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Why I fight for the education of refugee girls (like me) | {0: 'Mary Maker believes in the power of education to build peace and rebuild lives.'} | TEDxKakumaCamp | We do not choose where to be born. We do not choose who our parents are. But we do choose how we are going to live our lives. I did not choose to be born in South Sudan, a country rife with conflict. I did not choose my name — Nyiriak, which means "war." I've always rejected it and all the legacy it was born into. I choose to be called Mary. As a teacher, I've stood in front of 120 students, so this stage does not intimidate me. My students come from war-torn countries. They're so different from each other, but they have one thing in common: they fled their homes in order to stay alive. Some of them belong to parents back home in South Sudan who are killing each other because they belong to a different tribe or they have a different belief. Others come from other African countries devastated by war. But when they enter my class, they make friends, they walk home together, they do their homework together. There is no hatred allowed in my class. My story is like that of so many other refugees. The war came when I was still a baby. And my father, who had been absent in most of my early childhood, was doing what other men were doing: fighting for the country. He had two wives and many children. My mother was his second wife, married to him at the age of 16. This is simply because my mother came from a poor background, and she had no choice. My father, on the other hand, was rich. He had many cows. Gunshots were the order of the day. My community was constantly under attack. Communities would fight each other as they took water along the Nile. But that was not all. Planes would drop the spinning and terrifying bombs that chopped off people's limbs. But the most terrifying thing for every single parent was to see their children being abducted and turned into young soldiers. My mother dug a trench that soon became our home. But yet, we did not feel protected. She had to flee in search of a safe place for us. I was four years old, and my younger sister was two. We joined a huge mass of people, and together we walked for many agonizing days in search of a secure place. But we could barely rest before we were attacked again. I remember my mother was pregnant, when she would take turns to carry me and my younger sister. We finally made it across the Kenyan border, yes. But that was the longest journey that I have ever had in my whole life. My feet were raw with blisters. To our surprise, we found other family members who had fled into the camp earlier on, where you all are today, the Kakuma camp. Now, I want you all to be very quiet just for a moment. Do you hear that? The sound of silence. No gunshots. Peace, at last. That was my first memory of this camp. When you move from a war zone and come to a secure place like Kakuma, you've really gone far. I only stayed in the camp for three years, though. My father, who had been absent in most of my early childhood, came back into my life. And he organized for me to move with my uncle to our family in Nakuru. There, I found my father's first wife, my half sisters and my half brothers. I got enrolled in school. I remember my first day in school — I could sing and laugh again — and my first set of school uniforms, you bet. It was amazing. But then I came to realize that my uncle did not find it fit for me to go to school, simply because I was a girl. My half brothers were his first priority. He would say, "Educating a girl is a waste of time." And for that reason, I missed many days of school, because the fees were not paid. My father stepped in and organized for me to go to boarding school. I remember the faith that he put in me over the couple of years to come. He would say, "Education is an animal that you have to overcome. With an education, you can survive. Education shall be your first husband." And with these words came in his first big investment. I felt lucky! But I was missing something: my mother. My mother had been left behind in the camp, and I had not seen her since I left it. Six years without seeing her was really long. I was alone, in school, when I heard of her death. I've seen many people back in South Sudan lose their lives. I've heard from neighbors lose their sons, their husbands, their children. But I never thought that that would ever come into my life. A month earlier, my stepmother, who had been so good to me back in Nakuru, died first. Then I came to realize that after giving birth to four girls, my mother had finally given birth to something that could have made her be accepted into the community — a baby boy, my baby brother. But he, too, joined the list of the dead. The most hurting part for me was the fact that I wasn't able to attend my mother's burial. I wasn't allowed. They said her family did not find it fit for her children, who are all girls, to attend her burial, simply because we were girls. They would lament to me and say, "We are sorry, Mary, for your loss. We are sorry that your parents never left behind any children." And I would wonder: What are we? Are we not children? In the mentality of my community, only the boy child counted. And for that reason, I knew this was the end of me. But I was the eldest girl. I had to take care of my siblings. I had to ensure they went to school. I was 13 years old. How could I have made that happen? I came back to the camp to take care of my siblings. I've never felt so stuck. But then, one of my aunts, Auntie Okoi, decided to take my sisters. My father sent me money from Juba for me to go back to school. Boarding school was heaven, but it was also so hard. I remember during the visiting days when parents would come to school, and my father would miss. But when he did come, he repeated the same faith in me. This time he would say, "Mary, you cannot go astray, because you are the future of your siblings." But then, in 2012, life took away the only thing that I was clinging on. My father died. My grades in school started to collapse, and when I sat for my final high school exams in 2015, I was devastated to receive a C grade. OK, I keep telling students in my class, "It's not about the A's; it's about doing your best." That was not my best. I was determined. I wanted to go back and try again. But my parents were gone. I had no one to take care of me, and I had no one to pay that fee. I felt so hopeless. But then, one of my best friends, a beautiful Kenyan lady, Esther Kaecha, called me during this devastating moment, and she was like, "Mary, you have a strong will. And I have a plan, and it's going to work." OK, when you're in those devastating moments, you accept anything, right? So the plan was, she organized some travel money for us to travel to Anester Victory Girls High School. I remember that day so well. It was raining when we entered the principal's office. We were shaking like two chickens that had been rained on, and we looked at him. He was asking, "What do you want?" And we looked at him with the cat face. "We just want to go back to school." Well, believe it or not, he not only paid our school fees but also our uniform and pocket money for food. Clap for him. (Applause) When I finished my high school career, I became the head girl. And when I sat for the KCSE for a second time, I was able to receive a B minus. Clap. (Applause) Thank you. So I really want to say thank you to Anester Victory, Mr. Gatimu and the whole Anester fraternity for giving me that chance. From time to time, members of my family will insist that my sister and I should get married so that somebody will take care of us. They will say, "We have a man for you." I really hate the fact that people took us as property rather than children. Sometimes they will jokingly say, "You are going to lose your market value the more educated you become." But the truth is, an educated woman is feared in my community. But I told them, this is not what I want. I don't want to get kids at 16 like my mother did. This is not my life. Even though my sisters and I are suffering, there's no way we are heading in that direction. I refuse to repeat history. Educating a girl will create equal and stable societies. And educated refugees will be the hope of rebuilding their countries someday. Girls and women have a part to play in this just as much as men. Well, we have men in my family that encourage me to move on: my half brothers and also my half sisters. When I finished my high school career, I moved my sisters to Nairobi, where they live with my stepsister. They live 17 people in a house. But don't pity us. The most important thing is that they all get a decent education. The winners of today are the losers of yesterday, but who never gave up. And that is who we are, my sisters and I. And I'm so proud of that. My biggest investment in life — (Applause) is the education of my sisters. Education creates an equal and fair chance for everyone to make it. I personally believe education is not all about the syllabus. It's about friendship. It's about discovering our talents. It's about discovering our destiny. I will, for example, not forget the joy that I had when I first had singing lessons in school, which is still a passion of mine. But I wouldn't have gotten that anywhere else. As a teacher, I see my classroom as a laboratory that not only generates skills and knowledge but also understanding and hope. Let's take a tree. A tree may have its branches cut, but give it water, and it will grow new branches. For the child of war, an education can turn their tears of loss into a passion for peace. And for that reason, I refuse to give up on a single student in my class. (Applause) Education heals. The school environment gives you a focus to focus ahead. Let's take it this way: when you're busy solving mathematical equations, and you are memorizing poetry, you forget the violence that you witnessed back home. And that is the power of education. It creates this place for peace. Kakuma is teeming with learners. Over 85,000 students are enrolled in schools here, which makes up 40 percent of the refugee population. It includes children who lost years of education because of the war back home. And I want to ask you a question: If education is about building a generation of hope, why are there 120 students packed in my classroom? Why is it that only six percent of the primary school students are making it to high school, simply because we do not have enough places for them? And why is it that only one percent of the secondary school graduates are making it to university? I began by saying that I am a teacher. But once again, I have become a student. In March, I moved to Rwanda on a scholarship program called "Bridge2Rwanda." It prepares scholars for universities. They are able to get a chance to compete for universities abroad. I am now having teachers telling me what to do, instead of the other way round. People are once again investing in me. So I want to ask you all to invest in young refugees. Think of the tree that we mentioned earlier. We are the generation to plant it, so that the next generation can water it, and the one that follows will enjoy the shade. They will reap the benefits. And the greatest benefit of them all is an education that will last. Thank you. (Applause) |
What a scrapyard in Ghana can teach us about innovation | {0: 'DK Osseo-Asare creates architecture with and for the people that design overlooks.'} | TEDGlobal 2017 | Come with me to Agbogbloshie, a neighborhood in the heart of Accra, named after a god that lives in the Odaw River. There's a slum, Old Fadama, built on land reclaimed from the Korle Lagoon, just before it opens into the Gulf of Guinea. There's a scrapyard here where people take apart all kinds of things, from mobile phones to computers, automobiles to even entire airplanes. Agbogbloshie's scrapyard is famous because it has become a symbol of the downside of technology: the problem of planned obsolescence. It's seen as a place where devices from around the world end their life, where your data comes to die. These are the images that the media loves to show, of young men and boys burning wires and cables to recover copper and aluminum, using Styrofoam and old tires as fuel, seriously hurting themselves and the environment. It's a super-toxic process, producing pollutants that enter the global ecosystem, build up in fatty tissue and threaten the top of the food chain. But this story is incomplete. There's a lot we can learn from Agbogbloshie, where scrap collected from city- and nationwide is brought. For so many of us, our devices are black boxes. We know what they do, but not how they work or what's inside. In Agbogbloshie, people make it their business to know exactly what's inside. Scrap dealers recover copper, aluminum, steel, glass, plastic and printed circuit boards. It's called "urban mining." It's now more efficient for us to mine materials from our waste. There is 10 times more gold, silver, platinum, palladium in one ton of our electronics than in one ton of ore mined from beneath the surface of the earth. In Agbogbloshie, weight is a form of currency. Devices are dissected to recover materials, parts and components with incredible attention to detail, down to the aluminum tips of electric plugs. But scrap dealers don't destroy components that are still functional. They supply them to repair workshops like this one in Agbogbloshie and the tens of thousands of technicians across the country that refurbish electrical and electronic equipment, and sell them as used products to consumers that may not be able to buy a new television or a new computer. Make no mistake about it, there are young hackers in Agbogbloshie — and I mean that in the very best sense of that word — that know not only how to take apart computers but how to put them back together, how to give them new life. Agbogbloshie reminds us that making is a cycle. It extends to remaking and unmaking in order to recover the materials that enable us to make something anew. We can learn from Agbogbloshie, where cobblers remake work boots, where women collect plastic from all over the city, sort it by type, shred it, wash it and ultimately sell it back as feedstock to factories to make new clothing, new plastic buckets and chairs. Steel is stockpiled separately, where the carcasses of cars and microwaves and washing machines become iron rods for new construction; where roofing sheets become cookstoves; where shafts from cars become chisels that are used to scrap more objects; where aluminum recovered from the radiators of fridges and air conditioners are melted down and use sand casting to make ornaments for the building industry, for pots which are sold just down the street in the Agbogbloshie market with a full array of locally made ovens, stoves and smokers, which are used every day to make the majority of palm nut soups, of tea and sugar breads, of grilled tilapia in the city. They're made in roadside workshops like this one by welders like Mohammed, who recover materials from the waste stream and use them to make all kinds of things, like dumbbells for working out out of old car parts. But here's what's really cool: the welding machines they use look like this, and they're made by specially coiling copper around electrical steel recovered from old transformer scrap. There's an entire industry just next to Agbogbloshie making locally fabricated welding machines that power local fabrication. What's really cool as well is that there's a transfer of skills and knowledge across generations, from masters to apprentices, but it's done through active learning, through heuristic learning, learning by doing and by making. And this stands in sharp contrast to the experience of many students in school, where lecturers lecture, and students write things down and memorize them. It's boring, but the real problem is this somehow preempts their latent or their inherent entrepreneurial power. They know books but not how to make stuff. Four years ago, my cofounder Yasmine Abbas and I asked: What would happen if we could couple the practical know-how of makers in the informal sector with the technical knowledge of students and young professionals in STEAM fields — science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics — to build a STEAM-powered innovation engine to drive what we call "Sankofa Innovation," which I'll explain. We took forays into the scrapyard to look for what could be repurposed, like DVD writers that could become laser etchers, or the power supplies of old servers for a start-up in Kumasi making 3D printers out of e-waste. The key was to bring together young people from different backgrounds that ordinarily never have anything to do with each other, to have a conversation about how they could collaborate and to test and develop new machines and tools that could allow them to shred and strip copper instead of burning it, to mold plastic bricks and tiles, to build new computers out of components recovered from dead electronics, to build a drone. And here you can see it flying for the first time in Agbogbloshie. (Applause) Yasmine and I have collaborated with over 1,500 young people, 750 from STEAM fields, and over 750 grassroots makers and scrap dealers from Agbogbloshie and beyond. They've joined hands together to develop a platform which they call Spacecraft, a hybrid physical and digital space for crafting, more of a process than a product, an open architecture for making, which involves three parts: a makerspace kiosk, which is prefab and modular; tool kits which can be customized based on what makers want to make; and a trading app. We built the app specifically with the needs of the scrap dealers in mind first, because we realized that it was not enough to arm them with information and upgraded technology if we wanted them to green their recycling processes; they needed incentives. Scrap dealers are always looking for new scrap and new buyers and what interests them is finding buyers who will pay more for clean copper than for burnt. We realized that in the entire ecosystem, everyone was searching for something. Makers are searching for materials, parts, components, tools, blueprints to make what it is they want to make. They're also finding a way to let customers and clientele find out that they can repair a blender or fix an iron or, as we learned yesterday, to make a french fry machine. On the flip side, you find that there are end users that are desperately looking for someone that can make them a french fry machine, and you have scrap dealers who are looking how they can collect this scrap, process it, and turn it back into an input for new making. We tried to untangle that knot of not knowing to allow people to find what they need to make what they want to make. We prototyped the makerspace kiosk in Agbogbloshie, conceived as the opposite of a school: a portal into experiential and experimental making that connects local and global and connects making with remaking and unmaking. We made a rule that everything had to be made from scratch using only materials made in Ghana or sourced from the scrapyard. The structures essentially are simple trusses which bolt together. It takes about two hours to assemble one module with semi-skilled labor, and by developing tooling and jigs and rigs, we were able to actually build these standardized parts within this ecosystem of artisanal welders with the precision of one millimeter — of course, using made-in-Agbogbloshie welding machines, as well as for the tools, which can lock, the toolboxes, and stack to make workbenches, and again, customized based on what you want to make. We've tested the app in Agbogbloshie and are getting ready to open it up to other maker ecosystems. In six months, we'll have finished three years of testing the makerspace kiosk, which I have to admit, we've subjected to some pretty horrific abuse. But it's for a good cause, because based on the results of that testing, we've been able to redesign an upgraded version of this makerspace. If a fab lab is large, expensive, and fixed in place, think of this as the counterpoint: something low-cost, which can be locally manufactured, which can be expanded and kitted out incrementally as makers acquire resources. You can think of it as a toolshed, where makers can come and check out tools and take them via handcart to wherever they want in the city to make what it is they want to make. And moving into the next phase, we're planning to also add ceiling-mounted CNC bots, which allow makers to cocreate together with robots. Ultimately, this is a kit of parts, which can be assembled locally within the informal sector using standardized parts which can be upgraded collectively through an open-source process. In totality, this entire makerspace system tries to do five things: to enable emerging makers to gather the resources they need and the tools to make what they want to make; to learn by doing and from others; to produce more and better products; to be able to trade to generate steady income; and ultimately, to amplify not only their reputation as a maker, but their maker potential. Sankofa is one of the most powerful Adinkra symbols of the Akan peoples in Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire, and it can be represented as a bird reaching onto its back to collect an egg, a symbol of power. It translates literally from the Twi as "return and get it," and what this means is that if an individual or a community or a society wants to have a successful future, they have to draw on the past. To acquire and master existing ways of doing, access the knowledge of their ancestors. And this is very relevant if we want to think about an inclusive future for Africa today. We have to start from the ground up, mining what already works for methods and for models, and to think about how might we be able to connect, in a kind of "both-and," not "either-or" paradigm, the innovation capacity of this growing network of tech hubs and incubators across the continent and to rethink beyond national boundaries and political boundaries, to think about how we can network innovation in Africa with the spirit of Sankofa and the existing capacity of makers at the grassroots. If, in the future, someone tells you Agbogbloshie is the largest e-waste dump in the world, I hope you can correct them and explain to them that a dump is a place where you throw things away and leave them forever; a scrapyard is where you take things apart. Waste is something that no longer has any value, whereas scrap is something that you recover specifically to use it to remake something new. Making is a cycle, and African makerspaces are already pioneering and leading circular economy at the grassroots. Let's make more and better together. Thank you. (Applause) |
Zen kōans: unsolvable enigmas designed to break your brain | null | TED-Ed | How do we explain the unexplainable? This question has inspired numerous myths, religious practices, and scientific inquiries. But Zen Buddhists practicing throughout China from the 9th to 13th century asked a different question – why do we need an explanation? For these monks, blindly seeking answers was a vice to overcome, and learning to accept the mysteries of existence was the true path to enlightenment. But fighting the urge to explain the unexplainable can be difficult. So to help practice living with these mysteries, the meditating monks used a collection of roughly 1,700 bewildering and ambiguous philosophical thought experiments called kōans. The name, originally gong-an in Chinese, translates to “public record or case." But unlike real-world court cases, kōans were intentionally incomprehensible. They were surprising, surreal, and frequently contradicted themselves. On the surface, they contained a proverb about the Zen Buddhist monastic code - such as living without physical or mental attachments, avoiding binary thinking, and realizing one’s true “Buddha-nature." But by framing those lessons as illogical anecdotes, they became tests to help practicing monks learn to live with ambiguity and paradox. By puzzling through these confusing “cases," meditating monks could both internalize and practice Buddhist teachings. Hopefully, they would let go of the search for one true answer and trigger a spiritual breakthrough. Since these are intentionally unexplainable, it would be misguided to try and decipher these stories ourselves. But like the monks before us, we can puzzle over them together, and investigate just how resistant they are to simple explanations. Consider this kōan illustrating the practice of no-attachment. Two monks, Tanzan and Ekido, are traveling together down a muddy road. Ahead they see an attractive traveler, unable to cross the muddy path. Tanzan politely offers his help, carrying the traveler on his back across the street, and placing her down without a word. Ekido was shocked. According to monastic law, monks were not supposed to go near women, let alone touch a beautiful stranger. After miles of walking, Ekido could no longer restrain himself. “How could you carry that woman?” Tanzan smiled, “I left the traveler there. Are you still carrying her?” Like all kōans, this story has numerous interpretations. But one popular reading suggests that despite never having physically carried the traveler, Ekido broke monastic law by mentally "clinging to" the woman. This type of conflict – examining the grey area between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law – was common in kōans. In addition to exploring ambiguity, kōans often ridiculed characters claiming total understanding of the world around them. One such example finds three monks debating a temple flag rippling in the wind. The first monk refers to the flag as a moving banner, while the second monk insists that they are not seeing the flag move, but rather the wind blowing. They argue back and forth, until finally, a third monk intervenes, “It is not the flag moving, nor the wind blowing, but rather the movement of your minds!” One interpretation of this kōan plays on the supposed wisdom of the arguing monks – the first asserting the importance of the observable world, the second favoring deeper knowledge we can infer from that world. But each monk’s commitment to his own “answer” blinds him to the other’s insight, and in doing so, defies an essential Buddhist ideal: abolishing binary thinking. The third monk identifies their conflict as a perceptual one – both arguing monks fail to see the larger picture. Of course, all these interpretations only hint at how to wrestle with these kōans. Neither the wisdom from practicing monks before us, nor the supposedly wise characters in these stories can resolve them for you. That’s because the purpose of these kōans isn’t reaching a simple solution. It’s the very act of struggling with these paradoxical puzzles which challenge our desire for resolution, and our understanding of understanding itself. |
How cancer cells communicate -- and how we can slow them down | {0: 'Hasini Jayatilaka discovered a novel mechanism that causes cancer cells to break away from tumors and metastasize.'} | TEDxMidAtlantic | Cancer. It's a devastating disease that takes an enormous emotional toll. Not only on the patient, but the patient's loved ones, as well. It is a battle that the human race has been fighting for centuries. And while we've made some advancements, we still haven't beaten it. Two out of five people in the US will develop cancer in their lifetime. Of those, 90 percent will succumb to the disease due to metastases. Metastasis is a spread of cancer from a primary site to a distal site, through the circulatory or the lymphatic system. For instance, a female patient with breast cancer doesn't succumb to the disease simply because she has a mass on her breast. She succumbs to the disease because it spreads to the lungs, liver, lymph nodes, brain, bone, where it becomes unresectable or untreatable. Metastasis is a complicated process. One that I've studied for several years now. And something that my team and I discovered recently was that cancer cells are able to communicate with each other and coordinate their movement, based on how closely packed they are in the tumor microenvironment. They communicate with each other through two signaling molecules called Interleukin-6 and Interleukin-8. Now, like anything else in nature, when things get a little too tight, the signal is enhanced, causing the cancer cells to move away faster from the primary site and spread to a new site. So, if we block this signal, using a drug cocktail that we developed, we can stop the communication between cancer cells and slow down the spread of cancer. Let me pause here for a second and take you back to when this all began for me in 2010, when I was just a sophomore in college. I had just started working in Dr Danny Wirtz's lab at Johns Hopkins University. And I'll be honest: I was a young, naive, Sri Lankan girl, (Laughter) who had no previous research experience. And I was tasked to look at how cancer cells move in a 3D collagen I matrix that recapsulated, in a dish, the conditions that cancer cells are exposed to in our bodies. This was new and exciting for me, because previous work had been done on 2D, flat, plastic dishes that really weren't representative of what the cancer cells are exposed to in our bodies. Because, let's face it, the cancer cells in our bodies aren't stuck onto plastic dishes. It was during this time that I attended a seminar conducted by Dr Bonnie Bassler from Princeton University, where she talked about how bacteria cells communicate with each other, based on their population density, and perform a specific action. It was at this moment that a light bulb went off in my head, and I thought, "Wow, I see this in my cancer cells every day, when it comes to their movement." The idea for my project was thus born. I hypothesized that cancer cells are able to communicate with each other and coordinate their movement, based on how closely packed they are in the tumor microenvironment. I became obsessed with pursuing this hypothesis. And fortunately, I work for someone who is open to running with my crazy ideas. So, I threw myself into this project. However, I couldn't do it by myself. I needed help. I definitely needed help. So we recruited undergraduate students, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and professors from different institutions and multiple disciplines to come together and work on this idea that I conceived as a sophomore in college. After years of conducting experiments together and merging different ideas and perspectives, we discovered a new signaling pathway that controls how cancer cells communicate with each other and move, based on their cell density. Some of you might have heard this, because most of social media knows it as the Hasini effect. (Laughter) (Applause) And we weren't done yet. We then decided that we wanted to block this signaling pathway and see if we could slow down the spread of cancer. Which we did, in preclinical animal models. We came up with a drug cocktail consisting of tocilizumab, which is currently used to treat rheumatoid arthritis, and reparixin, which is currently in clinical trials against breast cancer. And interestingly, what we found was that this cocktail of drugs really had no effect on tumor growth, but directly targeted metastases. This was a significant finding, because currently, there aren't any FDA-approved therapeutics that directly target the spread of cancer. In fact, the spread of cancer, metastasis, is thought of as a byproduct of tumor growth. Where the idea is, if we can stop the tumor from growing, we can stop the tumor from spreading. However, most of us know that this is not true. We, on the other hand, came up with the drug cocktail that targets metastasis not by targeting tumor growth, but by targeting the complex mechanisms that govern it, through the targeting of the Hasini effect. (Laughter) This work was recently published in "Nature Communications," and my team and I received an overwhelming response from around the world. Nobody on my team could have predicted this sort of response. We seem to have struck a nerve. Looking back, I am extremely grateful for the positive response that I received, not only from academia, but also patients, and people around the world affected by this terrible disease. As I reflect on this success I've encountered with the Hasini effect, I keep coming back to the people that I was fortunate enough to work with. The undergraduate students who demonstrated superhuman powers through their hard work and dedication. The graduate students and the postdoctoral fellows, my fellow Avengers, who taught me new techniques and always made sure I stayed on track. The professors, my Yodas and my Obi-Wan Kenobis, who brought their expertise into making this work into what it is today. The support staff, the friends and family, people who lifted our spirits, and never let us give up on our ambitious endeavors. The best kind of sidekicks we could have asked for. It took a village to help me study metastasis. And believe me, without my village, I wouldn't be here. Today, our team has grown, and we are using the Hasini effect to develop combination therapies that will effectively target tumor growth and metastases. We are engineering new anticancer therapeutics, to limit toxicity and to reduce drug resistance. And we are developing groundbreaking systems that will help for the development of better human clinical trials. It blows my mind to think that all this, the incredible work that I'm pursuing — and the fact that I'm standing here, talking to you today — all came from this tiny idea that I had when I was sitting at the back of a seminar when I was just 20 years old. I recognize that right now, I am on this incredible journey that allows me to pursue work that I am extremely passionate about, and something that feeds my curiosity on a daily basis. But I have to say, my favorite part of all of this — other than, of course, being here, talking to you, today — is the fact that I get to work with a diverse group of people, who make my work stronger, better and just so much more fun. And because of this, I have to say that collaboration is my favorite superhuman power. And what I love about this power is that it's not unique to me. It's within all of us. My work shows that even cancer cells use collaboration to invade our bodies and spread their wrath. For us humans, it is a superpower that has produced incredible discoveries in the medical and scientific field. And it is the superpower that we can all turn to to inspire us to create something bigger than ourselves, that will help make the world a better place. Collaboration is the superpower that I turn to, to help me fight cancer. And I am confident that with the right collaborations, we will beat this terrible disease. Thank you. (Applause) |
How urban spaces can preserve history and build community | {0: 'Walter Hood imagines urban spaces as a new kind of public sculpture -- full of beauty, strangeness and idiosyncrasy.'} | TED2018 | How can landscapes imbue memory? When we think about this notion "e pluribus unum" — "out of many, one," it's a pretty strange concept, right? I mean, with all different races and cultures of people, how do you boil it down to one thing? I want to share with you today this idea of "e pluribus unum" and how our landscape might imbue those memories of diverse perspectives, as well as force us to stop trying to narrow things down to a single, clean set of identities. As an educator, designer, I'd like to share with you five simple concepts that I've developed through my work. And I'd like to share with you five projects where we can begin to see how the memory around us, where things have happened, can actually force us to look at one another in a different way. And lastly: this is not just an American motto anymore. I think e pluribus unum is global. We're in this thing together. First, great things happen when we exist in each other's world — like today, right? The world of community gardens — most of you have probably seen a community garden. They're all about subsistence and food. Right? I'll tell you a little story, what happened in New York more than a decade ago. They tried to sell all of their community gardens, and Bette Midler developed a nonprofit, the New York Restoration Project. They literally brought all the gardens and decided to save them. And then they had another novel idea: let's bring in world-class designers and let them go out into communities and make these beautiful gardens, and maybe they might not just be about food. And so they called me, and I designed one in Jamaica, Queens. And on the way to designing this garden, I went to the New York Restoration Project Office, and I noticed a familiar name on the door downstairs. I go upstairs, and I said, "Do you guys know who is downstairs?" And they said, "Gunit." And I said, "Gunit? You mean G-Unit? Curtis '50 Cent' Jackson?" (Laughter) And they said, "Yeah?" And I said, "Yes." And so we went downstairs, and before you knew it, Curtis, Bette and the rest of them formed this collaboration, and they built this garden in Jamaica, Queens. And it turned out Curtis, 50 Cent, grew up in Jamaica. And so again, when you start bringing these worlds together — me, Curtis, Bette — you get something more incredible. You get a garden that last year was voted one of the top 10 secret gardens in New York. Right? (Applause) It's for young and old, but more importantly, it's a place — there was a story in the Times about six months ago where this young woman found solace in going to the garden. It had nothing to do with me. It had more to do with 50, I'm sure, but it has inspired people to think about gardens and sharing each other's worlds in a different way. This next concept, "two-ness" — it's not as simple as I thought it would be to explain, but as I left to go to college, my father looked at me, and said, "Junior, you're going to have to be both black and white when you go out there." And if you go back to the early parts of the 20th century, W.E.B. Du Bois, the famous activist, said it's this peculiar sensation that the Negro has to walk around being viewed through the lens of other people, and this two-ness, this double consciousness. And I want to argue that more than a hundred years later, that two-ness has made us strong and resilient, and I would say for brown people, women — all of us who have had to navigate the world through the eyes of others — we should now share that strength to the rest of those who have had the privilege to be singular. I'd like to share with you a project, because I do think this two-ness can find itself in the world around us. And it's beginning to happen where we're beginning to share these stories. At the University of Virginia, the academical village by Thomas Jefferson, it's a place that we're beginning to notice now was built by African hands. So we have to begin to say, "OK, how do we talk about that?" As the University was expanding to the south, they found a site that was the house of Kitty Foster, free African American woman. And she was there, and her descendants, they all lived there, and she cleaned for the boys of UVA. But as they found the archaeology, they asked me if I would do a commemorative piece. So the two-ness of this landscape, both black and white ... I decided to do a piece based on shadows and light. And through that, we were able to develop a shadow-catcher that would talk about this two-ness in a different way. So when the light came down, there would be this ride to heaven. When there's no light, it's silent. And in the landscape of Thomas Jefferson, it's a strange thing. It's not made of brick. It's a strange thing, and it allows these two things to be unresolved. And we don't have to resolve these things. I want to live in a world where the resolution — there's an ambiguity between things, because that ambiguity allows us to have a conversation. When things are clear and defined, we forget. The next example? Empathy. And I've heard that a couple of times in this conference, this notion of caring. Twenty-five years ago, when I was a young pup, very optimistic, we wanted to design a park in downtown Oakland, California for the homeless people. And we said, homeless people can be in the same space as people who wear suits. And everyone was like, "That's never going to work. People are not going to eat lunch with the homeless people." We built the park. It cost 1.1 million dollars. We wanted a bathroom. We wanted horseshoes, barbecue pits, smokers, picnic tables, shelter and all of that. We had the design, we went to the then-mayor and said, "Mr. Mayor, it's only going to cost you 1.1 million dollars." And he looked at me. "For homeless people?" And he didn't give us the money. So we walked out, unfettered, and we raised the money. Clorox gave us money. The National Park Service built the bathroom. So we were able to go ahead because we had empathy. Now, 25 years later, we have an even larger homeless problem in the Bay Area. But the park is still there, and the people are still there. So for me, that's a success. And when people see that, hopefully, they'll have empathy for the people under freeways and tents, and why can't our public spaces house them and force us to be empathetic? The image on the left is Lafayette Square Park today. The image on the right is 1906, Golden Gate Park after the earthquake. Why do we have to have cataclysmic events to be empathetic? Our fellow men are out there starving, women sleeping on the street, and we don't see them. Put them in those spaces, and they'll be visible. (Applause) And to show you that there are still people out there with empathy, the Oakland Raiders' Bruce Irvin fries fish every Friday afternoon for anyone who wants it. And by going to that park, that park became the vehicle for him. The traditional belongs to all of us, and this is a simple one. You go into some neighborhoods — beautiful architecture, beautiful parks — but if people look a different way, it's not traditional. It's not until they leave and then new people come in where the traditional gets valued. A little quick story here: 1888 opera house, the oldest in San Francisco, sits in Bayview–Hunters Point. Over its history, it's provided theater, places for businesses, places for community gatherings, etc. It's also a place where Ruth Williams taught many black actors. Think: Danny Glover — came from this place. But over time, with our 1980s federal practices, a lot of these community institutions fell into disrepair. With the San Francisco Arts Council, we were able to raise money and to actually refurbish the place. And we were able to have a community meeting. And within the community meeting, people got up and said, "This place feels like a plantation. Why are we locked in? Why can't we learn theater?" Over the years, people had started putting in chicken coops, hay bales, community gardens and all of these things, and they could not see that traditional thing behind them. But we said, we're bringing the community back. American Disability Act — we were able to get five million dollars. And now, the tradition belongs to these brown and black people, and they use it. And they learn theater, after-school programs. There's no more chickens. But there is art. And lastly, I want to share with you a project that we're currently working on, and I think it will force us all to remember in a really different way. There are lots of things in the landscape around us, and most of the time we don't know what's below the ground. Here in Charleston, South Carolina, a verdant piece of grass. Most people just pass by it daily. But underneath it, it's where they discovered Gadsden’s Wharf. We think more than 40 percent of the African diaspora landed here. How could you forget that? How could you forget? So we dug, dug, and we found the wharf. And so in 2020, Harry Cobb and myself and others are building the International African American Museum. And it will celebrate — (Applause) this place where we know, beneath the ground, thousands died, perished, the food chain of the bay changed. Sharks came closer to the bay. It's where slaves were stored. Imagine this hallowed ground. So in this new design, the ground will erupt, and it will talk about this tension that sits below. The columns and the ground is made of tabby shales scooped up from the Atlantic, a reminder of that awful crossing. And as you make your way through on the other side, you are forced to walk through the remains of the warehouse, where slaves were stored on hot, sultry days, for days, and perished. And you'll have to come face-to-face with the Negro, who worked in the marshes, who was able to, with the sickle-cell trait, able to stand in high waters for long, long days. And at night, it'll be open 24/7, for everybody to experience. But we'll also talk about those other beautiful things that my African ancestors brought with them: a love of landscape, a respect for the spirits that live in trees and rocks and water, the ethnobotanical aspects, the plants that we use for medicinal purposes. But more importantly, we want to remind people in Charleston, South Carolina, of the black bodies, because when you go to Charleston today, the Confederacy is celebrated, probably more than any other city, and you don't have a sense of blackness at all. The Brookes map, which was an image that helped abolitionists see and be merciful for that condition of the crossing, is something that we want to repeat. And I was taken by the conceptuality of this kind of digital print that sits in a museum in Charleston. So we decided to bring the water up on top of the surface, seven feet above tide, and then cast the figures full length, six feet, multiply them across the surface, in tabby, and then allow people to walk across that divide. And hopefully, as people come, the water will drain out, fill up, drain out and fill up. And you'll be forced to come to terms with that memory of place, that memory of that crossing, that at times seems very lucid and clear, but at other times, forces us again to reconcile the scale. And hopefully, as people move through this landscape every day, unreconciled, they'll remember, and hopefully when we remember, e pluribus unum. Thank you. (Applause) |
