases with the same drug, just by giving people amphetamine, basically is what we were doing. And schizophrenia and depression are the same way. So rather than prescribing drugs to people essentially at random, as we had, we learned how to predict which drugs would be most effective in which patients, and that just led to this huge improvement in outcomes. OK, I want to bring you back now to the year 2017. Some of this may sound satirical or even far fetched. And some of it is. I mean, I can't actually see into the future. I don't actually know if we're going to be drilling hundreds or thousands of microscopic holes in our heads in 30 years. But what I can tell you is that we're not going to make any progress towards understanding the human brain or human diseases until we figure out how to get at the electrical activity of neurons in healthy humans. And almost no one is working on figuring out how to do that today. That is the future of neuroscience. And I think it's time for neuroscientists to put down the mouse brain and to dedicate the thought and investment necessary to understand the human brain and human disease. Thank you. (Applause) |
How to get empowered, not overpowered, by AI | {0: 'Max Tegmark is driven by curiosity, both about how our universe works and about how we can use the science and technology we discover to help humanity flourish rather than flounder.'} | TED2018 | After 13.8 billion years of cosmic history, our universe has woken up and become aware of itself. From a small blue planet, tiny, conscious parts of our universe have begun gazing out into the cosmos with telescopes, discovering something humbling. We've discovered that our universe is vastly grander than our ancestors imagined and that life seems to be an almost imperceptibly small perturbation on an otherwise dead universe. But we've also discovered something inspiring, which is that the technology we're developing has the potential to help life flourish like never before, not just for centuries but for billions of years, and not just on earth but throughout much of this amazing cosmos. I think of the earliest life as "Life 1.0" because it was really dumb, like bacteria, unable to learn anything during its lifetime. I think of us humans as "Life 2.0" because we can learn, which we in nerdy, geek speak, might think of as installing new software into our brains, like languages and job skills. "Life 3.0," which can design not only its software but also its hardware of course doesn't exist yet. But perhaps our technology has already made us "Life 2.1," with our artificial knees, pacemakers and cochlear implants. So let's take a closer look at our relationship with technology, OK? As an example, the Apollo 11 moon mission was both successful and inspiring, showing that when we humans use technology wisely, we can accomplish things that our ancestors could only dream of. But there's an even more inspiring journey propelled by something more powerful than rocket engines, where the passengers aren't just three astronauts but all of humanity. Let's talk about our collective journey into the future with artificial intelligence. My friend Jaan Tallinn likes to point out that just as with rocketry, it's not enough to make our technology powerful. We also have to figure out, if we're going to be really ambitious, how to steer it and where we want to go with it. So let's talk about all three for artificial intelligence: the power, the steering and the destination. Let's start with the power. I define intelligence very inclusively — simply as our ability to accomplish complex goals, because I want to include both biological and artificial intelligence. And I want to avoid the silly carbon-chauvinism idea that you can only be smart if you're made of meat. It's really amazing how the power of AI has grown recently. Just think about it. Not long ago, robots couldn't walk. Now, they can do backflips. Not long ago, we didn't have self-driving cars. Now, we have self-flying rockets. Not long ago, AI couldn't do face recognition. Now, AI can generate fake faces and simulate your face saying stuff that you never said. Not long ago, AI couldn't beat us at the game of Go. Then, Google DeepMind's AlphaZero AI took 3,000 years of human Go games and Go wisdom, ignored it all and became the world's best player by just playing against itself. And the most impressive feat here wasn't that it crushed human gamers, but that it crushed human AI researchers who had spent decades handcrafting game-playing software. And AlphaZero crushed human AI researchers not just in Go but even at chess, which we have been working on since 1950. So all this amazing recent progress in AI really begs the question: How far will it go? I like to think about this question in terms of this abstract landscape of tasks, where the elevation represents how hard it is for AI to do each task at human level, and the sea level represents what AI can do today. The sea level is rising as AI improves, so there's a kind of global warming going on here in the task landscape. And the obvious takeaway is to avoid careers at the waterfront — (Laughter) which will soon be automated and disrupted. But there's a much bigger question as well. How high will the water end up rising? Will it eventually rise to flood everything, matching human intelligence at all tasks. This is the definition of artificial general intelligence — AGI, which has been the holy grail of AI research since its inception. By this definition, people who say, "Ah, there will always be jobs that humans can do better than machines," are simply saying that we'll never get AGI. Sure, we might still choose to have some human jobs or to give humans income and purpose with our jobs, but AGI will in any case transform life as we know it with humans no longer being the most intelligent. Now, if the water level does reach AGI, then further AI progress will be driven mainly not by humans but by AI, which means that there's a possibility that further AI progress could be way faster than the typical human research and development timescale of years, raising the controversial possibility of an intelligence explosion where recursively self-improving AI rapidly leaves human intelligence far behind, creating what's known as superintelligence. Alright, reality check: Are we going to get AGI any time soon? Some famous AI researchers, like Rodney Brooks, think it won't happen for hundreds of years. But others, like Google DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis, are more optimistic and are working to try to make it happen much sooner. And recent surveys have shown that most AI researchers actually share Demis's optimism, expecting that we will get AGI within decades, so within the lifetime of many of us, which begs the question — and then what? What do we want the role of humans to be if machines can do everything better and cheaper than us? The way I see it, we face a choice. One option is to be complacent. We can say, "Oh, let's just build machines that can do everything we can do and not worry about the consequences. Come on, if we build technology that makes all humans obsolete, what could possibly go wrong?" (Laughter) But I think that would be embarrassingly lame. I think we should be more ambitious — in the spirit of TED. Let's envision a truly inspiring high-tech future and try to steer towards it. This brings us to the second part of our rocket metaphor: the steering. We're making AI more powerful, but how can we steer towards a future where AI helps humanity flourish rather than flounder? To help with this, I cofounded the Future of Life Institute. It's a small nonprofit promoting beneficial technology use, and our goal is simply for the future of life to exist and to be as inspiring as possible. You know, I love technology. Technology is why today is better than the Stone Age. And I'm optimistic that we can create a really inspiring high-tech future ... if — and this is a big if — if we win the wisdom race — the race between the growing power of our technology and the growing wisdom with which we manage it. But this is going to require a change of strategy because our old strategy has been learning from mistakes. We invented fire, screwed up a bunch of times — invented the fire extinguisher. (Laughter) We invented the car, screwed up a bunch of times — invented the traffic light, the seat belt and the airbag, but with more powerful technology like nuclear weapons and AGI, learning from mistakes is a lousy strategy, don't you think? (Laughter) It's much better to be proactive rather than reactive; plan ahead and get things right the first time because that might be the only time we'll get. But it is funny because sometimes people tell me, "Max, shhh, don't talk like that. That's Luddite scaremongering." But it's not scaremongering. It's what we at MIT call safety engineering. Think about it: before NASA launched the Apollo 11 mission, they systematically thought through everything that could go wrong when you put people on top of explosive fuel tanks and launch them somewhere where no one could help them. And there was a lot that could go wrong. Was that scaremongering? No. That's was precisely the safety engineering that ensured the success of the mission, and that is precisely the strategy I think we should take with AGI. Think through what can go wrong to make sure it goes right. So in this spirit, we've organized conferences, bringing together leading AI researchers and other thinkers to discuss how to grow this wisdom we need to keep AI beneficial. Our last conference was in Asilomar, California last year and produced this list of 23 principles which have since been signed by over 1,000 AI researchers and key industry leaders, and I want to tell you about three of these principles. One is that we should avoid an arms race and lethal autonomous weapons. The idea here is that any science can be used for new ways of helping people or new ways of harming people. For example, biology and chemistry are much more likely to be used for new medicines or new cures than for new ways of killing people, because biologists and chemists pushed hard — and successfully — for bans on biological and chemical weapons. And in the same spirit, most AI researchers want to stigmatize and ban lethal autonomous weapons. Another Asilomar AI principle is that we should mitigate AI-fueled income inequality. I think that if we can grow the economic pie dramatically with AI and we still can't figure out how to divide this pie so that everyone is better off, then shame on us. (Applause) Alright, now raise your hand if your computer has ever crashed. (Laughter) Wow, that's a lot of hands. Well, then you'll appreciate this principle that we should invest much more in AI safety research, because as we put AI in charge of even more decisions and infrastructure, we need to figure out how to transform today's buggy and hackable computers into robust AI systems that we can really trust, because otherwise, all this awesome new technology can malfunction and harm us, or get hacked and be turned against us. And this AI safety work has to include work on AI value alignment, because the real threat from AGI isn't malice, like in silly Hollywood movies, but competence — AGI accomplishing goals that just aren't aligned with ours. For example, when we humans drove the West African black rhino extinct, we didn't do it because we were a bunch of evil rhinoceros haters, did we? We did it because we were smarter than them and our goals weren't aligned with theirs. But AGI is by definition smarter than us, so to make sure that we don't put ourselves in the position of those rhinos if we create AGI, we need to figure out how to make machines understand our goals, adopt our goals and retain our goals. And whose goals should these be, anyway? Which goals should they be? This brings us to the third part of our rocket metaphor: the destination. We're making AI more powerful, trying to figure out how to steer it, but where do we want to go with it? This is the elephant in the room that almost nobody talks about — not even here at TED — because we're so fixated on short-term AI challenges. Look, our species is trying to build AGI, motivated by curiosity and economics, but what sort of future society are we hoping for if we succeed? We did an opinion poll on this recently, and I was struck to see that most people actually want us to build superintelligence: AI that's vastly smarter than us in all ways. What there was the greatest agreement on was that we should be ambitious and help life spread into the cosmos, but there was much less agreement about who or what should be in charge. And I was actually quite amused to see that there's some some people who want it to be just machines. (Laughter) And there was total disagreement about what the role of humans should be, even at the most basic level, so let's take a closer look at possible futures that we might choose to steer toward, alright? So don't get me wrong here. I'm not talking about space travel, merely about humanity's metaphorical journey into the future. So one option that some of my AI colleagues like is to build superintelligence and keep it under human control, like an enslaved god, disconnected from the internet and used to create unimaginable technology and wealth for whoever controls it. But Lord Acton warned us that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, so you might worry that maybe we humans just aren't smart enough, or wise enough rather, to handle this much power. Also, aside from any moral qualms you might have about enslaving superior minds, you might worry that maybe the superintelligence could outsmart us, break out and take over. But I also have colleagues who are fine with AI taking over and even causing human extinction, as long as we feel the the AIs are our worthy descendants, like our children. But how would we know that the AIs have adopted our best values and aren't just unconscious zombies tricking us into anthropomorphizing them? Also, shouldn't those people who don't want human extinction have a say in the matter, too? Now, if you didn't like either of those two high-tech options, it's important to remember that low-tech is suicide from a cosmic perspective, because if we don't go far beyond today's technology, the question isn't whether humanity is going to go extinct, merely whether we're going to get taken out by the next killer asteroid, supervolcano or some other problem that better technology could have solved. So, how about having our cake and eating it ... with AGI that's not enslaved but treats us well because its values are aligned with ours? This is the gist of what Eliezer Yudkowsky has called "friendly AI," and if we can do this, it could be awesome. It could not only eliminate negative experiences like disease, poverty, crime and other suffering, but it could also give us the freedom to choose from a fantastic new diversity of positive experiences — basically making us the masters of our own destiny. So in summary, our situation with technology is complicated, but the big picture is rather simple. Most AI researchers expect AGI within decades, and if we just bumble into this unprepared, it will probably be the biggest mistake in human history — let's face it. It could enable brutal, global dictatorship with unprecedented inequality, surveillance and suffering, and maybe even human extinction. But if we steer carefully, we could end up in a fantastic future where everybody's better off: the poor are richer, the rich are richer, everybody is healthy and free to live out their dreams. Now, hang on. Do you folks want the future that's politically right or left? Do you want the pious society with strict moral rules, or do you an hedonistic free-for-all, more like Burning Man 24/7? Do you want beautiful beaches, forests and lakes, or would you prefer to rearrange some of those atoms with the computers, enabling virtual experiences? With friendly AI, we could simply build all of these societies and give people the freedom to choose which one they want to live in because we would no longer be limited by our intelligence, merely by the laws of physics. So the resources and space for this would be astronomical — literally. So here's our choice. We can either be complacent about our future, taking as an article of blind faith that any new technology is guaranteed to be beneficial, and just repeat that to ourselves as a mantra over and over and over again as we drift like a rudderless ship towards our own obsolescence. Or we can be ambitious — thinking hard about how to steer our technology and where we want to go with it to create the age of amazement. We're all here to celebrate the age of amazement, and I feel that its essence should lie in becoming not overpowered but empowered by our technology. Thank you. (Applause) |
What causes insomnia? | null | TED-Ed | What keeps you up at night? Pondering deep questions? Excitement about a big trip? Or is it stress about unfinished work, an upcoming test, or a dreaded family gathering? For many people, this stress is temporary, as its cause is quickly resolved. But what if the very thing keeping you awake was stress about losing sleep? This seemingly unsolvable loop is at the heart of insomnia, the world’s most common sleep disorder. Almost anything can cause the occasional restless night - a snoring partner, physical pain, or emotional distress. And extreme sleep deprivation like jetlag can throw off your biological clock, wreaking havoc on your sleep schedule. But in most cases, sleep deprivation is short-term. Eventually, exhaustion catches up with all of us. However, some long-term conditions like respiratory disorders, gastrointestinal problems, and many others can overpower fatigue. And as sleepless nights pile up, the bedroom can start to carry associations of restless nights wracked with anxiety. Come bedtime, insomniacs are stressed. So stressed their brains hijack the stress response system, flooding the body with fight-flight-or-freeze chemicals. Cortisol and adrenocorticotropic hormones course through the bloodstream, increasing heart rate and blood pressure, and jolting the body into hyperarousal. In this condition, the brain is hunting for potential threats, making it impossible to ignore any slight discomfort or nighttime noise. And when insomniacs finally do fall asleep, the quality of their rest is compromised. Our brain’s primary source of energy is cerebral glucose, and in healthy sleep, our metabolism slows to conserve this glucose for waking hours. But PET studies show the adrenaline that prevents sleep for insomniacs also speeds up their metabolisms. While they sleep, their bodies are working overtime, burning through the brain’s supply of energy-giving glucose. This symptom of poor sleep leaves insomniacs waking in a state of exhaustion, confusion, and stress, which starts the process all over again. When these cycles of stress and restlessness last several months, they’re diagnosed as chronic insomnia. And while insomnia rarely leads to death, its chemical mechanisms are similar to anxiety attacks found in those experiencing depression and anxiety. So suffering from any one of these conditions increases your risk of experiencing the other two. Fortunately, there are ways to break the cycle of sleeplessness. Managing the stress that leads to hyperarousal is one of our best-understood treatments for insomnia, and good sleep practices can help rebuild your relationship with bedtime. Make sure your bedroom is dark and comfortably cool to minimize “threats” during hyperarousal. Only use your bed for sleeping, and if you’re restless, leave the room and tire yourself out with relaxing activities like reading, meditating, or journaling. Regulate your metabolism by setting consistent resting and waking times to help orient your body’s biological clock. This clock, or circadian rhythm, is also sensitive to light, so avoid bright lights at night to help tell your body that it’s time for sleep. In addition to these practices, some doctors prescribe medication to aid sleep, but there aren’t reliable medications that help in all cases. And over-the-counter sleeping pills can be highly addictive, leading to withdrawal that worsens symptoms. But before seeking any treatment, make sure your sleeplessness is actually due to insomnia. Approximately 8% of patients diagnosed with chronic insomnia are actually suffering from a less common genetic problem called delayed sleep phase disorder, or DSPD. People with DSPD have a circadian rhythm significantly longer than 24 hours, putting their sleeping habits out of sync with traditional sleeping hours. So while they have difficulty falling asleep at a typical bedtime, it’s not due to increased stress. And given the opportunity, they can sleep comfortably on their own delayed schedule. Our sleeping and waking cycle is a delicate balance, and one that’s vital to maintain for our physical and mental wellbeing. For all these reasons, it’s worth putting in some time and effort to sustain a stable bedtime routine, but try not to lose any sleep over it. |
How I'm bringing queer pride to my rural village | {0: "Katlego Kolanyane-Kesupile is the founder of the Queer Shorts Showcase Festival, Botswana's first and only LGBT-themed theatre festival."} | TEDGlobal 2017 | "You don't belong here" almost always means, "We can't find a function or a role for you." "You don't belong here" sometimes means, "You're too queer to handle." "You don't belong here" very rarely means, "There's no way for you to exist and be happy here." I went to university in Johannesburg, South Africa, and I remember the first time a white friend of mine heard me speaking Setswana, the national language of Botswana. I was on the phone with my mother and the intrigue which painted itself across her face was absolutely priceless. As soon as I hung up, she comes to me and says, "I didn't know you could do that. After all these years of knowing you, how did I not know you could do that?" What she was referring to was the fact that I could switch off the twang and slip into a native tongue, and so I chose to let her in on a few other things which locate me as a Motswana, not just by virtue of the fact that I speak a language or I have family there, but that a rural child lives within this shiny visage of fabulosity. (Laughter) (Applause) I invited the Motswana public into the story, my story, as a transgender person years ago, in English of course, because Setswana is a gender-neutral language and the closest we get is an approximation of "transgender." And an important part of my history got left out of that story, by association rather than out of any act of shame. "Kat" was an international superstar, a fashion and lifestyle writer, a musician, theater producer and performer — all the things that qualify me to be a mainstream, whitewashed, new age digestible queer. Kat. Kat had a degree from one of the best universities in Africa, oh no, the world. By association, what Kat wasn't was just like the little brown-skinned children frolicking through the streets of some incidental railway settlement like Tati Siding, or an off-the-grid village like Kgagodi, legs clad in dust stockings whose knees had blackened from years of kneeling and wax-polishing floors, whose shins were marked with lessons from climbing trees, who played until dusk, went in for supper by a paraffin lamp and returned to play hide-and-seek amongst centipedes and owls until finally someone's mother would call the whole thing to an end. That got lost both in translation and in transition, and when I realized this, I decided it was time for me to start building bridges between myselves. For me and for others to access me, I had to start indigenizing my queerness. What I mean by indigenizing is stripping away the city life film that stops you from seeing the villager within. In a time where being brown, queer, African and seen as worthy of space means being everything but rural, I fear that we're erasing the very struggles that got us to where we are now. The very first time I queered being out in a village, I was in my early 20s, and I wore a kaftan. I was ridiculed by some of my family and by strangers for wearing a dress. My defense against their comments was the default that we who don't belong, the ones who are better than, get taught, we shrug them off and say, "They just don't know enough." And of course I was wrong, because my idea of wealth of knowledge was based in removing yourself from Third World thinking and living. But it took time for me to realize that my acts of pride weren't most alive in the global cities I traipsed through, but in the villages where I speak the languages and play the games and feel most at home and I can say, "I have seen the world, and I know that people like me aren't alone here, we are everywhere." And so I used these village homes for self-reflection and to give hope to the others who don't belong. Indigenizing my queerness means bridging the many exceptional parts of myself. It means honoring the fact that my tongue can contort itself to speak the romance languages without denying or exoticizing the fact that when I am moved, it can do this: (Ululating) It means — (Cheers) (Applause) It means branding cattle with my mother or chopping firewood with my cousins doesn't make me any less fabulous or queer, even though I'm now accustomed to rooftop shindigs, wine-paired menus and VIP lounges. (Laughter) It means wearing my pride through my grandmother's tongue, my mother's food, my grandfather's song, my skin etched with stories of falling off donkeys and years and years and years of sleeping under a blanket of stars. If there's any place I don't belong, it's in a mind where the story of me starts with the branch of me being queer and not with my rural roots. Indigenizing my queerness means understanding that the rural is a part of me, and I am an indelible part of it. Thank you. (Applause) |
The incredible potential of flexible, soft robots | {0: 'Giada Gerboni works in surgical robotics, supporting surgeons with new flexible robotic devices in order to make once impossible operations a reality.'} | TED2018 | So, robots. Robots can be programmed to do the same task millions of times with minimal error, something very difficult for us, right? And it can be very impressive to watch them at work. Look at them. I could watch them for hours. No? What is less impressive is that if you take these robots out of the factories, where the environments are not perfectly known and measured like here, to do even a simple task which doesn't require much precision, this is what can happen. I mean, opening a door, you don't require much precision. (Laughter) Or a small error in the measurements, he misses the valve, and that's it — (Laughter) with no way of recovering, most of the time. So why is that? Well, for many years, robots have been designed to emphasize speed and precision, and this translates into a very specific architecture. If you take a robot arm, it's a very well-defined set of rigid links and motors, what we call actuators, they move the links about the joints. In this robotic structure, you have to perfectly measure your environment, so what is around, and you have to perfectly program every movement of the robot joints, because a small error can generate a very large fault, so you can damage something or you can get your robot damaged if something is harder. So let's talk about them a moment. And don't think about the brains of these robots or how carefully we program them, but rather look at their bodies. There is obviously something wrong with it, because what makes a robot precise and strong also makes them ridiculously dangerous and ineffective in the real world, because their body cannot deform or better adjust to the interaction with the real world. So think about the opposite approach, being softer than anything else around you. Well, maybe you think that you're not really able to do anything if you're soft, probably. Well, nature teaches us the opposite. For example, at the bottom of the ocean, under thousands of pounds of hydrostatic pressure, a completely soft animal can move and interact with a much stiffer object than him. He walks by carrying around this coconut shell thanks to the flexibility of his tentacles, which serve as both his feet and hands. And apparently, an octopus can also open a jar. It's pretty impressive, right? But clearly, this is not enabled just by the brain of this animal, but also by his body, and it's a clear example, maybe the clearest example, of embodied intelligence, which is a kind of intelligence that all living organisms have. We all have that. Our body, its shape, material and structure, plays a fundamental role during a physical task, because we can conform to our environment so we can succeed in a large variety of situations without much planning or calculations ahead. So why don't we put some of this embodied intelligence into our robotic machines, to release them from relying on excessive work on computation and sensing? Well, to do that, we can follow the strategy of nature, because with evolution, she's done a pretty good job in designing machines for environment interaction. And it's easy to notice that nature uses soft material frequently and stiff material sparingly. And this is what is done in this new field of robotics, which is called "soft robotics," in which the main objective is not to make super-precise machines, because we've already got them, but to make robots able to face unexpected situations in the real world, so able to go out there. And what makes a robot soft is first of all its compliant body, which is made of materials or structures that can undergo very large deformations, so no more rigid links, and secondly, to move them, we use what we call distributed actuation, so we have to control continuously the shape of this very deformable body, which has the effect of having a lot of links and joints, but we don't have any stiff structure at all. So you can imagine that building a soft robot is a very different process than stiff robotics, where you have links, gears, screws that you must combine in a very defined way. In soft robots, you just build your actuator from scratch most of the time, but you shape your flexible material to the form that responds to a certain input. For example, here, you can just deform a structure doing a fairly complex shape if you think about doing the same with rigid links and joints, and here, what you use is just one input, such as air pressure. OK, but let's see some cool examples of soft robots. Here is a little cute guy developed at Harvard University, and he walks thanks to waves of pressure applied along its body, and thanks to the flexibility, he can also sneak under a low bridge, keep walking, and then keep walking a little bit different afterwards. And it's a very preliminary prototype, but they also built a more robust version with power on board that can actually be sent out in the world and face real-world interactions like a car passing it over it ... and keep working. It's cute. (Laughter) Or a robotic fish, which swims like a real fish does in water simply because it has a soft tail with distributed actuation using still air pressure. That was from MIT, and of course, we have a robotic octopus. This was actually one of the first projects developed in this new field of soft robots. Here, you see the artificial tentacle, but they actually built an entire machine with several tentacles they could just throw in the water, and you see that it can kind of go around and do submarine exploration in a different way than rigid robots would do. But this is very important for delicate environments, such as coral reefs. Let's go back to the ground. Here, you see the view from a growing robot developed by my colleagues in Stanford. You see the camera fixed on top. And this robot is particular, because using air pressure, it grows from the tip, while the rest of the body stays in firm contact with the environment. And this is inspired by plants, not animals, which grows via the material in a similar manner so it can face a pretty large variety of situations. But I'm a biomedical engineer, and perhaps the application I like the most is in the medical field, and it's very difficult to imagine a closer interaction with the human body than actually going inside the body, for example, to perform a minimally invasive procedure. And here, robots can be very helpful with the surgeon, because they must enter the body using small holes and straight instruments, and these instruments must interact with very delicate structures in a very uncertain environment, and this must be done safely. Also bringing the camera inside the body, so bringing the eyes of the surgeon inside the surgical field can be very challenging if you use a rigid stick, like a classic endoscope. With my previous research group in Europe, we developed this soft camera robot for surgery, which is very different from a classic endoscope, which can move thanks to the flexibility of the module that can bend in every direction and also elongate. And this was actually used by surgeons to see what they were doing with other instruments from different points of view, without caring that much about what was touched around. And here you see the soft robot in action, and it just goes inside. This is a body simulator, not a real human body. It goes around. You have a light, because usually, you don't have too many lights inside your body. We hope. (Laughter) But sometimes, a surgical procedure can even be done using a single needle, and in Stanford now, we are working on a very flexible needle, kind of a very tiny soft robot which is mechanically designed to use the interaction with the tissues and steer around inside a solid organ. This makes it possible to reach many different targets, such as tumors, deep inside a solid organ by using one single insertion point. And you can even steer around the structure that you want to avoid on the way to the target. So clearly, this is a pretty exciting time for robotics. We have robots that have to deal with soft structures, so this poses new and very challenging questions for the robotics community, and indeed, we are just starting to learn how to control, how to put sensors on these very flexible structures. But of course, we are not even close to what nature figured out in millions of years of evolution. But one thing I know for sure: robots will be softer and safer, and they will be out there helping people. Thank you. (Applause) |
Four billion years of evolution in six minutes | {0: 'Prosanta Chakrabarty studies fish to help explain the evolution of human beings and our planet. '} | TED2018 | If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys? (Laughter) Well, because we're not monkeys, we're fish. (Laughter) Now, knowing you're a fish and not a monkey is actually really important to understanding where we came from. I teach one of the largest evolutionary biology classes in the US, and when my students finally understand why I call them fish all the time, then I know I'm getting my job done. But I always have to start my classes by dispelling some hardwired myths, because without really knowing it, many of us were taught evolution wrong. For instance, we're taught to say "the theory of evolution." There are actually many theories, and just like the process itself, the ones that best fit the data are the ones that survive to this day. The one we know best is Darwinian natural selection. That's the process by which organisms that best fit an environment survive and get to reproduce, while those that are less fit slowly die off. And that's it. Evolution is as simple as that, and it's a fact. Evolution is a fact as much as the "theory of gravity." You can prove it just as easily. You just need to look at your bellybutton that you share with other placental mammals, or your backbone that you share with other vertebrates, or your DNA that you share with all other life on earth. Those traits didn't pop up in humans. They were passed down from different ancestors to all their descendants, not just us. But that's not really how we learn biology early on, is it? We learn plants and bacteria are primitive things, and fish give rise to amphibians followed by reptiles and mammals, and then you get you, this perfectly evolved creature at the end of the line. But life doesn't evolve in a line, and it doesn't end with us. But we're always shown evolution portrayed something like this, a monkey and a chimpanzee, some extinct humans, all on a forward and steady march to becoming us. But they don't become us any more than we would become them. We're also not the goal of evolution. But why does it matter? Why do we need to understand evolution the right way? Well, misunderstanding evolution has led to many problems, but you can't ask that age-old question, "Where are we from?" without understanding evolution the right way. Misunderstanding it has led to many convoluted and corrupted views of how we should treat other life on earth, and how we should treat each other in terms of race and gender. So let's go back four billion years. This is the single-celled organism we all came from. At first, it gave rise to other single-celled life, but these are still evolving to this day, and some would say the Archaea and Bacteria that make up most of this group is the most successful on the planet. They are certainly going to be here well after us. About three billion years ago, multicellularity evolved. This includes your fungi and your plants and your animals. The first animals to develop a backbone were fishes. So technically, all vertebrates are fishes, so technically, you and I are fish. So don't say I didn't warn you. One fish lineage came onto land and gave rise to, among other things, the mammals and reptiles. Some reptiles become birds, some mammals become primates, some primates become monkeys with tails, and others become the great apes, including a variety of human species. So you see, we didn't evolve from monkeys, but we do share a common ancestor with them. All the while, life around us kept evolving: more bacteria, more fungi, lots of fish, fish, fish. If you couldn't tell — yes, they're my favorite group. (Laughter) As life evolves, it also goes extinct. Most species just last for a few million years. So you see, most life on earth that we see around us today are about the same age as our species. So it's hubris, it's self-centered to think, "Oh, plants and bacteria are primitive, and we've been here for an evolutionary minute, so we're somehow special." Think of life as being this book, an unfinished book for sure. We're just seeing the last few pages of each chapter. If you look out on the eight million species that we share this planet with, think of them all being four billion years of evolution. They're all the product of that. Think of us all as young leaves on this ancient and gigantic tree of life, all of us connected by invisible branches not just to each other, but to our extinct relatives and our evolutionary ancestors. As a biologist, I'm still trying to learn, with others, how everyone's related to each other, who is related to whom. Perhaps it's better still to think of us as a little fish out of water. Yes, one that learned to walk and talk, but one that still has a lot of learning to do about who we are and where we came from. Thank you. (Applause) |
Can home cooking change the world? | {0: 'Gastón Acurio is a chef, writer, entrepreneur and one of the most important promoters of Peruvian cooking in the world.'} | TED en Español en NYC | We're living in difficult times because, on one hand, thanks to connectivity, we can see the most beautiful sides of humanity but, on the other hand, also the ugliest: hunger, violence, war, hatred, intolerance; daily scenes that, when we come home at the end of the day, we feel that everything is kind of lost. But it's not, because it's precisely at home where we might find one of the most infallible tools to fight for the nutritional, emotional and environmental well-being of our planet. Where at home? Well, in the kitchen. I'll tell you why with three stories. The first one: I'm from Lima, a product of mixed bloods, as you can see: my mother, a daughter of the coastal area, aristocratic and viceregal, and my father, a son of the Andes, the Incas, from Cuzco. So in my home, the Andes and the coastal area, which are historically confrontational, ended up together because of love, as happened to most people from Lima, descendants of diverse backgrounds: Africans with people from the Amazons, Japanese with Andeans, Chinese with Italians. Like this love story, for example: the daughter of a prosperous Cantonese store owner fell in love playing on the streets of the port of Callao in Lima with the son of a famous Genovese pastry chef from Italy. In the beginning, their parents were totally against their love, so they decided to run away to create their home. It's there that they discover their biggest differences. Where? On the table. She discovers that she really loved the fried rice that her father used to make for her in the wok. And he loved his grandmother's slow-cooked risotto. She wanted to add soy sauce to everything. (Laughter) And he wanted to add Parmesan cheese to everything. (Laughter) In the end, they come to an agreement: They cook their rice in the wok, but they slow cook it. (Laughter) They add a little bit of Parmesan cheese and a little bit of soy sauce. And a new dish is born: the Peruvian rice with seafood, which has a little bit from one, and a little bit from the other — like all the dishes in our cuisine with that magical seal of a Peru that, for many centuries, received millions of people who had the dream of building their lives in our country. They were not received in ghettos or separated, but integrated, joined together, and, at least in the kitchen, learned to build bountiful bridges of love and peace. The message from Peru is clear: nothing bad can happen to us; only good things will occur when we embrace our diversity. The second story is about me, a chef. I started my training in Paris, as a student, where I also had the good fortune of meeting my wife, Astrid, who I convinced to come to Peru, to make our dream come true: a small restaurant, a nice restaurant that would support our family. This was our first restaurant: Astrid and Gastón. This was the 90s, and during the 90s — as was happening with cuisines across most of the world — we were living under the influence of the French haute cuisine, in a world where the local public would also always prefer anything that came from abroad, rather than from our own land. Maybe that's the reason why when we came home, even though we had a lot of customers every day, we didn't feel fulfilled. We'd hear that little voice saying: "Does it make sense to have a French restaurant, run by a German and a Peruvian, in a city that is not in France, but in Peru?" (Laughter) The answer would come years later, at the beginning of this century, when two important events took place. First, the world was becoming connected through internet. As a result, countries started to value the diversity of their people, and Peru was one of them. Second, the Peruvian economy began to experience a steady growth after the defeat of the Shining Path. It was the perfect timing for my generation of cooks and chefs to begin to work together; to move past egos, vanities and distrust, and to remove any competition between us in order to work for those who didn't have a voice: the cooks in the corners, the cooks in the markets, the small farmers in the Amazon, in the Andes, on the coast, the artisanal fishermen on the Pacific — all historically forgotten or underappreciated. Thanks to this movement, we began to envision an opportunity to build a space of mutual trust, an environment of trust that would allow us to work toward collective goals that were much more important and transcendental. Thanks to this movement, we started to imagine a Peruvian cuisine that would bring a new message of a magical and seductive Peru to the world, with Peruvian restaurants that spread all over the world transformed into vibrant embassies promoting our culture and our products every day and convincing the world's tourists to come and visit Peru. In the beginning, as it usually happens, they thought we were crazy utopians. "Ceviche? As important as a French dish?" (Laughter) "Using our cooking, an insignificant and day-to-day event, as a tool to promote the image of our country to the world, or as a key to unify a nation?" "No, that's impossible," they'd say. But, it happened. Today, the Peruvian cuisine is in people's hearts all over the world. Thanks to that, something very important happened — even more important than the presence of ceviche today on menus of famous restaurants in Paris; or that Peruvian cuisine is now, without doubt, at the same level as those other great cuisines of the world; or that Lima has become a hotspot for tourists thanks to the virtues of its gastronomy, creating opportunities and jobs for many people. The most important thing that we achieved was to build a deep sense of confidence and belief in our identity, and a space of union amongst Peruvians that moves us when we see our cuisine recognized around the world. It's true that for a long time, we were told that it'd be better if we denied our origins — that to be valued, we must act like Europeans or Americans. As a result, full of fear, we hid this love from our parents, to protect it. But finally, today we can celebrate proudly, with confidence and in peace, our multicultural identity. The message in this second story also emphasizes the idea that cooking can be a tool for happiness and well-being if we embrace our multicultural identity. The third story does not bring very good news. From the Industrial Revolution until now, we have been forced into a lifestyle that prompts us to consume products we don't really need. Products that are also cut off from the rational use of our ingredients and environment — but that marketing campaigns have led us to believe we couldn't happily live without them. Today, for example, this has culminated in more people dying due to obesity than due to hunger. In developed cities, more people die by suicide than by crime. In the case of Peru, despite a growing economy, there's malnutrition and anemia in places that export their own food, while the Amazon and our seas are being destroyed and overfished. Here is where cooking can help us again — not just in Peru, but all over the world. How? By placing cooking at the heart of our homes, at the center of everything, with information and education. Because with information and education, we can make the right decisions about what to cook and what to eat so we can find a new balance, in which we can all live in harmony. A new harmony between health and enjoyment, between small producers and the big industries, between the local culture and the environment, between local products and universal products. That's precisely the reason why we have to place cooking at the heart of our homes. Because if we take this message to every home, if cooking becomes important again in each home, the effects in the market and in many other activities would be massive and powerful. Maybe some are thinking the same thing as those other people who thought that Peruvian cuisine would never be in the hearts of people around the world. I can imagine them thinking: How can we relay to the public a message explaining that a balanced meal cooked in their home kitchen is the best tool to fight inequality and disease and to help save the environment? How can we convince politicians to write global public policies following this idea? It looks impossible. How can we achieve this? To be honest, we don't know. (Laughter) That's the reason why, for a long time, chefs from around the world have been working together, each of us in our own field, to reach the goal of spreading this message — and not waiting for the governments. For example, here in New York, Dan Barber, in his Blue Hill, very close to New York City, has been fighting for a long time to show that a diverse and sustainable agriculture can produce food and products of high quality at a massive scale for all families — and they can be delicious, accessible, healthy, friendly and sustainable. Or in France, the great chef Alain Ducasse in his Hôtel Plaza Athénée, on Avenue Montaigne, the most luxurious of Paris, decided to remove meat from his menu without fearing that his sometimes capricious clients might leave — because he's aware of the negative impact that excessive meat consumption has on the environment and is convinced that by sending a coherent discourse from his restaurant, his message can reach many more homes. Or in Peru, Pedro Miguel Schiaffino, a great chef and a good friend, who goes to the farthest corner of the Amazon looking for ingredients, traditions and craftsmanship, because he believes that by bringing them back to his restaurant he can convince the 10 million inhabitants of Lima that using these products will bring prosperity to these communities, while also showing respect and giving value to their cultural identity. All over the world, chefs are joining forces thanks to their cooking, just like our parents joined at the table because of their love. Just as it happened with that generation of chefs in Peru that one day decided to work together to promote their culture. Just as it's happening now. We're convinced that we can't wait for others to do it. So we've decided to act, because thanks to the media and the popularity of the professional kitchen in the world today, as chefs, we know that we can do a lot to help spread this message of placing cooking at the center of our home. In this way, sometime in the near future, each and every family, home and person with good information can pick ingredients that will help to recuperate our health and environment, to fight inequality, and moreover, to recover that emotional peace that we need. This is the power of cooking, one of the most infallible tools to achieve our well-being. Thank you. (Applause) |
Did the Amazons really exist? | null | TED-Ed | Since the time of Homer, ancient stories told of fierce warriors dwelling beyond the Mediterranean world, striking fear into the mightiest empires of antiquity. Their exploits were recounted by many epic poets. They fought in the legendary Trojan War and their grand army invaded Athens. Jason and the Argonauts passed by their shores, barely avoiding their deadly arrows. These formidable fighters faced off against the greatest champions of myth: Heracles, Theseus, and Achilles. And every single one of these warriors was a woman. The war-loving Amazons, "the equals of men" in courage and skill, were familiar to everyone in ancient Greece. Amazon battle scenes decorated the Parthenon on the Athenian Acropolis; paintings and statues of Amazons adorned temples and public spaces. Little girls played with Amazon dolls, and Amazons were a favorite subject on Greek vase paintings. In Greek art and literature, they were depicted as daring and desirable, but also terrifying and deadly, and doomed to die at the hands of Greek heroes. Were Amazons merely figures of myth, or something more? It was long assumed that they were imaginary, like the cyclops and centaurs. But curiously enough, stories from ancient Egypt, Persia, the Middle East, Central Asia, India, and China also featured Amazon-like warrior women. And Amazons were described in ancient historical accounts, not just myths. Writers like Herodotus, Plato, and Strabo never doubted their existence. So who were the real women warriors known as Amazons? Ancient historians located the Amazon homeland in Scythia, the vast territory stretching from the Black Sea across the steppes of Central Asia. This immense region was populated by nomadic tribes whose lives centered on horses, archery, and warfare. Their culture flourished for about 1,000 years beginning around 800 BC. Feared by Greeks, Persians, and the Chinese, the Scythians left no written records. But we can find clues in how their neighbors described them, as well as in archaeology. Scythians' ancestors were the first to ride horses and they invented the recurve bow. And, because a female mounted archer could be as fast and as deadly as a male, all children were trained to ride and shoot. Women hunted and fought alongside men, using the same weapons. The harsh landscape and their nomadic lifestyle created its own form of equality. This amazed the ancient Greeks, whose women led restricted indoor lives. The earliest stories of the Scythians, and Amazons, may have been exaggerated rumors. But as the Greeks began to trade around the Black Sea and further east, their portrayals became more realistic. Early depictions of Amazons showed them with Greek weapons and armor. But in later representations, they wielded bows and battle-axes, rode horses, and wore pointed caps and patterned trousers characteristic of steppe nomads. Until recently, no one was sure how strong the links were between Scythians and the Amazons of Greek myth. But recent archaeological discoveries have provided ample evidence. More than 1,000 ancient Scythian kurgans, or burial mounds, have been excavated, containing skeletons and weapons. Archaeologists had previously assumed that weapons could only belong to male warriors. But modern DNA analysis so far has revealed that about 300 skeletons buried with weapons belong to females ranging in age from 10 to 45, and more are being found every year. The women's skeletons show battle injuries: ribs slashed by swords, skulls bashed by battle-axes, and arrows embedded in bones. In classical art and writings, the fearsome Amazons were always portrayed as brave and heroic. In male-dominated classical Greece, however, the very idea of strong women who gloried in freedom and war aroused mixed feelings. And yet, the Greeks were also drawn to egalitarian ideals. Is it possible that the mythic realm of thrilling Amazon tales was a way to imagine women and men as equal companions? |
The surprising science of alpha males | {0: 'Frans de Waal studies primate social behavior -- how they fight and reconcile, share and cooperate.'} | TEDMED 2017 | Well, I have known many alpha males in my life, chimpanzee alpha males, and I'm going to talk about what an alpha male is, because I think we can all learn a lot from our close relatives where we have alpha males. And as an example, I want to give you Amos, a male that I knew who was a young male and he was alpha male, he was very popular, but he got sick and he lost his position because, you know, chimpanzee males they can spot from a mile away if you are weak and they went for him, and he lost his position, and then he got sicker and sicker until at some point we had to isolate him. The group lived on a grassy island, and we had to isolate him in a cage, but we cracked open the cage so that the rest of the chimps still had access to him. And what happened was most touching. Other chimps would bring food to him, they would bring wood wool to him, which is this thing that they use to sleep in and build nests out of, and females would put the wood wool behind his back. He was leaning heavily against the wall, and the way we do with pillows to patients in a hospital, they were putting that stuff behind his back. And I thought, this is the way to go for an alpha male. He was loved and respected, and everyone was taking care of him, and this is not always how it goes, because some males don't end so well when they lose their position. So Amos was an example of a male who was liked as a leader, and I think the term alpha male, if you look it up on the internet, you will find all these business books that tell you how to be an alpha male, and what they mean is how to beat up others and beat them over the head and let them know that you are boss and don't mess with me and so on. And basically an alpha male for them is a bully. And I really don't like that kind of description, because I am actually partly responsible for the term "alpha male" because I wrote this book "Chimpanzee Politics," which was recommended by Newt Gingrich to freshmen congressmen. I don't know what good it did, but he recommended that book to them, and after that the term "alpha male" became very popular. But I think it is used in a mischaracterization. It's used in a very superficial way that doesn't relate to what a real alpha male is. And so I'm here to explain what that is. The term itself goes back actually much further. It goes back to the '40s and '50s, research on wolves, and basically the definition is very simple. The highest ranking male is the alpha male. The highest ranking female is the alpha female. Every primate group has one alpha male, one alpha female, not more than that, there's only one. And I will explain how that goes. So first, the body language. What you see here is two male chimpanzees who are the same size, but one is walking upright, has his hair up, has a big rock in his hand, and he's the alpha male. The other male is pant-grunting to him, is being submissive to him and bowing for him, and that is the sort of ritual they need to go through many times a day in order to have a stable relationship. I'll show you a video from the field. What you will see here is a female pant-grunting to an alpha male and you will see how that goes. The male is approaching, she grunts at him. (Chimpanzee grunts) He has all his hair up and he displays. I'm actually standing far too close. A chimpanzee is far stronger than I am, and I just was not very prudent, this particular video. So what you saw him do is he was lifting himself up and standing on two legs, and putting his arms out. That's called the bipedal swagger. It's a very common posture in high-ranking males, and it's very recognizable because humans do this kind of stuff. (Laughter) Humans do this all the time. And what I really like about this particular picture is the two old guys to the side. This is very chimpanzee. In chimpanzees, we have usually old males who are over the hill, who cannot be alpha male themselves anymore, but they start playing games and forming coalitions, and behind the backs of others. And they become extremely influential, and you may actually have old males who are more influential than the alpha male himself. Just as an example, the three males that I used to work with most at the Dutch zoo long ago, where I worked, and the middle male here is a 17-year-old alpha male. The male whom he is grooming on the side is twice as old, and this old male has made him the leader. So you can imagine that that old male has an enormous amount of power, because he has made the alpha male alpha male. The male on the right is individually the strongest male. In captivity, you can test it out, and you can know that this male has no trouble with either one. He has only trouble with the combination of the two. And so the coalition formation that goes on in chimpanzee society makes it much more complex than you think. It means, for example, that the smallest male in a group can be the alpha male. You don't need to be the biggest and strongest male. The smallest male, if he has the right friends and keeps them happy, or he has female support, he can be the alpha male. So the coalition system makes everything complex, and I'm always waiting here in the US for the primaries, the end of the primaries, because that's a moment where you need to demonstrate unity. Now let me first show you how the unity is shown in chimpanzees. What you see here is two males on the left who are standing together. You also see the big canine teeth that they have. And they're standing together and they demonstrate to the rest of the group, "We are together. We are a unit." The males on the right are walking together in synchrony. That's another way of demonstrating that you are together. And so demonstrating unity is extremely important in a coalition system, and as I said, in the primaries always I'm waiting for that moment because then you have two members of the same party who have been fighting with each other, and they need to come together at some moment. And it leads to very awkward situations. People who don't like each other need to embrace each other and stand together, and that's absolutely essential for the unity of the party, and if you don't do that, the party may fall apart. And so if it doesn't go well, like in this particular case — (Laughter) then the party is in deep doo-doo because they have not demonstrated unity. So that's a very important part of the coalition system, and that's something that we share between humans and chimpanzees. Now, how do you become an alpha male? First of all, you need to be impressive and intimidating and demonstrate your vigor on occasion and show that you are very strong, and there's all sorts of ways of doing that. But other things that you need to do is you need to be generous. So, for example, males who go on a campaign to dethrone the leader, which may take two or three months where they're testing all the coalitions in the group, they also become extremely generous. They share food very easily with everyone. Or they start to tickle the babies of the females. They're normally, male chimpanzees, not particularly interested in infants, but when they are campaigning like that, they get very interested in infants and they tickle them, and they try to curry favor with the females. (Laughter) So in humans, of course, I am always intrigued by these men who are candidates and hold babies up like this. This is not particularly something that babies like — (Laughter) but since it is a signal to the rest of the world, they need to hold them in the air. And I was really intrigued by, when we had a female candidate in the last election, the way she held babies was more like this, which is what babies really like. But she of course didn't need to send the message that she could hold a baby without dropping it, which was what the man was doing. So this is a very common tactic, and male chimpanzees, they spend a lot of time currying favor with all sorts of parties when they are campaigning. Now, what are the privileges and the costs of being an alpha male? The biggest privilege is females. Food is really irrelevant. Male chimpanzees can go a week without food if there's a female in estrus and they're sexually interested in her. Food is secondary to sex. And so the male chimpanzees — and we evolutionary biologists, of course, we have an explanation for this, is that sex leads to reproduction, and reproductive success is the measure of evolution. That's how everything evolves. And so if males can enhance their reproductive success by being high ranking, you get automatically the ambition to be high ranking in the males. So that's the privilege. The costs, one cost is of course that you need to keep your partners happy. So if you come to power with the support of an old male, you need to let that old male mate with females. If you don't do that, that old male is going to get mad at you, and you're going to lose him as a partner. So there's a transaction going on. If you become alpha male this way, you need to keep your partners happy. And so that's one of the costs. The second cost is that everyone wants your position. Alpha male position is a very important position, and everyone wants to take it from you, and so you constantly have to watch your back. You have to be extremely vigilant. For example, you have to disrupt the coalitions of others and that's what male chimpanzees do quite a bit. Divide and rule strategies, they have. And so that's a very stressful situation, and we actually have data on this. The data comes from the field, from baboons not chimpanzees in this case, where they did fecal samples on the baboons and they analyzed them for glucocorticoids. And what you see here is a graph where you see that the lower ranking the male baboon is, the higher is his cortisol level in the feces, but the alpha male, as you see, has just as high a level as the lowest-ranking males, and so you may think that being alpha male is nice and dandy and is wonderful, but it's actually a very stressful position, and we can demonstrate that physiologically. Now, what are the obligations? And here, for me, it gets really interesting, and it deviates very much from your typical image of the alpha male. The alpha male has two sorts of obligations. One is to keep the peace in the group. We call that the control role, to control fights in the group, and the second is to be the most empathic, the consoler in chief, basically, of the nation, so to speak. So first of all, keeping the peace. This is a male who stops a fight between two females. Two females on the left and the right have been screaming and yelling at each other over food, because food is very important for the females, and so he stops the fight between them and stands between them like this. And it's very interesting to me that alpha males, when they do this, they become impartial. They don't support their mom or their best buddy. No, no, they stop fights, and they come up for the underdog in general. And this makes them extremely popular in the group, because they provide security for the lowest-ranking members of the group. And so they become impartial, which is an unusual condition for a chimpanzee to be in, because they're usually very fond of their friends and so on, and these alpha males who are good at this, they can be very effective at keeping the peace in the group. And the second thing they do is they show empathy for others. Now, I do an enormous amount of research on empathy, and I don't have time to go into it, but empathy is nowadays a topic that we study in rodents and dogs and elephants and primates, all sorts of animals. And what you see here is two bonobos. The one in front has been beaten up in a fight. The one in the back puts her arms around her and consoles her. This is also actually how we measure empathy in young children, by looking at how they respond to distressed individuals. And high-ranking males, they do a lot of this. High-ranking males provide an enormous amount of comfort in the group, and they go to places where there are earthquakes or hurricanes and they provide comfort. The pope does this. The presidents do this. All the leaders in the world have to do this job. The queen does it and so on. They all have to do this job, so providing consolation, and that's a very important task. And males who are good at these two, keeping the peace and providing comfort, they become extremely popular leaders, and there's actually some self-interest involved in it. They don't do it just for the group, because it also stabilizes their position. The more popular a male becomes as alpha male and the more the rest of them respects them and looks up to them, the better their position is defended in case it's going to be challenged by somebody else, because then, of course, the whole group is going to support that male because they want to keep a leader who is good for them. So the group is usually very supportive of males who are good leaders, and it's not supportive at all of bullies. And when bullies lose their position, they may end up in a very bad situation there. This is data actually on the consolation behavior. This is data on consolation in chimpanzees, and you see for the medium- and low-ranking individuals, the females do more of it than the males. This is basically the whole community. And this is true for all the mammal studies on empathy is that females have more of it than males. But look at the alpha male. The alpha male does far more than anybody else. And so that's the data on alpha males being the consoler in chief, basically. The last thing I want to say is something about alpha females. This is a picture of Mama, the alpha female in the Arnhem zoo where I used to work, who is now all over the internet, I think a hundred million clicks at the moment, for a video of her dying at the age of 59, which happened last year. And Mama was an absolute centrum of the group. So she was not physically capable of dominating the males. She ranked below the males, but she was the center of the community, and if there was big trouble in the community, everyone would end up in the arms of Mama. And so she was a very important figure. And so I don't want to minimize the position of alpha females in the chimpanzee group. And then we have a species that is equally close to us as the chimpanzee, the bonobo. We often forget about the bonobo, but the bonobos have a matriarchal society and the alpha individual is a female, generally. Generally, it's a female who is at the top of the community, and we know much less about how this is done and how they get to that position, and what they do with it, because we know much less about bonobos in general. But I do want to emphasize that the alpha in a group doesn't need to be a male, and that actually in one of our close relatives, it is a female. So the message I want to leave you with is that if you are looking at men in our society who are the boss of, let's say, a family or a business or Washington or whatever, you call them alpha male, you should not insult chimpanzees by using the wrong label. (Laughter) You should not call a bully an alpha male. Someone who is big and strong and intimidates and insults everyone is not necessarily an alpha male. An alpha male has all sorts of qualities, and I have seen bully alpha males in chimpanzees, they do occur, but most of the ones that we have have leadership capacities and are integrated in their community, and, like Amos at the end, they are loved and respected, and so it's a very different situation than you may think. And I thank you. (Applause) |
Technology that knows what you're feeling | {0: 'Poppy Crum builds technologies that best leverage human physiology to enhance our experiences and how we interact with the world.'} | TED2018 | What happens when technology knows more about us than we do? A computer now can detect our slightest facial microexpressions and be able to tell the difference between a real smile and a fake one. That's only the beginning. Technology has become incredibly intelligent and already knows a lot about our internal states. And whether we like it or not, we already are sharing parts of our inner lives that's out of our control. That seems like a problem, because a lot of us like to keep what's going on inside from what people actually see. We want to have agency over what we share and what we don't. We all like to have a poker face. But I'm here to tell you that I think that's a thing of the past. And while that might sound scary, it's not necessarily a bad thing. I've spent a lot of time studying the circuits in the brain that create the unique perceptual realities that we each have. And now I bring that together with the capabilities of current technology to create new technology that does make us better, feel more, connect more. And I believe to do that, we have to be OK losing some of our agency. With some animals, it's really amazing, and we get to see into their internal experiences. We get this upfront look at the mechanistic interaction between how they respond to the world around them and the state of their biological systems. This is where evolutionary pressures like eating, mating and making sure we don't get eaten drive deterministic behavioral responses to information in the world. And we get to see into this window, into their internal states and their biological experiences. It's really pretty cool. Now, stay with me for a moment — I'm a violinist, not a singer. But the spider's already given me a critical review. (Video) (Singing in a low pitch) (Singing in a middle pitch) (Singing in a high pitch) (Singing in a low pitch) (Singing in a middle pitch) (Singing in a high pitch) (Laughter) Poppy Crum: It turns out, some spiders tune their webs like violins to resonate with certain sounds. And likely, the harmonics of my voice as it went higher coupled with how loud I was singing recreated either the predatory call of an echolocating bat or a bird, and the spider did what it should. It predictively told me to bug off. I love this. The spider's responding to its external world in a way that we get to see and know what's happening to its internal world. Biology is controlling the spider's response; it's wearing its internal state on its sleeve. But us, humans — we're different. We like to think we have cognitive control over what people see, know and understand about our internal states — our emotions, our insecurities, our bluffs, our trials and tribulations — and how we respond. We get to have our poker face. Or maybe we don't. Try this with me. Your eye responds to how hard your brain is working. The response you're about to see is driven entirely by mental effort and has nothing to do with changes in lighting. We know this from neuroscience. I promise, your eyes are doing the same thing as the subject in our lab, whether you want them to or not. At first, you'll hear some voices. Try and understand them and keep watching the eye in front of you. It's going to be hard at first, one should drop out, and it should get really easy. You're going to see the change in effort in the diameter of the pupil. (Video) (Two overlapping voices talking) (Single voice) Intelligent technology depends on personal data. (Two overlapping voices talking) (Single voice) Intelligent technology depends on personal data. PC: Your pupil doesn't lie. Your eye gives away your poker face. When your brain's having to work harder, your autonomic nervous system drives your pupil to dilate. When it's not, it contracts. When I take away one of the voices, the cognitive effort to understand the talkers gets a lot easier. I could have put the two voices in different spatial locations, I could have made one louder. You would have seen the same thing. We might think we have more agency over the reveal of our internal state than that spider, but maybe we don't. Today's technology is starting to make it really easy to see the signals and tells that give us away. The amalgamation of sensors paired with machine learning on us, around us and in our environments, is a lot more than cameras and microphones tracking our external actions. Our bodies radiate our stories from changes in the temperature of our physiology. We can look at these as infrared thermal images showing up behind me, where reds are hotter and blues are cooler. The dynamic signature of our thermal response gives away our changes in stress, how hard our brain is working, whether we're paying attention and engaged in the conversation we might be having and even whether we're experiencing a picture of fire as if it were real. We can actually see people give off heat on their cheeks in response to an image of flame. But aside from giving away our poker bluffs, what if dimensions of data from someone's thermal response gave away a glow of interpersonal interest? Tracking the honesty of feelings in someone's thermal image might be a new part of how we fall in love and see attraction. Our technology can listen, develop insights and make predictions about our mental and physical health just by analyzing the timing dynamics of our speech and language picked up by microphones. Groups have shown that changes in the statistics of our language paired with machine learning can predict the likelihood someone will develop psychosis. I'm going to take it a step further and look at linguistic changes and changes in our voice that show up with a lot of different conditions. Dementia, diabetes can alter the spectral coloration of our voice. Changes in our language associated with Alzheimer's can sometimes show up more than 10 years before clinical diagnosis. What we say and how we say it tells a much richer story than we used to think. And devices we already have in our homes could, if we let them, give us invaluable insight back. The chemical composition of our breath gives away our feelings. There's a dynamic mixture of acetone, isoprene and carbon dioxide that changes when our heart speeds up, when our muscles tense, and all without any obvious change in our behaviors. Alright, I want you to watch this clip with me. Some things might be going on on the side screens, but try and focus on the image in the front and the man at the window. (Eerie music) (Woman screams) PC: Sorry about that. I needed to get a reaction. (Laughter) I'm actually tracking the carbon dioxide you exhale in the room right now. We've installed tubes throughout the theater, lower to the ground, because CO2 is heavier than air. But they're connected to a device in the back that lets us measure, in real time, with high precision, the continuous differential concentration of CO2. The clouds on the sides are actually the real-time data visualization of the density of our CO2. You might still see a patch of red on the screen, because we're showing increases with larger colored clouds, larger colored areas of red. And that's the point where a lot of us jumped. It's our collective suspense driving a change in carbon dioxide. Alright, now, watch this with me one more time. (Cheerful music) (Woman laughs) PC: You knew it was coming. But it's a lot different when we changed the creator's intent. Changing the music and the sound effects completely alter the emotional impact of that scene. And we can see it in our breath. Suspense, fear, joy all show up as reproducible, visually identifiable moments. We broadcast a chemical signature of our emotions. It is the end of the poker face. Our spaces, our technology will know what we're feeling. We will know more about each other than we ever have. We get a chance to reach in and connect to the experience and sentiments that are fundamental to us as humans in our senses, emotionally and socially. I believe it is the era of the empath. And we are enabling the capabilities that true technological partners can bring to how we connect with each other and with our technology. If we recognize the power of becoming technological empaths, we get this opportunity where technology can help us bridge the emotional and cognitive divide. And in that way, we get to change how we tell our stories. We can enable a better future for technologies like augmented reality to extend our own agency and connect us at a much deeper level. Imagine a high school counselor being able to realize that an outwardly cheery student really was having a deeply hard time, where reaching out can make a crucial, positive difference. Or authorities, being able to know the difference between someone having a mental health crisis and a different type of aggression, and responding accordingly. Or an artist, knowing the direct impact of their work. Leo Tolstoy defined his perspective of art by whether what the creator intended was experienced by the person on the other end. Today's artists can know what we're feeling. But regardless of whether it's art or human connection, today's technologies will know and can know what we're experiencing on the other side, and this means we can be closer and more authentic. But I realize a lot of us have a really hard time with the idea of sharing our data, and especially the idea that people know things about us that we didn't actively choose to share. Anytime we talk to someone, look at someone or choose not to look, data is exchanged, given away, that people use to learn, make decisions about their lives and about ours. I'm not looking to create a world where our inner lives are ripped open and our personal data and our privacy given away to people and entities where we don't want to see it go. But I am looking to create a world where we can care about each other more effectively, we can know more about when someone is feeling something that we ought to pay attention to. And we can have richer experiences from our technology. Any technology can be used for good or bad. Transparency to engagement and effective regulation are absolutely critical to building the trust for any of this. But the benefits that "empathetic technology" can bring to our lives are worth solving the problems that make us uncomfortable. And if we don't, there are too many opportunities and feelings we're going to be missing out on. Thank you. (Applause) |
The science of hearing | null | TED-Ed | You hear the gentle lap of waves, the distant cawing of a seagull. But then an annoying whine interrupts the peace, getting closer, and closer, and closer. Until...whack! You dispatch the offending mosquito, and calm is restored. How did you detect that noise from afar and target its maker with such precision? The ability to recognize sounds and identify their location is possible thanks to the auditory system. That’s comprised of two main parts: the ear and the brain. The ear’s task is to convert sound energy into neural signals; the brain’s is to receive and process the information those signals contain. To understand how that works, we can follow a sound on its journey into the ear. The source of a sound creates vibrations that travel as waves of pressure through particles in air, liquids, or solids. But our inner ear, called the cochlea, is actually filled with saltwater-like fluids. So, the first problem to solve is how to convert those sound waves, wherever they’re coming from, into waves in the fluid. The solution is the eardrum, or tympanic membrane, and the tiny bones of the middle ear. Those convert the large movements of the eardrum into pressure waves in the fluid of the cochlea. When sound enters the ear canal, it hits the eardrum and makes it vibrate like the head of a drum. The vibrating eardrum jerks a bone called the hammer, which hits the anvil and moves the third bone called the stapes. Its motion pushes the fluid within the long chambers of the cochlea. Once there, the sound vibrations have finally been converted into vibrations of a fluid, and they travel like a wave from one end of the cochlea to the other. A surface called the basilar membrane runs the length of the cochlea. It’s lined with hair cells that have specialized components called stereocilia, which move with the vibrations of the cochlear fluid and the basilar membrane. This movement triggers a signal that travels through the hair cell, into the auditory nerve, then onward to the brain, which interprets it as a specific sound. When a sound makes the basilar membrane vibrate, not every hair cell moves - only selected ones, depending on the frequency of the sound. This comes down to some fine engineering. At one end, the basilar membrane is stiff, vibrating only in response to short wavelength, high-frequency sounds. The other is more flexible, vibrating only in the presence of longer wavelength, low-frequency sounds. So, the noises made by the seagull and mosquito vibrate different locations on the basilar membrane, like playing different keys on a piano. But that’s not all that’s going on. The brain still has another important task to fulfill: identifying where a sound is coming from. For that, it compares the sounds coming into the two ears to locate the source in space. A sound from directly in front of you will reach both your ears at the same time. You’ll also hear it at the same intensity in each ear. However, a low-frequency sound coming from one side will reach the near ear microseconds before the far one. And high-frequency sounds will sound more intense to the near ear because they’re blocked from the far ear by your head. These strands of information reach special parts of the brainstem that analyze time and intensity differences between your ears. They send the results of their analysis up to the auditory cortex. Now, the brain has all the information it needs: the patterns of activity that tell us what the sound is, and information about where it is in space. Not everyone has normal hearing. Hearing loss is the third most common chronic disease in the world. Exposure to loud noises and some drugs can kill hair cells, preventing signals from traveling from the ear to the brain. Diseases like osteosclerosis freeze the tiny bones in the ear so they no longer vibrate. And with tinnitus, the brain does strange things to make us think there’s a sound when there isn’t one. But when it does work, our hearing is an incredible, elegant system. Our ears enclose a fine-tuned piece of biological machinery that converts the cacophony of vibrations in the air around us into precisely tuned electrical impulses that distinguish claps, taps, sighs, and flies. |
How to restore trust in Journalism | {0: 'A world-renowned journalist and television personality, Ann graduated from the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism, started her career in Ashland (and then Portland!), then quickly rose to global prominence. Most recognized for her high-profile interviews, as well as in-depth coverage of natural disasters and human suffering in active war zones, Ann’s reporting is testament to the power of journalism and its ability to connect us all.'} | TEDxPortland | Who can we trust to tell us the truth? Once in another tumultuous era, as the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Civil Rights and Women's Liberation Movements were challenging America to its core, my dad and I would watch Walter Cronkite, a man he trusted to tell us what was happening. Dad, a politically conservative career military man, cared a lot about this country and was determined to make sure he was well informed. He listened to the radio every morning, read the paper every afternoon, and watched the news on TV every evening before sitting down to dinner, or at some point, he would almost always launch a debate about what was happening in the world. He'd pound the table and say something like "Don't those Vietnam war protesters know it's my country, right or wrong?" And I'd react with something like "But, Dad, don't they have a point? I mean, what are we doing in Vietnam?" And he'd puff up and get red in the face and respond with something like "I can't believe I'm hearing those words out of the mouth of my own daughter." (Laughter) Our arguments could get so loud, my brothers and sisters would sometimes pick up their plates to eat somewhere else. Dad really liked to win these arguments. But even when he didn't, he'd respect my opinion. Sometimes, he would even say, "Ann, I don't always agree with you, but I'd still vote for you for President." (Laughter) (Applause) There were times, however, usually when Walter was off and someone else was substituting, when Dad would hear something on the evening news that would alarm him far more than the stories of the day. All it would take was one phrase, a changed tone of voice, a raised eyebrow, or even just a single word that struck Dad as opinionated, and he was offended. Suddenly, he was shaking his finger at the television set, shouting, "Stop telling me what to think! Just give me the facts!" And then he would look over at me and say, "See, Ann? He's disrespecting us, trying to tell us what to think as if we were stupid and can't make up our own minds." Boy, if my dad could see what counts for some of TV journalism today. (Laughter) (Applause) He would want to be right up here with me, standing right next to me, suggesting an idea that might be worth spreading. Journalism is only trustworthy when it dependably offers accurate, verifiable facts, not bias and speculation, and not for ratings, circulation or clicks (Applause) or for any financial or political motivation, but with one motive and one motive only: to reveal the truth for the greater public good. The bridge to trust is truth, and it's time to make things right. (Applause) (Cheers) What do we define as truth? Well, lately I've wondered if we've all gotten a little confused about what truth is and what it isn't. People ask, "Whose truth?" uncertain if objective, absolute truth even exists, thinking, as some philosophers have argued, that as it requires human judgment, truth is ultimately subjective. As others see it, reporters can't be fair and unbiased, because being humans, of course they have opinions and so should at least tell us what those opinions are. Other people, who've noticed objective facts now seem less influential than emotion and personal beliefs in shaping public opinion, have gone so far as to say we live in a post-truth era. To all this, my dad would say, "Balderdash!" (Laughter) He was a Navy man who didn't like to swear - go figure. I, however, don't seem to have that problem. (Laughter) (Applause) So maybe I should just call it what it is: FUBAR - Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition. (Applause) (Cheers) I appreciate philosophers, but not being one, I can't settle the "Is truth subjective or objective?" debate. Though it does seem to be an objective, verifiable fact that I'm standing on this stage and that I'm a little nervous, worried that I may have overdressed, and I'm wishing that I wore more comfortable shoes. (Laughter) There is actually compelling evidence that humans can be fair and impartial, not just from the ancient biblical story of Solomon, but from the known science, which tell us that fairness along with empathy are fundamental human traits, deeply rooted in our genetics. If it wasn't for these traits, we might not even be able to live amongst each other. And as a reporter, I know you can get in so deep, listening to and documenting all sides of the story, searching for the truth, that you don't even know what your own opinion is. I know because I've done it. And because we as a species cannot live long, cannot long endure without objective facts, unelaborated and unvarnished, it can be argued they still and will always matter. We need truth. Perhaps especially from journalism, which, when practiced well, can help us see each other and ourselves more honestly, tell us what we need to know to be smarter citizens, show us how to live healthier and more connected lives, and even warn us when we need to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe from danger. Post-truth? Really? We do seem to be experiencing a loss of credibility, a demise in the face of a rising tide of lies, in our ability to trust what we're told are objective facts are either objective or facts. Where does the information that's sowing this distrust and confusion come from? And what is it doing to us and the quality of our relationships with each other? Instead of a Walter Cronkite today, i.e., someone who a significant number of people trust, we are exposed to an overwhelming number of sources of information on multiple platforms, working around the clock to get our attention, some motivated to purposely manipulate us with lies and propaganda, some inept, shelling out incomplete, misleading or poorly-sourced information and some doing exemplary reporting but still doubted almost as much for any mistakes or perceived bias. The net impact of all of this is a chaotic overload of competing, conflicting and confusing information. And while our brains are truly excellent at collecting data, we're not always so great at remembering where we got it. So what we learn from a trusted source can easily get jumbled up in our brains with what we read on a website, saw in a tweet or a video posted on Facebook or heard from a pundit speculating on cable television. If you ever saw the David Bowie movie "The Man Who Fell to Earth" - I sometimes feel we're all in that scene in which he's watching a huge wall of TV monitors, each one tuned to a different channel, and suddenly, he can't take it anymore, and he starts yelling, "Get out of my mind, all of you!" Bet you didn't expect a David Bowie reference today. (Laughter) Perhaps never before have so many consumed so much news and yet have been so woefully misinformed. When, in this swirling chaos, can we be certain the information we need or want to know is accurate? The internet is an abyss as well as a wonderland. It mirrors the darkest dark in us and the brightest light of humanity and all there is in between. And because of it, no matter what comes next in journalism, there now seems no doubt that you and me and every one of us must become a better editor. So here, from one journalist's playbook, are some tried and true strategies that might up your game. Focus on defense and develop a skill for listening to both sides of a story even if it pains you. Realize - (Applause) Realize virtually every source wants a story told as he or she sees it. That means even seemingly good, honest people can tell you just the facts that support their point of view, sometimes leaving out key details. They might even distort the facts, purposely misdirect you or even out-and-out lie. Ask yourself, "What's the motivating force for this source to tell the story?" And could that motivation be influencing the story that you're getting? Then ask, "Is this source in a position, having been an eyewitness or having some expertise, to even know what is true?" Or is he or she wasting your time with speculation? And because even eyewitnesses and experts can get it wrong, you have to seek out sources from other points of view and then critically examine their motivations and credibility as well. Rarely is the truth one-sided; it tends to be nuanced. (Applause) And it's not always fair. But you may never find it unless you search fairly, with a mind that is truly open. And then, even if you think you have a balanced view of the story, you have to reexamine the facts and motivations and reputations of your sources one more time to make sure you weren't played or manipulated. And if your sources are anonymous, you better check and double check again. It is exhausting, but after this Sherlock Holmes-ing, you usually get the facts that people need to know to make up their own minds. This is Journalism 101, how we're trained in journalism schools to work in defense of truth. Why are even long-trusted news organizations that know how to gather the facts vulnerable to attacks on their credibility? Journalism tends to be vulnerable because of the enormous power of credible information. When we believe the same story, we can find a common purpose and work together. This is what has made humans an unstoppable force throughout our history. The historian Yuval Harari suggests this is why we are the only human species to survive when once there were at least six and why we've risen from the middle of the animal kingdom, once huddled around fires in fear of being eaten, to now the top, having the power to decide what species live or die, and how we ourselves will evolve from here. This power to move people is why everyone wants to control the narrative, why truth is fought over and is the victim, usually the first victim, especially in war. It's why journalists, as messengers of truth, are physically attacked in some parts of the world and even killed. At the same time, unfortunately, journalism is not like mathematics, in which two plus two is always four. Journalism is by humans, about humans and for humans and so is inherently as fallible as humans and as vulnerable to criticism. Add to that, the job is to ask prying questions, to push past the norms of good manners for honest answers, and then to race to report stories that can be controversial, embarrassing or infuriating. If you want to be popular, don't be a journalist. (Laughter) Of course, it doesn't help journalism's credibility when it's under constant attack by political leaders in the United States and around the world. (Applause) It doesn't help that emerging technologies have eliminated or diminished hundreds of local newspapers around the country and have failed, so far, to replace them with anything close to the same quality and range of credible reporting. (Applause) But perhaps what is making journalism most vulnerable is that in this industry shift, some media executives, struggling to keep making money for their corporate owners, are pressuring journalists to make choices that weaken their credibility. The pressure for profits is one reason we have witnessed the stunning growth of openly biased news coverage, especially on cable television, where not everyone who is telling us the news is actually a journalist. Some are advocates with political agendas, some are activists, some are former political operatives, and some are what were once called "opinionaters," people whose profession is to give their opinions and theories. So now I'm the one yelling at the television set: "Just give me the facts! Stop trying to tell us what to think!" (Applause) Opinion, thoughtful and supported with facts, has an important place in journalism, but it is not news. Thus, allowing viewers to think it's news, to fail to differentiate it, is fundamentally dishonest. News is not left or right; it's based on facts that are either right or wrong. (Applause) And for the record, ranting from any point of view is not journalism. Besides, it has serious side effects: it makes you look a little nuts. (Laughter) In the quest for profits, corporate owners are punching holes through the long-standing wall protecting journalists from corporate meddling. In some companies, the wall is crumbling. I have heard a request from corporate executives to kill a news story. I have seen a media company's advertising side try to get products placed in a news broadcast. In some companies, the wall appears to be collapsing. Recently, the nation's largest broadcaster, Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which owns and operates more than 190 stations, engaged in corporate manipulation when it required dozens of anchors to read a script the company had provided. The push for profits is also pressuring journalists to muddy their judgment with worries about reaching clicks, ratings and circulation goals. This can affect the decisions they make about what stories to cover, what interviews to do and how headlines and teasers should be written. The public is not stupid. It can sense these motives in the work and the hype. It knows the truth is in trouble. How do we make things right and defend our access to accurate, verifiable reporting, which according to our nation's Founding Fathers, our democracy needs to survive? We need a renaissance in journalism. (Applause) And it is actually possible that it is already beginning. We can see some of our nation's newspapers and magazines, in spite of everything, leading a rebirth, doubling down on serious, competitive and groundbreaking shoe-leather journalism, working to tell all the nuances of the stories they're covering, including both domestic and foreign. Our citizens are awakening to the reasons journalism is vital in a democracy. They're reminded by the movies "Spotlight" and "The Post," and they're increasingly demanding and supporting quality work, and in some cases, they are even donating to the Committee to Protect Journalists. And journalists can be seen increasingly standing up to corporate pressures, including at the Denver Post and at Sinclair TV stations. They're also pushing across platforms to do smarter and more impactful reporting and balanced stories. And in some newsrooms, editors are reviving investigative reporting. (Applause) Credibility lost is never fully regained. But what survives can be protected, and new bridges can be built by the journalists still to come. For that to happen, for news organizations to better endure attacks on their credibility, journalists must be able to work with one motive: the public good. Corporate owners and executives must know how to stay in their lane and out of influencing what and how stories are covered. Investors and advertisers will need to stop pressuring journalists to be their pot of gold and do what's right for this country: fund excellence and get out of the way. Editors and executive producers will have to fight harder against the blurring between opinion and news until all the stories we need to know, not just the ones or the one that might increase ratings and clicks. (Applause) Technologists should realize they are not journalists; they are platform creators and owners and should hire solid reporters and then leave them alone and make those reporters great forces for good. (Applause) And news consumers, if you want the facts, subscribe. (Applause) Read newspapers and perhaps ask, Why would journalism that's any good be free? (Applause) Why do any one of us routinely put up with baseless opinion, speculation and propaganda? And why do we waste so much time on the Kardashians? (Laughter) (Cheers) (Applause) Too much sugar just makes you fat. (Laughter) Journalists, keep going and stay humble. We may know a little about a lot, but few of us know enough about anything to have an opinion that matters. So we dig for the facts that do matter, from all sides, and then fight like hell to tell them. And potential future journalists, your country needs you. Journalism is war, a fight every day for truth. And it takes more than being curious and knowing how to write or blog or shoot a video or ask questions. It takes courage, and most of all, it takes integrity. Because journalism is only as good as the people who practice it and their willingness to stand up and fight for the stories that mean something. You will make mistakes; we all do. But with practice and instincts you may not know you have, you will learn to make less of them. You will face a lack of resources, you will be denied access, people will refuse to give you interviews, editors and executive producers will give you impossible deadlines and not enough time or space to tell your stories. This is emotionally hard and sometimes around-the-clock work. It might cause people to hate you. It might put you in danger or expose you to trauma that might give you PTSD. This I know from experience. But after nearly 40 years at this, I still stand here before you and can honestly say with all my heart: journalism is a noble calling, a way to serve people and respond like an EMT or an emergency room doctor in a crisis with information they may need. If you work for the people and not for those who pay your checks, you will make the right choices about who to interview, what to ask and how to tell your stories, and this will bring your news organizations value that will make even your bosses happy. Be incorruptible. Do it with a pure motive, earnestly, without bias and expectations. Do it even though you may never know the impact of your stories. Do it even if you know you will be criticized. But get it right, which you will find is far more important than getting it first. Attribute, (Applause) attribute whenever possible. Check, check, and then double check the facts. Ruthlessly edit out any word or phrase or tone in your work that could get in the way of people making up their own minds. This is how we build trust, by working to be worthy of it. It is time to lift truth off its knees, prize it, cherish it, defend it and watch it rise along with all of us. Thank you. (Applause) (Cheers) |
How we can bring mental health support to refugees | {0: 'Essam Doad provides first response mental health interventions to refugees and displaced populations.'} | TED2018 | For the last two and a half years, I'm one of the few, if not the only, child psychiatrist operating in refugee camps, shorelines and rescue boats in Greece and the Mediterranean Sea. And I can say, with great confidence, that we are witnessing a mental-health catastrophe that will affect most of us, and it will change our world. I live in Haifa, but nowadays, I spend most of my time abroad. During my time on the Greek island of Lesbos and on the rescue boats in the Mediterranean, thousands of refugee boats arrived to the shoreline, crowded with more than 1.5 million refugees. One-fourth of them are children, fleeing war and hardship. Each boat carries different sufferings and traumas from Syria, Iraq, Afganistan and different countries in Africa. In the last three years alone, more than 12,000 refugees lost their lives. And hundreds of thousands lost their souls and their mental health due to this cruel and traumatic experience. I want to tell you about Omar, a five-year-old Syrian refugee boy who arrived to the shore on Lesbos on a crowded rubber boat. Crying, frightened, unable to understand what's happening to him, he was right on the verge of developing a new trauma. I knew right away that this was a golden hour, a short period of time in which I could change his story, I could change the story that he would tell himself for the rest of his life. I could reframe his memories. I quickly held out my hands and said to his shaking mother in Arabic, (Arabic) "Ateeni elwalad o khudi nafas." "Give me the boy, and take a breath." His mother gave him to me. Omar looked at me with scared, tearful eyes and said, (Arabic) "Ammo (uncle in Arabic), shu hada?" "What is this?" as he pointed out to the police helicopter hovering above us. "It's a helicopter! It's here to photograph you with big cameras, because only the great and the powerful heroes, like you, Omar, can cross the sea." Omar looked at me, stopped crying and asked me, (Arabic) "Ana batal?" "I'm a hero?" I talked to Omar for 15 minutes. And I gave his parents some guidance to follow. This short psychological intervention decreases the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health issues in the future, preparing Omar to get an education, join the workforce, raise a family and beyond. How? By stimulating the good memories that will be stored in the amygdala, the emotional storage of the human brain. These memories will fight the traumatic ones, if they are reactivated in the future. To Omar, the smell of the sea will not just remind him of his traumatic journey from Syria. Because to Omar, this story is now a story of bravery. This is the power of the golden hour, which can reframe the trauma and establish a new narrative. But Omar is only one out of more than 350,000 children without the proper mental health support in this crisis alone. Three hundred and fifty thousand children and me. We need mental health professionals to join rescue teams during times of active crisis. This is why my wife and I and friends co-founded "Humanity Crew." One of the few aid organizations in the world that specializes in providing psychosocial aid and first-response mental health interventions to refugees and displaced populations. To provide them with a suitable intervention, we create the four-step approach, a psychosocial work plan that follows the refugees on each step of their journey. Starting inside the sea, on the rescue boats, as mental health lifeguards. Later in the camps, hospitals and through our online clinic that breaks down borders and overcomes languages. And ending in the asylum countries, helping them integrate. Since our first mission in 2015, "Humanity Crew" had 194 delegations of qualified, trained volunteers and therapists. We have provided 26,000 hours of mental health support to over 10,000 refugees. We can all do something to prevent this mental health catastrophe. We need to acknowledge that first aid is not just needed for the body, but it has also to include the mind, the soul. The impact on the soul is hardly visible, but the damage can be there for life. Let's not forget that what distinguishes us humans from machines is the beautiful and the delicate soul within us. Let's try harder to save more Omars. Thank you. (Applause) (Cheers) (Applause) |
How Netflix changed entertainment -- and where it's headed | {0: 'As co-founder and CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings is revolutionizing the world of entertainment.', 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: I have been long so fascinated and amazed by so many aspects of Netflix. You're full of surprises, if I may say so. One of those surprises happened, I think about six years ago. So, the company back then was doing really well, but you were basically a streaming service for other people's films and TV content. You'd persuaded Wall Street that you were right to make the kind of radical shift away from just sending people DVDs, so you were doing it by streaming. And you were growing like a weed — you had more than six million subscribers and healthy growth rates, and yet, you chose that moment to kind of make a giant — really, a bet-the-company decision. What was that decision, and what motivated it? Reed Hastings: Well, cable networks from all time have started on other people's content and then grown into doing their own originals. So we knew of the general idea for quite a while. And we had actually tried to get into original content back in 2005, when we were on DVD only and buying films at Sundance — Maggie Gyllenhaal, "Sherrybaby," we published on DVD — we were a mini studio. And it didn't work out, because we were subscale. And then, as you said, in 2011, Ted Sarandos, my partner at Netflix who runs content, got very excited about "House of Cards." And at that time, it was 100 million dollars, it was a fantastic investment, and it was in competition with HBO. And that was really the breakthrough, that he picked right upfront. CA: But that was a significant percentage of the revenue of the company at that time. But how could you get confident that that was actually worth doing? If you got that wrong, it might have been really devastating for the company. RH: Yeah, we weren't confident. I mean, that's the whole tension of it. We were like, "Holy ...!" — I can't say that. Yeah, it was scary. (Laughter) CA: And with that, it wasn't just producing new content. You also, pretty much with that, if I understand right, introduced this idea of binge-viewing. It wasn't, "We're going to do these episodes and build excitement" — boom! — all at one time. And that consumer mode hadn't really been tested. Why did you risk that? RH: Well, you know, we had grown up shipping DVDs. And then there were series, box sets, on DVD. And all of us had that experience watching some of the great HBO content you know, with the DVD — next episode, next episode. And so that was the trigger to make us think, wow, you know, with episodic content, especially serialized, it's so powerful to have all the episodes at once. And it's something that linear TV can't do. And so both of those made it really positive. CA: And so, did it work out on the math pretty much straight away, that an hour spent watching "House of Cards," say, was more profitable to you than an hour spent watching someone else's licensed content? RH: You know, because we're subscription, we don't have to track it at that level. And so it's really about making the brand stronger, so that more people want to join. And "House of Cards" absolutely did that, because then many people would talk about it and associate that brand with us, whereas "Mad Men" we carried — great show, AMC show — but they didn't associate it with Netflix, even if they watched it on Netflix. CA: And so you added all these other remarkable series, "Narcos," "Jessica Jones," "Orange is the New Black," "The Crown," "Black Mirror" — personal favorite — "Stranger Things" and so on. And so, this coming year, the level of investment you're planning to make in new content is not 100 million. It's what? RH: It's about eight billion dollars around the world. And it's not enough. There are so many great shows on other networks. And so we have a long way to go. CA: But eight billion — that's pretty much higher than any other content commissioner at this point? RH: No, Disney is in that realm, and if they're able to acquire Fox, they're even bigger. And then, really, that's spread globally, so it's not as much as it sounds. (Laughter) CA: But clearly, from the Barry Dillers and others in the media business, it feels like from nowhere, this company has come and has really revolutionized the business. It's like, as if Blockbuster one day said, "We're going to make Blockbuster videos," and then, six years later, was as big as Disney. I mean, that story would never have happened, and yet it did. RH: That's the bitch about the internet — it moves fast, you know? Everything around us moves really quick. CA: I mean, there must be something unusual about Netflix's culture that allowed you to take such bold — I won't say "reckless" — bold, well thought-through decisions. RH: Yeah, absolutely. We did have one advantage, which is we were born on DVD, and we knew that that was going to be temporary. No one thought we'd be mailing discs for 100 years. So then you have a lot of paranoia about what's coming next, and that's part of the founding ethos, is really worrying about what's coming next. So that's an advantage. And then in terms of the culture, it's very big on freedom and responsibility. I pride myself on making as few decisions as possible in a quarter. And we're getting better and better at that. There are some times I can go a whole quarter without making any decisions. (Laughter) (Applause) CA: But there are some really surprising things about your people. For example, I looked at one survey. It looks like Netflix employees, compared to your peers', are basically the highest paid for equivalent jobs. And the least likely to want to leave. And if you Google the Netflix culture deck, you see this list of quite surprising admonitions to your employees. Talk about a few of them. RH: Well, you know, my first company — we were very process obsessed. This was in the 1990s. And every time someone made a mistake, we tried to put a process in place to make sure that mistake didn't happen again — so, very semiconductor-yield orientation. And the problem is, we were trying to dummy-proof the system. And then, eventually, only dummies wanted to work there. Then, of course, the market shifted — in that case, it was C++ to Java. But you know, there's always some shift. And the company was unable to adapt, and it got acquired by our largest competitor. And so with Netflix, I was super focused on how to run with no process but not have chaos. And so then we've developed all these mechanisms, super high-talented people, alignment, talking openly, sharing information — internally, people are stunned at how much information — all the core strategies, etc. We're like the "anti-Apple" — you know how they compartmentalize? We do the opposite, which is: everybody gets all the information. So what we're trying to do is build a sense of responsibility in people and the ability to do things. I find out about big decisions now that are made all the time, I've never even heard about it, which is great. And mostly, they go well. CA: So you just wake up and read them on the internet. RH: Sometimes. CA: "Oh, we just entered China!" RH: Yeah, well that would be a big one. CA: But you allow employees to set their own vacation time, and ... There's just — RH: Sure, that's a big symbolic one, vacation, because most people, in practice, do that, anyway. But yeah, there's a whole lot of that freedom. CA: And courage, you ask for as a fundamental value. RH: Yeah, we want people to speak the truth. And we say, "To disagree silently is disloyal." It's not OK to let some decision go through without saying your piece, and typically, writing it down. And so we're very focused on trying to get to good decisions through the debate that always happens. And we try not to make it intense, like yelling at each other — nothing like that. You know, it's really curiosity drawing people out. CA: You've got this other secret weapon at Netflix, it seems, which is this vast trove of data, a word we've heard a certain amount about this week. You've often taken really surprising stances towards building smart algorithms at Netflix. Back in the day, you opened up your algorithm to the world and said, "Hey, can anyone do better than this recommendation we've got? If so, we'll pay you a million dollars." You paid someone a million dollars, because it was like 10 percent better than yours. RH: That's right. CA: Was that a good decision? Would you do that again? RH: Yeah, it was super exciting at the time; this was about 2007. But you know, we haven't done it again. So clearly, it's a very specialized tool. And so think of that as a lucky break of good timing, rather than a general framework. So what we've done is invest a lot on the algorithms, so that we feature the right content to the right people and try to make it fun and easy to explore. CA: And you made this, what seems like a really interesting shift, a few years ago. You used to ask people, "Here are 10 movies. What do you think? Which ones of these are your best movies?" And then tried to match those movies with recommendations for what was coming. And then you changed away from that. Talk about that. RH: Sure. Everyone would rate "Schindler's List" five stars, and then they'd rate Adam Sandler, "The Do-Over" three stars. But, in fact, when you looked at what they watched, it was almost always Adam Sandler. And so what happens is, when we rate and we're metacognitive about quality, that's sort of our aspirational self. And it works out much better to please people to look at the actual choices that they make, their revealed preferences by how much they enjoy simple pleasures. CA: OK, I want to talk for a couple of minutes about this, because this strikes me as a huge deal, not just for Netflix, for the internet as a whole. The difference between aspirational values and revealed values. You, brilliantly, didn't pay too much attention to what people said, you watched what they did, and then found the stuff that, "Oh my God, I never knew I would like a show about making horrible recipes, called 'Nailed It!'" RH: Called "Nailed It!" Right. CA: It's hilarious. I would never have even thought of that. But aren't there risks with this, if this go-only-with-revealed-values approach is taken too far? RH: Well, we get a lot of joy from making people happy, Sometimes you just want to relax and watch a show like "Nailed It!" And it's fun, and it's not stressful. Other times, people want to watch very intensive film. "Mudbound" was Oscar-nominated, it's a great, very intensive film. And you know, we've had over 20 million hours of viewing on "Mudbound," which is dramatically bigger than it would have been in the theaters or any other distribution. And so, we have some candy, too, but we have lots of broccoli. And you know, if you have the good mix, you get to a healthy diet. CA: But — yes, indeed. But isn't it the case that algorithms tend to point you away from the broccoli and towards the candy, if you're not careful? We just had a talk about how, on YouTube, somehow algorithms tend to, just by actually being smarter, tend to drive people towards more radical or specific content. It'd be easy to imagine that Netflix algorithms, just going on revealed values, would gradually — RH: Right, get too base — CA: We'd all be watching violent pornography or something. Or some people would, you know. But, how — (Laughter) Not me! I'm the child of a missionary, I don't even think about these things. But — (Laughter) But I mean, it's possible, right? RH: In practice, you're right that you can't just rely on algorithms. It's a mix of judgment and what we carry, and we're a curated service versus a platform like Facebook and YouTube, so we have an easier set of issues, which is: What are these great films and series that we acquire? But then within that, the algorithm is a tool. CA: But how — John Doerr just talked about measuring what matters. As a business, what matters, I presume, is fundamentally just growing subscribers. I mean, that's your unique advantage. Are subscribers grown only by the more time they spend watching Netflix, that is what will make them re-subscribe? Or is it even more about having shows that might not have been so much time as watching the whole season of "Nailed It!" or whatever? But just get into them more; they just think, "That was nourishing, that was extraordinary, I'm so glad I watched that with my family." Isn't there a version of the business model that would be less content but more awesome content, possibly even more uplifting content? RH: And people choose that uplifting content. I think you're right, which is, when people talk about Netflix, they talk about the shows that move them: "13 Reasons Why" or "The Crown." And that is way disproportionate and positive impact, even for the subscriber growth that you talked about is those couple big, memorable shows. But what we want to do is offer a variety. You don't want to watch the same thing every night, as much as you like it; you want to try different things. And what we haven't seen is this, say, race to the bottom of your violent pornography kind of examples. Instead, we've seen great viewing across a whole range — "Black Mirror" — we're filming season five now. And that was a struggling show when it was only in the BBC. And with the distribution of on-demand, you can make these much bigger shows. CA: You're telling me humans can get addicted by their angels as well as their demons. RH: Yeah, and again, we try not to think about it in addiction terms, we think about it as, you know: What are you going to do with your time and when you want to relax? You can watch linear TV, you can do video games, you can do YouTube, or you can watch Netflix. And if we're as great as we can be, and we have a variety of moods, then more often, people will choose us. CA: But you have people in the organization who are looking regularly at the actual impacts of these brilliant algorithms that you've created. Just for reality check, just, "Are we sure that this is the direction we want to go?" RH: You know, I think we learn. And you have to be humble and sort of say, "Look, there's no perfect tool." The algorithm’s one part, the way we commission the content, our relationships with societies. So there's a lot of ways that we have to look at it. So if you get too stuck in "Let's just increase viewing" or "Just increase subscribers," you're unlikely to be able to grow and be the great company you want to be. So think of it as this multiple measures of success. CA: So, speaking of algorithms that have raised questions: You were on the board of Facebook, and I think Mark Zuckerberg — you've done some mentoring for him. What should we know about Mark Zuckerberg that people don't know? RH: Well, many of you know him or have seen him. I mean, he's a fantastic human being. Really first-class. And social — these platforms, whether that's YouTube or Facebook, are clearly trying to grow up quickly. And we see that with all new technologies. I mean, yesterday we were talking about printed DNA, and it's like: could be fantastic or could be horrific. And you know, all new technologies — when television was first popular in the 1960s in the US, it was called a "vast wasteland," and that television was going to rot the minds of everybody. It turns out everybody's minds were fine. And there were some adjustments, but think of it as — or, I think of it as — all new technologies have pros and cons. And in social, we're just figuring that out. CA: How much of a priority is it for the board of Facebook to really address some of the issues? Or is the belief that, actually, the company has been completely unfairly criticized? RH: Oh, it's not completely unfairly. And Mark's leading the charge on fixing Facebook. And he's very passionate about that. CA: Reed, I want to look at another passion of yours. I mean, you've done incredibly well with Netflix, you're a billionaire, and you spend a lot of time and indeed, money, on education. RH: Yep. CA: Why is this a passion, and what are you doing about it? RH: Sure. Right out of college, I was a high school math teacher. So when I later went into business and became a philanthropist, I think I gravitated towards education and trying to make a difference there. And the main thing I noticed is, you know, educators want to work with other great educators and to create many unique environments for kids. And we need a lot more variety in the system than we have, and a lot more educator-centric organizations. And so the tricky thing is, right now in the US, most schools are run by a local school board. And it has to meet all needs in the community, and, in fact, what we need is a lot more variety. So in the US there's a form of public school called charter public schools, that are run by nonprofits. And that's the big emphasis for me, is if you can have schools run by nonprofits, they are more mission-focused, they support the educators well. I'm on the board of KIPP charter schools, which is one of the larger networks. And, you know, it's 30,000 kids a year getting very stimulating education. CA: Paint me a picture of what a school should look like. RH: It depends on the kid. Think about it as: with multiple kids, there's all different needs that need to be met, so there's not any one model. And you want to be able to choose, depending on your kid and what you think they need. But they should be very educator-centric and curious and stimulating and all of those things. And this whole idea of 30 kids in fifth grade, all learning the same thing at the same time, you know, is clearly an industrial throwback. But changing that, given the current government structure, is super hard. But what these innovative, nonprofit schools are doing is pushing the bounds, letting kids try new things. And so think of it as the governance reform, that is, the nonprofit, to allow the educational changes. CA: And sometimes the criticism is put that charter schools, intentionally or unintentionally, suck resources away from the public school system. Should we be concerned about that? RH: Well, they are public schools. I mean, there's these multiple types of public schools. And if you look at charters as a whole, they serve low-income kids. Because if high-income kids get in trouble, the parents will send them to a private school or they move neighborhoods. And low-income families generally don't have those choices. Like KIPP — it's 80 percent low-income kids, free and reduced lunch. And the college admissions for KIPP is fantastic. CA: Reed, you signed the Giving Pledge a few years ago, you're committed to giving away more than half of your fortune during your lifetime. Can I cheekily ask how much you've invested in education in the last few years? RH: It's a couple hundred million, I don't know exactly how many hundreds, but we're continuing to invest and — (Applause) thank you all — (Applause) You know, honestly, for a little while I tried to do politics full-time, working for John Doerr. And while I loved working for John, I just didn't thrive on politics. I love business, I love competing. I love going up against Disney and HBO. (Laughter) That's what gets me going. And now I do that to really increase Netflix's value, which allows me to write more checks to schools. And so for now, it's the perfect life. CA: Reed, you're a remarkable person, you've changed all of our lives and the lives of many kids. Thank you so much for coming to TED. (Applause) |
How do your hormones work? | null | TED-Ed | Over the course of our lifetimes, our bodies undergo a series of extraordinary metamorphoses: we grow, experience puberty, and many of us reproduce. Behind the scenes, the endocrine system works constantly to orchestrate these changes. Alongside growth and sexual maturity, this system regulates everything from your sleep to the rhythm of your beating heart, exerting its influence over each and every one of your cells. The endocrine system relies on interactions between three features to do its job: glands, hormones, and trillions of cell receptors. Firstly, there are several hormone-producing glands: three in your brain, and seven in the rest of your body. Each is surrounded by a network of blood vessels, from which they extract ingredients to manufacture dozens of hormones. Those hormones are then pumped out in tiny amounts, usually into the bloodstream. From there, each hormone needs to locate a set of target cells in order to bring about a specific change. To find its targets, it’s helped along by receptors, which are special proteins inside or on the cell’s surface. Those receptors recognise specific hormones as they waft by, and bind to them. When this happens, that hormone-receptor combination triggers a range of effects that either increase or decrease specific processes inside the cell to change the way that cell behaves. By exposing millions of cells at a time to hormones in carefully-regulated quantities, the endocrine system drives large-scale changes across the body. Take, for instance, the thyroid and the two hormones it produces, triiodothyronine and thyroxine. These hormones travel to most of the body’s cells, where they influence how quickly those cells use energy and how rapidly they work. In turn, that regulates everything from breathing rate to heartbeat, body temperature, and digestion. Hormones also have some of their most visible—and familiar—effects during puberty. In men, puberty begins when the testes start secreting testosterone. That triggers the gradual development of the sexual organs, makes facial hair sprout, and causes the voice to deepen and height to increase. In women, estrogen secreted from the ovaries signals the start of adulthood. It helps the body develop, makes the hips widen, and thickens the womb’s lining, preparing the body for menstruation or pregnancy. An enduring misconception around the endocrine system is that there are exclusively male and female hormones. In fact, men and women have estrogen and testosterone, just in different amounts. Both hormones play a role in pregnancy, as well, alongside more than 10 other hormones that ensure the growth of the fetus, enable birth, and help the mother feed her child. Such periods of hormonal change are also associated with fluctuations in mood. That’s because hormones can influence the production of certain chemicals in the brain, like serotonin. When chemical levels shift, they may cause changes in mood, as well. But that’s not to say that hormones have unlimited power over us. They’re frequently viewed as the main drivers of our behavior, making us slaves to their effects, especially during puberty. But research shows that our behavior is collectively shaped by a variety of influences, including the brain and its neurotransmitters, our hormones, and various social factors. The primary function of the endocrine system is to regulate our bodily processes, not control us. Sometimes disease, stress, and even diet can disrupt that regulatory function, however, altering the quantity of hormones that glands secrete or changing the way that cells respond. Diabetes is one of the most common hormonal disorders, occurring when the pancreas secretes too little insulin, a hormone that manages blood sugar levels. And hypo- and hyperthyroidism occur when the thyroid gland makes too little or too much thyroid hormone. When there’s too little thyroid hormone, that results in a slowed heart rate, fatigue, and depression, and when there’s too much thyroid hormone, weight loss, sleeplessness, and irritability. But most of the time, the endocrine system manages to keep our bodies in a state of balance. And through its constant regulation, it drives the changes that ultimately help us become who we are. |
Why you should love gross science | {0: 'Anna Rothschild makes videos about science for the young and the young at heart.'} | TEDxMidAtlantic | Did you know that one of the first fertility drugs was made from the pee of Catholic nuns, and that even the Pope got involved? So, this is totally true. Back in the 1950s, scientists knew that when women enter menopause, they start releasing high levels of fertility hormones in their urine. But there was this doctor named Bruno Lunenfeld, who wondered if he could actually isolate those hormones from the urine and use it to help women who are having trouble getting pregnant. Obviously, the problem with this was that in order to test this idea, he needed a lot of pee from older women. And that is not an easy thing to find. So he and his colleagues got special permission from the Pope to collect gallons and gallons of urine from hundreds of older Catholic nuns. And in doing so, he actually isolated hormones that are still used to help women get pregnant today, though now, they can be synthesized in a lab, and gallons of pee aren't necessary. So why am I standing up here, telling this wonderfully intellectual audience about nun pee? Well, I'm a science journalist and multimedia producer, who has always been fascinated by gross stuff. So fascinated, in fact, that I started a weekly YouTube series called "Gross Science," all about the slimy, smelly, creepy underbelly of nature, medicine and technology. Now, I think most of us would agree that there's something a little gross about pee. You know, it's something that we don't really like to talk about, and we keep the act of doing it very private. But when Lunenfeld peered into the world of pee, he discovered something deeply helpful to humanity. And after a year and a half of making my show, I can tell you that very often when we explore the gross side of life, we find insights that we never would have thought we'd find, and we even often reveal beauty that we didn't think was there. I think it's important for us to talk about gross things for a few reasons. So, first of all, talking about gross stuff is a great tool for education, and it's an excellent way to preserve curiosity. To explain what I mean, why don't I tell you a little bit about what I was like as a child? So, I was what you might call a gross kid. In fact, my love of science itself began when my parents bought me a slime chemistry set and was then only enhanced by doing gross experiments in my sixth-grade biology class. We did things like, we swabbed surfaces around our classroom and cultured the bacteria we'd collected, and we dissected owl pellets, which are these balls of material that are undigested that owls barf up, and it's really kind of gross and awesome and cool. Now, the fact that I was obsessed with gross stuff as a kid is not so revolutionary. You know, lots of kids are really into gross things, like playing in dirt or collecting beetles or eating their boogers. And why is that? I think really little kids are like little explorers. They just want to experience as much as they can and don't have any idea about the relative acceptability of touching a ladybug versus a stinkbug. They just want to understand how everything works and experience as much of life as they can. And that is pure curiosity. But then adults step in, and we tell kids not to pick their noses and not to touch the slugs or toads or whatever else they find in the backyard, because those things are gross. And we do that in part to keep kids safe, right? Like, maybe picking your nose spreads germs and maybe touching that toad will give you warts, even though I don't actually think that's true. You should feel free to touch as many toads as you want. So at a certain point, when kids get a little bit older, there's this way that engaging with gross stuff isn't just about curiosity, it's also about, sort of, finding out where the limits are, pushing the boundaries of what's OK. So, lots of kids of a certain age will have burping competitions or competitions to see who can make the grossest face. And they do that in part because it's a little bit transgressive, right? But there's another layer to why we define stuff as gross. As humans, we've sort of extended the concept of disgust to morality. So, the psychologist Paul Rozin would say that many of the things we categorize as gross are things that reminds us that we're just animals. These are things like bodily fluids and sex and physical abnormalities and death. And the idea that we're just animals can be really unsettling, because it can be this reminder of our own mortality. And that can leave many of us with this deep existential angst. Rozin would say that there's this way in which disgust and the avoidance of gross things becomes not just a way to protect our bodies, it becomes a way to protect our souls. I think at a certain point, kids really begin to internalize this link between disgusting things and immorality. And while I don't have any concrete data to back up this next idea, I think that for a lot of us, it happens around the time we hit puberty. And you know — yeah, I know. So during puberty, our bodies are changing, and we're sweating more, and girls get their periods, and we're thinking about sex in this way that we never did before. And through the human capacity for abstraction, this shame can settle in. So we don't necessarily just think, "Oh, my goodness, something really gross is happening to my body!" We think, "Oh my God, maybe I'm gross. And maybe that means that there's something bad or wrong about me." The thing is, that if you de facto associate gross stuff with immorality, you lose a huge part of your curiosity, because there is so much out there in the world that is a little bit gross. Like, think about going for a walk in the woods. You could just pay attention to the birds and the trees and the flowers and that would be fine, but in my view, you'd be missing a bigger and more awesome picture of life on this planet. There are cycles of decay that are driving forest growth, and there are networks of fungus beneath your feet that are connecting literally all of the plants around you. That's really amazing. So I feel like we should be talking about gross stuff early and often with young people, so they feel like they're actually allowed to claim this bigger picture of life on our planet. The good news is that for many of us, the fascination with gross stuff doesn't exactly go away, we just kind of pretend like it's not there. But truthfully, we all spend sort of a big part of our lives just trying not to be gross. When you really think about it, we're sort of just like bags of fluids and some weird tissues surrounded by a thin layer of skin. And to a certain extent, multiple times a day, whether consciously or subconsciously, I need to remind myself not to fart publicly. (Laughter) You know, we're desperately trying to avoid being gross all the time, so I think many of us take this kind of voyeuristic delight in learning about gross things. This is certainly true of kids; the number of middle school teachers who show my videos in their science classes is a testament to that. But I think it's totally true of adults, too. You know, I think we all love hearing about gross stories, because it's a socially acceptable way to explore the gross side of ourselves. But there's this other reason that I think talking about gross stuff is so important. A while back, I made a video on tonsil stones — sorry, everyone — which are these balls of mucus and bacteria and food that get lodged in your tonsils and they smell really terrible, sometimes you cough them up and it's like — it's awful. And many, many people have experienced this. But many of the people who have experienced this haven't really had a forum to talk about it. And today, this video that I made is my most popular video. It has millions of views. (Laughter) And the comment section for that video became sort of like a self-help section, where people could talk about their tonsil stone experiences and, like, tips and tricks for getting rid of them. And I think it became this great way for people to talk about something that they'd never felt comfortable taking about publicly. And that is wonderful when it's about something as goofy as tonsil stones, but it's a little sad when a video can have an effect like that when it's about something as common as periods. Last February, I released a video on menstruation, and to this day, I am still getting messages from people around the globe who are asking me about their periods. There are a lot of young people — and some not-so-young people — out there, who are worried that what's happening to their bodies is somehow not normal. And, of course, I always tell them that I am not a medical professional, and that, if possible, they should talk to a doctor. But the truth of the matter is that everyone should feel comfortable talking to a doctor about their own bodies. And that's why I think it's really important for us to start this dialogue about gross stuff from a pretty early age, so we can let our kids know that it's alright to have agency over your own body and over your own health. There's another reason that talking to your doctor about your health and gross stuff is really, really important. Doctors and the scientific community can only address issues when they know there's something to address. So one of the really interesting things I learned while making the video on periods, is that I was talking to this one scientist who told me there's actually still a lot we don't know about periods. There's a lot of basic research that still hasn't been done. In part, that's just because there weren't a lot of scientists in the field who were women, to ask questions about it. And it's also not a topic that women talk about publicly. So there's this gap in what we know, just because no one was there to ask a question. There's one final reason that I think talking about gross stuff is so important, and that's because you just never know what you're going to find when you peel back all those layers of disgustingness. So, take the California brown sea hare. This is a sea slug that squirts this lovely, bright purple ink at any creature that tries to eat it. But it also happens to be one of the kinkiest creatures in the animal kingdom. So these guys are hermaphrodites, which means they have both male and female genitalia. And when it's time to mate, up to 20 individuals will all get together in this kind of, like, conga line and they'll all mate together. (Laughter) A single sea hare will inseminate the partner in front of it and receive sperm from the one behind, which is sort of like an awesome time-saver, when you think about it. (Laughter) But if scientists had only seen this and they were like, "OK, we're just not going to touch that with a stick," they would have missed the bigger thing about sea hares that makes them really remarkable. It turns out that these sea hares have a small number of very large neurons, which makes them excellent to use in neuroscience research. And, in fact, the scientist Eric Kandel used them in his research to understand how memories are stored. And you know what? He won a Nobel Prize for his work. So go out there and pick up beetles and play in dirt and ask questions. And own your fascination with gross stuff and don't be ashamed of it, because you never know what you're going to find. And as I say at the end of all my videos, "Ew." Thank you. (Applause) |
The nightmare videos of children's YouTube -- and what's wrong with the internet today | {0: 'Working across technologies and disciplines, James Bridle examines technology, knowledge and the end of the future.'} | TED2018 | I'm James. I'm a writer and artist, and I make work about technology. I do things like draw life-size outlines of military drones in city streets around the world, so that people can start to think and get their heads around these really quite hard-to-see and hard-to-think-about technologies. I make things like neural networks that predict the results of elections based on weather reports, because I'm intrigued about what the actual possibilities of these weird new technologies are. Last year, I built my own self-driving car. But because I don't really trust technology, I also designed a trap for it. (Laughter) And I do these things mostly because I find them completely fascinating, but also because I think when we talk about technology, we're largely talking about ourselves and the way that we understand the world. So here's a story about technology. This is a "surprise egg" video. It's basically a video of someone opening up loads of chocolate eggs and showing the toys inside to the viewer. That's it. That's all it does for seven long minutes. And I want you to notice two things about this. First of all, this video has 30 million views. (Laughter) And the other thing is, it comes from a channel that has 6.3 million subscribers, that has a total of eight billion views, and it's all just more videos like this — 30 million people watching a guy opening up these eggs. It sounds pretty weird, but if you search for "surprise eggs" on YouTube, it'll tell you there's 10 million of these videos, and I think that's an undercount. I think there's way, way more of these. If you keep searching, they're endless. There's millions and millions of these videos in increasingly baroque combinations of brands and materials, and there's more and more of them being uploaded every single day. Like, this is a strange world. Right? But the thing is, it's not adults who are watching these videos. It's kids, small children. These videos are like crack for little kids. There's something about the repetition, the constant little dopamine hit of the reveal, that completely hooks them in. And little kids watch these videos over and over and over again, and they do it for hours and hours and hours. And if you try and take the screen away from them, they'll scream and scream and scream. If you don't believe me — and I've already seen people in the audience nodding — if you don't believe me, find someone with small children and ask them, and they'll know about the surprise egg videos. So this is where we start. It's 2018, and someone, or lots of people, are using the same mechanism that, like, Facebook and Instagram are using to get you to keep checking that app, and they're using it on YouTube to hack the brains of very small children in return for advertising revenue. At least, I hope that's what they're doing. I hope that's what they're doing it for, because there's easier ways of making ad revenue on YouTube. You can just make stuff up or steal stuff. So if you search for really popular kids' cartoons like "Peppa Pig" or "Paw Patrol," you'll find there's millions and millions of these online as well. Of course, most of them aren't posted by the original content creators. They come from loads and loads of different random accounts, and it's impossible to know who's posting them or what their motives might be. Does that sound kind of familiar? Because it's exactly the same mechanism that's happening across most of our digital services, where it's impossible to know where this information is coming from. It's basically fake news for kids, and we're training them from birth to click on the very first link that comes along, regardless of what the source is. That's doesn't seem like a terribly good idea. Here's another thing that's really big on kids' YouTube. This is called the "Finger Family Song." I just heard someone groan in the audience. This is the "Finger Family Song." This is the very first one I could find. It's from 2007, and it only has 200,000 views, which is, like, nothing in this game. But it has this insanely earwormy tune, which I'm not going to play to you, because it will sear itself into your brain in the same way that it seared itself into mine, and I'm not going to do that to you. But like the surprise eggs, it's got inside kids' heads and addicted them to it. So within a few years, these finger family videos start appearing everywhere, and you get versions in different languages with popular kids' cartoons using food or, frankly, using whatever kind of animation elements you seem to have lying around. And once again, there are millions and millions and millions of these videos available online in all of these kind of insane combinations. And the more time you start to spend with them, the crazier and crazier you start to feel that you might be. And that's where I kind of launched into this, that feeling of deep strangeness and deep lack of understanding of how this thing was constructed that seems to be presented around me. Because it's impossible to know where these things are coming from. Like, who is making them? Some of them appear to be made of teams of professional animators. Some of them are just randomly assembled by software. Some of them are quite wholesome-looking young kids' entertainers. And some of them are from people who really clearly shouldn't be around children at all. (Laughter) And once again, this impossibility of figuring out who's making this stuff — like, this is a bot? Is this a person? Is this a troll? What does it mean that we can't tell the difference between these things anymore? And again, doesn't that uncertainty feel kind of familiar right now? So the main way people get views on their videos — and remember, views mean money — is that they stuff the titles of these videos with these popular terms. So you take, like, "surprise eggs" and then you add "Paw Patrol," "Easter egg," or whatever these things are, all of these words from other popular videos into your title, until you end up with this kind of meaningless mash of language that doesn't make sense to humans at all. Because of course it's only really tiny kids who are watching your video, and what the hell do they know? Your real audience for this stuff is software. It's the algorithms. It's the software that YouTube uses to select which videos are like other videos, to make them popular, to make them recommended. And that's why you end up with this kind of completely meaningless mash, both of title and of content. But the thing is, you have to remember, there really are still people within this algorithmically optimized system, people who are kind of increasingly forced to act out these increasingly bizarre combinations of words, like a desperate improvisation artist responding to the combined screams of a million toddlers at once. There are real people trapped within these systems, and that's the other deeply strange thing about this algorithmically driven culture, because even if you're human, you have to end up behaving like a machine just to survive. And also, on the other side of the screen, there still are these little kids watching this stuff, stuck, their full attention grabbed by these weird mechanisms. And most of these kids are too small to even use a website. They're just kind of hammering on the screen with their little hands. And so there's autoplay, where it just keeps playing these videos over and over and over in a loop, endlessly for hours and hours at a time. And there's so much weirdness in the system now that autoplay takes you to some pretty strange places. This is how, within a dozen steps, you can go from a cute video of a counting train to masturbating Mickey Mouse. Yeah. I'm sorry about that. This does get worse. This is what happens when all of these different keywords, all these different pieces of attention, this desperate generation of content, all comes together into a single place. This is where all those deeply weird keywords come home to roost. You cross-breed the finger family video with some live-action superhero stuff, you add in some weird, trollish in-jokes or something, and suddenly, you come to a very weird place indeed. The stuff that tends to upset parents is the stuff that has kind of violent or sexual content, right? Children's cartoons getting assaulted, getting killed, weird pranks that actually genuinely terrify children. What you have is software pulling in all of these different influences to automatically generate kids' worst nightmares. And this stuff really, really does affect small children. Parents report their children being traumatized, becoming afraid of the dark, becoming afraid of their favorite cartoon characters. If you take one thing away from this, it's that if you have small children, keep them the hell away from YouTube. (Applause) But the other thing, the thing that really gets to me about this, is that I'm not sure we even really understand how we got to this point. We've taken all of this influence, all of these things, and munged them together in a way that no one really intended. And yet, this is also the way that we're building the entire world. We're taking all of this data, a lot of it bad data, a lot of historical data full of prejudice, full of all of our worst impulses of history, and we're building that into huge data sets and then we're automating it. And we're munging it together into things like credit reports, into insurance premiums, into things like predictive policing systems, into sentencing guidelines. This is the way we're actually constructing the world today out of this data. And I don't know what's worse, that we built a system that seems to be entirely optimized for the absolute worst aspects of human behavior, or that we seem to have done it by accident, without even realizing that we were doing it, because we didn't really understand the systems that we were building, and we didn't really understand how to do anything differently with it. There's a couple of things I think that really seem to be driving this most fully on YouTube, and the first of those is advertising, which is the monetization of attention without any real other variables at work, any care for the people who are actually developing this content, the centralization of the power, the separation of those things. And I think however you feel about the use of advertising to kind of support stuff, the sight of grown men in diapers rolling around in the sand in the hope that an algorithm that they don't really understand will give them money for it suggests that this probably isn't the thing that we should be basing our society and culture upon, and the way in which we should be funding it. And the other thing that's kind of the major driver of this is automation, which is the deployment of all of this technology as soon as it arrives, without any kind of oversight, and then once it's out there, kind of throwing up our hands and going, "Hey, it's not us, it's the technology." Like, "We're not involved in it." That's not really good enough, because this stuff isn't just algorithmically governed, it's also algorithmically policed. When YouTube first started to pay attention to this, the first thing they said they'd do about it was that they'd deploy better machine learning algorithms to moderate the content. Well, machine learning, as any expert in it will tell you, is basically what we've started to call software that we don't really understand how it works. And I think we have enough of that already. We shouldn't be leaving this stuff up to AI to decide what's appropriate or not, because we know what happens. It'll start censoring other things. It'll start censoring queer content. It'll start censoring legitimate public speech. What's allowed in these discourses, it shouldn't be something that's left up to unaccountable systems. It's part of a discussion all of us should be having. But I'd leave a reminder that the alternative isn't very pleasant, either. YouTube also announced recently that they're going to release a version of their kids' app that would be entirely moderated by humans. Facebook — Zuckerberg said much the same thing at Congress, when pressed about how they were going to moderate their stuff. He said they'd have humans doing it. And what that really means is, instead of having toddlers being the first person to see this stuff, you're going to have underpaid, precarious contract workers without proper mental health support being damaged by it as well. (Laughter) And I think we can all do quite a lot better than that. (Applause) The thought, I think, that brings those two things together, really, for me, is agency. It's like, how much do we really understand — by agency, I mean: how we know how to act in our own best interests. Which — it's almost impossible to do in these systems that we don't really fully understand. Inequality of power always leads to violence. And we can see inside these systems that inequality of understanding does the same thing. If there's one thing that we can do to start to improve these systems, it's to make them more legible to the people who use them, so that all of us have a common understanding of what's actually going on here. The thing, though, I think most about these systems is that this isn't, as I hope I've explained, really about YouTube. It's about everything. These issues of accountability and agency, of opacity and complexity, of the violence and exploitation that inherently results from the concentration of power in a few hands — these are much, much larger issues. And they're issues not just of YouTube and not just of technology in general, and they're not even new. They've been with us for ages. But we finally built this system, this global system, the internet, that's actually showing them to us in this extraordinary way, making them undeniable. Technology has this extraordinary capacity to both instantiate and continue all of our most extraordinary, often hidden desires and biases and encoding them into the world, but it also writes them down so that we can see them, so that we can't pretend they don't exist anymore. We need to stop thinking about technology as a solution to all of our problems, but think of it as a guide to what those problems actually are, so we can start thinking about them properly and start to address them. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Helen Walters: James, thank you for coming and giving us that talk. So it's interesting: when you think about the films where the robotic overlords take over, it's all a bit more glamorous than what you're describing. But I wonder — in those films, you have the resistance mounting. Is there a resistance mounting towards this stuff? Do you see any positive signs, green shoots of resistance? James Bridle: I don't know about direct resistance, because I think this stuff is super long-term. I think it's baked into culture in really deep ways. A friend of mine, Eleanor Saitta, always says that any technological problems of sufficient scale and scope are political problems first of all. So all of these things we're working to address within this are not going to be addressed just by building the technology better, but actually by changing the society that's producing these technologies. So no, right now, I think we've got a hell of a long way to go. But as I said, I think by unpacking them, by explaining them, by talking about them super honestly, we can actually start to at least begin that process. HW: And so when you talk about legibility and digital literacy, I find it difficult to imagine that we need to place the burden of digital literacy on users themselves. But whose responsibility is education in this new world? JB: Again, I think this responsibility is kind of up to all of us, that everything we do, everything we build, everything we make, needs to be made in a consensual discussion with everyone who's avoiding it; that we're not building systems intended to trick and surprise people into doing the right thing, but that they're actually involved in every step in educating them, because each of these systems is educational. That's what I'm hopeful about, about even this really grim stuff, that if you can take it and look at it properly, it's actually in itself a piece of education that allows you to start seeing how complex systems come together and work and maybe be able to apply that knowledge elsewhere in the world. HW: James, it's such an important discussion, and I know many people here are really open and prepared to have it, so thanks for starting off our morning. JB: Thanks very much. Cheers. (Applause) |