"Interpassion" / "Ba$$in" | {0: 'Yelle is a French band founded by lead singer Julie Budet and Jean-François Perrier.'} | TED Salon Brightline Initiative | (Music: "Interpassion") Hi, my name is I am the one that tangles up consonants and vowels. I am international. Hello, how are you? Hello, how are you? Hello, how are you? Hello, how — Hey! I speak a little bit — you don't understand, but I speak a little bit and I'm sure you are my friend. You are my friend, You are my friend, You are my friend, You are my — I love people. I think it's great we're all hugging here, as we mix our vowels, and we make the saddle. I appreciate less the consonants of those we haven't sounded. I'm pressing the buzzer; I am interpassionate. Interpassion, Interpassion, Interpassion. I am interpassionate. Interpassion, Interpassion, Interpassion. I am interpassionate. (Music) Good morning. What's your name? Do you know Mafalda? Do you speak Portuguese? Are you from California? Made in China, Made in China, Made in China, Made in China, I love people. I think it's great we're all hugging here, as we mix our vowels, that are making the saddle. I appreciate less the consonants of those we haven't sounded. I'm pressing the buzzer; I am interpassionate. Interpassion, Interpassion, Interpassion, I am interpassionate. Interpassion, Interpassion, Interpassion, I am interpassionate. Interpassion, Interpassion, Interpassion, I am interpassionate. Interpassion, Interpassion, Interpassion, I am interpassionate. (Music) Interpassion, (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) Thank you. Thank you very much. OK. Before leaving you guys with more talks with better English than mine — (Laughter) I would like to see you dance. (Laughter) And especially a section of your body ... your hips. (Laughter) Alright? OK, you know your pelvis is the center of your body and this is the intersection that makes you really strong, alright? (Laughter) OK, so it's super easy. We're going to roll our hips together, OK? So please stand up. (Laughter) It's really easy. You're just going to have to roll your hips like that. (Music: "Ba$$in") Ready? (Music) I'd like to kiss that boy but I don't know how to tell him. Teach me, teach me, teach me, teach me, I'd like to hit on that boy last time I chased him away. Show me, show me, show me, show me. OK! Start with making eyes at him. Start with saying he is cute. Then you to have to roll your hips, roll your hips, roll your hips, roll your hips. I'd like to dance with him, like I were his partner. Teach me, teach me, teach me, teach me. I'd like to make him fall in love with me, as he's looking at my back. Show me, show me, show me. Start with making eyes at him. Start with saying he is cute. Then you have to roll your hips, roll your hips, roll your hips, roll your hip. You have to roll your hips. roll your hips, roll your hips, roll your hips, You have to roll your hips, roll your hips, roll your hips, roll your hips, You have to roll your hips, roll your hips, roll your hips, roll your hips, You have to roll your hips, roll your hips, roll your hips, roll your hips, You have to roll your hips, roll your hips, roll your hips, roll your hips, You have to roll your hips, roll your hips, roll your hips, roll your hips, You've to roll, roll, roll, roll, roll roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll OK! (Music) The weekend in Rome, I have to roll my hips. While I'm eating an apple, I have to roll my hips. Whenever I see a man, I have to roll my hips. roll my hips, roll my hips. roll my hips, roll my hips. (Music) (Clapping) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) (Cheering) Thank you so much. (Applause) Thank you. |
How women in rural India turned courage into capital | {0: 'Chetna Gala Sinha is the founder and chair of the Mann Deshi Bank, aimed at the needs of rural women micro-entrepreneurs in India.'} | TED2018 | I'm here to tell you not just my story but stories of exceptional women from India whom I've met. They continue to inspire me, teach me, guide me in my journey of my life. These are incredible women. They never had an opportunity to go to school, they had no degrees, no travel, no exposure. Ordinary women who did extraordinary things with the greatest of their courage, wisdom and humility. These are my teachers. For the last three decades, I've been working, staying and living in India and working with women in rural India. I was born and brought up in Mumbai. When I was in college, I met Jayaprakash Narayan, famous Gandhian leader who inspired youth to work in rural India. I went into the villages to work in rural India. I was part of land rights movement, farmers' movement and women's movement. On the same line, I ended up in a very small village, fell in love with a young, handsome, dynamic young farmer-leader who was not very educated, but he could pull the crowd. And so in the passion of youth, I married him and left Mumbai, and went to a small village which did not have running water and no toilet. Honestly, my family and friends were horrified. (Laughter) I was staying with my family, with my three children in the village, and one day, a few years later one day, a woman called Kantabai came to me. Kantabai said, "I want to open a saving account. I want to save." I asked Kantabai: "You are doing business of blacksmith. Do you have enough money to save? You are staying on the street. Can you save?" Kantabai was insistent. She said, "I want to save because I want to buy a plastic sheet before the monsoons arrive. I want to save my family from rain." I went with Kantabai to the bank. Kantabai wanted to save 10 rupees a day — less than 15 cents. Bank manager refused to open the account of Kantabai. He said Kantabai's amount is too small and it's not worth his time. Kantabai was not asking any loan from the bank. She was not asking any subsidy or grant from the government. What she was asking was to have a safe place to save her hard-earned money. And that was her right. And I went — I said if banks are not opening the account of Kantabai, why not start the bank which will give an opportunity for women like Kantabai to save? And I applied for the banking license to Reserve Bank of India. (Applause) No, it was not an easy task. Our license was rejected — (Laughter) on the grounds — Reserve Bank said that we cannot issue a license to the bank whose promoting members who are nonliterate. I was terrified. I was crying. And by coming back home, I was continuously crying. I told Kantabai and other women that we couldn't get the license because our women are nonliterate. Our women said, "Stop crying. We will learn to read and write and apply again, so what?" (Applause) We started our literacy classes. Every day our women would come. They were so determined that after working the whole day, they would come to the class and learn to read and write. After five months, we applied again, but this time I didn't go alone. Fifteen women accompanied me to Reserve Bank of India. Our women told the officer of Reserve Bank, "You rejected the license because we cannot read and write. You rejected the license because we are nonliterate." But they said, "There were no schools when we were growing, so we are not responsible for our noneducation." And they said, "We cannot read and write, but we can count." (Laughter) (Applause) And they challenged the officer. "Then tell us to calculate the interest of any principal amount." (Laughter) "If we are unable to do it, don't give us license. Tell your officers to do it without a calculator and see who can calculate faster." (Applause) Needless to say, we got the banking license. (Laughter) (Applause) Today, more than 100,000 women are banking with us and we have more than 20 million dollars of capital. This is all women's savings, women capital, no outside investors asking for a business plan. No. It's our own rural women's savings. (Applause) I also want to say that yes, after we got the license, today Kantabai has her own house and is staying with her family in her own house for herself and her family. (Applause) When we started our banking operations, I could see that our women were not able to come to the bank because they used to lose the working day. I thought if women are not coming to the bank, bank will go to them, and we started doorstep banking. Recently, we starting digital banking. Digital banking required to remember a PIN number. Our women said, "We don't want a PIN number. That's not a good idea." And we tried to explain to them that maybe you should remember the PIN number; we will help you to remember the PIN number. They were firm. They said, "suggest something else," and they — (Laughter) and they said, "What about thumb?" I thought that's a great idea. We'll link that digital banking with biometric, and now women use the digital financial transaction by using the thumb. And you know what they said? They said, "Anybody can steal my PIN number and take away my hard-earned money, but nobody can steal my thumb." (Applause) That reinforced the teaching which I have always learned from women: never provide poor solutions to poor people. They are smart. (Applause) A few months later, another woman came to the bank — Kerabai. She mortgaged her gold and took the loan. I asked Kerabai, "Why are you mortgaging your precious jewelry and taking a loan?" Kerabai said, "Don't you realize that it's a terrible drought? There's no food or fodder for the animals. No water. I'm mortgaging gold to buy food and fodder for my animals." And then she asks me, "Can I mortgage gold and get water?" I had no answer. Kerabai challenged me: "You're working in the village with women and finance, but what if one day there's no water? If you leave this village, with whom are you going to do banking?" Kerabai had a valid question, so in this drought, we decided to start the cattle camp in the area. It's where farmers can bring their animals to one place and get fodder and water. It didn't rain. Cattle camp was extended for 18 months. Kerabai used to move around in the cattle camp and sing the songs of encouragement. Kerabai became very popular. It rained and cattle camp was ended, but after cattle camp ended, Kerabai came to our radio — we have community radio which has more than 100,000 listeners. She said, "I want to have a regular show on the radio." Our radio manager said, "Kerabai, you cannot read and write. How will you write the script?" You know what she replied? "I cannot read and write, but I can sing. What's the big deal?" (Laughter) And today, Kerabai is doing a regular radio program, and not only that, she's become a famous radio jockey and she has been invited by all of the radios, even from Mumbai. She gets the invitation and she does the show. (Applause) Kerabai has become a local celebrity. One day I asked Kerabai, "How did you end up singing?" She said, "Shall I tell you the real fact? When I was pregnant with my first child, I was always hungry. I did not have enough food to eat. I did not have enough money to buy food, and so to forget my hunger, I started singing." So strong and wise, no? I always think that our women overcome so many obstacles — cultural, social, financial — and they find out their ways. I would like to share another story: Sunita Kamble. She has taken a course in a business school, and she has become a veterinary doctor. She's Dalit; she comes from an untouchable caste, but she does artificial insemination in goats. It is a very male-dominated profession and it is all the more difficult for Sunita because Sunita comes from an untouchable caste. But she worked very hard. She did successful goat deliveries in the region and she became a famous goat doctor. Recently, she got a national award. I went to Sunita's house to celebrate — to congratulate her. When I entered the village, I saw a big cutout of Sunita. Sunita was smiling on that picture. I was really surprised to see an untouchable, coming from the village, having a big cutout at the entrance of the village. When I went to her house, I was even more amazed because upper caste leaders — men — were sitting in the house, in her house, and having chai and water, which is very rare in India. Upper caste leaders do not go to an untouchable's house and have chai or water. And they were requesting her to come and address the gathering of the village. Sunita broke centuries-old caste conditioning in India. (Applause) Let me come to what the younger generations do. As I'm standing here — I'm so proud as I stand here, from Mhaswad to Vancouver. Back home, Sarita Bhise — she's not even 16 years old. She's preparing herself — she's a part of our sports program, Champions' program. She's preparing herself to represent India in field hockey. And you know where she's going? She's going to represent in 2020 Olympics, Tokyo. (Applause) Sarita comes from a very poor shepherd community. I am just — I couldn't be more proud of her. There are millions of women like Sarita, Kerabai, Sunita, who can be around you also. They can be all over the world, but at first glance you may think that they do not have anything to say, they do not have anything to share. You would be so wrong. I am so lucky that I'm working with these women. They are sharing their stories with me, they are sharing their wisdom with me, and I'm just lucky to be with them. 20 years before — and I'm so proud — we went to Reserve Bank of India and we set up the first rural women's bank. Today they are pushing me to go to National Stock Exchange to set up the first fund dedicated to micro rural women entrepreneurs. They are pushing me to set up the first small finance women's bank in the world. And as one of them said, "My courage is my capital." And I say here, their courage is my capital. And if you want, it can be yours also. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why the "wrong side of the tracks" is usually the east side of cities | {0: 'Stephen DeBerry uses the economy and culture to build a more just and joyful society.'} | TED2018 | I came to talk about first principles and communities that I love — especially East Palo Alto, California, which is full of amazing people. It's also a community that's oddly separated by the 101 freeway that runs through Silicon Valley. On the west side of the freeway in Palo Alto are the "haves," on just about any dimension you can think of: education, income, access to water. On the east side of the freeway are the "have-nots." And even if you don't know East Palo Alto, you might know the story of eastside disparity, whether it's the separation of the railroad tracks in East Pittsburgh or the Grosse Pointe Gate in East Detroit or East St. Louis, East Oakland, East Philly. Why is it that communities on the social, economic and environmental margin tend to be on the east sides of places? Turns out, it's the wind. If you look at the Earth from the North Pole, you'd see that it rotates counterclockwise. The impact of this is that the winds in the northern and the southern hemispheres blow in the same direction as the rotation of the Earth — to the east. A way to think about this is: imagine you're sitting around a campfire. You've got to seat 10 people, you've got to keep everyone warm. The question is: Who sits with the smoky wind blowing in their face? And the answer is: people with less power. This campfire dynamic is what's playing out in cities, not just in the US, but all around the world: East London; the east side of Paris is this way; East Jerusalem. Even down the street from where we're sitting right now, the marginalized community is East Vancouver. I'm not the only one to notice this. I nerded on this hard, for years. And I finally found a group of economic historians in the UK who modeled industrial-era smokestack dispersion. And they came to the same conclusion mathematically that I'd come to as an anthropologist, which is: wind and pollution are driving marginalized communities to the east. The dominant logic of the industrial era is about disparity. It's about haves and have-nots, and that's become part of our culture. That's why you know exactly what I'm talking about if I tell you someone's from the "wrong side of the tracks." That phrase comes from the direction that wind would blow dirty train smoke — to the east, usually. I'm not saying every single community in the east is on the margin, or every community on the margin is in the east, but I'm trying to make a bigger point about disparity by design. So if you find yourself talking about any cardinal direction of a freeway, a river, some train tracks, you're talking about an eastside community. Now, the wind is obviously a natural phenomenon. But the human design decisions that we make to separate ourselves is not natural. Consider the fact that every eastside community in the United States was built during the era of legal segregation. We clearly weren't even trying to design for the benefit of everyone, so we ended up dealing with issues like redlining. This is where the government literally created maps to tell bankers where they shouldn't lend. These are some of those actual maps. And you'll notice how the red tends to be clustered on the east sides of these cities. Those financial design decisions became a self-fulfilling prophecy: no loans turned into low property tax base and that bled into worse schools and a less well-prepared workforce, and — lo and behold — lower incomes. It means that you can't qualify for a loan. Just a vicious downward spiral. And that's just the case with lending. We've made similarly sinister design decisions on any number of issues, from water infrastructure to where we decide to place grocery stores versus liquor stores, or even for whom and how we design and fund technology products. Collectively, this list of harms is the artifact of our more primitive selves. I don't think this is how we'd want to be remembered, but this is basically what we've been doing to eastside communities for the last century. The good news is, it doesn't have to be this way. We got ourselves into this eastside dilemma through bad design, and so we can get out of it with good design. And I believe the first principle of good design is actually really simple: we have to start with the commitment to design for the benefit of everyone. So, remember the campfire metaphor. If we want to benefit everyone, maybe we just sit in a horseshoe, so nobody gets the smoke in their face. I've got to make a note to the gentrifiers, because the point of this image is not to say you get to roll into eastside communities and just move people out of the way, because you don't. (Applause) But the point is, if you start with this first principle of benefiting everyone, then elegant solutions may become more obvious than you assume. What are the elegant solutions to close this gap between Palo Alto and East Palo Alto in Silicon Valley? I've got to like the odds of starting with EPA [East Palo Alto]. It's in the middle of Silicon Valley, the epicenter of innovation and wealth creation. If we can solve this problem anywhere, it ought to be here. And if we can solve the problems for EPA, we could apply those solutions to other eastside communities. If you think about it, it's actually a massive investment opportunity and an opportunity to drive policy change and philanthropy. But at the core, it's this fundamental design principle, this choice of whether we're going to decide to take care of everyone. And it's a choice we can make, loved ones. We've got the capital. We've got technology on our side, and it keeps getting better. We've got some of the best entrepreneurs in the world in this building and in these communities right now. But the fundamental question is: What are we designing for? More haves and have-nots? More disparity? Or parity, the choice to come together. Because the reality is, this is not the industrial era. We don't live in the era of legal segregation. So the punchline is, there is no wrong side of the tracks. And all I'm saying is, we should design our economy and our communities with that in mind. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why is Aristophanes called "The Father of Comedy"? | null | TED-Ed | At the annual Athenian drama festival in 426 BC, a comic play called The Babylonians, written by a young poet named Aristophanes, was awarded first prize. But the play’s depiction of Athens’ conduct during the Peloponnesian War was so controversial that afterwards, a politician named Kleon took Aristophanes to court for "slandering the people of Athens in the presence of foreigners." Aristophanes struck back two years later with a play called The Knights. In it, he openly mocked Kleon, ending with Kleon’s character working as a lowly sausage seller outside the city gates. This style of satire was a consequence of the unrestricted democracy of 5th century Athens and is now called "Old Comedy." Aristophanes’ plays, the world’s earliest surviving comic dramas, are stuffed full of parodies, songs, sexual jokes, and surreal fantasy. They often use wild situations, like a hero flying to heaven on a dung beetle, or a net cast over a house to keep the owner’s father trapped inside, in order to subvert audience expectations. And they’ve shaped how comedy’s been written and performed ever since. The word "comedy" comes from the Ancient Greek "komos," – revel, and "oide," – singing, and it differed from its companion art form, "tragedy" in many ways. Where ancient Athenian tragedies dealt with the downfall of the high and mighty, their comedies usually ended happily. And where tragedy almost always borrowed stories from legend, comedy addressed current events. Aristophanes’ comedies celebrated ordinary people and attacked the powerful. His targets were arrogant politicians, war-mongering generals, and self-important intellectuals, exactly the people who sat in the front row of the theatre, where everyone could see their reactions. As a result, they were referred to as komoidoumenoi: "those made fun of in comedy." Aristophanes’ vicious and often obscene mockery held these leaders to account, testing their commitment to the city. One issue, in particular, inspired much of Aristophanes’ work: the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. In Peace, written in 421 BC, a middle-aged Athenian frees the embodiment of peace from a cave, where she’d been exiled by profiteering politicians. Then, in the aftermath of a crushing naval defeat for Athens in 411 BC, Aristophanes wrote "Lysistrata." In this play, the women of Athens grow sick of war and go on a sex strike until their husbands make peace. Other plays use similarly fantastic scenarios to skewer topical situations, such as in "Clouds," where Aristophanes mocked fashionable philosophical thinking. The hero Strepsiades enrolls in Socrates’s new philosophical school, where he learns how to prove that wrong is right and that a debt is not a debt. No matter how outlandish these plays get, the heroes always prevail in the end. Aristophanes also became the master of the parabasis, a comic technique where actors address the audience directly, often praising the playwright or making topical comments and jokes. For example, in "Birds," the Chorus takes the role of different birds and threatens the Athenian judges that if their play doesn’t win first prize, they’ll defecate on them as they walk around the city. Perhaps the judges didn’t appreciate the joke, as the play came in second. By exploring new ideas and encouraging self-criticism in Athenian society, Aristophanes not only mocked his fellow citizens, but he shaped the nature of comedy itself. Hailed by some scholars as the father of comedy, his fingerprints are visible upon comic techniques everywhere, from slapstick to double acts to impersonations to political satire. Through the praise of free speech and the celebration of ordinary heroes, his plays made his audience think while they laughed. And his retort to Kleon in 425 BC still resonates today: “I’m a comedian, so I’ll speak about justice, no matter how hard it sounds to your ears.” |
To transform child welfare, take race out of the equation | {0: 'Jessica Pryce creates strategies to reduce the impact of racial bias in child protective services.'} | TED Residency | I want you to imagine that you are a Child Protective Services worker. And you have to respond to a report of child abuse. You walk into a home, unannounced, unexpected, certainly uninvited. The first thing you see is a mattress in the middle of the room, on the floor. Three kids lying on it, asleep. There's a small table nearby with a couple of ashtrays, empty beer cans. Large rat traps are set in the corner, not too far from where the kids lie asleep. So you make a note. A part of your job is walking through the entire home. So you start with the kitchen, where there's very little food. You notice another mattress in the bedroom, on the floor, that the mother shares with her infant child. Now, generally, at this point, two things may happen. The children are deemed unsafe and removed from the home, and placed in state custody for a specified period of time. Or the children remain with their family and the child welfare system provides help and support. When I was a Child Protective Services worker, I saw things like this all the time. Some far better, some far worse. I asked you to imagine yourself in that home, because I wonder what crossed your mind. What guides your decisions? What's going to impact your opinion of that family? What race, ethnicity, did you think the family was? I want you to realize that if those children were white, it is more likely that their family stays together after that visit. Research done at the University of Pennsylvania found that white families, on average, have access to more help and more support from the child welfare system. And their cases are less likely to go through a full investigation. But on the other hand, if those kids are black, they are four times more likely to be removed, they spend longer periods of time in foster care, and it's harder to find them a stable foster placement. Foster care is meant to be an immediate shelter of protection for kids who are at high risk. But it's also a confusing and traumatic exit from the family. Research done at the University of Minnesota found that kids who went through foster care had more behavioral problems and internalized issues than kids who remain with their families while receiving help and support. The scenario I mentioned earlier is not uncommon. A single mother, living in low-income housing with her four children. And the rats make it almost impossible to keep food, let alone fresh food in the home. Does that mother deserve to have her children taken from her? Emma Ketteringham, a family court attorney, says that if you live in a poor neighborhood, then you better be a perfect parent. She says that we place unfair, often unreachable standards on parents who are raising their kids with very little money. And their neighborhood and ethnicity impact whether or not their kids are removed. In the two years I spent on the front lines of child welfare, I made high-stakes decisions. And I saw firsthand how my personal values impacted my work. Now, as social work faculty at Florida State University, I lead an institute that curates the most innovative and effective child welfare research. And research tells us that there are twice as many black kids in foster care, twenty-eight percent, than there are in the general population, 14 percent. And although there are several reasons why, I want to discuss one reason today: implicit bias. Let's start with "implicit." It's subconscious, something you're not aware of. Bias — those stereotypes and attitudes that we all have about certain groups of people. So, implicit bias is what lurks in the background of every decision that we make. So how can we fix it? I have a promising solution that I want to share. Now, in almost every state, there are high numbers of black kids going into foster care. But data revealed that Nassau County, a community in New York, had managed to decrease the number of black kids being removed. And in 2016, I went into that community with my team and led a research study, discovering the use of blind removal meetings. This is how it works. A case worker responds to a report of child abuse. They go out to the home, but before the children are removed, the case worker must come back to the office and present what they found. But here's the distinction: When they present to the committee, they delete names, ethnicity, neighborhood, race, all identifiable information. They focus on what happened, family strength, relevant history and the parents' ability to protect the child. With that information, the committee makes a recommendation, never knowing the race of the family. Blind removals have made a drastic impact in that community. In 2011, 57 percent of the kids going into foster care were black. But after five years of blind removals, that is down to 21 percent. (Applause) Here's what we learned from talking to some of the case workers. "When a family has a history with the department, many of us hold that history against them, even if they're trying to do things differently." "When I see a case from a certain apartment building, neighborhood or zip code, I just automatically think the worst." "Child welfare is very subjective, because it's an emotional field. There's no one who doesn't have emotions around this work. And it's very hard to leave all of your stuff at the door when you do this work. So let's take the subjectivity of race and neighborhood out of it, and you might get different outcomes." Blind removals seem to be bringing us closer to solving the problem of implicit bias in foster-care decisions. My next step is figuring out how to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to bring this project to scale and make it more accessible to other states. I know we can transform child welfare. We can hold organizations accountable to developing the social consciousness of their employees. We can hold ourselves accountable to making sure our decisions are driven by ethics and safety. Let's imagine a child welfare system that focuses on partnering with parents, empowering families, and no longer see poverty as failure. Let's work together to build a system that wants to make families stronger instead of pulling them apart. Thank you. (Applause) (Cheering) |
How to get serious about diversity and inclusion in the workplace | {0: "UPS's Janet Stovall has developed a business approach that addresses corporate racism head-on -- and has created methods to help dismantle it."} | TED@UPS | Everybody has that one friend — you know, the single-minded one, the one who, no matter what the question is, always finds a way to make the answer whatever it is she's single-minded about. I'm that friend. (Laughter) And the thing that I'm single-minded about is racism. If someone were to ask me, "So, Janet, got any plans for the 4th of July?" I'm subject to answer, "Yeah, I'm going to binge-watch 'Roots.'" (Laughter) Or if they said, "Janet, I've got a joke for you: Why'd the chicken cross the road?" "Uh, was it a black chicken? Probably gentrification." (Laughter) (Applause) But for me, single-mindedness is not just caring about something. It's caring about something enough to do something about it. It's not just thinking, it's doing. It's not just praying, it is moving your feet. And the reason I'm single-minded about racism is because I know single-mindedness can destroy it. I learned that many, many years ago. Back in 1984, I was a junior at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina. Now, Davidson is a little-bitty town, Southern town, split by railroad tracks, with white Davidson on one side, black Davidson on the other side, and, as black students lived on the white side of the tracks, we got used to being stopped in downtown and asked for ID, until the police memorized our faces. But fortunately, that didn't take too long, because out of 1,200 students, only 52 of us were black. There was one black professor and one black assistant dean. Things weren't a lot better on campus. Well, I wasn't OK with this. And so, I started writing things. And then I started yelling things. And after about three years of that, I got tired. So I decided to write one more thing; I wrote something called "Project '87." Project '87 was really just a challenge to Davidson: in three years, by 1987, enroll 100 black students, hire 10 black professors, create five Black Studies classes and hire one black dean. It didn't seem particularly revolutionary, but what was different about it was, we also challenged Davidson to say that if you don't do this, we will question your commitment to diversity. It was a real problem. We put some real numbers to it. We gave them some real consequences. Well, the campus went absolutely nuts. But fortunately, in the middle of this, Davidson got a new president, and that president was single-minded about racism, too. And so, he created a task force to address the issues in Project '87. And several months after that, we produced a 77-page report. That report was the foundation for all the change that came after it. Now, I wasn't there to see that change, because, actually, in 1985, I graduated. (Applause) You are looking at the three happiest people on the planet that day, because I am leaving. (Laughter) However, the change did happen, and today, there are 185 black students, there are 16 black or multiracial professors, there are four black deans, and there's an entire degree-granting Africana Studies Department. (Applause) Project '87 changed Davidson. But it also changed me, because what it taught me was there's a lot of power in single-mindedness. Well, today, I'm an executive speechwriter for one of the biggest companies in the world. It's a profession that is 92 percent white and predominantly male, which makes me a little bit of a unicorn. But I'm a single-minded unicorn. (Laughter) So the thing about speech writing is, it's very personal. So I spend a lot of time in deep conversation with the CEO and senior executives, and a lot of times those conversations turn to diversity and inclusion, which, of course, I'm always happy to talk about. But after quite a few of these conversations, I've come to a conclusion: I believe that business is in a position to do something that no other entity can do. Business can dismantle racism. Now, colleges can't do it. There aren't but 5,000 of them in the United States and only 20 million students enrolled. Church can't do it, either — only 35 percent of us go on a regular basis, and when we do, eleven o'clock Sunday morning is "the most segregated hour" in America. But business? There are a 162 million people in the US workforce alone — people of all races, united in the spirit of wanting a paycheck and having to show up to get it. (Laughter) Now, I'm aware that diversity is bigger than race, and racism is bigger than America. But racial discrimination is the most prominent form, and Lord knows America is the absolute best at it. So what if, though, what if we worked in diverse and inclusive environments that we had something to do something with? And since we spend one-third of our lives at work, what if we did that with people who didn't look like us? I think the world would be a totally different place outside of work. That can happen if business gets single-minded about racism. But the question is: How is that supposed to happen? Well, I think there are three things that business can borrow from Project '87: real problems, real numbers, real consequences. Like it or not, diversity is not really a problem for business — yet. I mean, it's a nice thing to have, it's the right thing to do, but for decades, we've been trying to make the case that diversity fuels innovation and customer insight. I mean, at this point, it's kind of a no-brainer, a little bit like hearing a smoke alarm going off and standing with your hand on the hot door, waiting for some data to tell you that your house is on fire. Because the data is already there. Ethnically diverse companies perform 33 percent better than the norm. Forbes's best workplaces for diversity enjoy 24 percent higher revenue growth. And yet, here we are in 2018, and there are only three black CEOs in the Fortune 500. And if your name is Molly or Connor, you've got a 14 percent better chance of getting a callback on your resume than if your name is Shanice or DeShawn. And all of this, despite the fact that by 2045, America is projected to be a minority-majority country. Here's the thing: the business case for diversity, as it stands today, doesn't really speak to any problem. And the only way business is going to get single-minded about racial diversity is if it has a problem that is urgent and relative to somebody other than people of color. I got one: How about employees and customers? Because no matter what business you're in, you're going to need those, right? Well, let's talk about some real numbers. If you have employees and customers, wouldn't it make sense if they looked a little bit like the people that work for you? So if that's the case, maybe your employee base should be 13 percent Black and 18 percent Hispanic, because that's what the population looks like. Maybe that's what your customer base looks like. But let's be clear: diversity and inclusion are not the same things. Diversity is a numbers game. Inclusion is about impact. Companies can mandate diversity, but they have to cultivate inclusion. And if inclusion is what you're after, you've got to calculate some slightly different numbers. How about 30 percent? Because that's the point that research shows at which the voices of minorities actually begin to be heard. If you want a real problem, you're going to need real numbers to fix it, and if you're not willing to set real numbers, then maybe you're not real serious about diversity and inclusion. That brings me to my third point: real consequences. Think about this: when salespeople forget what they're doing and don't come up with their numbers, what do we do? We give them a little time, maybe we give them some training. But then if they don't hit those numbers eventually, we fire them. However, when you start talking about diversity and inclusion, we use terms like "accountability." And maybe we scold, and maybe we hold back an incentive or two. But you know what the best incentive is? A job. And you know what the best disincentive is? Losing it. So if companies really want accountability, they should assume that that is a given. Consequences are what happen when you don't do what you're accountable for. Imagine this: imagine a place where people of all colors and all races are on and climbing every rung of the corporate ladder; where those people feel safe — indeed, expected — to bring their unassimilated, authentic selves to work every day, because the difference that they bring is both recognized and respected. And imagine a place where the lessons we learn about diversity at work actually transform the things we do, think and say outside of work. That is what happens if we all work together to fix what's broken. That is what happens if we stop praying for change to happen and actually start moving our feet to making it. That is the power of single-mindedness. Thank you. (Applause) |