The psychology of post-traumatic stress disorder | null | TED-Ed | Many of us will experience some kind of trauma during our lifetime. Sometimes, we escape with no long-term effects. But for millions of us, those experiences linger, causing symptoms like flashbacks, nightmares, and negative thoughts that interfere with everyday life. This phenomenon, called post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, isn’t a personal failing; rather, it’s a treatable malfunction of certain biological mechanisms that allow us to cope with dangerous experiences. To understand PTSD, we first need to understand how the brain processes a wide range of ordeals, including the death of a loved one, domestic violence, injury or illness, abuse, rape, war, car accidents, and natural disasters. These events can bring on feelings of danger and helplessness, which activate the brain’s alarm system, known as the “fight-flight-freeze” response. When this alarm sounds, the hypothalamic, pituitary, and adrenal systems, known as the HPA axis, work together to send signals to the parasympathetic nervous system. That’s the network that communicates with adrenal glands and internal organs to help regulate functions like heart rate, digestion, and respiration. These signals start a chemical cascade that floods the body with several different stress hormones, causing physiological changes that prepare the body to defend itself. Our heart rate speeds up, breathing quickens, and muscles tense. Even after a crisis is over, escalated levels of stress hormones may last for days, contributing to jittery feelings, nightmares, and other symptoms. For most people, these experiences disappear within a few days to two weeks as their hormone levels stabilize. But a small percentage of those who experience trauma have persistent problems —sometimes vanishing temporarily only to resurface months later. We don’t completely understand what’s happening in the brain, but one theory is that the stress hormone cortisol may be continuously activating the “fight-flight-freeze” response while reducing overall brain functioning, leading to a number of negative symptoms. These symptoms often fall into four categories: intrusive thoughts, like dreams and flashbacks, avoiding reminders of the trauma, negative thoughts and feelings, like fear, anger, and guilt, and “reactive” symptoms like irritability and difficulty sleeping. Not everyone has all these symptoms, or experiences them to the same extent and intensity. When problems last more than a month, PTSD is often diagnosed. Genetics, on-going overwhelming stress, and many risk factors like preexisting mental illnesses or lack of emotional support, likely play a role in determining who will experience PTSD. But the underlying cause is still a medical mystery. A major challenge of coping with PTSD is sensitivity to triggers, physical and emotional stimuli that the brain associates with the original trauma. These can be everyday sensations that aren’t inherently dangerous but prompt powerful physical and emotional reactions. For example, the smell of a campfire could evoke the memory of being trapped in a burning house. For someone with PTSD, that memory activates the same neurochemical cascade as the original event. That then stirs up the same feelings of panic and helplessness as if they’re experiencing the trauma all over again. Trying to avoid these triggers, which are sometimes unpredictable, can lead to isolation. That can leave people feeling invalidated, ignored, or misunderstood, like a pause button has been pushed on their lives while the rest of the world continues around them. But, there are options. If you think you might be suffering from PTSD, the first step is an evaluation with a mental health professional who can direct you towards the many resources available. Psychotherapy can be very effective for PTSD, helping patients better understand their triggers. And certain medications can make symptoms more manageable, as can self- care practices, like mindfulness and regular exercise. What if you notice signs of PTSD in a friend or family member? Social support, acceptance, and empathy are key to helping and recovery. Let them know you believe their account of what they’re experiencing, and that you don’t blame them for their reactions. If they’re open to it, encourage them to seek evaluation and treatment. PTSD has been called “the hidden wound” because it comes without outward physical signs. But even if it’s an invisible disorder, it doesn’t have to be a silent one. |
How we can design timeless cities for our collective future | {0: 'Vishaan Chakrabarti\'s book, "A Country of Cities: A Manifesto for an Urban America," makes the case that a more urban USA would result in a more prosperous, sustainable, joyous and socially mobile nation.'} | TED2018 | Travel with me to some of the most beautiful spots in cities around the world: Rome's Spanish steps; the historic neighborhoods of Paris and Shanghai; the rolling landscape of Central Park; the tight-knit blocks of Tokyo or Fez; the wildly sloping streets of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro; the dizzying step wells of Jaipur; the arched pedestrian bridges of Venice. Now let's go to some newer cities. Six downtowns built across six continents in the 20th century. Why do none of these places have any of the charming characteristics of our older cities? Or let's go to six suburbs built on six continents in the 20th century. Why do none of them have any of the lyrical qualities that we associate with the places that we cherish the most? Now, maybe you think I'm just being nostalgic — why does it matter? Who cares if there is this creeping sameness besetting our planet? Well, it matters because most people around the world are gravitating to urban areas globally. And how we design those urban areas could well determine whether we thrive or not as a species. So, we already know that people who live in transit-rich areas, live in apartment buildings, have a far lower carbon footprint than their suburban counterparts. So maybe one lesson from that is if you love nature, you shouldn't live in it. (Laughter) But I think the dry statistics of what's known as transit-oriented development only tells part of the story. Because cities, if they're going to attract people, have to be great. They have to be powerful magnets with distinctive appeal to bring in all those new green urbanites. And this is not just an aesthetic issue, mind you. This is an issue of international consequence. Because today, every day, literally hundreds of thousands of people are moving into a city somewhere, mainly in the Global South. And when you think about that, ask yourself: Are they condemned to live in the same bland cities we built in the 20th century, or can we offer them something better? And to answer that question, you have to unpack how we got here in the first place. First: mass production. Just like consumer goods and chain stores, we mass-produce glass and steel and concrete and asphalt and drywall, and we deploy them in mind-numbingly similar ways across the planet. Second: regulation. So, take cars, for instance. Cars travel at very high speeds. They're susceptible to human error. So when we're asked, as architects, to design a new street, we have to look at drawings like this, that tell us how high a curb needs to be, that pedestrians need to be over here and vehicles over there, a loading zone here, a drop-off there. What the car really did in the 20th century is it created this carved-up, segregated landscape. Or take the ladder fire truck — you know, those big ladder trucks that are used to rescue people from burning buildings? Those have such a wide turning radius, that we have to deploy an enormous amount of pavement, of asphalt, to accommodate them. Or take the critically important wheelchair. A wheelchair necessitates a landscape of minimal slopes and redundant vertical circulation. So wherever there's a stair, there has to be an elevator or a ramp. Now, don't get me wrong, please — I am all for pedestrian safety, firefighting and certainly, wheelchair access. Both of my parents were in wheelchairs at the end of their lives, so I understand very much that struggle. But we also have to acknowledge that all of these well-intentioned rules, they had the tremendous unintended consequence of making illegal the ways in which we used to build cities. Similarly illegal: at the end of the 19th century, right after the elevator was invented, we built these charming urban buildings, these lovely buildings, all over the world, from Italy to India. And they had maybe 10 or 12 apartments in them. They had one small elevator and a staircase that wrapped them and a light well. And not only were they charming buildings that were cost-effective, they were communal — you ran into your neighbor on that stairwell. Well, you can't build this, either. By contrast, today, when we have to build a major new apartment building somewhere, we have to build lots and lots of elevators and lots of fire stairs, and we have to connect them with these long, anonymous, dreary corridors. Now, developers — when they're confronted with the cost of all of that common infrastructure, they have to spread that cost over more apartments, so they want to build bigger buildings. What that results in is the thud, the dull thud of the same apartment building being built in every city across the world. And this is not only creating physical sameness, it's creating social sameness, because these buildings are more expensive to build, and it helped to create an affordability crisis in cities all over the world, including places like Vancouver. Now, I said there was a third reason for all this sameness, and that's really a psychological one. It's a fear of difference, and architects hear this all the time from their clients: "If I try that new idea, will I be sued? Will I be mocked? Better safe than sorry." And all of these things have conspired together to blanket our planet with a homogeneity that I think is deeply problematic. So how can we do the opposite? How can we go back to building cities that are physically and culturally varied again? How can we build cities of difference? I would argue that we should start by injecting into the global the local. This is already happening with food, for instance. You just look at the way in which craft beer has taken on corporate beer. Or, how many of you still eat Wonder Bread? I'd bet most of you don't. And I bet you don't because you don't want processed food in your life. So if you don't want processed food, why would you want processed cities? Why would you want these mass-produced, bleached places where all of us have to live and work every day? (Applause) So, technology was a big part of the problem in the 20th century. When we invented the automobile, what happened is, the world all bent towards the invention. And we recreated our landscape around it. In the 21st century, technology can be part of the solution — if it bends to the needs of the world. So what do I mean by that? Take the autonomous vehicle. I don't think the autonomous vehicle is exciting because it's a driverless car. That, to me, only implies that there's even more congestion on the roads, frankly. I think what's exciting about the autonomous vehicle is the promise — and I want to stress the word "promise," given the recent accident in Arizona — the promise that we could have these small, urban vehicles that could safely comingle with pedestrians and bicycles. That would enable us to design humane streets again, streets without curbs, maybe streets like the wooden walkways on Fire Island. Or maybe we could design streets with the cobblestone of the 21st century, something that captures kinetic energy, melts snow, helps you with your fitness when you walk. Or remember those big ladder fire trucks? What if we could replace them and all the asphalt that comes with them with drones and robots that could rescue people from burning buildings? And if you think that's outlandish, you'd be amazed to know how much of that technology is already being used today in rescue activity. But now I'd like you to really imagine with me. Imagine if we could design the hovercraft wheelchair. Right? An invention that would not only allow equal access, but would enable us to build the Italian hill town of the 21st century. I think you'd be amazed to know that just a few of these inventions, responsive to human need, would completely transform the way we could build our cities. Now, I bet you're also thinking: "We don't have kinetic cobblestones or flying wheelchairs yet, so what can we do about this problem with today's technology?" And my inspiration for that question comes from a very different city, the city of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. I have clients there who have asked us to design a 21st-century open-air village that's sustainably heated using today's technology, in the heart of their downtown. And that's to cope with their frigid winters. And the project is both poetry and prose. The poetry is really about evoking the local: the mountainous terrain, using colors to pick up the spectacular light, understanding how to interpret the nomadic traditions that animate the nation of Mongolia. The prose has been the development of a catalogue of buildings, of small buildings that are fairly affordable, using local construction materials and technology that can still provide new forms of housing, new workspace, new shops and cultural buildings, like a theater or a museum — even a haunted house. While working on this in our office, we've realized that we're building upon the work of our colleagues, including architect Tatiana Bilbao, working in Mexico City; Pritzker laureate Alejandro Aravena, working in Chile; and recent Pritzker winner Balkrishna Doshi, working in India. And all of them are building spectacular new forms of affordable housing, but they're also building cities of difference, because they're building cities that respond to local communities, local climates and local construction methods. We're doubling down on that idea, we're researching a new model for our growing cities with gentrification pressures, that could build upon that late-19th-century model with that center core, but a prototype that could shape-shift in response to local needs and local building materials. All of these ideas, to me, are nostalgia-free. They all tell me that we can build cities that can grow, but grow in a way that reflects the diverse residents that live in those cities; grow in a way that can accommodate all income groups, all colors, creeds, genders. We could build such spectacular cities that we could disincentivize sprawl and actually protect nature. We can grow cities that are high-tech, but also respond to the timeless cultural needs of the human spirit. I'm convinced that we can build cities of difference that help to create the global mosaic to which so many of us aspire. Thank you. (Applause) |
The symbols of systemic racism -- and how to take away their power | {0: 'TED Fellow Paul Rucker creates art that explores issues related to mass incarceration, racially-motivated violence, police brutality and the continuing impact of slavery in the US.'} | TED2018 | [This talk contains graphic images Viewer discretion is advised] I collect objects. I collect branding irons that were used to mark slaves as property. I collect shackles for adults and restraints for adults as well as children. I collect lynching postcards. Yes, they depict lynchings. They also depict the massive crowds that attended these lynchings, and they are postcards that were also used for correspondence. I collect proslavery books that portray black people as criminals or as animals without souls. I brought you something today. This is a ship's branding iron. It was used to mark slaves. Well, they actually were not slaves when they were marked. They were in Africa. But they were marked with an "S" to designate that they were going to be slaves when they were brought to the US and when they were brought to Europe. Another object or image that captured my imagination when I was younger was a Klan robe. Growing up in South Carolina, I would see Ku Klux Klan rallies occasionally, actually more than occasionally, and the memories of those events never really left my mind. And I didn't really do anything with that imagery until 25 years later. A few years ago, I started researching the Klan, the three distinct waves of the Klan, the second one in particular. The second wave of the Klan had more than five million active members, which was five percent of the population at the time, which was also the population of New York City at the time. The Klan robe factory in the Buckhead neighborhood of Georgia was so busy it became a 24-hour factory to keep up with orders. They kept 20,000 robes on hand at all time to keep up with the demand. As a collector of artifacts and as an artist, I really wanted a Klan robe to be part of my collection, because artifacts and objects tell stories, but I really couldn't find one that was really good quality. What is a black man to do in America when he can't find the quality Klan robe that he's looking for? (Laughter) So I had no other choice. I decided I was going to make the best quality Klan robes in America. These are not your traditional Klan robes you would see at any KKK rally. I used kente cloth, I used camouflage, spandex, burlap, silks, satins and different patterns. I make them for different age groups; I make them for young kids as well as toddlers. I even made one for an infant. After making so many robes, I realized that the policies the Klan had in place or wanted to have in place a hundred years ago are in place today. We have segregated schools, neighborhoods, workplaces, and it's not the people wearing hoods that are keeping these policies in place. My work is about the long-term impact of slavery. We're not just dealing with the residue of systemic racism. It's the basis of every single thing we do. Again we have intentionally segregated neighborhoods, workplaces and schools. We have voter suppression. We have disproportionate representation of minorities incarcerated. We have environmental racism. We have police brutality. I brought you a few things today. The stealth aspect of racism is part of its power. When you're discriminated against, you can't always prove you're being discriminated against. Racism has the power to hide, and when it hides, it's kept safe because it blends in. I created this robe to illustrate that. The basis of capitalism in America is slavery. Slaves were the capital in capitalism. The first Grand Wizard in 1868, Nathan Bedford Forrest, was a Confederate soldier and a millionaire slave trader. The wealth that was created from chattel slavery — that's slaves as property — would boggle the mind. Cotton sales alone in 1860 equalled 200 million dollars. That would equal five billion dollars today. A lot of that wealth can be seen today through generational wealth. Oh, I forgot the other crops as well. You have indigo, rice and tobacco. In 2015, I made one robe a week for the entire year. After making 75 robes, I had an epiphany. I have a realization that white supremacy is there, but the biggest force of white supremacy is not the KKK, it's the normalization of systemic racism. There was something else I realized. The robes had no more power over me at all. But if we as a people collectively look at these objects — branding irons, shackles, robes — and realize that they are part of our history, we can find a way to where they have no more power over us. If we look at systemic racism and acknowledge that it's sown into the very fabric of who we are as a country, then we can actually do something about the intentional segregation in our schools, neighborhoods and workplaces. But then and only then can we actually address and confront this legacy of slavery and dismantle this ugly legacy of slavery. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The story of 'Oumuamua, the first visitor from another star system | {0: 'Karen J. Meech is an astronomer who investigates how habitable worlds form and explores the bigger picture of whether there is life elsewhere.'} | TED2018 | NASA's always on the lookout for possible asteroid collision hazards, so the Pan-STARRS telescope is scanning the sky every night. Each morning, candidate objects are examined by Pan-STARRS staff and usually discovered to be no big deal. But on October 19, 2017, Pan-STARRS spotted an object moving rapidly between the stars, and this time the usual follow-up measurements of position and speed showed something completely different. By October 22nd, we had enough data to realize that this object wasn't from our solar system. Holy cow. That's when I got the phone call, the phone call that all solar system astronomers are waiting for. Let me tell you how exciting this was. (Laughter) NASA's been expecting to see an interstellar comet pass through the solar system since the 1970s, but until now, we'd never seen anything. Our own solar system is huge, so even getting a package from the nearest star system 4.4 light years away would take over 50,000 years. So this is a really big deal. The interstellar visitor entered our solar system from above the plane of the planets, coming from the direction of the constellation Lyra, and it passed closest to the Sun on September 9th, passing inside the orbit of Mercury. Now this isn't a particularly close approach or unusual distance. It's just much easier to see objects close by. On October 14th, before we discovered it, it made its closest approach to the Earth, within about 15 million miles. This is really close by astronomical standards. Now rather than call this by its unwieldy catalog name, we briefly called it "Rama," after the cylindrical spacecraft that passed through the solar system in Arthur C. Clarke's classic science fiction story in 1973. But this wasn't quite right either, so in honor of it being discovered by a telescope in Hawaii, we consulted two experts on Hawaiian culture — a Hawaiian navigator and a linguist — to propose a name. And they suggested "'Oumuamua," which means scout or messenger from the distant past reaching out to us. Now this discovery was important for many reasons, but to me the most significant is for what 'Oumuamua can tell us about the past of our solar system. The process of the birth of a new solar system and the growth of planets can be a violent and messy business. Leftover icy and rocky debris gets ejected from the new solar system as the giant planets migrate through the dusty disk out of which they're formed. Now have you ever felt an emotional chill, something that's so exciting that a shiver runs up and down your spine? Or something that's very emotionally moving? Well this was it for me. This was my wow moment. We actually had a piece of material from another solar system coming close enough for us to observe. So what would you like to know about 'Oumuamua, the very first visitor from another star system? Well, I could think of a million things, but there's what you want and what you can have, and 'Oumuamua was moving away and fading very rapidly. In the span of about a week, it had dropped in brightness by a factor of [10]. So this is about all the time we were going to have to study it easily. So we had to distill the process of getting telescope time — normally a very competitive, peer-reviewed proposal process that can take up to months — down to less than a few days. So began a "polite" competition for resources. OK, let me not mince words. It was a fierce battle. We dropped everything, working around the clock, trying to craft perfectly crafted proposal words to send to the observatory directors. Well, good news. We got the time. Now, from a perfectly selfish point of view, the first thing we might like to know is how massive 'Oumuamua is. Because after all, it passed very close to the Earth, and we didn't know about it until afterwards. How bad would this have been had it not missed the Earth? Well, the impact energy depends on the square of the velocity times its mass, and the mass depends on how big it is and what it's made of. So how big is 'Oumuamua, and what's its shape? Well, we can get this from its brightness. Now, if you don't believe me, think of comparing the brightness of a firefly in your backyard to the navigation lights on a distant airplane. You know the airplane is much brighter — it just appears faint because it's so far away. We're also going to need to know how reflective the surface of 'Oumuamua is, and we don't have any clue, but it's reasonable to assume it's very similar to small asteroids and comets in our solar system, or in technical terms, something between the reflectivity of charcoal and wet sand. Nowadays, most of the big telescopes are used in what's called a service mode, meaning we have to carefully develop all the instructions and send them to the telescope operator, and then anxiously wait for the data to come back, praying to the weather gods. Now I bet most of you don't have careers that critically depend on whether or not it's cloudy last night. Well, we weren't going to get any second chances here. Because the weather was great, 'Oumuamua decided not to be. Its brightness wasn't constant. Now here we see 'Oumuamua racing between the stars. It's centered in the middle. The stars are trailed out because the telescope is following its motion. It started faint and then it got brighter, fainter, brighter, and fainter again, as sunlight is reflected off of four sides of an oblong object. The extreme brightness change led us to an unbelievable conclusion about its shape. As shown in this artist's impression, 'Oumuamua is apparently very long and narrow, with an axis ratio of about 10 to one. Assuming it's dark, this means it's about half a mile long. Nothing else in our solar system looks like this. We only have a handful of objects that even have an axis ratio bigger than five to one. So we don't know how this forms, but it may be part of its birth process in its home solar system. 'Oumuamua was varying in brightness every 7.34 hours, or so we thought. As more data started to come in from other teams, they were reporting different numbers. Why is it the more we learn about something, the harder it gets to interpret? Well, it turns out that 'Oumuamua is not rotating in a simple way. It's wobbling like a top. So while it is rotating around its short axis, it's also rolling around the long axis and nodding up and down. This very energetic, excited motion is almost certainly the result of it being violently tossed out of its home solar system. Now how we interpret the shape from its brightness depends very critically on how it's spinning, so now we have to rethink what it may look like, and as shown in this beautiful painting by space artist Bill Hartmann, we think that 'Oumuamua may be more of a flattened oval. So let's get back to the energetics. What is it made of? Well, ideally we would love to have a piece of 'Oumuamua into the laboratory, so we could study it in detail. But since even private industry can't manage to launch a spacecraft within a week to something like this, astronomers have to rely on remote observations. So astronomers will look at how the light interacts with the surface. Some colors may get absorbed, giving it a chemical fingerprint, whereas other colors may not. On the other hand, some substances may just reflect more blue or red light efficiently. In the case of 'Oumuamua, it reflected more red light, making it look very much like the organic rich surface of the comet recently visited by the Rosetta spacecraft. But not everything that looks reddish has the same composition. In fact, minerals that have tiny little bits of iron in the surface can also look red, as does the dark side of Saturn's moon Iapetus, shown in these images from the Cassini spacecraft. Nickel-iron meteorites, in other words, metal, can also look red. So while we don't know what's on the surface, we know even less about what's on the inside. However, we do know that it must at least be strong enough to not fly apart as it rotates, so it probably has a density similar to that of rocky asteroids; perhaps even denser, like metal. Well, at the very least, I want to show you one of the beautiful color images that we got from one of the ground-based telescopes. All right, I admit, it's not all that spectacular. (Laughter) We just don't have the resolution. Even Hubble Space Telescope doesn't present a much better view. But the importance of the Hubble data was not because of the images, but because it extended our observations out to two and a half months from the discovery, meaning we get more positions along the orbit, which will hopefully let us figure out where 'Oumuamua came from. So what exactly is 'Oumuamua? We firmly believe it's likely to be a leftover archaeological remnant from the process of the birth of another planetary system, some celestial driftwood. Some scientists think that maybe 'Oumuamua formed very close to a star that was much denser than our own, and the star's tidal forces shredded planetary material early in the solar system's history. Still others suggest that maybe this is something that formed during the death throes of a star, perhaps during a supernova explosion, as planetary material got shredded. Whatever it is, we believe it's a natural object, but we can't actually prove that it's not something artificial. The color, the strange shape, the tumbling motion could all have other explanations. Now while we don't believe this is alien technology, why not do the obvious experiment and search for a radio signal? That's exactly what the Breakthrough Listen project did, but so far, 'Oumuamua has remained completely quiet. Now could we send a spacecraft to 'Oumuamua and answer this question once and for all? Yes, we do actually have the technology, but it would be a long and expensive voyage, and we would get there so far from the Sun that the final approach trajectory would be very difficult. So I think 'Oumuamua probably has many more things to teach us, and in fact there might be more surprises in store as scientists such as myself continue to work with the data. More importantly, I think this visitor from afar has really brought home the point that our solar system isn't isolated. We're part of a much larger environment, and in fact, we may even be surrounded by interstellar visitors and not even know it. This unexpected gift has perhaps raised more questions than its provided answers, but we were the first to say hello to a visitor from another solar system. Thank you. (Applause) Jedidah Isler: Thanks, Karen. I of course enjoyed that talk very much. Thank you. As I recall, we found it pretty late in its journey towards us. Will future technologies like the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope help us detect these things sooner? Karen Meech: Yeah. We're hoping that we'll start to see a lot of these things, and ideally, you'd love to find one as it's approaching the Sun, because you want to have time to do all the science, or even more ideal, you'd get a spacecraft ready to go, parked somewhere in the L4 or L5 position, somewhere near Earth, so that when something comes by, you can chase it. JI: Awesome, thanks so much. Let's thank Karen again. (Applause) |
Bridges should be beautiful | {0: 'Ian Firth designs bridges all around the world; some are very long and cross over wide rivers or sea channels, and some are really short and in the middle of towns and cities, but "all of them are unique and special in their own way."'} | TED2018 | The world needs bridges. Have you ever thought about what it would be like not to have any? It's hard to imagine a civilization without bridges because they're so essential for growth and development of human society, but they're not just about a safe way across a river or an obstacle. They shout about connectivity — community. They reveal something about creativity, our ingenuity — they even hint at our identity. And when bridges fail, or are destroyed in conflict, communities struggle, development stagnates, people suffer. Even today, there are over one billion people living in poor, rural communities around the world that do not have safe, year-round access to the things that you and I take for granted: education, medical care, access to markets ... which is why wonderful organizations like Bridges to Prosperity build bridges in this kind of place — this is in Rwanda. And they make such a difference, not only to those lives immediately around the bridge, but the impact of these bridges is huge, and it spreads over the whole community, far, far away. Of course bridges have been around for an awfully long time. The oldest ones are stone because it's a very durable material. I don't know about you — I love to look at the development of technology to learn about what people did with the materials and tools available to them at the time. So the Pont Du Gard in the center is a wonderful example — Roman aqueduct in the South of France — fantastic piece of technology built using massive stones put together, dry — there's no mortar in those joints. They're just dry stone joints — fantastic and almost as good as new today. Or sometimes up in the mountains, people would build these suspension bridges, often across some dizzy canyon, using a vine. In this case, this is in Peru. This is using grass which grows locally and is woven into ropes to build these bridges. And do you know they rebuild this every year? Because of course grass is not a durable material. So this bridge is unchanged since Inca times. And bridges can be symbols of their location. Of course, Golden Gate and Sydney are well familiar. In Mostar the bridge was synonymous with the name of the place, and to such an extent that in the war in 1993 when the bridge was destroyed, the town all but lost its identity until the bridge was reconstructed. And bridges are enormous features in our landscape — not just enormous, sometimes there's small ones — and they are really significant features, and I believe we have a duty to make our bridges beautiful. Thankfully, many people do. Think of the stunning Millau Viaduct in the South of France. French engineer Michel Virlogeux and British architect Lord Foster collaborated together to produce something which is a really spectacular synergy of architecture and engineering. Or Robert Maillart's Salginatobel Bridge in the mountains in Switzerland — absolutely sublime. Or more recently, Laurent Ney's beautiful and rather delicate bridge for Tintagel Castle in the UK. These are spectacular and beautiful designs and we need to see more of this. Bridges can be considered in three convenient categories, depending on the nature of the structural system that they adopt as their principal support. So, bending, of course, is the way a beam will behave — so, beams and bending. Or compression is the principal way of operating for an arch. Or for the really long spans you need to go lightweight, as we'll see in a minute, and you'll use tension, cables — suspension bridges. And the opportunity for variety is enormous. Engineers have a fantastic scope for innovation and ingenuity and developing different forms around these types. But technological change happens relatively slowly in my world, believe it or not, compared to the changes that happen in mobile phone technology and computers and digital technologies and so on. In our world of construction, the changes seem positively glacial. And the reason for this can be summarized in one word: risk. Structural engineers like me manage risk. We are responsible for structural safety. That's what we do. And when we design bridges like these, I have to balance the probability that loads will be excessive on one side or the strength will be too low on the other side. Both of which, incidentally, are full of uncertainty usually, and so it's a probabilistic problem, and we have to make sure that there's an adequate margin for safety between the two, of course. There's no such thing, I have to tell you, as absolute safety. Contrary to popular belief, zero risk doesn't exist. Engineers have to do their calculations and get their sums right to make sure that those margins are there, and society expects them to do so, which is why it's all the more alarming when things like this happen. I'm not going to go into the reasons for these tragedies, but they are part of the reason why technological change happens quite slowly. Nobody wants this to happen. Clients don't want this to happen on their projects, obviously. And yet of course they want innovation. Innovation is vital. As an engineer, it's part of my DNA. It's in my blood. I couldn't be a very good engineer if I wasn't wanting to innovate, but we have to do so from a position of knowledge and strength and understanding. It's no good taking a leap in the dark, and civilization has learned from mistakes since the beginning of time — no one more so than engineers. Some of you may have seen this film before — this is the very famous Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse in Tacoma, Washington state, 1940. The bridge became known as "Galloping Gertie" because she — she? Is a bridge female? I don't know. She was wobbling like this for quite a long time, and notice this twisting motion. The bridge was far too flexible. It was designed by a chap called Leon Moisseiff, no stranger to suspension bridge design, but in this case he pushed the limits just that little bit too far and paid the price. Thankfully, nobody was killed. But this bridge collapse stopped suspension bridge development dead in its tracks. For 10 years nobody thought about doing another suspension bridge. There were none. And when they did emerge in the 1950s, they were an understandable overreaction, this sort of oversafe response to what had happened. But when it did occur in the mid-60s, there was indeed a step change — an innovation, a technological step change. This is the Severn Bridge in the UK. Notice the aerodynamically streamlined cross section in the center there. It's also a box which makes it very torsionally stiff — that twisting motion which we saw at Tacoma would not happen here. And it's also really lightweight, and as we'll see in a moment, lightweight is really important for long spans, and everybody seems to want us to build longer spans. The longest at the moment is in Japan. It's just under 2,000 meters — one span. Just under two kilometers. The Akashi Kaikyō Bridge. We're currently working on one in Turkey which is a bit longer, and we've designed the Messina Bridge in Italy, which is just waiting to get started with construction one day, who knows when. (Laughter) I'm going to come back to Messina in a moment. But the other kind of long-span bridge which uses that tension principle is the cable-stayed bridge, and we see a lot of these. In fact, in China they're building a whole load of these right now. The longest of these is the Russky Bridge in Vladivostok, Russia — just over 1,100 meters. But let me take you back to this question about long-span and lightweight. This is using Messina Bridge as an example. The pie chart in the center represents the capacity of the main cables — that's what holds the bridge up — the capacity of the main cables. And notice that 78 percent of that capacity is used up just holding the bridge up. There's only 22 percent of its capacity — that's less than a quarter — available for the payload, the stuff that the bridge is there to support: the railway, the road and so on. And in fact, over 50 percent of that payload — of that dead load — is the cable on its own. Just the cable without any bridge deck. If we could make that cable lighter, we could span longer. Right now if we use the high-strength steel wire available to us, we can span, practically speaking, around about five or six kilometers if we really push it. But if we could use carbon fiber in those cables, we could go more than 10 kilometers. That's pretty spectacular. But of course superspans is not necessarily the way to go everywhere. They're very expensive and they've got all sorts of other challenges associated with them, and we tend to build multispan when we're crossing a wide estuary or a sea crossing. But of course if that sea crossing were somewhere like Gibraltar, or in this case, the Red Sea, we would indeed be building multiple superlong spans and that would be something spectacular, wouldn't it? I don't think I'm going to see that one finished in my lifetime, but it will certainly be worth waiting for for some of you guys. Well, I want to tell you about something which I think is really exciting. This is a multispan suspension bridge across very deep water in Norway, and we're working on this at the moment. The deep water means that foundations are prohibitively expensive. So this bridge floats. This is a floating, multispan suspension bridge. We've had floating bridges before, but nothing like this. It stands on floating pontoons which are tethered to the seabed and held down — so, pulled down against those buoyancy forces, and in order to make it stable, the tops of the towers have to be tied together, otherwise the whole thing would just wobble around and nobody will want to go on that. But I'm really excited about this because if you think about the places around the world where the water is so deep that nobody has given a second thought to the possibility of a bridge or any kind of crossing, this now opens up that possibility. So this one's being done by the Norwegian Roads Administration, but I'm really excited to know where else will this technology enable development — that growing together, that building of community. Now, what about concrete? Concrete gets a pretty bad name sometimes, but in the hands of people like Rudy Ricciotti here, look what you can do with it. This is what we call ultra-high performance fiber-reinforced concrete. It's a bit of a mouthful. Us engineers love those kinds of words. (Laughter) But what you do with this — this is really superstrong, and it's really durable, and you can get this fantastic sculptural quality. Who said concrete bridges are dull? We could talk about all sorts of other new technologies and things which are going on, robots and 3-D printing and AI and all of that, but I want to take you back to something which I alluded to earlier on. Our bridges need to be functional, yes. They need to be safe — absolutely. They need to be serviceable and durable. But I passionately believe they need to be elegant; they need to be beautiful. Our bridges are designed for a long time. We tend to design for 100 years plus. They're going to be there for an awfully long time. Nobody is going to remember the cost. Nobody will remember whether it overran a few months. But if it's ugly or just dull, it will always be ugly or dull. (Laughter) Bridges — beauty enriches life. Doesn't it? It enhances our well-being. Ugliness and mediocrity does exactly the opposite. And if we go on building mediocre, ugly environments — and I believe we're becoming numb to that stuff — if we go on doing that, it's something like a large-scale vandalism, which is completely unacceptable. (Applause) This is a bridge in Lyon in France, which was procured through a design competition. And I think we need to start talking to those people who procure our bridges and our structures, because it's the procurement which is often the key. Design competitions is one way to get good design, but it's not the only one. There's an awful lot of procurement going on that is absolutely prejudiced against good design. So yes, technology happens a bit slowly sometimes in my world. But I'm really excited about what we can do with it. Whether it's saving lives in rural Africa or stretching the boundaries of long-span technology or just crossing the road next-door, I hope we continue to build elegant and beautiful stuff that save lives and build communities. Thank you. (Applause) |
What causes hallucinations? | null | TED-Ed | An elderly woman named Rosalie was sitting in her nursing home when her room suddenly burst to life with twirling fabrics. Through the elaborate drapings, she could make out animals, children, and costumed characters. Rosalie was alarmed, not by the intrusion, but because she knew this entourage was an extremely detailed hallucination. Her cognitive function was excellent, and she had not taken any medications that might cause hallucinations. Strangest of all, had a real-life crowd of circus performers burst into her room, she wouldn’t have been able to see them: she was completely blind. Rosalie had developed a condition known as Charles Bonnet Syndrome, in which patients with either impaired vision or total blindness suddenly hallucinate whole scenes in vivid color. These hallucinations appear suddenly, and can last for mere minutes or recur for years. We still don’t fully understand what causes them to come and go, or why certain patients develop them when others don’t. We do know from fMRI studies that these hallucinations activate the same brain areas as sight, areas that are not activated by imagination. Many other hallucinations, including smells, sights, and sounds, also involve the same brain areas as real sensory experiences. Because of this, the cerebral cortex is thought to play a part in hallucinations. This thin layer of grey matter covers the entire cerebrum, with different areas processing information from each of our senses. But even in people with completely unimpaired senses, the brain constructs the world we perceive from incomplete information. For example, our eyes have blind spots where the optic nerve blocks part of the retina. When the visual cortex processes light into coherent images, it fills in these blind spots with information from the surrounding area. Occasionally, we might notice a glitch, but most of the time we’re none the wiser. When the visual cortex is deprived of input from the eyes, even temporarily, the brain still tries to create a coherent picture, but the limits of its abilities become a lot more obvious. The full-blown hallucinations of Charles Bonnet Syndrome are one example. Because Charles Bonnet Syndrome only occurs in people who had normal vision and then lost their sight, not those who were born blind, scientists think the brain uses remembered images to compensate for the lack of new visual input. And the same is true for other senses. People with hearing loss often hallucinate music or voices, sometimes as elaborate as the cacophony of an entire marching band. In addition to sensory deprivation, recreational and therapeutic drugs, conditions like epilepsy and narcolepsy, and psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia, are a few of the many known causes of hallucinations, and we’re still finding new ones. Some of the most notorious hallucinations are associated with drugs like LSD and psilocybin. Their hallmark effects include the sensation that dry objects are wet and that surfaces are breathing. At higher doses, the visual world can appear to melt, dissolve into swirls, or burst into fractal-like patterns. Evidence suggests these drugs also act on the cerebral cortex. But while visual impairment typically only causes visual hallucinations, and hearing loss auditory ones, substances like LSD cause perceptual disturbances across all the senses. That’s likely because they activate receptors in a broad range of brain areas, including the cortical regions for all the senses. LSD and psilocybin both function like serotonin in the brain, binding directly to one type of serotonin receptor in particular. While serotonin’s role in the brain is complex and poorly understood, it likely plays an important part in integrating information from the eyes, nose, ears, and other sensory organs. So one theory is that LSD and psilocybin cause hallucinations by disrupting the signaling involved in sensory integration. Hallucinations associated with schizophrenia may share a similar mechanism with those caused by LSD and psilocybin. Patients with schizophrenia often have elevated levels of serotonin in the brain. And antipsychotic drugs relieve symptoms of schizophrenia by blocking the same serotonin receptors LSD and psilocybin bind to. And, in some cases, these drugs can even relieve the hallucinations of patients with Charles Bonnet Syndrome. We’re still a long way from understanding all the different causes and interconnected mechanisms of hallucinations. But it’s clear that hallucinatory experiences are much more closely tied to ordinary perception than we once thought. And by studying hallucinations, we stand to learn a great deal about how our brains construct the world we see, hear, smell, and touch. As we learn more, we’ll likely come to appreciate just how subjective and individual each person’s island universe of perception really is. |
The agony of opioid withdrawal -- and what doctors should tell patients about it | {0: 'Travis Rieder wants to help find a solution to America’s opioid crisis -- and if that sounds a bit too lofty, he’d settle for making clear, incremental progress in a responsible, evidence-based way.'} | TEDxMidAtlantic | "How much pain medication are you taking?" That was the very routine question that changed my life. It was July 2015, about two months after I nearly lost my foot in a serious motorcycle accident. So I was back in my orthopedic surgeon's office for yet another follow-up appointment. I looked at my wife, Sadiye; we did some calculating. "About 115 milligrams oxycodone," I responded. "Maybe more." I was nonchalant, having given this information to many doctors many times before, but this time was different. My doctor turned serious and he looked at me and said, "Travis, that's a lot of opioids. You need to think about getting off the meds now." In two months of escalating prescriptions, this was the first time that anyone had expressed concern. Indeed, this was the first real conversation I'd had about my opioid therapy, period. I had been given no warnings, no counseling, no plan ... just lots and lots of prescriptions. What happened next really came to define my entire experience of medical trauma. I was given what I now know is a much too aggressive tapering regimen, according to which I divided my medication into four doses, dropping one each week over the course of the month. The result is that I was launched into acute opioid withdrawal. The result, put another way, was hell. The early stages of withdrawal feel a lot like a bad case of the flu. I became nauseated, lost my appetite, I ached everywhere, had increased pain in my rather mangled foot; I developed trouble sleeping due to a general feeling of restlessness. At the time, I thought this was all pretty miserable. That's because I didn't know what was coming. At the beginning of week two, my life got much worse. As the symptoms dialed up in intensity, my internal thermostat seemed to go haywire. I would sweat profusely almost constantly, and yet if I managed to get myself out into the hot August sun, I might look down and find myself covered in goosebumps. The restlessness that had made sleep difficult during that first week now turned into what I came to think of as the withdrawal feeling. It was a deep sense of jitters that would keep me twitching. It made sleep nearly impossible. But perhaps the most disturbing was the crying. I would find myself with tears coming on for seemingly no reason and with no warning. At the time they felt like a neural misfire, similar to the goosebumps. Sadiye became concerned, and she called the prescribing doctor who very helpfully advised lots of fluids for the nausea. When she pushed him and said, "You know, he's really quite badly off," the doctor responded, "Well, if it's that bad, he can just go back to his previous dose for a little while." "And then what?" I wondered. "Try again later," he responded. Now, there's no way that I was going to go back on my previous dose unless I had a better plan for making it through the withdrawal next time. And so we stuck to riding it out and dropped another dose. At the beginning of week three, my world got very dark. I basically stopped eating, and I barely slept at all thanks to the jitters that would keep me writhing all night. But the worst — the worst was the depression. The tears that had felt like a misfire before now felt meaningful. Several times a day I would get that welling in my chest where you know the tears are coming, but I couldn't stop them and with them came desperation and hopelessness. I began to believe that I would never recover either from the accident or from the withdrawal. Sadiye got back on the phone with the prescriber and this time he recommended that we contact our pain management team from the last hospitalization. That sounded like a great idea, so we did that immediately, and we were shocked when nobody would speak with us. The receptionist who answered the phone advised us that the pain management team provides an inpatient service; although they prescribe opioids to get pain under control, they do not oversee tapering and withdrawal. Furious, we called the prescriber back and begged him for anything — anything that could help me — but instead he apologized, saying that he was out of his depth. "Look," he told us, "my initial advice to you is clearly bad, so my official recommendation is that Travis go back on the medication until he can find someone more competent to wean him off." Of course I wanted to go back on the medication. I was in agony. But I believed that if I saved myself from the withdrawal with the drugs that I would never be free of them, and so we buckled ourselves in, and I dropped the last dose. As my brain experienced life without prescription opioids for the first time in months, I thought I would die. I assumed I would die — (Crying) I'm sorry. (Crying) Because if the symptoms didn't kill me outright, I'd kill myself. And I know that sounds dramatic, because to me, standing up here years later, whole and healthy — to me, it sounds dramatic. But I believed it to my core because I no longer had any hope that I would be normal again. The insomnia became unbearable and after two days with virtually no sleep, I spent a whole night on the floor of our basement bathroom. I alternated between cooling my feverish head against the ceramic tiles and trying violently to throw up despite not having eaten anything in days. When Sadiye found me at the end of the night she was horrified, and we got back on the phone. We called everyone. We called surgeons and pain docs and general practitioners — anyone we could find on the internet, and not a single one of them would help me. The few that we could speak with on the phone advised us to go back on the medication. An independent pain management clinic said that they prescribe opioids but they don't oversee tapering or withdrawal. When my desperation was clearly coming through my voice, much as it is now, the receptionist took a deep breath and said, "Mr. Rieder, it sounds like perhaps what you need is a rehab facility or a methadone clinic." I didn't know any better at the time, so I took her advice. I hung up and I started calling those places, but it took me virtually no time at all to discover that many of these facilities are geared towards those battling long-term substance use disorder. In the case of opioids, this often involves precisely not weaning the patient off the medication, but transitioning them onto the safer, longer-acting opioids: methadone or buprenorphine for maintenance treatment. In addition, everywhere I called had an extensive waiting list. I was simply not the kind of patient they were designed to see. After being turned away from a rehab facility, I finally admitted defeat. I was broken and beaten, and I couldn't do it anymore. So I told Sadiye that I was going back on the medication. I would start with the lowest dose possible, and I would take only as much as I absolutely needed to escape the most crippling effects of the withdrawal. So that night she helped me up the stairs and for the first time in weeks I actually went to bed. I took the little orange prescription bottle, I set it on my nightstand ... and then I didn't touch it. I fell asleep, I slept through the night and when I woke up, the most severe symptoms had abated dramatically. I'd made it out. (Applause) Thanks for that, that was my response, too. (Laughter) So — I'm sorry, I have to gather myself just a little bit. I think this story is important. It's not because I think I'm special. This story is important precisely because I'm not special; because nothing that happened to me was all that unique. My dependence on opioids was entirely predictable given the amount that I was prescribed and the duration for which I was prescribed it. Dependence is simply the brain's natural response to an opioid-rich environment and so there was every reason to think that from the beginning, I would need a supervised, well-formed tapering plan, but our health care system seemingly hasn't decided who's responsible for patients like me. The prescribers saw me as a complex patient needing specialized care, probably from pain medicine. The pain docs saw their job as getting pain under control and when I couldn't get off the medication, they saw me as the purview of addiction medicine. But addiction medicine is overstressed and focused on those suffering from long-term substance use disorder. In short, I was prescribed a drug that needed long-term management and then I wasn't given that management, and it wasn't even clear whose job such management was. This is a recipe for disaster and any such disaster would be interesting and worth talking about — probably worth a TED Talk — but the failure of opioid tapering is a particular concern at this moment in America because we are in the midst of an epidemic in which 33,000 people died from overdose in 2015. Nearly half of those deaths involved prescription opioids. The medical community has in fact started to react to this crisis, but much of their response has involved trying to prescribe fewer pills — and absolutely, that's going to be important. So for instance, we're now gaining evidence that American physicians often prescribe medication even when it's not necessary in the case of opioids. And even when opioids are called for, they often prescribe much more than is needed. These sorts of considerations help to explain why America, despite accounting for only five percent of the global population, consumes nearly 70 percent of the total global opioid supply. But focusing only on the rate of prescribing risks overlooking two crucially important points. The first is that opioids just are and will continue to be important pain therapies. As somebody who has had severe, real, long-lasting pain, I can assure you these medications can make life worth living. And second: we can still fight the epidemic while judiciously prescribing opioids to people who really need them by requiring that doctors properly manage the pills that they do prescribe. So for instance, go back to the tapering regimen that I was given. Is it reasonable to expect that any physician who prescribes opioids knows that that is too aggressive? Well, after I initially published my story in an academic journal, someone from the CDC sent me their pocket guide for tapering opioids. This is a four-page document, and most of it's pictures. In it, they teach physicians how to taper opioids in the easier cases, and one of the their recommendations is that you never start at more than a 10 percent dose reduction per week. If my physician had given me that plan, my taper would have taken several months instead of a few weeks. I'm sure it wouldn't have been easy. It probably would have been pretty uncomfortable, but maybe it wouldn't have been hell. And that seems like the kind of information that someone who prescribes this medication ought to have. In closing, I need to say that properly managing prescribed opioids will not by itself solve the crisis. America's epidemic is far bigger than that, but when a medication is responsible for tens of thousands of deaths a year, reckless management of that medication is indefensible. Helping opioid therapy patients to get off the medication that they were prescribed may not be a complete solution to our epidemic, but it would clearly constitute progress. Thank you. (Applause) |
Can you solve the Mondrian squares riddle? | null | TED-Ed | Dutch artist Piet Mondrian’s abstract, rectangular paintings inspired mathematicians to create a two-fold challenge. First, we must completely cover a square canvas with non-overlapping rectangles. All must be unique, so if we use a 1x4, we can’t use a 4x1 in another spot, but a 2x2 rectangle would be fine. Let’s try that. Say we have a canvas measuring 4x4. We can’t chop it directly in half, since that would give us identical rectangles of 2x4. But the next closest option - 3x4 and 1x4 - works. That was easy, but we’re not done yet. Now take the area of the largest rectangle, and subtract the area of the smallest. The result is our score, and the goal is to get as low a score as possible. Here, the largest area is 12 and the smallest is 4, giving us a score of 8. Since we didn’t try to go for a low score that time, we can probably do better. Let’s keep our 1x4 while breaking the 3x4 into a 3x3 and a 3x1. Now our score is 9 minus 3, or 6. Still not optimal, but better. With such a small canvas, there are only a few options. But let’s see what happens when the canvas gets bigger. Try out an 8x8; what’s the lowest score you can get? Pause here if you want to figure it out yourself. Answer in: 3 Answer in: 2 Answer in: 1 To get our bearings, we can start as before: dividing the canvas roughly in two. That gives us a 5x8 rectangle with area 40 and a 3x8 with area 24, for a score of 16. That’s pretty bad. Dividing that 5x8 into a 5x5 and a 5x3 leaves us with a score of 10. Better, but still not great. We could just keep dividing the biggest rectangle. But that would leave us with increasingly tiny rectangles, which would increase the range between the largest and smallest. What we really want is for all our rectangles to fall within a small range of area values. And since the total area of the canvas is 64, the areas need to add up to that. Let’s make a list of possible rectangles and areas. To improve on our previous score, we can try to pick a range of values spanning 9 or less and adding up to 64. You’ll notice that some values are left out because rectangles like 1x13 or 2x9 won’t fit on the canvas. You might also realize that if you use one of the rectangles with an odd area like 5, 9, or 15, you need to use another odd-value rectangle to get an even sum. With all that in mind, let’s see what works. Starting with area 20 or more puts us over the limit too quickly. But we can get to 64 using rectangles in the 14-18 range, leaving out 15. Unfortunately, there’s no way to make them fit. Using the 2x7 leaves a gap that can only be filled by a rectangle with a width of 1. Going lower, the next range that works is 8 to 14, leaving out the 3x3 square. This time, the pieces fit. That’s a score of 6. Can we do even better? No. We can get the same score by throwing out the 2x7 and 1x8 and replacing them with a 3x3, 1x7, and 1x6. But if we go any lower down the list, the numbers become so small that we’d need a wider range of sizes to cover the canvas, which would increase the score. There’s no trick or formula here – just a bit of intuition. It's more art than science. And for larger grids, expert mathematicians aren’t sure whether they’ve found the lowest possible scores. So how would you divide a 4x4, 10x10, or 32x32 canvas? Give it a try and post your results in the comments. |
How autonomous flying taxis could change the way you travel | {0: 'Rodin Lyasoff makes improbable objects fly.'} | TED2018 | I love airplanes. Oh — I love airplanes. So, when I went to college in the late 90s, it was obvious that I was going to study aerospace. And you wouldn't believe how many people told me, "Oh no, not aerospace. Aerospace is going to be boring, everything in aerospace has already been done." Well, they were a little bit off the mark. And in fact, I think the next decade is going to be another golden age for aviation. For one thing, and this is where I get excited, flight is about to get a lot more personal. So, a little compare and contrast. In the last century, large commercial airplanes have connected cities across the globe. And 100 years ago, it would have been unthinkable for all of us to fly here from around the world for a five-day conference. But we did, and most of us probably without a second thought. And that's a remarkable achievement for humanity. But on a day-to-day basis, we still spend a lot of time in cars. Or actively trying to avoid it. Some of my best friends live in San Francisco, I live in Mountain View, about 40 miles away. We're all busy. At the end of the day, we're separated by something like two hours of heavy traffic. So frankly, we haven't seen each other in a few months. Now, I work in downtown San Jose, which is near the airport. And there are actually days when I can leave work, get on a plane and fly to Los Angeles faster than I can drive to San Francisco. Cities are only getting more populated, the roads are full, and it's really difficult to expand them. And so in a lot of places, there really aren't a lot of good solutions for getting around traffic. But what if you could fly over it? The sky is underutilized, and I would argue it will never be as congested as the roads are. First of all, you've got a whole other dimension, but also just safety considerations and air-traffic management will not allow bumper-to-bumper traffic in the sky. Which means, in many cases, flying can be a long-term, compelling alternative to traveling on the ground. So imagine this: you call an Uber, it takes you to a nearby landing spot — we call these vertiports — there's an airplane waiting for you there, flies you over all of the traffic in the middle, and on the other side, another Uber takes you to your friend's house. And I said Uber, but I really think we need to congratulate the Lyft branding team for their forward thinking in choosing their brand. (Laughter) So in that example, OK, there are a few extra steps, I admit. But it's 30 minutes versus two hours, it costs around 60 dollars, and you get to fly. We're not there yet, but we are a lot closer than you might think. So one of the first things we need is we need an aircraft that can take off and land in small spaces and quickly take you where you want to go. And helicopters can do that today, but traditionally, helicopters have been just a little bit too expensive, just a little too hard to pilot and just a little too noisy to be used for daily transportation in cities. Well, electric flight and autonomy are changing that. Electric flight, in particular, unlocks new possibilities for vehicle configurations that we just could not explore in the past. If you use electric motors, you can have many of them around the aircraft, and it doesn't add a lot of extra weight. And that gives you redundancy and safety. And also, they are cleaner, cheaper and quieter than internal combustion engines. Autonomy allows the transportation network to scale, and I actually think it makes the aircraft safer. Commercial flights are already automated for most of their duration, and I believe there will come a day when we won't even trust an airplane that required a human to fly. So, one of our teams at A3 wanted to see just how close this future really was. So they built and flew a prototype of one such vehicle. And they made a point of only using mature, commercially available technologies today. We call it Vahana. It's fully electric. It takes off and lands vertically, but flies forward like a regular airplane. It's fully self-piloted. You push a button, it takes off, flies and lands, all by itself. The prototype that you see here is designed to carry a single passenger and luggage. And it can go about 20 miles in 15 minutes. And our estimate for a trip like that is it would cost around 40 dollars, which you can really build a business around. It has multiple redundant motors and batteries, you can lose one, it will continue flying and land normally. It's pretty quiet. When it's flying overhead, it will be quieter than a Prius on the highway. It's intelligent and has cameras, lidar and radar, so it can detect and avoid unexpected obstacles. And the team really focused on making it efficient, so the batteries are small, light, and they last longer. For reference, the Vahana battery is less than half the size of a Tesla Model S battery. It's about 40 kilowatt-hours. And you can hot swap the batteries in just a few minutes. And I do think that in a few years, people will be comfortable getting by themselves in a self-piloted, electric, VTOL air taxi. But the team is busy working on the next version, which is going to carry at least two passengers and fly quite a bit farther. But more importantly, there are over 20 companies around the world working on vehicles just like this one right now. My best guess is in the next five years, you'll start seeing vertiports in some cities, and little airplane icons on your ride-sharing apps. And it might begin with a dozen, but eventually, we could have hundreds of these, flying around our cities. And it will fundamentally transform our relationship with local travel. In the past century, flight connected our planet, in the next, it will reconnect our local communities, and I hope it will reconnect us to each other. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: OK, so when these things first roll out — right now, it's a single person aircraft, right? Rodin Lyasoff: Ours is, yes. CA: Yours is. I mean, someone comes out of their car, the door opens, they get in, there's no one else in there. This thing takes off. Could we do a poll here? Because these are early adopters in this room. I want to know who here is excited about the idea of being picked up solo in an auto-flying — Well, there you go! RL: It's pretty good. CA: That is pretty awesome, half of TED is completely stark staring bonkers. (Laughter) RL: So, one of the things we're really focusing on is, really, the cost. So you can really wrap a business around that. And so, that's why some of the features are really driven by price. And the 40-dollar price tag is really a target that we're aiming for. Which should make it accessible to a larger crowd than this one. CA: The biggest blockage in terms of when this rolls out is probably not the technology at this point — it's regulation, right? RL: That's probably true, yes, I would agree with that. The technology need to mature in terms of safety, to get to the safety levels that we expect from aircraft. But I don't think there are any blockers there, just work needs to get done. CA: So, first, this is ride sharing. Are we that far away from a time when lots of people have one of these in their garage and just kind of, go direct to their friend's house? RL: My personal view is that ride sharing actually allows you to operate that entire business much more efficiently. You know, there are millennials that say they never want to own a car. I think they'll probably feel even stronger about aircraft. So — (Laughter) I really think that the network scales and operates a lot better as a ride-sharing platform, also because the integration with air-traffic management works a lot better if it's handled centrally. CA: Cool. Thank you for that. RL: Thank you. CA: That was amazing. |
The tiny creature that secretly powers the planet | {0: 'Penny Chisholm studies an extremely tiny microorganism that plays an enormous role in ocean ecosystems. Discovered only three decades ago, it has defined her career and inspired her to think differently about life on Earth.'} | TED2018 | I'd like to introduce you to a tiny microorganism that you've probably never heard of: its name is Prochlorococcus, and it's really an amazing little being. For one thing, its ancestors changed the earth in ways that made it possible for us to evolve, and hidden in its genetic code is a blueprint that may inspire ways to reduce our dependency on fossil fuel. But the most amazing thing is that there are three billion billion billion of these tiny cells on the planet, and we didn't know they existed until 35 years ago. So to tell you their story, I need to first take you way back, four billion years ago, when the earth might have looked something like this. There was no life on the planet, there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. So what happened to change that planet into the one we enjoy today, teeming with life, teeming with plants and animals? Well, in a word, photosynthesis. About two and a half billion years ago, some of these ancient ancestors of Prochlorococcus evolved so that they could use solar energy and absorb it and split water into its component parts of oxygen and hydrogen. And they used the chemical energy produced to draw CO2, carbon dioxide, out of the atmosphere and use it to build sugars and proteins and amino acids, all the things that life is made of. And as they evolved and grew more and more over millions and millions of years, that oxygen accumulated in the atmosphere. Until about 500 million years ago, there was enough in the atmosphere that larger organisms could evolve. There was an explosion of life-forms, and, ultimately, we appeared on the scene. While that was going on, some of those ancient photosynthesizers died and were compressed and buried, and became fossil fuel with sunlight buried in their carbon bonds. They're basically buried sunlight in the form of coal and oil. Today's photosynthesizers, their engines are descended from those ancient microbes, and they feed basically all of life on earth. Your heart is beating using the solar energy that some plant processed for you, and the stuff your body is made out of is made out of CO2 that some plant processed for you. Basically, we're all made out of sunlight and carbon dioxide. Fundamentally, we're just hot air. (Laughter) So as terrestrial beings, we're very familiar with the plants on land: the trees, the grasses, the pastures, the crops. But the oceans are filled with billions of tons of animals. Do you ever wonder what's feeding them? Well there's an invisible pasture of microscopic photosynthesizers called phytoplankton that fill the upper 200 meters of the ocean, and they feed the entire open ocean ecosystem. Some of the animals live among them and eat them, and others swim up to feed on them at night, while others sit in the deep and wait for them to die and settle down and then they chow down on them. So these tiny phytoplankton, collectively, weigh less than one percent of all the plants on land, but annually they photosynthesize as much as all of the plants on land, including the Amazon rainforest that we consider the lungs of the planet. Every year, they fix 50 billion tons of carbon in the form of carbon dioxide into their bodies that feeds the ocean ecosystem. How does this tiny amount of biomass produce as much as all the plants on land? Well, they don't have trunks and stems and flowers and fruits and all that to maintain. All they have to do is grow and divide and grow and divide. They're really lean little photosynthesis machines. They really crank. So there are thousands of different species of phytoplankton, come in all different shapes and sizes, all roughly less than the width of a human hair. Here, I'm showing you some of the more beautiful ones, the textbook versions. I call them the charismatic species of phytoplankton. And here is Prochlorococcus. I know, it just looks like a bunch of schmutz on a microscope slide. (Laughter) But they're in there, and I'm going to reveal them to you in a minute. But first I want to tell you how they were discovered. About 38 years ago, we were playing around with a technology in my lab called flow cytometry that was developed for biomedical research for studying cells like cancer cells, but it turns out we were using it for this off-label purpose which was to study phytoplankton, and it was beautifully suited to do that. And here's how it works: so you inject a sample in this tiny little capillary tube, and the cells go single file by a laser, and as they do, they scatter light according to their size and they emit light according to whatever pigments they might have, whether they're natural or whether you stain them. And the chlorophyl of phytoplankton, which is green, emits red light when you shine blue light on it. And so we used this instrument for several years to study our phytoplankton cultures, species like those charismatic ones that I showed you, just studying their basic cell biology. But all that time, we thought, well wouldn't it be really cool if we could take an instrument like this out on a ship and just squirt seawater through it and see what all those diversity of phytoplankton would look like. So I managed to get my hands on what we call a big rig in flow cytometry, a large, powerful laser with a money-back guarantee from the company that if it didn't work on a ship, they would take it back. And so a young scientist that I was working with at the time, Rob Olson, was able to take this thing apart, put it on a ship, put it back together and take it off to sea. And it worked like a charm. We didn't think it would, because we thought the ship's vibrations would get in the way of the focusing of the laser, but it really worked like a charm. And so we mapped the phytoplankton distributions across the ocean. For the first time, you could look at them one cell at a time in real time and see what was going on — that was very exciting. But one day, Rob noticed some faint signals coming out of the instrument that we dismissed as electronic noise for probably a year before we realized that it wasn't really behaving like noise. It had some regular patterns to it. To make a long story short, it was tiny, tiny little cells, less than one-one hundredth the width of a human hair that contain chlorophyl. That was Prochlorococcus. So remember this slide that I showed you? If you shine blue light on that same sample, this is what you see: two tiny little red light-emitting cells. Those are Prochlorococcus. They are the smallest and most abundant photosynthetic cell on the planet. At first, we didn't know what they were, so we called the "little greens." It was a very affectionate name for them. Ultimately, we knew enough about them to give them the name Prochlorococcus, which means "primitive green berry." And it was about that time that I became so smitten by these little cells that I redirected my entire lab to study them and nothing else, and my loyalty to them has really paid off. They've given me a tremendous amount, including bringing me here. (Applause) So over the years, we and others, many others, have studied Prochlorococcus across the oceans and found that they're very abundant over wide, wide ranges in the open ocean ecosystem. They're particularly abundant in what are called the open ocean gyres. These are sometimes referred to as the deserts of the oceans, but they're not deserts at all. Their deep blue water is teeming with a hundred million Prochlorococcus cells per liter. If you crowd them together like we do in our cultures, you can see their beautiful green chlorophyl. One of those test tubes has a billion Prochlorococcus in it, and as I told you earlier, there are three billion billion billion of them on the planet. That's three octillion, if you care to convert. (Laughter) And collectively, they weigh more than the human population and they photosynthesize as much as all of the crops on land. They're incredibly important in the global ocean. So over the years, as we were studying them and found how abundant they were, we thought, hmm, this is really strange. How can a single species be so abundant across so many different habitats? And as we isolated more into culture, we learned that they are different ecotypes. There are some that are adapted to the high-light intensities in the surface water, and there are some that are adapted to the low light in the deep ocean. In fact, those cells that live in the bottom of the sunlit zone are the most efficient photosynthesizers of any known cell. And then we learned that there are some strains that grow optimally along the equator, where there are higher temperatures, and some that do better at the cooler temperatures as you go north and south. So as we studied these more and more and kept finding more and more diversity, we thought, oh my God, how diverse are these things? And about that time, it became possible to sequence their genomes and really look under the hood and look at their genetic makeup. And we've been able to sequence the genomes of cultures that we have, but also recently, using flow cytometry, we can isolate individual cells from the wild and sequence their individual genomes, and now we've sequenced hundreds of Prochlorococcus. And although each cell has roughly 2,000 genes — that's one tenth the size of the human genome — as you sequence more and more, you find that they only have a thousand of those in common and the other thousand for each individual strain is drawn from an enormous gene pool, and it reflects the particular environment that the cell might have thrived in, not just high or low light or high or low temperature, but whether there are nutrients that limit them like nitrogen, phosphorus or iron. It reflects the habitat that they come from. Think of it this way. If each cell is a smartphone and the apps are the genes, when you get your smartphone, it comes with these built-in apps. Those are the ones that you can't delete if you're an iPhone person. You press on them and they don't jiggle and they don't have x's. Even if you don't want them, you can't get rid of them. (Laughter) Those are like the core genes of Prochlorococcus. They're the essence of the phone. But you have a huge pool of apps to draw upon to make your phone custom-designed for your particular lifestyle and habitat. If you travel a lot, you'll have a lot of travel apps, if you're into financial things, you might have a lot of financial apps, or if you're like me, you probably have a lot of weather apps, hoping one of them will tell you what you want to hear. (Laughter) And I've learned the last couple days in Vancouver that you don't need a weather app — you just need an umbrella. So — (Laughter) (Applause) So just as your smartphone tells us something about how you live your life, your lifestyle, reading the genome of a Prochlorococcus cell tells us what the pressures are in its environment. It's like reading its diary, not only telling us how it got through its day or its week, but even its evolutionary history. As we studied — I said we've sequenced hundreds of these cells, and we can now project what is the total genetic size — gene pool — of the Prochlorococcus federation, as we call it. It's like a superorganism. And it turns out that projections are that the collective has 80,000 genes. That's four times the size of the human genome. And it's that diversity of gene pools that makes it possible for them to dominate these large regions of the oceans and maintain their stability year in and year out. So when I daydream about Prochlorococcus, which I probably do more than is healthy — (Laughter) I imagine them floating out there, doing their job, maintaining the planet, feeding the animals. But also I inevitably end up thinking about what a masterpiece they are, finely tuned by millions of years of evolution. With 2,000 genes, they can do what all of our human ingenuity has not figured out how to do yet. They can take solar energy, CO2 and turn it into chemical energy in the form of organic carbon, locking that sunlight in those carbon bonds. If we could figure out exactly how they do this, it could inspire designs that could reduce our dependency on fossil fuels, which brings my story full circle. The fossil fuels that are buried that we're burning took millions of years for the earth to bury those, including those ancestors of Prochlorococcus, and we're burning that now in the blink of an eye on geological timescales. Carbon dioxide is increasing in the atmosphere. It's a greenhouse gas. The oceans are starting to warm. So the question is, what is that going to do for my Prochlorococcus? And I'm sure you're expecting me to say that my beloved microbes are doomed, but in fact they're not. Projections are that their populations will expand as the ocean warms to 30 percent larger by the year 2100. Does that make me happy? Well, it makes me happy for Prochlorococcus of course — (Laughter) but not for the planet. There are winners and losers in this global experiment that we've undertaken, and it's projected that among the losers will be some of those larger phytoplankton, those charismatic ones which are expected to be reduced in numbers, and they're the ones that feed the zooplankton that feed the fish that we like to harvest. So Prochlorococcus has been my muse for the past 35 years, but there are legions of other microbes out there maintaining our planet for us. They're out there ready and waiting for us to find them so they can tell their stories, too. Thank you. (Applause) |
The keys to a happier, healthier sex life | {0: 'Emily Nagoski teaches women to live with confidence and joy inside their bodies.'} | TEDxUniversityofNevada | (Exhales deeply) Today, right? Please join me in one big, deep breath before we dive into talking about sex. (Laughter) Just one big, slow, deep breath in. (Inhales) And a big, slow, deep breath out. (Exhales) OK, now let's talk about sex. So yes, my name is Emily. I am a sex educator. It's the best job in the world. In the fall of 2010, I taught a class called "Women's Sexuality" at Smith College. It was a 100-level, introductory-level class, but I shoehorned in all the science I could, all the psychophysiology and all the neuroscience and even - God forbid - all the sociology, and at the end of this really intense semester, I asked my students to write down just one really important thing that they had learned. This is what they said: "I'm normal." "I am normal." "Just because my sexuality is not the same as other women's, that does not make me abnormal." "Everything is normal. Bringing joy and confidence to sex." "I learned that everything is normal, making it possible for me to go through the rest of my life with confidence and joy." 187 students I had in that class, and more than half of them wrote something along the lines of ... "I'm normal." So I sat in my office, and I read those responses with tears in my eyes. There was something essential to my students about feeling normal, and somehow my class had unlocked the door to that feeling. Moments like that are why I'm a sex educator; it's why I'm here. I mean, it's why I'm here in Nevada, but it's why I'm here: to give everyone on Earth an experience like the one my students had, of unlocking the door to their own authentic sexual well-being. So that's what I'm going to do with you guys today. (Laughter) Because it turns out, we all really are ... normal. The science says so. I can prove it! Are you ready? Let's do it! OK! (Inhales deeply) The mechanism in your brain that controls sexual response is the "dual control model." The dual control model - that means there's how many parts? Two! Thank you! And if I tell you the first part is the sexual accelerator or the "gas pedal," that means the second part has to be the ... ? Brake! They don't let just anybody into these TED Talks. (Laughter) So, the sexual accelerator notices all the sexually-relevant information in the environment, everything you see, hear, smell, touch, taste or imagine, that your brain codes as sexually relevant, and it sends the signal that says "Turn on." And it is functioning at a low level all the time, including right now, just the fact that we're talking about sex is a little bit sexually relevant. At the same time that that's happening, in parallel, your brake is noticing all the very good reasons not to be turned on right now. This is everything you see, hear, smell, touch, taste or imagine that your brain codes as a potential threat. And it sends a signal that says "Turn off." So the process of becoming aroused is the dual process of turning on the ons and turning off the offs. Usually when people struggle with their sexual well-being, it's because - sometimes there's not enough stimulation to the gas pedal, but more often, it's because there's too much stimulation to the brake, and all kinds of things can hit the brake. Like: Are you worried about unwanted pregnancy? Are you worried about your kids walking in, in the middle? Are you really sure that your partner loves your sexy body? Are you really sure that you love your sexy body? Did you spend the first two decades of your life in a culture that taught you that sex is dangerous, disgusting and dirty? That's going to hit the brake, right? (Laughter) So the first thing science tells us to do when we're struggling with our sexual functioning, when we want to access our own authentic sexual well-being, is to start to think through: What are things that hit our accelerator? What are the things that hit our brake? And especially, what are some strategies that we can use in order to minimise the things that are hitting the brake? I'm going to talk about two such evidence-based strategies at the end of the talk. But before I do that, I need to come clean with you about something, which is that all that stuff I just said isn't anywhere near as simple as I made it sound. Sorry. To explain what I mean, I'll tell you about the only affective neuroscience that has ever made me laugh out loud. OK. So I need you to imagine that you're a lab rat. You're a very savvy, experienced lab rat and the researchers have inserted a probe into your nucleus accumbens, a little, sort of jellybean-shaped thing in the middle of your emotional brain. It's a painless procedure, the researchers are clear to say. Plink! So you're this sort of semi-remote-controlled bionic rat, and you're in a three-chambered box, here you are in box #1 - just the ordinary lab environment - there's a bit of noise, the lights are on, but it's fine, you're good at this. So when the researchers zap the front of your nucleus accumbens, here's what you do: Ooh, ooh! What's that? Ooh! So these are approach, moving toward, curious behaviors, right? Ooh! What's that? And then, in this ordinary lab environment - the first box - when they zap the back of your nucleus accumbens, you do this: aaah, what the hell is that!? You're kicking up dust in the face of the predator. These are stress, avoidance, dread responses, right? Moving away as opposed to moving towards. Hit the front? Ooh..! What's that? Hit the back? What the hell is that!? Got that? (Laughter) That's box #1. So we move into box #2. Now box #2 is silent, and it's dark, and it smells like your mother. (Laughter) It is ... I call it the "Rat Spa." It's the most peaceful, calm state of mind you can imagine being in, and when they zap the front of your nucleus accumbens, What do you do? Ooh, ooh! What's that? Ooh! And then, when they zap the back of your nucleus accumbens, What do they do? Ooh, ooh! What's that? When you're in a calm, relaxed, peaceful state of mind, your brain will interpret almost any sensation as something that should be approached with curiosity. Even stimulation that in a different context, it might interpret as a potential threat to be moved away from. But wait ... There's more! (Laughter) We move to box #3. So, here in box #3, the lights are on really bright, music's played at different volumes, you can't even get used to it, they specify in the research paper - this made me laugh out loud - they specify they're playing Iggy Pop. So ... (Laughter) Imagine "Lust for Life" is playing at lots of different volumes, you can't get used to it, you're an introverted bookworm in the worst nightclub in the world, and when they zap the front of your nucleus accumbens, What do you do? Aah..! What the hell is that!? Exactly! They don't let just anybody into these talks, that's amazing! So, when you are in a stressed-out, threatened state of mind, your brain will interpret almost any sensation as something to be avoided, as a potential threat - even stimulation that in a different context, it might've interpreted as something to be approached with curiosity. All of which is a really nerdy way of describing a thing all of us have experienced in the form of tickling. (Laughter) Because, you know, tickling is not everyone's favorite, that's fair, I understand, but at least hypothetically, you can imagine a world where you're in a sexy, fun, flirty state of mind already, and your certain special someone starts tickling on you, and it can feel fun and playful and potentially lead to further nooky, right? But if that exact same certain special someone tried to tickle when you were pissed off at them, (Laughter) how would that feel? As one of my students recently put it: "Violence would shortly ensue." (Laughter) But the weird thing is, it's exactly the same sensation, but because the context is different, your brain interprets it entirely the opposite way. So when I say, "Turn on the ons, and turn off the offs," it's nowhere near as simple as just "Touch me here - don't touch me that way." What it means is, create a context that allows your brain to interpret the world as a pleasurable, safe, sexy place. For most people - again, people vary - but for most people, that context is low stress, high affection and high trust. Those three things are hard enough to come by in the 21st century, but they are not actually the keys that unlock that door to your authentic sexual well-being. Sorry! But this is the big moment, right? This is when I - here they are. I've got this satin shiny pillow with tassels and two keys lying on it. Right here: the keys to your authentic sexual well-being. Don't you want to know what they are? I will explain. The first key says "confidence," and the second key says "joy." How do they work? What do you mean? Where do I get them? Confidence - Confidence comes from knowing what is true about your body, your sexuality, your internal experience. Knowing what's true. Knowing that you have a brake, for example, as well as an accelerator. Knowing that they're sensitive to context, knowing what's true even if it's not what you were taught to expect would be true, even if it's not what you were taught "should" be true. Confidence is knowing what is true. Joy ... is loving what's true. Loving your brake as much as your accelerator, loving that they're sensitive to context, loving what's true even if it's not what you were taught to expect would be true, even - especially - if it's not what you were taught "should" be true. And I guarantee you, you're going to walk out of here with both keys in your pocket. I'm going to tell you specifically how to get your hands on them. But first, I need to talk to you about a cartoon panda. (Laughter) Have you seen the movie "Kung-fu Panda"? It's about a cartoon panda named Po; he becomes a kung-fu master - "Kung Fu Panda" - by diligent effort, the support of his teacher and the wisdom of the Dragon Scroll. The Dragon Scroll contains the key to limitless power! And when Po first gets his hands on the Dragon Scroll he is ... disappointed because there's nothing written on it. It's blank. It just reflects his face. And then comes his epiphany: There is no secret ingredient. It's just ... you. And that is how you get your hands on the keys that unlock the door to your own authentic sexual well-being, by turning toward your own internal experience with calm curiosity. Ooh! What's that? Because it turns out the key to limitless power is you. And now I will tell you the two concrete, specific, evidence-based things that you can do in order to increase your grasp on these two keys of confidence and joy. Ready? Thing #1: What I want you to do is stand in front of a mirror as close to naked as you can tolerate. (Laughter) It gets worse! (Laughter) So what you're going to do is look at what you see there, and you're going to write down everything that you see that you like. Of course, first your brain will flood with culturally-constructed messages about how your body falls short of the culturally-constructed ideal - that's fine, you have every other minute of the day to have those self-critical thoughts, just set them aside, temporarily. Right now, you will write down the things you see that you like. If it is your eyelashes, write that down. If it's your toenails, write that down. And then do it again tomorrow. And then do it again the next day, and the next day, and the more often you do it, the more obvious it will become to you what a frickin' frackin' miracle your body is, and the more immune you'll become to all the cultural, noisy crap that's hitting the brakes. Option #2: If you genuinely cannot imagine looking in a mirror and seeing anything there that you would like, here's what I want you to do instead. I want you to get into a calm, quiet state of mind, just for a couple of minutes each day, and I want you to visualize that door, that door that stands between you and your authentic sexual well-being. And what I want you to do when you can see it really clearly, is that I want you to shine a beacon of kindness and compassion on the door. Because here's the thing about the door: It's not innate, you weren't born with it. It was constructed in your brain by your life experience and by your culture, and you may hate the culture that built that door, you may work to change the culture that built that door, but never turn toward the door itself with hate, because the door is part of you too. And it is not random, it's there to do some work. If you've been shamed for what's on the other side of that door, if you have been shamed for your sexuality - and who hasn't? - that door is there trying to protect you from social isolation and judgement. If you have had what's behind that door - if you had your own sexuality used against you as a weapon, if you're a survivor of sexual violence, your door is there doing really important work. I'm talking here about one in four - you've heard these statistics already - one in four women in America, one in six men ... One in four women in this room, one in six men. And two thirds of transgender folks. If that's you, your door is doing the hard work of helping you to survive in a world where your own sexuality can be used against you as a weapon, and it is working! You know how I can tell? Here you are! Surviving. And I am so grateful to your door for doing that really important work, and I don't know if your door might be ready to open a little bit or if your door needs to stay closed a little while longer, but I know that the first step is always to turn toward the door with kindness and compassion. Confidence is knowing what's true about you, your sexuality, your internal experience. Joy is loving what's true even when it's not what you were taught "should" be true. I'm a sex educator. It's the best job in the world! (Laughter) I teach people to live with confidence and joy inside their bodies, but really all that means is I offer them the science that helps them find the way back to themselves. Because it turns out we all really are ... Oh, who am I kidding? We're not just normal! We, the human species, we're amazing! We - all of us - are beguiling, we are courageous, God knows we are delectable, we are all the way down the alphabet to "yopping" and "zesty." (Laughter) Your body - (Cheering) (Applause) It's you guys! Your body is perfect. Exactly the way it is. The science says so. And now you can prove it! Thank you very much. (Cheering) (Applause) |
How do you define yourself? | {0: 'Lizzie Velasquez is a motivational speaker, YouTube star and author of "Lizzie Beautiful: The Lizzie Velásquez Story."'} | TEDxAustinWomen | I'm really, really, really excited to be here. I kind of want to tell you a little bit more of the - I don't want to say basics - because we really don't know anything about my syndrome. I was born with this very rare syndrome, that only two other people in the world including myself, that we know of, have. Basically what this syndrome causes, is that I cannot gain weight. Yes, it does sound as good as it is. (Laughter) I could eat absolutely whatever I want, whenever I want and I won't really gain any weight. I'm going to be 25 in March, and I've never weighed over about 64 pounds in my entire life. When I was in college, I hid - well, I didn't 'hide' it, everyone knew it was there - but it was a giant tub of Twinkies, donuts, chips, Skittles, and my roommate would say, "I could hear you at 12:30 am, reaching under your bed to get food." But I'm like, "You know what? It's alright, I can do these things!" Because there are benefits to this syndrome. There are benefits to not being able to gain weight. There are benefits to being visually impaired. There are benefits to being kind of really small. A lot of people think, "Lizzie, how in the world are you saying there are benefits when you can only see out of one eye?" Well, let me tell you what the benefits are because they are great. I wear contacts—conTACT. Half-off conTACTS. (Laughter) When I wear my reading glasses: half-off prescription. If somebody is annoying me, being rude: Stand on my right side. (Laughter) It's like you're not even there. I don't even know you're standing there. Right now, if I stand like this, I have no clue that there's this whole side of the room. Also, being small, I am very willing to volunteer myself to go to Weight Watchers or to some gym, and say, "Hi, I'm Lizzie. I will be your poster child. Put my face on whatever you need, and I will say, 'Hi! I used this program. Look how well it worked.'" (Laughter) Even though there are amazing things that have come from this syndrome, there are also things that have been very, very difficult, as you can imagine. Growing up, I was raised 150% normally. I was my parents' first child. And when I was born, the doctors told my mom, "Your daughter has no amniotic fluid around her. At all." So when I was born, it was a miracle that I came out screaming. The doctors told my parents, "We just want to warn you: Expect your daughter to never be able to talk, walk, crawl, think, or do anything by herself." Now, as first-time parents, you would think that my parents would say, "Oh no. Why? Why are we getting our first child with all these unknown problems?" But that's not what they did. The first thing they told the doctor was, "We want to see her, and we are going to take her home and love her, and raise her to the best of our abilities." And that's what they did. I credit pretty much everything that I've done in my life to my parents. My dad is here with me today, and my mom is at home watching. Hi mom! (Laughter) She's recovering from surgery. She has been the glue that's held our family together, and she's given me the strength to see that she's going through so much, but she has this fighting spirit that she's instilled in me, so that I have proudly been able to stand in front of people and say, "You know what? I've had a really difficult life. But that's okay." That's okay. Things have been scary, things have been tough. One of the biggest things that I had to deal with growing up was something I'm pretty sure every single one of us in this room has dealt with before. Can you guess what that is? It starts with a 'B'. Can you guys guess it? Audience: Boys! Lizzie: Boys? (Laughter) Bullying! (Laughter) I know what you all are thinking. (Laughter) Why can't I sit here with them? (Laughter) I had to deal with bullying a lot, but as I said, I was raised very normally, so when I started kindergarten, I had absolutely no idea that I looked different. No clue. I couldn't see that I looked different from other kids. I think of it as a big slap of reality for a five year-old, because I went in to school the first day, decked-out in Pocahontas gear. I was ready! (Laughter) I went in with my backpack that looked like a turtle shell because it was bigger than me, and I walked up to a little girl and smiled at her, and she looked up at me like I was a monster, like I was the scariest thing she had ever seen in her life. My first reaction was, "She is really rude. (Laughter) I am a fun kid, and she's the one missing out. So I'll just go over here and play with blocks. Or boys." (Laughter) (Lizzie laughs) I thought the day would get better, and unfortunately, it didn't. The day got worse and worse. A lot of people just wanted to have absolutely nothing to do with me, and I couldn't understand why. Why? What did I do? I didn't do anything to them! In my mind I was still a really cool kid. I had to go home and ask my parents, "What's wrong with me? What did I do? Why don't they like me?" They sat me down and said, "Lizzie, the only thing different about you is that you're smaller than the other kids. You have this syndrome, but it's not going to define who you are." They said, "Go to school, pick your head up, smile, continue to be yourself, and people will see that you're just like them." And so that's what I did. I want you to think, and ask yourself this in your head, right now: What defines you? Who are you? Is it where you come from? Is it your background? Is it your friends? What is it? What defines who you are as a person? It's taken me a very long time to figure out what defines me. For so long I thought what defined me was my outer appearance. I thought that my little tiny legs, and my little arms, and my little face were ugly. I thought I was disgusting. I hated when I'd wake up in the morning when I was going to middle school, and would be looking in the mirror getting ready, and thinking, "Can I just scrub this syndrome off? It would make my life so much easier if I could just scrub it off. I could look like other kids; I wouldn't have to buy clothes that had Dora the Explorer on them. I wouldn't have to buy stuff that was 'Bedazzled', when I was trying to be like the cool kids." I would wish, and pray, and hope, and do whatever I could so I would wake up in the morning and be different, and I wouldn't have to deal with these struggles. It's what I wanted every single day, and every single day I was disappointed. I have an amazing support system around me, who never pity me, who are there to pick me up if I'm sad, who are there to laugh with me during the good times, and they taught me that, even though I have this syndrome, even though things are hard, I can't let that define me. My life was put into my hands, just like your lives are put into yours. You are the person in the front seat of your car. You are the one who decides whether your car goes down a bad path, or a good path. You are the one who decides what defines you. Now let me tell you: it could be really hard to figure out what defines you, because there were times when I'd get so annoyed and frustrated, and say: "I don't care what defines me!" When I was in high school I found a video, unfortunately, that somebody posted of me, labeling me the world's ugliest woman. There were over four million views to this video; eight seconds long, no sound, thousands of comments; people saying, "Lizzie, please - please - just do the world a favor, put a gun to your head, and kill yourself." Think about that, if people told you that, if strangers told you this. I cried my eyes out of course, and I was ready to fight back and something kind of clicked in my head, and I thought, "I'm just going to leave it alone." I started realizing that my life is in my hands. I could either choose to make this really good, or I could choose to make this really bad. I could be grateful, and open my eyes and realize the things that I do have, and make those the things that define me. I can't see out of one eye, but I can see out of the other. I might get sick a lot, but I have really nice hair. (Laughter) (Audience) You do, you do! Thanks. You guys are like the best little section right here. (Laughter) (Lizzie laughs) You made me lose my train of thought! (Laughter) Okay... where was I? Audience: Your hair! Hair! Hair. Ok, ok, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. So I could either choose to be happy or I could choose to be upset with what I have and still kind of complain about it, but then I started realizing: Am I going to let the people who called me a monster define me? Am I going to let the people who said, "Kill it with fire!" define me? No; I'm going to let my goals, and my success, and my accomplishments be the things that define me - Not my outer appearance, not the fact that I'm visually impaired, not the fact that I have this syndrome that nobody knows what it is. So I told myself I'm going to work my butt off and do whatever I could to make myself better, because in my mind, the best way that I could get back at all those people who made fun of me, who teased me, who called me ugly, who called me a monster was to make myself better, and to show them: You know what? Tell me those negative things, I'm going to turn them around, and I'm going to use them as a ladder to climb up to my goals. That's what I did. I told myself that I wanted to be a motivational speaker, I wanted to write a book, graduate college, have my own family, and have my own career. Eight years later, I’m standing in front of you, still doing motivational speaking. First thing, I accomplished it. I wanted to write a book; in a couple of weeks I will be submitting the manuscript for my third book. (Applause) I wanted to graduate college, and I just finished college. (Cheers and applause) I'm getting a degree in Communication Studies from Texas State University in San Marcos, and I have a minor in English. I really, really tried to use real-life experience while I was getting my degree, and my professors were not having it. I wanted to have, lastly, my own family and my own career. The family part is kind of down the line, and my career part, I feel like I'm really doing well with it, considering the fact that when I decided I wanted to be a motivational speaker, I went home, I sat in front of my laptop, went to Google, and typed in: "How to be a motivational speaker." (Laughter) I'm not even joking. I worked my butt off. I used the people who were telling me that I couldn't do this to motivate me. I used their negativity to light my fire to keep going. Use that. Use that. Use that negativity that you have in your life to make yourself better, because I guarantee you - guarantee you - You will win. Now I want to end, with asking you again. I want you to leave here, and ask yourself what defines you. But remember: Brave starts here. Thank you. (Applause) |
How we're saving one of Earth's last wild places | {0: 'Steve Boyes is working to study and conserve the endangered Okavango Delta in Botswana. '} | TED2018 | Visible from space, the Okavango Delta is Africa's largest remaining intact wetland wilderness. This shining delta in landlocked Botswana is the jewel of the Kalahari, more valuable than diamonds to the world's largest diamond producer and celebrated in 2014 as our planet's 1000th UNESCO World Heritage Site. Now, what you see here are the two major tributaries, the Cuito and the Cubango, disappearing up north into the little-known Angolan highlands. This is the largest undeveloped river basin on the planet, spanning an area larger than California. These vast, undeveloped Angolan watersheds were frozen in time by 27 years of civil war. In fact, Africa's largest tank battle since World War II was fought over a bridge crossing the Okavango's Cuito River. There on the right, disappearing off into the unknown, into the "Terra do fim do mundo" — the land at the end of the earth, as it was known by the first Portuguese explorers. In 2001, at the age of 22, I took a job as head of housekeeping at Vundumtiki Camp in the Okavango Delta ... a patchwork mosaic of channels, floodplains, lagoons and thousands upon thousands of islands to explore. Home to the largest remaining population of elephants on the planet. Rhinos are airlifted in C130s to find sanctuary in this wilderness. Lion, leopard, hyena, wild dog, cheetah, ancient baobab trees that stand like cathedrals under the Milky Way. Here, I discovered something obvious: wilderness is our natural habitat, too. We need these last wild places to reconnect with who we really are. We — all seven billion of us — must never forget we are a biological species forever bound to this particular biological world. Like the waves connected to the ocean, we cannot exist apart from it — a constant flow of atoms and energy between individuals and species around the world in a day and out into the cosmos. Our fates are forever connected to the millions of species we rely on directly and indirectly every day. Four years ago, it was declared that 50 percent of all wildlife around the world had disappeared in just 40 years. This is a mass drowning of 15,000 wildebeests that I witnessed in the Maasai Mara two years ago. This is definitely our fault. By 2020, global wildlife populations are projected to have fallen by a staggering two-thirds. We are the sixth extinction because we left no safe space for millions of species to sustainably coexist. Now, since 2010, I have poled myself eight times across the Okavango Delta to conduct detailed scientific surveys along a 200-mile, 18-day research transect. Now, why am I doing this? Why am I risking my life each year? I'm doing this because we need this information to benchmark this near-pristine wilderness before upstream development happens. These are the Wayeyi river bushmen, the people of the Okavango Delta. They have taught me all I know about the Mother Okavango — about presence in the wild. Our shared pilgrimage across the Okavango Delta each year in our mokoros or dugout canoes — remembers millenia living in the wild. Ten thousand years ago, our entire world was wilderness. Today, wilderness is all that remains of that world, now gone. Ten thousand years ago, we were as we are today: a modern, dreaming intelligence unlike anything seen before. Living in the wilderness is what taught us to speak, to seek technologies like fire and stone, bow and arrow, medicine and poison, to domesticate plants and animals and rely on each other and all living things around us. We are these last wildernesses — every one of us. Over 80 percent of our planet's land surface is now experiencing measurable human impact: habitat destruction and illegal wildlife trade are decimating global wildlife populations. We urgently need to create safe space for these wild animals. So in late 2014, we launched an ambitious project to do just that: explore and protect. By mid-May 2015, we had pioneered access through active minefields to the undocumented source lake of the Cuito River — this otherworldly place; an ancient, untouched wilderness. By the 21st of May, we had launched the Okavango megatransect ... in seven dugout canoes; 1,500 miles, 121 days later, all of the poling, paddling and intensive research got us across the entire river basin to Lake Xau in the Kalahari Desert, 480 kilometers past the Okavango Delta. My entire world became the water: every ripple, eddy, lily pad and current ... any sign of danger, every sign of life. Now imagine millions of sweat bees choking the air around you, flesh-eating bacteria, the constant threat of a landmine going off or an unseen hippo capsizing your mokoro. These are the scenes moments after a hippo did just that — thrusting its tusks through the hull of my boat. You can see the two holes — puncture wounds in the base of the hull — absolutely terrifying and completely my fault. (Laughter) Many, many portages, tree blockages and capsizes in rocky rapids. You're living on rice and beans, bathing in a bucket of cold water and paddling a marathon six to eight hours every single day. After 121 days of this, I'd forgotten the PIN numbers to my bank accounts and logins for social media — a complete systems reboot. You ask me now if I miss it, and I will tell you I am still there. Now why do we need to save places we hardly ever go? Why do we need to save places where you have to risk your life to be there? Now, I'm not a religious or particularly spiritual person, but in the wild, I believe I've experienced the birthplace of religion. Standing in front of an elephant far away from anywhere is the closest I will ever get to God. Moses, Buddha, Muhammad, Jesus, the Hindu teachers, prophets and mystics, all went into the wilderness — up into the mountains, into the desert, to sit quietly and listen for those secrets that were to guide their societies for millennia. I go into the Okavango on my mokoro. You must join me one day. Over 50 percent of the remaining wilderness is unprotected. A huge opportunity — a chance for us all. We need to act with great urgency. Since the 2015 megatransect, we have explored all major rivers of the Okavango River basin, covering a life-changing 4,000 miles of detailed research transects on our dugout canoes and our fat-tire mountain bikes. We now have 57 top scientists rediscovering what we call the Okavango-Zambezi water tower — this vast, post-war wilderness with undocumented source lakes, unnamed waterfalls in what is Africa's largest remaining Miombo woodland. We've now discovered 24 new species to science and hundreds of species not known to be there. This year, we start the process, with the Angolan government, to establish one of the largest systems of protected areas in the world to preserve the Okavango-Zambezi water tower we have been exploring. Downstream, this represents water security for millions of people and more than half of the elephants remaining on this planet. There is no doubt this is the biggest conservation opportunity in Africa in decades. Over the next 10 to 15 years, we need to make an unprecedented investment in the preservation of wilderness around the world. To me, preserving wilderness is far more than simply protecting ecosystems that clean the water we drink and create the air we breathe. Preserving wilderness protects our basic human right to be wild — our basic human rights to explore. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why teens confess to crimes they didn't commit | {0: 'Lindsay Malloy studies how kids function in a legal system that was designed for adults. '} | TEDxFIU | Tyler Edmonds, Bobby Johnson, Davontae Sanford, Marty Tankleff, Jeffrey Deskovic, Anthony Caravella and Travis Hayes. You probably don't recognize their faces. Together, they served 89 years for murders that they didn't commit; murders that they falsely confessed to committing when they were teenagers. I'm a forensic developmental psychologist, and I study these types of cases. As a researcher, a professor and a new parent, my goal is to conduct scientific research that helps us understand how kids function in a legal system that was designed for adults. In March of 2006, police interrogated Brendan Dassey, a 16-year-old high school student with an IQ around 70, putting him in the range of intellectual disability. So here's just a brief snippet of his four-hour interrogation. (Video) Police 1: Brendan, be honest. I told you before that's the only thing that's going to help you here. We already know what happened, OK? Police 2: If we don't get honesty here — I'm your friend right now, but I've got to believe in you, and if I don't believe in you, I can't go to bat for you. OK? You're nodding. Tell us what happened. P1: Your mom said you'd be honest with us. P2: And she's behind you 100 percent no matter what happens here. P1: That's what she said, because she thinks you know more, too. P2: We're in your corner. P1: We already know what happened, now tell us exactly. Don't lie. Lindsay Malloy: They told Brendan that honesty would "set him free," but they were completely convinced of his guilt at that point. So by honesty, they meant a confession, and his confession would definitely not end up setting him free. They eventually got a confession from Brendan that didn't really make sense, didn't match much of the physical evidence of the crime and is widely believed to be false. Still, it was enough to convict Brendan and sentence him to life in prison for murder and sexual assault in 2007. There was no physical evidence against Brendan at all. It was nothing more than his own words that sent him to prison for nearly a decade, until a judge overturned his conviction just a few months ago. The Dassey case is unique because it made its way into a Netflix series, called "Making a Murderer," which I'm sure many of you saw, and if you haven't, you should definitely watch it. The Dassey case is also unique because it led to such intense public outrage. People were very angry about how Brendan was questioned, and many assumed that his interrogation had to have been illegal. It wasn't illegal. As someone who's a researcher in this area and is familiar with police interrogation training manuals, I wasn't really surprised by what I saw. The fact is, Dassey's interrogation itself is actually not all that unique, and to be honest with you, I've seen worse. So I understand the public outcry about injustice in Brendan Dassey's individual case. But let's not forget that approximately one million or so of his peers are arrested every year in the United States and may be subjected to similar interrogation techniques, techniques that we know increase the risk for false confession. And I know many people are going to struggle with that term, "false confession," and with believing that false confessions actually occur. And I get that. It's very shocking and counterintuitive: Why would someone confess and even give gruesome details about a horrifying crime like rape or murder if they hadn't actually done it? It makes no sense. And the fact is, we can never know precisely how often false confessions occur. But what we do know is that false confessions or admissions were present in approximately 25 percent of wrongful convictions of people later exonerated by DNA evidence. Turns out, they were innocent. These cases are crystal clear because we have the DNA. So they didn't do the crime, and yet one-quarter of them confessed to it anyway. And at this point, from countless research studies, we have a pretty good sense of why people falsely confess, and why some people, like Brendan Dassey, are at greater risk for doing so. We know that youth are especially vulnerable to providing false confessions. In one study of exonerations, for example, only eight percent of adults had falsely confessed, but 42 percent of juveniles had done so. Of course, if we're just looking at wrongful convictions and exonerations, we're only getting part of the story. Left out, for instance, are the many cases that are resolved by guilty pleas, not trials. From TV and news headlines, you may think that trials are the norm in our legal system, but the reality is that 97 percent of legal cases in the US are resolved by pleas, not trials. Ninety-seven percent. Also left out will be confessions to more minor types of crimes that don't typically involve DNA evidence and aren't usually reviewed or appealed following a conviction. So for this reason, many refer to the false confessions we actually do know about as the tip of a much larger iceberg. In our research, we found alarming rates of false confession among teenagers. We interviewed almost 200 incarcerated 14-to-17-year-olds, and 17 percent of them reported that they'd made at least one false confession to police. What's also shocking to most is that, in interrogations in the US, police are allowed to interrogate juveniles just like adults. So they can lie to them — blatant lies like, "We have your fingerprints, we have your DNA; your friend is down the hall saying that this was all your idea." Lying to suspects is banned in the UK, for example, but legal here in the US, even with intellectually impaired teens like Brendan Dassey. In our research, most of the incarcerated teens that we interviewed reported experiencing high-pressure police interrogations without lawyers or parents present. More than 80 percent described having been threatened by the police, including with the possibility of being raped or killed in jail or being tried as an adult. These maximization strategies are designed to make suspects feel like denials are pointless and confession is the only option. So you may have heard of playing the role of "good cop/bad cop," right? Well, this is bad cop. Juveniles are more suggestible and susceptible to social influence, like the intense pressure accusations and suggestions coming from authority figures in interrogations. More than 70 percent of the teens in our study said that the police had tried to "befriend" them or indicate a desire to help them out during the interrogation. These are referred to as "minimization strategies," and they're designed to convey sympathy and understanding to the suspect, and they imply that a confession will result in more lenient treatment. So in the classic good-cop-bad-cop oversimplification of police interrogations, this is "good cop." (Video) P1: Honesty here, Brendan, is the thing that's going to help you, OK? No matter what you did, we can work through that, OK? We can't make any promises, but we'll stand behind you no matter what you did, OK? LM: "No matter what you did, we can work through that." Hints of leniency like you just saw with Brendan are especially powerful among adolescents, in part because they evaluate reward and risk differently than adults do. Confessing brings an immediate reward to the suspect, right? Now the stressful, unpleasant interrogation is over. So confessing may seem like the best option to most teens, who are less focused on that long-term risk of conviction and punishment down the road as a result of that confession. I think we can all agree that thoughtful, long-term planning is not a strength of most teenagers that we know. And by and large, the legal system seems to get that young victims and witnesses should be treated differently than adults. But when it comes to young suspects, it's like the kid gloves come off. And treating juveniles as though they're adults in interrogations is a problem, because literally hundreds of psychological and neuroscientific studies tell us that juveniles do not think like adults, they do not behave like adults, and they're not built like adults. Adolescent brains are different from adult brains — even anatomically. So there are important changes happening in the structure and function of the brain during adolescence, especially in the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system, and these are areas that are crucial for things like self-control, decision-making, emotion processing and regulation and sensitivity to reward and risk, all of which can affect how you function in a stressful circumstance, like a police interrogation. We need to educate law enforcement, attorneys, judges and jurors on juveniles' developmental limitations and how they can play out in a high-stakes interrogation. In one national survey of police officers, 75 percent of them actually requested specialized training in how to talk to children and adolescents — most of them had had none. We also need to consider having special protections in place for juveniles. In his 91-page decision to overturn Dassey's conviction earlier this year, the judge made a big deal about the fact that Dassey had no parent or other allied adult in the interrogation room with him. So here's a clip of Brendan talking to his mom after he confessed, when it was obviously far too late for him. (Video) Mom: What do you mean? Brendan: Like, if his story is, like, different, like I never did nothing or something. M: Did you? Huh? B: Not really. M: What do you mean, "Not really"? B: They got into my head. LM: So he sums it up pretty beautifully there: "They got into my head." We don't know if the outcome would have been different for Brendan if his mom had been in the interrogation room with him. But it's certainly possible. In our research, only seven percent of incarcerated teens, most of whom had had numerous encounters with police, had ever had a parent or attorney in the room with them when they were questioned as a suspect. Few had ever asked for a parent or attorney to be present. And you see this in lower-stake situations, too. We did a mock interrogation experiment in our lab here at FIU — with parent permission for all minors, of course, and all the appropriate ethical approvals. We falsely accused teens and adults of cheating on a study task — an academic dishonesty offense — that we told them was as serious as cheating in a class. In reality, participants had witnessed a peer cheat, someone who was actually part of our research team and was allegedly on academic probation. And we gave everyone a tough choice: you can lose your extra credit for participating in the study or accuse your peer, who will probably be expelled because of his academic probation status. Of course, in reality, none of these consequences would have panned out, and we fully debriefed all of the participants afterward. But most teenagers — 59 percent of them — signed the confession statement, falsely taking responsibility for the cheating. Only three teens out of 74, or about four percent of them, asked to talk to a parent when we accused them of cheating, despite the fact that for most of them, their parent was literally sitting in the next room during the study. Of course, cheating is far from murder, and I know that. But it's interesting that so many teens, significantly more teens than adults, signed the confession saying that they cheated. They hadn't cheated, but they signed this form anyway saying that they had, rarely attempting to involve a parent in the situation. Other studies tell the same story. Over 90 percent of juveniles waive their Miranda rights and submit to police questioning without lawyers or parents present. In England and Wales, interrogations of juveniles must be conducted in the presence of an "appropriate adult," like a parent, guardian or social worker. And this isn't something youth have to ask for — which is great, because research shows that they won't — it's automatic. Now, having an appropriate adult safeguard for juveniles here in the US would not be a cure-all for improving police questioning of youth. Unfortunately, parents often lack the knowledge and legal sophistication to appropriately advise their children. You can just look at the case of the Central Park Five: five teenagers who falsely confessed to a brutal gang rape in 1989, with their parents by their sides. And it took over a decade to clear their names. So the appropriate adult really should be an attorney or perhaps a trained child advocate. Overturning Dassey's conviction, the judge pointed out that there's no federal law requiring that the police even inform a juvenile's parent that the juvenile is being questioned or honor that juvenile's request to have a parent in the room. So if you think about all of this together for a second: as a country, we've decided that juveniles cannot be trusted with things like voting, buying cigarettes, attending an R-rated movie or driving, but they can make the judgment call to waive their Miranda rights, rights that we know from research, most teens don't understand or appreciate. And parents in the room: depending on the state that you live in, your child can potentially waive these rights without your knowledge and without consulting any adult first. Now, no one — and certainly not me — wants to prevent police from doing the very important investigative work that they do every day. But we need to make sure that they have appropriate training for talking to youth. As a parent and as a researcher, I think we can do better. I think we can take steps to prevent another Brendan Dassey, while still getting the crucial information that we need from children and teens to solve crimes. Thank you. (Applause) |
A simple trick to improve positive thinking | {0: 'Alison Ledgerwood is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on the psychological tools that allow humans to reach beyond their current experiences.'} | TEDxUCDavis | Hi everyone. Gosh, I wish I could dance, but I can't, and you really don't want me to. So instead I thought I would talk a little today about how people think. I'm fascinated by this question. I'm a social psychologist, which basically means I'm a professional people watcher. So, this is what I do; I try to figure out how humans think and how we might be able to think better. Here's something I noticed a few years ago about how I seem to think; here's a typical week in my life, which usually seems to revolve entirely around publishing papers. So here I am, at maximum of my artistic abilities as a stick figure, going along at baseline, and a paper gets accepted. I get this rush, this blip of happiness, and then I'm back to baseline by about lunch time. (Laughter) A few days later, a paper might get rejected, and that feels pretty awful. And I wait for that blip to end, but somehow I just can't stop thinking about it. Here's the craziest part: even if another paper gets accepted the next day, well, that's nice, but somehow I can't get that pesky rejection out of my head. So, what is going on here? Why does a failure seem to stick in our minds so much longer than a success? Together with my colleague Amber Boydstun in the Political Science Department, I started thinking about this question, this question of, "do our minds get stuck in the negatives?" We all know intuitively that there are different ways of thinking about things. The same glass, the saying goes can be seen as half-full or half-empty. There's a lot of research in the social sciences showing that depending on how you describe the glass to people, as half-full or half-empty, it changes how they feel about it. So if you describe the glass as half-full, this is called the gain frame, because you're focusing on what's gained, then people like it. But if you describe the same glass as half-empty, a loss frame, then people don't like it. But we wondered what happens when you try to switch from thinking about it one way to thinking about it another way. Can people shift back and forth, or do they get stuck in one way of thinking about it? Does one of these labels, in other words, tend to stick more in the mind? Well, to investigate this question, we conducted a simple experiment. We told participants in our experiment about a new surgical procedure, and we randomly assigned them to one of two conditions. For participants in the first condition, the first group, we described the surgical procedure in terms of gains; we said it had a 70% success rate. For participants in the second group, we described the procedure in terms of losses; we said it had a 30% failure rate. So it's the exact same procedure, we're just focusing people's attention on the part of the glass that's full, or the part of the glass that's empty. Perhaps unsurprisingly, people like the procedure when it's described as having a 70% success rate, and they don't like it when it's described as having a 30% failure rate. But then we added a twist: we told participants in the first group, "You know, you could think of this as a 30% failure rate." And now they don't like it anymore; they've changed their minds. We told participants in the second group, "You know, you could think of this as a 70% success rate", but unlike the first group, they stuck with their initial opinion; they seemed to be stuck in the initial loss frame that they saw at the beginning of the study. We conducted another experiment. This time we told participants about the current governor of an important state who is running for re-election against his opponent. We again had two groups of participants, and we described the current governor's track record to them in one of two ways. We said that when the current governor took office, statewide budget cuts were expected to affect of about 10,000 jobs, and then half of the participants read that under the current governor's leadership 40% of these jobs had been saved. They like the current governor; they think he is doing a great job. The rest of the participants read that under the current governor's leadership, 60% of these jobs had been lost, and they don't like the current governor; they think he's doing a terrible job. But then, once more, we added a twist. For participants in the first group, we reframed the information in terms of losses, and now they didn't like the current governor anymore. For participants in the second group, we reframed the information in terms of gains, but just like in the first study, this didn't seem to matter. People in this group still didn't like the current governor. So notice what this means. Once the loss frame gets in there, it sticks. People can't go back to thinking about jobs saved once they thought about jobs lost. So in both of these scenarios actually the current governor gets ousted in favor of his opponent. At this point we were getting curious: why does this happen? Could it be that it's actually mentally harder for people to convert from losses to gains than it is for them to go from gains to losses? So we conducted the third study to test how easily people could covert from one frame to another. This time we told participants, "Imagine there's been an outbreak of an unusual disease and six hundred lives are at stake." We asked participants in one group, "If a hundred lives are saved, how many will be lost?" And we asked participants in the other group, "If a hundred lives are lost, how many will be saved?" So everyone just has to calculate 600 minus 100, and come up with the answer of 500 but whereas people in one group have to convert from gains to losses in order to do that, people in the second group have to convert from losses to gains. We timed how long it took them to solve this simple math problem, and what we found was that when people had to convert from gains to losses, they could solve the problem quite quickly; it took them about 7 seconds on average. But when they had to convert from losses to gains, well now it took them far longer, almost 11 seconds. So this suggests that once we think about something as a loss, that way of thinking about it tends to stick in our heads and to resist our attempts to change it. What I take away from this research and from related research is that our view of the world has a fundamental tendency to tilt toward the negative. It's pretty easy to go from good to bad, but far harder to shift from bad to good. We literally have to work harder to see the upside of things. And this matters. So, think about the economy. Here's economic well-being from 2007 to 2010. You can see it tanked, just like we all remember, and then by late 2010 it has recovered by most objective measures. But here's consumer confidence over the same time period. You can see it tanks right along with the economy, but then it seems to get stuck. Instead of rebounding with the economy itself, consumers seem to be psychologically stuck back there in the recession. So oddly then, it may take more effort to change our minds about how the economy is doing then to change the economy itself. On the more personal level, what this research means to me is that you have to work to see the up-side. Literally, this takes work, this takes effort. And you can practice this; you can train your mind to do this better. There's research out at UC Davis, showing that just writing for a few minutes each day about things that you're grateful for can dramatically boost your happiness and well-being, and even your health. We can also rehearse good news and share it with others. We tend to think, right, that misery loves company, that venting will help get rid of our negative emotions, that we'll feel better if we just talk about how terrible our day was. And so we talk, and we talk, and we talk about the boss who’s driving us crazy, and that friend who never called us back, and that meeting at work where every little thing that could go wrong, did. But we forget to talk about the good stuff. And yet, that's exactly where our minds need the most practice. So, my husband who has this disconcerting habit of listening to what I say other people should do, and then pointing out that, technically speaking, I'm a person, too, (Laughter) has taken to listening to me for about two minutes on days when I come home all grumpy and complaining about everything, and he listens, and he says, "Okay, but what happened today that was good?" So I tell him about the student who came up to me after class with this really interesting, insightful question, and I tell him about the friend who emailed me out of the blue this morning just to say, "hello". And somewhere in the telling, I start to smile, and I start to think that maybe my day was pretty decent after all. I think we can also work in our communities to focus on the upside. We can be more aware that bad tends to stick. One mean comment can stick with somebody all day, all week even, and bad tends to propagate itself, right? Somebody snaps at you and you snap back, and you snap at the next guy, too. But what if the next time somebody snapped at you, you forgave them? What if the next time you had a really grumpy waitress, you left her an extra large tip? Our minds may be built to look for negative information and to hold on to it, but we can also retrain our minds if we put some effort into it and start to see that the glass may be a little more full than we initially thought. Thank you. (Applause) |
Love others to love yourself | {0: "Keiichiro Hirano is the award-winning author of Nisshoku, L'Eclipse,\r\nConte de la première lune, The Only Form of Love, and \r\nDawn."} | TEDxKyoto | As I have been recently hearing about disturbing sad news, I often think about the idea of loving yourself. We have been taught to love other people as an important value, but I think loving our own selves hasn't been considered to be an issue worth talking about. Why? It may be because it's too obvious, that we love ourselves, to take up the issue and stress the importance. All of us can't avoid being egoistic, sometimes. We want to have things our own way. If everything in our life is going well, can we love ourselves? Not necessarily so. The reason why it's hard to discuss "self-love" may be that it has a kind of a narcissistic whiff and sounds a little icky to people. If we saw somebody looking in the mirror, saying, "How I love myself! Don't bother me!"... I am not talking about myself! We would want to say, "Suit yourself! Keep looking in the mirror." I want to say it doesn't have to be like that, to love ourselves. Life isn't always easy. It would be, of course, nice if we were happy all our life. But in our life, many people might say, "I hate you," or "I wish you would disappear from this world." Going through the agony, we ultimately reach the realization that we have to love ourselves in the sense of taking responsibility for ourselves and looking after ourselves. If, when people tell us, "I hate you," we respond to it by saying, "Yes, I hate myself, too," the moment we said so, I'm sure we would lose our desire to go on living. I've felt the need for that kind of attitude more than once myself. Since we don't know what will happen in the future, the kind of situation in which we have to love ourselves might arise again, in the sense of needing to take care of ourselves. It would be wonderful if you could live a trouble-free life. For a quite long time, I couldn't figure out what kind of person I was. When I did something good for others, people showed appreciation to me, and then I thought I was basically a pretty good person. Like that, I had occasions that made me feel relieved. On the other hand, when I would really hurt someone, I was very disappointed in myself, feeling like I was fundamentally a cruel person. To love ourselves actually may be harder than to love any other person, because we know ourselves thoroughly, through and through. Looking back at all we have done in the past, and remembering: "Boy, I did such things as this and that..." And not only the good things we've done, but unpleasant things we've done also come back at us. Can we love ourselves with knowing all those sides of us? At this point, I thought, in our thought process, there must be something fundamentally wrong. Then, I started by doing this to change it: First, I honestly looked back at myself, seeing a pretty good person, or one not so good. And for the time being, I accepted all my "selves," good or bad. Instead of being judgmental about myself, thinking "I may be a nice guy at heart," or "I may be basically a cruel person," "Which one is really me?" I decided to accept all my "selves" as parts of myself, and thought about why I had so many varied "selves" in this one person. To sum it up, it's in response to different people and different situations. When I talk to my grandmother, I am very relaxed. When I talk to people at work, I may sound serious, putting on a serious look, talking about difficult things. When I talk to somebody who rubs me the wrong way, you can bet the tone of my voice can't be this calm. I try not to come into contact with such a person in the first place. In any case, each "self" of mine has its own uniqueness. To love each "self" of mine equally in order to love myself may be very difficult, but I can say, "I love my 'self' when I am with this person. I become somebody whom I even abhor when I am with that person. But I like my 'self' pretty well when I am with this particular person. I am not too bad." In fact, to love ourselves may not be that hard after all. Take romance. Suppose there are two girls, and I have feelings toward both of them. One day I have a date with one of them, and have dinner with her. I enjoy being with her, talking a lot, frequently interjecting jokes, smiling at each other, and we interact with each other very well. Then suddenly I notice it's the time for the last train. I rush to the train station to catch the last one. And at home, I'm happy with myself. As for the other girl, I also like her, but during our date, I can't talk or joke that much... And we often get awkward silences. I feel like a miserable loser. I don't feel like going on with her, so after having dinner, we say goodbye to each other. After the two dates, if I were asked which one I would rather see again, I would choose the first one without hesitation. There's no doubt I like her, but rather because I like my "self" when I am with her. I enjoy my "self" when I am with her, and find life worth living in the life of that "self" of mine. The definition of "love" may be to love somebody else, this surely is not wrong, but what I would like to add to it is: Rather, to love means, with the help of the person we love, for us to be able to love ourselves. That's what I'd like to think. "I can reveal my inner self as I wish without any difficulties, being true to myself, when I am with that person, and it will never happen with anybody else." Unfortunately, some of our relationships come to end. Some end out of disputes. Others end due to death. When we grieve over losing our loved ones, we miss the voice and hug of the person, and many other things, but I wonder if we may rather be grieving over losing the life of our "self" who lived with that person, thinking: "Only with them could I talk freely like that. Only with them could I be honest with myself. Only with them could I be silly like that. But that person is gone now, and I can't live the life of that 'self' of mine I love any longer." I wonder if that is what we really grieve over. And, of course, vice versa. If somebody says to me, "I love you," I will be euphoric, yelling, "Yes!" But if I were told, "Thanks to you, I come to love myself," or "I love myself when I'm with you more than when I am with anybody else," that would be something which strikes my heart more. That my existence validates one person's existence that way moves me with a deep joy, something poignant. Each time when we find one "self" we love, we may be finding our foothold we need to go on living. In our life, we feel like we need to be loved by many people, a certain percentage of people in our groups, in our class, our workplace. But not that many of those "selves" we love may be necessary. If we find two or three of our "selves" we love in ourselves, we can go on with those as our foothold. Five or six may be more than enough. You may think you only have 3 friends in your class at school or you may think three that many friends who help you like yourself. All depends on how you take it. To love ourselves doesn't mean saying: "I am crazy about myself," looking into a mirror, but, instead, it means, with the help of or via somebody else, for us to come to love ourselves. It's probably where we start really loving ourselves. And that is why, as we feel the need, we love others as indispensable individuals. That's all I want to say. Thank you. (Applause) |