Don't fail fast -- fail mindfully | {0: 'Leticia Gasca is co-founder of the movement Fuckup Nights and Executive Director for the Failure Institute, the first think tank in the world devoted to studying business failure and the reasons behind it.'} | TED Salon Brightline Initiative | [This talk contains mature language Viewer discretion is advised] If we traveled back to the year 800 BC, in Greece, we would see that merchants whose businesses failed were forced to sit in the marketplace with a basket over their heads. In premodern Italy, failed business owners, who had outstanding debts, were taken totally naked to the public square where they had to bang their butts against a special stone while a crowd jeered at them. In the 17th century in France, failed business owners were taken to the center of the market, where the beginning of their bankruptcy was publicly announced. And in order to avoid immediate imprisonment, they had to wear a green bonnet so that everyone knew they were a failure. Of course, these are extreme examples. But it is important to remember that when we excessively punish those who fail, we stifle innovation and business creation, the engines of economic growth in any country. Time has passed, and today we don't publicly humiliate failed entrepreneurs. And they don't broadcast their failures on social media. In fact, I think that all of us can relate with the pain of failure. But we don't share the details of those experiences. And I totally get it, my friends, I have also been there. I had a business that failed and sharing that story was incredibly hard. In fact, it required seven years, a good dose of vulnerability and the company of my friends. This is my failure story. When I was in college, studying business, I met a group of indigenous women. They lived in a poor rural community in the state of Puebla, in central Mexico. They made beautiful handmade products. And when I met them and I saw their work, I decided I wanted to help. With some friends, I cofounded a social enterprise with the mission to help the women create an income stream and improve their quality of life. We did everything by the book, as we had learned in business school. We got investors, we spent a lot of time building the business and training the women. But soon we realized we were novices. The handmade products were not selling, and the financial plan we had made was totally unrealistic. In fact, we worked for years without a salary, hoping that a miracle would happen, that magically a great buyer would arrive and she would make the business profitable. But that miracle never happened. In the end, we had to close the business, and that broke my heart. I started everything to create a positive impact on the life of the artisans. And I felt that I have done the opposite. I felt so guilty that I decided to hide this failure from my conversations and my resume for years. I didn't know other failed entrepreneurs, and I thought I was the only loser in the world. One night, seven years later, I was out with some friends and we were talking about the life of the entrepreneur. And of course, the issue of failure came out. I decided to confess to my friends the story of my failed business. And they shared similar stories. In that moment, a thought became really clear in my mind: all of my friends were failures. (Laughter) Being more serious, that night I realized that A: I wasn't the only loser in the world, and B: we all have hidden failures. Please tell me if that is not true. That night was like an exorcism for me. I realized that sharing your failures makes you stronger, not weaker. And being open to my vulnerability helped me connect with others in a deeper and more meaningful way and embrace life lessons I wouldn't have learned previously. As a consequence of this experience of sharing stories of businesses that didn't work, we decided to create a platform of events to help others share their failure stories. And we called it Fuckup Nights. Years later, we also created a research center devoted to the story of failure and its implications on business, people and society and as we love cool names, we called it the Failure Institute. It has been surprising to see that when an entrepreneur stands on a stage and shares a story of failure, she can actually enjoy that experience. It doesn't have to be a moment of shame and embarrassment, as it used to be in the past. It is an opportunity to share lessons learned and build empathy. We have also discovered that when the members of a team share their failures, magic happens. Bonds grow stronger and collaboration becomes easier. Through our events and research projects, we have found some interesting facts. For instance, that men and women react in a different way after the failure of a business. The most common reaction among men is to start a new business within one year of failure, but in a different sector, while women decide to look for a job and postpone the creation of a new business. Our hypothesis is that this happens because women tend to suffer more from the impostor syndrome. We feel that we need something else to be a good entrepreneur. But I have seen that in many, many cases women have everything that's needed. We just need to take the step. And in the case of men, it is more common to see that they feel they have enough knowledge and just need to put it in practice in another place with better luck. Another interesting finding has been that there are regional differences on how entrepreneurs cope with failure. For instance, the most common reaction after the failure of a business in the American continent is to go back to school. While in Europe, the most common reaction is to look for a therapist. (Laughter) We're not sure which is a better reaction after the failure of a business, but this is something we will study in the future. Another interesting finding has been the profound impact that public policy has on failed entrepreneurs. For instance, in my country, in Mexico, the regulatory environment is so hard, that closing a business can take you a lot of time and a lot of money. Let's begin with the money. In the best possible scenario, meaning you don't have problems with partners, providers, clients, employees, in the best possible scenario, officially closing a business will cost you 2,000 dollars. Which is a lot of money in Mexico. Someone who earns the minimum wage would have to work for 15 months to save this amount. Now, let's talk about the time. As you may know, in most of the developing world, the average life expectancy of a business is two years. In Mexico, the process of officially closing a business takes two years. What happens when the average life expectancy of a business is so similar to the time it will take you to close it if it doesn't work? Of course, this discourages business creation and promotes informal economy. In fact, econometric research has proved that if the process of declaring bankruptcy takes less time and less money, more new firms will enter the market. For this reason, in 2017, we proposed a series of public policy recommendations for the procedure of officially closing businesses in Mexico. For a whole year, we worked with entrepreneurs from all over the country and with Congress. And the good news is that we managed to help change the law. Yay! (Applause) The idea is that when the new regulation comes into force, entrepreneurs will be able to close their businesses in an online procedure that is faster and inexpensive. (Sighs) On the night we invented Fuckup Nights, we never imagined that the movement would grow this big. We are in 80 countries now. In that moment, our only intention was to put the topic of failure on the table. To help our friends see that failure is something we must talk about. It is not a cause of humiliation, as it used to be in the past, or a cause of celebration, as some people say. In fact, I want to confess something. Every time I listen to Silicon Valley types or students bragging about failing fast and often like it's no big deal, I cringe. Because I think that there is a dark side on the mantra "fail fast." Of course, failing fast is a great way to accelerate learning and avoid wasting time. But I fear that when we present rapid failure to entrepreneurs as their one and only option, we might be promoting laziness. We might be promoting that entrepreneurs give up too easily. I also fear that the culture of rapid failure could be minimizing the devastating consequences of the failure of a business. For instance, when my social enterprise died, the worst part was that I had to go back to the indigenous community and tell the women that the business had failed and it was my fault. For some people this could be seen like a great learning opportunity for me, but the truth is that the closure of this business represented much more than that. It meant that the women would stop receiving an income that they really needed. For this reason, I want to propose something. I want to propose that just as we put aside the idea of publicly humiliating failed entrepreneurs, we must put aside the idea that failing fast is always the best. And I want to propose a new mantra: fail mindfully. We must remember that businesses are made of people, businesses are not entities that appear and disappear magically without consequences. When a firm dies, some people will lose their jobs. And others will lose their money. And in the case of social and green enterprises, the death of this business can have a negative impact on the ecosystems or communities they were trying to serve. But what does it mean to fail mindfully? It means being aware of the impact, of the consequences of the failure of that business. Being aware of the lessons learned. And being aware of the responsibility to share those learnings with the world. Thank you. (Applause) |
Can you solve the Leonardo da Vinci riddle? | null | TED-Ed | You’ve found Leonardo Da Vinci’s secret vault, secured by a series of combination locks. Fortunately, your treasure map has three codes: 1210, 3211000, and… hmm. The last one appears to be missing. Looks like you’re gonna have to figure it out on your own. There’s something those first two numbers have in common: they’re what’s called autobiographical numbers. This is a special type of number whose structure describes itself. Each of an autobiographical number’s digits indicates how many times the digit corresponding to that position occurs within the number. The first digit indicates the quantity of zeroes, the second digit indicates the number of ones, the third digit the number of twos, and so on until the end. The last lock takes a 10 digit number, and it just so happens that there’s exactly one ten-digit autobiographical number. What is it? Pause here if you want to figure it out for yourself! Answer in: 3 Answer in: 2 Answer in: 1 Blindly trying different combinations would take forever. So let’s analyze the autobiographical numbers we already have to see what kinds of patterns we can find. By adding all the digits in 1210 together, we get 4 – the total number of digits. This makes sense since each individual digit tells us the number of times a specific digit occurs within the total. So the digits in our ten-digit autobiographical number must add up to ten. This tells us another important thing – the number can’t have too many large digits. For example, if it included a 6 and a 7, then some digit would have to appear 6 times, and another digit 7 times– making more than 10 digits. We can conclude that there can be no more than one digit greater than 5 in the entire sequence. So out of the four digits 6, 7, 8, and 9, only one – if any— will make the cut. And there will be zeroes in the positions corresponding to the numbers that aren’t used. So now we know that our number must contain at least three zeroes – which also means that the leading digit must be 3 or greater. Now, while this first digit counts the number of zeroes, every digit after it counts how many times a particular non-zero digit occurs. If we add together all the digits besides the first one – and remember, zeroes don’t increase the sum – we get a count of how many non-zero digits appear in the sequence, including that leading digit. For example, if we try this with the first code, we get 2 plus 1 equals 3 digits. Now, if we subtract one, we have a count of how many non-zero digits there are after the first digit – two, in our example. Why go through all that? Well, we now know something important: the total quantity of non-zero digits that occur after the first digit is equal to the sum of these digits, minus one. And how can you get a distribution where the sum is exactly 1 greater than the number of non-zero positive integers being added together? The only way is for one of the addends to be a 2, and the rest 1s. How many 1s? Turns out there can only be two – any more would require additional digits like 3 or 4 to count them. So now we have the leading digit of 3 or greater counting the zeroes, a 2 counting the 1s, and two 1s – one to count the 2s and another to count the leading digit. And speaking of that, it’s time to find out what the leading digit is. Since we know that the 2 and the double 1s have a sum of 4, we can subtract that from 10 to get 6. Now it’s just a matter of putting them all in place: 6 zeroes, 2 ones, 1 two, 0 threes, 0 fours, 0 fives, 1 six, 0 sevens, 0 eights, and 0 nines. The safe swings open, and inside you find... Da Vinci’s long-lost autobiography. |
Una nueva manera de hablar del fracaso en los negocios | {0: 'Leticia Gasca is co-founder of the movement Fuckup Nights and Executive Director for the Failure Institute, the first think tank in the world devoted to studying business failure and the reasons behind it.'} | TED en Español en NYC | If we were to travel to the past, to the year 800 BCE, we would see that the Greeks, by law, forced failed businesspeople to sit in the marketplace with a basket on their heads, so that everyone had a clear idea as to the state of their business. In premodern Italy, owners of failed businesses that had outstanding debts were taken, completely nude, to the public plaza, where they had to hit their backside against a rock while a crowd jeered at them. In 17th-century France, failed business owners were carried to the center of the marketplace, where the beginning of their bankruptcy was announced publicly. To avoid being immediately taken to jail, they had to wear a green beret so everyone knew they were a failure. Of course, these are extreme cases, but it's important to refer to the past to remember that when the laws are too punishing to failed entrepreneurs, it disincentivizes the creation of new businesses and innovation, which are the engines of economic growth of any country. Fortunately, time has passed, and now we don't publicly humiliate entrepreneurs who fail. Still, it's not common to see big business figures publish the details of their mistakes on social media. I think everyone here can relate to the pain you feel when a project fails. But that doesn't mean we share the details of those experiences with our friends. And I understand perfectly — I've been there, too. I had a business that failed horribly. It was a very painful experience and sharing it was very difficult. In fact, sharing it took seven years, a good amount of vulnerability and the company of my friends. This is the story of my failure. When I was at college studying business, I met a group of indigenous women who lived in a very marginalized rural community in Puebla, a state in the center of Mexico. They created beautiful handmade crafts. So when I met them and became familiar with their work, I decided that I wanted to do something to help them. And I did everything just like they had taught me at business school back then: I partnered with my friends; we procured funding; we spent a lot of time building the business and training the artisans. But we soon realized that we were rookies. The truth is, the crafts didn't sell — or better yet, we didn't know how to sell them — and the business plan we had made wasn't realistic. We worked for years without salary, waiting for a miracle to happen, hoping that magically, a huge buyer would appear and make the business profitable and prevent the entire project from dying. But in the end, the miracle didn't happen. We had to close the business and that broke my heart, because I began the whole project in order to have a positive impact on the life of the artisans, and I felt that I had actually had a very negative impact. I felt so guilty about what happened that for years I hid it from my résumé and from my conversations. Some time later, I was out with some entrepreneur friends, and the topic of failure came up. I took the risk and confessed to them the story of my failed business that I had kept a secret for so many years. To my surprise, my friends had similar stories. And at that moment, something became very clear in my mind: I hung out with total failures! (Laughter) No, but seriously, that day I realized that we all have hidden failures. Tell me if that's not true. (Audience responds) That night, I realized that sharing your failures publicly makes you stronger, not weaker. Actually, for me, it was like an exorcism. It was like a weight was lifted off of me; I had nothing to hide anymore. That night, I also realized that being open to this new place of my vulnerability helped me connect with others in a much deeper and authentic way. As a result of that experience, of sharing stories of businesses that didn't work, we decided to create an event series so that other people could also share their stories of failed businesses. We called it "FuckUp Nights." And some time later, we created the Failure Institute — (Laughter) the name is awesome — the Failure Institute. It's a research center dedicated to the study of failure and its consequences on people, businesses and society. It's been really surprising and gratifying to find that when an entrepreneur gets up on stage to tell the story of their failed business, it's not a cause for humiliation or shame, as it usually was in the past. Actually, it's an opportunity to share lessons and generate empathy. We've also found that when members of the same team get together to share their stories of failure, something magical happens: collaboration becomes easier, and the bonds become stronger. In fact, over the course of the events and the research, we've found surprising things. Perhaps among my favorites are the differences between men and women when they're faced with failure. The most common behavior among men after closing their business is to open another business but in a different sector within a year, while among women, it's more common to look for a job and postpone creating a new business for the future. Our hypothesis is that this can be attributed to women's tendency to suffer more from impostor syndrome; that is, we feel like we're lacking in some way in order to be true entrepreneurs. However, I've seen that many times, we have everything necessary, and all that's missing is that we risk taking the first step. And in the case of men, it's more common that they feel they have the necessary knowledge and they just need to apply it in another place where they'd have more luck. We've also found that there are interesting regional differences in terms of the way in which entrepreneurs recuperate after the failure of our business. For example, on the European continent, it's much more common that entrepreneurs seek out a therapist to recuperate emotionally. On the other hand, on the American continent, the most common behavior is to seek out education and training. Another finding that's really changed my life is the profound impact that public policy has on the way in which entrepreneurs decide to close their business and recuperate from the experience. For example, in my country, Mexico, the regulatory framework for closing a business is so strict that closing a business in compliance with the law can take too much time and too much money. Let's start with the money part. If things go well, if your business isn't involved in big problems, if you don't have any issues with suppliers like outstanding debts, closing a business will cost you US $2,000. which in my country is a considerable amount of money. Someone who earns the minimum salary as of 2018 would have to work 15 months to come up with that money. And with respect to time, on average, closing a business takes two years. As we know, in Mexico and in many other places in the world, the average life expectancy of a business is two years. So what happens when the life expectancy of a business is so similar to the amount of time it will take you to close it if it doesn't work? Of course, this disincentivizes the creation of new businesses and promotes the informal economy. In fact, econometric research has shown that the less time and money needed to close a business, the greater the creation of new business. So in 2017, we decided to present a series of public policy recommendations for the law that governs the closing of businesses. For a year, we worked with the Association of Entrepreneurs and with the Mexican congress, and the good news is that we managed to change the law. (Applause) The idea is that once the new legislation goes into effect, entrepreneurs will be able to close their business via an online process, which will be much more accessible to everyone and shorter. The truth is, when I look back and remember that night when my friends and I confessed our failures to each other six years ago, I'm surprised, because at that moment, our intention was very simple: the only thing we wanted to do was put the subject of failure on the table so more friends could see that this was a topic to be talked about. It's not a time for humiliation as in the past, nor is it a cause for celebration, as some people say. In fact, I'll admit that when I hear students or people from Silicon Valley brag about failing fast or frequently, as if closing a business were no big deal, the truth is, it worries me a lot. And it worries me because I think that behind the mantra of failing fast, or "fail fast" as they say in Silicon Valley, there's a dark side. On one hand, when we insist to entrepreneurs that failing fast is the only option, it's possible that we're promoting mediocrity — that entrepreneurs don't give their maximum effort, and that they give up when faced with the most minor difficulty. I also think that when we talk about failing fast, we're minimizing that negative impact that closing a business has. Of course, I believe failing fast is a great way to accelerate learning and avoid wasting time. But we can't deny the negative consequences that exist behind the death of a business. For example, when my social enterprise failed, the worst part was going back to the indigenous community and confessing to the artisans that the project had died, and that I was responsible. For many, this could have been viewed as a learning opportunity. The truth is that the death of this business meant that the artisans would lose income that they desperately needed. So today, I'd like to propose an idea. I'd like to propose that just as we put aside the idea of publicly humiliating entrepreneurs who fail, we should also put aside the idea that to fail fast is always best. Instead, I want to propose a new mantra: fail with awareness, or "fail mindfully" — experience with full attention the entire process that closing a business involves. Remember that businesses are not entities that magically appear and disappear. Businesses are made up of people. And if a business project fails, surely, some of those people will lose their jobs or lose money. And in the case of social enterprises or green businesses, when they fail, surely the closing of the project will have a negative impact on the communities or ecosystems they were intended to benefit. But what do I mean by "fail mindfully"? For me, it means being aware of the impact that closing a business has, being aware of the lessons learned, and above all, being aware of the great responsibility to share those lessons with the world. Thank you. (Applause) |
How we can use light to see deep inside our bodies and brains | {0: "Mary Lou Jepsen pushes the edges of what's possible in optics and physics, to make new types of devices, leading teams and working with huge factories that can ship vast volumes of these strange, new things."} | TED2018 | People don't realize that red light and benign near-infrared light go right through your hand, just like this. This fact could enable better, faster and cheaper health care. Our translucence is key here. I'm going to show you how we use this key and a couple of other keys to see deep inside our bodies and brains. OK, so first up ... You see this laser pointer and the spot it makes on my hand? The light goes right through my hand — if we could bring the lights down, please — as I've already shown. But you can no longer see that laser spot. You see my hand glow. That's because the light spreads out, it scatters. I need you to understand what scattering is, so I can show you how we get rid of it and see deep inside our bodies and brains. So, I've got a piece of chicken back here. (Laughter) It's raw. Putting on some gloves. It's got the same optical properties as human flesh. So, here's the chicken ... putting it on the light. Can you see, the light goes right through? I also implanted a tumor in that chicken. Can you see it? Audience: Yes. Mary Lou Jepsen: So this means, using red light and infrared light, we can see tumors in human flesh. But there's a catch. When I throw another piece of chicken on it, the light still goes through, but you can no longer see the tumor. That's because the light scatters. So we have to do something about the scatter so we can see the tumor. We have to de-scatter the light. So ... A technology I spent the early part of my career on enables de-scattering. It's called holography. And it won the Nobel Prize in physics in the 70s, because of the fantastic things it enables you to do with light. This is a hologram. It captures all of the light, all of the rays, all of the photons at all of the positions and all of the angles, simultaneously. It's amazing. To see what we can do with holography ... You see these marbles? Look at these marbles bouncing off of the barriers, as an analogy to light being scattered by our bodies. As the marbles get to the bottom of the scattering maze, they're chaotic, they're scattering and bouncing everywhere. If we record a hologram at the bottom inside of the screen, we can record the position and angle of each marble exiting the maze. And then we can bring in marbles from below and have the hologram direct each marble to exactly the right position and angle, such as they emerge in a line at the top of the scatter matrix. We're going to do that with this. This is optically similar to human brain. I'm going to switch to green light now, because green light is brighter to your eyes than red or infrared, and I really need you to see this. So we're going to put a hologram in front of this brain and make a stream of light come out of it. Seems impossible but it isn't. This is the setup you're going to see. Green light. Hologram here, green light going in, that's our brain. And a stream of light comes out of it. We just made a brain lase of densely scattering tissue. Seems impossible, no one's done this before, you're the first public audience to ever see this. (Applause) What this means is that we can focus deep into tissue. Our translucency is the first key. Holography enabling de-scattering is the second key to enable us to see deep inside of our bodies and brains. You're probably thinking, "Sounds good, but what about skull and bones? How are you going to see through the brain without seeing through bone?" Well, this is real human skull. We ordered it at skullsunlimited.com. (Laughter) No kidding. But we treat this skull with great respect at our lab and here at TED. And as you can see, the red light goes right through it. Goes through our bones. So we can go through skull and bones and flesh with just red light. Gamma rays and X-rays do that, too, but they cause tumors. Red light is all around us. So, using that, I'm going to come back here and show you something more useful than making a brain lase. We challenged ourselves to see how fine we could focus through brain tissue. Focusing through this brain, it was such a fine focus, we put a bare camera die in front of it. And the bare camera die ... Could you turn down the spotlight? OK, there it is. Do you see that? Each pixel is two-thousandths of a millimeter wide. Two microns. That means that spot focus — full width half max — is six to eight microns. To give you an idea of what that means: that's the diameter of the smallest neuron in the human brain. So that means we can focus through skull and brain to a neuron. No one has seen this before, we're doing this for the first time here. It's not impossible. (Applause) We made it work with our system, so we've made a breakthrough. (Laughter) Just to give an idea — like, that's not just 50 marbles. That's billions, trillion of photons, all falling in line as directed by the hologram, to ricochet through densely scattering brain, and emerge as a focus. It's pretty cool. We're excited about it. This is an MRI machine. It's a few million dollars, it fills a room, many people have probably been in one. I've spent a lot of time in one. It has a focus of about a millimeter — kind of chunky, compared to what I just showed you. A system based on our technology could enable dramatically lower cost, higher resolution and smaller medical imaging. So that's what we've started to do. My team and I have built a rig, a lab rig to scan out tissue. And here it is in action. We wanted to see how good we could do. We've built this over the last year. And the result is, we're able to find tumors in this sample — 70 millimeters deep, the light going in here, half a millimeter resolution, and that's the tumor it found. You're probably looking at this, like, "Sounds good, but that's kind of a big system. It's smaller than a honking-big MRI machine, monster MRI machine, but can you do something to shrink it down?" And the answer is: of course. We can replace each big element in that system with a smaller component — a little integrated circuit, a display chip the size of a child's fingernail. A bit about my background: I've spent the last two decades inventing, prototype-developing and then shipping billions of dollars of consumer electronics — with full custom chips — on the hairy edge of optical physics. So my team and I built the big lab rig to perfect our architecture and test the corner cases and really fine-tune our chip designs, before spending the millions of dollars to fabricate each chip. Our new chip inventions slim down the system, speed it up and enable rapid scanning and de-scattering of light to see deep into our bodies. This is the third key to enable better, faster and cheaper health care. This is a mock-up of something that can replace the functionality of a multimillion-dollar MRI machine into a consumer electronics price point, that you could wear as a bandage, line a ski hat, put inside a pillow. That's what we're building. (Applause) Oh, thanks! (Applause) So you're probably thinking, "I get the light going through our bodies. I even get the holography de-scattering the light. But how do we use these new chip inventions, exactly, to do the scanning?" Well, we have a sound approach. No, literally — we use sound. Here, these three discs represent the integrated circuits that we've designed, that massively reduce the size of our current bulky system. One of the spots, one of the chips, emits a sonic ping, and it focuses down, and then we turn red light on. And the red light that goes through that sonic spot changes color slightly, much like the pitch of the police car siren changes as it speeds past you. So. There's this other thing about holography I haven't told you yet, that you need to know. Only two beams of exactly the same color can make a hologram. So, that's the orange light that's coming off of the sonic spot, that's changed color slightly, and we create a glowing disc of orange light underneath a neighboring chip and then record a hologram on the camera chip. Like so. From that hologram, we can extract information just about that sonic spot, because we filter out all of the red light. Then, we can optionally focus the light back down into the brain to stimulate a neuron or part of the brain. And then we move on to shift the sonic focus to another spot. And that way, spot by spot, we scan out the brain. Our chips decode holograms a bit like Rosalind Franklin decoded this iconic image of X-ray diffraction to reveal the structure of DNA for the first time. We're doing that electronically with our chips, recording the image and decoding the information, in a millionth of a second. We scan fast. Our system may be extraordinary at finding blood. And that's because blood absorbs red light and infrared light. Blood is red. Here's a beaker of blood. I'm going to show you. And here's our laser, going right through it. It really is a laser, you can see it on the — there it is. In comparison to my pound of flesh, where you can see the light goes everywhere. So let's see that again, blood. This is really key: blood absorbs light, flesh scatters light. This is significant, because every tumor bigger than a cubic millimeter or two has five times the amount of blood as normal flesh. So with our system, you can imagine detecting cancers early, when intervention is easy, or tracking the size of your tumor as it grows or shrinks. Our system also should be extraordinary at finding out where blood isn't, like a clogged artery, or the color change in blood as it carries oxygen versus not carrying oxygen, which is a way to measure neural activity. There's a saying that "sunlight" is the best disinfectant. It's literally true. Researchers are killing pneumonia in lungs by shining light deep inside of lungs. Our system could enable this noninvasively. Let me give you three more examples of what this technology can do. One: stroke. There's two major kinds of stroke: the one caused by clogs and another caused by rupture. If you can determine the type of stroke within an hour or two, you can give medication to massively reduce the damage to the brain. Get the drug wrong, and the patient dies. Today, that means access to an MRI scanner within an hour or two of a stroke. Tomorrow, with compact, portable, inexpensive imaging, every ambulance and every clinic can decode the type of stroke and get the right therapy on time. (Applause) Thanks. Two: two-thirds of humanity lacks access to medical imaging. Compact, portable, inexpensive medical imaging can save countless lives. And three: brain-computer communication. I've shown here onstage our system focusing through skull and brain to the diameter of the smallest neuron. Using light and sound, you can activate or inhibit neurons, and simultaneously, we can match spec by spec the resolution of an fMRI scanner, which measures oxygen use in the brain. We do that by looking at the color change in the blood, rather than using a two-ton magnet. So you can imagine that with fMRI scanners today, we can decode the imagined words, images and dreams of those being scanned. We're working on a system that puts all three of these capabilities into the same system — neural read and write with light and sound, while simultaneously mapping oxygen use in the brain — all together in a noninvasive portable that can enable brain-computer communication, no implants, no surgery, no optional brain surgery required. This can do enormous good for the two billion people that suffer globally with brain disease. (Applause) People ask me how deep we can go. And the answer is: the whole body's in reach. But here's another way to look at it. (Laughter) My whole head just lit up, you want to see it again? Audience: Yes! (Laughter) MLJ: This looks scary, but it's not. What's truly scary is not knowing about our bodies, our brains and our diseases so we can effectively treat them. This technology can help. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
How art can shape America's conversation about freedom | {0: 'Dread Scott makes revolutionary art to propel history forward. '} | TED2018 | I am a visual artist, and I make revolutionary art to propel history forward. I'm going to come right out and tell you something: I don't accept the economic foundation, the social relations or the governing ideas of America. My art contributes to fundamental change by encouraging an audience to address big questions from that perspective. Social change is hard, but ideas matter tremendously. When I say I'm an artist, most people think, "Oh, he's a painter." Behind me, you can see some of the kind of work I do. "Imagine a World Without America" is a painting, but I work in a range of media, including photography, video and performance art. A current project, "Slave Rebellion Reenactment," is going to be reenacted on the outskirts of New Orleans this November. In 1989, I had an artwork that became the center of controversy over its transgressive use of the American flag. "What is the Proper Way to Display a US Flag?" is a conceptual work that encouraged audience participation. It consisted of a photo montage that had text that read, "What is the Proper Way to Display a US Flag?" Below that were books that people could write responses to that question in, and below that was a flag that people had the option of standing on. The photo montage consisted of images of South Korean students burning American flags, holding signs that said, "Yankee go home. Son of a bitch," and below that were flag-draped coffins coming back from Vietnam. People wrote long and short answers. Thousands of people engaged with the work in a lot of different languages. Some of the people said, "I'm a German girl. If we Germans would admire our flag as you all do, we would be called Nazis again. I think you do have too much trouble about this flag." "I think that the artist should be returned to his heritage, i.e., the jungles of Africa, and then he can shovel manure in his artistic way." "This flag I'm standing on stands for everything oppressive in this system: the murder of the Indians and all the oppressed around the world, including my brother who was shot by a pig, who kicked over his body to 'make sure the nigger was dead.' That pig was wearing the flag. Thank you, Dread Scott, for this opportunity." "As a veteran defending the flag, I personally would never defend your stupid ass! You should be shot!" — US Navy Seal Team. As you can see, people had very strong reactions about the flag then, as they do now. There were demonstrations of veterans in front of the Art Institute of Chicago. They chanted things like, "The flag and the artist, hang them both high," evoking images of lynching. I received numerous death threats, and bomb threats were phoned in to my school. It was a very dangerous situation. Later, President Bush called the work "disgraceful," which I viewed as a tremendous honor, and Congress outlawed the work. (Laughter) I became part of a Supreme Court case when I and others defied that law, by burning flags on the steps of the Capitol. That action and the subsequent legal and political battle led to a landmark First Amendment decision that prevented the government from demanding patriotism be mandatory. But let me back up a bit. These people literally wanted me dead. What I would do at this moment would make a difference. This is me at the exact same moment, eight stories above that crowd. It was supposed to be for a photo shoot that was going to take place on the steps where the veterans were at that time. It wouldn't have been safe for me to be there, to say the least. But it was really important to do that shoot, because while some wanted to kill me, it was also a situation where those who viewed the American flag as standing for everything oppressive in this system felt that they had a voice, and that voice needed to be amplified. The point is this: changing anything — whether it's conventional ideas about US national symbols, traditional thinking challenged by scientific breakthroughs or ousting an authoritarian president — requires a lot of things. It requires courage, luck and also vision and boldness of action. But on luck — I have to say, the photo shoot we did might not have worked out so well. We laughed after we were out of the area. But the thing is, it was worth the risk because of the stakes that were involved. And in this case, the luck led to a wonderful, profound and powerful situation that was also humorous. Thank you. (Applause) |
A rare galaxy that's challenging our understanding of the universe | {0: 'Burçin Mutlu-Pakdil studies the structure and dynamics of galaxies to help us understand how they form and evolve.'} | TED2018 | There are more than a trillion galaxies in the universe. And my team discovered an extremely rare one, a galaxy that doesn't look quite like anything observed before. This galaxy is so peculiar, that it challenges our theories and our assumptions about how the universe works. The majority of the galaxies are spiral, similar to our own Milky Way. We have strong theories about how these common galaxies form and evolve. But we don't understand how rare galaxies form and evolve. An especially puzzling rare case is Hoag's Object. It has a very symmetric central body surrounded by a circular outer ring, with nothing visible connecting them. Hoag-type galaxies are among the rarest types of galaxies currently known. There are fewer than one in 1,000 galaxies. It's a mystery how the stars in the outer ring are just floating there in such an orderly manner. That's interesting, right? Hold on. Things are about to get more mysterious. The galaxy that my team discovered is even rarer and much more complex than that. You know, sometimes, you search and search for these objects, and you find nothing. But sometimes, it just appears in the background, when you are not even looking for it. This system looks very similar to Hoag's Object, with its central body and circular outer ring. We got very excited and thought we discovered another Hoag's Object. But my research showed this is an entirely new galaxy type, now commonly referred to as "Burçin's Galaxy." (Laughs) (Cheers) (Applause) We will not be visiting this galaxy anytime soon. It is approximately 359 million light years away from Earth. You may think this is far. Well, actually, this is one of the nearby galaxies. I study this object in different light — in ultraviolet, optical and near-infrared. Small details on our body, like a scar or wrinkles, tell the story of our lives. Similarly, a galaxy's structure in different light can help us trace back their origin and evolution. How do I look for these details? I model the bright central body and remove my model from the image to check for any hidden features, because a bright structure in a galaxy may blind our views of faint features, just like using sunglasses when you are blinded by the intense light. The result was a big surprise. This galaxy doesn't just have an outer ring, it has an additional, diffused inner ring. We were having a hard time explaining the origin of the outer ring in Hoag-type galaxies. Now we also need to explain this mysterious second ring. There is currently no known mechanism that can explain the existence of an inner ring in such a peculiar galaxy. So the discovery of Burçin's Galaxy clearly highlights the gap in our knowledge of galaxy evolution. Further research into how this extremely rare galaxy was formed can provide us with new clues on how the universe works. This discovery tells us that we still have a lot to learn, and we should keep looking deeper and deeper in space and keep searching for the unknown. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why art thrives at Burning Man | {0: 'Nora Atkinson is a craft curator, a humanist and a romantic -- as she says, "I can’t believe I get to do what I do for a living."'} | TED2018 | It's like a dream. Imagine, in the empty desert, you come upon a huge wheel ringed in skeletons, and someone invites you to come pull a series of heavy ropes at its base, so you walk to one side, where a team is waiting, and you all throw your backs into it, and you pull in turn, and eventually, the wheel roars to life, lights begin to flicker, and the audience cheers, and you've just activated Peter Hudson's "Charon," one of the world's largest zoetropes. This is the farthest thing from marketable art. (Laughter) It's huge, it's dangerous, it takes a dozen people to run, and it doesn't go with the sofa. (Laughter) It's beautifully crafted and completely useless, and it's wonderful. You're unlikely to see works like "Charon" in the art-world headlines. These days, the buying and selling of artwork often gets more attention than the works themselves. In the last year, a Jean-Michel Basquiat sold for 110 million dollars, the highest price ever achieved for the work of an American artist, and a painting by Leonardo da Vinci sold for 450 million, setting a new auction record. Still, these are big, important artists, but still, when you look at these works and you look at the headlines, you have to ask yourself, "Do I care about these because they move me, or do I care about them because they're expensive and I think they're supposed to?" In our contemporary world, it can be hard to separate those two things. But what if we tried? What if we redefined art's value — not by its price tag, but by the emotional connection it creates between the artist and the audience, or the benefits it gives our society, or the fulfillment it gives the artists themselves? This is Nevada's Black Rock Desert, about as far as you can get from the galleries of New York and London and Hong Kong. And here, for just about 30 years, at Burning Man, a movement has been forming that does exactly that. Since its early anarchist years, Burning Man has grown up. Today, it's more of an experiment in collective dreaming. It's a year-round community, and every August, for a single week, 70,000 people power down their technology and pilgrimage out into the desert to build an anti-consumerist society outside the bounds of their everyday lives. The conditions are brutal. Strangers will hug you, and every year, you will swear it was better the last, but it's still ridiculous and freeing and alive, and the art is one thing that thrives here. So this is me on the desert playa last year with my brother, obviously hard at work. (Laughter) I'd been studying the art of Burning Man for several years, for an exhibition I curated at the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery, and what fascinates me the most isn't the quality of the work here, which is actually rather high, it's why people come out here into the desert again and again to get their hands dirty and make in our increasingly digital age. Because it seems like this gets to something that's essentially human. Really, the entire encampment of Burning Man could be thought of as one giant interactive art installation driven by the participation of everyone in it. One thing that sets this work aside from the commercial art world is that anyone who makes work can show it. These days, around 300 art installations and countless artistic gestures go to the playa. None of them are sold there. At the end of the week, if the works aren't burned, artists have to cart them back out and store them. It's a tremendous labor of love. Though there is certainly a Burning Man aesthetic, pioneered by artists like Kate Raudenbush and Michael Christian, much of the distinctive character of the work here comes from the desert itself. For a work to succeed, it has to be portable enough to make the journey, rugged enough to withstand the wind and weather and participants, stimulating in daylight and darkness, and engaging without interpretation. Encounters with monumental and intimate works here feel surreal. Scale has a tendency to fool the eyes. What looked enormous in an artist's studio could get lost on the playa, but there are virtually no spatial limits, so artists can dream as big as they can build. Some pieces bowl you over by their grace and others by the sheer audacity it took to bring them here. Burning Man's irreverent humor comes out in pieces like Rebekah Waites' "Church Trap," a tiny country chapel set precariously on a wooden beam, like a mousetrap, that lured participants in to find religion — it was built and burned in 2013 ... while other works, like Christopher Schardt's "Firmament," aim for the sublime. Here, under a canopy of dancing lights set to classical music, participants could escape the thumping rave beats and chaos all around. At night, the city swarms with mutant vehicles, the only cars allowed to roam the playa. And if necessity is the mother of invention, here, absurdity is its father. (Laughter) They zigzag from artwork to artwork like some bizarre, random public transportation system, pulsing with light and sound. When artists stop worrying about critics and collectors and start making work for themselves, these are the kinds of marvelous toys they create. And what's amazing is that, by and large, when people first come to Burning Man, they don't know how to make this stuff. It's the active collaborative maker community there that makes this possible. Collectives like Five Ton Crane come together to share skills and take on complex projects a single artist would never even attempt, from a Gothic rocket ship that appears ready to take off at any moment to a fairytale home inside a giant boot complete with shelves full of artist-made books, a blackbird pie in the oven and a climbable beanstalk. Skilled or unskilled, all are welcome. In fact, part of the charm and the innovation of the work here is that so many makers aren't artists at all, but scientists or engineers or welders or garbage collectors, and their works cross disciplinary boundaries, from a grove of origami mushrooms that developed out of the design for a yurt to a tree that responds to the voices and biorhythms of all those around it through 175,000 LEDs embedded in its leaves. In museums, a typical visitor spends less than 30 seconds with a work of art, and I often watch people wander from label to label, searching for information, as though the entire story of a work of art could be contained in that one 80-word text. But in the desert, there are no gatekeepers and no placards explaining the art, just natural curiosity. You see a work on the horizon, and you ride towards it. When you arrive, you walk all around it, you touch it, you test it. Is it sturdy enough to climb on? Will I be impaled by it? (Laughter) Art becomes a place for extended interaction, and although the display might be short-lived, the experience stays with you. Nowhere is that truer at Burning Man than at the Temple. In 2000, David Best and Jack Haye built the first Temple, and after a member of their team was killed tragically in an accident shortly before the event, the building became a makeshift memorial. By itself, it's a magnificent piece of architecture, but the structure is only a shell until it disappears under a thick blanket of messages. "I miss you." "Please forgive me." "Even a broken crayon still colors." Intimate testaments to the most universal of human experiences, the experience of loss. The collective emotion in this place is overpowering and indescribable, before it's set afire on the last night of the event. Every year, something compels people from all different walks of life, from all over the world, to go out into the desert and make art when there is no money in it. The work's not always refined, it's not always viable, it's not even always good, but it's authentic and optimistic in a way we rarely see anywhere else. In these cynical times, it's comforting to know that we're still capable of great feats of imagination, and that when we search for connection, we come together and build cathedrals in the dust. Forget the price tags. Forget the big names. What is art for in our contemporary world if not this? Thank you. (Applause) |