A new way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere | {0: 'Jennifer Wilcox works on ways to test and measure methods of trace metal and carbon capture, to mitigate the effects of fossil fuels on our planet.'} | TED2018 | Four hundred parts per million: that's the approximate concentration of CO2 in the air today. What does this even mean? For every 400 molecules of carbon dioxide, we have another million molecules of oxygen and nitrogen. In this room today, there are about 1,800 of us. Imagine just one of us was wearing a green shirt, and you're asked to find that single person. That's the challenge we're facing when capturing CO2 directly out of the air. Sounds pretty easy, pulling CO2 out of the air. It's actually really difficult. But I'll tell you what is easy: avoiding CO2 emissions to begin with. But we're not doing that. So now what we have to think about is going back; pulling CO2 back out of the air. Even though it's difficult, it's actually possible to do this. And I'm going to share with you today where this technology is at and where it just may be heading in the near future. Now, the earth naturally removes CO2 from the air by seawater, soils, plants and even rocks. And although engineers and scientists are doing the invaluable work to accelerate these natural processes, it simply won't be enough. The good news is, we have more. Thanks to human ingenuity, we have the technology today to remove CO2 out of the air using a chemically manufactured approach. I like to think of this as a synthetic forest. There are two basic approaches to growing or building such a forest. One is using CO2-grabbing chemicals dissolved in water. Another is using solid materials with CO2-grabbing chemicals. No matter which approach you choose, they basically look the same. So what I'm showing you here is what a system might look like to do just this. This is called an air contactor. You can see it has to be really, really wide in order to have a high enough surface area to process all of the air required, because remember, we're trying to capture just 400 molecules out of a million. Using the liquid-based approach to do this, you take this high surface area packing material, you fill the contactor with the packing material, you use pumps to distribute liquid across the packing material, and you can use fans, as you can see in the front, to bubble the air through the liquid. The CO2 in the air is separated [by] the liquid by reacting with the really strong-binding CO2 molecules in solution. And in order to capture a lot of CO2, you have to make this contactor deeper. But there's an optimization, because the deeper you make that contactor, the more energy you're spending on bubbling all that air through. So air contactors for direct air capture have this unique characteristic design, where they have this huge surface area, but a relatively thin thickness. And now once you've captured the CO2, you have to be able to recycle that material that you used to capture it, over and over again. The scale of carbon capture is so enormous that the capture process must be sustainable, and you can't use a material just once. And so recycling the material requires an enormous amount of heat, because think about it: CO2 is so dilute in the air, that material is binding it really strong, and so you need a lot of heat in order to recycle the material. And to recycle the material with that heat, what happens is that concentrated CO2 that you got from dilute CO2 in the air is now released, and you produce high-purity CO2. And that's really important, because high-purity CO2 is easier to liquify, easier to transport, whether it's in a pipeline or a truck, or even easier to use directly, say, as a fuel or a chemical. So I want to talk a little bit more about that energy. The heat required to regenerate or recycle these materials absolutely dictates the energy and the subsequent cost of doing this. So I ask a question: How much energy do you think it takes to remove a million tons of CO2 from the air in a given year? The answer is: a power plant. It takes a power plant to capture CO2 directly from the air. Depending on which approach you choose, the power plant could be on the order of 300 to 500 megawatts. And you have to be careful about what kind of power plant you choose. If you choose coal, you end up emitting more CO2 than you capture. Now let's talk about costs. An energy-intensive version of this technology could cost you as much as $1,000 a ton just to capture it. Let's translate that. If you were to take that very expensive CO2 and convert it to a liquid fuel, that comes out to 50 dollars a gallon. That's way too expensive; it's not feasible. So how could we bring these costs down? That's, in part, the work that I do. There's a company today, a commercial-scale company, that can do this as low as 600 dollars a ton. There are several other companies that are developing technologies that can do this even cheaper than that. I'm going to talk to you a little bit about a few of these different companies. One is called Carbon Engineering. They're based out of Canada. They use a liquid-based approach for separation combined with burning super-abundant, cheap natural gas to supply the heat required. They have a clever approach that allows them to co-capture the CO2 from the air and the CO2 that they generate from burning the natural gas. And so by doing this, they offset excess pollution and they reduce costs. Switzerland-based Climeworks and US-based Global Thermostat use a different approach. They use solid materials for capture. Climeworks uses heat from the earth, or geothermal, or even excess steam from other industrial processes to cut down on pollution and costs. Global Thermostat takes a different approach. They focus on the heat required and the speed in which it moves through the material so that they're able to release and produce that CO2 at a really fast rate, which allows them to have a more compact design and overall cheaper costs. And there's more still. A synthetic forest has a significant advantage over a real forest: size. This next image that I'm showing you is a map of the Amazon rainforest. The Amazon is capable of capturing 1.6 billion tons of CO2 each year. This is the equivalent of roughly 25 percent of our annual emissions in the US. The land area required for a synthetic forest or a manufactured direct air capture plant to capture the same is 500 times smaller. In addition, for a synthetic forest, you don't have to build it on arable land, so there's no competition with farmland or food, and there's also no reason to have to cut down any real trees to do this. I want to step back, and I want to bring up the concept of negative emissions again. Negative emissions require that the CO2 separated be permanently removed from the atmosphere forever, which means putting it back underground, where it came from in the first place. But let's face it, nobody gets paid to do that today — at least not enough. So the companies that are developing these technologies are actually interested in taking the CO2 and making something useful out of it, a marketable product. It could be liquid fuels, plastics or even synthetic gravel. And don't get me wrong — these carbon markets are great. But I also don't want you to be disillusioned. These are not large enough to solve our climate crisis, and so what we need to do is we need to actually think about what it could take. One thing I'll absolutely say is positive about the carbon markets is that they allow for new capture plants to be built, and with every capture plant built, we learn more. And when we learn more, we have an opportunity to bring costs down. But we also need to be willing to invest as a global society. We could have all of the clever thinking and technology in the world, but it's not going to be enough in order for this technology to have a significant impact on climate. We really need regulation, we need subsidies, taxes on carbon. There are a few of us that would absolutely be willing to pay more, but what will be required is for carbon-neutral, carbon-negative paths to be affordable for the majority of society in order to impact climate. In addition to those kinds of investments, we also need investments in research and development. So what might that look like? In 1966, the US invested about a half a percent of gross domestic product in the Apollo program. It got people safely to the moon and back to the earth. Half a percent of GDP today is about 100 billion dollars. So knowing that direct air capture is one front in our fight against climate change, imagine that we could invest 20 percent, 20 billion dollars. Further, let's imagine that we could get the costs down to a 100 dollars a ton. That's going to be hard, but it's part of what makes my job fun. And so what does that look like, 20 billion dollars,100 dollars a ton? That requires us to build 200 synthetic forests, each capable of capturing a million tons of CO2 per year. That adds up to about five percent of US annual emissions. It doesn't sound like much. Turns out, it's actually significant. If you look at the emissions associated with long-haul trucking and commercial aircraft, they add up to about five percent. Our dependence on liquid fuels makes these emissions really difficult to avoid. So this investment could absolutely be significant. Now, what would it take in terms of land area to do this, 200 plants? It turns out that they would take up about half the land area of Vancouver. That's if they were fueled by natural gas. But remember the downside of natural gas — it also emits CO2. So if you use natural gas to do direct air capture, you only end up capturing about a third of what's intended, unless you have that clever approach of co-capture that Carbon Engineering does. And so if we had an alternative approach and used wind or solar to do this, the land area would be about 15 times larger, looking at the state of New Jersey now. One of the things that I think about in my work and my research is optimizing and figuring out where we should put these plants and think about the local resources available — whether it's land, water, cheap and clean electricity — because, for instance, you can use clean electricity to split water to produce hydrogen, which is an excellent, carbon-free replacement for natural gas, to supply the heat required. But I want us to reflect a little bit again on negative emissions. Negative emissions should not be considered a silver bullet, but they may help us if we continue to stall at cutting down on CO2 pollution worldwide. But that's also why we have to be careful. This approach is so alluring that it can even be risky, as some may cling onto it as some kind of total solution to our climate crisis. It may tempt people to continue to burn fossil fuels 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. I argue that we should not see negative emissions as a replacement for stopping pollution, but rather, as an addition to an existing portfolio that includes everything, from increased energy efficiency to low-energy carbon to improved farming — will all collectively get us on a path to net-zero emissions one day. A little bit of self-reflection: my husband is an emergency physician. And I find myself amazed by the lifesaving work that he and his colleagues do each and every day. Yet when I talk to them about my work on carbon capture, I find that they're equally amazed, and that's because combatting climate change by capturing carbon isn't just about saving a polar bear or a glacier. It's about saving human lives. A synthetic forest may not ever be as pretty as a real one, but it could just enable us to preserve not only the Amazon, but all of the people that we love and cherish, as well as all of our future generations and modern civilization. Thank you. (Applause) |
A crash course in organic chemistry | {0: 'Professor Jakob Magolan is a synthetic chemist who assembles new molecules to discover new medicines.'} | TEDxUIdaho | I'd like you to ask yourself, what do you feel when you hear the words "organic chemistry?" What comes to mind? There is a course offered at nearly every university, and it's called Organic Chemistry, and it is a grueling, heavy introduction to the subject, a flood of content that overwhelms students, and you have to ace it if you want to become a doctor or a dentist or a veterinarian. And that is why so many students perceive this science like this ... as an obstacle in their path, and they fear it and they hate it and they call it a weed-out course. What a cruel thing for a subject to do to young people, weed them out. And this perception spread beyond college campuses long ago. There is a universal anxiety about these two words. I happen to love this science, and I think this position in which we have placed it is inexcusable. It's not good for science, and it's not good for society, and I don't think it has to be this way. And I don't mean that this class should be easier. It shouldn't. But your perception of these two words should not be defined by the experiences of premed students who frankly are going through a very anxious time of their lives. So I'm here today because I believe that a basic knowledge of organic chemistry is valuable, and I think that it can be made accessible to everybody, and I'd like to prove that to you today. Would you let me try? Audience: Yeah! Jakob Magolan: All right, let's go for it. (Laughter) Here I have one of these overpriced EpiPens. Inside it is a drug called epinephrine. Epinephrine can restart the beat of my heart, or it could stop a life-threatening allergic reaction. An injection of this right here will do it. It would be like turning the ignition switch in my body's fight-or-flight machinery. My heart rate, my blood pressure would go up so blood could rush to my muscles. My pupils would dilate. I would feel a wave of strength. Epinephrine has been the difference between life and death for many people. This is like a little miracle that you can hold in your fingers. Here is the chemical structure of epinephrine. This is what organic chemistry looks like. It looks like lines and letters ... No meaning to most people. I'd like to show you what I see when I look at that picture. I see a physical object that has depth and rotating parts, and it's moving. We call this a compound or a molecule, and it is 26 atoms that are stitched together by atomic bonds. The unique arrangement of these atoms gives epinephrine its identity, but nobody has ever actually seen one of these, because they're very small, so we're going to call this an artistic impression, and I want to explain to you how small this is. In here, I have less than half a milligram of it dissolved in water. It's the mass of a grain of sand. The number of epinephrine molecules in here is one quintillion. That's 18 zeroes. That number is hard to visualize. Seven billion of us on this planet? Maybe 400 billion stars in our galaxy? You're not even close. If you wanted to get into the right ballpark, you'd have to imagine every grain of sand on every beach, under all the oceans and lakes, and then shrink them all so they fit in here. Epinephrine is so small we will never see it, not through any microscope ever, but we know what it looks like, because it shows itself through some sophisticated machines with fancy names like "nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometers." So visible or not, we know this molecule very well. We know it is made of four different types of atoms, hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen. These are the colors we typically use for them. Everything in our universe is made of little spheres that we call atoms. There's about a hundred of these basic ingredients, and they're all made from three smaller particles: protons, neutrons, electrons. We arrange these atoms into this familiar table. We give them each a name and a number. But life as we know it doesn't need all of these, just a smaller subset, just these. And there are four atoms in particular that stand apart from the rest as the main building blocks of life, and they are the same ones that are found in epinephrine: hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. Now what I tell you next is the most important part. When these atoms connect to form molecules, they follow a set of rules. Hydrogen makes one bond, oxygen always makes two, nitrogen makes three and carbon makes four. That's it. HONC — one, two, three, four. If you can count to four, and you can misspell the word "honk," you're going to remember this for the rest of your lives. (Laughter) Now here I have four bowls with these ingredients. We can use these to build molecules. Let's start with epinephrine. Now, these bonds between atoms, they're made of electrons. Atoms use electrons like arms to reach out and hold their neighbors. Two electrons in each bond, like a handshake, and like a handshake, they are not permanent. They can let go of one atom and grab another. That's what we call a chemical reaction, when atoms exchange partners and make new molecules. The backbone of epinephrine is made mostly of carbon atoms, and that's common. Carbon is life's favorite structural building material, because it makes a good number of handshakes with just the right grip strength. That's why we define organic chemistry as the study of carbon molecules. Now, if we build the smallest molecules we can think of that follow our rules, they highlight our rules, and they have familiar names: water, ammonia and methane, H20 and NH3 and CH4. The words "hydrogen," "oxygen" and "nitrogen" — we use the same words to name these three molecules that have two atoms each. They still follow the rules, because they have one, two and three bonds between them. That's why oxygen gets called O2. I can show you combustion. Here's carbon dioxide, CO2. Above it, let's place water and oxygen, and beside it, some flammable fuels. These fuels are made of just hydrogen and carbon. That's why we call them hydrocarbons. We're very creative. (Laughter) So when these crash into molecules of oxygen, as they do in your engine or in your barbecues, they release energy and they reassemble, and every carbon atom ends up at the center of a CO2 molecule, holding on to two oxygens, and all the hydrogens end up as parts of waters, and everybody follows the rules. They are not optional, and they're not optional for bigger molecules either, like these three. This is our favorite vitamin sitting next to our favorite drug, (Laughter) and morphine is one of the most important stories in medical history. It marks medicine's first real triumph over physical pain, and every molecule has a story, and they are all published. They're written by scientists, and they're read by other scientists, so we have handy representations to do this quickly on paper, and I need to teach you how to do that. So we lay epinephrine flat on a page, and then we replace all the spheres with simple letters, and then the bonds that lie in the plane of the page, they just become regular lines, and the bonds that point forwards and backwards, they become little triangles, either solid or dashed to indicate depth. We don't actually draw these carbons. We save time by just hiding them. They're represented by corners between the bonds, and we also hide every hydrogen that's bonded to a carbon. We know they're there whenever a carbon is showing us any fewer than four bonds. The last thing that's done is the bonds between OH and NH. We just get rid of those to make it cleaner, and that's all there is to it. This is the professional way to draw molecules. This is what you see on Wikipedia pages. It takes a little bit of practice, but I think everyone here could do it, but for today, this is epinephrine. This is also called adrenaline. They're one and the same. It's made by your adrenal glands. You have this molecule swimming through your body right now. It's a natural molecule. This EpiPen would just give you a quick quintillion more of them. (Laughter) We can extract epinephrine from the adrenal glands of sheep or cattle, but that's not where this stuff comes from. We make this epinephrine in a factory by stitching together smaller molecules that come mostly from petroleum. And this is 100 percent synthetic. And that word, "synthetic," makes some of us uncomfortable. It's not like the word "natural," which makes us feel safe. But these two molecules, they cannot be distinguished. We're not talking about two cars that are coming off an assembly line here. A car can have a scratch on it, and you can't scratch an atom. These two are identical in a surreal, almost mathematical sense. At this atomic scale, math practically touches reality. And a molecule of epinephrine ... it has no memory of its origin. It just is what it is, and once you have it, the words "natural" and "synthetic," they don't matter, and nature synthesizes this molecule just like we do, except nature is much better at this than we are. Before there was life on earth, all the molecules were small, simple: carbon dioxide, water, nitrogen, just simple things. The emergence of life changed that. Life brought biosynthetic factories that are powered by sunlight, and inside these factories, small molecules crash into each other and become large ones: carbohydrates, proteins, nucleic acids, multitudes of spectacular creations. Nature is the original organic chemist, and her construction also fills our sky with the oxygen gas we breathe, this high-energy oxygen. All of these molecules are infused with the energy of the sun. They store it like batteries. So nature is made of chemicals. Maybe you guys can help me to reclaim this word, "chemical," because it has been stolen from us. It doesn't mean toxic, and it doesn't mean harmful, and it doesn't mean man-made or unnatural. It just means "stuff," OK? (Laughter) You can't have chemical-free lump charcoal. That is ridiculous. (Laughter) And I'd like to do one more word. The word "natural" doesn't mean "safe," and you all know that. Plenty of nature's chemicals are quite toxic, and others are delicious, and some are both ... (Laughter) toxic and delicious. The only way to tell whether something is harmful is to test it, and I don't mean you guys. Professional toxicologists: we have these people. They're well-trained, and you should trust them like I do. So nature's molecules are everywhere, including the ones that have decomposed into these black mixtures that we call petroleum. We refine these molecules. There's nothing unnatural about them. We purify them. Now, our dependence on them for energy — that means that every one of those carbons gets converted into a molecule of CO2. That's a greenhouse gas that is messing up our climate. Maybe knowing this chemistry will make that reality easier to accept for some people, I don't know, but these molecules are not just fossil fuels. They're also the cheapest available raw materials for doing something that we call synthesis. We're using them like pieces of LEGO. We have learned how to connect them or break them apart with great control. I have done a lot of this myself, and I still think it's amazing it's even possible. What we do is kind of like assembling LEGO by dumping boxes of it into washing machines, but it works. We can make molecules that are exact copies of nature, like epinephrine, or we can make creations of our own from scratch, like these two. One of these eases the symptoms of multiple sclerosis; the other one cures a type of blood cancer that we call T-cell lymphoma. A molecule with the right size and shape, it's like a key in a lock, and when it fits, it interferes with the chemistry of a disease. That's how drugs work. Natural or synthetic, they're all just molecules that happen to fit snugly somewhere important. But nature is much better at making them than we are, so hers look more impressive than ours, like this one. This is called vancomycin. She gave this majestic beast two chlorine atoms to wear like a pair of earrings. We found vancomycin in a puddle of mud in a jungle in Borneo in 1953. It's made by a bacteria. We can't synthesize this cost-efficiently in a lab. It's too complicated for us, but we can harvest it from its natural source, and we do, because this is one of our most powerful antibiotics. And new molecules are reported in our literature every day. We make them or we find them in every corner of this planet. And that's where drugs come from, and that's why your doctors have amazing powers ... (Laughter) to cure deadly infections and everything else. Being a physician today is like being a knight in shining armor. They fight battles with courage and composure, but also with good equipment. So let's not forget the role of the blacksmith in this picture, because without the blacksmith, things would look a little different ... (Laughter) But this science is bigger than medicine. It is oils and solvents and flavors, fabrics, all plastics, the cushions that you're sitting on right now — they're all manufactured, and they're mostly carbon, so that makes all of it organic chemistry. This is a rich science. I left out a lot today: phosphorus and sulfur and the other atoms, and why they all bond the way they do, and symmetry and non-bonding electrons, and atoms that are charged, and reactions and their mechanisms, and it goes on and on and on, and synthesis takes a long time to learn. But I didn't come here to teach you guys organic chemistry — I just wanted to show it to you, and I had a lot of help with that today from a young man named Weston Durland, and you've already seen him. He's an undergraduate student in chemistry, and he also happens to be pretty good with computer graphics. (Laughter) So Weston designed all the moving molecules that you saw today. He and I wanted to demonstrate through the use of graphics like these to help someone talk about this intricate science. But our main goal was just to show you that organic chemistry is not something to be afraid of. It is, at its core, a window through which the beauty of the natural world looks richer. Thank you. (Applause) |
Are there universal expressions of emotion? | null | TED-Ed | The 40 or so muscles in the human face can be activated in different combinations to create thousands of expressions. But do these expressions look the same and communicate the same meaning around the world, regardless of culture? Is one person’s smile another’s grimace? Charles Darwin theorized that emotional expression was a common human feature. But he was in the minority. Until the mid-20th century, many researchers believed that the specific ways we show emotion were learned behaviors that varied across cultures. Personality theorist Silvan Tomkins was one of the few to insist otherwise. Tomkins claimed that certain affects— emotional states and their associated facial expressions— were universal. In the 1960s, psychologist Paul Ekman set about testing this theory by examining hundreds of hours of film footage of remote tribes isolated from the modern world. Ekman found the native peoples’ expressions to be not only familiar, but occurring in precisely the situations he would expect. Conversely, he ran tests with tribes who had no prior exposure to Western culture. They were able to correctly match photos of different facial expressions with stories designed to trigger particular feelings. Over the next few decades, further research has corroborated Darwin’s idea that some of our most important emotional expressions are in fact universal. The degrees of expression appropriate to a given situation can, however, vary greatly across cultures. For instance, researchers have studied facial expression in people who are born blind, hypothesizing that if expressions are universal, they would be displayed in the same way as sighted people. In one study, both blind and sighted athletes displayed the same expressions of emotion when winning or losing their matches. Further evidence can be found in our evolutionary relatives. Comparisons of facial expression between humans and non-human mammals have found similarities in the structure and movement of facial muscles. Chimpanzee laughter looks different from ours, but uses some of the same muscle movements. Back in the 60s, Ekman identified six core expressions. Anger is accompanied by lowered eyebrows drawn together, tense and narrowed eyes, and tight lips; disgust, by the lips pulled up and the nose crinkling. In fear, the upper white of the eyes are revealed as the eyebrows raise and the mouth stretches open, while surprise looks similar, but with rounded eyebrows and relaxed lips. Sadness is indicated by the inner corners of the eyebrows being drawn inwards and upwards, drooping eyes, and a downturned mouth. And of course there’s happiness: lips drawn up and back, and raised cheeks causing wrinkling around the eyes. More recently, researchers have proposed additional entries such as contempt, shame, and disapproval, but opinions vary on how distinct boundaries between these categories can be drawn. So if Ekman and other researchers are correct, what makes certain expressions universal? And why are they expressed in these particular ways? Scientists have a lot of theories rooted in our evolutionary history. One is that certain expressions are important for survival. Fear and surprise could signal to others an immediate danger. Studies of humans and some other primates have found that we pay more attention to faces that signal threats over neutral faces, particularly when we’re already on high alert. Expressions also could help improve group fitness by communicating our internal states to those around us. Sadness, for example, signals to the group that something’s wrong. There’s some evidence that expressions might be even more directly linked to our physiology. The fear expression, for instance, could directly improve survival in potentially dangerous situations by letting our eyes absorb more light and our lungs take in more air, preparing us to fight or flee. There’s still much research to be done in understanding emotional expression, particularly as we learn more about the inner workings of the brain. But if you ever find yourself among strangers in a strange land, a friendly smile could go a long way. |
Why don't poisonous animals poison themselves? | null | TED-Ed | One fine day, when Charles Darwin was still a student at Cambridge, the budding naturalist tore some old bark off a tree and found two rare beetles underneath. He’d just taken one beetle in each hand when he spotted a third beetle. Stashing one of the insects in his mouth for safekeeping, he reached for the new specimen – when a sudden spray of hot, bitter fluid scalded his tongue. Darwin’s assailant was the bombardier beetle. It’s one of thousands of animal species, like frogs, jellyfish, salamanders, and snakes, that use toxic chemicals to defend themselves – in this case, by spewing poisonous liquid from glands in its abdomen. But why doesn’t this caustic substance, ejected at 100 degrees Celsius, hurt the beetle itself? In fact, how do any toxic animals survive their own secretions? The answer is that they use one of two basic strategies: securely storing these compounds or evolving resistance to them. Bombardier beetles use the first approach. They store ingredients for their poison in two separate chambers. When they’re threatened, the valve between the chambers opens and the substances combine in a violent chemical reaction that sends a corrosive spray shooting out of the glands, passing through a hardened chamber that protects the beetle’s internal tissues. Similarly, jellyfish package their venom safely in harpoon-like structures called nematocysts. And venomous snakes store their flesh-eating, blood-clotting compounds in specialized compartments that only have one exit: through the fangs and into their prey or predator. Snakes also employ the second strategy: built-in biochemical resistance. Rattlesnakes and other types of vipers manufacture special proteins that bind and inactivate venom components in the blood. Meanwhile, poison dart frogs have also evolved resistance to their own toxins, but through a different mechanism. These tiny animals defend themselves using hundreds of bitter-tasting compounds called alkaloids that they accumulate from consuming small arthropods like mites and ants. One of their most potent alkaloids is the chemical epibatidine, which binds to the same receptors in the brain as nicotine but is at least ten times stronger. An amount barely heavier than a grain of sugar would kill you. So what prevents poison frogs from poisoning themselves? Think of the molecular target of a neurotoxic alkaloid as a lock, and the alkaloid itself as the key. When the toxic key slides into the lock, it sets off a cascade of chemical and electrical signals that can cause paralysis, unconsciousness, and eventually death. But if you change the shape of the lock, the key can’t fit. For poison dart frogs and many other animals with neurotoxic defenses, a few genetic changes alter the structure of the alkaloid-binding site just enough to keep the neurotoxin from exerting its adverse effects. Poisonous and venomous animals aren’t the only ones that can develop this resistance: their predators and prey can, too. The garter snake, which dines on neurotoxic salamanders, has evolved resistance to salamander toxins through some of the same genetic changes as the salamanders themselves. That means that only the most toxic salamanders can avoid being eaten— and only the most resistant snakes will survive the meal. The result is that the genes providing the highest resistance and toxicity will be passed on in greatest quantities to the next generations. As toxicity ramps up, resistance does too, in an evolutionary arms race that plays out over millions of years. This pattern appears over and over again. Grasshopper mice resist painful venom from scorpion prey through genetic changes in their nervous systems. Horned lizards readily consume harvester ants, resisting their envenomed sting with specialized blood plasma. And sea slugs eat jellyfish nematocysts, prevent their activation with compounds in their mucus, and repurpose them for their own defenses. The bombardier beetle is no exception: the toads that swallow them can tolerate the caustic spray that Darwin found so distasteful. Most of the beetles are spit up hours later, amazingly alive and well. But how do the toads survive the experience? That is still a mystery. |
The rapid growth of the Chinese internet -- and where it's headed | {0: 'Gary Liu is CEO of the South China Morning Post, a leading news media company that has reported on China and Asia for more than a century.'} | TED2018 | Once every 12 months, the world's largest human migration happens in China. Over the 40-day travel period of Chinese New Year, three billion trips are taken, as families reunite and celebrate. Now, the most strenuous of these trips are taken by the country's 290 million migrant workers, for many of whom this is the one chance a year to go home and see parents and their left-behind children. But the travel options are very limited; plane tickets cost nearly half of their monthly salary. So most of them, they choose the train. Their average journey is 700 kilometers. The average travel time is 15 and a half hours. And the country's tracks now have to handle 390 million travelers every Spring Festival. Until recently, migrant workers would have to queue for long hours — sometimes days — just to buy tickets, often only to be fleeced by scalpers. And they still had to deal with near-stampede conditions when travel day finally arrived. But technology has started to ease this experience. Mobile and digital tickets now account for 70 percent of sales, greatly reducing the lines at train stations. Digital ID scanners have replaced manual checks, expediting the boarding process, and artificial intelligence is deployed across the network to optimize travel routes. New solutions have been invented. China's largest taxi-hailing platform, called Didi Chuxing, launched a new service called Hitch, which matches car owners who are driving home with passengers looking for long-distance routes. In just its third year, Hitch served 30 million trips in this past holiday season, the longest of which was further than 1,500 miles. That's about the distance from Miami to Boston. This enormous need of migrant workers has powered fast upgrade and innovation across the country's transport systems. Now, the Chinese internet has developed in both familiar and unfamiliar ways. Just like in Silicon Valley, some of the seismic shifts in technology and consumer behavior have been driven by academic research, have been driven by enterprise desires, with the whims of privilege and youth sprinkled in every once in a while. I am a product of the American tech industry, both as a consumer and a corporate leader. So I am well acquainted with this type of fuel. But about a year and a half ago, I moved from my home in New York City to Hong Kong to become the CEO of the South China Morning Post. And from this new vantage point, I've observed something that is far less familiar to me, propelling so much of China's innovation and many of its entrepreneurs. It is an overwhelming need economy that is serving an underprivileged populous, which has been separated for 30 years from China's economic boom. The stark gaps that exist between the rich and the poor, between urban and rural or the academic and the unschooled — these gaps, they form a soil that's ready for some incredible empowerment. So when capital and investment become focused on the needs of people who are hanging to the bottom rungs of an economic ladder, that's when we start to see the internet truly become a job creator, an education enabler and in many other ways, a path forward. Of course, China is not the only place where this alternative fuel exists, nor the only place where it is possible. But because of the country's sheer scale and status as a rising superpower, the needs of its population have created an opportunity for truly compelling impact. When explaining the rapid growth of the Chinese tech industry, many observers will cite two reasons. The first is the 1.4 billion people that call China home. The second is the government's active participation — or pervasive intervention, depending on how you view it. Now, the central authorities have spent heavily on network infrastructure over the years, creating an attractive environment for investment. At the same time, they've insisted on standards and regulation, which has led to fast consensus and therefore, fast adoption. The world's largest pool of tech talent exists because of the abundance of educational incentives. And local, domestic companies, in the past, have been protected from international competition by market controls. Of course, you cannot observe the Chinese internet without finding widespread censorship and very serious concerns about dystopian monitoring. As an example: China is in the process of rolling out a social credit rating that will cover its entire population, rewarding and restricting citizens, based on highly qualitative characteristics like honesty and integrity. At the same time, China is deploying facial recognition across many of its 170 million closed-circuit cameras. Artificial intelligence is being used to predict crime and terrorism in Xinjiang province, where the Muslim minority is already under constant surveillance. Yet, the internet has continued to grow, and it is so big — much bigger than I think most of us realize. By the end of 2017, the Chinese internet population had reached 772 million users. That's larger than the populations of the United States, Russia, of Germany, of the United Kingdom, of France and Canada combined. Ninety-eight percent of them are active on mobile. Ninety-two percent of them use messaging apps. There are now 650 million digital news consumers, 580 million digital video consumers, and the country's largest e-commerce platform, Taobao, now boasts 580 million monthly active users. It's about 80 percent larger than Amazon. On-demand travel, between bikes and cars, now accounts for 10 billion trips a year in China. That's two-thirds of all trips taken around the world. So it's a very mixed bag. The internet exists in a restricted, arguably manipulated form within China, yet it is massive and has vastly improved the lives of its citizens. So even in its imperfection, the growth of the Chinese internet should not be dismissed, and it's worthy of our closer examination. Let me tell you two other stories today. Luo Zhaoliu is a 34-year-old engineer from Jiangxi province. Now, his home region used to be extremely important to the Communist party because this was the birthplace of the Red Army. But over the decades, because of its separation from the economic and manufacturing centers of the country, it has slid into irrelevance. Luo, like so many in his generation, left home at a young age to look for work in a major city. He ended up in Shenzhen, which is one of China's tech hubs. As the young migrate, these rural villages are left with only elderly, who are really struggling to elevate themselves above abject poverty. After nine years, Luo decided to return to Jiangxi in 2017, because he believed that the booming e-commerce marketplace in China could help him revive his village. Like many rural communities, Luo's home specialized in a very specific provincial craft — making fermented bean curd, in this case. So he started a small factory and started selling his locally made goods online. There have been many years of consumption growth across China's major cities. But recently, technology has been driving an explosion in craft goods sales among China's middle and upper classes. WeChat and other e-commerce platforms allow rural producers to market and sell their goods far beyond their original distribution areas. Research companies actually track this impact by counting what is called "Taobao villages." This is any rural village where at least 10 percent of its households are selling goods online and making a certain amount of revenue. And the growth has been significant in the last few years. There were just 20 Taobao villages in 2013, 212 in 2014, 780 in 2015, 1,300 in 2016 and over 2,100 at the end of 2017. They now account for nearly half a million active online stores, 19 billion dollars in annual sales and 1.3 million new jobs created. In Luo's first year back home, he was able to employ 15 villagers. And he sold about 60,000 units of fermented bean curd. He expects to hire 30 more people in the next year, as his demand rapidly rises. There are 60 million left-behind children scattered across China's rural landscape. And they grow up with at least one parent far away from home, as a migrant worker. Alongside all the general hardships of rural life, they often have to travel vast and dangerous distances just to get to school. They account for 30 percent of the country's primary and high school students. Ten-year-old Chang Wenxuan is one of these students. He walks an hour each way every single day to school, across these deep ravines, in an isolated landscape. But when he arrives at the small farming village in Gansu province, he will find just two other students in this entire school. Now, Chang's school is one of 1,000 in Gansu alone that has less than five registered students. So with limited student interaction, with underqualified teachers and schoolhouses that are barely furnished and not insulated, rural students have long been disadvantaged, with almost no path to higher education. But Chang's future has been dramatically shifted with the installation of a “Sunshine Classroom.” He's now part of a digital classroom of 100 students across 28 different schools, taught by qualified and certified teachers live-streaming from hundreds of miles away. He has access to new subjects like music and art, to new friends and to experiences that extend far beyond his home. Recently, Chang even got to visit the Frederiksborg Castle museum in Denmark — virtually, of course. Now, online education has existed for many years outside of China. But it has never reached truly transformative scale, likely because traditional education systems in other tech centers of the world are far more advanced and far more stable. But China's extreme terrain and size have created an enormous and immediate need for innovation. There's a tech start-up in Shenzhen that grew to 300,000 students in just one year. And by our best estimation at the Post, there are now 55 million rural students across China that are addressable and accessible by live-streaming classes. This market of need is larger than the entire US student population between kindergarten and grade 12. So I'm extremely encouraged to find out that private investment in ed-tech in China now exceeds one billion dollars a year, with another 30 billion dollars in public funding that is committed between now and 2020. As the Chinese internet continues to grow, even in its imperfection and restrictions and controls, the lives of its once-forgotten populations have been irrevocably elevated. There is a focus on populations of need, not of want, that has driven a lot of the curiosity, the creativity and the development that we see. And there's still more to come. In America, internet population, or penetration, has now reached 88 percent. In China, the internet has still only reached 56 percent of the populous. That means there are over 600 million people who are still offline and disconnected. That's nearly twice the US population. An enormous opportunity. Wherever this alternative fuel exists, be it in China or Africa, Southeast Asia or the American heartland, we should endeavor to follow it with capital and with effort, driving both economic and societal impact all over the world. Just imagine for a minute what more could be possible if the global needs of the underserved become the primary focus of our inventions. Thank you. (Applause) |
What is the coldest thing in the world? | null | TED-Ed | The coldest materials in the world aren’t in Antarctica. They’re not at the top of Mount Everest or buried in a glacier. They’re in physics labs: clouds of gases held just fractions of a degree above absolute zero. That’s 395 million times colder than your refrigerator, 100 million times colder than liquid nitrogen, and 4 million times colder than outer space. Temperatures this low give scientists a window into the inner workings of matter, and allow engineers to build incredibly sensitive instruments that tell us more about everything from our exact position on the planet to what’s happening in the farthest reaches of the universe. How do we create such extreme temperatures? In short, by slowing down moving particles. When we’re talking about temperature, what we’re really talking about is motion. The atoms that make up solids, liquids, and gases are moving all the time. When atoms are moving more rapidly, we perceive that matter as hot. When they’re moving more slowly, we perceive it as cold. To make a hot object or gas cold in everyday life, we place it in a colder environment, like a refrigerator. Some of the atomic motion in the hot object is transferred to the surroundings, and it cools down. But there’s a limit to this: even outer space is too warm to create ultra-low temperatures. So instead, scientists figured out a way to slow the atoms down directly – with a laser beam. Under most circumstances, the energy in a laser beam heats things up. But used in a very precise way, the beam’s momentum can stall moving atoms, cooling them down. That’s what happens in a device called a magneto-optical trap. Atoms are injected into a vacuum chamber, and a magnetic field draws them towards the center. A laser beam aimed at the middle of the chamber is tuned to just the right frequency that an atom moving towards it will absorb a photon of the laser beam and slow down. The slow down effect comes from the transfer of momentum between the atom and the photon. A total of six beams, in a perpendicular arrangement, ensure that atoms traveling in all directions will be intercepted. At the center, where the beams intersect, the atoms move sluggishly, as if trapped in a thick liquid — an effect the researchers who invented it described as “optical molasses.” A magneto-optical trap like this can cool atoms down to just a few microkelvins — about -273 degrees Celsius. This technique was developed in the 1980s, and the scientists who'd contributed to it won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997 for the discovery. Since then, laser cooling has been improved to reach even lower temperatures. But why would you want to cool atoms down that much? First of all, cold atoms can make very good detectors. With so little energy, they’re incredibly sensitive to fluctuations in the environment. So they’re used in devices that find underground oil and mineral deposits, and they also make highly accurate atomic clocks, like the ones used in global positioning satellites. Secondly, cold atoms hold enormous potential for probing the frontiers of physics. Their extreme sensitivity makes them candidates to be used to detect gravitational waves in future space-based detectors. They’re also useful for the study of atomic and subatomic phenomena, which requires measuring incredibly tiny fluctuations in the energy of atoms. Those are drowned out at normal temperatures, when atoms speed around at hundreds of meters per second. Laser cooling can slow atoms to just a few centimeters per second— enough for the motion caused by atomic quantum effects to become obvious. Ultracold atoms have already allowed scientists to study phenomena like Bose-Einstein condensation, in which atoms are cooled almost to absolute zero and become a rare new state of matter. So as researchers continue in their quest to understand the laws of physics and unravel the mysteries of the universe, they’ll do so with the help of the very coldest atoms in it. |
How farming could employ Africa's young workforce -- and help build peace | {0: 'Kola Masha is the founder of Babban Gona, the first for-profit social enterprise in history to be awarded the prestigious Skoll Award, due to its financial sustainability and highly scalable impact. The organization is part-owned by the farmers they serve.'} | TEDGlobal 2017 | Since 1997, researchers at the University of Sussex have monitored global trends in armed conflict. Their research clearly shows that in Africa, over the last 10 years, armed conflict has gone up by sevenfold. Let's think about that: sevenfold in a single decade. Why is this? We believe, as oxygen is to fire, so are unemployed youth to insecurity. We have a lot of youth on this continent. Youth like Sandra, who, on a Saturday morning in March 2014, woke up excited at the prospects of getting a coveted job at the Nigerian Immigration Services. She kissed her daughter goodbye, left her home, never to return. Sandra and 15 other young Nigerians died that day, applying for a job, in the ensuing stampede, as tens of thousands of people applied for a few thousand open positions. In the last 20 years, 20 million youth have entered the Nigerian workforce alone. Today, half our population is under the age of 18. That's almost 80 million people that will be entering the workforce in the next 20 years. My friends, if a wave of 20 million people entering the workforce triggered Niger Delta crisis, Fulani herdsmen crisis and Boko Haram, I ask you: What will four times that number do? To do my part to solve this challenge, in 2012, I moved to a small village in northern Nigeria, in the center of the area most recently hit by the spread of insecurity, brutal bombings and searing poverty, with an idea: Could we create an economic buffer to halt the spread of this insecurity, by unlocking the power of agriculture as a job-creation engine? We knew this had been done before in countries like Thailand, where, in 1980, they suffered from the same economic challenges as us. Today, however, Thailand produces two million cars a year — more than the United Kingdom — with over 30 percent of its workforce as highly commercial, profitable small farmers, with an unemployment rate of less than one percent. How did they do this? In the 80s, Thailand dramatically improved the productivity of its small farmers, ensuring that it was able to start to dominate export markets for produce. Building on this strength, they attracted investment and started to process, being able to export higher-value products like starch from cassava. Finally, coupled with investment in education, they started to expand to even higher-value manufacturing. To make our idea a reality and follow a path similar to Thailand, we knew that we would have to sell young farmers on farming. A young man in northern Nigeria, for the purpose of today's discussion, we'll call "Saminu," made it very clear to me that this would not be easy. Saminu grew up in a beautiful village in northern Nigeria. And he tells wondrous stories of playing for hours with his friends, running up and down the beautiful rock formations that dot the countryside around his home. Despite this beauty, Saminu knew that the first chance he got, he would leave. He did not want to be a farmer. Growing up, he saw his parents work so hard as farmers, but barely get by. As he says, they had "babu" — nothing. Young farmers like Saminu do not have access to the cash to buy the farming products to pair with their hard work to be successful. When their meager harvest came in, desperate for cash, they would sell most of it at fire-sale prices, when, if they could just wait six months, they could get 50 percent more. Hence, Saminu left to the city, where he soon realized that life was not easy. He borrowed a very old motorcycle, with tires that were more patches than tires, to become a motorcycle taxi driver. He lived in constant fear every day that his precious, tattered motorcycle would be ripped away from him, as it had before. But he got it back, thankfully. He knew of others, however, who were not so lucky — other young men who, once they'd lost their motorcycles, became destitute. Angry, these young men set out to wreak vengeance on a society that they believed had turned its back on them. Saminu told me that they joined insurgent groups, often acting as getaway drivers in bombings and kidnappings. To end this cycle of insecurity, we must make farming a viable choice. We must ensure that these young men, on their small farms, can earn enough money to make a life for themselves; to make a future. The question now is how. Recognizing that Africa has grassroot-level leadership, we simply developed a model to bring the professional management and investment to scale to these grassroot leaders. We called it "Babban Gona" — "great farm" in Hausa. Upon reaching the village in 2012, I traveled from community to community, trying to convince people of our idea, trying to recruit farmer members. We failed woefully that first year, barely recruiting 100 brave souls. But we persevered. We kept doing what we promised, slowly we gained their trust. More farmers joined us. Fast-forward now five years. With a passionate and committed team and the tremendous support of our partners, we grew dramatically, today, serving 20,000 small farmers, enabling them to double their yields and triple their net income relative to their peers. We are very proud of the fact — (Applause) Fast-forward three years, Saminu has earned enough money to buy three goats for his mother to start a goat-rearing business, owns his own retail store and bought not one, but two motorcycles, with vanity license plates: "Babban Gona." (Applause) My friends, in the next 20 years, over 400 million Saminus are entering the African workforce, with potentially half of them having opportunities in agriculture. To unlock these opportunities, through models similar to ours, they would require 150 billion dollars a year in financing. This is a big number. But if we can tap into commercial debt, it is a small number — only 0.1 percent of all the debt in the world today, 10 cents out of every 100 dollars. This is why we designed our model to be very different from conventional agricultural development programs. In a few short years, we have shown that our model works, is high-impact and can turn a profit, attracting commercial investors that do not typically invest in small farmers in Africa. Imagine a world where millions of young men across Africa, hardworking young men, have other options. I know these driven, ambitious young men will make the right choice. We can realize this dream if they have a choice. Thank you. (Applause) |
How we study the microbes living in your gut | {0: 'Dan Knights develops computational methods for doing precision medicine with gut bacterial communities, or microbiomes, and he applies those methods to study human disease. '} | TEDMED 2017 | If I asked you to name a microbe that's living in your gut, many of you would probably say E. coli. A lot of people say this. It's the best-known of the gut microbes. But it turns out that E. coli is outnumbered in your gut about a thousand to one by other species, many of which you probably haven't heard of. These are Bacteroides; Prevotella is another example. Those are the two that dominate the modern human gut. There are about a hundred trillion microbes living inside you. We call this your microbiome, so it's like a little world living inside you — actually more like a universe. A hundred trillion means if you took a blade of grass and planted it for every microbe living in your gut, that could fill a million football fields. So it's incredibly complex. But interestingly, as our bodies have been adapting to life in modern society, we're losing some of our normal microbes, and at the same time, there are quite a few diseases related to the gut that are skyrocketing in developed nations all around the world. And many of you probably know someone who suffers from obesity, diabetes, Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis, allergies and asthma. Every one of these diseases and many others related to metabolism and autoimmunity are linked to a loss of healthy diversity in the gut. My lab got our first indication of this when actually we were studying non-human primates. We wanted to find out what happens to a monkey's microbiome when they move from the jungle to a zoo. Does their microbiome change? Do they pick up new bugs? Do they lose some? Does it get better or worse? We tracked two different species in the jungle, one in Vietnam, one in Costa Rica, and then we sequenced the DNA from their stool. This is how we study the microbiome in my research lab. And what we found in the DNA is that in the wild, these two species had totally different sets of microbes. It was like a fingerprint for the species. But in the zoo, they had lost most of that diversity and had acquired some other set of microbes. So this was very curious. We've got these two different microbiomes. In the wild, picture a lush tropical rainforest living the guts of these monkeys. That's the kind of diversity that we're talking about. Then in the zoo, they've lost diversity. Picture a rainforest that's been burned to the ground and taken over by a few invasive species. That's more like the microbiome in a captive primate. Now, in the meantime, many of the animals in the zoo are not doing so well. They have issues with obesity, wasting, gastroenteritis, diarrhea, bloating, and some of them were barely holding onto their lives. Now, of course, we were very interested to find out what are these so-called invasive species that are taking over in the zoo. So we went back to the DNA, and what the DNA told us is that every monkey in the zoo had become dominated by Bacteroides and Prevotella, the same microbes that we all have in our guts as modern humans. We wanted to find a way to visualize this, and we used some tools from multivariate ecology to put all of the microbiomes we were studying onto an axis. And what you're seeing here is a distance plot where every point is a different animal's microbiome. So every point represents a whole zoo of microbes. And the microbiomes that have a lot of microbes in common are close to each other. The ones that are very different are farther apart. So this is showing you that the two groups of wild monkeys are over on the left. The top left are these highly endangered monkeys called the red-shanked douc in Vietnam. And at the bottom left are monkeys from Costa Rica. So you can see that they have totally different microbiomes in the wild. And then the same two species of monkey in the zoo are converging, so their microbiomes change and they become much more similar to each other, even though these are zoos on different continents, different geographical regions, and they're eating different diets. Now, we did study some other species of primate. What species of primate do you think is even more divergent from the wild primates than the captive primates? Modern humans. These are humans living in developing nations. So they were more different from the wild primates than those in the zoo. And the final group that we studied, all the way on the right, is people living in the USA. And when I saw this figure, the hairs raised up on the back of my neck, because one way to think about it is, "Oh, that's interesting, captive monkeys are sort of on their way to becoming like Americans." (Laughter) But the other way to think about it is that Americans are like super-captive monkeys. And I was actually looking at this figure on my computer screen when I got the news that four of the red-shanked doucs had died in the zoo of gut-related issues. So for some of these animals, having the right microbes living inside them may be a matter of survival. Now this brings us to the human part of the story. Obviously, the microbiomes in the USA aren't causing premature death as frequently as in the zoo, but we have major risk of obesity, diabetes, a number of these other diseases. And this applies not just to people who have been living in the USA for many generations, but also to immigrants and refugees, who, for most immigrant and refugee groups, arrive in the USA metabolically healthy, and then within a few years, they become just as high-risk for obesity and diabetes as other Americans. And we discussed this issue with two groups that have been coming to the USA from Southeast Asia: the Hmong, who started coming in the mid-1970s as refugees from the Vietnam War and the US secret war in Laos; and the Karen, who have been coming more recently as refugees from Myanmar. So we've been working for a few years with these local communities and clinicians to study what happens to the Hmong and Karen microbiomes when people move from refugee camps and villages in Thailand to the USA. And what we found is that when people come to the USA from these groups, they lose a large fraction of their microbiome, somewhere around 20 percent, and those who come to the USA and become obese lose about a third of their microbes. So we know that moving to the USA is sufficient to cause a dramatic change in your microbiome, probably not for the better. Are these microbes actually causing the obesity, or is the obesity causing a change in the microbes? This is something that we're following up on, and the evidence we have now in my lab combined with evidence from a number of labs around the world tells us that certain changes in the microbiome do lead to obesity, and a number of other modern, kind of Westernized diseases. The good news is that your microbiome can actually change. Unlike your own genome, it's a living, breathing thing, and there's a broad front of research happening right now to better understand how we can restore our microbiomes when something goes wrong, using diet, using live microbes. And in fact, one of the next steps for us is collecting and preserving microbes from healthy people around the world so that they can be kept as cultural assets for those groups to potentially protect them as they adapt to modern society, and to protect future generations who are currently growing up to have increased risk of these diseases with every generation. I'm looking forward to a future where we have the tools that we need to restore and replenish our microbiomes, and in that world, the monkeys will live happier and healthier lives, and so will we. (Applause) |
How to build synthetic DNA and send it across the internet | {0: 'Dan Gibson leads a new breed of bioengineers, called genome writers, who use DNA to design and build new products powering the next industrial revolution.'} | TED2018 | Alright, let me tell you about building synthetic cells and printing life. But first, let me tell you a quick story. On March 31, 2013, my team and I received an email from an international health organization, alerting us that two men died in China shortly after contracting the H7N9 bird flu. There were fears of a global pandemic as the virus started rapidly moving across China. Although methods existed to produce a flu vaccine and stop the disease from spreading, at best, it would not be available for at least six months. This is because a slow, antiquated flu vaccine manufacturing process developed over 70 years ago was the only option. The virus would need to be isolated from infected patients, packaged up and then sent to a facility where scientists would inject the virus into chicken eggs, and incubate those chicken eggs for several weeks in order to prepare the virus for the start of a multistep, multimonth flu vaccine manufacturing process. My team and I received this email because we had just invented a biological printer, which would allow for the flu vaccine instructions to be instantly downloaded from the internet and printed. Drastically speeding up the way in which flu vaccines are made, and potentially saving thousands of lives. The biological printer leverages our ability to read and write DNA and starts to bring into focus what we like to call biological teleportation. I am a biologist and an engineer who builds stuff out of DNA. Believe it or not, one of my favorite things to do is to take DNA apart and put it back together so that I can understand better how it works. I can edit and program DNA to do things, just like coders programing a computer. But my apps are different. They create life. Self-replicating living cells and things like vaccines and therapeutics that work in ways that were previously impossible. Here's National Medal of Science recipient Craig Venter and Nobel laureate Ham Smith. These two guys shared a similar vision. That vision was, because all of the functions and characteristics of all biological entities, including viruses and living cells, are written into the code of DNA, if one can read and write that code of DNA, then they can be reconstructed in a distant location. This is what we mean by biological teleportation. To prove out this vision, Craig and Ham set a goal of creating, for the first time, a synthetic cell, starting from DNA code in the computer. I mean, come on, as a scientist looking for a job, doing cutting-edge research, it doesn't get any better than this. (Laughter) OK, a genome is a complete set of DNA within an organism. Following the Human Genome Project in 2003, which was an international effort to identify the complete genetic blueprint of a human being, a genomics revolution happened. Scientists started mastering the techniques for reading DNA. In order to determine the order of the As, Cs, Ts and Gs within an organism. But my job was far different. I needed to master the techniques for writing DNA. Like an author of a book, this started out as writing short sentences, or sequences of DNA code, but this soon turned into writing paragraphs and then full-on novels of DNA code, to make important biological instructions for proteins and living cells. Living cells are nature's most efficient machines at making new products, accounting for the production of 25 percent of the total pharmaceutical market, which is billions of dollars. We knew that writing DNA would drive this bioeconomy even more, once cells could be programmed just like computers. We also knew that writing DNA would enable biological teleportation ... the printing of defined, biological material, starting from DNA code. As a step toward bringing these promises to fruition, our team set out to create, for the first time, a synthetic bacterial cell, starting from DNA code in the computer. Synthetic DNA is a commodity. You can order very short pieces of DNA from a number of companies, and they will start from these four bottles of chemicals that make up DNA, G, A, T and C, and they will build those very short pieces of DNA for you. Over the past 15 years or so, my teams have been developing the technology for stitching together those short pieces of DNA into complete bacterial genomes. The largest genome that we constructed contained over one million letters. Which is more than twice the size of your average novel, and we had to put every single one of those letters in the correct order, without a single typo. We were able to accomplish this by developing a procedure that I tried to call the "one-step isothermal in vitro recombination method." (Laughter) But, surprisingly, the science community didn't like this technically accurate name and decided to call it Gibson Assembly. Gibson Assembly is now the gold standard tool, used in laboratories around the world for building short and long pieces of DNA. (Applause) Once we chemically synthesized the complete bacterial genome, our next challenge was to find a way to convert it into a free-living, self-replicating cell. Our approach was to think of the genome as the operating system of the cell, with the cell containing the hardware necessary to boot up the genome. Through a lot of trial and error, we developed a procedure where we could reprogram cells and even convert one bacterial species into another, by replacing the genome of one cell with that of another. This genome transplantation technology then paved the way for the booting-up of genomes written by scientists and not by Mother Nature. In 2010, all of the technologies that we had been developing for reading and writing DNA all came together when we announced the creation of the first synthetic cell, which of course, we called Synthia. (Laughter) Ever since the first bacterial genome was sequenced, back in 1995, thousands more whole bacterial genomes have been sequenced and stored in computer databases. Our synthetic cell work was the proof of concept that we could reverse this process: pull a complete bacterial genome sequence out of the computer and convert that information into a free-living, self-replicating cell, with all of the expected characteristics of the species that we constructed. Now I can understand why there may be concerns about the safety of this level of genetic manipulation. While the technology has the potential for great societal benefit, it also has the potential for doing harm. With this in mind, even before carrying out the very first experiment, our team started to work with the public and the government to find solutions together to responsibly develop and regulate this new technology. One of the outcomes from those discussions was to screen every customer and every customer's DNA synthesis orders, to make sure that pathogens or toxins are not being made by bad guys, or accidentally by scientists. All suspicious orders are reported to the FBI and other relevant law-enforcement agencies. Synthetic cell technologies will power the next industrial revolution and transform industries and economies in ways that address global sustainability challenges. The possibilities are endless. I mean, you can think of clothes constructed form renewable biobased sources, cars running on biofuel from engineered microbes, plastics made from biodegradable polymers and customized therapies, printed at a patient's bedside. The massive efforts to create synthetic cells have made us world leaders at writing DNA. Throughout the process, we found ways to write DNA faster, more accurately and more reliably. Because of the robustness of these technologies, we found that we could readily automate the processes and move the laboratory workflows out of the scientist's hands and onto a machine. In 2013, we built the first DNA printer. We call it the BioXp. And it has been absolutely essential in writing DNA across a number of applications my team and researchers around the world are working on. It was shortly after we built the BioXp that we received that email about the H7N9 bird flu scare in China. A team of Chinese scientists had already isolated the virus, sequenced its DNA and uploaded the DNA sequence to the internet. At the request of the US government, we downloaded the DNA sequence and in less than 12 hours, we printed it on the BioXp. Our collaborators at Novartis then quickly started turning that synthetic DNA into a flu vaccine. Meanwhile, the CDC, using technology dating back to the 1940s, was still waiting for the virus to arrive from China so that they could begin their egg-based approach. For the first time, we had a flu vaccine developed ahead of time for a new and potentially dangerous strain, and the US government ordered a stockpile. (Applause) This was when I began to appreciate, more than ever, the power of biological teleportation. (Laughter) Naturally, with this in mind, we started to build a biological teleporter. We call it the DBC. That's short for digital-to-biological converter. Unlike the BioXp, which starts from pre-manufactured short pieces of DNA, the DBC starts from digitized DNA code and converts that DNA code into biological entities, such as DNA, RNA, proteins or even viruses. You can think of the BioXp as a DVD player, requiring a physical DVD to be inserted, whereas the DBC is Netflix. To build the DBC, my team of scientists worked with software and instrumentation engineers to collapse multiple laboratory workflows, all in a single box. This included software algorithms to predict what DNA to build, chemistry to link the G, A, T and C building blocks of DNA into short pieces, Gibson Assembly to stitch together those short pieces into much longer ones, and biology to convert the DNA into other biological entities, such as proteins. This is the prototype. Although it wasn't pretty, it was effective. It made therapeutic drugs and vaccines. And laboratory workflows that once took weeks or months could now be carried out in just one to two days. And that's all without any human intervention and simply activated by the receipt of an email which could be sent from anywhere in the world. We like to compare the DBC to fax machines. But whereas fax machines received images and documents, the DBC receives biological materials. Now, consider how fax machines have evolved. The prototype of the 1840s is unrecognizable, compared with the fax machines of today. In the 1980s, most people still didn't know what a fax machine was, and if they did, it was difficult for them to grasp the concept of instantly reproducing an image on the other side of the world. But nowadays, everything that a fax machine does is integrated on our smart phones, and of course, we take this rapid exchange of digital information for granted. Here's what our DBC looks like today. We imagine the DBC evolving in similar ways as fax machines have. We're working to reduce the size of the instrument, and we're working to make the underlying technology more reliable, cheaper, faster and more accurate. Accuracy is extremely important when synthesizing DNA, because a single change to a DNA letter could mean the difference between a medicine working or not or synthetic cell being alive or dead. The DBC will be useful for the distributed manufacturing of medicine starting from DNA. Every hospital in the world could use a DBC for printing personalized medicines for a patient at their bedside. I can even imagine a day when it's routine for people to have a DBC to connect to their home computer or smart phone as a means to download their prescriptions, such as insulin or antibody therapies. The DBC will also be valuable when placed in strategic areas around the world, for rapid response to disease outbreaks. For example, the CDC in Atlanta, Georgia could send flu vaccine instructions to a DBC on the other side of the world, where the flu vaccine is manufactured right on the front lines. That flu vaccine could even be specifically tailored to the flu strain that's circulating in that local area. Sending vaccines around in a digital file, rather than stockpiling those same vaccines and shipping them out, promises to save thousands of lives. Of course, the applications go as far as the imagination goes. It's not hard to imagine placing a DBC on another planet. Scientists on Earth could then send the digital instructions to that DBC to make new medicines or to make synthetic organisms that produce oxygen, food, fuel or building materials, as a means for making the planet more habitable for humans. (Applause) With digital information traveling at the speed of light, it would only take minutes to send those digital instructions from Earth to Mars, but it would take months to physically deliver those same samples on a spacecraft. But for now, I would be satisfied beaming new medicines across the globe, fully automated and on demand, saving lives from emerging infectious diseases and printing personalized cancer medicines for those who don't have time to wait. Thank you. (Applause) |