What is imposter syndrome and how can you combat it? | null | TED-Ed | Even after writing eleven books and winning several prestigious awards, Maya Angelou couldn’t escape the nagging doubt that she hadn’t really earned her accomplishments. Albert Einstein experienced something similar: he described himself as an “involuntary swindler” whose work didn’t deserve as much attention as it had received. Accomplishments at the level of Angelou’s or Einstein’s are rare, but their feeling of fraudulence is extremely common. Why can’t so many of us shake feelings that we haven’t earned our accomplishments, or that our ideas and skills aren’t worthy of others’ attention? Psychologist Pauline Rose Clance was the first to study this unwarranted sense of insecurity. In her work as a therapist, she noticed many of her undergraduate patients shared a concern: though they had high grades, they didn’t believe they deserved their spots at the university. Some even believed their acceptance had been an admissions error. While Clance knew these fears were unfounded, she could also remember feeling the exact same way in graduate school. She and her patients experienced something that goes by a number of names— imposter phenomenon, imposter experience, and imposter syndrome. Together with colleague Suzanne Imes, Clance first studied imposterism in female college students and faculty. Their work established pervasive feelings of fraudulence in this group. Since that first study, the same thing has been established across gender, race, age, and a huge range of occupations, though it may be more prevalent and disproportionately affect the experiences of underrepresented or disadvantaged groups. To call it a syndrome is to downplay how universal it is. It's not a disease or an abnormality, and it isn’t necessarily tied to depression, anxiety, or self-esteem. Where do these feelings of fraudulence come from? People who are highly skilled or accomplished tend to think others are just as skilled. This can spiral into feelings that they don’t deserve accolades and opportunities over other people. And as Angelou and Einstein experienced, there’s often no threshold of accomplishment that puts these feelings to rest. Feelings of imposterism aren’t restricted to highly skilled individuals, either. Everyone is susceptible to a phenomenon known as pluralistic ignorance, where we each doubt ourselves privately, but believe we’re alone in thinking that way because no one else voices their doubts. Since it’s tough to really know how hard our peers work, how difficult they find certain tasks, or how much they doubt themselves, there’s no easy way to dismiss feelings that we’re less capable than the people around us. Intense feelings of imposterism can prevent people from sharing their great ideas or applying for jobs and programs where they’d excel. At least so far, the most surefire way to combat imposter syndrome is to talk about it. Many people suffering from imposter syndrome are afraid that if they ask about their performance, their fears will be confirmed. And even when they receive positive feedback, it often fails to ease feelings of fraudulence. But on the other hand, hearing that an advisor or mentor has experienced feelings of imposterism can help relieve those feelings. The same goes for peers. Even simply finding out there’s a term for these feelings can be an incredible relief. Once you’re aware of the phenomenon, you can combat your own imposter syndrome by collecting and revisiting positive feedback. One scientist who kept blaming herself for problems in her lab started to document the causes every time something went wrong. Eventually, she realized most of the problems came from equipment failure, and came to recognize her own competence. We may never be able to banish these feelings entirely, but we can have open conversations about academic or professional challenges. With increasing awareness of how common these experiences are, perhaps we can feel freer to be frank about our feelings and build confidence in some simple truths: you have talent, you are capable, and you belong. |
How China is (and isn't) fighting pollution and climate change | {0: 'Angel Hsu is a professor and data geek who applies data-driven methods to solve challenging environmental issues.\r\n'} | TED2018 | When is seeing not believing? A couple years ago, my friend sent me this photo from Ürümqi, which is the capital of Xinjiang province in northwest China. On this particular day, she couldn't believe her eyes. Checking the quality of the air outside using this app on her iPad, the numbers were telling her the air quality was good, one on a scale of 500. But when she looked outside, she saw something much different. Yes, those are buildings in the background. (Laughter) But the data were simply not telling the truth of what people were seeing and breathing, and it's because they were failing to measure PM2.5, or fine particulate pollution. When PM2.5 levels went off the charts in 2012, or "crazy bad," as the US Embassy once described it in a tweet, Chinese denizens took to social media and they started to question why it was that they were seeing this disconnect between official air quality statistics and what they were seeing and breathing for themselves. Now, this questioning has led to an environmental awakening of sorts in China, forcing China's government to tackle its pollution problems. Now China has the opportunity to become a global environmental leader. But the picture that I'll paint for you today is one that's mixed. There are some signs that are very promising, and there are other trends that are more troubling that warrant closer attention. But now let's go back to the story at hand. I started to witness the beginnings of China's green evolution when I was a PhD student conducting fieldwork in China in 2011. I traveled all across the country seeking answers to the question that I often got myself from the skeptical outsider: What, you mean China is doing something on the environment? They have environmental policies? What policies? At that time, PM2.5 data was considered too politically sensitive and so the government was keeping it secret, but citizens were becoming aware of its harmful human health effects, and they were demanding greater transparency on the part of the government. I actually started to see some of this growing evolution and awareness myself cropping up all over China. Department stores, for example, started to market these air purifiers that could filter out harmful PM2.5. Citizens were also adopting PM2.5 as the title of musical festivals. (Laughter) And then I went to a golf course in Shenzhen, which is in southern China, and you can see from this banner, they're advertising a retreat from PM2.5. Golf sub-par, but don't breathe sub-par air. And then Shanghai's Environmental Protection Bureau decided to create a mascot named after the air quality index to better communicate the air quality data to its people. I call her AQI Girl, and her expression and hair color changes depending on the quality of air outside. Five years later and she's still the mostly smiling face of Shanghai's air quality. And then in 2015, former CCTV reporter Chai Jing created this documentary called "Under the Dome." It would be likened to Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring." And much like Rachel Carson brought to attention the fact that pesticides were harming human health, "Under the Dome" stamped into the popular consciousness that air pollution was leading to one million premature deaths every year in China alone. This video garnered more than a hundred million views in a single weekend before China's government, fearing that it might incite some type of social unrest, pulled it from the internet. But the damage had already been done. Public outcry over air pollution galvanized China's government, perhaps in an act of self-preservation, to think big and decisively about how it could tackle the root of its air pollution and many of its other environmental problems: its energy system. For you see, in China, about two thirds of its electricity comes from coal. China has more coal-fired power plants than any other country in the world, about 40 percent of the global total, and it's because of this fact that China's government has decided since 2014 to wage a war on coal, shutting down small coal mines, setting limits on coal consumption, even canceling an Australia's worth of coal-fired power plants. They've also been making enormous investments when it comes to clean and renewable energy, like hydropower, wind and solar, and the pace and the scale of this transformation has been absolutely mind-blowing. Let me give you a couple of statistics to show you what I mean. China leads the world when it comes to hydropower, with a third of total capacity. There's enough for every Chinese citizen to power two homes in a single year from hydropower alone. You may have heard of the Three Gorges Dam, pictured here, which is the largest power station in the world, and it's powered by water. In terms of wind power, China has a third of the global capacity. This makes it the number one leader by far. When we look at solar, China's also leading. In fact, they crushed their 2020 target of installing 105 gigawatts of solar power. This is after the government already revised upwards several times its solar energy target between 2009 and 2015. Last year, in seven months alone, China was able to install a whopping 35 gigawatts of solar power. This is more than half of what the US has combined in total and China did this in just seven months alone. We can verify this remarkable growth in solar power from space, like the startup SpaceKnow has done in this slide. By 2020, China is on track to generate Germany's entire electricity consumption from just wind and solar power alone. It's pretty darn remarkable. And we see some evidence now that China's efforts on clean energy is actually having an effect, not just on air pollution reduction, but also on global climate change, where China has the world's largest carbon footprint. If we look at some of the data, we can see that China's coal consumption may have already reached a peak as early as 2013. This is a major reason why China's government announced that actually they've already achieved their 2020 carbon reduction pledge ahead of schedule. This reduction in coal consumption is also directly driving improvements in air quality across the country, as I've shown here in blue. In most major Chinese cities, air pollution has fallen by as much as 30 percent. And this reduction in air pollution is actually leading people to live longer lives in China, on average two and a half years more than they would have in 2013. In yellow, we can see the cities that have experienced the greatest improvements in air quality. But of course, as I mentioned at the beginning of this talk, we have to temper some of this optimism with a healthy dose of caution, and that's largely because the data are still being determined. At the end of last year, after roughly three years of pretty steady global carbon emissions, scientific projections suggest that global emissions may be on the rise again and that could be due to increases in China's fossil fuel consumptions, so they may not have reached that peak that I showed earlier. But of course, the statistics and the data are still murky and that's because China regularly revises its coal statistics after the fact. Actually, it's funny, since I've been here I've been having a debate on Twitter with other climate modelers, trying to figure out whether China's carbon emissions have gone up, gone down or whether they're staying relatively stable. And of course, China is still a rapidly developing country. It's still experimenting with a range of policies, like dockless bike sharing, which has been hailed as a possible sustainable transport solution. But then we have images of this bicycle graveyard that tell a more cautionary tale. Sometimes, solutions can move too fast and outpace demand. And of course, coal is still king in China, at least for now. So why should we care about what China is doing on the environment? Well, what China does at home on the environment can have global implications for the rest of us. To borrow a line from Chai Jing, we're all under the same dome, and air pollution that originates in China can travel beyond its borders and affect populations as far away as those in North America. China's not only exporting air pollution, but they're also exporting aid, infrastructure, technology abroad. President Xi Jinping in 2013 announced the One Belt, One Road Initiative, a massive, one-trillion-US-dollar infrastructure investment project in more than 60 other countries. And historically, when we've seen that China has made these infrastructure investments abroad, they haven't always been clean. The Global Environment Institute, a Chinese civil society group, found that in the last 15 years, China has invested in more than 240 coal-fired power plants in more than 68 countries affiliated with the One Belt, One Road Initiative. That's more than a quarter of China's own domestic coal-fired capacity that is exported abroad. So we can see that even though China is cleaning up at home, it's exporting some of that pollution to other countries, and greenhouse gas emissions simply don't have a passport. So when we're trying to evaluate this question of whether or not China is actually leading, we can see it's still very much an open debate. But time is running out. I've studied the climate models, and the outlook is not good. We still have a gap between current policies and what needs to happen if we want to avoid dangerous climate change. Leadership is what we desperately need, but it's not coming from the US, for example. The US administration last June announced its intent to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, so now people are looking towards China to fill that leadership void. So China is very much in the driver's seat determining our global environmental future. What they do on carbon trading, on clean energy, on air pollution, we can learn many lessons. One of those lessons is that clean energy is not just good for the environment, it can save lives by reducing air pollution. It's also good for the economy. We can see that last year, China was responsible for 30 percent of the global growth in green jobs. The US? Only six. So the picture that I just painted for you hopefully seems much different from those murky, foggy air quality statistics to a much clearer picture of China's clean energy. And even though China is headed in the right direction, we know that there's still a very long road ahead. So let me ask you once more: Is seeing believing? Can we trust the data and the statistics that show that China's air quality is coming down and that its war on coal is actually having an effect? Well, let's take a look at some of the latest satellite images of China's solar power installations. I want you to look very closely at this image. Can you see? The proof may just be in the pandas. Thank you so much. (Applause) |
How I went from child refugee to international model | {0: 'Halima Aden was the first ever hijab-wearing fashion model.'} | TEDxKakumaCamp | This is me at age seven. And this is also me. (Applause and cheering) To be standing here in Kakuma refugee camp feels so surreal, and I'm overcome with so much emotion. These very grounds are where I was born and spent the first seven years of my life. I think many people are surprised to hear that I had a great upbringing here at Kakuma. But I was happy, I was smart, I had friends and above all, I had hope for a brighter future. That's not to say that we didn't have our obstacles. I mean, boy were there struggles. I would sometimes get sick with malaria and didn't always know where our next meal would come from. But the sense of community that is here in Kakuma and the pride that everyone here possesses is simply unparalleled. When I was younger, I remember conflicts breaking out. That tends to happen when people come from different backgrounds and don't speak the same language. Eventually, Swahili — the main language here — became our common ground. I made friends with the kids at the camp and even started embracing some of their cultures, celebrating holidays like Christmas even though I was raised Muslim. The other kids would embrace my culture as well, sometimes even praying right alongside me. It was easy, as children, to come together, blend all of our beliefs to form our own unique, multicultural environment. My name is Halima Aden and I'm a black, Muslim, Somali-American from Kenya. (Applause) Some have called me a trailblazer — I was the first Muslim homecoming queen at my high school, the first Somali student senator at my college and the first hijab-wearing woman in many places, like the Miss Minnesota USA beauty pageant, the runways of Milan and New York Fashion Weeks and even on the historic cover of British "Vogue." As you can see, I'm not afraid to be the first, to step out on my own, to take risks and seek change, because that's what being a minority is about. It's about using yourself as a vessel to create change and being a human representation for the power of diversity. And now I use my platform to spread an important message of acceptance. But it hasn't always been easy. When we first arrived to the United States and made St. Louis, Missouri home, I remember asking my mom, "Is this really America?" There were things that were sadly familiar, like hearing gunshots at night and the streets looking impoverished. But there were things that were also very different. Like when I started first grade, I noticed how the kids played in groups. In America, we call them "cliques." Back here, we all played together. Gender didn't matter, and race most certainly never mattered. I remember asking myself, "Why don't they understand Swahili? Swahili is the language that brings people together." To make matters worse, the school I was enrolled in didn't have an English immersion program. So everyday I would get up, go to school, sit in my desk and never learn a thing. This is when I started losing hope, and I wanted nothing more than return to Kakuma, a refugee camp. Soon, my mother learned that many Somalis found refuge in a small town in Minnesota. So when I was eight, we moved to Minnesota. My life changed as I met other students who spoke Somali, attended a school that had an English immersion program and found teachers that would go above and beyond, staying there after school hours and lunch breaks, dedicated to helping me find success in the classroom. Being a child refugee has taught me that one could be stripped of everything: food, shelter, clean drinking water, even friendship, but the one thing that no one could ever take away from you is your education. So I made studying my top priority and soon started flourishing within the classroom. As I grew older, I became more aware of others and how they viewed my race and background. Specifically, when I started wearing the head scarf known as a hijab. When I first started wearing it, I was excited. I remember admiring my mother's, and I wanted to emulate her beauty. But when I started middle school, the students teased me about not having hair, so to prove them wrong, I started showing them my hair — something that goes against my beliefs, but something I felt pressured to do. I wanted so badly to fit in at the time. When I reflect on the issues of race, religion, identity, a lot of painful memories come to mind. It would be easy for me to blame those of another culture for making me feel the pain I felt, but when I think deeper, I also recognize that the most impactful, positive, life-changing events that have happened to me are thanks to those people who are different than me. It was at this moment that I decided to step outside of my comfort zone and compete in a pageant wearing a hijab and burkini. I saw it as an opportunity to be a voice for women who, like myself, had felt underrepresented. And although I didn't capture the crown, that experience opened so many doors for me. I was receiving emails and messages from women all over the world, telling me that I've inspired them by simply staying true to myself. The other "firsts" kept coming. I was invited to New York City by fashion icon Carine Roitfeld to shoot my very first editorial. It was around this time that I became the first hijab-wearing model, and in my first year, I graced the covers of nine fashion magazines. It was a whirlwind, to say the least. But with all the overnight success, there was one thing that remained constant — the thought that this could be what brings me back here to Kakuma, the place that I call home. And just a few months ago, something incredible happened to me. I was in New York City, on a photo shoot, when I met South Sudanese model Adut Akech, who also happened to be born right here in Kakuma. That experience in itself is the definition of hope. I mean, just imagine: two girls born in the same refugee camp, reunited for the first time on the cover of British "Vogue." (Applause and cheering) I was given the distinct pleasure of partnering up with UNICEF, knowing firsthand the work that they do for children in need. And I want you to remember that although the children here may be refugees, they are children. They deserve every opportunity to flourish, to hope, to dream — to be successful. My story began right here in Kakuma refugee camp, a place of hope. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why should you read "One Hundred Years of Solitude"? | null | TED-Ed | One day in 1965, while driving to Acapulco for a vacation with his family, Colombian journalist Gabriel García Márquez abruptly turned his car around, asked his wife to take care of the family’s finances for the coming months, and returned home. The beginning of a new book had suddenly come to him: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” Over the next eighteen months, those words would blossom into One Hundred Years of Solitude. A novel that would go on to bring Latin American literature to the forefront of the global imagination, earning García Márquez the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature. What makes One Hundred Years of Solitude so remarkable? The novel chronicles the fortunes and misfortunes of the Buendía family over seven generations. With its lush, detailed sentences, large cast of characters, and tangled narrative, One Hundred Years of Solitude is not an easy book to read. But it’s a deeply rewarding one, with an epic assortment of intense romances, civil war, political intrigue, globe-trotting adventurers, and more characters named Aureliano than you’d think possible. Yet this is no mere historical drama. One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of the most famous examples of a literary genre known as magical realism. Here, supernatural events or abilities are described in a realistic and matter-of-fact tone, while the real events of human life and history reveal themselves to be full of fantastical absurdity. Surreal phenomena within the fictional village of Macondo intertwine seamlessly with events taking place in the real country of Colombia. The settlement begins in a mythical state of isolation, but is gradually exposed to the outside world, facing multiple calamities along the way. As years pass, characters grow old and die, only to return as ghosts, or to be seemingly reincarnated in the next generation. When the American fruit company comes to town, so does a romantic mechanic who is always followed by yellow butterflies. A young woman up and floats away. Although the novel moves forward through subsequent generations, time moves in an almost cyclical manner. Many characters have similar names and features to their forebears, whose mistakes they often repeat. Strange prophecies and visits from mysterious gypsies give way to the skirmishes and firing squads of repeated civil wars. An American fruit company opens a plantation near the village and ends up massacring thousands of striking workers, mirroring the real-life ‘Banana Massacre’ of 1928. Combined with the novel’s magical realism, this produces a sense of history as a downward spiral the characters seem powerless to escape. Beneath the magic is a story about the pattern of Colombian and Latin American history from colonial times onward. This is a history that the author experienced firsthand. Gabriel García Márquez grew up in a Colombia torn apart by civil conflict between its Conservative and Liberal political parties. He also lived in an autocratic Mexico and covered the 1958 Venezuelan coup d’état as a journalist. But perhaps his biggest influences were his maternal grandparents. Nicolás Ricardo Márquez was a decorated veteran of the Thousand Days War whose accounts of the rebellion against Colombia's conservative government led Gabriel García Márquez to a socialist outlook. Meanwhile, Doña Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes’ omnipresent superstition became the foundation of One Hundred Years of Solitude’s style. Their small house in Aracataca where the author spent his childhood formed the main inspiration for Macondo. With One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez found a unique way to capture the unique history of Latin America. He was able to depict the strange reality of living in a post-colonial society, forced to relive the tragedies of the past. In spite of all this fatalism, the novel still holds hope. At his Nobel Lecture, García Marquez reflected on Latin America’s long history of civil strife and rampant iniquity. Yet he ended the speech by affirming the possibility of building a better world, to quote, “where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second chance on earth." |
A new way to think about the transition to motherhood | {0: 'Alexandra Sacks, M.D. is widely recognized as the leading clinical expert on matrescence: the developmental transition into motherhood. '} | TED Residency | Do you remember a time when you felt hormonal and moody? Your skin was breaking out, your body was growing in strange places and very fast, and at the same time, people were expecting you to be grown-up in this new way. Teenagers, right? Well, these same changes happen to a woman when she's having a baby. And we know that it's normal for teenagers to feel all over the place, so why don't we talk about pregnancy in the same way? There are entire textbooks written about the developmental arc of adolescence, and we don't even have a word to describe the transition to motherhood. We need one. I'm a psychiatrist who works with pregnant and postpartum women, a reproductive psychiatrist, and in the decade that I've been working in this field, I've noticed a pattern. It goes something like this: a woman calls me up, she's just had a baby, and she's concerned. She says, "I'm not good at this. I'm not enjoying this. Do I have postpartum depression?" So I go through the symptoms of that diagnosis, and it's clear to me that she's not clinically depressed, and I tell her that. But she isn't reassured. "It isn't supposed to feel like this," she insists. So I say, "OK. What did you expect it to feel like?" She says, "I thought motherhood would make feel whole and happy. I thought my instincts would naturally tell me what to do. I thought I'd always want to put the baby first." This — this is an unrealistic expectation of what the transition to motherhood feels like. And it wasn't just her. I was getting calls with questions like this from hundreds of women, all concerned that something was wrong, because they couldn't measure up. And I didn't know how to help them, because telling them that they weren't sick wasn't making them feel better. I wanted to find a way to normalize this transition, to explain that discomfort is not always the same thing as disease. So I set out to learn more about the psychology of motherhood. But there actually wasn't much in the medical textbooks, because doctors mostly write about disease. So I turned to anthropology. And it took me two years, but in an out-of-print essay written in 1973 by Dana Raphael, I finally found a helpful way to frame this conversation: matrescence. It's not a coincidence that "matrescence" sounds like "adolescence." Both are times when body morphing and hormone shifting lead to an upheaval in how a person feels emotionally and how they fit into the world. And like adolescence, matrescence is not a disease, but since it's not in the medical vocabulary, since doctors aren't educating people about it, it's being confused with a more serious condition called postpartum depression. I've been building on the anthropology literature and have been talking about matrescence with my patients using a concept called the "push and pull." Here's the pull part. As humans, our babies are uniquely dependent. Unlike other animals, our babies can't walk, they can't feed themselves, they're very hard to take care of. So evolution has helped us out with this hormone called oxytocin. It's released around childbirth and also during skin-to-skin touch, so it rises even if you didn't give birth to the baby. Oxytocin helps a human mother's brain zoom in, pulling her attention in, so that the baby is now at the center of her world. But at the same time, her mind is pushing away, because she remembers there are all these other parts to her identity — other relationships, her work, hobbies, a spiritual and intellectual life, not to mention physical needs: to sleep, to eat, to exercise, to have sex, to go to the bathroom, alone — (Laughter) if possible. This is the emotional tug-of-war of matrescence. This is the tension the women calling me were feeling. It's why they thought they were sick. If women understood the natural progression of matrescence, if they knew that most people found it hard to live inside this push and pull, if they knew that under these circumstances, ambivalence was normal and nothing to be ashamed of, they would feel less alone, they would feel less stigmatized, and I think it would even reduce rates of postpartum depression. I'd love to study that one day. I'm a believer in talk therapy, so if we're going to change the way our culture understands this transition to motherhood, women need to be talking to each other, not just me. So mothers, talk about your matrescence with other mothers, with your friends, and, if you have one, with your partner, so that they can understand their own transition and better support you. But it's not just about protecting your relationship. When you preserve a separate part of your identity, you're also leaving room for your child to develop their own. When a baby is born, so is a mother, each unsteady in their own way. Matrescence is profound, but it's also hard, and that's what makes it human. Thank you. (Applause) |
"Wild Women" | {0: 'Originally from New Orleans, Louisiana, Sunni Patterson combines the heritage, culture, and traditions of her native town with a spiritual worldview to create powerful music and poetry.\r\n\r\n'} | TEDWomen 2017 | They wanted her piecemealed, papier-mâchéd, practically broken, limp-like and loveless, a litany of exaggeration. They wanted her low. And high. Flat and wide. Filled with all of their empty. They wanted her to be more like them. Not knowing her conception was immaculate. That she was birthed in sandalwood-scented river water, sweet sapphire honey-touched tongue, she was too much of a mouthful for the greedy. Just a small amount of her was more than they could stand. Oh, they wanted her bland. And barren. Unspirited, un-African, uncultured, under siege in the streets. They wanted her face down, ass up, hands cuffed and ankles strapped. They wanted her knowing she could never want them back. Oh, they wanted her holy, baptized in her divine, they wanted her secrets, pearls to swine. They wanted to unravel the mystery of her design. Fascinated by glory, hypnotized by her kind. Oh, they wanted her complete. They wanted her whole, though they came fractioned, half-hearted, half-soul, with no regards and no knowledge as to who she really was. Oh, but if they knew. If they knew her, praise songs would rain from the clouds of their eyes, clearing the vision, bathing the heart. They would bow every time they saw her. Be their best selves when she was around. If they knew her, knew she was the glue to their revolution, the life flow of blood through their veins. If they knew her, she would know, she would feel that her body is more than battlefield. More than bone break and bleeding bigotry. More than bridge over your troubled conscience. More than used up, walked on, driven through, shot up. More than your "Selma, Lord, Selma" Edmund Pettus. More than your killer Katrina Danziger. More than your bust them out of Baltimore "Highway to Nowhere." If they knew her, she would know. (Singing) Wild women, wild women, they walk with buffalo. Have lightning on their tongues, fly whisks as weapons. Wild women, they walk with machetes. With wisdom, with grace, with ease. Wild women have hurricanes in their bellies, releasing a flood of a lesson. Oh, wild women, they fly free. Just watch their ways, how they rip and shred. Oh, who can understand her, this winding Niger river of a woman one who is unafraid to tear away only to roam and then become the wind. She who speaks in gusts and cyclones blasting us back to high ground, high consciousness, she turns and so does the world. Feel her spinning, spanning several lifetimes. Hear her speaking, sparking alarm. See her dancing, summoning the dead, resurrecting new life. Heaven hears her knocking on the door, safely transporting the ones who call for her assistance. Wild women, they open portals to new worlds, new speech, new dreams. Oh, dearly beloveds, so dearly departed from the ways of the guardian, beware. For wild women are not to be tamed. Only admired. Just let her in and witness her set your days ablaze. (Cheers) (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
Let's get honest about our money problems | {0: 'Tammy Lally helps others master their finances.'} | TEDxOrlando | Have you every had to break your family's rules? Today, I'm breaking mine, around money, secrecy and shame. In 2006, on my brother Keith's 40th birthday, he called. "Tam, I'm in dire straits. I wouldn't ask unless I had to. Can I borrow 7,500 dollars?" This wasn't the first time he needed quick cash, but this time, his voice frightened me. I had never heard him so beaten down and shameful, and it was on his 40th birthday. After a few basic questions that we would all ask, I agreed to loan him the money, but under one condition: that as the financial professional in the family, I wanted to meet with him and his wife to see what was really happening. Weeks later, we met at the local Starbucks, and I started right in with the tough-love budget conversation. "You should sell the house, downsize to something you can afford, sell the toys. And Starbucks? Give up the five-dollar-a-day coffee." You know, all the trappings that we do to keep up with the Joneses. Quickly, my brother and his wife went into a fearsome blame game, and it got messy. I vacillated between therapist and pissed-off sister. I wanted them to be better than this. "Come on, you two. Get your shit together. You're parents. Grow up and buck up." After we left, I called my mom, but Keith beat me to it, and he told her that I wasn't helpful. In fact, he was hurt and felt ganged-up on. Of course he did. I shamed him with my tough-love budget conversation. Two months went by when I received a call. "Tam? I have bad news. Keith committed suicide last night." Days later, at his home, I went looking for answers, in his "office" — the garage. There, I found a stack of overdue credit card bills and a foreclosure notice served to him on the day that he died. My brother left behind his beautiful 10-year-old daughter, his brilliant 18-year-old son, weeks before his high school graduation, and his wife of 20 years. How did this happen? My brother was caught in our family's money-shame cycle, and he was far from alone in this. Suicide rates among adults ages 40 to 64 have risen nearly 40 percent since 1999. Job loss, bankruptcy and foreclosures were present in nearly 40 percent of the deaths, with white middle-aged men accounting for seven out of 10 suicides. What I've learned is that our self-destructive and self-defeating financial behaviors are not driven by our rational, logical minds. Instead, they are a product of our subconscious belief systems rooted in our childhoods and so deeply ingrained in us, they shape the way that we deal with money our entire adult lives, and so many of you are left believing that you're lazy, crazy or stupid — or just bad with money. This is what I call money shame. Dr. Brené Brown, a well-known shame researcher, defines shame as "the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed, and therefore unworthy of love and belonging." Based on this definition, here's how I'm defining money shame: "the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed, and therefore unworthy of love and belonging, based on our bank account balances, our debts, our homes, our cars and our job titles." Let me give you a couple of examples of what I mean. I believe that we all have money shame, whether you earn 10,000 dollars a year or 10 million, and it's because we give money all of our power. Here's what it would look like if someone that you love, or you, might have money shame. They play the big shot, always picking up the check, financially rescuing family and friends. They are financially secure, but they live in a state of chronic not-enoughness. They drive a Mercedes, but their budget really only can afford a Honda. And they're looking good at every cost. I know that we can break free from the grips of money shame, because I did. Shortly after my brother's death, the Recession hit. I lost my business and faced bankruptcy. Secretly, I was terrified. I stayed in my home for a year, thinking I did something wrong, told myself, "What did you do? What happened?" I stayed silent, while all along, I went outside and smiled. Nobody knew. That's money shame. So what I had to do was let go of the grip that I had on knowing all the answers. I was the know-it-all in my family, and I had to give up the idea that a new financial plan was the solution. And so just like everything in my life, for me, I was sent a human to help, and I accepted the help, but I had to do major self-inquiry about my family's money history and my money beliefs. We have to start having this conversation. Money can no longer be a taboo topic. We have to get honest with each other that we're suffering with money issues, and let's get real — we have to stop numbing out our pain. In order to uncover the painful parts of your money story and your money history, you can't be numb. We have to let go of our past in order to be free. Letting go of the past happens through surrender, faith and forgiveness. Debt is the tangible manifestation of not forgiving. If you have debt, you've not completely forgiven your past, so it's our work to forgive ourselves and others so that we can live freely. Otherwise, our history will continue to repeat. This is not a quick fix, and I know we all want one, but it's a slow wake-up. This is another level of work. We have to go higher to get it, to get at it. So try this: follow your dollars. Your money will show you right away what you value. Where's it going? And then ask yourself: Do I really value all this stuff? And get curious about what you're feeling when you're spending. Are you lonely? Are you bored? Or are you just excited? But there's deeper work that needs to happen. How did you get all these money beliefs to begin with? I call this your money autobiography, and as a money coach, this is the first step I take with my clients. Think back to your earliest childhood money memory. What did it feel like when you got money? Were you excited, proud or confused? And what did you do with the money? Did you run with the candy store, or did you run to the bank? And what did you hear your parents say, and what did you see your parents do with the money? My brother and I heard, "More money will make us happy." Every day. "More money will make us happy." And we internalized that into the money belief that our self worth was equal to our net worth as we watched our mom live in a state of chronic not-enoughness. And she numbed the pain with sugar and shopping. So what did we do? Keith played out my mother's life. He was an underearner, longed to be financially rescued, and he numbed out the pain with alcohol. I did the opposite. I became a high earner, rescuer, and I numbed the pain out with self-help books. But what we had in common was our money belief. We both believed that our bank account balance was equal to our self worth. Looking back at the Starbucks meeting with my brother ... he didn't need a budget and my judgment. He needed a breakthrough from his suffering, and he needed my compassion. Keith was not able to be the one to speak up and break our family money shame cycle, so he left me to do the work and share his legacy. Change is difficult, but in my family, not changing is fatal. So I did the work, and I have experienced deep and profound forgiveness, and as I stand here today, I am living on purpose, I serve, and money serves me. It only takes one person in your family to break through the money-shame cycle. I want you to be the one. Thank you. (Applause) |
The surprising link between stress and memory | null | TED-Ed | You spend weeks studying for an important test. On the big day, you wait nervously as your teacher hands it out. You’re working your way through, when you’re asked to define ‘ataraxia.’ You know you’ve seen it before, but your mind goes blank. What just happened? The answer lies in the complex relationship between stress and memory. There are many types and degrees of stress and different kinds of memory, but we’re going to focus on how short-term stress impacts your memory for facts. To start, it helps to understand how this kind of memory works. Facts you read, hear, or study become memories through a process with three main steps. First comes acquisition: the moment you encounter a new piece of information. Each sensory experience activates a unique set of brain areas. In order to become lasting memories, these sensory experiences have to be consolidated by the hippocampus, influenced by the amygdala, which emphasizes experiences associated with strong emotions. The hippocampus then encodes memories, probably by strengthening the synaptic connections stimulated during the original sensory experience. Once a memory has been encoded, it can be remembered, or retrieved, later. Memories are stored all over the brain, and it’s likely the prefrontal cortex that signals for their retrieval. So how does stress affect each of these stages? In the first two stages, moderate stress can actually help experiences enter your memory. Your brain responds to stressful stimuli by releasing hormones known as corticosteroids, which activate a process of threat-detection and threat-response in the amygdala. The amygdala prompts your hippocampus to consolidate the stress-inducing experience into a memory. Meanwhile, the flood of corticosteroids from stress stimulates your hippocampus, also prompting memory consolidation. But even though some stress can be helpful, extreme and chronic stress can have the opposite effect. Researchers have tested this by injecting rats directly with stress hormones. As they gradually increased the dose of corticosteroids, the rats’ performance on memory tests increased at first, but dropped off at higher doses. In humans, we see a similar positive effect with moderate stress. But that only appears when the stress is related to the memory task— so while time pressure might help you memorize a list, having a friend scare you will not. And the weeks, months, or even years of sustained corticosteroids that result from chronic stress can damage the hippocampus and decrease your ability to form new memories. It would be nice if some stress also helped us remember facts, but unfortunately, the opposite is true. The act of remembering relies on the prefrontal cortex, which governs thought, attention, and reasoning. When corticosteroids stimulate the amygdala, the amygdala inhibits, or lessens the activity of, the prefrontal cortex. The reason for this inhibition is so the fight/flight/freeze response can overrule slower, more reasoned thought in a dangerous situation. But that can also have the unfortunate effect of making your mind go blank during a test. And then the act of trying to remember can itself be a stressor, leading to a vicious cycle of more corticosteroid release and an even smaller chance of remembering. So what can you do to turn stress to your advantage and stay calm and collected when it matters the most? First, if you know a stressful situation like a test is coming, try preparing in conditions similar to the stressful environment. Novelty can be a stressor. Completing practice questions under time pressure, or seated at a desk rather than on a couch, can make your stress response to these circumstances less sensitive during the test itself. Exercise is another useful tool. Increasing your heart and breathing rate is linked to chemical changes in your brain that help reduce anxiety and increase your sense of well-being. Regular exercise is also widely thought to improve sleeping patterns, which comes in handy the night before a test. And on the actual test day, try taking deep breaths to counteract your body’s flight/fight/freeze response. Deep breathing exercises have shown measurable reduction in test anxiety in groups ranging from third graders to nursing students. So the next time you find your mind going blank at a critical moment, take a few deep breaths until you remember ataraxia: a state of calmness, free from anxiety. |
America's most invisible communities -- mobile home parks | {0: 'Esther Sullivan is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Colorado, Denver. Her research focuses on poverty, spatial inequality, legal regulation, housing, and the built environment, with a special interest in both forced and voluntary residential mobility. Esther holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from The University of Texas at Austin and a B.A. in English from The University of Chicago.'} | TEDxMileHigh | Right now, there is no state in the nation where a person working full-time for minimum wage can afford rent for a fair-market, one-bedroom home. In fact, affordable housing is so hard to find you'll actually spend less of your income if you can afford to buy a house rather than rent. But even an entry-level home, the cheapest homes on the market, will cost you $370,000 in L.A., $245K in Boston, $222K in Denver. What if instead you could buy a brand new, three-bedroom, two-bathroom home for $45,000, which would put your total housing costs somewhere in the range of $400-700 per month? (Cheers) (Applause) Right, exactly! It seems like you'd be crazy not to jump at the opportunity. Well, 18 million Americans are already in on the secret. They've achieved the American dream of homeownership and they've done it on a budget. How? You're totally hoping I'm going to say "tiny home." (Laughter) Mmmm. Alright. Well sort of. Enter the mobile home. Okay, it lacks all the hype, but 18 million Americans live in one. In fact, one in every five new single-family homes sold is a mobile home, and that's a serious statistic. It's serious because homeownership has long been a source of stability and a principal source of wealth in the U.S. And mobile homes are a primary way that low-income households break into homeownership and start building that wealth. Mobile homes provide a massive source of owner-occupied affordable housing at a time when the U.S. has a major affordable housing problem. We hear that a lot, right? We're in an affordable housing crisis. But what does that really mean? It means we don't have enough housing to meet the needs of millions. At the lowest income levels, the people who really need housing help, we're short 7.4 million units. That's just 35 affordable units for every 100 households that need it. The good news is that cities have begun to recognize that access to quality affordable housing is good for everyone, not just those that need it, but larger communities as well. Sociologists like myself, who study housing, show us why. Housing is an incredible source of stability, which translates into positive educational outcomes, health benefits, employment opportunities, and neighborhood safety. So recognizing this, cities are building some affordable units, but many remain unaffordable for low-income people. This problem is simply too big. We can't just build our way out of it. If we're serious about solving it, we need to preserve the affordable housing that we already have. Enter, once again, the mobile home. Mobile homes are this country's single largest source of unsubsidized affordable housing, and could play a major role in addressing our affordable housing crisis, but there's a problem. One of our largest sources of affordable housing is also one of our most insecure. Mobile homes are insecure for two reasons which are like two trains heading right for each other. The first reason isn't the home itself; it's the land. About a third of mobile homes are installed in mobile home parks, where residents own the home but rent the land. Now, this is part of what makes the housing so affordable, but it also means that homeowners can be evicted at any time if the property owner decides to sell or redevelop the park. The second reason they're insecure is they're invisible. Think for a second about the mobile home park closest to your house. Some of you can probably picture it. Maybe it's off a highway, behind a strip mall. But many of you might not actually know where the nearest mobile home park is, and that's not by accident. That's by design. For over a century, planning and zoning regulations have required that mobile home parks be walled in, fenced off, and, in the language of planners, visually screened from view. But perhaps the most damning of these regulations comes from laws that don't allow mobile home parks to be established near conventional housing. As a result, mobile home parks are disproportionately located in commercial and industrial areas. So now you can see those two trains about to collide, right? When communities of homeowners that rent the land are isolated onto commercial properties owned by a third party, they're the first victims of urban growth. When a big-box store is looking for a place to build, a mobile home park is an easy target. Mobile home park brokers actually make a living selling off parks for redevelopment. One broker told me that Walmart is his best client. When parks are redeveloped, communities of homeowners who have lived in their homes for decades are evicted with as little as 30 days' notice, and entire communities are dismantled. And this is happening at an alarming rate, right now. We have an affordable housing crisis in this country, yet we are allowing one of our largest sources of affordable housing to disappear. As a sociologist, I wanted to document the effects of these mass evictions, so beginning in 2012, I rented a mobile home inside closing parks, first in Florida and then in Texas. I moved in and lived beside neighbors over 17 consecutive months as they scrambled to deal with their eviction. I then followed them for six more months after they were evicted. This is what I learned. The term "mobile home" is a complete misnomer. Mobile homes are not RVs, they're not campers. They're not intended to be mobile once they're first transported from the factory. Once installed on land, just like any other home, they settle. Moving them can cause serious structural damage and cost up to $15,000, and all of that is if they can be moved. In the parks where I lived, lucky residents lost entire savings and months of their lives dealing with eviction. Unlucky residents lost everything. Their homes were not structurally sound for relocation, and they were forced to abandon them. These residents were real people, like my neighbor Stella. Stella prided herself on being able to live independently at the age of 87. Stella was blind and completely homebound, but her cheap rent and knowing every corner of her mobile home had made that possible. Stella had paid off her home many years ago, but when her park closed, she couldn't afford to move it on her $790 Social Security check. In the end, Stella lost her home of 20 years and her prized independence. She moved into a guest room in her son's apartment. Two blocks over from Stella, Randall meticulously maintained his home. It was the first home he'd ever owned. The first time he had me over, he apologized for it being so messy, but then he later admitted he'd just been scrubbing the cabinets. Randall learned that this home could not be moved, and he desperately searched for housing nearby so he could keep his job. But he found nothing he could afford, even after months. On the day before Randall's park closed, he transitioned from homeowner to homeless, and to this day, he sleeps on a park bench about a mile from where his home once was. When these parks close, residents lose homes but also neighbors and social supports. So Stella lost the neighbors who would come and check on her, and Randall lost the people who could give him a ride when he needed it. Randall and Stella are just two of about 200 evicted homeowners I met during those two years, and while everyone's story is a little different, the common reality is that mobile home park closures create a cycle of housing instability that extends well beyond these moments of eviction, and that affects all of us. Housing instability means that local teachers get an influx of new kids partway through the year. It means social service providers are stretched thin managing new caseloads. It means small businesses lose reliable employees. Zoning communities into invisibility creates housing instability. But more than that, it creates social vulnerability because it's hard to care about what you don't see. But there's hope because over the last century we've solved some of our toughest housing challenges by shining a spotlight on invisible problems. We passed the first progressive tenement housing reforms only after a photojournalist showed the world the unsafe conditions in crowded slums. We passed the Fair Housing Act only after African American Vietnam vets showed us that they'd risked their lives for this country but couldn't buy a home in a white neighborhood. We passed the housing measures in the Americans with Disabilities Act only after activists with disabilities demonstrated that they couldn't fit through a standard entrance and into a home. So perhaps we're primed to bring this next housing challenge into the light. And that starts by working to change some of the very regulations that keep mobile home parks invisible. We're ready for this. I mean, you're already binge-watching "tiny house" shows on HGTV. (Laughter) Your Facebook feed is full of them, you love them, you want to retire in one. So we're ready to push for new policies that better integrate different forms of housing into the fabric of our residential communities. And we're ready to address that underlying land ownership issue too. We already have a model to follow: the condo model, where residents own their unit and hold the condo property collectively. There are parks that have actually tried this and it's working. In about 200 parks across the country, nonprofit groups have helped residents collectively get a loan so that they can buy their park and run it themselves, and residents in these parks report seeing immediate improvements in the maintenance, quality, and stability of their communities. But maybe we can take an even more important step to ensure housing security for everyone. If we can reshape our thinking about the mobile home park, we can go further to imagining housing as a basic human right. The UN and most developed nations recognize and have policies that affirm a human right to housing, for all of the reasons that we've been talking about. It's hard to have health, wealth, and stability if you don't have a roof over your head. Plus, housing insecurity is expensive. It has costs for social services, businesses, schools. Those are costs we all bear, so a dollar spent on housing is a dollar saved on healthcare, infrastructure, and education. Yet the U.S. remains the only developed nation that doesn't guarantee a fundamental human right to shelter, but perhaps it's time to change that. (Applause) So if we want to, then that's going to require enacting legislation and shifting budgetary priorities, absolutely, but we've made just these kind of legislative shifts before. And it turns out that the mobile home park provides a pretty good roadmap for why and how we should do this. Parks show us the value of homeownership for all income levels. Parks even show us how we might imagine new, collective forms of property ownership. And most importantly, parks show us that entire cities can benefit when housing is secure for everyone. Housing is one of our most fundamental human needs and perhaps our biggest blindspot. Let's bring our attention back home so we can create communities that work for all of us. Thank you. (Applause) |
How prefab homes can transform affordable housing | null | TEDxYouth@Beaconstreet | Subtitle Provided by JUFE MOOC Studio M Subtitle Provided by JUFE MOOC Studio M Good morning, I'm going to talk about architecture and prefabrication. How a house could be built? And how we could improve with the current technology, the quality of our living spaces, the affordablility, and share these with greater markets and people. We think that this is, the present and the future of architecture. And, this house that we've built in Madrid, is our manifesto, our starting point. We prefabricated towards this house, You're seeing a civilian engineering parts, that perfectly assembled and balanced, to demonstrate that how prefabrication could be, the way to create amazing, inspiring, and affordable spaces to live. This house was based in these engineering parts, balanced in consonance and in harmony, in equilibrium with this rock of granite of 20 tons that put all their parts together. This is our house in Madrid. The Hemeroscopium House that is full of air, and full of life, to enable it, the structure, that as you can see, defers very little the house and the structure that created it. This house is a space to share with our family, It's a space to share in conspiracy, in communal with outdoors. in very intimate relationship with nature. This is the space that we were living in Spain and space that we would like to have here in Boston when we came at the full of harmony. This house has been built in Madrid, and when we came to Boston, we were looking for a same space, a similar space to live. We started struggling with "0", in the search of housings around. MIT where I work, POPLab is found that everyone want to be closer with good schools like this one, and we discovered how insane the prices are, how expensive these houses become, and also how these houses were responding to a(n) old American dream. a lifestyle, a technology, and a formal unspecialized exact was not there where we understood house should be. And also when you come as an migrant to United States, you don't have financial history and this was part of the problem that we have to solve so we actually went low to high. In the sea of browser, and we found the cheapest place in the area — I think it was a cheapest place in Massachusetts and this was how our dream house. A three base garage very... unfinished yet, but with a lot of potential. (laugh) so we thought that we could build a house of our dreams I recruited a group of young architects, and tell them "let's build the technology that could be available and fit the house in Brookline." It was the same being, but very light, that could be lifted and transported easily, and that could be estrangedly insulated to the weather in Boston. So we got hands on, and without being skilled to build a house, we crafted a prefabrication putting together their technologies from their North-Amarican tradition of building houses, with our European ones. Framing but in steel instead of in wood. creating thick walls but very light filled with forth and insulating materials that could be clad with cement boards. It's a different material plate, but what we created was a very affordable lightweight technology that could be packed in a container, because we are going to the move to United States but not only moving our staff, our furnishing, our memory, we are going to move their full house. So we packed it in containers, And we made the trip to United States, Their house in one side and our family in the other one. When we arrived to Brookline, two blocks away from this place, It was like receiving an Amazon pack, instead of a goodie where the full house that we had to and pack. Craned and assembled together. This is what we did in Madrid, but with these pieces that came with the kitchen, the bathroom, the closets, the furnishing, everything was embedded into these walls. These walls had to be assembled with total precision as a Swiss watch. And it took 7 days, of craning, and putting all these parts together in perfect balance. We think that this is the way, architecture should move on to make it really affordable, real technological, and overall, exciting. We think that architecture has to inspire and create a point of space that make our lives better. There the house was constructed above a garage, but the garage is still there. It's coated with a thin layer of vegetation that hopefully will grow next spring. But it was recycle, it wasn't turned on, we just created a big room above, where all our family could again enjoy all their activities without separating ourselves into rooms. A big room where we could have our meals, play, study, do some work, and where we could enjoy also, the light and the vistas from the neighbors, trees, and where at night, even all that activity after their dinner, could be transformed in to a fantastic bedroom. The bed comes from the wall and we still enjoy that big space, that we created above. Good night. (applause). (applause). |
I hate McMansions -- and you should too | {0: 'Kate Wagner is the author of the blog McMansionHell, which aims to educate the general public about architecture, design, and urbanism by making examples of America’s most despised architectural style. Her personal research is in how socioeconomic changes in the last 36 years are reflected in architecture and design at the consumer level. Kate is currently a first-year master’s student in Acoustics, a joint venture between Johns Hopkins University and Peabody Conservatory.'} | TEDxMidAtlantic | First of all, I'd like to apologize to anyone in the room who considers themselves to be architecturally sensitive. What you're about to see may upset you. So, the number one question I get in my inbox all the time is, so McMansion hell, what the hell is McMansion? So, it's pretty easy. I've narrowed it down to a couple of factors. First of all, they are oversized. That means there's over 3,000 square feet which is 500 feet more than the highest national housing average. So, AKA that space, as you can see here probably 26 children. (Laughter) And the other thing is, if you look at this house, which is quite lovely, (Laughter) I'm sorry. This house probably has three media rooms, seven bathrooms with a garden tub, and a chandelier and whatever, but it doesn't have a front porch and I cannot find the front door. (Laughter) Also there's no lawn So, that leads to my second point, they are poorly designed. So, that means there's no respect for form or scale or other things that people in the architecture would call 'the basic rules of architecture.' So, as you can see here, this house looks like it was designed by someone who maybe saw a house once in their life, but either had some sort of visual issues or was wearing kaleidoscope glasses that you get during Halloween. Even worse these poorly designed houses are cheaply constructed. So, I will get to that in a second. But, I'd like to point out that this is an engineering marvel. This is a house that is a wood frame covered in different types of foam. (Laughter) So, and finally, they are disrespectful. (Laughter) So, you have to feel really bad for the poor folks in these little houses who on longer have any natural light in their homes. It is a dark time for them as it is for all of us. So, basically they are fundamentally bad architecture. Now, even though I'm dressed impeccably well, I'm not the gatekeeper of what is and is not good aesthetic architecture. But, we've been talking about these things in architectural history for thousands of years starting with Vitruvius, the great-great-great -granddaddy of architecture. Sorry art history majors, this is going to be boring. So, Vitruvius said that architecture should be three things, right? It should be durable, it should be useful or functional, and it should be beautiful. And McMansions are well, you know, none of these things. So, let's start with durable. So, through most of human history houses were built to last generations, that means that you were born in the house, had kids in your house, died in your house, and then your kids had kids in your house and died in your house. AKA, they were permanent. That changed in the 1980s with access to cheaper construction methods and materials and also in deregulation economies, etc, causing a huge housing bubble, right? That we all know of. And basically these houses weren't built to last 15 years, because they were built to have the most amount of space for the lowest price, and people didn't really care about how long they'd last anyway because they were going to live there for maybe six years, maybe less because they were going to flip that house and make, like, a million dollars. A million dollars. (Laughter) And they would be on the next house before you ever knew it, so it was not their problem anymore, but we all know how that ended. So that brings me to another part of durability- they are not aesthetically durable. That means that certain house designs like you know, you have the box, and the box has a roof and the roof looks like this, and this is the house that every child draws, this is your idea of the house. These houses, of course, as you can see in this case, this is a house that is got water damage, and the balconies don't lay anywhere, you can actually go out open those doors, you will fall into your yard. (Laughter) These were just trends. People saw stuff like this on TV and said, "I want that on my house." And so they're not really aesthetically durable because they were built on these trends, and when the trends ran out, they would be onto the third house or the fourth house because they were flipping and making millions of dollars. So, according to Bloomberg now, these houses aren't selling well. And houses that are smaller, you know, like normal people houses, built for normal people not giant cars to live in, are appreciating at a much higher and faster rate. And so we are gonna move on to useful. What does it mean for house to be useful? So there are primary uses for a house. One is to keep us, you know, out of the elements. Like you saw in the last example, it's not doing a good job of that with the water damage in the missing deck. Oh, speaking of the elements, imaging trying to heat and cool that house. So you can't even stay warm or cool without spending millions of dollars. (Laughter) But most of all, a house is suppose to be our home. It's a place for our sanctuary, community, and being one with our families. And in a space that is designed where everyone has their own room, and their own living room, and their own dining room, and their own pool table? You don't have to interact with any members of your family. So trust me I would have loved that in the seventh grade. But I think most of us are the well-adjusted people that we are, because we've had to fight with our siblings in our parents, and all these things that come from living in a smaller-knit space. And when you rob that sense of community from our homes, what real purpose do they have? But McMansions ignore both of these purposes to focus on a new purpose, and that purpose was the house is an asset, the house was now becoming through series of, you know, deregulatory economic policies, etc, a liquid asset, it was money, it was no longer a place to live, and it was seperated from the sense of place and space that we know and consider our homes, and so beautiful. McMansions don't follow the rules of traditional architecture, but really love to use the icons and the symbols, and shapes of the traditional architecture like columns in windows styles, and the box with the roof, though the roof is three times as big as the box. And in this case, you can see none of the windows actually match. Some have muntains which is the bits that separate the panes of glass, and some don't, and most of all it looks like it is a screaming animal. (Laughter) So, there's no regard for basic matching, scale, you know, the rules of architecture, because they were designed mostly from the inside out, and mommy really needed her cathedral ceilings in the bathroom. You know sometimes that meant you had a roof on that looked like this. Okay what's the point, right? Why do I even care about McMansions if they are so horrible, and why do I write about them? Well, it's about education. 60 percent of people according to the U.S. census bureau live in the suburbs, and not all of us have access to the fabric of our cities that have buildings from different eras, and all their beautiful details, all interwoven into an urban fabric. Most of us have to live with, you know, McMansions. And so it's about teaching with what you have, and also they're politically charged. They're sort of the poster child of the recession, and they are attached to concepts like urbanism and sustainability and other things that make up a better world. You might be still asking, "Okay, well, why not talk about you know good architecture?" Well why so negative? I started writing about architecture in high school to defend buildings like this. This is the Goshen Government Centre by Paul Rudolph, in Goshen, New York which is undergoing, what I like to call 'a murder.' (Laughter). I discovered, in the fight for preservation of late modernist and post-modernist architecture which is the part that I like, if you were on the side of "I don't like this," you have the advantage. People say, "Oh, I like this," and like, okay, but if you say, "I don't like this," then like why? And if you don't know why you're pretty much a jerk - but that gets people talking and starts a disscusion and so in McMansion hell I saw this opportunity to explore, because a lof people hate McMansions but they have no idea why. They're like, "I hate that, it's big and it's ugly!", but they don't know what is so ugly about it or why it seems so big, and that's sort of where I come in, and it brings me to my final point. It's about the greater purpose. So my professor at Peabody where I study acoustics has this saying that says, "The first step to good design is avoiding the bad, then you can design the good, and the first step to avoiding the bad is recognizing the bad." It's about looking at the world through a critical eye, and the best part about being snarky is that you are automatically critical. And so people can say, avoiding the bad, right? You don't want a house thet looks like the ginormous thing that's on the screen here. This is literally the McMansion, it is a house that someone took to their little mouth and blew up into a balloon. It's like they took the nice house with the cable and (Puffs) Now if you know I don't like that, and here's why I don't like that then I can start thinking about encouraging other people and educating them about why I don't like that and they don't like that. And maybe through this sort of education and design, getting people who don't care about design to talk about design is another really huge step in perpetuating better design. And so through using America's ugliest and most hated houses, I mean, I'm sorry. We can... (Laughter) In talking about them in a way that introduces humor so it's not, "I'm shoving my good design down your throat, dang you!" We can encourage people through discussion, through education, through empowerment, to be a greater force for change, and a change towards a more beautiful, a more sustainable, a more inclusive, and you know, a better-looking world. (Laughter) Or at least, prevent them from building more McMansions. Thank you! (Applause) |
How data is helping us unravel the mysteries of the brain | {0: 'Steve McCarroll is conducting groundbreaking research on the causes of mental illness.'} | TEDMED 2017 | Nine years ago, my sister discovered lumps in her neck and arm and was diagnosed with cancer. From that day, she started to benefit from the understanding that science has of cancer. Every time she went to the doctor, they measured specific molecules that gave them information about how she was doing and what to do next. New medical options became available every few years. Everyone recognized that she was struggling heroically with a biological illness. This spring, she received an innovative new medical treatment in a clinical trial. It dramatically knocked back her cancer. Guess who I'm going to spend this Thanksgiving with? My vivacious sister, who gets more exercise than I do, and who, like perhaps many people in this room, increasingly talks about a lethal illness in the past tense. Science can, in our lifetimes — even in a decade — transform what it means to have a specific illness. But not for all illnesses. My friend Robert and I were classmates in graduate school. Robert was smart, but with each passing month, his thinking seemed to become more disorganized. He dropped out of school, got a job in a store ... But that, too, became too complicated. Robert became fearful and withdrawn. A year and a half later, he started hearing voices and believing that people were following him. Doctors diagnosed him with schizophrenia, and they gave him the best drug they could. That drug makes the voices somewhat quieter, but it didn't restore his bright mind or his social connectedness. Robert struggled to remain connected to the worlds of school and work and friends. He drifted away, and today I don't know where to find him. If he watches this, I hope he'll find me. Why does medicine have so much to offer my sister, and so much less to offer millions of people like Robert? The need is there. The World Health Organization estimates that brain illnesses like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression are the world's largest cause of lost years of life and work. That's in part because these illnesses often strike early in life, in many ways, in the prime of life, just as people are finishing their educations, starting careers, forming relationships and families. These illnesses can result in suicide; they often compromise one's ability to work at one's full potential; and they're the cause of so many tragedies harder to measure: lost relationships and connections, missed opportunities to pursue dreams and ideas. These illnesses limit human possibilities in ways we simply cannot measure. We live in an era in which there's profound medical progress on so many other fronts. My sister's cancer story is a great example, and we could say the same of heart disease. Drugs like statins will prevent millions of heart attacks and strokes. When you look at these areas of profound medical progress in our lifetimes, they have a narrative in common: scientists discovered molecules that matter to an illness, they developed ways to detect and measure those molecules in the body, and they developed ways to interfere with those molecules using other molecules — medicines. It's a strategy that has worked again and again and again. But when it comes to the brain, that strategy has been limited, because today, we don't know nearly enough, yet, about how the brain works. We need to learn which of our cells matter to each illness, and which molecules in those cells matter to each illness. And that's the mission I want to tell you about today. My lab develops technologies with which we try to turn the brain into a big-data problem. You see, before I became a biologist, I worked in computers and math, and I learned this lesson: wherever you can collect vast amounts of the right kinds of data about the functioning of a system, you can use computers in powerful new ways to make sense of that system and learn how it works. Today, big-data approaches are transforming ever-larger sectors of our economy, and they could do the same in biology and medicine, too. But you have to have the right kinds of data. You have to have data about the right things. And that often requires new technologies and ideas. And that is the mission that animates the scientists in my lab. Today, I want to tell you two short stories from our work. One fundamental obstacle we face in trying to turn the brain into a big-data problem is that our brains are composed of and built from billions of cells. And our cells are not generalists; they're specialists. Like humans at work, they specialize into thousands of different cellular careers, or cell types. In fact, each of the cell types in our body could probably give a lively TED Talk about what it does at work. But as scientists, we don't even know today how many cell types there are, and we don't know what the titles of most of those talks would be. Now, we know many important things about cell types. They can differ dramatically in size and shape. One will respond to a molecule that the other doesn't respond to, they'll make different molecules. But science has largely been reaching these insights in an ad hoc way, one cell type at a time, one molecule at a time. We wanted to make it possible to learn all of this quickly and systematically. Now, until recently, it was the case that if you wanted to inventory all of the molecules in a part of the brain or any organ, you had to first grind it up into a kind of cellular smoothie. But that's a problem. As soon as you've ground up the cells, you can only study the contents of the average cell — not the individual cells. Imagine if you were trying to understand how a big city like New York works, but you could only do so by reviewing some statistics about the average resident of New York. Of course, you wouldn't learn very much, because everything that's interesting and important and exciting is in all the diversity and the specializations. And the same thing is true of our cells. And we wanted to make it possible to study the brain not as a cellular smoothie but as a cellular fruit salad, in which one could generate data about and learn from each individual piece of fruit. So we developed a technology for doing that. You're about to see a movie of it. Here we're packaging tens of thousands of individual cells, each into its own tiny water droplet for its own molecular analysis. When a cell lands in a droplet, it's greeted by a tiny bead, and that bead delivers millions of DNA bar code molecules. And each bead delivers a different bar code sequence to a different cell. We incorporate the DNA bar codes into each cell's RNA molecules. Those are the molecular transcripts it's making of the specific genes that it's using to do its job. And then we sequence billions of these combined molecules and use the sequences to tell us which cell and which gene every molecule came from. We call this approach "Drop-seq," because we use droplets to separate the cells for analysis, and we use DNA sequences to tag and inventory and keep track of everything. And now, whenever we do an experiment, we analyze tens of thousands of individual cells. And today in this area of science, the challenge is increasingly how to learn as much as we can as quickly as we can from these vast data sets. When we were developing Drop-seq, people used to tell us, "Oh, this is going to make you guys the go-to for every major brain project." That's not how we saw it. Science is best when everyone is generating lots of exciting data. So we wrote a 25-page instruction book, with which any scientist could build their own Drop-seq system from scratch. And that instruction book has been downloaded from our lab website 50,000 times in the past two years. We wrote software that any scientist could use to analyze the data from Drop-seq experiments, and that software is also free, and it's been downloaded from our website 30,000 times in the past two years. And hundreds of labs have written us about discoveries that they've made using this approach. Today, this technology is being used to make a human cell atlas. It will be an atlas of all of the cell types in the human body and the specific genes that each cell type uses to do its job. Now I want to tell you about a second challenge that we face in trying to turn the brain into a big data problem. And that challenge is that we'd like to learn from the brains of hundreds of thousands of living people. But our brains are not physically accessible while we're living. But how can we discover molecular factors if we can't hold the molecules? An answer comes from the fact that the most informative molecules, proteins, are encoded in our DNA, which has the recipes our cells follow to make all of our proteins. And these recipes vary from person to person to person in ways that cause the proteins to vary from person to person in their precise sequence and in how much each cell type makes of each protein. It's all encoded in our DNA, and it's all genetics, but it's not the genetics that we learned about in school. Do you remember big B, little b? If you inherit big B, you get brown eyes? It's simple. Very few traits are that simple. Even eye color is shaped by much more than a single pigment molecule. And something as complex as the function of our brains is shaped by the interaction of thousands of genes. And each of these genes varies meaningfully from person to person to person, and each of us is a unique combination of that variation. It's a big data opportunity. And today, it's increasingly possible to make progress on a scale that was never possible before. People are contributing to genetic studies in record numbers, and scientists around the world are sharing the data with one another to speed progress. I want to tell you a short story about a discovery we recently made about the genetics of schizophrenia. It was made possible by 50,000 people from 30 countries, who contributed their DNA to genetic research on schizophrenia. It had been known for several years that the human genome's largest influence on risk of schizophrenia comes from a part of the genome that encodes many of the molecules in our immune system. But it wasn't clear which gene was responsible. A scientist in my lab developed a new way to analyze DNA with computers, and he discovered something very surprising. He found that a gene called "complement component 4" — it's called "C4" for short — comes in dozens of different forms in different people's genomes, and these different forms make different amounts of C4 protein in our brains. And he found that the more C4 protein our genes make, the greater our risk for schizophrenia. Now, C4 is still just one risk factor in a complex system. This isn't big B, but it's an insight about a molecule that matters. Complement proteins like C4 were known for a long time for their roles in the immune system, where they act as a kind of molecular Post-it note that says, "Eat me." And that Post-it note gets put on lots of debris and dead cells in our bodies and invites immune cells to eliminate them. But two colleagues of mine found that the C4 Post-it note also gets put on synapses in the brain and prompts their elimination. Now, the creation and elimination of synapses is a normal part of human development and learning. Our brains create and eliminate synapses all the time. But our genetic results suggest that in schizophrenia, the elimination process may go into overdrive. Scientists at many drug companies tell me they're excited about this discovery, because they've been working on complement proteins for years in the immune system, and they've learned a lot about how they work. They've even developed molecules that interfere with complement proteins, and they're starting to test them in the brain as well as the immune system. It's potentially a path toward a drug that might address a root cause rather than an individual symptom, and we hope very much that this work by many scientists over many years will be successful. But C4 is just one example of the potential for data-driven scientific approaches to open new fronts on medical problems that are centuries old. There are hundreds of places in our genomes that shape risk for brain illnesses, and any one of them could lead us to the next molecular insight about a molecule that matters. And there are hundreds of cell types that use these genes in different combinations. As we and other scientists work to generate the rest of the data that's needed and to learn all that we can from that data, we hope to open many more new fronts. Genetics and single-cell analysis are just two ways of trying to turn the brain into a big data problem. There is so much more we can do. Scientists in my lab are creating a technology for quickly mapping the synaptic connections in the brain to tell which neurons are talking to which other neurons and how that conversation changes throughout life and during illness. And we're developing a way to test in a single tube how cells with hundreds of different people's genomes respond differently to the same stimulus. These projects bring together people with diverse backgrounds and training and interests — biology, computers, chemistry, math, statistics, engineering. But the scientific possibilities rally people with diverse interests into working intensely together. What's the future that we could hope to create? Consider cancer. We've moved from an era of ignorance about what causes cancer, in which cancer was commonly ascribed to personal psychological characteristics, to a modern molecular understanding of the true biological causes of cancer. That understanding today leads to innovative medicine after innovative medicine, and although there's still so much work to do, we're already surrounded by people who have been cured of cancers that were considered untreatable a generation ago. And millions of cancer survivors like my sister find themselves with years of life that they didn't take for granted and new opportunities for work and joy and human connection. That is the future that we are determined to create around mental illness — one of real understanding and empathy and limitless possibility. Thank you. (Applause) |