A new way to monitor vital signs (that can see through walls) | {0: 'Dina Katabi investigates how AI can make wireless devices sense human motion and vital signs.'} | TED2018 | When I was a kid, I was, like many of you in this room, very much fascinated by Star Wars, and what fascinated me the most is this notion of the Force, this energy that connects all people and all objects and allows you to feel people that you can't even see. And I remember many nights, I would be sitting at home, just, like, concentrating and focusing, trying to feel the Force, and I didn't feel anything, don't worry. (Laughter) And later in life, I became a scientist. I joined the MIT faculty and started working on wireless signals. These are things like Wi-Fi or cellular systems, and I did a lot of work in that domain. But then, again, this Force thing kept nagging me, and at some point, I was just like, "Wait a minute, these wireless signals — they are like the Force." So if you think about it, wireless signals, they travel through space, they go through obstacles and walls and occlusions, and some of them, they reflect off our bodies, because our bodies are full of water, and some of these minute reflections, they come back. And if, just if, I had a device that can just sense these minute reflections, then I would be able to feel people that I cannot see. So I started working with my students on building such a device, and I want to show you some of our early results. So here, you see my student standing, and here is our device. And we are going to put the device in the other office, behind the wall, and we are going to monitor him as he moves. This red dot is tracking him using wireless signals. And as you can see, the red dot is tracking his movements very accurately, purely based on how his body interacts with the surrounding wireless signals. Pretty accurate, isn't it? He has no wearables, nothing. (Applause) Now you might be wondering, how is it possible that we can sense people and track them, without any wearables, through walls, and the easiest analogy to think about is radar. I'm sure many of you have seen this picture. You transmit a wireless signal to the sky, it reflects off some airplane, comes back to you, and you start detecting these airplanes. But if it were just radar, then we would have this 50 years ago. So it's not just radar. There are two key differences. So the first difference, of course — you can't, like radar, just blast wireless power at somebody. You're going to fry them like if they were in a microwave. Don't do that. So it means that you have to be able to deal with very weak signals, and that means that your device has to be very sensitive. The second difference is that, unlike the sky, where it's empty — if you are lucky, there is one airplane that you can catch there. Like, look at the room and look how many objects and people there are. So in indoor environments, the signal not only reflects off the person, if reflects off the person, off the floor, the ceiling, off other people around, and you get very complex reflections where the same signal reflects off me and then off you, and then off the ceiling, then off the floor. And you have to make sense of that mess. But we were lucky. We were coming at the right time. So two things helped us. The first thing is radiotechnologies have evolved a lot, and over the last decade, radio technology became much more powerful, so we were able to build very sensitive radios that can sense weak and minute RF signals. The second thing: machine learning. So you keep hearing about machine learning and there was a revolution of machine learning recently, in deep learning, and that allowed us to build machine-learning models that can understand wireless signals and interpret them so they would know what happened in the environment. So if you think of it, the radio is like the ear of our device and the machine learning is like the brain, and together, they have a very powerful device. So what else can we sense about people using wireless signals? Sleep. Sleep, actually, is something very dear to my heart, because my sleep is a disaster. (Laughter) So one thing is when you start working on some physiological signal and you discover that yours sucks. (Laughter) So you can see why we can capture sleep, because the person walks and the device sees him as he walks to bed, when he stops tossing around in bed, when he steps out of bed, and that measure of sleep is what people call actigraphy. It's based on motion. But it turned out that we can actually get sleep at a much more important level. We can understand the change in the brain waves that occur during sleep. So, many of you probably know that as we go to sleep, our brainwaves change and we enter different stages: awake, light sleep, deep sleep and REM, or rapid eye movement. These stages are of course related to sleep disorders, but they are also related to various diseases. So for example, disturbances in REM are associated with depression. Disturbances in deep sleep are associated with Alzheimer's. So if you want to get sleep staging, today, you will send the person to the hospital, they put all of these electrodes on their head, and they ask them to sleep like that. (Laughter) It's not really a happy experience. So what if I tell you that I can do the same thing but without any of these electrodes on the person's body? So here is our device, transmitting very low power wireless signal, analyzes the reflections using AI and spits out the sleep stages throughout the night. So we know, for example, when this person is dreaming. Not just that ... we can even get your breathing while you are sitting like that, and without touching you. So he is sitting and reading and this is his inhales, exhales. We asked him to hold his breath, and you see the signal staying at a steady level because he exhaled. He did not inhale. And I want to zoom in on the signal. And this is the same signal as before. These are the inhales, these are the exhales. And you see these blips on the signal? These are not noise. They are his heartbeats. And you can see them beat by beat. So I want to stop here for a moment and show you a live demo. Zach is going to help me with the demo, and we're going to use the device to monitor Zach's breathing. So this white box that you see here is the device, and Zach is turning it on ... and let's see whether he breathes well. So we're going to do exactly what we did in the video with the other guy, so the wireless signal is going through, it's touching Zach's body, and it's reflecting back to the device, and we want to monitor his breathing, his inhale-exhale motion. So we see the inhales, exhales — so see, these ups and downs are Zach breathing. Inhaling, exhaling. (Applause) So, he can breathe. (Laughter) Zach, can you hold your breath, please? OK, so now he's holding his breath, so you see the signal stays at a steady level, and these are his heartbeats. Beat, beat, beat, beat, beat. (Applause) OK, Zach, you can breathe again. (Laughter) We don't want accidents here. (Laughter) OK, thank you. (Applause) So as you can see, we have this device that can monitor so many physiological signals for you, and what is really interesting about this device is that it does all this without any wearables, without asking the person to change his behavior or to wear anything or charge anything special. And that got doctors very excited, because doctors, they always want to know more information about their patients, particularly at home, and this is particularly true in chronic diseases, like pulmonary diseases, like COPD, or heart failure or Alzheimer's and even depression. All of these chronic diseases are very important. In fact — perhaps you know — two-thirds of the cost of health care in the US is due to chronic diseases. But what is really interesting about chronic diseases is that when the person, for example, has a problem that leads to the hospital and the emergency room, this problem doesn't happen overnight. Actually, things happen gradually. So if we can monitor chronic disease patients in their home, we can detect changes in their breathing, heartbeat, mobility, sleep — and we can detect emergencies before they occur and have the doctor intervene earlier so that we can avoid hospitalization. And indeed, today we are working with multiple doctors in different disease categories. So I'm really excited because we have deployed the device with many patients. We have deployed the device with patients that have COPD, which is a pulmonary disease, patients that have Alzheimer's, patients that have depression and anxiety and people that have Parkinson's. And we are working with the doctors on improving their life, understanding the disease better. So when I started, I told you that I'm really fascinated with Star Wars and the Force in Star Wars, and indeed, I'm still very much fascinated, even now, as a grown-up, with Star Wars, waiting for the next movie. But I'm very fascinated now and excited about this new Force of wireless signals, and the potential of changing health care with this new force. One of the patients with whom we deployed is actually my aunt. She has heart failure, and I'm sure many of you guys in the audience have parents, grandparents, loved ones who have chronic diseases. So I want you to imagine with me a future where in every home that has a chronic disease patient, there is a device like this device sitting in the background and just monitoring passively sleep, breathing, the health of this chronic disease patient, and before an emergency occurs, it would detect the degradation in the physiological signal and alert the doctor so that we can avoid hospitalization. This can change health care as we know it today, improve how we understand chronic diseases and also save many lives. Thank you. (Applause) Helen Walters: Dina, thank you so much. Thank you too, Zach. So glad you're breathing. So Dina, this is amazing. The positive applications are incredible. What is the framework, though, like the ethical framework around this? What are you doing to prevent this technology from being used for other, perhaps less positive types of applications? Dina Katabi: Yeah, this is a very important question, of course, like, what about misuse, or what about, I guess you could say, about the Dark Side of the Force? HW: Right, right. (Laughter) DK: So we actually have technologies that prevent people from trying to use this device to monitor somebody without their consent. Because the device understands space, it will ask you to prove, by doing certain movements, that you have access to the space and you are the person who you are asking the device to monitor. So technology-wise, we have technology that we integrate to prevent misuse, but also, I think there is a role for policy, like everything else, and hopefully, with the two of them, we can control any misuse. HW: Amazing. Thank you so much. DK: Thank you. (Applause) |
How exactly does binary code work? | null | TED-Ed | Imagine trying to use words to describe every scene in a film, every note in your favorite song, or every street in your town. Now imagine trying to do it using only the numbers 1 and 0. Every time you use the Internet to watch a movie, listen to music, or check directions, that’s exactly what your device is doing, using the language of binary code. Computers use binary because it's a reliable way of storing data. For example, a computer's main memory is made of transistors that switch between either high or low voltage levels, such as 5 volts and 0 volts. Voltages sometimes oscillate, but since there are only two options, a value of 1 volt would still be read as "low." That reading is done by the computer’s processor, which uses the transistors’ states to control other computer devices according to software instructions. The genius of this system is that a given binary sequence doesn't have a pre-determined meaning on its own. Instead, each type of data is encoded in binary according to a separate set of rules. Let’s take numbers. In normal decimal notation, each digit is multiplied by 10 raised to the value of its position, starting from zero on the right. So 84 in decimal form is 4x10⁰ + 8x10¹. Binary number notation works similarly, but with each position based on 2 raised to some power. So 84 would be written as follows: Meanwhile, letters are interpreted based on standard rules like UTF-8, which assigns each character to a specific group of 8-digit binary strings. In this case, 01010100 corresponds to the letter T. So, how can you know whether a given instance of this sequence is supposed to mean T or 84? Well, you can’t from seeing the string alone – just as you can’t tell what the sound "da" means from hearing it in isolation. You need context to tell whether you're hearing Russian, Spanish, or English. And you need similar context to tell whether you’re looking at binary numbers or binary text. Binary code is also used for far more complex types of data. Each frame of this video, for instance, is made of hundreds of thousands of pixels. In color images, every pixel is represented by three binary sequences that correspond to the primary colors. Each sequence encodes a number that determines the intensity of that particular color. Then, a video driver program transmits this information to the millions of liquid crystals in your screen to make all the different hues you see now. The sound in this video is also stored in binary, with the help of a technique called pulse code modulation. Continuous sound waves are digitized by taking "snapshots" of their amplitudes every few milliseconds. These are recorded as numbers in the form of binary strings, with as many as 44,000 for every second of sound. When they’re read by your computer’s audio software, the numbers determine how quickly the coils in your speakers should vibrate to create sounds of different frequencies. All of this requires billions and billions of bits. But that amount can be reduced through clever compression formats. For example, if a picture has 30 adjacent pixels of green space, they can be recorded as "30 green" instead of coding each pixel separately - a process known as run-length encoding. These compressed formats are themselves written in binary code. So is binary the end-all-be-all of computing? Not necessarily. There’s been research into ternary computers, with circuits in three possible states, and even quantum computers, whose circuits can be in multiple states simultaneously. But so far, none of these has provided as much physical stability for data storage and transmission. So for now, everything you see, hear, and read through your screen comes to you as the result of a simple "true" or "false" choice, made billions of times over. |
An honest look at the personal finance crisis | {0: 'Elizabeth White is an author and aging solutions advocate for older adults facing uncertain work and financial insecurity.'} | TEDxVCU | You know me. I am in your friendship circle hidden in plain sight. My clothes are still impeccable — bought in the good years when I was still making money. To look at me you would not know that my electricity was cut off last week for nonpayment, or that I meet the eligibility requirements for food stamps. But if you paid attention, you would see that sadness in my eyes — hear that hint of fear in my otherwise self-assured voice. These days I'm buying the $1.99 trial-size jug of Tide to make ends meet. I bet you didn't know laundry detergent came in that size. You invite me to the same expensive restaurants the two of us have always enjoyed, but I order mineral water now with a twist of lemon, not the 12-dollar glass of chardonnay. I am frugal in my menu choices. Meticulous, I count every penny in my head. I demur dividing the table bill evenly to cover desserts and designer coffees and second and third glasses of wine I did not consume. I am tired of trying to fake appearances. A friend told me that I'm broke not poor, and there is a difference. I live without cable, my gym membership and nail appointments. I've discovered I can do my own hair. There is no retirement savings, no nest egg. I exhausted that long ago. There is no expensive condo to draw equity and no husband to back me up. Months of slow pay and no pay have decimated my credit. Bill collectors call constantly, reading verbatim from a script before expressing polite sympathy for my plight and then demanding payment arrangements I can't possibly meet. Friends wonder privately how someone so well educated could be in economic free fall. I'm still as talented as ever and smart as a whip, but work is sketchy now, mostly on and off consulting gigs. At 55 I've learned how to fake cheeriness, but there are not many opportunities for work anymore. I don't remember exactly when it stopped, but I cannot deny now having entered the uncertain world of formerly and used to be. I'm not sure anymore where I belong. What I do know is that dozens of online job applications seem to just disappear into a black hole. I'm wondering what is to become of me. So far my health has held up, but my body aches — or is it my spirit? Homeless women used to be invisible to me but I appraise them now with curious eyes, wondering if their stories started like mine. I wrote this piece a year ago. It's a composite of my story and other women I know. I wrote it because I was tired of pretending I was all right when I wasn't. I was tired of faking normal. I wasn't seeing myself in the popular press. Nobody I knew was traveling the world or buying a condo in Costa Rica. Very few of my friends had set aside the 15 to 20 percent experts tell us we need to maintain our standard of living in retirement. My friends, many in their 50s and 60s, were looking at a downward mobility, a work-for-life proposition, just a job loss, medical diagnosis or divorce away from insolvency. We may not have hit rock bottom, but many of us saw a sequence of events where rock bottom was possible for the first time. And the truth is, it really doesn't take much. The median household in the US only has enough savings to replace one month of income. Forty-seven percent of us cannot pull together 400 dollars to deal with an emergency. That's almost half of us. A major car repair and we're standing on the abyss. You wouldn't know it to look around you — I'm not the only one in this situation. There are people in this room who are in the same predicament, and if it's not you, it is your parents or your sister or maybe your best friend. We get good at faking normal. Shame keeps us silent and siloed. When I first decided I was going to come out with my story, I did a website and a friend noticed that there were no photos of me — it was all kind of cartoons like this. Even as I was coming out, I was still hiding. We live in a world where success is defined by income. When you say that you have money problems, you're announcing pretty much that you're a loser. When you're a graduate of Harvard Business School as I am, you're some kind of double loser. We boomers hear a lot about how we have underfunded our retirement; how it's all our fault. Why on earth would we draw down our 401(k) plan to cover the shortfall on our mother-in-law's nursing home care, or to pay for our kid's tuition, or just to survive? We're accused of being poor planners and deadbeats — all that money we spent on lattes and bottled water. To shame and blame is so deliciously tempting. Many of us don't even wait for others to do it we're so busy doing it to ourselves. I say let's own our part: we all could have saved more. I know I could have saved more, and if you were to rifle through my life over the last 30 years, you would see more than one dumb thing I have done financially. I can't change that now and neither can you, but let's not mix up individual, isolated behavior with the systemic factors that have caused a 7.7-trillion-dollar retirement income gap. Millions of boomer-age Americans did not land here because of too many trips to Starbucks. We spent the last three decades dealing with flat and falling wages and disappearing pensions and through-the-roof cost on housing and health care and education. It used to not be like this. We all remember the three-legged retirement income stool which had the savings and pension and social security. Well, that stool has gone wobbly. Take savings — what savings? For many families, there's just nothing left to save after the bills have been paid. The pension leg of the stool has also gone wobbly. We can remember when many people had pensions. Today only 13 percent of American workers are employed by companies that offer them. So what did we get instead? We got 401(k)-type plans and suddenly responsibility for retirement planning got shifted from our companies to us. We got the reigns but we also got the risk, and it turns out that millions of us just aren't that good at voluntarily investing over 40 years. Millions of us just aren't that good at managing market risk. And really the numbers tell the story. Half of all American households have no retirement savings at all. That would be zero. No 401(k), no IRA, not a dime. Among 55-to-64-year-olds who do have a retirement account, the median value of that account is 104,000 dollars. Now, 104,000 dollars does sound better than zero, but as an annuity, it generates about 300 dollars. I don't have to tell you that you can't live on that. With savings down, pensions becoming a relic of the past and 401(k) plans failing millions of Americans, many near-retirees are dependent on social security as their retirement plan. But here's the problem. Social security was never supposed to be the retirement plan. It's not nearly enough. At best it replaces something like 40 percent of your pre-retirement income. Things have changed a lot from when social security was introduced back in 1935. Then, a 21-year-old male had a 50 percent chance of living until he was 65. So he retired at 60, did a little fishing, kissed his grandkids, got his gold watch — he'd be dead within five years of receiving benefits. That's not the pattern today. If you're in your late 50s and in good health, you're going to live easily another 20 or 25 years. That's a really long time to make ends meet if you are broke. So what's the play if you've landed here and you're 50 or 55 or 60? What's the play if you don't want to land here and you're 22 or 32? Here's what I've learned from my own experience. The cavalry's not coming. There is no big rescue, no prince charming, no big bailout in the works. To have a shot at something other than being old and poor in America, we're going to have to save ourselves and each other. I've had to come out of the shadows, stand here openly, and I'm inviting you to do so as well. I'm not going to tell you that it's not easy. I ventured though to tell my story because I thought it would make it a little easier for people to tell theirs. I think it's only through our strength in numbers that we can begin to change the national "la-la" conversation that we are having on this retirement crisis. With so many of us shell-shocked and adrift about what has happened to us, we're going to have to build up from the grassroots, forming what I think are resilience circles. These are small groups of people coming together to talk about what has happened to them, to share resources and information and to begin to figure out a way forward. I believe from this base that we can find our voices again and sound the alarm — start pushing our institutions and policymakers to go hard on this retirement crisis with the urgency it deserves. In the meantime — and there is an "in the meantime" — we're going to have to adopt a live-low-to-the-ground mindset, drastically cutting back on our expenses. And I don't mean just living within our means. A lot of people are already doing that. What is called for now is to, in a much deeper way, ask ourselves what it really means to live a life that is not defined by things. I call it "smalling up." Smalling up is figuring out what you really need to feel contented and grounded. I have a friend who drives really beat-up, raggedy cars, but he will scrimp and save 15,000 dollars at one point to buy a flute because music is what really matters to him. He smalled up. I've had to also let go of magical thinking — this idea that if I just was patient enough and tightened my belt that things would go back to normal. If I just sent in one more CV or applied to one more job online or attended one more networking event that surely I'd get the kind of job I was used to having. Surely things would return to normal. The truth is I'm not going back and neither are you. The normal that we knew is over. In this new place that we are, we're going to be asked to do things that we don't want to do. We're going to be asked to take assignments that we think are beneath our station and our talent and our skill. I have had to get off my throne. Last year, a good friend of mine asked me if I would help her with some organization work. I assumed she meant community organizing along the lines of what President Obama did in Chicago. She meant organizing somebody's closet. I said, "I'm not doing that." She said, "Get off your throne. Money is green." It's not easy being part of the advance team that is ushering in this new era of work and living. First is always hardest. First is before there are networks and pathways and role models ... before there are policies and ways to show us how to go forward. We're in the middle of a seismic shift, and we're going to have to find bridgework to get us through. Bridgework is what we do in the meantime; bridgework is what we do while we're trying to figure out what is next. Bridgework is also letting go of this notion that our worth and our value depend on our income and our titles and our jobs. Bridgework can look crazy or cool depending on how you were rolling when your personal financial crisis hit. I have friends with PhDs who are working at the Container Store or driving Uber or Lyft, and then I have other friends who are partnering with other boomers and doing really cool entrepreneurial ventures. Bridgework doesn't mean that we don't want to build on our past careers, that we don't want meaningful work. We do. Bridgework is what we do in the meantime while we're figuring out what is next. I've also learned to think strategy not failure when I'm sort of processing all these things that I don't want to do. And I say that that's an approach that I would invite you to consider as well. So if you need to move in with your brother to make ends meet, call him. If you need to take in a boarder to help you pay your mortgage or pay your rent, do it. If you need to get food stamps, get the darn food stamps. AARP says only a third of older adults who are eligible actually get them. Do what you need to do to go another round. Know that there are millions of us. Come out of the shadows. Cut back, small up; think strategy, not failure; get off your throne and find the bridgework to get your through the lean times. As a country, we have achieved longevity, investing billions of dollars in the diagnosis, treatment and management of disease. It's not enough to just live a long time. We want to live well. We haven't invested nearly as much in the physical infrastructure to ensure that that happens. We need now a new way of thinking about what it means to be old in America. And we need guidance and ideas about how to live a richly textured life on a much more modest income. So I am calling on change agents and social entrepreneurs, artists and elders and impact investors. I'm calling on developers and disrupters of the status quo. We need you to help us imagine how to invest in the services and products and infrastructure that will support our dignity, our independence and our well-being in these many, many decades that we're going to live. My journey has taken me from a place of fear and shame to one of humility and understanding. I'm ready now to link shields with others, to fight this fight, and I'm inviting you to join me. Thank you. (Applause) |
The genius behind some of the world's most famous buildings | {0: 'Renzo Piano is a builder of shelters for human beings. And communities.'} | TED2018 | Architecture is amazing, for sure. It's amazing because it's art. But you know, it's a very funny kind of art. It's an art at the frontier between art and science. It's fed by ... by real life, every day. It's driven by force of necessity. Quite amazing, quite amazing. And the life of the architect is also amazing. You know, as an architect, at 10 o’clock in the morning, you need to be a poet, for sure. But at 11, you must become a humanist, otherwise you'd lose your direction. And at noon, you absolutely need to be a builder. You need to be able to make a building, because architecture, at the end, is the art of making buildings. Architecture is the art of making shelter for human beings. Period. And this is not easy at all. It's amazing. Look at this. Here we are in London, at the top of the Shard of Glass. This is a building we completed a few years ago. Those people are well-trained workers, and they are assembling the top piece of the tower. Well, they look like rock climbers. They are. I mean, they are defying the force of gravity, like building does, by the way. We got 30 of those people — actually, on that site, we got more than 1,400 people, coming from 60 different nationalities. You know, this is a miracle. It's a miracle. To put together 1,400 people, coming from such different places, is a miracle. Sites are miracles. This is another one. Let's talk about construction. Adventure, it's adventure in real life, not adventure in spirit. This guy there is a deepwater diver. From rock climbers to deepwater divers. This is in Berlin. After the fall of the Wall in '89, we built this building, connecting East Berlin to West Berlin, in Potsdamer Platz. We got on that project almost 5,000 people. Almost 5,000 people. And this is another site in Japan, building the Kansai Airport. Again, all the rock climbers, Japanese ones. You know, making buildings together is the best way to create a sense of cooperation. The sense of pride — pride is essential. But, you know, construction, of course, is one of the reasons why architecture is amazing. But there is another one, that is maybe even more amazing. Because architecture is the art of making shelter for communities, not just for individuals — communities and society at large. And society is never the same. The world keeps changing. And changes are difficult to swallow by people. And architecture is a mirror of those changes. Architecture is the built expression of those changes. So, this is why it is so difficult, because those changes create adventure. They create adventure, and architecture is adventure. This is the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, a long time ago. That was back in time, '77. This was a spaceship landing in the middle of Paris. Together with my friend in adventure, Richard Rogers, we were, at the time, young bad boys. Young, bad boys. (Laughter) It was really only a few years after May '68. So it was a rebellion, pure rebellion. The idea was to make the proof that cultural buildings should not be intimidating. They should create a sense of curiosity. This is the way to create a cultural place. Curiosity is the beginning of a cultural attitude. And there's a piazza there, you can see that piazza. And a piazza is the beginning of urban life. A piazza is the place where people meet. And they mix experience. And they mix ages. And, you know, in some way, you create the essence of the city. And since then, we made, in the office, so many other places for people. Here, in Rome, is a concert hall. Another place for people. This building inside is actually designed by the sound, you can see. It's flirting with sound. And this is the Kansai Airport, in Japan. To make a building, sometimes you need to make an island, and we made the island. The building is more than one mile long. It looks like an immense glider, landing on the ground. And this is in San Francisco. Another place for people. This building is the California Academy of Sciences. And we planted on that roof — thousands and thousands of plants that use the humidity of the air, instead of pumping water from the water table. The roof is a living roof, actually. And this building was made Platinum LEED. The LEED is the system to measure, of course, the sustainability of a building. So this was also a place for people that will stay a long time. And this is actually New York. This is the new Whitney, in the Meatpacking District in New York. Well, another flying vessel. Another place for people. Here we are in Athens, the Niarchos Foundation. It's a library, it's an open house, a concert hall and a big park. This building is also a Platinum LEED building. This building actually captures the sun's energy with that roof. But, you know, making a building a place for people is good. Making libraries, making concert halls, making universities, making museums is good, because you create a place that's open, accessible. You create a building for a better world, for sure. But there is something else that makes architecture amazing, even more. And this is the fact that architecture doesn't just answer to need and necessity, but also to desires — yes, desires — dreams, aspirations. This is what architecture does. Even the most modest hut on earth is not just a roof. It's more than a roof. It's telling a story; it's telling a story about the identity of the people living in that hut. Individuals. Architecture is the art of telling stories. Like this one. In London: the Shard of Glass. Well, this building is the tallest building in Western Europe. It goes up more than 300 meters in the air, to breathe fresh air. The facets of this building are inclined, and they reflect the sky of London, that is never the same. After rain, everything becomes bluish. In the sunny evening, everything is red. It's something that is difficult to explain. It's what we call the soul of a building. On this picture on the left, you have the Menil Collection, used a long time ago. It's a museum. On the right is the Harvard Art Museum. Both those two buildings flirt with light. Light is probably one of the most essential materials in architecture. And this is in Amsterdam. This building is flirting with water. And this is my office, on the sea. Well, this is flirting with work. Actually, we enjoy working there. And that cable car is the little cable car that goes up to there. That's "The New York Times" in New York. Well, this is playing with transparency. Again, the sense of light, the sense of transparency. On the left here, you have the Magic Lantern in Japan, in Ginza, in Tokyo. And in the center is a monastery in the forest. This monastery is playing with the silence and the forest. And a museum, a science museum. This is about levitation. And this is in the center of Paris, in the belly of the whale. This is the Pathé Foundation in Paris. All those buildings have something in common: it's that something is searching for desire, for dreams. And that's me. (Laughter) Well, it's me on my sailing boat. Flirting with breeze. Well, there's not a very good reason to show you this picture. (Laughter) I'm trying, I'm trying. You know, one thing is clear: I love sailing, for sure. I actually also love designing sailing boats. But I love sailing, because sailing is associated with slowness. And ... and silence. And the sense of suspension. And there is another thing that this picture says. It says that I'm Italian. (Laughter) Well, there is very little I can do about that. (Laughter) I'm Italian, and I love beauty. I love beauty. Well, let's go sailing, I want to take you sailing here, to this place, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. This is the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Center. It's for the Kanaky ethnic group. It's in Nouméa, New Caledonia. This place is for art. Art and nature. And those buildings actually flirt with the wind, with the trade winds. They have a sound, they have a voice, those buildings. I'm showing this because it's about beauty. It's about pure beauty. And let's talk about beauty for a moment. Beauty is like the bird of paradise: the very moment you try to catch it, it flies away. Your arm is too short. But beauty is not a frivolous idea. It's the opposite. In my native language, that is Italian, "beautiful" is "bello." In Spanish, "beauty" is "belleza." In Greek, "beautiful" is "kalos." When you add "agathos," that means "beautiful and good." In no one of those languages, "beautiful" just means "beautiful." It also means "good." Real beauty is when the invisible joins the visible, coming on surface. And this doesn't apply only to art or nature. This applies to science, human curiosity, solidarity — that's the reason why you may say, "This is a beautiful person," "That's a beautiful mind." This, this is the beauty that can change people into better people, by switching a special light in their eyes. And making buildings for this beauty makes cities better places to live. And better cities make better citizens. Well, this beauty — this universal beauty, I should say — is one of the few things that can change the world. Believe me, this beauty will save the world. One person at a time, but it will do it. Thank you. (Applause) |
The mission to create a searchable database of Earth's surface | {0: 'At Planet, Will Marshall leads overall strategy for commercializing new geospatial data and analytics that are disrupting agriculture, mapping, energy, the environment and other vertical markets.'} | TED2018 | Four years ago, here at TED, I announced Planet's Mission 1: to launch a fleet of satellites that would image the entire Earth, every day, and to democratize access to it. The problem we were trying to solve was simple. Satellite imagery you find online is old, typically years old, yet human activity was happening on days and weeks and months, and you can't fix what you can't see. We wanted to give people the tools to see that change and take action. The beautiful Blue Marble image, taken by the Apollo 17 astronauts in 1972 had helped humanity become aware that we're on a fragile planet. And we wanted to take it to the next level, to give people the tools to take action, to take care of it. Well, after many Apollo projects of our own, launching the largest fleet of satellites in human history, we have reached our target. Today, Planet images the entire Earth, every single day. Mission accomplished. (Applause) Thank you. It's taken 21 rocket launches — this animation makes it look really simple — it was not. And we now have over 200 satellites in orbit, downlinking their data to 31 ground stations we built around the planet. In total, we get 1.5 million 29-megapixel images of the Earth down each day. And on any one location of the Earth's surface, we now have on average more than 500 images. A deep stack of data, documenting immense change. And lots of people are using this imagery. Agricultural companies are using it to improve farmers' crop yields. Consumer-mapping companies are using it to improve the maps you find online. Governments are using it for border security or helping with disaster response after floods and fires and earthquakes. And lots of NGOs are using it. So, for tracking and stopping deforestation. Or helping to find the refugees fleeing Myanmar. Or to track all the activities in the ongoing crisis in Syria, holding all sides accountable. And today, I'm pleased to announce Planet stories. Anyone can go online to planet.com open an account and see all of our imagery online. It's a bit like Google Earth, except it's up-to-date imagery, and you can see back through time. You can compare any two days and see the dramatic changes that happen around our planet. Or you can create a time lapse through the 500 images that we have and see that change dramatically over time. And you can share these over social media. It's pretty cool. (Applause) Thank you. We initially created this tool for news journalists, who wanted to get unbiased information about world events. But now we've opened it up for anyone to use, for nonprofit or personal uses. And we hope it will give people the tools to find and see the changes on the planet and take action. OK, so humanity now has this database of information about the planet, changing over time. What's our next mission, what's Mission 2? In short, it's space plus AI. What we're doing with artificial intelligence is finding the objects in all the satellite images. The same AI tools that are used to find cats in videos online can also be used to find information on our pictures. So, imagine if you can say, this is a ship, this is a tree, this is a car, this is a road, this is a building, this is a truck. And if you could do that for all of the millions of images coming down per day, then you basically create a database of all the sizable objects on the planet, every day. And that database is searchable. So that's exactly what we're doing. Here's a prototype, working on our API. This is Beijing. So, imagine if we wanted to count the planes in the airport. We select the airport, and it finds the planes in today's image, and finds the planes in the whole stack of images before it, and then outputs this graph of all the planes in Beijing airport over time. Of course, you could do this for all the airports around the world. And let's look here in the port of Vancouver. So, we would do the same, but this time we would look for vessels. So, we zoom in on Vancouver, we select the area, and we search for ships. And it outputs where all the ships are. Now, imagine how useful this would be to people in coast guards who are trying to track and stop illegal fishing. See, legal fishing vessels transmit their locations using AIS beacons. But we frequently find ships that are not doing that. The pictures don't lie. And so, coast guards could use that and go and find those illegal fishing vessels. And soon we'll add not just ships and planes but all the other objects, and we can output data feeds of those locations of all these objects over time that can be integrated digitally from people's work flows. In time, we could get more sophisticated browsers that people pull in from different sources. But ultimately, I can imagine us abstracting out the imagery entirely and just having a queryable interface to the Earth. Imagine if we could just ask, "Hey, how many houses are there in Pakistan? Give me a plot of that versus time." "How many trees are there in the Amazon and can you tell me the locations of the trees that have been felled between this week and last week?" Wouldn't that be great? Well, that's what we're trying to go towards, and we call it "Queryable Earth." So, Planet's Mission 1 was to image the whole planet every day and make it accessible. Planet's Mission 2 is to index all the objects on the planet over time and make it queryable. Let me leave you with an analogy. Google indexed what's on the internet and made it searchable. Well, we're indexing what's on the Earth and making it searchable. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The power of diversity within yourself | {0: 'Rebeca Hwang is co-founder and managing director of Rivet Ventures, investing in solutions for women and empowering their choices.'} | TED2018 | We're holding hands, staring at the door. My siblings and I were waiting for my mother to come back from the hospital. She was there because my grandmother had cancer surgery that day. Finally, the doors opened, and she said, "She's gone. She's gone." She started sobbing and immediately said, "We must make arrangements. Your grandmother's dying wish was to be buried back home in Korea." I was barely 12 years old, and when the shock wore off, my mother's words were ringing in my ears. My grandmother wanted to be buried back home. We had moved from Korea to Argentina six years prior, without knowing any Spanish, or how we were going to make a living. And upon arrival, we were immigrants who had lost everything, so we had to work really hard to rebuild our lives. So it hadn't occurred to me that after all these years, back home was still in Korea. It made me ponder where I would want to be buried someday, where home was for me, and the answer was not obvious. And this really bothered me. So this episode launched a lifelong quest for my identity. I was born in Korea — the land of kimchi; raised in Argentina, where I ate so much steak that I'm probably 80 percent cow by now; and I was educated in the US, where I became addicted to peanut butter. (Laughter) During my childhood, I felt very much Argentinian, but my looks betrayed me at times. I remember on the first day of middle school, my Spanish literature teacher came into the room. She scanned all of my classmates, and she said, "You — you have to get a tutor, otherwise, you won't pass this class." But by then I was fluent in Spanish already, so it felt as though I could be either Korean or Argentinian, but not both. It felt like a zero-sum game, where I had to give up my old identity to be able to gain or earn a new one. So when I was 18, I decided to go to Korea, hoping that finally I could find a place to call home. But there people asked me, "Why do you speak Korean with a Spanish accent?" (Laughter) And, "You must be Japanese because of your big eyes and your foreign body language." And so it turns out that I was too Korean to be Argentinian, but too Argentinian to be Korean. And this was a pivotal realization to me. I had failed to find that place in the world to call home. But how many Japanese-looking Koreans who speak with a Spanish accent — or even more specific, Argentinian accent — do you think are out there? Perhaps this could be an advantage. It was easy for me to stand out, which couldn't hurt in a world that was rapidly changing, where skills could become obsolete overnight. So I stopped looking for that 100 percent commonality with the people that I met. Instead, I realized that oftentimes, I was the only overlap between groups of people that were usually in conflict with each other. So with this realization in mind, I decided to embrace all of the different versions of myself — even allow myself to reinvent myself at times. So for example, in high school, I have to confess I was a mega-nerd. I had no sense of fashion — thick glasses, simple hairstyle — you can get the idea. I think, actually, I only had friends because I shared my homework. That's the truth. But once at university, I was able to find a new identity for myself, and the nerd became a popular girl. But it was MIT, so I don't know if I can take too much credit for that. As they say over there, "The odds are good, but the goods are odd." (Laughter) I switched majors so many times that my advisors joked that I should get a degree in "random studies." (Laughter) I told this to my kids. And then over the years, I have gained a lot of different identities. I started as an inventor, entrepreneur, social innovator. Then I became an investor, a woman in tech, a teacher. And most recently, I became a mom, or as my toddler says repeatedly, "Mom!" day and night. Even my accent was so confused — its origin was so obscure, that my friends called it, "Rebecanese." (Laughter) But reinventing yourself can be very hard. You can face a lot of resistance at times. When I was nearly done with my PhD, I got bitten by that entrepreneurial bug. I was in Silicon Valley, and so writing a thesis in the basement didn't seem as interesting as starting my own company. So I went to my very traditional Korean parents, who are here today, with the task of letting them know that I was going to drop out from my PhD program. You see, my siblings and I are the first generation to go to university, so for a family of immigrants, this was kind of a big deal. You can imagine how this conversation was going to go. But fortunately, I had a secret weapon with me, which was a chart that had the average income of all of the graduates from Stanford PhD programs, and then the average income of all the dropouts from Stanford graduate programs. (Laughter) I must tell you — this chart was definitely skewed by the founders of Google. (Laughter) But my mom looked at the chart, and she said, "Oh, for you — follow your passion." (Laughter) Hi, Mom. Now, today my identity quest is no longer to find my tribe. It's more about allowing myself to embrace all of the possible permutations of myself and cultivating diversity within me and not just around me. My boys now are three years and five months old today, and they were already born with three nationalities and four languages. I should mention now that my husband is actually from Denmark — just in case I don't have enough culture shocks in my life, I decided to marry a Danish guy. In fact, I think my kids will be the first Vikings who will have a hard time growing a beard when they become older. (Laughter) Yeah, we'll have to work on that. But I really hope that they will find that their multiplicity is going to open and create a lot of doors for them in their lives, and that they can use this as a way to find commonality in a world that's increasingly global today. I hope that instead of feeling anxious and worried that they don't fit in that one box or that their identity will become irrelevant someday, that they can feel free to experiment and to take control of their personal narrative and identity. I also hope that they will use their unique combination of values and languages and cultures and skills to help create a world where identities are no longer used to alienate what looks different, but rather, to bring together people. And most importantly, I really hope that they find tremendous joy in going through these uncharted territories, because I know I have. Now, as for my grandmother, her last wish was also her last lesson to me. It turns out that it was never about going back to Korea and being buried there. It was about resting next to her son, who had died long before she moved to Argentina. What mattered to her was not the ocean that divided her past and new world; it was about finding common ground. Thank you. (Applause) |
How memory science can help fight harassment | {0: 'Julia Shaw is best known for her work in the areas of memory and criminal psychology.'} | TEDxLondon | Me Too and Time's Up have highlighted that harassment and discrimination are a shockingly common part of many people's lived reality, and that this reality extends into the workplace. Whether in tech or finance, sports or the service industry, every day we seem to hear another story about an abuse of power or another grossly inappropriate workplace behavior. People are furious. They're taking to Twitter and social media to voice that this must change. But it's time to move beyond the hashtag. It's time for us to report harassment and discrimination to those who can fix this mess. And it's time for us to talk about harassment in a more inclusive way: not just about sexual harassment, but to encourage people to come forward about harassment and discrimination based on other characteristics such as age, disability or ethnicity. Because only together can we fix the underlying causes and consequences of harassment. You see, most of us will, at some point in our lives, experience workplace harassment or discrimination. Research shows that particularly women, people of color and people who openly identify as LGBTQI are likely to be targeted, and for some people, this is a pervasive and persistent part of their reality. And for most of these people - 98 percent according to some studies - most of these people will never speak up and tell their employer. Too often, harassment and discrimination is a lonely and isolating experience, but we need to help people out from under their desks. We need to empower people to have a voice. The reasonable first question that everybody asks once they've been harassed is, "What do I do now?" And this is what I want to help you with. Navigating the barriers to reporting can be absolutely dizzying. How can we speak up in a society that too often discredits or diminishes our experiences? How can we speak up in a society that is likely to be retributive towards us? How can we deal with the silencing that goes on all around us? Making matters worse, often our memories are the only evidence we have of what happened. Now, here's where I can come in. I'm a memory scientist, and I specialize in how we remember important emotional events. I've particularly focused on how the memory interview process can severely impact the evidentiary quality of reports that we produce. A bad interview can lead you to forget details or misremember them, while a good interview can forever change your life for the better. After looking at lab reports and working, studying this issue, both in the courtroom and in research settings, I've dissected all the different things that can go wrong with our memories that can really threaten your case. And now I'm turning my attention to helping people tackle recording and reporting of workplace harassment and discrimination. There's three things that I've learned from my research on this that you can immediately apply if you've been harassed or discriminated against at work. I want to help you turn your memory into evidence - evidence that even a memory skeptic like me is unlikely to find fault with. First of all, James Comey had it right. The former head of the FBI used to sit in his car, lock himself in after meetings with the president and write down absolutely everything he could remember about what happened. The now-famous recordings proved to be quite useful later on. Be like Comey. Now, you don't need to lock yourself into your car to do this, but please, immediately after something happens, I want you to contemporaneously record what happened. And do this before talking to anyone else about it. Because as soon as your share your story with friends or family or colleagues or therapists, you have the potential to distort or change your memory of the event. Uncontaminated, contemporaneous evidence is worth gold. Second: the type of evidence matters. Sure, you can do a handwritten note of what happens, but how do you prove when you wrote it? Instead, pull out your computer or smartphone and make a note that's time-stamped, where you can prove this was recorded at this time. Contemporaneous, time-stamped evidence is better. Finally, make sure what you're writing down is actually relevant. Too often, we see that people bring out Facebook messages, they bring out time-stamped pieces of evidence, but sure, they're not particularly relevant, they're not particularly useful. It's easy to write an emotional, unstructured account of what happened - understandable because it's an emotional experience - but those might not actually be the details that matter later on for an investigation. Write down this list. I want you to keep track of this and simply fill in the blanks. First of all, what happened? In as much detail as possible, describe the situation, and do it on the day it happened if at all possible. Second, who was there? Were there any witnesses? This becomes crucial potentially later on. What exact time and date did this happen? What location? Where did this happen? Who did you tell after the event? How did it make you feel during and after it happened? And is there any other evidence such as WhatsApps, photos or emails that might lend more credibility to your case. These are all details that are incredibly easy to record contemporaneously but are also incredibly easy to forget later on. Humans, according to research, often overestimate their ability to remember important emotional details later on. Assume that you're going to forget. Assume you have to write it down. Now, these three pieces of advice are a good start, but of course they don't overcome a lot of the other barriers to reporting. According to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which published a report in 2018, there's one key recommendation to overcome some of the other fears often associated with reporting these kinds of incidents to your employer. One piece of advice that they made? Have an online, anonymous reporting tool. Only that way, they say, can you truly overcome many of the fears associated with reporting. Now, in line with this, and informed by what was happening all around me and taking and applying the memory science, the science I had been doing for many years, I sat down with a number of people and we together created TalkToSpot.com. Spot is an online, anonymous reporting tool that helps you record and report workplace harassment and discrimination. It allows you to do it anonymously, it allows you to do it for free, and it's completely evidence-based. You don't have to talk to a person, there's no fear of judgment, and you can do it whenever and wherever you need. Now you have the power to walk through an evidence-based memory interview. Now, this is called a cognitive interview. This is the same technique that police use when they're doing their job properly. So best-case scenarios: people who are being asked about important emotional events are being asked in line with the cognitive interview. Now, this walks you through all the relevant information so that at the end, after you've talked to the bot - which is an automatic messaging system - after you've talked to the bot, it generates a PDF record that's time-stamped and securely signed that you can keep for yourself as evidence in case you want to share it later, or you can submit it to your employer right away. And in line with recommendations, you can submit it to your employer anonymously. But a reporting tool is only as useful as the audience that's listening. So if your employer is truly committed to change, we've decided to also offer them the tool to respond. So if organizations work with us and are truly committed to doing something about workplace harassment and discrimination, they're also able to respond to you even if you've chosen to stay anonymous. We think it's important that you can work together with your employer to tackle this issue. We think that everybody wins when we bring light into this dark issue. Whether it happens to you or to someone you know, recording and reporting what happened can really improve how we talk about these issues. And if you're an organization, this is a call to give your employees access to better and more effective reporting mechanisms. We know that the current methods that are used in most organizations don't work effectively. It's time to change that if you're committed to inclusion and diversity. It's time for us to celebrate our diversity. It's time for us to give a voice to those who have for too long been denied one. It's time for us to celebrate those who come forward, even if they feel they need to stay anonymous - to stay masked to do so. It's time for a reporting revolution. Thank you. (Applause) |
History vs. Augustus | null | TED-Ed | His reign marked the beginning of one of history’s greatest empires and the end of one of its first republics. Was Rome’s first emperor a visionary leader who guaranteed his civilization’s place in history or a tyrant who destroyed its core values? Find out in History versus Augustus. Order, order. The defendant today is Gaius Octavius? Gaius Julius Caesar/Augustus... Do we have the wrong guy? No, your Honor. Gaius Octavius, born in 63 BCE, was the grand-nephew of Julius Caesar. He became Gaius Julius Caesar upon being named his great-uncle’s adoptive son and heir. And he gained the title Augustus in 27 BCE when the Senate granted him additional honors. You mean when he established sole authority and became emperor of Rome. Is that bad? Didn’t every place have some king or emperor back then? Actually, your Honor, the Roman people had overthrown their kings centuries before to establish a republic, a government meant to serve the people, not the privilege of a ruling family. And it was Octavius who destroyed this tradition. Octavius was a model public servant. At 16, he was elected to the College of Pontiffs that supervised religious worship. He fought for Rome in Hispania alongside his great-uncle Caesar and took up the responsibility of avenging Caesar’s death when the corrupt oligarchs in the Senate betrayed and murdered him. Caesar had been a power-hungry tyrant who tried to make himself a king while consorting with his Egyptian queen Cleopatra. After his death, Octavius joined his general Mark Antony in starting a civil war that tore Rome apart, then stabbed his ally in the back to increase his own power. Antony was a fool. He waged a disastrous campaign in Parthia and plotted to turn Roman territories into personal kingdoms for himself and Cleopatra. Isn’t that what Caesar had been accused of? Well... So Octavius destroyed Antony for trying to become a king and then became one himself? That’s right. You can see the megalomania even in his adopted title – "The Illustrious One." That was a religious honorific. And Augustus didn’t seek power for his own sake. As winner of the civil war and commander of the most troops, it was his duty to restore law and order to Rome so that other factions didn’t continue fighting. He didn’t restore the law - he made it subordinate to him! Not true. Augustus worked to restore the Senate’s prestige, improved food security for the lower classes, and relinquished control of the army when he resigned his consul post. Mere optics. He used his military influence and personal wealth to stack the Senate in his favor, while retaining the powers of a tribune and the right to celebrate military triumphs. He kept control of provinces with the most legions. And if that wasn’t enough, he assumed the consul position twice more to promote his grandchildren. He was clearly trying to establish a dynasty. But what did he do with all that power? Glad you asked, your Honor. Augustus’s accomplishments were almost too many to name. He established consistent taxation for all provinces, ending private exploitation by local tax officials. He personally financed a network of roads and employed couriers so news and troops could travel easily throughout the realm. And it was under Augustus that many of Rome’s famous public buildings were constructed. The writers of the time were nearly unanimous in praising his rule. Did the writers have any other choice? Augustus exiled plenty of people on vague charges, including Ovid, one of Rome’s greatest poets. And you forgot to mention the intrusive laws regarding citizens’ personal lives – punishing adultery, restricting marriage between social classes, even penalties for remaining unmarried. He was trying to improve the citizenry and instill discipline. And he succeeded. His legacy speaks for itself: 40 years of internal stability, a professional army that expanded Rome’s frontiers in all directions, and a government still remembered as a model of civic virtue. His legacy was an empire that would go on to wage endless conquest until it collapsed, and a tradition of military autocracy. Any time a dictator in a general’s uniform commits atrocities while claiming to act on behalf of "the people," we have Augustus Caesar to thank. So you’re saying Augustus was a good emperor, and you’re saying there’s no such thing? We’re used to celebrating historical leaders for their achievements and victories. But to ask whether an individual should have such power in the first place is to put history itself on trial. |
El valor de nuestra diversidad interna | {0: 'Rebeca Hwang is co-founder and managing director of Rivet Ventures, investing in solutions for women and empowering their choices.'} | TED en Español en NYC | Holding hands, we watched the door, boring holes in it with our intense stares. My siblings and I were waiting for our mom to come back from the hospital, where my grandmother was having surgery for advanced cancer. Finally, the doors opened, and my mom said, "She didn't survive the operation." She burst into tears and between sobs, said, "Your grandmother's last wish was to be buried in her home, in Korea." I was only 12 when this happened, and when I recovered from the initial shock, my mom's words echoed in my ears: Grandma wanted to be buried in her "home." We had emigrated from Korea to Argentina six years earlier. We knew no Spanish, or how we were going to make a living. We were immigrants in a new land, where we had lost everything on account of a scam, and we had worked very hard to rebuild our lives. That's why I couldn't imagine that after so many years, our home would still be Korea. It made me wonder: Where do I want to be buried someday? Where is my home? To be honest, I didn't have an answer to these questions, and that really worried me. This episode triggered an existential search for my identity. I was born in Korea, the land of kimchi, and I grew up in Argentina, where there was always meat on the table; truly, it would not be surprising if today I were 80 percent cow. (Laughter) I was educated in the United States, where I became addicted to peanut butter. During childhood, I honestly felt very Argentine, but my appearance always gave me away. I remember the first day of high school, my literature teacher entered the classroom, carefully looked at everyone, stopped in front of me and prophesized: "You won't pass this class unless you get a private tutor." But by then, I was speaking perfect Spanish — better than I speak it now, I think, because it's been years since I left. And I felt forced to choose between my Argentine identity and my Korean one. Apparently, I couldn't be both, and I had to abandon my previous identity in order to adopt the new one. So when I turned 18, I went to Korea to see if I could find this home that I could call my place in the world. In Korea, people assumed I was a foreigner, and they'd ask me, “Why do you speak Korean with a Spanish accent?” (Laughter) Apparently, I was too Korean to be Argentine, but too Argentine to be Korean. Realizing that, honestly, was very transformative. I decided not to try and change what I can't change and accept it. In fact, I was inspired by one of my grandmother's stories. My grandmother never learned Spanish, but she was very independent and managed on her own. She would walk all around the streets of Buenos Aires, even in the most dangerous areas. One afternoon, she was attacked and threatened at gunpoint. They put the gun to her head and said, "The ring! The ring! Give me your ring!" They wanted her gold ring, which was her most prized possession back then. Well, my grandmother looked the criminal in the eyes, sat down on the sidewalk, and a peaceful smile came onto her face. My grandmother thought they were saying "anyó" instead of "ring," which in Korean, means "sit down." (Laughter) She thought, "Well, it's the last day of my life, so if I'm leaving, let's leave with a smile." She gracefully accepted her fate. Imagine the face of her attacker — he must have thought my poor grandmother was a creature from another planet, and he took off running, bewildered. That experience inspired me to accept my new reality with optimism. I hadn't managed to find that place in the world that I could call home. But then I wondered: How many Koreans with Latino mannerisms that speak Korean with a Spanish accent are there in the world? Maybe it could be an advantage, a useful tool, a way to stand out in a world where things are changing very quickly, where qualities and abilities can sometimes become obsolete from one day to the next. So I decided not to focus on having 100 percent in common with people I met, Instead, I realized that I was frequently the only intersection between groups of people that didn't have much in common and that were even, at times, in conflict among themselves. So with this new perspective, I proudly accepted the different versions of myself and even, at times, allowed me to reinvent myself. For example, I have to confess that in high school I was what we call a bookworm — I had thick glasses, had no fashion sense whatsoever. What's more, I think the only reason I had friends was because I let them copy my homework every morning. That's true. Once I went to college, I was able to find a new identity, and the "worm" became a popular girl. OK, granted, it was MIT, so I don't think the bar was very high — (Laughter) but at least I could maintain that identity. I changed majors so many times that my advisor told me that instead of chemical engineering, I should get a degree in random studies. (Laughter) Over the years, I've had a lot of identities: academic, scientist, social innovator, inventor entrepreneur, investor; most recently, networker, teacher and, most importantly, a mother, three years ago. I was so confused that even my accent couldn't decide who it was. My friends would joke and say that it was of such an unknown origin that I was the only person in the world who spoke this language, "Rebecanese." Reinventing oneself can be hard. For example, when I was finishing my doctorate, I was bitten by the entrepreneurship bug. So suddenly, writing a 400-page thesis in an office in a basement seemed less appealing than starting my own company. So I had the job of telling this to my parents, who are traditional Asian immigrants — whereas my siblings and I are the first to attend college — in other words, that education is the most important thing in my family. You can imagine the reaction awaiting me upon telling my parents I was abandoning my studies. So I went to my parents, but with a secret weapon: a chart showing the average income of people who graduated with doctorates from Stanford compared to the average incomes of Stanford students who abandoned their thesis or doctorate. Now, I have to confess that the chart was really skewed by the founders of Google. (Laughter) My mom looked at the chart and without blinking, said, "I've always said you should follow your heart." (Laughter) My search for identity these days isn't about finding my tribe. Really, it's about finding and accepting all the different possible permutations of myself. It's about cultivating diversity within myself, instead of just around me. Currently, my kids are three years old and six months old, just turned, and they were born into three nationalities and four languages — and I need to clarify that I married a Danish guy, in case I didn't have enough cultural confusion in my life, I ended up marrying a Viking. I think my kids will be the only Vikings that won't be able to grow a beard when they grow up. It'll be hard for them. (Laughter) I hope that my kids will have a multidimensionality that works for them; that they see it as a tool for creating connections in a world that's every day more global and also more divided. I hope that instead of feeling anxious and worried that they don't fit into a predefined box, that they can feel free to experiment and take control of their life narratives in their own way. I hope they can use the unique combination of values, cultures, languages and abilities that they have to create a world where their identities are used to unite peoples and people, and not as an excuse to generate intolerance — because identity can be a double-edged sword: we can use it to differentiate ourselves from others, or to find points of connection. And when we accept our multiplicity, we amplify this power of connection and forget about the differences a little. Now, back to my grandmother: her last wish was also her final life lesson for me. It turns out that after many years, I found out why she wanted to be buried in Korea. It wasn't a question of patriotism or nationality. She wanted to rest in peace next to her son, who had died many years before she emigrated to Argentina. My grandmother lived a life full of deep connections and indestructible ties, including those separated by distances or oceans or even death. She had many identities: matriarch, farmer, businesswoman, Korean, immigrant, mother, grandmother. With her last wish, she taught me that finding our home isn't about putting down roots somewhere. It's about intertwining those roots with the roots of others who enrich our lives. Thank you. (Applause) |