What commercialization is doing to cannabis | {0: 'Ben Cort focuses on marijuana education and consulting in the substance use disorder treatment field.'} | TEDxMileHigh | Hey look, if you guys are anything like me, you have found it harder and harder to turn around recently without seeing words like "free-range," "farm-to-table," "organically produced," especially here in Colorado. Now, as we've become more conscientious of the way that we eat in recent years, these once unfamiliar words have worked their way into our daily lexicon. When we started to pay more attention to the way that the food we were eating interacted with our bodies and with the earth, the food industry had to listen. And the results have been really powerful. Now, those of you out there from states like Washington and Oregon and, of course, my fellow Coloradans — (Cheers) y'all know what I'm talking about. Because this is not ... Words like "all-natural" and "homegrown" are not just being used in our diets. There's this whole new industry using this language now. You guys know. It's weed, an industry that taxed a sale of about six billion dollars worth of product in 2016. So what if I were to propose to you that some of what you think you know about this legalized marijuana thing could be wrong? Listen, I get it — talking about issues with legal weed is a pretty quick way to get uninvited from the cool kids' table. I know that better than most, but I intend to do it anyway. First, before I get started, let me be perfectly clear about one thing: my fight is not against the casual adult use of marijuana — I don't care about that. What I care deeply about is this new industry that is working to convince us that we are consuming something natural while fixing social ills, when we aren't. So let's start with a little bit of Weed 101. Cannabis is a plant that grows naturally and has been used within textiles and even traditional Chinese medicine for thousands of years. Genesis 1:12 even tells us: "I have given you all of the seed-bearing plants and herbs to use." It's the microphone — it's got a TV preacher sort of thing. (Laughter) Now, cannabis is made up of hundreds of different chemicals, but two of those chemicals are by far the most interesting. That's CBD and THC. CBD is where almost all of the medicinal properties lie. It's an incredibly fascinating part of the plant with real potential to help people. It also is totally nonintoxicating. You could take a bath in the stuff while vaping pure CBD and drinking a CBD smoothie, and you still couldn't get high. (Laughter) I've tried. (Laughter) I haven't, I haven't. That'd cost a lot of money. (Laughter) Now, for as interesting and remarkable a part of the plant as CBD is, it actually makes up a really tiny portion of the commercial market. The real money is being made in that other chemical — in THC. THC is the natural part of the plant that gets you high. And before the 1970s, cannabis contained less than half of a percent of THC. That's what's naturally occurring. Over the last 40 years, as we became better gardeners, that — (Laughter) that percentage of THC started to slowly but steadily rise, until recently, when the chemists started to get involved. So these guys moved grow cycles — sorry — these guys moved cultivation exclusively indoors, and they made grow cycles extremely and unnaturally short. They also started to use pesticides and fertilizers in some ways that we should be concerned with. In fact, I was recently talking to a buddy who had just left a job at a commercial grow operation because he was so concerned with the chemicals that he was being asked to interact with. Some of his fellow employees were actually encouraged to wear hazmat suits while they were spraying the chemical cocktails on the plants. With that kind of manipulation, the products that are being sold today can contain above 30 percent THC. And our concentrates — our concentrates can actually contain above 95 percent THC — a far cry from the natural plant. Listen, this isn't your grandpa's weed. (Laughter) This isn't your dad's weed. Like, this isn't even my weed. (Laughter) If you've ever set foot inside one of the thousands of dispensaries that have sprung up in recent years, you know that what we're really selling in them is THC. All of the weed that you buy commercially lists exactly how much THC it contains, as do our other, much more popular products like vape pens, coffee, ice cream, condiments, granola, gum, candy, baked goods, suppositories. (Laughter) And, of course, lube. Pretty much — no, for real — (Laughter) pretty much anything that you can imagine introducing into the human body. The vast majority of cannabis that's being sold today — it isn't really cannabis. It's THC in either a pure form or in an extremely high and unnatural concentration. To say that we have legalized weed is subtly misleading. We have commercialized THC. And it's happened really quickly. Now, the reason why the commercial market has so rapidly exploded is because there is a hell of a lot of money to be made in satisfying and increasing our desire to get high. And that money is no longer really being made by the mom-and-pop shops. So industry groups and corporations — groups like the Drug Policy Alliance, the Marijuana Policy Project, Arcview Investment, the Cannabis Industry Association — they've chased out and helped to chase out a lot of the small-time growers. So these cats know that the best way to continue to profit off of us is if they follow the alcohol industry's 80/20 rule. It's simple — it's where 80 percent of the product is consumed by 20 percent of the consumers — the problemed users. The wealthy, white, weed lobbyists — and seriously, they are almost all rich, white men — they know that we will consume more of what they're selling if they jack up the potency. They also know that we are more than twice as likely to consume THC regularly if we earn under 20,000 dollars a year than those who earn over 50,000 dollars a year. In other words, the poorer you are, the more likely you are to spend your money on their products. And in this country, income and race are highly correlated. One of the reasons we often hear cited for the legalization of marijuana is that it will help to stop the disproportionate incarceration rates among minorities, which is something everybody in this room should be extremely concerned with. Unfortunately, we don't have to look any further than arrest rates for juveniles here in Colorado to counter that argument. According to the Colorado Department of Public Safety, since we opened retail in 2014 — almost all of which are in poor, minority neighborhoods — we saw an eight percent reduction in the arrest of white kids for all weed-related activity. Good on 'em. During that same time period, there was a 29 percent increase in the arrest of Hispanic kids for weed-related activity and a 58 percent increase in the arrest of black kids for weed-related crimes. You guys heard that, right? We are actually arresting more people of color in Colorado than we were prior to commercialization. And you're not reading that in the Post. Colorado Department of Safety. Legal marijuana coming into focus. Another big issue that we have is in school suspension rates. So, schools that are predominantly white — that is, they have a minority population of 25 percent or fewer — in the first full year of data collection following commercialization, these schools had a grand total of 190 drug-related suspensions, almost all of which are for THC. At the same time, schools with a minority population of 75 to 100 percent had 801 drug-related suspensions, almost all of which were for THC. When discussing minority populations, one that unfortunately often gets left out of the conversation is the LGBTQ community. Members of this community are more than twice as likely to consume THC than those who identify as heterosexual or cisgender. They also, unfortunately, have higher rates of mental illness and suicide. According to a study published in 2014 called "Going to Pot," we see that the unnaturally high levels of THC found in today's products actually compound those issues. They make them worse. Unfortunately, that seems to matter very little to the folks who are selling these products, because as you just saw, clearly, this is a good consumer base. Listen, man — I get it. In many circles, legalized marijuana is too much of a sacred cow to question. But we need to start this conversation, because what's being sold today is not natural, and lobbyists and industry are using social justice as a smoke screen so that they can get richer. It's been my own journey to sobriety that led me to begin questioning a lot of what I was seeing; that's kind of one of the things that we're taught to do. When I left Boulder for the Washington, DC, area at 12 years old, I was transported into a world where the kind of shoes you wore mattered more than just about anything else. And my family was just too poor to help me play that game. So I was faced with a pretty real crisis of identity. In this new scene where there's more blacktop than treetops, man, I just didn't know who I was. So I smoked weed for the first time when I was 13. And I loved it. (Laughter) I instantly found this social group, and I also just really liked being high. I finally found a way to shut this up. I quickly turned to other drugs and alcohol, and something just woke up inside of my brain. I was a daily user within a couple of months. My addictive use mirrors many of the stories that I'm sure you've heard before. It started out as fun, it got scary, and then it was just necessary. Enough said. I got wasted for the last time on June 15 of 1996. And I — (Applause and cheers) Thank you. And I've spent the last 21 years trying to both put my life back in order as well as trying to find some peace in this world. And one of the ways I've done that is by working inside of nonprofit drug and alcohol treatment for the last 10 years, with groups like Phoenix Multisport, the University of Colorado Hospital and NALGAP — the National Association for Lesbian, Gay, Transgender, Bisexual Treatment Providers and their Allies. Even after all of my work on the front lines and as a former consumer myself, I was shocked and pissed when I started to see what commercialization was doing to cannabis, because, you see, our hope for something pure and natural is making it hard for us to see what's really going on, and that is that the rich are getting richer on the backs of the poor and lying to our faces the entire time. (Applause) Thank you. My friends, once again I fear that we are allowing industry to take advantage of the most challenged among us in order to turn a profit, much like we saw with tobacco and food in years past. So when we told the food industry that we understood the impact our choices were having, and that we demanded better for ourselves and our families, that industry got into line. So is there any reason why we couldn't demand the same thing from this and from future industries who are trying to get a piece of our paychecks? What if we made these guys answer some hard questions? What if we held them to a higher standard than we are right now? Because as it stands, for many in our community, the grass isn't greener on this side of commercialization. They've just been sold a bag of goods. Thank you. (Applause) Jeremy Duhon: I know this is a sensitive topic but a very important one, so thank you for bringing this up and helping us explore it. You know, a lot of folks are experiencing health benefits from marijuana and cannabis. What would you say to that part of the community? Ben Cort: I'm actually glad you brought that up. I think one of the most important things that we can do right now is to separate out medicinal, and especially what's happening and some of the advances that are being made using parts of this plant and even some whole-plant medicines, from the commercial market for THC. That's, I think, crucial. We've got to stop putting them together, and we've got to say, "OK, here's the part about getting high, and here's the part about the medicine." (Applause) JD: So it sounds like your talk is less about being anti-cannabis and more about raising awareness about aspects of commercialization. Is that a fair way to put it? BC: Yes. So, I am not the anti-weed guy. (Laughter) I'm the pro-logic guy. For me to cast stones — listen, I'm a drug addict. I don't get to do that, and I don't want to do that. But what's bothering me and what's so hard for me is to see the way that we are just embracing without asking the hard questions, when if this was another industry, we'd be holding their feet to the fire on some stuff. And no, I'm not the anti-weed guy, I'm the pro-thought guy. So: think. I don't even care if you're smoking when you do it, just so long as you're an adult. So long as you're an adult, just think. (Applause) |
Why we need to make education more accessible to the deaf | {0: 'Nyle is a model, an actor, and also an activist! In 2014 he became the second male winner and the first deaf contestant to win AMERICA’S NEXT TOP MODEL. And this was only the beginning of his career in the spotlight. Only two years later he added the Mirror Ball Trophy to his collection when winning DANCING WITH THE STARS. You could have also seen him on TV in DIFFICULT PEOPLE, SWITCHED AT BIRTH and THIS CLOSE. As a model, he walked for Giorgio Armani at Milan Fashion Week S/S17. Yet, his greatest accomplishment was to become the face of the deaf community and disabled people worldwide. The work of his foundation, The Nyle DiMarco Foundation, with focus on bilingual education and improving access to accurate information about early language acquisition is one of the many reasons to TRUST in Nyle’s cause. Through his own disability, he has managed to communicate the loudest message to us - communication is always possible.'} | TEDxKlagenfurt | I'd like to tell you a story. When I was 24, I found myself living in a small beach town by the name of Naples, Florida. I was looking for something new. I was 24. I'm 29 now. And in that small coastal town, I was the only Deaf resident. In fact, the closest deaf person was a few hours away by car. And all of the friends and acquaintances that I had made could hear. I didn't mind though; I wanted something new. Lucky for me, Naples, Florida is home to some of the U.S. Olympics volleyball team, where they reside and train through the year. So I had a fantastic opportunity to play with them every day I could. And we'd hit the court all the time, either indoors or out at the beach; it was great. Lucky for them, I happen to be very good at volleyball. So one night after a great game, a friend and I pull up some chairs by the water to watch the sun go down and chat. And he looks over at me and he asks me a question that completely blew me away. To be honest, in 24 years of my life, nobody had ever asked me. And his question was simple: "Have you ever wished you could hear?" I looked at him for a second and thought, Where did that come from? Then I took a moment and I realized while we had been sitting there, I could see waves coming in and crashing on the beach. He could hear that. Obviously, I couldn't. My entire world is completely silent. To our left, people had taken over the court and were playing volleyball, cheering each other on. To our right, a mother was playing and laughing with her baby. And behind us, cars and ATVs had passed by all day without me even noticing. So, I was quick to answer: "No, of course not. I've never wished I could hear. I've never wished that because I love who I am." And you may be wondering, How do I love myself as a Deaf man? Well, first, I was born deaf. My deafness shaped my childhood, and it's all I've ever known. So my perspective on life and my experience of the world is very different. My outlook and my life has involved experiences that many of you have never had to encounter as hearing people. My culture, something I embody and cherish, has always been Deaf. My perspective on life is completely different. The experiences I've had, something I hold most dear, have taught me to love myself as a Deaf man. To illustrate that point, if I were to walk into a job interview with a panel of hearing peers, and if I were to approach that meeting wishing that I could hear, wishing that I could speak like them, and focusing on that imbalance, do you think that I would do very well? Obviously not, right? Because in the back of my mind I'm focusing on the negative, therefore creating a negative outcome, and I'm certain I wouldn't get that job. But, if instead, I use my difference as an advantage and an asset, I know that as a Deaf man I have so much to offer their company. My experiences growing up are much different from theirs. And knowing that allows me to approach the interview positive. I can go into that meeting and confidently tell them how they will benefit from hiring a Deaf man for a multitude of reasons. And I can walk out with that job because it's all about mindset. So I say first and foremost to love yourself. So as I mentioned, the first reason I love myself is my upbringing. But many of you may not know that I come from a rather large family. I have two brothers who are also Deaf along with my parents, my grandparents, and yes, even my great-grandparents as well. I'm the fourth generation in a beautiful family with over 25 Deaf members. Born to Deaf parents who understood the Deaf experience, they knew exactly how to raise me. They knew how to provide me with the best opportunities and to support me. From day one of my existence, my parents gave me language, access to education, and love. Growing up, my life was perfect. Imagine, like many of you born to hearing parents, I never noticed barriers that simply weren't there. I'm sure many of you felt your life was normal, the same way that I did. Coming from a Deaf family, my world, in every way, was a utopia. When it came time for my parents to enroll me in school, they already knew that I would go to the Deaf school. I would learn in an environment that was designed for me. At that time, all of my peers, and teachers, and even the superintendent was Deaf. So, I was still in my perfect world. I was in an environment where I could grow and where I could thrive. And I had no problems; it was perfect for me. And many people don't believe that, but it's true. For me, the Deaf community, our world, was the perfect world for me. And I remember in the summer before fifth grade, I was ready to go back to school, and I asked my mom to go to a public school. She thought I was crazy. She said, "What?! No! Public school, it's all hearing kids. The Deaf school is a perfect fit." And I said, "No, I want to learn what those students are learning. I want to see what their classrooms are like. What are public school teachers like?" So upon my insistence she enrolled me. And after two weeks of frustration, I came home pleading to go back to the Deaf school. She listened very sympathetically and told me, "Nope, too bad." I was floored. She told me I needed to stick it out for a year because I needed to learn how to interact with my hearing peers, and that if I gave it a little patience, I would learn so much about the world around me. Because the reality is the world is hearing. I was the only Deaf kid in the entire school. Of course, I always had hearing friends, but they could sign like me. So that year I gained a lot of insight. I couldn't be involved in any of the school organizations. My friends never learned enough sign to communicate. And every time I tried to play a sport, I'd get benched. The basketball coach told me a Deaf kid could never help the team win a game. And I was athletic. So after a year, I went back to the Deaf school where I realized that's my home. That's my community. And my community is where I can thrive. I got involved in the classroom again, joined a bunch of school organizations, and got back on the basketball team, where I helped win many games. So it's without hesitation that I can say the Deaf community is in fact my home. After graduating high school, I was accepted into the only Deaf university in the world: Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. It was there I gained my degree in mathematics with the intention of becoming a better teacher than the ones I had growing up. Like many of you, I sat through some math teachers who seriously sucked. (Laughter) I wanted to be a good math teacher. But I also wanted to be a good role model for those students. So as time got closer to graduation, of course I was nervous. I started questioning if I had made the right decision. And I decided to get out - to get out of my comfort zone and to travel the world. Since then, I've been to over 43 countries. And the funny thing about when I travel is that I'm constantly meeting hearing people who say, "Nyle, you are so brave. How do you travel like this? Isn't it hard to be Deaf and travel? It looks impossible." And let me tell you, traveling as a Deaf person, I think, is actually much easier than traveling for hearing people. Because sign language is something that gives me access to a much larger world. I'll tell you one of my favorite stories. A few years ago, I was in south Sicily perusing a flea market, when I walked into a butcher shop, and standing there is an American tourist trying to ask the butcher where the meat he was slicing is sourced from. So the Sicilian man, speaking no English, is gesturing, right? And you know Italians gesture. He's trying to explain where the meat comes from, and it's going right over the head of the tourist. So watching this very comical breakdown in conversation, I'm understanding everything perfectly, so I pull out a paper and a pen, and I translate what the butcher is saying, and I hand it over to the tourist and explain, "This is what he's trying to tell you." So there I am, the Deaf person translating for two hearing people. And in that situation, they're the ones disabled, not me. (Laughter) While that story is ironic, it happens so many times when I meet people in other countries. I'm always amazed to meet locals in other countries, and their ability to gesticulate and communicate with me, often quite easily. And I would always tell myself to visit the local Deaf schools and to make time to meet Deaf locals. But with every new Deaf school that I saw, I was sad to see that their schools were in terrible condition, and their education was greatly lacking. Often, I just couldn't believe my eyes. When I would meet Deaf adults, I realized a common thread very quickly. They either didn't have the same level of education I did or their language was incomplete, making it hard to communicate. They'd often complain to me that the system had failed them, and now they struggled to find work. And I kept asking myself, why is this happening, and why is this happening so often? Why am I somehow more fortunate? Growing up, I thought every deaf person in the world was like me and had the same opportunities that I did. So in returning to the United States, I decided to do some research on the topic. And what I found shocked me. There are currently more than 70 million deaf people in the world with only two percent of them having access to education in sign languages. Which means millions upon millions of deaf children not receiving the education they need, also known as education deprivation. I also learned that over 75 percent of hearing parents don't sign to communicate with their deaf children. Which is astonishing. Again, imagine millions and millions of deaf children without an education, without a language. Those children without language and access to education exhibit signs of brain damage. In my research, I also found that I'm a part of an even smaller group. Ten percent of Deaf children come from Deaf parents like mine. Only 10 percent. I'm incredibly lucky. I had access to language, an education, and I had parents who loved me and put me on a path to success. I wouldn't be who I am today without any of those things. So it was clear to me that something needed to be done. I got to work in setting up my own foundation - the Nyle DiMarco Foundation - with the goal of improving the lives of millions of deaf people around the world. We've since partnered with another Deaf organization in the United States to introduce legislation - a bill that requires all deaf children have access to language between the ages of zero and five, setting up benchmarks for their success. Because before the age of five, children have the ability to acquire a foundation in language, readying them for the classroom and for a successful life. After the age of five, that critical language acquisition window closes. I'm working to give every deaf child in the world a future filled with a rich language and the opportunities I was lucky enough to receive. But the Deaf community cannot do it alone; we need you to become our allies and join us in making the world more knowledgeable. We need you to join us, to fight with us and for us in the ongoing battle of affording children what they need to thrive. So before I go, I want to teach you two very simple but important signs. The first is "love." The second, "yourself." Follow me: Love yourself. Brilliant! A-plusses all around! Thank you. (Laughter) |
What is the universe expanding into? | null | TED-Ed | The universe began its cosmic life in a big bang nearly fourteen billion years ago, and has been expanding ever since. But what is it expanding into? That's a complicated question. Here's why: Einstein's equations of general relativity describe space and time as a kind of inter-connected fabric for the universe. This means that what we know of as space and time exist only as part of the universe and not beyond it. Now, when everyday objects expand, they move out into more space. But if there is no such thing as space to expand into, what does expanding even mean? In 1929 Edwin Hubble's astronomy observations gave us a definitive answer. His survey of the night sky found all faraway galaxies recede, or move away, from the Earth. Moreover, the further the galaxy, the faster it recedes. How can we interpret this? Consider a loaf of raisin bread rising in the oven. The batter rises by the same amount in between each and every raisin. If we think of raisins as a stand-in for galaxies, and batter as the space between them, we can imagine that the stretching or expansion of intergalactic space will make the galaxies recede from each other, and for any galaxy, its faraway neighbors will recede a larger distance than the nearby ones in the same amount of time. Sure enough, the equations of general relativity predict a cosmic tug-of-war between gravity and expansion. It's only in the dark void between galaxies where expansion wins out, and space stretches. So there's our answer. The universe is expanding unto itself. That said, cosmologists are pushing the limits of mathematical models to speculate on what, if anything, exists beyond our spacetime. These aren't wild guesses, but hypotheses that tackle kinks in the scientific theory of the Big Bang. The Big Bang predicts matter to be distributed evenly across the universe, as a sparse gas —but then, how did galaxies and stars come to be? The inflationary model describes a brief era of incredibly rapid expansion that relates quantum fluctuations in the energy of the early universe, to the formation of clumps of gas that eventually led to galaxies. If we accept this paradigm, it may also imply our universe represents one region in a greater cosmic reality that undergoes endless, eternal inflation. We know nothing of this speculative inflating reality, save for the mathematical prediction that its endless expansion may be driven by an unstable quantum energy state. In many local regions, however, the energy may settle by random chance into a stable state, stopping inflation and forming bubble universes. Each bubble universe —ours being one of them —would be described by its own Big Bang and laws of physics. Our universe would be part of a greater multiverse, in which the fantastic rate of eternal inflation makes it impossible for us to encounter a neighbor universe. The Big Bang also predicts that in the early, hot universe, our fundamental forces may unify into one super-force. Mathematical string theories suggest descriptions of this unification, in addition to a fundamental structure for sub-atomic quarks and electrons. In these proposed models, vibrating strings are the building blocks of the universe. Competing models for strings have now been consolidated into a unified description, and suggest these structures may interact with massive, higher dimensional surfaces called branes. Our universe may be contained within one such brane, floating in an unknown higher dimensional place, playfully named “the bulk,” or hyperspace. Other branes—containing other types of universes—may co-exist in hyperspace, and neighboring branes may even share certain fundamental forces like gravity. Both eternal inflation and branes describe a multiverse, but while universes in eternal inflation are isolated, brane universes could bump into each other. An echo of such a collision may appear in the cosmic microwave background —a soup of radiation throughout our universe, that’s a relic from an early Big Bang era. So far, though, we’ve found no such cosmic echo. Some suspect these differing multiverse hypotheses may eventually coalesce into a common description, or be replaced by something else. As it stands now, they’re speculative explorations of mathematical models. While these models are inspired and guided by many scientific experiments, there are very few objective experiments to directly test them, yet. Until the next Edwin Hubble comes along, scientists will likely be left to argue about the elegance of their competing models… and continue to dream about what, if anything, lies beyond our universe. |
3 ways businesses can fight sex trafficking | {0: "Nikki Clifton represents UPS's interests before Members of US Congress, federal agencies and the states’ Attorneys General."} | TED@UPS | A few years ago, I got a call from the highest ranking legal official in the state of Georgia: the attorney general. That moment was a wake-up call. It was 2013, and the city of Atlanta was hosting the Final Four basketball tournament. The AG called to ask if the company that I worked for could help sponsor billboards that would be put up around the city as part of an anti-human trafficking campaign. He said this was important because sex trafficking spikes with big sporting events and with conventions. And the billboards would help to raise awareness. Now, if I'm being honest with you, my first inclination was to politely decline. (Laughter) Let's face it — there are thousands of things that corporate America could get involved in. Sex trafficking seemed a little messy. Little bit too difficult, something that is better left for someone else. But then I started to understand and learn how big the problem really is. And that it's rampant in my company's home town. I lived and worked in Atlanta for years. I practice law here. And yet, I had no idea that the birthplace of my children is among the most prevalent cities for sex trafficking in the US. At last report, Atlanta's illegal sex trade has generated up to 290 million dollars a year. That's more money that the city's illegal gun and drug trade combined. So we stepped up and we helped with the billboards. But I couldn't help feeling like it wasn't enough. The parent in me, the mother in me needed to do more. I started talking to people about this and inevitably, I was surprised, because the conversation would turn from curiosity: "Really? This happens here?" to empathy: "Wow, we've got to do something about that." To blame: "You're not telling me that every prostitute is a victim, are you? I mean, don't they know what they're getting into?" I get it, I understand why people are confused. So, to be clear, the people that I'm talking about do not choose this life. They're forced, defrauded or coerced. That's actually the legal definition for human trafficking under federal law, for adults. Now, when it comes to kids, any minor under 18 that's transported, facilitated or used for commercial sex, is automatically a victim. Regardless of whether force, fraud or coercion is used. This crime knows no age, gender or socioeconomic barrier. I'm talking about the 16-year-old girl that I met in Washington, DC. She had been trafficked from the time she was 14 until she was 16. She was a victim of the foster care system. And she told me she'd been sold up to five times a day. She didn't even know the term "human trafficking;" she thought that it was just a part of her life as a foster care kid. Sex trafficking also shows up in affluent areas and gated communities. And men lure young girls into sex trafficking situations with promises of modeling contracts, cell phones. Sometimes they're just kidnapped right off the street. In the US, an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 girls and boys are anticipated to be used for commercial sex trafficking every year. You heard that right — girls and boys. Worldwide, the International Labor Organization estimates that up to one million children a year are vulnerable for sex trafficking. Those numbers are huge. And so while the billboards are great for raising awareness generally, they're just not enough to put an end to this problem. I believe that if we're going to be serious about sex trafficking, we can't legislate or arrest our way out of modern-day slavery. If we really want to end sex trafficking in the US, we have to systematically educate and target demand. And I think the business community is in the perfect position to do just that. So, sex trafficking is big business. And I'm proposing a business plan that starts with the customer. And in the sex trade, the customer is referred to as a John. He is the man that fuels the demand for sex trafficking. Johns do not fit into neat stereotypes. But there is one universal truth: no John, no buyer, no victim. So if we want to start to put a dent in sex trafficking, we have to get to John. And businesses can do that while he's at work. There's an organization called Businesses Ending Slavery and Trafficking, or BEST for short. And when they launched in 2012, they did a study of Seattle-based Johns. And you know what they found out? Johns are everyday guys, employed at local businesses. They range in age from 18 to 84. Johns are dads. Johns have admitted that they buy sex when they are traveling for business, when they're going to sporting events or when they're in the military. But here's the kicker. BEST study determined that web-based sex buying spikes at 2pm in the afternoon. Which means that these Johns are likely buying sex in the middle of the workday. I believe that there is a way to stop Johns in the middle of the workday from buying sex. And businesses can do it in three simple ways. The first is with a policy. A policy that clearly says, the company prohibits sex-buying during work, with company resources or on company time. That's right. I'm saying that your handbook has to specifically give an example that says no sex-buying while you're traveling, at the international trade show, because that's where it's happening. Now, a policy is only as good as its enforcement and its communication. Several studies have indicated from Johns that the best way to deter them is public humiliation and embarrassment. So, businesses who catch Johns buying sex, using company-based equipment or company resources, but cut them a break or sweep it under the rug and don't fire them, are complicit in fueling demand. Now, a policy is one of the best ways to start. The second way is educating the workforce. Businesses can go a long way in simply training their workforce about the signs and the red flags of human trafficking. This was my "aha!" moment for how our company could make a big difference. Our nation's highways, airports and truck stops are literally used as modern-day slave routes. Our company has more than 100,000 drivers all over the country, all over the world. And so it made perfect sense to train them to see the red flags. We don't want them jumping out there and doing things on their own, so we want them to call a phone number, the hotline, and let law enforcement intervene. So to do this, we teamed up with an organization called Truckers Against Trafficking. This Colorado-based organization had web-based support and materials that we gave to our truck drivers that gave them exactly what they needed to spot the red flags. Like, hearing CB chatter on their radios about girls at nearby exits. Or, seeing underaged women emerging from vehicles in the truck stop parking lots. When we rolled out this training, a few brave drivers admitted they had seen these women, knocking on the cabs in the truck stops, looking for customers. Now, they said that they weren't buying. But they also didn't know enough to make a call. And that's what we want them to do. TAT's organization — Truckers Against Trafficking — also emphasizes the need for men to talk to other men about web-based sex buying and not buying commercial sex. They feature men in uniform, proudly proclaiming why they don't buy. If we're going to see a cultural shift in this atrocity, we need men talking to other men about the underlying issues fueling demand. Because sometimes, Johns don't even know that they're purchasing girls who are enslaved. Which brings me to my final way that businesses can help. Every business has a special resource or a secret sauce or resource that they can bring to fight human trafficking. For example, Visa, Master Card and American Express refuse to process transactions from backpage.com, an online sex site that sold commercial sex to the tune of nine million dollars a month. In April of 2018, backpage.com and affiliated websites were shut down, and the FBI seized all their assets. Hiring survivors is another way that any company can help. Randstad, an organization that works with companies to find survivors who need good jobs, has an excellent program, called Hire Hope. We've used this program; we know that it works. In addition to training their flight attendants and their airline crew, Delta Air Lines also offers SkyMiles, through a program called SkyWish, to survivors to help them escape their traffickers and reunite with their families. There are thousands of things that businesses can do. They just have to decide what to do to join the fight. No one can justify slavery today. But I believe it remains one of the greatest civil rights atrocities of our time. Fortunately, the business community is uniquely positioned to help train their employees, to enforce policies and to help use their special resources to fight human trafficking. And what about you? What if you decided to learn the red flags? What if you decided to look at the signs that are all around you and make a call? There is no penalty for calling law enforcement when you see something that doesn't sit right. Together, we can all protect our children, we can educate the workforces around us and improve society, where we all live and work with John. Thank you. (Applause) |