What your smart devices know (and share) about you | {0: 'Kashmir Hill writes about privacy and technology.\r\n', 1: 'Think of Surya Mattu as a data detective. As he writes: "I am interested in figuring out the ways in which algorithmic systems harm people."\r\n'} | TED2018 | Kashmir Hill: So for my birthday last year, my husband got me an Amazon Echo. I was kind of shocked, actually, because we both work in privacy and security. (Laughter) And this was a device that would sit in the middle of our home with a microphone on, constantly listening. We're not alone, though. According to a survey by NPR and Edison Research, one in six American adults now has a smart speaker, which means that they have a virtual assistant at home. Like, that's wild. The future, or the future dystopia, is getting here fast. Beyond that, companies are offering us all kinds of internet-connected devices. There are smart lights, smart locks, smart toilets, smart toys, smart sex toys. Being smart means the device can connect to the internet, it can gather data, and it can talk to its owner. But once your appliances can talk to you, who else are they going to be talking to? I wanted to find out, so I went all-in and turned my one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco into a smart home. I even connected our bed to the internet. As far as I know, it was just measuring our sleeping habits. I can now tell you that the only thing worse than getting a terrible night's sleep is to have your smart bed tell you the next day that you "missed your goal and got a low sleep score." (Laughter) It's like, "Thanks, smart bed. As if I didn't already feel like shit today." (Laughter) All together, I installed 18 internet-connected devices in my home. I also installed a Surya. Surya Mattu: Hi, I'm Surya. (Laughter) I monitored everything the smart home did. I built a special router that let me look at all the network activity. You can think of my router sort of like a security guard, compulsively logging all the network packets as they entered and left the smart home. KH: Surya and I are both journalists, he's not my husband, we just work together at Gizmodo. SM: Thank you for clarifying. The devices Kashmir bought — we were interested in understanding what they were saying to their manufacturers. But we were also interested in understanding what the home's digital emissions look like to the internet service provider. We were seeing what the ISP could see, but more importantly, what they could sell. KH: We ran the experiment for two months. In that two months, there wasn't a single hour of digital silence in the house — not even when we went away for a week. SM: Yeah, it's so true. Based on the data, I knew when you guys woke up and went to bed. I even knew when Kashmir brushed her teeth. I'm not going to out your brushing habits, but let's just say it was very clear to me when you were working from home. KH: Uh, I think you just outed them to, like, a lot of people here. SM: Don't be embarrassed, it's just metadata. I knew when you turned on your TV and how long you watched it for. Fun fact about the Hill household: they don't watch a lot of television, but when they do, it's usually in binge mode. Favorite shows include "Difficult People" and "Party Down." KH: OK, you're right, I loved "Party Down." It's a great show, and you should definitely watch it. But "Difficult People" was all my husband, Trevor. And Trevor was actually a little upset that you knew about his binges, because even though he'd been the one to connect the TV to the router, he forgot that the TV was watching us. It's actually not the first time that our TV has spied on us. The company that made it, VIZIO, paid a 2.2 million-dollar settlement to the government just last year, because it had been collecting second-by-second information about what millions of people were watching on TV, including us, and then it was selling that information to data brokers and advertisers. SM: Ah, classic surveillance economy move. The devices Kashmir bought almost all pinged their servers daily. But do you know which device was especially chatty? The Amazon Echo. It contacted its servers every three minutes, regardless of whether you were using it or not. KH: In general, it was disconcerting that all these devices were having ongoing conversations that were invisible to me. I mean, I would have had no idea, without your router. If you buy a smart device, you should probably know — you're going to own the device, but in general, the company is going to own your data. And you know, I mean, maybe that's to be expected — you buy an internet-connected device, it's going to use the internet. But it's strange to have these devices moving into the intimate space that is the home and allowing companies to track our really basic behavior there. SM: So true. Even the most banal-seeming data can be mined by the surveillance economy. For example, who cares how often you brush your teeth? Well, as it turns out, there's a dental insurance company called Beam. They've been monitoring their customers' smart toothbrushes since 2015 — for discounts on their premiums, of course. KH: We know what some of you are thinking: this is the contract of the modern world. You give up a little privacy, and you get some convenience or some price breaks in return. But that wasn't my experience in my smart home. It wasn't convenient, it was infuriating. I'll admit, I love my smart vacuum, but many other things in the house drove me insane: we ran out of electrical outlets, and I had to download over a dozen apps to my phone to control everything. And then every device had its own log-in, my toothbrush had a password ... (Laughter) And smart coffee, especially, was just a world of hell. SM: Wait, really? Cloud-powered coffee wasn't really working for you? KH: I mean, maybe I'm naive, but I thought it was going to be great. I thought we'd just wake up in the morning and we'd say, "Alexa, make us coffee." But that's not how it went down. We had to use this really particular, brand-specific phrase to make it work. It was, "Alexa, ask the Behmor to run quick start." And this was just, like, really hard to remember first thing in the morning, before you have had your caffeine. (Laughter) And apparently, it was hard to say, because the Echo Dot that was right next to our bed just couldn't understand us. So we would basically start every day by screaming this phrase at the Echo Dot. (Laughter) And Trevor hated this. He'd be like, "Please, Kashmir, just let me go to the kitchen and push the button to make the coffee run." And I'd be like, "No, you can't! We have to do it the smart way!" (Laughter) I'm happy to report that our marriage survived the experiment, but just barely. SM: If you decide to make your home smart, hopefully, you’ll find it less infuriating than Kashmir did. But regardless, the smart things you buy can and probably are used to target and profile you. Just the number of devices you have can be used to predict how rich or poor you are. Facebook's made this tech, and they've also patented it. KH: All the anxiety you currently feel every time you go online, about being tracked, is about to move into your living room. Or into your bedroom. There's this sex toy called the We-Vibe. You might wonder why a sex toy connects to the internet, but it's for two people who are in a long-distance relationship, so they can share their love from afar. Some hackers took a close look at this toy and saw it was sending a lot of information back to the company that made it — when it was used, how long it was used for, what the vibration settings were, how hot the toy got. It was all going into a database. So I reached out to the company, and I said, "Why are you collecting this really sensitive data?" And they said, "Well, it's great for market research." But they were data-mining their customers' orgasms. And they weren't telling them about it. I mean, even if you're cavalier about privacy, I hope that you would admit that's a step too far. SM: This is why I want to keep my sex toys dumb. KH: That's great. We're all very glad to know that. (Laughter) SM: A data point I'm willing to share. (Laughter) The devices Kashmir bought range from useful to annoying. But the thing they all had in common was sharing data with the companies that made them. With email service providers and social media, we've long been told that if it's free, you're the product. But with the internet of things, it seems, even if you pay, you're still the product. So you really have to ask: Who's the true beneficiary of your smart home, you or the company mining you? KH: Look, we're a tech savvy crowd here. I think most of us know that these things connect to the internet and send data out. And fine, maybe you're OK with living in that commercial panopticon, but others aren't. We need the companies to rethink the design of these devices with our privacy in mind, because we're not all willing to participate in "market research," just because a device we bought has a Wi-Fi connection. And I have to tell you, even when you're aware, generally, this is happening, it's really easy to forget that normal household items are spying on you. It's easy to forget these things are watching you, because they don't look like cameras. They could look like ... well, they could look like a dildo. Thank you. (Applause) |
What the Russian Revolution would have looked like on social media | {0: 'Mikhail Zygar is the founder of Future History, the creative digital studio behind Project1917 and 1968.digital.'} | TED2018 | What is history? It is something written by the winners. There is a stereotype that history should be focused on the rulers, like Lenin or Trotsky. As a result, people in many countries, like mine, Russia, look at history as something that was predetermined or determined by the leaders, and common people could not influence it in any way. Many Russians today do not believe that Russia could ever have been or ever will be a truly democratic nation, and this is due to the way history has been framed to the citizens of Russia. And this is not true. To prove it, I spent two years of my life trying to go 100 years back, to the year 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution. I asked myself, what if the internet and Facebook existed 100 years ago? So last year, we built a social network for dead people, named Project1917.com. My team and I created our software, digitized and uploaded all possible real diaries and letters written by more than 3,000 people 100 years ago. So any user of our website or application can follow a news feed for each day of 1917 and read what people like Stravinsky or Trotsky, Lenin or Pavlova and others thought and felt. We watch all those personalities being ordinary people like you and me, not demigods, and we see that history consists of their mistakes, fears, weaknesses, not only their "genius ideas." Our project was a shock for many Russians, who used to think that our country has always been an autocratic empire and the ideas of freedom and democracy could never have prevailed, just because democracy was not our destiny. But if we take a broader look, it's not that black and white. Yes, 1917 led to 70 years of communist dictatorship. But with this project, we see that Russia could have had a different history and a democratic future, as any other country could or still can. Reading the posts from 1917, you learn that Russia was the first country in the world to abolish the death penalty, or one of the first ones to grant women voting rights. Knowing history and understanding how ordinary people influenced history can help us create a better future, because history is just a rehearsal of what's happening right now. We do need new ways of telling history, and this year, for example, we started a new online project that is called 1968Digital.com, and that is an online documentary series that gives you an impression of that year, 1968, a year marked by global social change that, in many ways, created the world as we know it now. But we are making that history alive by imagining what if all the main characters could use mobile phones ... just like that? And we see that a lot of individuals were facing the same challenges and were fighting for the same values, no matter if they lived in the US or in USSR or in France or in China or in Czechoslovakia. By exposing history in such a democratic way, through social media, we show that people in power are not the only ones making choices. That gives any user a possibility of reclaiming history. Ordinary people matter. They have an impact. Ideas matter. Journalists, scientists, philosophers matter. We shape society. We all make history. Thank you. (Applause) |
Where are all the aliens? | {0: "Stephen Webb is a science fiction fan who's passionately interested in what the future might hold for our species."} | TED2018 | I saw a UFO once. I was eight or nine, playing in the street with a friend who was a couple of years older, and we saw a featureless silver disc hovering over the houses. We watched it for a few seconds, and then it shot away incredibly quickly. Even as a kid, I got angry it was ignoring the laws of physics. We ran inside to tell the grown-ups, and they were skeptical — you'd be skeptical too, right? I got my own back a few years later: one of those grown-ups told me, "Last night I saw a flying saucer. I was coming out of the pub after a few drinks." I stopped him there. I said, "I can explain that sighting." (Laughter) Psychologists have shown we can't trust our brains to tell the truth. It's easy to fool ourselves. I saw something, but what's more likely — that I saw an alien spacecraft, or that my brain misinterpreted the data my eyes were giving it? Ever since though I've wondered: Why don't we see flying saucers flitting around? At the very least, why don't we see life out there in the cosmos? It's a puzzle, and I've discussed it with dozens of experts from different disciplines over the past three decades. And there's no consensus. Frank Drake began searching for alien signals back in 1960 — so far, nothing. And with each passing year, this nonobservation, this lack of evidence for any alien activity gets more puzzling because we should see them, shouldn't we? The universe is 13.8 billion years old, give or take. If we represent the age of the universe by one year, then our species came into being about 12 minutes before midnight, 31st December. Western civilization has existed for a few seconds. Extraterrestrial civilizations could have started in the summer months. Imagine a summer civilization developing a level of technology more advanced than ours, but tech based on accepted physics though, I'm not talking wormholes or warp drives — whatever — just an extrapolation of the sort of tech that TED celebrates. That civilization could program self-replicating probes to visit every planetary system in the galaxy. If they launched the first probes just after midnight one August day, then before breakfast same day, they could have colonized the galaxy. Intergalactic colonization isn't much more difficult, it just takes longer. A civilization from any one of millions of galaxies could have colonized our galaxy. Seems far-fetched? Maybe it is, but wouldn't aliens engage in some recognizable activity — put worldlets around a star to capture free sunlight, collaborate on a Wikipedia Galactica, or just shout out to the universe, "We're here"? So where is everybody? It's a puzzle because we do expect these civilizations to exist, don't we? After all, there could be a trillion planets in the galaxy — maybe more. You don't need any special knowledge to consider this question, and I've explored it with lots of people over the years. And I've found they often frame their thinking in terms of the barriers that would need to be cleared if a planet is to host a communicative civilization. And they usually identify four key barriers. Habitability — that's the first barrier. We need a terrestrial planet in that just right "Goldilocks zone," where water flows as a liquid. They're out there. In 2016, astronomers confirmed there's a planet in the habitable zone of the closest star, Proxima Centauri — so close that Breakthrough Starshot project plans to send probes there. We'd become a starfaring species. But not all worlds are habitable. Some will be too close to a star and they'll fry, some will be too far away and they'll freeze. Abiogenesis — the creation of life from nonlife — that's the second barrier. The basic building blocks of life aren't unique to Earth: amino acids have been found in comets, complex organic molecules in interstellar dust clouds, water in exoplanetary systems. The ingredients are there, we just don't know how they combine to create life, and presumably there will be worlds on which life doesn't start. The development of technological civilization is a third barrier. Some say we already share our planet with alien intelligences. A 2011 study showed that elephants can cooperate to solve problems. A 2010 study showed that an octopus in captivity can recognize different humans. 2017 studies show that ravens can plan for future events — wonderful, clever creatures — but they can't contemplate the Breakthrough Starshot project, and if we vanished today, they wouldn't go on to implement Breakthrough Starshot — why should they? Evolution doesn't have space travel as an end goal. There will be worlds where life doesn't give rise to advanced technology. Communication across space — that's a fourth barrier. Maybe advanced civilizations choose to explore inner space rather than outer space, or engineer at small distances rather than large. Or maybe they just don't want to risk an encounter with a potentially more advanced and hostile neighbor. There'll be worlds where, for whatever reason, civilizations either stay silent or don't spend long trying to communicate. As for the height of the barriers, your guess is as good as anyone's. In my experience, when people sit down and do the math, they typically conclude there are thousands of civilizations in the galaxy. But then we're back to the puzzle: Where is everybody? By definition, UFOs — including the one I saw — are unidentified. We can't simply infer they're spacecraft. You can still have some fun playing with the idea aliens are here. Some say a summer civilization did colonize the galaxy and seeded Earth with life ... others, that we're living in a cosmic wilderness preserve — a zoo. Yet others — that we're living in a simulation. Programmers just haven't revealed the aliens yet. Most of my colleagues though argue that E.T. is out there, we just need to keep looking, and this makes sense. Space is vast. Identifying a signal is hard, and we haven't been looking that long. Without doubt, we should spend more on the search. It's about understanding our place in the universe. It's too important a question to ignore. But there's an obvious answer: we're alone. It's just us. There could be a trillion planets in the galaxy. Is it plausible we're the only creatures capable of contemplating this question? Well, yes, because in this context, we don't know whether a trillion is a big number. In 2000, Peter Ward and Don Brownlee proposed the Rare Earth idea. Remember those four barriers that people use to estimate the number of civilizations? Ward and Brownlee said there might be more. Let's look at one possible barrier. It's a recent suggestion by David Waltham, a geophysicist. This is my very simplified version of Dave's much more sophisticated argument. We are able to be here now because Earth's previous inhabitants enjoyed four billion years of good weather — ups and downs but more or less clement. But long-term climate stability is strange, if only because astronomical influences can push a planet towards freezing or frying. There's a hint our moon has helped, and that's interesting because the prevailing theory is that the moon came into being when Theia, a body the size of Mars, crashed into a newly formed Earth. The outcome of that crash could have been a quite different Earth-Moon system. We ended up with a large moon and that permitted Earth to have both a stable axial tilt and a slow rotation rate. Both factors influence climate and the suggestion is that they've helped moderate climate change. Great for us, right? But Waltham showed that if the moon were just a few miles bigger, things would be different. Earth's spin axis would now wander chaotically. There'd be episodes of rapid climate change — not good for complex life. The moon is just the right size: big but not too big. A "Goldilocks" moon around a "Goldilocks" planet — a barrier perhaps. You can imagine more barriers. For instance, simple cells came into being billions of years ago ... but perhaps the development of complex life needed a series of unlikely events. Once life on Earth had access to multicellularity and sophisticated genetic structures, and sex, new opportunities opened up: animals became possible. But maybe it's the fate of many planets for life to settle at the level of simple cells. Purely for the purposes of illustration, let me suggest four more barriers to add to the four that people said blocked the path to communicative civilization. Again, purely for the purposes of illustration, suppose there's a one-in-a-thousand chance of making it across each of the barriers. Of course there might be different ways of navigating the barriers, and some chances will be better than one in a thousand. Equally, there might be more barriers and some chances might be one in a million. Let's just see what happens in this picture. If the galaxy contains a trillion planets, how many will host a civilization capable of contemplating like us projects such as Breakthrough Starshot? Habitability — right sort of planet around the right sort of star — the trillion becomes a billion. Stability — a climate that stays benign for eons — the billion becomes a million. Life must start — the million becomes a thousand. Complex life forms must arise — the thousand becomes one. Sophisticated tool use must develop — that's one planet in a thousand galaxies. To understand the universe, they'll have to develop the techniques of science and mathematics — that's one planet in a million galaxies. To reach the stars, they'll have to be social creatures, capable of discussing abstract concepts with each other using complex grammar — one planet in a billion galaxies. And they have to avoid disaster — not just self-inflicted but from the skies, too. That planet around Proxima Centauri, last year it got blasted by a flare. One planet in a trillion galaxies, just as in the visible universe. I think we're alone. Those colleagues of mine who agree we're alone often see a barrier ahead — bioterror, global warming, war. A universe that's silent because technology itself forms the barrier to the development of a truly advanced civilization. Depressing, right? I'm arguing the exact opposite. I grew up watching "Star Trek" and "Forbidden Planet," and I saw a UFO once, so this idea of cosmic loneliness I certainly find slightly wistful. But for me, the silence of the universe is shouting, "We're the creatures who got lucky." All barriers are behind us. We're the only species that's cleared them — the only species capable of determining its own destiny. And if we learn to appreciate how special our planet is, how important it is to look after our home and to find others, how incredibly fortunate we all are simply to be aware of the universe, humanity might survive for a while. And all those amazing things we dreamed aliens might have done in the past, that could be our future. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
A day in the life of an ancient Egyptian doctor | null | TED-Ed | It’s another sweltering morning in Memphis, Egypt. As the sunlight brightens the Nile, Peseshet checks her supplies. Honey, garlic, cumin, acacia leaves, cedar oil. She’s well stocked with the essentials she needs to treat her patients. Peseshet is a swnw, or a doctor. In order to become one, she had to train as a scribe and study the medical papyri stored at the Per Ankh, the House of Life. Now, she teaches her own students there. Before teaching, Peseshet has a patient to see. One of the workers at the temple construction site has injured his arm. When Peseshet arrives, the laborer’s arm is clearly broken, and worse, the fracture is a sed, with multiple bone fragments. Peseshet binds and immobilizes the injury. Her next stop is the House of Life. On her way, a woman intercepts Peseshet in the street. The woman’s son has been stung by a scorpion. Peseshet has seen many similar stings and knows exactly what to do. She must say an incantation to cast the poison out. She begins to recite the spell, invoking Serqet, patron of physicians and goddess of venomous creatures. Peseshet recites the spell as if she is Serqet. This commanding approach has the greatest chance at success. After she utters the last line, she tries to cut the poison out with a knife for good measure. Peseshet packs up to leave, but the woman has another question. She wants to find out if she is pregnant. Peseshet explains her fail-safe pregnancy test: plant two seeds: one barley, one emmer. Then, urinate on the seeds every day. If the plants grow, she’s pregnant. A barley seedling predicts a baby boy, while emmer foretells a girl. Peseshet also recommends a prayer to Hathor, goddess of fertility. When Peseshet finally arrives at the House of Life, she runs into the doctor-priest Isesi. She greets Isesi politely, but she thinks priests are very full of themselves. She doesn’t envy Isesi’s role as neru pehut, which directly translates to herdsman of the anus to the royal family, or, guardian of the royal anus. Inside, the House of Life is bustling as usual with scribes, priests, doctors, and students. Papyri containing all kinds of records, not just medical information, are stored here. Peseshet’s son Akhethetep is hard at work copying documents as part of his training to become a scribe. He’s a particularly promising student, but he was admitted to study because Peseshet is a scribe, as was her father before her. Without family in the profession, it’s very difficult for boys, and impossible for girls, to pursue this education. Peseshet oversees all the female swnws and swnws-in-training in Memphis. The men have their own overseer, as the male doctors won’t answer to a woman. Today, Peseshet teaches anatomy. She quizzes her students on the metu, the body’s vessels that transport blood, air, urine, and even bad spirits. Peseshet is preparing to leave when a pale, thin woman accosts her at the door and begs to be examined. The woman has a huge, sore lump under her arm. Peseshet probes the growth and finds it cool to the touch and hard like an unripe hemat fruit. She has read about ailments like this, but never seen one. For this tumor there is no treatment, medicine or spell. All the texts give the same advice: do nothing. After delivering the bad news, Peseshet goes outside. She lingers on the steps of the House of Life, admiring the city at dusk. In spite of all her hard work, there will always be patients she can’t help, like the woman with the tumor. They linger with her, but Peseshet has no time to dwell. In a few short weeks, the Nile’s annual flooding will begin, bringing life to the soil for the next year’s harvest and a whole new crop of patients. |
What archaeology and DNA can teach us about prehistoric migration | {0: 'Prof Ian Barnes is a Research Leader at the Natural History Museum, where he focuses on the investigation of ancient biomolecules to resolve questions in archaeology, palaeontology and evolutionary biology. He has degrees in Archaeological Science (from Bradford) and Molecular Ecology (from York) and for the last 20 years he has been heavily involved in the development of ancient DNA. For much of that time, he has investigated the histories of living and extinct species in the Holarctic – a region from Europe across Asia into North America – between 100 and 10 thousand years ago. Recently, his major focus has been on the role of adaptation and migration in the human settlement of the British Isles.'} | TEDxLondon | Hello everyone. So, I'm going to talk today about migration and movement, and particularly people moving into the British Isles in the past. And if we think about past migrations into Britain, we probably first off might have some ideas about the 20th century, people coming from the Caribbean, from east Africa, or from India, or Pakistan, or places like that. And if we have to go back a bit further in time, of course we've got people like the Normans, Romans or the Vikings. But despite the fact that we've noticed quite a lot of people who have moved into Britain at different times, I don't think we really think of ourselves as a migrant nation. We think of ourselves more outside as an island nation. But what about if we go back really a long way, we really go back far in time beyond the time when there is any notion of a Britain or an England, beyond any kind of english language, in fact beyond written history at all. In fact, we can go so far back in time that Britain is actually not even an island at all. It's still joined to the continent, still part of the Eurasian landmass. So that's what I want to talk to you about today, about Britain in prehistory, and the prehistory of migration here. So we're going to take a big jump back in time, but I can't do that with you all in one go. So we are going to take little jumps first. We are going to jump back to the late Victorian period, and we're going to start off here. Here, we start in Somerset at Cheddar Gorge. It is here during the last decades of the 19th century, that this guy, Richard Cox Gough, discovered and excavated and blasted out a series of caves that he made into a major tourist attraction or a showcase. But it's actually a year after Richard died that the really big discovery was made, the one we're actually interested in. So that discovery was made in December, 1903, and it was made by Richard's son, Arthur, who was digging a drainage ditch to try to combat the seasonal flooding that they had in the caves. They tended to make all their big discoveries in the winter because that's when there weren't any tourists around. So workmen who were working on the cave actually blasted out and uncovered the skeleton of an adult male. And rather quickly, this skeleton made big news. Experts of the day said that perhaps it was the body of the first Englishman, and that he was of extreme importance, that he was at least 40,000 years old and perhaps as much as 80,000 years old. Well, that's not entirely true. What we actually know today is that "Cheddar Man," as he became known, Is actually about 10,000 years old, but he is still certainly very important. He's extremely important for a number of reasons. Firstly because he is the only near-complete skeleton that we have from that kind of time period. He is also important because he's the only one where we have a complete skull or near-complete skull. And here is the skull, in this rather post-setting with the two brothers, William and Arthur, staring at it. They seem to be enjoying themselves which is what I really like about this picture. (Laughter) So what else do we know about Cheddar Man? Well, he's definitely a man. And that has been the subject of a little bit debate over the years because he has a rather gracile and slender skeleton. He was probably in his early twenties when he died; he was buried deliberately, it seems, and he was buried on his own. Today, he looks something like this. This guy has been better assembled, and you can see him at the Natural History Museum. He is on display a couple of galleries away from where my office is. So, we've worked on Cheddar Man and a number of other individuals over the years and built together quite a large complex project exploring the history of the British Isles. And one of the things that came up as the result of that project was the opportunity to take part in a channel 4 documentary where we were going to explore Cheddar Man and his history to build up more of a story about him. So that was good because we already had quite a lengthy project working on the history of the British Isles, but what the people who put the documentary together wanted to know about was something a little bit more complicated, more detailed, and that was about his appearance, about his skin color, hair color and eye color. And what we were able to do for them was to supply that information. We passed it on to the people who made the reconstruction. Well, they came back with this, an individual with a rather small face compared to the overall size of his head, with blue eyes, dark curly hair, and obviously with dark skin. And that was a surprise for some people, for most of the people I talked to actually. And most of them actually seem to think that this was rather cool. People who saw the show generally quite enjoyed it. We weren't particularly surprised by this because similar information had already been generated by a group, a couple of year previously, looking at different skeletons around Europe of a similar kind of age. They had already identified that dark skin was practically normal for people about 10,000 years ago. But what we've been able to do was better quantify exactly how dark that was. And we've done that using a tool borrowed from forensic sciences. Some people didn't think that this was very cool. Some people I think were expecting to see something a little bit more like this, which is the results of the previous reconstruction. Both reconstructions are obviously quite different, but they do share one feature at least which is this rather wispy facial hair. And I'm surprised about that because there's really no evidences either way, from the archeological genetic data, that would tend to actually suggest that. But that is perhaps their only shared feature actually. So those people, who didn't think it was very cool, were a bit surprised, and they made their surprise known on social media, as you might expect. And actually things got rather heated there, and you can look at that. Right now I don't really want to go into too much detail about it. But here's one of the sort of slightly odd events that happened there, one of my childhood heroes indirectly ... (Laughter) ... indirectly congratulating me on having upset some people. So that was a little bit weird actually. And that went on for a while. So, what became clear to us was something rather disappointing. As I've already said to you, we had spent quite a bit of time getting a pretty good understanding of what the population history of British Isles actually looks like. So how do you get from someone like this to people in the audience today? I mean Cheddar Man obviously not Billy Bragg! So that's what I'm going to go through now, what we're going to have a look at. Okay, but before we can do that we have to work out how exactly we're going to look at that information. We really have a lot of data here. The human genome has 3.2 billion base pairs and I can't just keep flashing that up because we'd run out of time quite quickly. So what we need to do is find a way of crunching those data down and just pulling out the most important and interesting parts of it. And the method that we often use just to get a handle on the data initially is called the "principal components analysis," and that's what I'm going to show you here. So these are genome data that has been squashed down onto something that looks a bit like a graph or a plot. And so individuals who are close together are genetically similar to each other, regardless of where they might happen to come from. So let's start here with Cheddar Man. But all alone, like he was in Gough's cave, he's not actually doing much for us, he's not telling us very much. So let's put on the other five individuals from Britain, from which we have very small amounts of genome sequenced data, and see what happens. What happens then is that they all plot together quite neatly. Despite the fact that we have individuals here from Scotland, Wales and southwest England, they actually all look quite similar to each other. Let's expand the search a bit more across the rest of Europe. What we have here are some more individuals. The ones in blue are older individuals, slightly older ones from slightly earlier time periods. The ones in that kind of dark red color are of a similar age. And these are samples that have been taken from Spain, Hungary, Germany, Sweden, Luxembourg, all sorts of places including Britain. And what you see is that the British ones kind of bridge the gap between the earlier and later ones. But there's still not much of a picture here. Where we do get a bit of a surprise is if we jump forward in time a bit more. Okay, so what we have here, about 4000 years after Cheddar Man died, is that something quite surprising happened in Britain, and that's the origins of farming. So the first farmers had arrived in Europe several thousands years earlier. They had arrived in Greece. They are the red folks on that plot. They'd made they way across Europe over several millennia and eventually arrived in Britain where we have the grey individuals on the plot. What you can see there about those grey people is that we have two important things to get out of this. They are genetically extremely different to the hunter-gatherers that were in Britain at that time. And they entirely replaced them, a complete replacement of the population. Now it's always tempting at these points to think of some kind of vast horde arriving and committing some kind of genocidal act on the people, the peaceful hunter-gatherer people. We don't have any evidence for that at all. So what we think in fact is quite plausible is that there were actually remarkably few people in the British Isles at this time. [Farmers] arrive and just take over. And they can easily take over the country. What is even more surprising is that a very similar thing happens about 1300 years later. A second genetically very distinct group arrives in the British Isles. These are the so-called "Beaker people" who are called that because of the distinctive ceramic vessels that they're often buried with. These Beaker people were also genetically very different and seem to completely replace the Neolithic people there, the farmers that were there before. And this, it seems, is the last major population replacement that we can detect at the resolution that we can work with at the moment, with ancient DNA data. So if we bring up now the modern population across Europe, you can see that those Beaker people sit pretty much on top of current British Isles populations and, in fact, the populations of northwestern Europe continents in a bit of smear across there as well. Okay, so what can we draw from this? What do we really have to conclude here? One of the things that I realized some time after we've done this work and the documentary show was that for some people who are upset by the way we had reconstructed Cheddar Man, the issue was one of population continuity. We had challenged that notion that they had that there was a long-term population continuity in Britain. And that's very much not what the data seem to be saying. The history and the prehistory of Britain is one where populations are under a series of replacements. The other thing that you can also draw from this data is about migration and our modern day concerns about mass migration and how it affects society. What you can see here is that the scale of migration today, despite the advent of globalization and mass transportation, is nothing like the kind of migrations that we must have had in the past that have led to these very large-scale replacements. Thanks very much. (Applause) |
"Dead Romance" | {0: 'Anielle Reid is an American singer-songwriter and banjoist.', 1: 'Matthew Brookshire is a songwriter and performer originally from North Carolina. '} | TEDNYC | (Banjo plays) (Banjo and guitar play) (Sings) Is this what it's like to be alive? I reached the point of no return and I don't know if I've been burned from the burned bridges in my life, thinkin' you were wrong and I was right. Maybe I messed up, either way it's too late for us. 'Cause baby I'm old with regret, wishin' I could hold you and just forget. Since I can't I'll just be home but homesick, wishin' you were mine and I didn't hurt you like I did. Can't go back to when we had a chance, wishin' I could have a shot at real romance. Now I realize all the things I could have had were in your cold hands. I'm a fool for a dead romance. Gone, gone, gone. I'm a fool for a dead romance. Gone, gone, gone. I'm a fool for a dead romance. Is this what it's like to fantasize about a love that never was alive outside my mind or distance? With time I clearly lost my sight, thinkin' I was wrong to ever leave your side. But time's the harshest judge, makes us think we were in love. And now I'm old with regret, wishin' I could hold you and just forget. Since I can't I'll just be home but homesick, wishin' you were mine and I didn't hurt you like I did. Can't go back to when we had a chance, wishin' I could have a shot at real romance. Now I realize all the things I could have had were in your cold hands. I'm a fool for a dead romance. Gone, gone, gone. I'm a fool for a dead romance. (Banjo and guitar play) And baby I'm old with regret, wishin' I could hold you and just forget. Since I can't I'll just be home but homesick, wishin' you were mine and I didn't hurt you like I did. Can't go back to when we had a chance, wishin' I could have a shot at real romance. Now I realize all the things I could have had were in your cold hands. I'm a fool for a dead romance. Gone, gone, gone. I'm a fool for a dead romance. Gone, gone, gone. I'm a fool for a dead romance. Is this what it's like? |
How to train employees to have difficult conversations | {0: 'Tamekia MizLadi Smith wants to start new conversations around involving non-clinical staff in healthcare.'} | TED2018 | We live in a world where the collection of data is happening 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. This data is usually collected by what we call a front-desk specialist now. These are the retail clerks at your favorite department stores, the cashiers at the grocery stores, the registration specialists at the hospital and even the person that sold you your last movie ticket. They ask discreet questions, like: "May I please have your zip code?" Or, "Would you like to use your savings card today?" All of which gives us data. However, the conversation becomes a little bit more complex when the more difficult questions need to be asked. Let me tell you a story, see. Once upon a time, there was a woman named Miss Margaret. Miss Margaret had been a front-desk specialist for almost 20 years. And in all that time, she has never, and I do mean never, had to ask a patient their gender, race or ethnicity. Because, see, now Miss Margaret has the ability to just look at you. Uh-huh. And she can tell if you are a boy or a girl, black or white, American or non-American. And in her mind, those were the only categories. So imagine that grave day, when her sassy supervisor invited her to this "change everything" meeting and told her that would have to ask each and every last one of her patients to self-identify. She gave her six genders, eight races and over 100 ethnicities. Well, now, Miss Margaret was appalled. I mean, highly offended. So much so that she marched down to that human-resource department to see if she was eligible for an early retirement. And she ended her rant by saying that her sassy supervisor invited her to this "change everything" meeting and didn't, didn't, even, even bring, bring food, food, food, food. (Laughter) (Applause) (Cheers) You know you've got to bring food to these meetings. (Laughter) Anyway. (Laughter) Now, that was an example of a healthcare setting, but of course, all businesses collect some form of data. True story: I was going to wire some money. And the customer service representative asked me if I was born in the United States. Now, I hesitated to answer her question, and before she even realized why I hesitated, she began to throw the company she worked for under the bus. She said, "Girl, I know it's stupid, but they makin' us ask this question." (Laughter) Because of the way she presented it to me, I was like, "Girl, why? Why they makin' you ask this question? Is they deportin' people?" (Laughter) But then I had to turn on the other side of me, the more professional speaker-poet side of me. The one that understood that there were little Miss Margarets all over the place. People who were good people, maybe even good employees, but lacked the ability to ask their questions properly and unfortunately, that made her look bad, but the worst, that made the business look even worse than how she was looking. Because she had no idea who I was. I mean, I literally could have been a woman who was scheduled to do a TED Talk and would use her as an example. Imagine that. (Applause) And unfortunately, what happens is people would decline to answer the questions, because they feel like you would use the information to discriminate against them, all because of how you presented the information. And at that point, we get bad data. And everybody knows what bad data does. Bad data costs you time, it costs you money and it costs you resources. Unfortunately, when you have bad data, it also costs you a lot more, because we have health disparities, and we have social determinants of health, and we have the infant mortality, all of which depends on the data that we collect, and if we have bad data, than we have those issues still. And we have underprivileged populations that remain unfortunate and underprivileged, because the data that we're using is either outdated, or is not good at all or we don't have anything at all. Now, wouldn't it be amazing if people like Miss Margaret and the customer-service representative at the wiring place were graced to collect data with compassionate care? Can I explain to you what I mean by "graced?" I wrote an acrostic poem. G: Getting the front desk specialist involved and letting them know R: the Relevance of their role as they become A: Accountable for the accuracy of data while implementing C: Compassionate care within all encounters by becoming E: Equipped with the education needed to inform people of why data collection is so important. (Applause) Now, I'm an artist. And so what happens with me is that when I create something artistically, the trainer in me is awakened as well. So what I did was, I began to develop that acrostic poem into a full training entitled "I'm G.R.A.C.E.D." Because I remember, being the front-desk specialist, and when I went to the office of equity to start working, I was like, "Is that why they asked us to ask that question?" It all became a bright light to me, and I realized that I asked people and I told people about — I called them by the wrong gender, I called them by the wrong race, I called them by the wrong ethnicity, and the environment became hostile, people was offended and I was frustrated because I was not graced. I remember my computerized training, and unfortunately, that training did not prepare me to deescalate a situation. It did not prepare me to have teachable moments when I had questions about asking the questions. I would look at the computer and say, "So, what do I do when this happens?" And the computer would say ... nothing, because a computer cannot talk back to you. (Laughter) So that's the importance of having someone there who was trained to teach you and tell you what you do in situations like that. So, when I created the "I'm G.R.A.C.E.D" training, I created it with that experience that I had in mind, but also that conviction that I had in mind. Because I wanted the instructional design of it to be a safe space for open dialogue for people. I wanted to talk about biases, the unconscious ones and the conscious ones, and what we do. Because now I know that when you engage people in the why, it challenges their perspective, and it changes their attitudes. Now I know that data that we have at the front desk translates into research that eliminates disparities and finds cures. Now I know that teaching people transitional change instead of shocking them into change is always a better way of implementing change. See, now I know people are more likely to share information when they are treated with respect by knowledgeable staff members. Now I know that you don't have to be a statistician to understand the power and the purpose of data, but you do have to treat people with respect and have compassionate care. Now I know that when you've been graced, it is your responsibility to empower somebody else. But most importantly, now I know that when teaching human beings to communicate with other human beings, it should be delivered by a human being. (Applause) So when y'all go to work and y'all schedule that "change everything" meeting — (Laughter) remember Miss Margaret. And don't forget the food, the food, the food, the food. Thank you. (Applause) (Cheers) Thank you. (Applause) |
Why doctors are offering free tax prep in their waiting rooms | {0: 'Lucy Marcil is providing fiscal services to low-income families in the doctor’s waiting room.'} | TED2018 | How many of you have had your doctor ask you about sex? Your mental health? Alcohol use? These questions are almost universal. But how many of you have had your doctor ask you about money? Most of us haven't. But that is strange, because compared to most high-income countries, child poverty is an epidemic in the United States. It creates conditions that may elevate stress hormone levels and impair brain development. Poor children in the US are one and a half times more likely to die and twice as likely to be hospitalized as their middle-class counterparts. So my colleague Dr. Michael Hole and I started asking moms about money. We knew we needed to reimagine what a doctor's visit looks like, to get kids out of poverty and to give them a fair shot at a healthy life. Our questions led to a surprising solution: tax credits. It turns out, the earned income tax credit, or EITC, is the best poverty prescription we have in the US. The average mom gets two to three thousand dollars a year from it. When families get it, moms and babies are healthier: fewer depressed moms, babies weighing more at birth. But one out of five families who could get it doesn't, and most who do lose of hundreds of dollars to the for-profit tax-preparation industry. One day, a mom asked us why we couldn't do her taxes while she waited for the doctor. (Laughter) We all know that purgatory. Why not make good use of that time? So we started StreetCred, an organization prescribing tax preparation in clinics serving kids. This is a brand-new approach and one that left some questioning our sanity. After all, we're doctors, not accountants. But we have something accountants don't: access to families. Over 90 percent of kids in the US see a doctor at least once a year. Their parents trust us and will do anything to give them a better life. Doctors in every clinic around the country could be doing this work, too — it's simple, really. The hospital registers as a tax-preparation site, and everyone, from medical students to retirees, can volunteer as a tax preparer after passing an IRS exam. It's not as hard as it sounds, I promise. I certainly never thought I would be doing other people's taxes, but here I am. We're nearing the end of our third year. In the first two, we returned 1.6 million dollars to 750 families in Boston alone. This year — (Applause) This year, we've expanded to nine sites in four states. Sixty-three percent of our families have never heard of the EITC. How can you claim something you haven't heard of? And half have never used free tax preparation. That two to three thousand dollars a year goes a long way. Take hunger. An adequately nutritious, low-cost diet for a mom and two young kids costs 477 dollars a month. With EITC money, that family can eat for five to six months. Or think about medical care. Twenty million children in the US lack access to care meeting modern pediatric standards. And yet, the average cost of that care is only 400 dollars per kid per year. EITC money can help fix this access problem. Perhaps most powerfully of all, this money gives moms hope. One mom used her refund for her son to study abroad in Spain. She was struggling to pay her rent, but she saw EITC money as his shot at a better future. We have an opportunity, as doctors and as citizens, to get to the root of this problem. We can reimagine health care as a place addressing the causes of poor health, be it infections or finances. Thank you. (Applause) |
How AI is making it easier to diagnose disease | {0: 'TED Fellow Pratik Shah creates novel intersections between engineering, medical imaging, machine learning and medicine.'} | TEDGlobal 2017 | Computer algorithms today are performing incredible tasks with high accuracies, at a massive scale, using human-like intelligence. And this intelligence of computers is often referred to as AI or artificial intelligence. AI is poised to make an incredible impact on our lives in the future. Today, however, we still face massive challenges in detecting and diagnosing several life-threatening illnesses, such as infectious diseases and cancer. Thousands of patients every year lose their lives due to liver and oral cancer. Our best way to help these patients is to perform early detection and diagnoses of these diseases. So how do we detect these diseases today, and can artificial intelligence help? In patients who, unfortunately, are suspected of these diseases, an expert physician first orders very expensive medical imaging technologies such as fluorescent imaging, CTs, MRIs, to be performed. Once those images are collected, another expert physician then diagnoses those images and talks to the patient. As you can see, this is a very resource-intensive process, requiring both expert physicians, expensive medical imaging technologies, and is not considered practical for the developing world. And in fact, in many industrialized nations, as well. So, can we solve this problem using artificial intelligence? Today, if I were to use traditional artificial intelligence architectures to solve this problem, I would require 10,000 — I repeat, on an order of 10,000 of these very expensive medical images first to be generated. After that, I would then go to an expert physician, who would then analyze those images for me. And using those two pieces of information, I can train a standard deep neural network or a deep learning network to provide patient's diagnosis. Similar to the first approach, traditional artificial intelligence approaches suffer from the same problem. Large amounts of data, expert physicians and expert medical imaging technologies. So, can we invent more scalable, effective and more valuable artificial intelligence architectures to solve these very important problems facing us today? And this is exactly what my group at MIT Media Lab does. We have invented a variety of unorthodox AI architectures to solve some of the most important challenges facing us today in medical imaging and clinical trials. In the example I shared with you today, we had two goals. Our first goal was to reduce the number of images required to train artificial intelligence algorithms. Our second goal — we were more ambitious, we wanted to reduce the use of expensive medical imaging technologies to screen patients. So how did we do it? For our first goal, instead of starting with tens and thousands of these very expensive medical images, like traditional AI, we started with a single medical image. From this image, my team and I figured out a very clever way to extract billions of information packets. These information packets included colors, pixels, geometry and rendering of the disease on the medical image. In a sense, we converted one image into billions of training data points, massively reducing the amount of data needed for training. For our second goal, to reduce the use of expensive medical imaging technologies to screen patients, we started with a standard, white light photograph, acquired either from a DSLR camera or a mobile phone, for the patient. Then remember those billions of information packets? We overlaid those from the medical image onto this image, creating something that we call a composite image. Much to our surprise, we only required 50 — I repeat, only 50 — of these composite images to train our algorithms to high efficiencies. To summarize our approach, instead of using 10,000 very expensive medical images, we can now train the AI algorithms in an unorthodox way, using only 50 of these high-resolution, but standard photographs, acquired from DSLR cameras and mobile phones, and provide diagnosis. More importantly, our algorithms can accept, in the future and even right now, some very simple, white light photographs from the patient, instead of expensive medical imaging technologies. I believe that we are poised to enter an era where artificial intelligence is going to make an incredible impact on our future. And I think that thinking about traditional AI, which is data-rich but application-poor, we should also continue thinking about unorthodox artificial intelligence architectures, which can accept small amounts of data and solve some of the most important problems facing us today, especially in health care. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How to stop swiping and find your person on dating apps | {0: 'A self-described "human Venn diagram," Christina Wallace has crafted a career at the intersection of business, the arts and technology.'} | TED2018 | I first tried online dating my freshman year of college, which was in 2001, in case you can't see my wrinkle. Now, as you may have noticed, I'm six-feet tall, and when I arrived at my chosen university and realized our men's Division III basketball team averaged five-foot-eight, I abandoned the on-campus scene and went online. Now, back then, online dating was pretty close to the plot of "You've Got Mail." You'd write long emails back and forth for weeks, before you finally met up in real life. Except, in my case, you'd realize you have no chemistry and so now, you're back to square one. So, while online dating has changed a lot in the last 17 years, many of the frustrations remain the same. Because here's what it does well. It broadens your pool of potential dates beyond your existing social and professional circles. And here's what it doesn't do well. Literally everything else. (Laughter) A few things you should know about me: I'm an action-oriented overachieving math and theater nerd, who ended up with an MBA. So, when things aren't working out, I tend to take a step back, apply my business toolkit to figure out why, and to fix it. My love life was no exception. The summer before I turned 30, I took myself on a relationship off-site. Which means I went camping solo in Maine for a week, to do a retro on my track record of mediocre relationships. Because the thing was, I knew what I wanted in a partner. Kindness, curiosity, empathy, a sense of purpose. And yet, here's what I chose for online: Ivy League degree, six feet or taller, lives within 12 subway stops of me. It's not that I intentionally prioritized those things, it's just the easiest to vet for online. It kind of is like a résumé review, which is why these guys looked great on paper and never quite fit me. So when I went back online in the spring of 2016, I decided to reengineer the process through some classic business tools. First, I went to OkCupid, because I wanted to avoid the gamification of swipe-based apps. And also, because I wanted a writing sample. Next, I set up a sales funnel, throwing out any sense of my type, and instead defining the criteria that would qualify a lead. An inbound message had to do three things: had to be written in complete sentences and with good grammar; it had to reference something in my profile, so I know it's not a copy-and-paste situation; and it had to avoid all sexual content. I figured this was a pretty low bar, but it turns out, of my 210 inbound messages, only 14 percent cleared that hurdle. (Laughter) Next, I wanted to meet in real life as quickly as possible, because the things I cared about, I couldn't see online. But the research, and my experience, shows you only need about 30 seconds with someone to tell if you click. So I invented the zero date. The zero date is one drink, one hour. With the goal of answering one question: Would I like to have dinner with this person? Not "are they the one"? Literally, "Would I like to spend three hours across the table from this person?" You tell them you have a hard stop — drinks with girlfriends, a conference call with China — it doesn't matter, they don't know you. The point is one hour. If it's awesome, you schedule a first date. And if it's not awesome, you downshift into entertainer mode and you workshop a few new stories for your next networking event. Plus, because it's just an hour, you can squeeze up to three in one evening and then you only have to do your hair and pick out one great outfit a week. The zero date also gave me a chance to see how they responded to me asking them out. I figured not everyone would dig my moxie, and I was right. Of my 29 qualified leads, only 15 replied to my message, and of those, six scheduled a zero date. My first zero date was with a set designer. And we were both into yoga and preferred our bagels with peanut butter, so it looked pretty promising. But two minutes in, I could tell it wasn't going to be a thing and I was relieved not to be spending dinner with him. After that, I was a little nervous about going to my next zero date. But we had agreed to meet on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade with a flask of whiskey to watch the sunset, and honestly, it was two blocks from my apartment. Plus, this guy had a podcast, I have a podcast, worst case scenario, we can talk about our podcasts. Then, Chas set down next to me. And this kind and empathetic man told great jokes and asked even better questions. He was a lawyer and a writer, and his eyes twinkled when he laughed and they squeezed tight when I kissed him and at some point in the evening, our zero date became a first date. And two years later, we have a washer, dryer and two house plants together. Now, I can't promise you're going to end up with house plants. But the point of this story is that online dating doesn't have to suck. Don't treat it like a game, and don't treat it like a resume review. Instead, use it to source and qualify leads and then get offline as quickly as possible with the zero date. Because the point of this isn't swiping. It's finding your person. Good luck. (Applause) |
Fake videos of real people -- and how to spot them | {0: 'Supasorn Suwajanakorn works on ways to reconstruct, preserve and reanimate anyone -- just from their existing photos and videos.'} | TED2018 | Look at these images. Now, tell me which Obama here is real. (Video) Barack Obama: To help families refinance their homes, to invest in things like high-tech manufacturing, clean energy and the infrastructure that creates good new jobs. Supasorn Suwajanakorn: Anyone? The answer is none of them. (Laughter) None of these is actually real. So let me tell you how we got here. My inspiration for this work was a project meant to preserve our last chance for learning about the Holocaust from the survivors. It's called New Dimensions in Testimony, and it allows you to have interactive conversations with a hologram of a real Holocaust survivor. (Video) Man: How did you survive the Holocaust? (Video) Hologram: How did I survive? I survived, I believe, because providence watched over me. SS: Turns out these answers were prerecorded in a studio. Yet the effect is astounding. You feel so connected to his story and to him as a person. I think there's something special about human interaction that makes it much more profound and personal than what books or lectures or movies could ever teach us. So I saw this and began to wonder, can we create a model like this for anyone? A model that looks, talks and acts just like them? So I set out to see if this could be done and eventually came up with a new solution that can build a model of a person using nothing but these: existing photos and videos of a person. If you can leverage this kind of passive information, just photos and video that are out there, that's the key to scaling to anyone. By the way, here's Richard Feynman, who in addition to being a Nobel Prize winner in physics was also known as a legendary teacher. Wouldn't it be great if we could bring him back to give his lectures and inspire millions of kids, perhaps not just in English but in any language? Or if you could ask our grandparents for advice and hear those comforting words even if they're no longer with us? Or maybe using this tool, book authors, alive or not, could read aloud all of their books for anyone interested. The creative possibilities here are endless, and to me, that's very exciting. And here's how it's working so far. First, we introduce a new technique that can reconstruct a high-detailed 3D face model from any image without ever 3D-scanning the person. And here's the same output model from different views. This also works on videos, by running the same algorithm on each video frame and generating a moving 3D model. And here's the same output model from different angles. It turns out this problem is very challenging, but the key trick is that we are going to analyze a large photo collection of the person beforehand. For George W. Bush, we can just search on Google, and from that, we are able to build an average model, an iterative, refined model to recover the expression in fine details, like creases and wrinkles. What's fascinating about this is that the photo collection can come from your typical photos. It doesn't really matter what expression you're making or where you took those photos. What matters is that there are a lot of them. And we are still missing color here, so next, we develop a new blending technique that improves upon a single averaging method and produces sharp facial textures and colors. And this can be done for any expression. Now we have a control of a model of a person, and the way it's controlled now is by a sequence of static photos. Notice how the wrinkles come and go, depending on the expression. We can also use a video to drive the model. (Video) Daniel Craig: Right, but somehow, we've managed to attract some more amazing people. SS: And here's another fun demo. So what you see here are controllable models of people I built from their internet photos. Now, if you transfer the motion from the input video, we can actually drive the entire party. George W. Bush: It's a difficult bill to pass, because there's a lot of moving parts, and the legislative processes can be ugly. (Applause) SS: So coming back a little bit, our ultimate goal, rather, is to capture their mannerisms or the unique way each of these people talks and smiles. So to do that, can we actually teach the computer to imitate the way someone talks by only showing it video footage of the person? And what I did exactly was, I let a computer watch 14 hours of pure Barack Obama giving addresses. And here's what we can produce given only his audio. (Video) BO: The results are clear. America's businesses have created 14.5 million new jobs over 75 straight months. SS: So what's being synthesized here is only the mouth region, and here's how we do it. Our pipeline uses a neural network to convert and input audio into these mouth points. (Video) BO: We get it through our job or through Medicare or Medicaid. SS: Then we synthesize the texture, enhance details and teeth, and blend it into the head and background from a source video. (Video) BO: Women can get free checkups, and you can't get charged more just for being a woman. Young people can stay on a parent's plan until they turn 26. SS: I think these results seem very realistic and intriguing, but at the same time frightening, even to me. Our goal was to build an accurate model of a person, not to misrepresent them. But one thing that concerns me is its potential for misuse. People have been thinking about this problem for a long time, since the days when Photoshop first hit the market. As a researcher, I'm also working on countermeasure technology, and I'm part of an ongoing effort at AI Foundation, which uses a combination of machine learning and human moderators to detect fake images and videos, fighting against my own work. And one of the tools we plan to release is called Reality Defender, which is a web-browser plug-in that can flag potentially fake content automatically, right in the browser. (Applause) Despite all this, though, fake videos could do a lot of damage, even before anyone has a chance to verify, so it's very important that we make everyone aware of what's currently possible so we can have the right assumption and be critical about what we see. There's still a long way to go before we can fully model individual people and before we can ensure the safety of this technology. But I'm excited and hopeful, because if we use it right and carefully, this tool can allow any individual's positive impact on the world to be massively scaled and really help shape our future the way we want it to be. Thank you. (Applause) |
The breathtaking courage of Harriet Tubman | null | TED-Ed | Escaping slavery; risking everything to save her family; leading a military raid; championing the cause of women’s suffrage; these are just a handful of the accomplishments of one of America’s most courageous heroes. Harriet Tubman was born Araminta Ross in Dorchester County, Maryland, in the early 1820s. Born into chattel slavery, Araminta, or Minty, was the fifth of nine children. Two of Minty’s older sisters were sold to a chain gang. Even as a small child, Minty was hired out to different owners, who subjected her to whippings and punishment. Young Minty’s life changed forever on an errand to a neighborhood store. There, an overseer threw a two-pound weight at a fugitive enslaved person, missed, and struck Minty instead. Her injury caused her to experience sleeping spells, which we know of today as narcolepsy, for the rest of her life. Minty’s owner tried to sell her, but there were no buyers for an enslaved person who fell into sleeping spells. She was instead put to work with her father, Ben Ross, who taught her how to lumber. Lumbering increased Minty’s physical strength and put her in touch with free black sailors who shipped the wood to the North. From them, Minty learned about the secret communications that occurred along trade routes, information that would prove invaluable later in her life. In this mixed atmosphere of free and enslaved blacks working side by side, Minty met John Tubman, a free black man she married in 1844. After marriage, she renamed herself Harriet, after her mother. Harriet Tubman’s owner died in 1849. When his widow planned to sell off her enslaved human beings, Harriet feared she would be sold away from everyone she loved. She had heard of an “underground railroad," a secret network of safe houses, boat captains, and wagon drivers willing to harbor fugitive enslaved people on their way north. So Tubman fled with two of her brothers, Ben and Harry. They eventually turned back, fearing they were lost. But in one of her sleeping spells, Harriet dreamed that she could fly like a bird. Looking down below, she saw the path to liberation. And in the autumn of 1849, she set out on her own, following the North Star to Pennsylvania, and to freedom. Tubman returned to the South 13 times to free her niece, brothers, parents, and many others. She earned the nickname Black Moses and worked diligently with fellow abolitionists to help enslaved people escape, first to the North, and later to Canada. Harriet Tubman worked as a Union army nurse, scout, and spy during the Civil War. In 1863, she became the first woman in United States history to plan and lead a military raid, liberating nearly 700 enslaved persons in South Carolina. After the war, the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution legally abolished slavery, while the 14th expanded citizenship and the 15th gave voting rights to formerly enslaved black men. But she was undaunted, and she persisted. She raised funds for formerly enslaved persons and helped build schools and a hospital on their behalf. In 1888, Tubman became more active in the fight for women’s right to vote. In 1896, she appeared at the founding convention of the National Association of Colored Women in Washington D.C. and later at a woman’s suffrage meeting in Rochester, New York. There she told the audience: “I was a conductor on the Underground Railroad, and I can say what many others cannot. I never ran my train off the track, and I never lost a passenger.” As her fame grew, various friends and allies helped her in the fight to collect a veteran’s pension for her service in the Union Army. In 1899, she was finally granted $20 a month. In a fitting twist of fate, the United States Treasury announced in 2016 that Tubman’s image will appear on a redesigned twenty dollar bill. Harriet Tubman died on March 10, 1913. Even on her deathbed at age 91, she kept the freedom of her people in mind. Her final words were: "I go away to prepare a place for you.” |
You may be accidentally investing in cigarette companies | {0: 'Dr. Bronwyn King on a mission to save a billion lives -- from tobacco, the greatest preventable cause of premature death.'} | TEDxSydney | In 2001, I was a brand new, shiny doctor, planning to save the world. My first job was working for three months on a lung cancer unit. Nearly all of my patients were smokers or ex-smokers, and most of them had started smoking when they were children or in their early teens. And despite living in a beautiful, wealthy country, with access to the most sophisticated medicines, nearly every single one of my patients died. Everyone knows tobacco is bad, but when you see the impact firsthand, day-by-day, it leaves a very deep impression. Ten years later, I'm a radiation oncologist, fully aware of the suffering caused by tobacco. I'm sitting at the hospital cafeteria, having my first ever meeting with a representative from my superannuation fund. It was thrilling, I'm sure you can imagine. (Laughter) He tells me I'm in the default option. And I said, "Option? Does that mean there are other options?" He looked at me, rolled his eyes, and said, "Well, there is this one greenie option for people who have a problem with investing in mining, alcohol or tobacco." I said, "Did you just say tobacco?" He said, "Yes." I said, "So, are you telling me I'm currently investing in tobacco?" And he said, "Oh, yes, everyone is." When you invest in a company, you own part of that company. You want that company to grow and succeed and thrive. You want that company to attract new customers, you want that company to sell more of its products. And when it comes to tobacco, I couldn't think of anything that I wanted less. Now, I know you can only see one person standing here on this big red dot, on this enormous stage. But instead, I would like you to imagine that you're looking at seven million people crammed up here beside me today. Seven million people across the world have died as a result of tobacco in the past year alone. Just imagine, if a brand new industry were launched today, and by the end of next June, that industry's products had killed seven million people. Would any of us invest in that new, deadly industry? Tobacco is one of the most pressing global issues of our time, and most of us are far more complicit in the problem than we may realize. So, the super fund representative explained to me that tobacco companies would be found in the international shares portion of my portfolio. So I asked him, "Well, which international shares do I have?" He got back to me two weeks later with this list: my number one holding in international shares was British American Tobacco. Number two, Imperial Tobacco. Number four, Philip Morris. And number five, the Swedish Match company. Four of the top five companies were tobacco companies, my investments, an oncologist. And then I realized it wasn't just me. It was all members of my super fund. And then I realized it wasn't just my super fund, it was all of them. And then I realized, it wasn't just superannuation funds, it was banks, insurers and fund managers. And then I realized it wasn't just Australia. It was the entire global finance sector, completely tangled up with the tobacco industry. The industry that makes products that kill seven million people every year. So I started discussing the issue with my superannuation fund, and I've been discussing it ever since. Finance leaders have many challenging issues to deal with, these days. So I suggest they adopt a framework that clearly articulates why it is reasonable to take a strong position on tobacco. I suggest finance leaders ask a suite of three questions of any company in which they might invest our money. Question one: Can the product made by the company be used safely? "No" is the answer for tobacco companies. Zero is the only safe number of cigarettes for a human being. It could not be more black and white. Question two: Is the problem caused by the company so significant on a global level that it is subject to a UN treaty or convention? "Yes" is the answer for tobacco. Indeed there is a UN tobacco treaty that has been ratified by 180 countries. The treaty was created because of the catastrophic global impact of tobacco. The current forecast is that the world is on track for one billion tobacco-related deaths this century. One billion deaths. There's only seven billion of us. Question three relates to the concept of engagement. Many financial organizations genuinely want to be good corporate citizens. They want to use their shareholder power to sit down with companies, engage with them, and encourage them to do better things. So the question is: Can engagement with the company be an effective lever for change? "No" is the answer for tobacco companies. Engagement with the tobacco industry is futile. The only acceptable outcome would be if tobacco companies ceased their primary business. In fact, engagement with the tobacco industry has never led to less human death. When we consider that framework, three simple questions, we can see that is reasonable and defensible to take a strong position and exclude investment in the tobacco industry. In addition to the UN tobacco treaty, there is, in fact, another global treaty that demands that we act on tobacco. In 2015, the UN adopted the Sustainable Development Goals. Now, we're talking about tobacco, and I know you're going to jump straight to number three: good health and well-being. And indeed, ramping up tobacco control regulation is essential if we're going to achieve that goal. However, look a bit more deeply, and you will find that 13 of the 17 goals cannot be achieved unless there is a major shake-up of the tobacco industry. Personally, my favorite goal is number 17: partnerships for the goals. At present, we have the entire global health sector doing everything it can to help the tidal wave of patients suffering as a result of tobacco. But that said, in the past year alone, seven million people have died, so clearly, that is not enough. We also have governments aligned on tobacco, 180 of them, busily trying to implement the provisions of the UN tobacco treaty. But that, too, is not enough. If the global finance sector continues to lend money to tobacco companies, to invest in tobacco companies, and to strive to profit from tobacco companies, we are working against each other. Now, if we are going to disrupt what doctors call "the global tobacco epidemic," we need every sector of society to stand side by side and be part of the solution. So I call on finance leaders to implement a framework to deal with sensitive issues. And I call on them to uphold global conventions. But in addition, there are business risks. Pure financial risks, associated with being invested in the tobacco industry over the long term, and I ask finance leaders to consider them. The first risk is that fewer and fewer people will smoke, as a result of increasing tobacco regulation. When these warnings were put on cigarette packets in Canada, [Tobacco can make you impotent] the first response of smokers was to give them right back to the salespeople and say, "Could you please just give me the ones that say they'll kill me?" (Laughter) Regulation gets noticed, regulation reduces consumption, and we have 180 countries committed to more regulation. Let's talk about litigation and the risk that presents. At present, it's the business model of the tobacco industry that is being challenged. Currently, the tobacco industry externalizes all of the health costs associated with tobacco. Governments pay, communities pay, you pay, I pay. The tobacco industry externalizes all those costs, with an estimated one trillion US dollars per year. Yet they internalize and privatize the profits. In 2015, in Quebec province, the courts determined that the tobacco industry was indeed responsible for those health costs, and ordered them to pay 15 billion US dollars. That case is under appeal. But it begs the question, why should any of us, in any country, be paying for the costs of the tobacco industry? Let's move on to supply chain and the risk there. It is not well known that the tobacco industry significantly relies on child labor. In March 2017, the International Labour Organization issued a report which stated: "In tobacco-growing communities, child labor is rampant." The US Department of Labor currently lists 16 countries that use children to produce tobacco leaf. Scrutiny of supply chains is intensifying, and that cannot continue to escape public attention. Finally, there is also reputation risk to consider for individuals and organizations that continue to maintain an affiliation with the tobacco industry. In countless surveys, the tobacco industry ranks as the world's least reputable industry. Let's just look at the impact on children. Globally, every single day, it is estimated that 100,000 children start smoking. That's enough children to fit inside the Melbourne Cricket Ground. And most of those children are from the poorest communities on earth. Here in Australia, the average age that people start smoking is 16 years and two months. They look pretty young to me, but the worst thing here is that while we don't have data from every country on earth, we believe that is the oldest age. Everywhere else is younger. Now for the good news. Things are changing. The finance sector is coming to the party. After around 2,000 meetings with finance leaders, primarily in the cafés of Melbourne and Sydney and London and Paris and New York and all across the globe, momentum, moving away from investment in the tobacco industry, is starting to snowball. Finance leaders are alarmed when they're presented with the facts, and overwhelmingly, they want to be part of the solution. Here, in Australia, we now have 10,636,101 superannuation accounts that are tobacco-free. That one is mine, by the way. (Applause) There is still a lot of work to be done, but I've watched the conversation go from "Should we go tobacco-free?" to "Why haven't we done it yet?" In the past year alone, major tobacco-free moves have been made by leading financial organizations in eight different countries. In Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, France, Ireland and the USA. By sovereign wealth funds, fund managers, pension funds, banks, insurers and reinsurers. Since tobacco-free portfolios began, more than six billion dollars has been redirected away from investment in the tobacco industry. The case study is well and truly proven. When making the tobacco-free announcement in March this year, the CEO of AMP Capital said, "We are not prepared to deliver investment returns at any cost to society." And that is the question we need to ask ourselves. Is there no baseline standard below which we will not sink to make profit? Along the way, I've had a lot of help and incredible support. Now, if you're trying to do something, I highly recommend that you have a princess on your team. Her Royal Highness, Princess Dina Mired, is the global ambassador for this work. We also have a lord, a knight, a former premier, a former federal minister and a stack of CEOs. But the capacity to change things does not rest exclusively with these highly influential people. The power to do that is with all of us. Everyone here can be part of the solution. In fact, everyone here must be part of the solution. Most people in this room own companies via their superannuation funds, their banks and their insurers. And it is time for us to ask them: Are they investing our money in companies that make products that kill seven million people every year? It's your money. It's my money, it's our money. And that is a very reasonable question. Pretty cramped up here, with seven million people beside me today. But if we don't act now, and act together, we'll need to make way for one billion people before the end of this century. And this is a very big stage. But there is no more room. Thank you. (Applause) |