A love letter to realism in a time of grief | {0: "Mark Pollock was the first blind person to race to the South Pole. Now he's exploring the intersection where humans and technology collide on a new expedition to cure paralysis in our lifetime.", 1: 'Driven by a belief in fairness, Simone George is a human rights lawyer and activist.'} | TED2018 | Simone George: I met Mark when he was just blind. I had returned home to live in Dublin after the odyssey that was my 20s, educating my interest in human rights and equality in university, traveling the world, like my nomad grandmother. And during a two-year stint working in Madrid, dancing many nights till morning in salsa clubs. When I met Mark, he asked me to teach him to dance. And I did. They were wonderful times, long nights talking, becoming friends and eventually falling for each other. Mark had lost his sight when he was 22, and the man that I met eight years later was rebuilding his identity, the cornerstone of which was this incredible spirit that had taken him to the Gobi Desert, where he ran six marathons in seven days. And to marathons at the North Pole, and from Everest Base Camp. When I asked him what had led to this high-octane life, he quoted Nietzsche: "He, who has a Why to live, can bear with almost any How." He had come across the quote in a really beautiful book called "Man's Search for Meaning," by Viktor Frankl, a neurologist and psychiatrist who survived years in a Nazi concentration camp. Frankl used this Nietzsche quote to explain to us that when we can no longer change our circumstances, we are challenged to change ourselves. Mark Pollock: Eventually, I did rebuild my identity, and the Why for me was about competing again, because pursuing success and risking failure was simply how I felt normal. And I finished the rebuild on the 10th anniversary of losing my sight. I took part in a 43-day expedition race in the coldest, most remote, most challenging place on earth. It was the first race to the South Pole since Shackleton, Scott and Amundsen set foot in Antarctica, 100 years before. And putting the demons of blindness behind me with every step towards the pole, it offered me a long-lasting sense of contentment. As it turned out, I would need that in reserve, because one year after my return, in, arguably, the safest place on earth, a bedroom at a friend's house, I fell from a third-story window onto the concrete below. I don't know how it happened. I think I must have got up to go to the bathroom. And because I'm blind, I used to run my hand along the wall to find my way. That night, my hand found an open space where the closed window should have been. And I cartwheeled out. My friends who found me thought I was dead. When I got to hospital, the doctors thought I was going to die, and when I realized what was happening to me, I thought that dying might have been ... might have been the best outcome. And lying in intensive care, facing the prospect of being blind and paralyzed, high on morphine, I was trying to make sense of what was going on. And one night, lying flat on my back, I felt for my phone to write a blog, trying to explain how I should respond. It was called "Optimist, Realist or Something Else?" and it drew on the experiences of Admiral Stockdale, who was a POW in the Vietnam war. He was incarcerated, tortured, for over seven years. His circumstances were bleak, but he survived. The ones who didn't survive were the optimists. They said, "We'll be out by Christmas," and Christmas would come and Christmas would go, and then it would be Christmas again, and when they didn't get out, they became disappointed, demoralized and many of them died in their cells. Stockdale was a realist. He was inspired by the stoic philosophers, and he confronted the brutal facts of his circumstances while maintaining a faith that he would prevail in the end. And in that blog, I was trying to apply his thinking as a realist to my increasingly bleak circumstances. During the many months of heart infections and kidney infections after my fall, at the very edge of survival, Simone and I faced the fundamental question: How do you resolve the tension between acceptance and hope? And it's that that we want to explore with you now. SG: After I got the call, I caught the first flight to England and arrived into the brightly lit intensive care ward, where Mark was lying naked, just under a sheet, connected to machines that were monitoring if he would live. I said, "I'm here, Mark." And he cried tears he seemed to have saved just for me. I wanted to gather him in my arms, but I couldn't move him, and so I kissed him the way you kiss a newborn baby, terrified of their fragility. Later that afternoon, when the bad news had been laid out for us — fractured skull, bleeds on his brain, a possible torn aorta and a spine broken in two places, no movement or feeling below his waist — Mark said to me, "Come here. You need to get yourself as far away from this as possible." As I tried to process what he was saying, I was thinking, "What the hell is wrong with you?" (Laughter) "We can't do this now." So I asked him, "Are you breaking up with me?" (Laughter) And he said, "Look, you signed up for the blindness, but not this." And I answered, "We don't even know what this is, but what I do know is what I can't handle right now is a breakup while someone I love is in intensive care." (Laughter) So I called on my negotiation skills and suggested we make a deal. I said, "I will stay with you as long as you need me, as long as your back needs me. And when you no longer need me, then we talk about our relationship." Like a contract with the possibility to renew in six months. (Laughter) He agreed and I stayed. In fact, I refused to go home even to pack a bag, I slept by his bed, when he could eat, I made all his food, and we cried, one or other or both of us together, every day. I made all the complicated decisions with the doctors, I climbed right into that raging river over rapids that was sweeping Mark along. And at the first bend in that river, Mark's surgeon told us what movement and feeling he doesn't get back in the first 12 weeks, he's unlikely to get back at all. So, sitting by his bed, I began to research why, after this period they call spinal shock, there's no recovery, there's no therapy, there's no cure, there's no hope. And the internet became this portal to a magical other world. I emailed scientists, and they broke through paywalls and sent me their medical journal and science journal articles directly. I read everything that "Superman" actor Christopher Reeve had achieved, after a fall from a horse left him paralyzed from the neck down and ventilated. Christopher had broken this 12-week spell; he had regained some movement and feeling years after his accident. He dreamed of a world of empty wheelchairs. And Christopher and the scientists he worked with fueled us with hope. MP: You see, spinal cord injury strikes at the very heart of what it means to be human. And it had turned me from my upright, standing, running form, into a seated compromise of myself. And it's not just the lack of feeling and movement. Paralysis also interferes with the body's internal systems, which are designed to keep us alive. Multiple infections, nerve pain, spasms, shortened life spans are common. And these are the things that exhaust even the most determined of the 60 million people around the world who are paralyzed. Over 16 months in hospital, Simone and I were presented with the expert view that hoping for a cure had proven to be psychologically damaging. It was like the formal medical system was canceling hope in favor of acceptance alone. But canceling hope ran contrary to everything that we believed in. Yes, up to this point in history, it had proven to be impossible to find a cure for paralysis, but history is filled with the kinds of the impossible made possible through human endeavor. The kind of human endeavor that took explorers to the South Pole at the start of the last century. And the kind of human endeavor that will take adventurers to Mars in the early part of this century. So we started asking, "Why can't that same human endeavor cure paralysis in our lifetime?" SG: Well, we really believed that it can. My research taught us that we needed to remind Mark's damaged and dormant spinal cord of its upright, standing, running form, and we found San Francisco-based engineers at Ekso Bionics, who created this robotic exoskeleton that would allow Mark to stand and walk in the lab that we started to build in Dublin. Mark became the first person to personally own an exo, and since then, he and the robot have walked over one million steps. (Applause) It was bit of an early celebration, because actually it wasn't enough, the robot was doing all of the work, so we needed to plug Mark in. So we connected the San Francisco engineers with a true visionary in UCLA, Dr. Reggie Edgerton, the most beautiful man and his team's life work had resulted in a scientific breakthrough. Using electrical stimulation of the spinal cord, a number of subjects have been able to stand, and because of that, regain some movement and feeling and most importantly, to regain some of the body's internal functions that are designed to keep us alive and to make that life a pleasure. Electrical stimulation of the spinal cord, we think, is the first meaningful therapy ever for paralyzed people. Now, of course, the San Francisco engineers and the scientists in UCLA knew about each other, knew about each other's work. But as so often happens when we're busy creating groundbreaking scientific research, they hadn't quite yet got together. That seemed to be our job now. So we created our first collaboration, and the moment when we combined the electrical stimulation of Mark's spinal cord, as he walked in his robotic exoskeleton, was like that moment when Iron Man plugs the mini arc reactor into his chest and suddenly he and his suit become something else altogether. MP: Simone, my robot and I moved into the lab at UCLA for three months. And every day, Reggie and his team put electrodes onto the skin on my lower back, pushed electricity into my spinal cord to excite my nervous system, as I walked in my exo. And for the first time since I was paralyzed, I could feel my legs underneath me. Not normally — (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) It wasn't a normal feeling, but with the stimulator turned on, upright in my exo, my legs felt substantial. I could feel the meat of my muscles on the bones of my legs, and as I walked, because of the stimulation, I was able to voluntarily move my paralyzed legs. And as I did more, the robot intelligently did less. My heart rate got a normal running, training zone of 140 to 160 beats per minute, and my muscles, which had almost entirely disappeared, started to come back. And during some standard testing throughout the process, flat on my back, twelve weeks, six months and three whole years after I fell out that window and became paralyzed, the scientists turned the stimulator on and I pulled my knee to my chest. (Video) Man: OK, start, go, go, go, go, go. Good, good, good. SG: Yeah, yeah, go on, Mark, go on, go, go, go, go, go, wow! (Applause) (Laughter) SG: Well done! (Applause) MP: Do you know, this week, I've been saying to Simone, if we could forget about the paralysis, you know, the last few years have been incredibly exciting. (Laughter) Now, the problem is, we can't quite forget about the paralysis just yet. And clearly, we're not finished, because when we left that pilot study and went back to Dublin, I rolled home in my wheelchair and I'm still paralyzed and I'm still blind and we're primarily focusing on the paralysis at the moment, but being at this conference, we're kind of interested if anyone does have a cure for blindness, we'll take that as well. (Laughter) (Applause) But if you remember the blog that I mentioned, it posed a question of how we should respond, optimist, realist or something else? And I think we have come to understand that the optimists rely on hope alone and they risk being disappointed and demoralized. The realists, on the other hand, they accept the brutal facts and they keep hope alive, as well. The realists have managed to resolve the tension between acceptance and hope by running them in parallel. And that's what Simone and I have been trying to do over the last number of years. Look, I accept the wheelchair — I mean, it's almost impossible not to. And we're sad, sometimes, for what we've lost. I accept that I, and other wheelchair users, can and do live fulfilling lives, despite the nerve pain and the spasms and the infections and the shortened life spans. And I accept that it is way more difficult for people who are paralyzed from the neck down. For those who rely on ventilators to breathe, and for those who don't have access to adequate, free health care. So, that is why we also hope for another life. A life where we have created a cure through collaboration. A cure that we are actively working to release from university labs around the world and share with everyone who needs it. SG: I met Mark when he was just blind. He asked me to teach him to dance, and I did. One night, after dance classes, I turned to say goodnight to him at his front door, and to his gorgeous guide dog, Larry. I realized, that in switching all the lights off in the apartment before I left, that I was leaving him in the dark. I burst into uncontrollable tears and tried to hide it, but he knew. And he hugged me and said, "Ah, poor Simone. You're back in 1998, when I went blind. Don't worry, it turns out OK in the end." Acceptance is knowing that grief is a raging river. And you have to get into it. Because when you do, it carries you to the next place. It eventually takes you to open land, somewhere where it will turn out OK in the end. And it truly has been a love story, an expansive, abundant, deeply satisfying kind of love for our fellow humans and everyone in this act of creation. Science is love. Everyone we've met in this field just wants to get their work from the bench and into people's lives. And it's our job to help them to do that. Because when we do, we and everyone with us in this act of creation will be able to say, "We did it. And then we danced." (Video) (Music) SG: Thank you. (Applause) MP: Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
How AI could compose a personalized soundtrack to your life | {0: 'Pierre Barreau is an entrepreneur, computer scientist, composer and director who loves to create impactful things. '} | TED2018 | About two and a half years ago, I watched this movie called "Her." And it features Samantha, a superintelligent form of AI that cannot take physical form. And because she can't appear in photographs, Samantha decides to write a piece of music that will capture a moment of her life just like a photograph would. As a musician and an engineer, and someone raised in a family of artists, I thought that this idea of musical photographs was really powerful. And I decided to create an AI composer. Her name is AIVA, and she's an artificial intelligence that has learned the art of music composition by reading over 30,000 scores of history's greatest. So here's what one score looks like to the algorithm in a matrix-like representation. And here's what 30,000 scores, written by the likes of Mozart and Beethoven, look like in a single frame. So, using deep neural networks, AIVA looks for patterns in the scores. And from a couple of bars of existing music, it actually tries to infer what notes should come next in those tracks. And once AIVA gets good at those predictions, it can actually build a set of mathematical rules for that style of music in order to create its own original compositions. And in a way, this is kind of how we, humans, compose music, too. It's a trial-and-error process, during which we may not get the right notes all the time. But we can correct ourselves, either with our musical ear or our musical knowledge. But for AIVA, this process is taken from years and years of learning, decades of learning as an artist, as a musician and a composer, down to a couple of hours. But music is also a supersubjective art. And we needed to teach AIVA how to compose the right music for the right person, because people have different preferences. And to do that, we show to the algorithm over 30 different category labels for each score in our database. So those category labels are like mood or note density or composer style of a piece or the epoch during which it was written. And by seeing all this data, AIVA can actually respond to very precise requirements. Like the ones, for example, we had for a project recently, where we were commissioned to create a piece that would be reminiscent of a science-fiction film soundtrack. And the piece that was created is called "Among the Stars" and it was recorded with CMG Orchestra in Hollywood, under great conductor John Beal, and this is what they recorded, made by AIVA. (Music) (Music ends) What do you think? (Applause) Thank you. So, as you've seen, AI can create beautiful pieces of music, and the best part of it is that humans can actually bring them to life. And it's not the first time in history that technology has augmented human creativity. Live music was almost always used in silent films to augment the experience. But the problem with live music is that it didn't scale. It's really hard to cram a full symphony into a small theater, and it's really hard to do that for every theater in the world. So when music recording was actually invented, it allowed content creators, like film creators, to have prerecorded and original music tailored to each and every frame of their stories. And that was really an enhancer of creativity. Two and a half years ago, when I watched this movie "Her," I thought to myself that personalized music would be the next single biggest change in how we consume and create music. Because nowadays, we have interactive content, like video games, that have hundreds of hours of interactive game plays, but only two hours of music, on average. And it means that the music loops and loops and loops over and over again, and it's not very immersive. So what we're working on is to make sure that AI can compose hundreds of hours of personalized music for those use cases where human creativity doesn't scale. And we don't just want to do that for games. Beethoven actually wrote a piece for his beloved, called "Für Elise," and imagine if we could bring back Beethoven to life. And if he was sitting next to you, composing a music for your personality and your life story. Or imagine if someone like Martin Luther King, for example, had a personalized AI composer. Maybe then we would remember "I Have a Dream" not only as a great speech, but also as a great piece of music, part of our history, and capturing Dr. King's ideals. And this is our vision at AIVA: to personalize music so that each and every one of you and every individual in the world can have access to a personalized live soundtrack, based on their story and their personality. So this moment here together at TED is now part of our life story. So it only felt fitting that AIVA would compose music for this moment. And that's exactly what we did. So my team and I worked on biasing AIVA on the style of the TED jingle, and on music that makes us feel a sense of awe and wonder. And the result is called "The Age of Amazement." Didn't take an AI to figure that one out. (Laughter) And I couldn't be more proud to show it to you, so if you can, close your eyes and enjoy the music. Thank you very much. (Music) [The Age of Amazement Composed by AIVA] (Music ends) This was for all of you. Thank you. (Applause) |
Can you solve the rebel supplies riddle? | null | TED-Ed | You’re overseeing the delivery of crucial supplies to a rebel base deep in the heart of enemy territory. To get past Imperial customs, all packages must follow a strict protocol: if a box is marked with an even number on the bottom, it must be sealed with a red top. The boxes are already being loaded onto the transport when you receive an urgent message. One of the four boxes was sealed incorrectly, but they lost track of which one. All the boxes are still on the conveyor belt. Two are facing down: one marked with a four, and one with a seven. The other two are facing up: one with a black top, another with a red one. You know that any violation of the protocol will get the entire shipment confiscated and put your allies in grave danger. But any boxes you pull off for inspection won’t make it onto this delivery run, depriving the rebels of critically needed supplies. The transport leaves in a few moments, with or without its cargo. Which box or boxes should you grab off the conveyor belt? Pause the video now if you want to figure it out for yourself! Answer in: 3 Answer in: 2 Answer in: 1 It may seem like you need to inspect all four boxes to see what’s on the other side of each. But in fact, only two of them matter. Let’s look at the protocol again. All it says is that even-numbered boxes must have a red top. It doesn’t say anything about odd-numbered boxes, so we can just ignore the box marked with a seven. What about the box with a red top? Don’t we need to check that the number on the bottom is even? As it turns out, we don’t. The protocol says that if a box has an even number, then it should have a red top. It doesn’t say that only boxes with even numbers can have red tops, or that a box with a red top must have an even number. The requirement only goes in one direction. So we don’t need to check the box with the red lid. We do, however, need to check the one with the black lid, to make sure it wasn’t incorrectly placed on an even-numbered box. If you initially assumed the rules imply a symmetrical match between the number on the box and the type of lid, you’re not alone. That error is so common, we even have a name for it: affirming the consequent, or the fallacy of the converse. This fallacy wrongly assumes that just because a certain condition is necessary for a given result, it must also be sufficient for it. For instance, having an atmosphere is a necessary condition for being a habitable planet. But this doesn’t mean that it’s a sufficient condition – planets like Venus have atmospheres but lack other criteria for habitability. If that still seems hard to wrap your head around, let’s look at a slightly different problem. Imagine the boxes contain groceries. You see one marked for shipment to a steakhouse and one to a vegetarian restaurant. Then you see two more boxes turned upside down: one labeled as containing meat, and another as containing onions. Which ones do you need to check? Well, it’s easy – make sure the meat isn’t being shipped to the vegetarian restaurant, and that the box going there doesn’t contain meat. The onions can go to either place, and the box bound for the steakhouse can contain either product. Why does this scenario seem easier? Formally, it’s the same problem – two possible conditions for the top of the box, and two for the bottom. But in this case, they’re based on familiar real-world needs, and we easily understand that while vegetarians only eat vegetables, they’re not the only ones who do so. In the original problem, the rules seemed more arbitrary, and when they’re abstracted that way, the logical connections become harder to see. In your case, you’ve managed to get enough supplies through to enable the resistance to fight another day. And you did it by thinking outside the box – both sides of it. |
A new way to fund health care for the most vulnerable | {0: 'TED Fellow Andrew Bastawrous studies eye health -- and builds accessible new tools to bring eye care to more people.'} | TED Salon Optum | These two Kenyan ladies were best friends from neighboring villages, but they'd stopped seeing each other, literally, for 10 years, because both had gone blind from a curable condition called cataracts. They hadn't been aware they'd been sat together for over an hour when we offered them surgery at the nearest hospital. Mama Jane, on the right, told me her biggest fear was that she would poison her grandson, whom she'd never seen, because she couldn't see what she was cooking for him. Her arms were covered in burns from cooking on a charcoal stove, and she despaired that she was robbing her six-year-old grandson of his childhood because he was effectively her eyes. The effect of her blindness was going through the generations. He wasn't able to go to school or break the cycle of poverty. All of this, despite cost-effective solutions existing. Cataract surgery can be done in under 10 minutes for just a hundred dollars. Four in every five people who are blind don't need to be; curative or preventive treatments already exist. Fortunately for Mama Jane and her friend, a donor had provided treatment so that we could take them to the nearest hospital three hours away. But in that very same clinic, I met Theresa, a shy young woman who couldn't look me in the eyes, not because she couldn't see, but the appearance of the growth on her eyes called pterygium meant she'd lost her confidence, and with it, her place in her community. She had no prospects for marriage or children and had been completely ostracized. I knew how to treat her condition; it was pretty straightforward. But we had strict instructions that the funds we had were for people with cataracts. What was I supposed to do? Ignore her? My wife and I managed to raise the funds to cover her treatment, but situations like Theresa were common every day, where people had the wrong diseases. And by the "wrong diseases," I mean conditions for which funding hadn't been earmarked. Earmarking may seem like smart business or smart philanthropy on paper, but it doesn't make any sense when you're looking the person in the eye. Yet, this is how we deliver health care to millions of people the world over. I've been thinking about this problem for a very long time. Things happened to me at the age of 12 that completely transformed my life. My teachers insisted that I would go for an eye test. I resisted it for as many years as I could because as the only brown boy in the school, I already felt like a chocolate chip in rice pudding, and the idea of looking more different was not particularly appealing. You see, I'd associated an eye test with wearing glasses and looking different, not with seeing differently. When eventually I was persuaded to go, the optometrist fitted me with the trial lenses and was shocked at just how poor my sight was. He sent me outside to report what I could see. I remember looking up and seeing trees had leaves on them. I had never known this. Later that week, for the first time, I saw stars in the night sky. It was breathtaking. In fact, the entire trajectory of my life changed. I went from a failing child at school who was constantly told I was lazy and not paying attention to suddenly being a child with opportunity and potential. But I soon realized that this opportunity was not universal. That same summer, in Egypt, the home where my parents are originally from, I was with children that looked a lot more like me but couldn't have been more different. What separated us was opportunity. How is it that I had this life and they had theirs? It still makes no sense to me. How is it we've — in a world where glasses, that completely changed my life have been around for 700 years, yet two and a half billion people still can't access them. This deep sense of injustice drove me to become a doctor, eventually an eye surgeon, and in 2012, my wife and I packed our bags and moved to Kenya to try and give something back. We started by setting up a hundred eye clinics across the Great Rift Valley, where we met people like Mama Jane and Theresa. We founded a new organization called Peek Vision, a social enterprise where we built smartphone technology that makes it possible for people in the community to find people in their homes, the most vulnerable groups who are being missed, and created new tools that made it easier to diagnose them and connect them to services. Inspired by the challenges I'd had as a child, we equipped teachers, 25 of them, with smartphones to screen children in schools. Our first program resulted in 21,000 children being screened in just nine days. That same program was replicated to reach 200,000 children, covering the entire district. Soon we were able to repeat this in six new programs in different countries. But now, I was faced with the very same problems I had with Theresa of earmarked funds, but now as an organization. People wanted to fund specific projects or particular diseases or subsets of the population. But it didn't make sense, because what we needed to do was build an incredible team who could create the systems that would change the lives of millions of people, whatever their needs were. But it didn't work that way. Soon, we were able to align ourselves with partners who understood, because I understand the challenge. Ultimately, you need to trust where your money's going, and that trust usually manifests through the requirement to create detailed plans — lots of paperwork. But what happens if the dynamic needs of people don't fit with the plan that you created, and your funding is dependent on delivering the plan? You end up with a choice: Do you serve the plan, the funder, or do you serve the need? This is not a choice we should have to make, because ultimately, we can only serve one master. The measure of our humanity is how we serve the most vulnerable amongst us. Currently, the system is not working, and too many people are being left behind. We've been fortunate to find incredible supporters and partners, which led to a new program in Botswana, in which every single schoolchild is being screened and treated by the end of 2021, meaning an entire generation of children will have the opportunity that good vision affords. But this took years of work. It took multiple feasibility studies, engaging different partners and stakeholders, business cases, economic analyses, to persuade the government to eventually come on board. But they're now leading and funding this in their own national budget. But we did not have the resources to do this. Our visionary funders and partners came alongside us, and the key ingredients were we were aligned on mission, on the why we were doing it. We agreed on the outcome, what had to be done. But critically, they were flexible and gave us autonomy to work out how we got there, giving us the space to be creative, ambitious and take risk. What if all health care looked like this? What would it mean for all the social causes we're trying to solve? Business knows this. By taking a long-term, ambitious view and giving people the autonomy to be creative to solve our world's biggest challenges, we've disrupted entire industries. Look at Amazon, Google. Surely, we need the same level of ambition if we're going to serve the most vulnerable in our societies. As a planet, we've set a target, the Sustainable Development Goals, yet we're spending less than half the amount on tackling the global goals than we are on conflict resolution, which mostly arises from the very inequalities we're not serving. It's time for change. It's not just common sense as well — it makes business sense. Our work in Botswana showed for a modest investment, the economy would gain 1.3 billion dollars over the lifetime of the children. That was 150 times return on investment. But part of the problem is that value is generated in the future, but we need the money now to deliver it. Turns out, this is not a new problem. Banks have been solving it for centuries. Simply put, it's called financing. If you want to buy a house but you can't afford to pay for it up front, the bank financiers, you see, can realize that future value now. In other words, you can live in the house straightaway. But what if you couldn't? What if you had to wait until you'd raised all of the money to move into the house, and you were kept homeless whilst trying to save the money to get there in the first place? You'd end up in an impossible cycle, never able to get there, yet that's this very same bind we've put on ourselves. Inspired by the change in Botswana and by the visionary support of our funders and partners, we've come together — two world-leading banks, for-profit and private, not-for-profit organizations, foundations and philanthropists — to launch the Vision Catalyst Fund, a fund which will have trust built in by design. It will make funding available now to the organizations that can serve the need of the most vulnerable. It will ensure that those organizations can work together in partnership, rather than competing for limited funds, serving the priority needs of an entire population, whatever they are, so that ultimately the individuals affected can receive the care that they deserve. And as we've shown, it doesn't make just a health and social difference, it creates huge economic benefit. This benefit in itself will create sustainability to perpetuate a virtuous, catalytic cycle of improvement and change. Because when we do this, the individual needs of people like myself can be met. And this coalition has come together this year to make a commitment with 53 heads of government, who have now committed to take action towards achieving access to quality eye care for all. We've had incredible commitments of 200 million pairs of glasses to the fund and millions of dollars, so that the dynamic and individual needs of people — like my own issues that I had as child, and like Theresa, who just required simple surgery — can be met. For Theresa, it meant her place back in society, now with her own family and children. And for Mama Jane, it wasn't just restoring her sight, it meant the opportunity to restore hope, to restore joy and to restore dignity. (Music) Thank you. (Applause) |
Why some anger can be good for you | {0: 'Dr. Ryan Martin is the chair of the psychology department at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.'} | TEDxFondduLac | I want you to imagine that you get a text from a friend, and it reads, "You will not believe what just happened. I'm so mad right now." So you do the dutiful thing as a friend, and you ask for details, and they tell you a story about what happened to them at the gym or at work or on their date last night. You listen, and you try to understand why they're so mad. Maybe you even secretly judge whether or not they should be so mad. (Laughter) Maybe you even offer some suggestions. Now, in that moment, you are doing essentially what I get to do every day because I'm an anger researcher, and as an anger researcher, I spend a good part of my professional life - who am I kidding, also my personal life - (Laughter) studying why people get mad. I study the types of thoughts they have when they get mad and even what they do then, whether it's getting into fights or breaking things or even yelling at people in all caps on the Internet. (Laughter) As you can imagine, when people hear I'm an anger researcher, they want to talk to me about their anger and share with me their anger stories. It's not because they need a therapist, though that does sometimes happen, it's really because anger is universal. It's something we all feel, and it's something they can relate to. We've been feeling it since the first few months of life, when we didn't get what we wanted and our cries of protests, things like, "What do you mean, you won't pick up the rattle, dad? I want it!" (Laughter) We feel it throughout our teenage years, as my mom can certainly attest to with me. Sorry, mom. We feel it to the very end. In fact, anger has been with us at some of the worst moments of our lives; it's a natural and expected part of our grief. But it's also been with us at some of the best moments of our lives, with those special occasions like weddings and vacations often marred by these everyday frustrations - bad weather, travel delays - that feel horrible in the moment but then are ultimately forgotten when things go okay. So I have many conversations with people about their anger, and through those conversations, I've learned that many people - and I bet many people here right now - you see anger as a problem. You see the way it interferes in your life, the way it damages relationships, maybe even in a way that's scary. And while I get all of that, I see anger a little differently, and today I want to tell you something important about your anger, and it's this: Anger is a powerful and healthy force in your life. It's good that you feel it. You need to feel it. But to understand all of that, we have to back up and talk about why we get mad in the first place. A lot of this goes back to the work of an anger researcher named Dr. Jerry Deffenbacher, who wrote about this back in 1996 in a book chapter on how to deal with problematic anger. For most of us - and I bet most of you - it feels as simple as this: I get mad when I'm provoked. Right? You hear it in the language people use. They say things like, "It makes me so mad when people drive this slow." Or "I got mad because she left the milk out again." Or my favorite: "I don't have an anger problem; people just need to stop messing with me." (Laughter) Now, in the spirit of better understanding those types of provocations, I ask a lot of people, including my friends and colleagues and even family, "What are the things that really get to you? What makes you mad?" And by the way, one of the advantages of being an anger researcher is that I've spent more than a decade generating a comprehensive list of all the things that really irritate my colleagues. Right? Just in case I need it. (Laughter) But their answers are fascinating because they say things like, "When my sports team loses," "People who chew too loudly." And it's surprisingly common, by the way. (Laughter) "People who walk too slowly." That one's mine. And of course, roundabouts. Right? Roundabouts. (Laughter) I can tell you honestly, there is no rage like roundabout rage. (Laughter) Sometimes their answers aren't minor at all. Sometimes they talk about racism and sexism and bullying and environmental destruction, big global problems we all face. But sometimes, their answers are very specific, maybe even oddly specific. "That wet line you get across your shirt when you accidentally lean against the counter of a public bathroom." (Laughter) Yeah, super gross, right? Or, "Flash drives - there's only two ways to plug them in, so why does it always take me three tries?" (Laughter) Whether it's minor or major, whether it's general or specific, we can look at these examples, and we can tease out some common themes. We get angry in situations that are unpleasant, that feel unfair, where our goals are blocked, that could have been avoided, and that leave us feeling powerless. This is a recipe for anger, but you can also tell that anger is probably not the only thing we're feeling in these situations - right? Anger doesn't happen in a vacuum. We can feel angry at the same time that we're scared or sad or feeling a host of other emotions. But here's the thing. These provocations - they aren't making us mad. At least not on their own, and we know that because if they were, we'd all get angry over the same things, and we don't. The reasons I get angry are different than the reasons you get angry, so there's got to be something else going on. What is that something else? Well, we know what we're doing and feeling at the moment of that provocation matters. We call this the pre-anger state. Are you hungry, are you tired? Are you anxious about something else, are you running late for something? When you're feeling those things, those provocations feel that much worse. But what matters the most is not the provocation, it's not the pre-anger state, it's this: it's how we interpret that provocation, it's how we make sense of it in our lives. When something happens to us, we first decide: is this good or bad; is it fair or unfair; is it blameworthy; is it punishable? That's primary appraisal, it's when you evaluate the event itself. We decide what it means in the context of our lives, and then, once we've done that, we decide how bad it is. That's secondary appraisal. We say, "Is this the worst thing that's ever happened, or can I cope with this?" To illustrate that, I want you to imagine you are driving somewhere. Before I go any further, I should tell you if I were an evil genius, and I wanted to create a situation that was going to make you mad, that situation would look a lot like driving. (Laughter) It's true. You are, by definition, on your way somewhere, so everything that happens - traffic, other drivers, road construction - it feels like it's blocking your goals. There are all these written and unwritten rules of the road, and those rules are routinely violated right in front of you, usually without consequence. And who's violating those rules? Anonymous others, people you will never see again, making them a very easy target for your wrath. (Laughter) So you're driving somewhere, thus teed up to be angry, and the person in front of you is driving well below the speed limit. It's frustrating because you can't really see why they're driving so slow. Right? That's primary appraisal. You've looked at this and you said, "It's bad and it's blameworthy." But maybe you also decide it's not that big a deal. You're not in a hurry, doesn't matter. That's secondary appraisal. You don't get angry. But now imagine you're on your way to a job interview. What that person is doing - it hasn't changed. Right? So, primary appraisal doesn't change: still bad, still blameworthy. But your ability to cope with it sure does because all of a sudden, you're going to be late to that job interview. All of a sudden, you are not going to get your dream job, the one that was going to give you piles and piles of money - right? (Laughter) Somebody else is going to get your dream job, and you're going to be broke. You're going to be destitute. You might as well stop now, turn around, move in with your parents. (Laughter) Why? Because of this person in front of me. Scratch that; this is not a person. This is a monster. (Laughter) And this monster is here just to ruin your life. (Laughter) Now, that thought process, it's called catastrophizing, the one where we make the worst of things. It's one of the primary types of thoughts that we know is associated with chronic anger. But there's a couple of others. Misattributing causation. Angry people tend to put blame where it doesn't belong, not just on people, but actually inanimate objects as well. If you think that sounds ridiculous, think about the last time you lost your car keys, and you said, "Where did those car keys go?" Because you know they ran off on their own. (Laughter) They tend to overgeneralize. They use words like always, never, every. "This always happens to me." "I never get what I want." Or, "I hit every stoplight on the way here today." Demandingness - they put their own needs ahead of the needs of others. "I don't care why this person is driving so slow. They need to speed up or move over so I can get to this job interview." And finally, inflammatory labeling. They call people fools, idiots, monsters, or a whole bunch of things I've been told not to say in this TED talk. (Laughter) For a long time, psychologists have referred to these as cognitive distortions or even irrational beliefs, and yes, sometimes they are irrational. Maybe even most of the time. But sometimes, these thoughts are totally rational. There is unfairness in the world. There are cruel, selfish people, and it's not only okay to be angry when we're treated poorly, it's right to be angry when we're treated poorly. If there's one thing I want you to remember from my talk today, it's this: Your anger exists in you as an emotion because it offered your ancestors, both human and non human, with an evolutionary advantage. Just as your fear alerts you to danger, your anger alerts you to injustice. It's one of the ways your brain communicates to you that you have had enough. What's more, it energizes you to confront that injustice. Think for a second about the last time you got mad. Your heart rate increased, your breathing increased, you started to sweat. That's your sympathetic nervous system, or fight-or-flight system, kicking in to offer you the energy you need to respond. And that's just the stuff you noticed. At the same time, your digestive system slowed down so you can conserve energy. That's why your mouth went dry. Your blood vessels dilated to get blood to your extremities. That's why your face went red. It's all part of this complex pattern of physiological experiences that exist today because they helped your ancestors deal with cruel and unforgiving forces of nature. The problem is that the thing your ancestors did to deal with their anger, to physically fight, they're no longer reasonable or appropriate. You can't and you shouldn't swing a club every time you're provoked. (Laughter) But here's the good news. You are capable of something your non-human ancestors weren't capable of, and that is the capacity to regulate your emotions. Even when you want to lash out, you can stop yourself, and you can channel that anger into something more productive. So often when we talk about anger, we talk about how to keep from getting angry. We tell people to calm down or relax; we even tell people to let it go. All of that assumes that anger is bad, and that it's wrong to feel it. But instead, I like to think of anger as a motivator. The same way your thirst motivates you to get a drink of water, the same way your hunger motivates you to get a bite to eat, your anger can motivate you to respond to injustice. Because we don't have to think too hard to find things we should be mad about. When we go back to the beginning, yes, some of those things are silly and not worth getting angry over, but racism, sexism, bullying, environmental destruction - those things are real, those things are terrible, and the only way to fix them is to get mad first, and then channel that anger into fighting back. You don't have to fight back with aggression or hostility or violence. There are infinite ways that you can express your anger. You can protest; you can write letters to the editor; you can donate to and volunteer for causes. You can create art; you can create literature; you can create poetry and music. You can create a community that cares for one another and does not allow those atrocities to happen. So the next time you feel yourself getting angry, instead of trying to turn it off, I hope you'll listen to what that anger is telling you, and then I hope you'll channel it into something positive and productive. Thank you. (Applause) |
Did the global response to 9/11 make us safer? | {0: 'Benedetta Berti studies how conflicts impact civilians.'} | TED2018 | Almost 20 years have passed since 9/11. It is time to take stock of where we stand and stop and think. It is time to ask ourselves, have the assumptions and policies we developed in the wake of those tragic events truly made us more secure? Have they made our societies, both in Europe and in the United States, more resilient? I've worked all my life in the field of security and defense, and I am convinced that now, more than ever, we need to radically reframe the way we think and act about security, and especially about international security. By international security, I actually mean what we do, how we prepare our countries to better respond and prevent external threats, and how we protect our citizens. The key to both is to focus on protecting civilians, both in our own countries and in those where we are present in the name of security. Now, this idea goes against the fixed narrative that we developed over the past 20 years over what security is and how to get it, but that narrative is flawed, and worse, it is counterproductive. Over the past 20 years, both in the United States and in Europe, we've come to accept that we must talk about security in zero sum terms, as if the only way to gain more security is by compromising on values and rights: security versus human rights, safety versus freedom and development. This is a false opposition. It just doesn't work like that. We need to recognize that security and human rights are not opposite values, they are intrinsically related. After all, the most basic human right is the right to live and to be free from violence, and a state's most basic responsibility is to guarantee that right for its citizens. Conversely, if we think about communities all over the world affected by war and conflict, it is insecurity and violence that stops them from achieving their full freedom and development. Now, they need basic security just as much as we do and they need it so they can live a normal life and so that they can enjoy their human rights. This is why we need to shift. We need to acknowledge that sustainable security builds on a foundation of human rights, builds on promoting and respecting human rights. Also, over the past two decades, we have accepted that the best way to guarantee our own security is by defeating our enemies, and to do that, we need to rely almost exclusively on the military. Again, this clashes with my work, with my research, with what I see in the field. What I see is that building sustainable security has a lot less to do with crushing enemies, has a lot less to do with winning on the battlefield, and has a lot more to do with protecting victims and building stability. And to do that, well, the military alone is simply insufficient. This is why I believe we need to shelve the never-ending War on Terror, and we need to replace it with a security agenda that is driven by the principle of protecting civilians, no matter where they are from, what passport they hold, or where they live: Vancouver, New York, Kabul, Mosul, Aleppo or Douma. Sustainable security tells us that we're more likely to have long-term security at home for ourselves if we focus our engagements abroad on protecting civilians and on ensuring their lives are lived in dignity and free from violence. For example, we all know that defeating ISIS is a security achievement. Absolutely. But rebuilding destroyed homes, restoring order, ensuring a representative political system, these are just as, if not more important, and not just for the security of civilians in Iraq and in Syria, but for our own security and for global stability. More fundamentally, ISIS's danger should not just be counted in the number of weapons it holds but also in the number of children it has kept out of school or indoctrinated. This is from a security perspective. From a security perspective, the long-term generational impact of having millions of children in Syria growing up knowing only war and out of school, this is a far more dangerous threat to stability than all of ISIS's weapons combined, and we should spend just as much time and just as much energy to counter this as what we spend when countering ISIS militarily. Over the past two decades, our security policy has been short-term. It has focused on the here and now. It has systematically downplayed the link between what we do today in the name of security and the long-term impact of those choices. In the years after 9/11, some of the choices, some of the policies we've implemented have probably made us less, not more secure in the long term. Sustainable, civilian-centered security needs to look at what happens in the long term. Again, for example, relying on drones to target enemies in faraway countries may be a tool. It may be a tool to make sure or to lessen the threat of an imminent attack on the United States. But what about the long-term impact? If civilians are killed, if communities are targeted, this will feed a vicious circle of war, conflict, trauma and radicalization, and that vicious circle is at the center of so many of the security challenges we face today. This will not make us safer in the long term. We need civilian security, we need sustainable civilian-centered security, and we need it now. We need to encourage thinking and research around this concept, and to implement it. We live in a dangerous world. We have many threats to peace and conflict. Much like in the days after 9/11, we simply cannot afford not to think about international security. But we have to learn the lessons of the past 20 years. To get it right, to get security right, we need to focus on the long term. We need to focus on protecting civilians. And we need to respect and acknowledge the fact that sustainable security builds on a foundation of human rights. Otherwise, in the name of security, we risk leaving the world a far more dangerous and unstable place than what we already found it in. Thank you. (Applause) |