You are fluent in this language (and don't even know it) | {0: 'With charm and incisive wit, Christoph Niemann sketches the moments of our shared experience. '} | TED2018 | I'm an artist. Being an artist is the greatest job there is. And I really pity each and every one of you who has to spend your days discovering new galaxies or saving humanity from global warming. (Laughter) But being an artist is also a daunting job. I spend every day, from nine to six, doing this. (Laughter) I even started a side career that consists entirely of complaining about the difficulty of the creative process. (Laughter) But today, I don't want to talk about what makes my life difficult. I want to talk about what makes it easy. And that is you — and the fact that you are fluent in a language that you're probably not even aware of. You're fluent in the language of reading images. Deciphering an image like that takes quite a bit of an intellectual effort. But nobody ever taught you how this works, you just know it. College, shopping, music. What makes a language powerful is that you can take a very complex idea and communicate it in a very simple, efficient form. These images represent exactly the same ideas. But when you look, for example, at the college hat, you know that this doesn't represent the accessory you wear on your head when you're being handed your diploma, but rather the whole idea of college. Now, what drawings can do is they cannot only communicate images, they can even evoke emotions. Let's say you get to an unfamiliar place and you see this. You feel happiness and relief. (Laughter) Or a slight sense of unease or maybe downright panic. (Laughter) Or blissful peace and quiet. (Laughter) But visuals, they're of course more than just graphic icons. You know, if I want to tell the story of modern-day struggle, I would start with the armrest between two airplane seats and two sets of elbows fighting. What I love there is this universal law that, you know, you have 30 seconds to fight it out and once it's yours, you get to keep it for the rest of the flight. (Laughter) Now, commercial flight is full of these images. If I want to illustrate the idea of discomfort, nothing better than these neck pillows. They're designed to make you more comfortable — (Laughter) except they don't. (Laughter) So I never sleep on airplanes. What I do occasionally is I fall into a sort of painful coma. And when I wake up from that, I have the most terrible taste in my mouth. It's a taste that's so bad, it cannot be described with words, but it can be drawn. (Laughter) The thing is, you know, I love sleeping. And when I sleep, I really prefer to do it while spooning. I've been spooning on almost a pro level for close to 20 years, but in all this time, I've never figured out what to do with that bottom arm. (Laughter) (Applause) And the only thing — the only thing that makes sleeping even more complicated than trying to do it on an airplane is when you have small children. They show up at your bed at around 4am with some bogus excuse of, "I had a bad dream." (Laughter) And then, of course you feel sorry for them, they're your kids, so you let them into your bed. And I have to admit, at the beginning, they're really cute and warm and snugly. The minute you fall back asleep, they inexplicably — (Laughter) start rotating. (Laughter) We like to call this the helicopter mode. (Laughter) Now, the deeper something is etched into your consciousness, the fewer details we need to have an emotional reaction. (Laughter) So why does an image like this work? It works, because we as readers are incredibly good at filling in the blanks. Now, when you draw, there's this concept of negative space. And the idea is, that instead of drawing the actual object, you draw the space around it. So the bowls in this drawing are empty. But the black ink prompts your brain to project food into a void. What we see here is not a owl flying. What we actually see is a pair of AA batteries standing on a nonsensical drawing, and I animate the scene by moving my desk lamp up and down. (Laughter) The image really only exists in your mind. So, how much information do we need to trigger such an image? My goal as an artist is to use the smallest amount possible. I try to achieve a level of simplicity where, if you were to take away one more element, the whole concept would just collapse. And that's why my personal favorite tool as an artist is abstraction. I've come up with this system which I call the abstract-o-meter, and this is how it works. So you take a symbol, any symbol, for example the heart and the arrow, which most of us would read as the symbol for love, and I'm an artist, so I can draw this in any given degree of realism or abstraction. Now, if I go too realistic on it, it just grosses everybody out. (Laughter) If I go too far on the other side and do very abstract, nobody has any idea what they're looking at. So I have to find the perfect place on that scale, in this case it's somewhere in the middle. Now, once we have reduced an image to a more simple form, all sorts of new connections become possible. And that allows for totally new angles in storytelling. (Laughter) And so, what I like to do is, I like to take images from really remote cultural areas and bring them together. Now, with more daring references — (Laughter) I can have more fun. But of course, I know that eventually things become so obscure that I start losing some of you. So as a designer, it's absolutely key to have a good understanding of the visual and cultural vocabulary of your audience. With this image here, a comment on the Olympics in Athens, I assumed that the reader of the "New Yorker" would have some rudimentary idea of Greek art. If you don't, the image doesn't work. But if you do, you might even appreciate the small detail, like the beer-can pattern here on the bottom of the vase. (Laughter) A recurring discussion I have with magazine editors, who are usually word people, is that their audience, you, are much better at making radical leaps with images than they're being given credit for. And the only thing I find frustrating is that they often seem to push me towards a small set of really tired visual clichés that are considered safe. You know, it's the businessman climbing up a ladder, and then the ladder moves, morphs into a stock market graph, and anything with dollar signs; that's always good. (Laughter) If there are editorial decision makers here in the audience, I want to give you a piece of advice. Every time a drawing like this is published, a baby panda will die. (Laughter) Literally. (Laughter) (Applause) When is a visual cliché good or bad? It's a fine line. And it really depends on the story. In 2011, during the earthquake and the tsunami in Japan, I was thinking of a cover. And I went through the classic symbols: the Japanese flag, "The Great Wave" by Hokusai, one of the greatest drawings ever. And then the story changed when the situation at the power plant in Fukushima got out of hand. And I remember these TV images of the workers in hazmat suits, just walking through the site, and what struck me was how quiet and serene it was. And so I wanted to create an image of a silent catastrophe. And that's the image I came up with. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) What I want to do is create an aha moment, for you, for the reader. And unfortunately, that does not mean that I have an aha moment when I create these images. I never sit at my desk with the proverbial light bulb going off in my head. What it takes is actually a very slow, unsexy process of minimal design decisions that then, when I'm lucky, lead to a good idea. So one day, I'm on a train, and I'm trying to decode the graphic rules for drops on a window. And eventually I realize, "Oh, it's the background blurry upside-down, contained in a sharp image." And I thought, wow, that's really cool, and I have absolutely no idea what to do with that. A while later, I'm back in New York, and I draw this image of being stuck on the Brooklyn bridge in a traffic jam. It's really annoying, but also kind of poetic. And only later I realized, I can take both of these ideas and put them together in this idea. And what I want to do is not show a realistic scene. But, maybe like poetry, make you aware that you already had this image with you, but only now I've unearthed it and made you realize that you were carrying it with you all along. But like poetry, this is a very delicate process that is neither efficient nor scalable, I think. And maybe the most important skill for an artist is really empathy. You need craft and you need — (Laughter) you need creativity — (Laughter) thank you — to come up with an image like that. But then you need to step back and look at what you've done from the perspective of the reader. I've tried to become a better artist by becoming a better observer of images. And for that, I started an exercise for myself which I call Sunday sketching, which meant, on a Sunday, I would take a random object I found around the house and try to see if that object could trigger an idea that had nothing to do with the original purpose of that item. And it usually just means I'm blank for a long while. And the only trick that eventually works is if I open my mind and run through every image I have stored up there, and see if something clicks. And if it does, just add a few lines of ink to connect — to preserve this very short moment of inspiration. And the great lesson there was that the real magic doesn't happen on paper. It happens in the mind of the viewer. When your expectations and your knowledge clash with my artistic intentions. Your interaction with an image, your ability to read, question, be bothered or bored or inspired by an image is as important as my artistic contribution. Because that's what turns an artistic statement really, into a creative dialogue. And so, your skill at reading images is not only amazing, it is what makes my art possible. And for that, I thank you very much. (Applause) (Cheers) Thank you. (Applause) |
How can you change someone's mind? | null | TED-Ed | Three people are at a dinner party. Paul, who’s married, is looking at Linda. Meanwhile, Linda is looking at John, who’s not married. Is someone who’s married looking at someone who’s not married? Take a moment to think about it. Most people answer that there’s not enough information to tell. And most people are wrong. Linda must be either married or not married—there are no other options. So in either scenario, someone married is looking at someone who’s not married. When presented with the explanation, most people change their minds and accept the correct answer, despite being very confident in their first responses. Now let’s look at another case. A 2005 study by Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler examined American attitudes regarding the justifications for the Iraq War. Researchers presented participants with a news article that showed no weapons of mass destruction had been found. Yet many participants not only continued to believe that WMDs had been found, but they even became more convinced of their original views. So why do arguments change people’s minds in some cases and backfire in others? Arguments are more convincing when they rest on a good knowledge of the audience, taking into account what the audience believes, who they trust, and what they value. Mathematical and logical arguments like the dinner party brainteaser work because even when people reach different conclusions, they’re starting from the same set of shared beliefs. In 1931, a young, unknown mathematician named Kurt Gödel presented a proof that a logically complete system of mathematics was impossible. Despite upending decades of work by brilliant mathematicians like Bertrand Russell and David Hilbert, the proof was accepted because it relied on axioms that everyone in the field already agreed on. Of course, many disagreements involve different beliefs that can’t simply be reconciled through logic. When these beliefs involve outside information, the issue often comes down to what sources and authorities people trust. One study asked people to estimate several statistics related to the scope of climate change. Participants were asked questions, such as “how many of the years between 1995 and 2006 were one of the hottest 12 years since 1850?” After providing their answers, they were presented with data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in this case showing that the answer was 11 of the 12 years. Being provided with these reliable statistics from a trusted official source made people more likely to accept the reality that the earth is warming. Finally, for disagreements that can’t be definitively settled with statistics or evidence, making a convincing argument may depend on engaging the audience’s values. For example, researchers have conducted a number of studies where they’ve asked people of different political backgrounds to rank their values. Liberals in these studies, on average, rank fairness— here meaning whether everyone is treated in the same way—above loyalty. In later studies, researchers attempted to convince liberals to support military spending with a variety of arguments. Arguments based on fairness— like that the military provides employment and education to people from disadvantaged backgrounds— were more convincing than arguments based on loyalty— such as that the military unifies a nation. These three elements— beliefs, trusted sources, and values— may seem like a simple formula for finding agreement and consensus. The problem is that our initial inclination is to think of arguments that rely on our own beliefs, trusted sources, and values. And even when we don’t, it can be challenging to correctly identify what’s held dear by people who don’t already agree with us. The best way to find out is simply to talk to them. In the course of discussion, you’ll be exposed to counter-arguments and rebuttals. These can help you make your own arguments and reasoning more convincing and sometimes, you may even end up being the one changing your mind. |
Did ancient Troy really exist? | null | TED-Ed | When Homer’s Iliad was first written down in the 8th century BCE, the story of the Trojan war was already an old one. From existing oral tradition, audiences knew the tales of the long siege, the epic duels outside the city walls, and the cunning trick that finally won the war. In the end, the magnificent city was burned to the ground, never to rise again. But had it ever existed? By the time the field of archaeology began to take shape in the 19th century, many were skeptical, considering the epic to be pure fiction, a founding myth imagining a bygone heroic era. But some scholars believed that behind the superhuman feats and divine miracles there must have been a grain of historical truth - a war that was really fought, and a place where it happened. Frank Calvert was one such believer. He had spent his youth traveling and learning about ancient civilizations before accompanying his brother Frederick on a diplomatic mission to the northwest Anatolian region of Çanakkale. It was here that Homer described the Greek encampment at the mouth of the Scamander river. And it was here that fate brought Frank into contact with a journalist and geologist named Charles Maclaren. Locals and travelers had long speculated that Troy might’ve stood on one of the surrounding hilltops. But Maclaren had been one of the first to publish a detailed topographical study of the area. He believed he had found the site – a 32-meter mound known by the name Hisarlık, derived from the Turkish word for “fortress.” Soon after meeting with him in 1847, the Calverts bought 2,000 acres of farmland that included part of the hill. Before they could explore any further, the Crimean War broke out and forestalled their archaeological ambitions for several years. After the war’s end, Frank Calvert began to survey the site, but lacked the funds for a full excavation. This was where the wealthy German businessman and amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann came in. At Calvert’s invitation, Schliemann visited the grounds in 1868, and decided to excavate. Eager to find the ancient city, Schliemann tore massive trenches all the way to the base of the hill. There, he uncovered a hoard of precious artifacts, jewelry, and metalwork, including two diadems and a copper shield. Schliemann took full credit for the discovery, announcing that he had found Troy and the treasure of its king Priam. But the real treasure was elsewhere. When later archaeologists studied the site, they realized that the mound consisted of no less than nine cities, each built atop the ruins of the last. The layer Schliemann had uncovered dated back to the Mycenaean Age, more than 1,000 years too early for Homer. But inside the mound was indeed evidence for a city that had thrived during the Bronze Age, with charred stone, broken arrowheads, and damaged human skeletons suggesting a violent end. It was Troy VII, contained in the middle layers and now ravaged for a second time by Schliemann’s careless excavation. The settlement, spanning some 200,000 square meters and home to as many as 10,000 people, thrived until around 1180 BCE. Its position at the southern entrance of the Dardanelles strait would’ve made a formidable strategic location for both defense and trade. Most importantly, there are the remains of a massive fortification wall – perhaps the very same one from which Priam and Hector once watched the Greeks approach. Of course, it’s difficult to be certain that these ruins are the true remains of ancient Troy, and scholars still dispute whether the Trojan War as described by Homer ever happened. Yet the evidence is strong enough that UNESCO has labelled Hisarlık the archeological site of Troy. Regardless of its identity, thanks to persistence, a bit of faith, and a lot of research, archaeologists are bringing the long-buried secrets of an ancient, lost city to light. |
Why does your voice change as you get older? | null | TED-Ed | In the mid-16th century, Italians were captivated by a type of male singer whose incredible range contained notes previously thought impossible for adult men. However, this gift came at a high price. To prevent their voices from breaking, these singers had been castrated before puberty, halting the hormonal processes that would deepen their voices. Known as castrati, their light, angelic voices were renowned throughout Europe, until the cruel procedure that created them was outlawed in the 1800s. Though stunting vocal growth can produce an extraordinary musical range, naturally developing voices are already capable of incredible variety. And as we age, our bodies undergo two major changes which explore that range. So how exactly does our voice box work, and what causes these shifts in speech? The specific sound of a speaking voice is the result of many anatomical variables, but it’s mostly determined by the age and health of our vocal cords and the size of our larynxes. The larynx is a complex system of muscle and cartilage that supports and moves the vocal cords, or, as they’re more accurately known, the vocal folds. Strung between the thyroid and arytenoid cartilages, these two muscles form an elastic curtain that opens and shuts across the trachea, the tube that carries air through the throat. The folds are apart when we’re breathing, but when we speak, they slam shut. Our lungs push air against the closed folds, blowing them open and vibrating the tissue to produce sound. Unlike the deliberate focus required for playing an external instrument, we effortlessly change notes as we speak. By pushing air faster or slower, we change the frequency and amplitude of these vibrations, which respectively translate to the pitch and volume of our voices. Rapid and small vibrations create high-pitched, quiet tones, while slow, large vibrations produce deep, bellowing rumbles. Finally, by moving the laryngeal muscles between the cartilages, we can stretch and contract those folds to intuitively play our internal instruments. This process is the same from your first words to your last, but as you age, your larynx ages too. During puberty, the first major shift starts, as your voice begins to deepen. This happens when your larynx grows in size, elongating the vocal folds and opening up more room for them to vibrate. These longer folds have slower, larger vibrations, which result in a lower baseline pitch. This growth is especially dramatic in many males, whose high testosterone levels lead first to voice cracks, and then to deeper, more booming voices, and laryngeal protrusions called Adam’s apples. Another vocal development during puberty occurs when the homogenous tissue covering the folds specializes into three distinct functional layers: a central muscle, a layer of stiff collagen wrapped in stretchy elastin fibers, and an outer layer of mucus membrane. These layers add nuance and depth to the voice, giving it a distinct timbre that sets it apart from its pre-pubescent tones. After puberty, most people’s voices remain more or less the same for about 50 years. But we all use our voices differently, and eventually we experience the symptoms associated with aging larynxes, known as presbyphonia. First, the collagen in our folds stiffens and the surrounding elastin fibers atrophy and decay. This decreased flexibility increases the pitch of older voices. But for people who have experienced the hormonal effects of menopause, the higher pitch is countered and outweighed by swollen vocal folds. The folds' increased mass slows their vibrations, resulting in deeper voices. All these symptoms are further complicated by having fewer healthy laryngeal nerve endings, which reduces precise muscle control and causes breathy or rough voices. Ultimately, these anatomical changes are just a few of the factors that can affect your voice. But when kept in good condition, your voice box is a finely tuned instrument, capable of operatic arias, moody monologues, and stirring speeches. |
Can you solve the rogue AI riddle? | null | TED-Ed | A hostile artificial intelligence called NIM has taken over the world’s computers. You’re the only person skilled enough to shut it down, and you’ll only have one chance. You’ve broken into NIM’s secret lab, and now you’re floating in a raft on top of 25 stories of electrified water. You’ve rigged up a remote that can lower the water level by ejecting it from grates in the sides of the room. If you can lower the water level to 0, you can hit the manual override, shut NIM off, and save the day. However, the AI knows that you’re here, and it can lower the water level, too, by sucking it through a trapdoor at the bottom of the lab. If NIM is the one to lower the water level to 0, you’ll be sucked out of the lab, resulting in a failed mission. Control over water drainage alternates between you and NIM, and neither can skip a turn. Each of you can lower the water level by exactly 1, 3, or 4 stories at a time. Whoever gets the level exactly to 0 on their turn will win this deadly duel. Note that neither of you can lower the water below 0; if the water level is at 2, then the only move is to lower the water level 1 story. You know that NIM has already computed all possible outcomes of the contest, and will play in a way that maximizes its chance of success. You go first. How can you survive and shut off the artificial intelligence? Pause here if you want to figure it out for yourself. Answer in: 3 Answer in: 2 Answer in: 1 You can’t leave anything up to chance - NIM will take any advantage it can get. And you’ll need to have a response to any possible move it makes. The trick here is to start from where you want to end and work backwards. You want to be the one to lower the water level to 0, which means you need the water level to be at 1, 3, or 4 when control switches to you. If the water level were at 2, your only option would be to lower it 1 story, which would lead to NIM making the winning move. If we color code the water levels, we can see a simple principle at play: there are “losing” levels like 2, where no matter what whoever starts their turn there does, they’ll lose. And there are winning levels, where whoever starts their turn there can either win or leave their opponent with a losing level. So not only are 1, 3, and 4 winning levels, but so are 5 and 6, since you can send your opponent to 2 from there. What about 7? From 7, all possible moves would send your opponent to a winning level, making this another losing level. And we can continue up the lab in this way. If you start your turn 1, 3, or 4 levels above a losing level, then you’re at a winning level. Otherwise, you’re destined to lose. You could continue like this all the way to level 25. But as a shortcut, you might notice that levels 8 through 11 are colored identically to 1 through 4. Since a level’s color is determined by the levels 1, 3, and 4 stories below it, this means that level 12 will be the same color as level 5, 13 will match 6, 14 will match 7, and so on, In particular, the losing levels will always be multiple of 7, and two greater than multiples of 7. Now, from your original starting level of 25, you have to make sure your opponent starts on a losing level every single turn— if NIM starts on a winning level even once, it’s game over for you. So your only choice on turn 1 is to lower the water level by 4 stories. No matter what the AI does, you can continue giving it losing levels until you reach 0 and trigger the manual override. And with that, the crisis is averted. Now, back to a less stressful kind of surfing. |
How the Normans changed the history of Europe | null | TED-Ed | In the year 1066, 7000 Norman infantry and knights sailed in warships across the English Channel. Their target: England, home to more than a million people. Theirs was a short voyage with massive consequences. And around the same period of time, other groups of Normans were setting forth all across Europe, going on adventures that would reverberate throughout that continent’s history. So who were these warriors and how did they leave their mark so far and wide? Our story begins over 200 years earlier, when Vikings began to settle on the shores of northern France as part of a great Scandinavian exodus across northern Europe. The French locals called these invaders Normans, named for the direction they came from. Eventually, Charles, the king of the Franks, negotiated peace with the Viking leader Rollo in 911, granting him a stretch of land along France’s northern coast that came to be known as Normandy. The Normans proved adaptable to their newly settled life. They married Frankish women, adopted the French language, and soon started converting from Norse paganism to Christianity. But though they adapted, they maintained the warrior tradition and conquering spirit of their Viking forebears. Before long, ambitious Norman knights were looking for new challenges. The Normans’ best-known achievement was their conquest of England. In 1066, William, the Duke of Normandy, disputed the claim of the new English king, Harold Godwinson. Soon after landing in England, William and his knights met Harold’s army near the town of Hastings. The climactic moment in the battle is immortalized in the 70-meter-long Bayeux Tapestry, where an arrow striking Harold in the eye seals the Norman victory. William consolidated his gains with a huge castle-building campaign and a reorganization of English society. He lived up to his nickname "William the Conqueror" through a massive survey known as the Domesday Book, which recorded the population and ownership of every piece of land in England. Norman French became the language of the new royal court, while commoners continued to speak Anglo-Saxon. Over time, the two merged to give us the English we know today, though the divide between lords and peasants can still be felt in synonym pairs such as cow and beef. By the end of the 12th century, the Normans had further expanded into Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Meanwhile, independent groups of Norman knights traveled to the Mediterranean, inspired by tales of pilgrims returning from Jerusalem. There, they threw themselves into a tangled mass of conflicts among the established powers all over that region. They became highly prized mercenaries, and during one of these battles, they made the first recorded heavy cavalry charge with couched lances, a devastating tactic that soon became standard in medieval warfare. The Normans were also central to the First Crusade of 1095-99, a bloody conflict that re-established Christian control in certain parts of the Middle East. But the Normans did more than just fight. As a result of their victories, leaders like William Iron-Arm and Robert the Crafty secured lands throughout Southern Italy, eventually merging them to form the Kingdom of Sicily in 1130. Under Roger II, the kingdom became a beacon of multicultural tolerance in a world torn apart by religious and civil wars. Muslim Arab poets and scholars served in the royal court alongside Byzantine Greek sailors and architects. Arabic remained an official language along with Latin, Greek, and Norman French. The world’s geographical knowledge was compiled in The Book of Roger, whose maps of the known world would remain the most accurate available for 300 years. And the churches built in Palermo combined Latin-style architecture, Arab ceilings, and Byzantine domes, all decorated with exquisite golden mosaics. So if the Normans were so successful, why aren’t they still around? In fact, this was a key part of their success: not just ruling the societies they conquered, but becoming part of them. Although the Normans eventually disappeared as a distinct group, their contributions remained. And today, from the castles and cathedrals that dot Europe’s landscape to wherever the English language is spoken, the Norman legacy lives on. |
How AI can save our humanity | {0: 'At Sinovation Ventures, Kai-Fu Lee invests in the next generation of Chinese high-tech companies.'} | TED2018 | I'm going to talk about how AI and mankind can coexist, but first, we have to rethink about our human values. So let me first make a confession about my errors in my values. It was 11 o'clock, December 16, 1991. I was about to become a father for the first time. My wife, Shen-Ling, lay in the hospital bed going through a very difficult 12-hour labor. I sat by her bedside but looked anxiously at my watch, and I knew something that she didn't. I knew that if in one hour, our child didn't come, I was going to leave her there and go back to work and make a presentation about AI to my boss, Apple's CEO. Fortunately, my daughter was born at 11:30 — (Laughter) (Applause) sparing me from doing the unthinkable, and to this day, I am so sorry for letting my work ethic take precedence over love for my family. (Applause) My AI talk, however, went off brilliantly. (Laughter) Apple loved my work and decided to announce it at TED1992, 26 years ago on this very stage. I thought I had made one of the biggest, most important discoveries in AI, and so did the "Wall Street Journal" on the following day. But as far as discoveries went, it turned out, I didn't discover India, or America. Perhaps I discovered a little island off of Portugal. But the AI era of discovery continued, and more scientists poured their souls into it. About 10 years ago, the grand AI discovery was made by three North American scientists, and it's known as deep learning. Deep learning is a technology that can take a huge amount of data within one single domain and learn to predict or decide at superhuman accuracy. For example, if we show the deep learning network a massive number of food photos, it can recognize food such as hot dog or no hot dog. (Applause) Or if we show it many pictures and videos and sensor data from driving on the highway, it can actually drive a car as well as a human being on the highway. And what if we showed this deep learning network all the speeches made by President Trump? Then this artificially intelligent President Trump, actually the network — (Laughter) can — (Applause) You like double oxymorons, huh? (Laughter) (Applause) So this network, if given the request to make a speech about AI, he, or it, might say — (Recording) Donald Trump: It's a great thing to build a better world with artificial intelligence. Kai-Fu Lee: And maybe in another language? DT: (Speaking Chinese) (Laughter) KFL: You didn't know he knew Chinese, did you? So deep learning has become the core in the era of AI discovery, and that's led by the US. But we're now in the era of implementation, where what really matters is execution, product quality, speed and data. And that's where China comes in. Chinese entrepreneurs, who I fund as a venture capitalist, are incredible workers, amazing work ethic. My example in the delivery room is nothing compared to how hard people work in China. As an example, one startup tried to claim work-life balance: "Come work for us because we are 996." And what does that mean? It means the work hours of 9am to 9pm, six days a week. That's contrasted with other startups that do 997. And the Chinese product quality has consistently gone up in the past decade, and that's because of a fiercely competitive environment. In Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs compete in a very gentlemanly fashion, sort of like in old wars in which each side took turns to fire at each other. (Laughter) But in the Chinese environment, it's truly a gladiatorial fight to the death. In such a brutal environment, entrepreneurs learn to grow very rapidly, they learn to make their products better at lightning speed, and they learn to hone their business models until they're impregnable. As a result, great Chinese products like WeChat and Weibo are arguably better than the equivalent American products from Facebook and Twitter. And the Chinese market embraces this change and accelerated change and paradigm shifts. As an example, if any of you go to China, you will see it's almost cashless and credit card-less, because that thing that we all talk about, mobile payment, has become the reality in China. In the last year, 18.8 trillion US dollars were transacted on mobile internet, and that's because of very robust technologies built behind it. It's even bigger than the China GDP. And this technology, you can say, how can it be bigger than the GDP? Because it includes all transactions: wholesale, channels, retail, online, offline, going into a shopping mall or going into a farmers market like this. The technology is used by 700 million people to pay each other, not just merchants, so it's peer to peer, and it's almost transaction-fee-free. And it's instantaneous, and it's used everywhere. And finally, the China market is enormous. This market is large, which helps give entrepreneurs more users, more revenue, more investment, but most importantly, it gives the entrepreneurs a chance to collect a huge amount of data which becomes rocket fuel for the AI engine. So as a result, the Chinese AI companies have leaped ahead so that today, the most valuable companies in computer vision, speech recognition, speech synthesis, machine translation and drones are all Chinese companies. So with the US leading the era of discovery and China leading the era of implementation, we are now in an amazing age where the dual engine of the two superpowers are working together to drive the fastest revolution in technology that we have ever seen as humans. And this will bring tremendous wealth, unprecedented wealth: 16 trillion dollars, according to PwC, in terms of added GDP to the worldwide GDP by 2030. It will also bring immense challenges in terms of potential job replacements. Whereas in the Industrial Age it created more jobs because craftsman jobs were being decomposed into jobs in the assembly line, so more jobs were created. But AI completely replaces the individual jobs in the assembly line with robots. And it's not just in factories, but truckers, drivers and even jobs like telesales, customer service and hematologists as well as radiologists over the next 15 years are going to be gradually replaced by artificial intelligence. And only the creative jobs — (Laughter) I have to make myself safe, right? Really, the creative jobs are the ones that are protected, because AI can optimize but not create. But what's more serious than the loss of jobs is the loss of meaning, because the work ethic in the Industrial Age has brainwashed us into thinking that work is the reason we exist, that work defined the meaning of our lives. And I was a prime and willing victim to that type of workaholic thinking. I worked incredibly hard. That's why I almost left my wife in the delivery room, that's why I worked 996 alongside my entrepreneurs. And that obsession that I had with work ended abruptly a few years ago when I was diagnosed with fourth stage lymphoma. The PET scan here shows over 20 malignant tumors jumping out like fireballs, melting away my ambition. But more importantly, it helped me reexamine my life. Knowing that I may only have a few months to live caused me to see how foolish it was for me to base my entire self-worth on how hard I worked and the accomplishments from hard work. My priorities were completely out of order. I neglected my family. My father had passed away, and I never had a chance to tell him I loved him. My mother had dementia and no longer recognized me, and my children had grown up. During my chemotherapy, I read a book by Bronnie Ware who talked about dying wishes and regrets of the people in the deathbed. She found that facing death, nobody regretted that they didn't work hard enough in this life. They only regretted that they didn't spend enough time with their loved ones and that they didn't spread their love. So I am fortunately today in remission. (Applause) So I can be back at TED again to share with you that I have changed my ways. I now only work 965 — occasionally 996, but usually 965. I moved closer to my mother, my wife usually travels with me, and when my kids have vacation, if they don't come home, I go to them. So it's a new form of life that helped me recognize how important it is that love is for me, and facing death helped me change my life, but it also helped me see a new way of how AI should impact mankind and work and coexist with mankind, that really, AI is taking away a lot of routine jobs, but routine jobs are not what we're about. Why we exist is love. When we hold our newborn baby, love at first sight, or when we help someone in need, humans are uniquely able to give and receive love, and that's what differentiates us from AI. Despite what science fiction may portray, I can responsibly tell you that AI has no love. When AlphaGo defeated the world champion Ke Jie, while Ke Jie was crying and loving the game of go, AlphaGo felt no happiness from winning and certainly no desire to hug a loved one. So how do we differentiate ourselves as humans in the age of AI? We talked about the axis of creativity, and certainly that is one possibility, and now we introduce a new axis that we can call compassion, love, or empathy. Those are things that AI cannot do. So as AI takes away the routine jobs, I like to think we can, we should and we must create jobs of compassion. You might ask how many of those there are, but I would ask you: Do you not think that we are going to need a lot of social workers to help us make this transition? Do you not think we need a lot of compassionate caregivers to give more medical care to more people? Do you not think we're going to need 10 times more teachers to help our children find their way to survive and thrive in this brave new world? And with all the newfound wealth, should we not also make labors of love into careers and let elderly accompaniment or homeschooling become careers also? (Applause) This graph is surely not perfect, but it points at four ways that we can work with AI. AI will come and take away the routine jobs and in due time, we will be thankful. AI will become great tools for the creatives so that scientists, artists, musicians and writers can be even more creative. AI will work with humans as analytical tools that humans can wrap their warmth around for the high-compassion jobs. And we can always differentiate ourselves with the uniquely capable jobs that are both compassionate and creative, using and leveraging our irreplaceable brains and hearts. So there you have it: a blueprint of coexistence for humans and AI. AI is serendipity. It is here to liberate us from routine jobs, and it is here to remind us what it is that makes us human. So let us choose to embrace AI and to love one another. Thank you. (Applause) |
How teachers can help kids find their political voices | {0: 'Sydney Chaffee believes that teachers and students can change the world together.'} | TEDxBeaconStreet | To me, social justice is a simple concept. It's the notion that all people in a society deserve fair and equitable rights, opportunities and access to resources. But it's become controversial and nebulous, because we've stopped talking about what working for social justice actually looks like. Working for social justice can look like this ... or this. It can look like this ... or it can look like this ... or my favorite ... it can look like that. Those are my students, and whenever I'm asked to articulate my work or my priorities as a teacher, I explain that I believe education can be a tool for social justice. But a few months ago, I logged onto Twitter — as I do — and I saw that a fellow teacher had taken issue with that belief. "Teachers," he said, "should not be social justice warriors, because the purpose of education is to educate." And he ended his argument by saying, "I teach my subject." But I reject that simplification, because teachers don't just teach subjects, we teach people. When our students walk into our classrooms, they bring their identities with them. Everything they experience in our rooms is bound up in historical context, and so if we insist that education happens in a vacuum, we do our students a disservice. We teach them that education doesn't really matter, because it's not relevant to what's happening all around them. And what's happening all around them? Well, racism for one. According to results of the Implicit Association Test, fully 88 percent of white people harbored subconscious biases against black people, believing them to be less intelligent, lazier and more dangerous than whites. And that's just one concrete example of the insidious effects of historic and systemic racism on our country. For more evidence, we could look at incarceration rates; we could look at statistics on police violence against black people; we could look at the opportunity gap in education — so yeah, social justice belongs in our schools. Social justice should be a part of the mission of every school and every teacher in America, if we want "liberty and justice for all" to be more than a slogan ... because schools are crucial places for children to become active citizens and to learn the skills and the tools that they need to change the world. So what are those skills? OK, here's a secret: many of the skills that people need to orchestrate the kinds of change that will lead to justice are already built into the work of schools. Things like problem-solving, critical thinking, collaboration, perseverance — none of that should be revolutionary on its own. Combine that with the ability to understand history not as one static and objective narrative on which we all agree, but as a series of intertwined events about which there can be countless interpretations. If we deliberately choose to explore history with our students rather than just teach it, we help them understand that history is ongoing and that it's connected to current movements for justice. And we help them see themselves as potential players within a living history. So those are the skills I'm talking about when I say that education can be a place to help kids learn how to work for justice. But maybe the reason that my Twitter critic wasn't happy with that idea is because he doesn't agree with my definition of justice. Fair enough. Maybe he and I don't see eye to eye, politically. But here's the thing: our aim is to encourage students to articulate their own opinions, not to coerce them into agreeing with us, so it actually doesn't matter if he and I agree. What matters is that we're helping students have those conversations with each other. And that means that as adults, we need to learn how to become effective facilitators of our students' activism. We've got to help them learn how to have really tricky conversations, we have to expose them to different opinions, and we have to help them see how what they're learning in school connects to the world outside. So here's an example of that. Every year, my students study the history of apartheid in South Africa as a case study of injustice. Now for those of you who don't know, apartheid was a brutally racist system, and the white-ruled government in South Africa imposed racist laws to oppress people of color, and if you resisted those laws, you risked jail time, violence or death. And around the world, other countries' governments, including ours in the United States, hesitated to sanction South Africa, because ... well ... we benefited from its resources. So in 1976, the South African government passed a new law which required that all students in South Africa learn in the language Afrikaans, which was a white language, and many black South Africans referred to that language as the language of the oppressor. So not surprisingly, students of color were outraged at this law. They already attended segregated schools with overcrowded classrooms, a lack of resources and a frankly racist curriculum, and now they were being told to learn in a language neither they nor their teachers spoke. So on the morning of June 16, 1976, thousands of kids from the township of Soweto walked out of schools. And they marched peacefully through the streets to protest the law. At an intersection, they met up with the police, and when the kids refused to turn back, the police officers set dogs on them ... and then they opened fire ... and the Soweto uprising ended in tragedy. Apartheid itself didn't end until almost 20 years later, but the activism of those kids in Soweto profoundly changed the way the world viewed what was happening in South Africa. News outlets all around the world published this photo of 13-year-old Hector Pieterson, who was one of the first people killed by police in Soweto, and it became nearly impossible to ignore the brutality of the apartheid regime. In the months and the years that followed the Soweto uprising, more and more countries exerted political and economic pressure on the South African government to end apartheid, and it was largely due to the activism of those kids in Soweto. So every year my kids learn about this. And invariably, they start to draw connections between those kids in Soweto and themselves. And they start to ask themselves what kind of political power and agency they have. They ask themselves whether there would ever be a reason they would risk their lives so that a future generation could live in a more just world. And most profoundly for me, every single year, they ask themselves whether adults will ever listen to their voices. A few years ago, my principal got an anonymous email from one of our students. It informed him that the following day, the students planned to walk out of school. This was in the wake of Michael Brown's death in Ferguson, Missouri, and the students were planning to join a walkout and march in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. So at this point, the staff at the school had a decision to make. Would we use our authority and our power to try to control the students and prevent them from leaving, or would we support them as they put into practice the principles of social justice that we had taught them about since the ninth-grade year? So the next morning, the kids left school en masse and they gathered on the lawn. And one of the seniors jumped up on a picnic table and went over safety expectations. (Laughter) And the younger kids took it very seriously. And as teachers and as staff we told them, "OK, be safe," and we watched as they marched off. The kids who chose to stay spent that afternoon in class. They debated the merits of protest, they talked about the history of the Black Lives Matter movement, and they went on with classes as scheduled. And those who chose to leave participated in a citywide student walkout and raised their collective voice for justice. But no matter where they chose to spend the afternoon, our kids learned valuable lessons that day. They learned that the adults in their lives would support them even as we worried for their safety. And they learned that they didn't need us to tell them how or when or even why to protest. They learned that they were members of a community of young people with a shared vision of a more equitable society, and they learned that they had power within that society. They learned that events like the Soweto uprising are not ancient history, and they don't have to end in tragedy. And that's what education as a tool for social justice can look like. And here's the thing: our kids are ready for this kind of work. So in 2015, incoming college freshmen were surveyed, and 8.5 percent of them said that there was a "very good chance" they would participate in a protest sometime during their college career. That might not seem very impressive, but consider the fact that it's the largest number of students to say that since 1967. And 75 percent of those kids said that helping other people who are having difficulty was a "very important" or "essential" goal for them. Again, the highest number of people to say that since the late 1960s. And research shows us that working for justice doesn't just follow from building all those skills I talked about earlier — it actually goes the other way, too. So working for justice, engaging in activism, helps students build skills like leadership and critical thinking, and it correlates positively with their political participation and their civic engagement and their commitment to their communities later in life. So in other words, students are telling us that social justice matters to them and researchers are telling us that it helps students learn. So now it's up to us to listen, and that might not be easy. In 1976, one of those kids who participated in the Soweto uprising, he said that that event represented divorce between black children and their families, because their families had grown up under apartheid, and they knew how dangerous it was to speak out. They wanted their kids to lay low and stay safe. And when our kids threatened to walk out, a lot of the adults in our community were really conflicted, too. Some of us worried that they might encounter violence. Other people worried that they would walk out but they wouldn't really know why they were protesting. And some, including some students' families, were really angry that the school hadn't done more to prevent them from leaving. And all of those fears that adults have about getting this stuff wrong — all of those fears make total sense. But despite those fears, we have got to prove to our students that we will listen to their voices and that they do have the power to effect change. It's our responsibility to equip our students with the tools and the skills that they need to insist on a more equitable world — and then sometimes, to get out of their way, and let them apply those skills to things that they care about. Living up to that vision is going to require that we are flexible, and it's going to require that we're creative. It's going to require that we're brave enough to stand up in the face of people who try to silence or delegitimize dissenting voices. And hardest of all, it's going to require accepting the fact that sometimes we will be the ones our students will rebel against. (Laughter) Sometimes they're going to point out ways in which systems that we have created, or in which we are complicit, contribute to inequity. It's going to be uncomfortable, and it's going to be painful as they push us to question our own assumptions and beliefs. But what if we change the way we think about rebellion in our kids? When our kids rebel — when they thoughtfully push back against our ideas or the way that we do things, what if we chose to see that as a sign that we're doing something right and that they're becoming liberated? I know it would be easier if their critical thinking skills manifested in more convenient ways — on their essays or their standardized tests — I get it — but convenience and justice do not often go hand in hand. And when our kids learn to think critically about the world around them, they become the kinds of engaged citizens who will recognize and question injustice when they see it and work to do something about it. Welcoming rebellion into our schools is going to require some rethinking about what teaching and learning look like, because there's this misconception that if we give students any wiggle room, they're going to walk all over us and classrooms and dinner tables will devolve into total chaos. And if we expect kids to sit silently and passively receive knowledge from us, then their voices will always feel overwhelming. But if we accept instead that learning is sometimes messy, that it requires opportunities to brainstorm and mess up and try again, that our kids dislike chaos and want to learn when they come to school, then we can set up schools to facilitate that kind of learning. So do me a favor and close your eyes for a second and imagine schools where teachers are thought partners, letting students grapple with complex, hard issues and not necessarily giving them the right answers. And imagine schools where we let students make choices — we trust them enough to do that and we let them experience the consequences of those choices. Imagine schools where we let students be humans, with all of the messiness and the uncertainty that is bound to come with that. Whatever you just imagined, it's not mythical, it's not unrealistically idealistic, because teachers all over the country are already pushing the boundaries of what teaching and learning can look like with amazing results for kids. They're doing that in all kinds of schools, and there are countless models for teachers who want to get better at helping students learn in a way that's more authentic and engaging and empowering. I was a reading a book recently, it's called "The Students Are Watching," and it was by Ted and Nancy Sizer, and in that book, they said that the work of education is often described as a series of nouns, like "respect," "honesty," "integrity." And they say those nouns sound really impressive, but often, they fail to actually mean anything in practice. But verbs, they say, are "active, no less demanding but requiring constant engagement. Verbs are not structures but, rather, engines." And so as I read that, I wondered: How do we make justice into an engine driving our work as teachers? What's the verb form of justice? I think there might be an answer to be found in the words of Cornel West, who famously said that "justice is what love looks like in public." And all of my nerdy English teachers in the crowd know that love can be a noun and a verb. School has to be bigger. It has to mean more than "I teach my subject." School has to be about teaching people to change the world for the better. If we believe that, then teaching will always be a political act. We can't be afraid of our students' power. Their power will help them make tomorrow better. But before they can do that, we have to give them chances to practice today. And that practice should start in our schools. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
What really happened to the Library of Alexandria? | null | TED-Ed | 2,300 years ago, the rulers of Alexandria set out to fulfill one of humanity’s most audacious goals: to collect all the knowledge in the world under one roof. In its prime, the Library of Alexandria housed an unprecedented number of scrolls and attracted some of the Greek world’s greatest minds. But by the end of the 5th century CE, the great library had vanished. Many believed it was destroyed in a catastrophic fire. The truth of the library’s rise and fall is much more complex. The idea for the library came from Alexander the Great. After establishing himself as a conqueror, the former student of Aristotle turned his attention to building an empire of knowledge headquartered in his namesake city. He died before construction began, but his successor, Ptolemy I, executed Alexander’s plans for a museum and library. Located in the royal district of the city, the Library of Alexandria may have been built with grand Hellenistic columns, native Egyptian influences, or a unique blend of the two—there are no surviving accounts of its architecture. We do know it had lecture halls, classrooms, and, of course, shelves. As soon as the building was complete, Ptolemy I began to fill it with primarily Greek and Egyptian scrolls. He invited scholars to live and study in Alexandria at his expense. The library grew as they contributed their own manuscripts, but the rulers of Alexandria still wanted a copy of every book in the world. Luckily, Alexandria was a hub for ships traveling through the Mediterranean. Ptolemy III instituted a policy requiring any ship that docked in Alexandria to turn over its books for copying. Once the Library’s scribes had duplicated the texts, they kept the originals and sent the copies back to the ships. Hired book hunters also scoured the Mediterranean in search of new texts, and the rulers of Alexandria attempted to quash rivals by ending all exports of the Egyptian papyrus used to make scrolls. These efforts brought hundreds of thousands of books to Alexandria. As the library grew, it became possible to find information on more subjects than ever before, but also much more difficult to find information on any specific subject. Luckily, a scholar named Callimachus of Cyrene set to work on a solution, creating the pinakes, a 120-volume catalog of the library’s contents, the first of its kind. Using the pinakes, others were able to navigate the Library’s swelling collection. They made some astounding discoveries. 1,600 years before Columbus set sail, Eratosthenes not only realized the earth was round, but calculated its circumference and diameter within a few miles of their actual size. Heron of Alexandria created the world’s first steam engine over a thousand years before it was finally reinvented during the Industrial Revolution. For about 300 years after its founding in 283 BCE, the library thrived. But then, in 48 BCE, Julius Caesar laid siege to Alexandria and set the ships in the harbor on fire. For years, scholars believed the library burned as the blaze spread into the city. It's possible the fire destroyed part of the sprawling collection, but we know from ancient writings that scholars continued to visit the library for centuries after the siege. Ultimately, the library slowly disappeared as the city changed from Greek, to Roman, Christian, and eventually Muslim hands. Each new set of rulers viewed its contents as a threat rather than a source of pride. In 415 CE, the Christian rulers even had a mathematician named Hypatia murdered for studying the library’s ancient Greek texts, which they viewed as blasphemous. Though the Library of Alexandria and its countless texts are long gone, we’re still grappling with the best ways to collect, access, and preserve our knowledge. There’s more information available today and more advanced technology to preserve it, though we can’t know for sure that our digital archives will be more resistant to destruction than Alexandria’s ink and paper scrolls. And even if our reservoirs of knowledge are physically secure, they will still have to resist the more insidious forces that tore the library apart: fear of knowledge, and the arrogant belief that the past is obsolete. The difference is that, this time, we know what to prepare for. |
The little risks you can take to increase your luck | {0: 'Tina Seelig teaches innovation and entrepreneurship and is passionate about creative problem-solving.'} | TED Salon Brightline Initiative | I've spent nearly two decades observing what makes people luckier than others and trying to help people increase their luck. You see, I teach entrepreneurship, and we all know that most new ventures fail, and innovators and entrepreneurs need all the luck they can get. So what is luck? Luck is defined as success or failure apparently caused by chance. Apparently. That's the operative word. It looks like it's chance because we rarely see all the levers that come into play to make people lucky. But I've realized, by watching so long, that luck is rarely a lightning strike, isolated and dramatic. It's much more like the wind, blowing constantly. Sometimes it's calm, and sometimes it blows in gusts, and sometimes it comes from directions that you didn't even imagine. So how do you catch the winds of luck? It's easy, but it's not obvious. So I'm going to share three things with you that you can do to build a sail to capture the winds of luck. The first thing you want to do is to change your relationship with yourself. Be willing to take small risks that get you out of your comfort zone. Now, when we're children, we do this all the time. We have to do this if we're going to learn how to walk or talk or ride a bike or even quantum mechanics. Right? We need to go from someone one week who doesn't ride a bike to, next week, someone who does. And this requires us to get out of our comfort zone and take some risks. The problem is, as we get older, we rarely do this. We sort of lock down the sense of who we are and don't stretch anymore. Now, with my students, I spend a lot of time giving them encouragement to get out of their comfort zone and take some risks. How do I do this? Well, I start out by having them fill out a risk-o-meter. Now, it's basically a fun thing we developed in our class where they map out what risks they're willing to take. And it becomes clear very quickly to them that risk-taking is not binary. There are intellectual risks and physical risks and financial risks and emotional risks and social risks and ethical risks and political risks. And once they do this, they compare their risk profiles with others, and they quickly realize that they're all really different. I then encourage them to stretch, to take some risks that get them out of their comfort zone. For example, I might ask them to do an intellectual risk and try to tackle a problem they haven't tried before; or a social risk, talking to someone sitting next to them on the train; or an emotional risk, maybe telling someone they really care about how they feel. I do this myself all the time. About a dozen years ago, I was on an airplane, early, early morning flight on my way to Ecuador. And normally, I would just put on my headphones and go to sleep, wake up, do some work, but I decided to take a little risk, and I started a conversation with the man sitting next to me. I introduced myself, and I learned that he was a publisher. Interesting. We ended up having a fascinating conversation. I learned all about the future of the publishing industry. So about three quarters of the way through the flight, I decided to take another risk, and I opened up my laptop and I shared with him a book proposal I put together for something I was doing in my class. And he was very polite, he read it, and he said, "You know what, Tina, this isn't right for us, but thank you so much for sharing." It's OK. That risk didn't work out. I shut my laptop. At the end of the flight, we exchanged contact information. A couple of months later, I reached out to him, and I said, "Mark, would you like to come to my class? I'm doing a project on reinventing the book, the future of publishing." And he said, "Great. I'd love to come." So he came to my class. We had a great experience. A few months later, I wrote to him again. This time, I sent him a bunch of video clips from another project my students had done. He was so intrigued by one of the projects the students had done, he thought there might be a book in it, and he wanted to meet those students. I have to tell you, I was a little bit hurt. (Laughter) I mean, he wanted to do a book with my students and not with me, but OK, it's all right. So I invited him to come down, and he and his colleagues came to Stanford and met with the students, and afterwards, we had lunch together. And one of his editors said to me, "Hey, have you ever considered writing a book?" I said, "Funny you should ask." And I pulled out the exact same proposal that I had showed his boss a year earlier. Within two weeks, I had a contract, and within two years, the book had sold over a million copies around the world. (Applause) Now, you might say, "Oh, you're so lucky." But of course I was lucky, but that luck resulted from a series of small risks I took, starting with saying hello. And anyone can do this, no matter where you are in your life, no matter where you are in the world — even if you think you're the most unlucky person, you can do this by taking little risks that get you out of your comfort zone. You start building a sail to capture luck. The second thing you want to do is to change your relationship with other people. You need to understand that everyone who helps you on your journey is playing a huge role in getting you to your goals. And if you don't show appreciation, not only are you not closing the loop, but you're missing an opportunity. When someone does something for you, they're taking that time that they could be spending on themselves or someone else, and you need to acknowledge what they're doing. Now, I run three fellowship programs at Stanford, and they are very competitive to get into, and when I send out the letters to those students who don't get in, I always know there are going to be people who are disappointed. Some of the people who are disappointed send me notes, complaining. Some of them send notes saying what could I do to make myself more successful next time around? And every once in a while, someone sends me a note thanking me for the opportunity. This happened about seven years ago. A young man named Brian sent me a beautiful note saying, "I know I've been rejected from this program twice, but I want to thank you for the opportunity. I learned so much through the process of applying." I was so taken by the graciousness of his message that I invited him to come and meet me. And we spent some time chatting and cooked up an idea for an independent study project together. He was on the football team at Stanford, and he decided to do a project on looking at leadership in that context. We got to know each other incredibly well through that quarter, and he took the project that he started working on in the independent study and turned it, ultimately, into a company called Play for Tomorrow, where he teaches kids from disadvantaged backgrounds how to, essentially, craft the lives they dream to live. Now, the important thing about this story is that we both ended up catching the winds of luck as a result of his thank-you note. But it was the winds that we didn't expect in the first place. Over the course of the last couple of years, I've come up with some tactics for my own life to help me really foster appreciation. My favorite is that at the end of every single day, I look at my calendar and I review all the people I met with, and I send thank-you notes to every single person. It only takes a few minutes, but at the end of every day, I feel incredibly grateful and appreciative, and I promise you it has increased my luck. So first, you need to take some risks and get out of your comfort zone. Second, you need to show appreciation. And third, you want to change your relationship with ideas. Most people look at new ideas that come there way and they judge them. "That's a great idea" or "That's a terrible idea." But it's actually much more nuanced. Ideas are neither good or bad. And in fact, the seeds of terrible ideas are often something truly remarkable. One of my favorite exercises in my classes on creativity is to help students foster an attitude of looking at terrible ideas through the lens of possibilities. So I give them a challenge: to create an idea for a brand new restaurant. They have to come up with the best ideas for a new restaurant and the worst ideas for a new restaurant. So the best ideas are things like a restaurant on a mountaintop with a beautiful sunset, or a restaurant on a boat with a gorgeous view. And the terrible ideas are things like a restaurant in a garbage dump, or a restaurant with terrible service that's really dirty, or a restaurant that serves cockroach sushi. (Laughter) So they hand all the ideas to me, I read the great ideas out loud, and then I rip them up and throw them away. I then take the horrible ideas and redistribute them. Each team now has an idea that another team thought was horrible, and their challenge is to turn it into something brilliant. Here's what happens. Within about 10 seconds, someone says, "This is a fabulous idea." And they have about three minutes before they pitch the idea to the class. So the restaurant in the garbage dump? What does that turn into? Well, they collect all the extra food from Michelin star restaurants that was going to get thrown out, and they have another restaurant at a much lower price, with all the leftovers. Pretty cool? Or the restaurant that's dirty with terrible service? Well, that turns into a restaurant that's a training ground for future restauranteurs to figure out how to avoid all the pitfalls. And the restaurant with cockroach sushi? It turns into a sushi bar with all sorts of really interesting and exotic ingredients. If you look around at the companies, the ventures that are really innovative around you, the ones that we now take for granted that have changed our life, well, you know what? They all started out as crazy ideas. They started ideas that when they pitched to other people, most people said, "That's crazy, it will never work." So, yes, sometimes people were born into terrible circumstances, and sometimes, luck is a lightning bolt that hits us with something wonderful or something terrible. But the winds of luck are always there, and if you're willing to take some risks, if you're willing to really go out and show appreciation and willing to really look at ideas, even if they're crazy, through the lens of possibilities, you can build a bigger and bigger sail to catch the winds of luck. Thank you. (Applause) |
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