Is there any truth to the King Arthur legends? | null | TED-Ed | “Here lies Arthur, king who was, and king who will be.” So reads the inscription on King Arthur’s gravestone in Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. Writing in the 15th century, Malory couldn’t have known how prophetic this inscription would turn out to be. King Arthur has risen again and again in our collective imagination, along with his retinue of knights, Guinevere, the Round Table, Camelot, and of course, Excalibur. But where do these stories come from, and is there any truth to them? King Arthur as we know him is a creation of the later Middle Ages, but his legend actually has its roots in Celtic poetry from an earlier time: the Saxon invasions of Britain. After the Romans left Britain in 410 CE, Saxon invaders from what’s now Germany and Denmark quickly capitalized on the vulnerability of the abandoned territory. The inhabitants of Britain fought fiercely against the invaders through several centuries of turmoil. There are hardly any written records from this time, so it’s difficult to reconstruct an accurate history. However, surviving poetry from the era gives us some clues. One of the poems, The Gododdin, contains the very first reference to Arthur, though Arthur himself doesn’t actually appear in it. It says a different warrior, named Gwawrddur, was skilled at slaying his enemies, but was no Arthur. That’s not much to go on, but whoever this Arthur was, he must’ve been the gold standard of warriors. Whether he ruled anyone, or even lived at all is, unfortunately, less clear. Despite this uncertainty, references to Arthur caught the attention of an aspiring historian hundreds of years later. In 1130, Geoffrey of Monmouth was a lowly cleric with grand ambitions. Using Celtic and Latin sources, he spent years creating a lengthy chronicle titled, "The History of the Kings of Britain." The centerpiece of this tome was King Arthur. History is a generous term for Geoffrey’s account. Writing six hundred years after the Saxon invasions, he cobbled together fragments of myth and poetry to compensate for the almost complete lack of official records. A few of his sources contained mentions of Arthur, and some others were realistic accounts of battles and places. But many featured mythic heroes fighting long odds with the help of magical swords and sorcery. Geoffrey blended them all: A magical sword called Caledfwlch and a Roman fortress called Caerleon appeared in his source material, so Geoffrey’s Arthur ruled from Caerleon and wielded Caliburnus, the Latin translation of Caledfwlch. Geoffrey even added a wise counselor named Merlin, based on the Celtic bard Myrrdin, to Arthur’s story. If Arthur did live, he would likely have been a military leader, but a castle-bound king better fit Geoffrey’s regal history. Geoffrey’s chronicle got the attention he’d hoped for, and was soon translated from Latin into French by the poet Wace around 1155 CE. Wace added another centerpiece of Arthurian lore to Geoffrey’s sword, castle, and wizard: the Round Table. He wrote that Arthur had the table constructed so that all guests in his court would be equally placed, and none could boast that he had the highest position at the table. After reading Wace’s translation, another French poet, Chrétien de Troyes, wrote a series of romances that catapulted Arthur’s story to fame. He introduced tales of individual knights like Lancelot and Gawain, and mixed elements of romance in with the adventures. He conceived Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere’s love triangle. In addition to interpersonal intrigue, he also introduced the Holy Grail. Chrétien probably based his Grail’s powers on magical objects in Celtic mythology. He lived in the middle of the Crusades, and others imposed the preoccupations of the time on the Grail, casting it as a powerful relic from the crucifixion. Numerous adaptations in French and other languages followed from Chrétien’s work. In the course of these retellings, Caerleon became Camelot, and Caliburnus was rechristened Excalibur. In the 15th century, Sir Thomas Malory synthesized these stories in Le Morte D’arthur, the basis of many modern accounts of King Arthur. In the thousand years since Arthur first appeared in a Celtic poem, his story has transformed over and over to reflect the concerns of his chroniclers and their audiences. And we’re still rewriting and adapting the legend today. Whether or not the man ever lived, loved, reigned, or adventured, it’s undeniable that the character has achieved immortality. |
What I learned investigating Nixon | {0: 'Bob Woodward is an investigative reporter and an associate editor at The Washington Post, where he has worked since 1971.'} | TEDxMidAtlantic | Thank you. You're nice to invite me. What I want to do is talk a little bit about Watergate - which was a long time ago - what we've learned about corruption, what we've learned about Nixon since then - because of his secret taping system, there's so much that comes out; it's almost as if every season, there is a new batch of Nixon tapes - and then try to address the question a little bit, What does that mean? What does Watergate, what does the kind of corruption that leads to the resignation of a president entail, and what happened? The beginning of Watergate was five burglars caught in the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate, and it seemed bizarre. I remember that morning being called in to the Post, and there's, you know, burglars - I was sent down to the courthouse where the burglars were arraigned. They all had business suits. Now, there are lots of burglars in Washington; (Laughter) none to my knowledge ever had business suits. And they were there before the judge, and the judge asked the leader where he worked, and the leader said (whispers), and the judge said, "Speak up!" And so it was James McCord, he said, "CIA." (Laughter) And the judge then said, "No, speak up so we can hear." And so, McCord said, "CIA." I was in the front row, listening - and I'm going to speak English here because that's what happened - I said, not in a whisper but kind of blurted it out, "Holy shit." (Laughter) So it was 26 months of Watergate and the revelations that sort of tumbled out, and as you look at it now, you know, What really was Watergate? Wasn't just that burglary; it was the series of illegal activities designed to subvert the process of electing a president in this country and nominating - in the case in 1972 - of the Democratic opponent to Nixon. Sam Ervin, who led the Senate Watergate Committee, addressed the question, "What was Watergate?" and he said, "It was this subversion, but why? Why Watergate?" And his answer, which I think is right, is it was "a lust for political power," retaining that political power that Nixon had. So as you look at "What was Watergate?" it was really five wars conducted by Nixon, led by Nixon. The first war was, interestingly enough, the war against the anti-war movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, which was growing. Nixon had inherited the Vietnam War from President Johnson. He wanted to do it his way, which was "We're going to withdraw troops, but we're going to bomb and bomb and bomb," which of course is what they did, but he hated the anti-war movement so strongly that he had one of his aides in the White House, Thomas Charles Huston, draw up a top-secret plan of how to deal with the domestic opposition, people who were thought to be radicals or were radicals. This Huston plan - Huston, in proposing it to Nixon, in writing said, "Oh, this is illegal," because it involved break-ins, wiretapping, surveillance - everything necessary to bring the anti-war movement, or the violent parts of the anti-war movement, to toe. And Nixon approved it. J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI Director, objected, not because he thought, gee, these are illegal things, but he thought and he knew that break-ins, wiretapping, surveillance - that's the job of the FBI, that's our turf. (Laughter) We don't want to share it. And so Nixon rescinded the Huston plan. But then, things in 1971 got so intense, and there's a tape of a meeting in the Oval Office. It was June 17th, 1971. Now, this is a year before the Watergate burglary, and it's Nixon, his Chief of Staff, Haldeman, and Henry Kissinger, the National Security Advisor, and there is a document that they want to get out of the Brookings Institution that's going to help in criticizing President Johnson and his conduct of the war, and they're talking about it, and, literally, Bob Haldeman said, "Oh, if we get this document, we'll be able to blackmail Lyndon Johnson." Think about it. Can you imagine John Adams, the second president, sitting around and saying, "Let's get something so we can blackmail George Washington"? But here, that was the proposal, and Nixon said, "Well, I want to burglarize the Brookings Institution to get this document." Listen to the tape. It is chilling - President of the United States saying, "Let's blow the safe," "I want to do this on a thievery basis." You know, it's that anybody would talk this way; that your President would talk this way is stunning. Now, the second war of Nixon was against the news media; set up an operation in the White House called the "Plumbers," led by Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy. They were to find out leaks to the news media. There were 17 wiretaps of reporters, White House officials to gain information. They burglarized the psychiatrist's office of Daniel Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times and The Washington Post. Now think of that. The government has decided - and Ellsberg is under criminal indictment also - they decide they're going to get him, so let's break into his psychiatrist's office to get dirt on him. The third war was to take this apparatus of Hunt and Liddy in the Plumbers, and the wiretapping and the break-ins and bring it into the White House and to turn it against the Democrats - and that was the Watergate operation - and sabotage and espionage that accompanied that. The fourth war was, significantly, the war against justice, which is the cover-up: "Oh, my God, we've been caught. Now we have to lie." And if you listen to some of these tapes - here is the President of the United States proposing to his counsel, John Dean, "Well, we have to pay the Watergate burglars for their silence," and John Dean, the counsel, says on this tape, said, "Well, it's going to be expensive." And Nixon said, "Well, how much?" And Dean said, "Well, a million dollars." Nixon: "Oh, I know where I can get that." In the White House. Level of criminality which is astonishing. Then the whole series of investigations, special prosecutor of Senate Watergate Committee, the impeachment investigation of Nixon, and he resigns in August, 1974. And what happened there, he lived for 20 more years, and the fifth war was the war against history, to say, "Oh, no, Watergate was really not that important. I did not commit impeachable offenses," having surrogates go out and say, "Well, there are unanswered questions about Watergate" - which there are. But I think in a very important way, you look at Nixon and this record on the tapes - what he did is - the presidency is supposed to be something that can do good for a majority of people in the country. Listen to those tapes; time and time again, it's "Let's use the power of the Presidency as an instrument of personal revenge. Let's get the IRS, the FBI, the CIA on Nixon's real or perceived opponents." The dog - and this is ultimately, I think, the final corruption of Nixon in Watergate - the dog that doesn't bark on the tapes. No one, to my knowledge, ever says, What does the country need? What would be good for the people? It's all in this vicious way of let's screw somebody, let's help Nixon's career, let's prosecute the Vietnam War so he'll get reelected even though - in one memo in my latest book, Nixon actually wrote out, which we didn't know at the time, just found this out last year, he said, "Well, the bombing has achieved zilch, nothing." And what did he do the year he was running for reelection? He increased the bombing, intensified it: 1.1 million tons of bombs in Southeast Asia. So the day Nixon resigned, he called his aides, friends, cabinet officers to the East Room of the White House and had his wife, two daughters, son-in-law standing there, and there was no script - it was Nixon raw - and he talked about his mother and his father, and he was sweating. It was just a lot of people worried that he was going to come unglued, because it was televised nationally. Then at the end, Nixon kind of waved his hand, "Ah, here is why I called you all here." And he said the following: "Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself." Now think of the wisdom in that: hate was the poison, hate was what drove him and his presidency, and at that moment he had to leave office, he understood the poison and how hate had destroyed him, had put the country on edge, and if there is anything to reflect on now if you look back, as we've seen the current presidential election, on the surface and underneath, there is too much contempt, too much hate, and that, if you think about it, we need to know what's really going on. We don't know enough, and if we don't know what's going on, the judge who said it got it right: "Democracies die in darkness." And history proves that. And we think we're resilient - I think we are. We think we're strong. We think that we have a process that will protect us from that. But if we are infected with hate and infected with the lack of knowledge - who these people really are, what's inside, what's driving them - we could partake of losing our wonderful democracy. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
What are the most important moral problems of our time? | {0: 'Will MacAskill is a cofounder of the effective altruism movement, a philosophy that tries to answer the question: How can we do as much good as possible?'} | TED2018 | This is a graph that represents the economic history of human civilization. [World GDP per capita over the last 200,000 years] There's not much going on, is there. For the vast majority of human history, pretty much everyone lived on the equivalent of one dollar per day, and not much changed. But then, something extraordinary happened: the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. And the basically flat graph you just saw transforms into this. What this graph means is that, in terms of power to change the world, we live in an unprecedented time in human history, and I believe our ethical understanding hasn't yet caught up with this fact. The Scientific and Industrial Revolutions transformed both our understanding of the world and our ability to alter it. What we need is an ethical revolution so that we can work out how do we use this tremendous bounty of resources to improve the world. For the last 10 years, my colleagues and I have developed a philosophy and research program that we call effective altruism. It tries to respond to these radical changes in our world, uses evidence and careful reasoning to try to answer this question: How can we do the most good? Now, there are many issues you've got to address if you want to tackle this problem: whether to do good through your charity or your career or your political engagement, what programs to focus on, who to work with. But what I want to talk about is what I think is the most fundamental problem. Of all the many problems that the world faces, which should we be focused on trying to solve first? Now, I'm going to give you a framework for thinking about this question, and the framework is very simple. A problem's higher priority, the bigger, the more easily solvable and the more neglected it is. Bigger is better, because we've got more to gain if we do solve the problem. More easily solvable is better because I can solve the problem with less time or money. And most subtly, more neglected is better, because of diminishing returns. The more resources that have already been invested into solving a problem, the harder it will be to make additional progress. Now, the key thing that I want to leave with you is this framework, so that you can think for yourself what are the highest global priorities. But I and others in the effective altruism community have converged on three moral issues that we believe are unusually important, score unusually well in this framework. First is global health. This is supersolvable. We have an amazing track record in global health. Rates of death from measles, malaria, diarrheal disease are down by over 70 percent. And in 1980, we eradicated smallpox. I estimate we thereby saved over 60 million lives. That's more lives saved than if we'd achieved world peace in that same time period. On our current best estimates, we can save a life by distributing long-lasting insecticide-treated bed nets for just a few thousand dollars. This is an amazing opportunity. The second big priority is factory farming. This is superneglected. There are 50 billion land animals used every year for food, and the vast majority of them are factory farmed, living in conditions of horrific suffering. They're probably among the worst-off creatures on this planet, and in many cases, we could significantly improve their lives for just pennies per animal. Yet this is hugely neglected. There are 3,000 times more animals in factory farms than there are stray pets, but yet, factory farming gets one fiftieth of the philanthropic funding. That means additional resources in this area could have a truly transformative impact. Now the third area is the one that I want to focus on the most, and that's the category of existential risks: events like a nuclear war or a global pandemic that could permanently derail civilization or even lead to the extinction of the human race. Let me explain why I think this is such a big priority in terms of this framework. First, size. How bad would it be if there were a truly existential catastrophe? Well, it would involve the deaths of all seven billion people on this planet and that means you and everyone you know and love. That's just a tragedy of unimaginable size. But then, what's more, it would also mean the curtailment of humanity's future potential, and I believe that humanity's potential is vast. The human race has been around for about 200,000 years, and if she lives as long as a typical mammalian species, she would last for about two million years. If the human race were a single individual, she would be just 10 years old today. And what's more, the human race isn't a typical mammalian species. There's no reason why, if we're careful, we should die off after only two million years. The earth will remain habitable for 500 million years to come. And if someday, we took to the stars, the civilization could continue for billions more. So I think the future is going to be really big, but is it going to be good? Is the human race even really worth preserving? Well, we hear all the time about how things have been getting worse, but I think that when we take the long run, things have been getting radically better. Here, for example, is life expectancy over time. Here's the proportion of people not living in extreme poverty. Here's the number of countries over time that have decriminalized homosexuality. Here's the number of countries over time that have become democratic. Then, when we look to the future, there could be so much more to gain again. We'll be so much richer, we can solve so many problems that are intractable today. So if this is kind of a graph of how humanity has progressed in terms of total human flourishing over time, well, this is what we would expect future progress to look like. It's vast. Here, for example, is where we would expect no one to live in extreme poverty. Here is where we would expect everyone to be better off than the richest person alive today. Perhaps here is where we would discover the fundamental natural laws that govern our world. Perhaps here is where we discover an entirely new form of art, a form of music we currently lack the ears to hear. And this is just the next few thousand years. Once we think past that, well, we can't even imagine the heights that human accomplishment might reach. So the future could be very big and it could be very good, but are there ways we could lose this value? And sadly, I think there are. The last two centuries brought tremendous technological progress, but they also brought the global risks of nuclear war and the possibility of extreme climate change. When we look to the coming centuries, we should expect to see the same pattern again. And we can see some radically powerful technologies on the horizon. Synthetic biology might give us the power to create viruses of unprecedented contagiousness and lethality. Geoengineering might give us the power to dramatically alter the earth's climate. Artificial intelligence might give us the power to create intelligent agents with abilities greater than our own. Now, I'm not saying that any of these risks are particularly likely, but when there's so much at stake, even small probabilities matter a great deal. Imagine if you're getting on a plane and you're kind of nervous, and the pilot reassures you by saying, "There's only a one-in-a-thousand chance of crashing. Don't worry." Would you feel reassured? For these reasons, I think that preserving the future of humanity is among the most important problems that we currently face. But let's keep using this framework. Is this problem neglected? And I think the answer is yes, and that's because problems that affect future generations are often hugely neglected. Why? Because future people don't participate in markets today. They don't have a vote. It's not like there's a lobby representing the interests of those born in 2300 AD. They don't get to influence the decisions we make today. They're voiceless. And that means we still spend a paltry amount on these issues: nuclear nonproliferation, geoengineering, biorisk, artificial intelligence safety. All of these receive only a few tens of millions of dollars of philanthropic funding every year. That's tiny compared to the 390 billion dollars that's spent on US philanthropy in total. The final aspect of our framework then: Is this solvable? I believe it is. You can contribute with your money, your career or your political engagement. With your money, you can support organizations that focus on these risks, like the Nuclear Threat Initiative, which campaigns to take nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert, or the Blue Ribbon Panel, which develops policy to minimize the damage from natural and man-made pandemics, or the Center for Human-Compatible AI, which does technical research to ensure that AI systems are safe and reliable. With your political engagement, you can vote for candidates that care about these risks, and you can support greater international cooperation. And then with your career, there is so much that you can do. Of course, we need scientists and policymakers and organization leaders, but just as importantly, we also need accountants and managers and assistants to work in these organizations that are tackling these problems. Now, the research program of effective altruism is still in its infancy, and there's still a huge amount that we don't know. But even with what we've learned so far, we can see that by thinking carefully and by focusing on those problems that are big, solvable and neglected, we can make a truly tremendous difference to the world for thousands of years to come. Thank you. (Applause) |
"You Never Can Tell" / "Over the Mountain, Across the Sea" | {0: 'Powerhouse singer Elise LeGrow plays with the classic sounds of R&B.'} | TED2018 | (Music) (Singing) It was a teenage wedding and the old folks wished them well. You could see that Pierre did truly love the mademoiselle. Oh, and now the young monsieur and madame have rung the chapel bell. C'est la vie, say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell. No, no. They furnished off an apartment with a two-room Roebuck sale. The coolerator was crammed with TV dinners and ginger ale. Oh, but when Pierre found work, the little money comin' worked out well . C'est la vie, say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell. You never can tell. They bought a souped-up jitney, was a cherry red '53. They drove it down to New Orleans to celebrate their anniversary. Oh, it was there where Pierre was wedded to the lovely mademoiselle. C'est la vie, say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell. No, no, you never can tell. No, no, you never can tell. You never can tell. You never can tell. No, no, you never can tell. (Applause and cheers) Thank you. I recently had the tremendous opportunity of searching for gold in the vast mine of songs released by Chess Records, a Chicago-based label that was really very active in the '50s and '60s in the US and that music spread all over the world. And the songs that I'm singing tonight are from an album that I just put out called, "Playing Chess," that pays homage to those songs. And these guys were really the innovators of rock 'n' roll and soul and R&B as we now know it. (Applause) (Music) (Singing) Over the mountain, across the sea, there's a girl waiting, she's waiting for ... me. (Music) Over the river, beyond every cloud, she's passed the wind blowin' loud. Over the mountain, a girl waits for me. (Music) Tell the sands, every blade of grass, please tell the wind to let my love pass. Over the mountain, a girl waits for me. Tell the moon up — up in the sky. Tell all the birds that fly on by that over and over the mountain ... my love waits for me. Oh, into each dark, starry night, oh, what a mystery that's sealed so tight. Over the mountain, a girl waits for me. Tell the moon up — up in the sky. Tell the birds that fly by that over and over the mountain my love waits for me. Into each dark and starry night, oh, what a mystery that's sealed so tight. Over the mountains, a girl waits for me. She waits for me. Oh, she waits for me. I know, I know, I know, I know, I know. Oh, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know. Oh, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, oh oh, oh oh. (Applause and cheers) |
How to create a world where no one dies waiting for a transplant | {0: 'Dr. Luhan Yang is the co-founder and chief scientific officer at eGenesis, working to make xenotransplantation a routine medical procedure for the delivery of safe and effective human transplantable cells, tissues and organs.'} | TED2018 | Hi everyone. I would like to introduce you to Laika. To most of us, Laika is simply a very cute pig. However, to hundreds of thousands of patients in need of a lifesaving organ Laika is a symbol of hope. You see, ever since the 1970s, when organ transplants became a real option for patients with kidney failure and other organ diseases, organ supply has been an issue. Over the last few decades, the issue only worsened as organ demand has exponentially increased. Currently in the US, there are close to 115,000 patients in need of a lifesaving organ transplant. By the end of my talk, one more patient will be added to this list. Today, about 100 people will get a new organ, a chance to start their life anew, and yet by the end of today, 20 others will die waiting. The situation is heartbreaking for patients, for their families and for the doctors who want to do more. In some parts of the world, the situation also becomes a disturbing social issue. In Asia, for example, media outlets reported that desperate patients are obtaining organs from the cruel black market. It is clear that a solution is needed to this crisis. Human lives are at stake. As a biologist and a geneticist, it has become my mission to help solve this problem. Today, I am optimistic to say that we are on our way there, thanks to Laika. Using gene editing technology, it's now possible to exquisitely create a human-transplantable organ that can be safely grown in pigs. Before we jump into the incredible science that makes it happen, let's have a better understanding what xenotransplantation is. It's a process of transplanting animal organs into humans. You may want to ask, why pig organs? Because some pigs carry organs with similar size and physiology to human organs. Over the last half a century, pioneers of transplantation have tried hard to make it happen, but with limited to no success. Why is that? Two fundamental hurdles stood in the way. First is a problem of rejection. When our immune system sees a new organ as foreign, it will reject it. Second, and this one is specific to the organs from the pig, every pig carries a virus that is benign to the pig, but can be transmitted into humans. It is called the porcine endogenous retrovirus (PERV), and this virus has the potential to cause a viral epidemic similar to HIV. Without an effective way to address these issues, the field of xenotransplantation has been on hold for more than one decade. Little progress has been made, until now. Let me share with you how I got here today with Laika. My journey started from Emei Mountain in China. That is the place well described in a lot of legendary stories, like the "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." That is the place I call home. Growing up in the mountain, I started to have a strong connection with nature. This is me when I was seven years old standing in front of an ancient Buddhist temple with a monkey on my shoulder. I still vividly remember how my friends and I would toss peanuts around to distract the monkeys so that we could cross to hike through the valley. I love nature. When it was time to choose a field of study, I chose to study biology at Peking University in Beijing. However, the more I learned, the more questions I had. How could our genetic makeup be so similar to animals and yet we look so different? How is our immune system capable of fighting off so many pathogens but smart enough not to attack ourselves. Questions like this tormented me. I know it sounds nerdy, but you know I'm a scientist. After college, I decided I didn't want to just ask the questions, I wanted to answer them, so I did. In 2008, I was lucky enough to be accepted into the PhD program at Harvard University and worked with Dr. George Church. While working in Church's lab, I started to learn and experiment with the genetic makeup of mammals. Among all the experiments, one particular one took me closer to Laika. In 2013, my colleagues and I made changes in a human cell using a tool you may have heard about called CRISPR. We were one of the first two groups to report the successful use of such a tool in changing our DNA. It was an exciting moment in scientific discovery. The gene-editing tool CRISPR has two components. It has a scissor called the enzyme CRISPR and what is called a guide RNA. Think about it as genetic scissors with a microscope. The microscope is a guide RNA, which brings the scissors to the place we want to cut and says, "Here it is," and the enzyme CRISPR just cuts and repairs the DNA in the way we want. Shortly after we reported our study, physicians at Mass General Hospital were intrigued by the medical applications of our research. They reached out to us, and together, we began to see the potential to use CRISPR to solve the organ shortage crisis. How do we do it? It is simple, yet very complex. We started by making changes in a pig's cell to make it virus-free and human-immune-compatible. The nucleus of that cell is then implanted into a pig egg and allowed to divide into an embryo. The resulting embryo is then placed into the uterus of a surrogate mother and allowed to divide into a pig. Basically, it's a process of cloning. The piglet then carries organs whose genetic makeup hopefully wouldn't be rejected by the human immune system. In 2015, our team decided to tackle the viral transmission problem first. We wanted to take out all 62 copies of the PERV virus from the pig genome, but at the time, it was nearly mission impossible. Even with CRISPR, we could only do one or two modifications within a cell. The record for number of modifications we can do in a particular cell was five. We had to increase the throughput by more than tenfold to achieve that. With very careful design and hundreds of trials, we successfully took out all the virus, broke the record. More importantly, our studies showed that we could eliminate the possibility of this dangerous virus being transmitted into humans. Last year, with a modified cell and cloning technology, our startup, eGenesis, produced Laika, the first pig of its kind born without PERV. (Applause) Laika represents the first critical step in establishing safe xenotransplantation. It is also a platform that we can do further genetic modification on to solve the immunology problem. Since then, we have created more than 30 pigs without PERV, and they may be the most advanced geno-modified animal living on earth. We named Laika after the Soviet dog who was the first animal to orbit the earth. We hope Laika and her siblings can lead us into a new frontier of science and medicine. Imagine a world where patients who suffer from liver failure can be saved with a new liver without having to wait for a donation or another human to die. Imagine a world where people with diabetes do not have to rely on insulin after every meal because we can provide them with good pancreatic cells that can produce insulin on their own. And imagine a world where patients with kidney failure do not have to face the burden of dialysis. We are striving to create that world, a world without organ shortage. We finally have the tool to tackle the problem we could never tackle before, and Laika is just the beginning of our journey. We have to be very humble in front of nature, because there are more issues to be addressed, including immunology and things we couldn't even anticipate at this point. However, it is our responsibility to translate the cutting-edge science into medicine to save the lives of all the patients who are waiting. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: I mean, Luhan, this is extraordinary work here. Come forward. So what's the next steps here? You've got rid of the virus. The next steps involve trying to get to the point where a human body won't reject a transplant. What's involved in solving that? Luhan Yang: It's a very complicated process. So we need to take out the antigen of the pigs. In addition, we can learn a lot from cancer. How can cancer invade or circumvent our immune system so that we can utilize the trick of cancer and implement that on the pig organ to fool our immune system to not attack the organ. CA: When would you estimate, when do you hope that the first successful transplant would happen? LY: It would be irresponsible for me to give you any number. CA: We're at TED. We're always irresponsible. LY: But we are working day and night trying to make this happen for the patients. CA: So not even, you won't say that you think it could happen within a decade or within five years or something? LY: For sure we hope it happens within one decade. (Laughter) CA: So there's a lot of people here who would be very, very excited at that, the potential is extraordinary. There will be some other people here who are going, "That pig is too cute. Humans shouldn't be exploiting something so cute for our benefit." Do you have any response to that? LY: Yeah, sure. So imagine one pig can save eight people's lives. In addition, similar to human donation, if we only harvest one kidney from the pig, the pig can still be alive, so we are very mindful about the issues, but I think our goal is just to address the unmet medical need for those patients and their families. CA: Plus, no one can say that to you if they eat bacon, right? LY: That's a good point. (Laughter) CA: Luhan, thank you so much. LY: Thank you so much. (Applause) |
How I'm using LEGO to teach Arabic | {0: 'A pioneering graphic designer in Egypt, Ghada Wali has designed fonts, brands and design-driven art projects.'} | TEDGlobal 2017 | I come from Egypt, which is also called Umm al-Dunya, the Mother of the World. It's a rich country filled with stories of rebellion, stories of civilizational triumph and downfall and the rich, religious, ethnic, cultural and linguistic diversity. Growing up in such an environment, I became a strong believer in the power of storytelling. As I searched for the medium with which to tell my story, I stumbled upon graphic design. I would like to share with you a project of how graphic design can bring the Arabic language to life. But first, let me tell you why I want to do this. I believe that graphic design can change the world. At least in my very own city of Cairo, it helped overthrow two separate dictators. As you can see from those photos, the power and potential of graphic design as a tool for positive change is undeniably strong. Egypt's 2011 revolution was also a grassroots design revolution. Everyone became a creator. People were the real designers and, just overnight, Cairo was flooded with posters, signage, graffiti. Visual communication was the medium that spoke far louder than words when the population of over 90 million voices were suppressed for almost 30 years. It was precisely this political and social suppression, coupled with decades of colonialism and miseducation that slowly eroded the significance of the Arabic script in the region. All of these countries once used Arabic. Now it's just the green and the blue. To put it simply, the Arabic script is dying. In postcolonial Arab countries functioning in an increasingly globalized world, it is a growing alarm that less and less people are using the Arabic script to communicate. As I was studying my master's in Italy, I noticed myself missing Arabic. I missed looking at the letters, digesting their meaning. So one day, I walked into one of the biggest libraries in Italy in search of an Arabic book. I was surprised to find that this is what they had under the category of "Arabic/Middle Eastern books." (Laughter) Fear, terrorism and destruction. One word: ISIS. My heart ached that this is how we are portrayed to the world, even from a literary perspective. I asked myself: Whatever happened to the world-renowned writers like Naguib Mahfouz, Khalil Gibran, iconic poets like Mutanabbi, Nizar Qabbani? Think about this. The cultural products of an entire region of the world, as rich, as diverse, have been deemed redundant, if not ignored altogether. The cultural products of an entire region of the world have been barred from imparting any kind of real impact on global media productions and contemporary social discourse. And then I reminded myself of my number one belief: design can change the world. All you need is for someone to catch a glimpse of your work, feel, connect. And so I started. I thought about how can I stop the world from seeing us as evil, as terrorists of this planet, and start perceiving us as equals, fellow humans? How can I save and honor the Arabic script and share it with other people, other cultures? And then it hit me: What if I combined the two most significant symbols of innocence and Arab identity? Maybe then people could resonate. What's more pure, innocent and fun as LEGO? It's a universal child's toy. You play with them, you build with them, and with them, you imagine endless possibilities. My eureka moment was to find a bilingual solution for Arabic education, because effective communication and education is the road to more tolerant communities. However, the Arabic and Latin scripts do not only represent different worlds but also create technical difficulties for both Eastern and Western communities on a daily basis. There are so many reasons why Arabic and Latin are different, but here are some of the main ones. Yes, both use upward and downward strokes, but have completely different baselines. Arabic tends to be more calligraphic and connectivity is important to the Arabic language, whose letters have to be mostly joined in order to articulate a given word. It also uses an entirely different system of punctuation and diacritics. But most importantly, Arabic has no capital letters. Instead it has four different letter forms: initial, medial, isolated and final. I want to introduce the Arabic language to young learners, foreign speakers, but most importantly help refugees integrate to their host societies through creating a bilingual learning system, a two-way flow of communication. And I called it "Let's Play." The idea is to simply create a fun and engaging way of learning Modern Standard Arabic through LEGO. These are the two words. "Let's Play." Every colored bar marks an Arabic letter. As you can see, the letter is explained in form, sound and examples of words in function, in addition to the equivalent in Latin. Together, they form a fun pocket book with the 29 Arabic letters and the four different forms, plus a 400-word dictionary. So this is how the page looks like. You have the letter, the transliteration in Latin and the description underneath. I'll take you through the process. So first in my tiny studio in Florence, I built the letters. I photographed each letter separately, and then I retouched every letter and chose the correct color background and typefaces to use. Ultimately, I created the full letter set, which is 29 letters times four different forms. That's 116 letters build just in one week. I believe that information should and can be fun, portable. This book is the final product, which I would eventually like to publish and translate into as many languages in the world, so that Arabic teaching and learning becomes fun, easy and accessible globally. With this book, I hope to save my nation's beautiful script. (Applause) Thank you. Working on this project was a form of visual meditation, like a Sufi dance, a prayer to a better planet. One set of building blocks made two languages. LEGO is just a metaphor. It's because we are all made of the same building unit, is that I can see a future where the barriers between people all come tumbling down. So no matter how ugly the world around us gets, or how many discouraging books on ISIS, the terrorist group, and not Isis, the ancient Egyptian goddess, continue to be published, I will keep building one colorful world. Shukran, which means "thank you." (Applause) Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. |
How do cigarettes affect the body? | null | TED-Ed | Cigarettes aren’t good for us. That’s hardly news—we’ve known about the dangers of smoking for decades. But how exactly do cigarettes harm us? Let’s look at what happens as their ingredients make their way through our bodies, and how we benefit physically when we finally give up smoking. With each inhalation, smoke brings its more than 5,000 chemical substances into contact with the body’s tissues. From the start, tar, a black, resinous material, begins to coat the teeth and gums, damaging tooth enamel, and eventually causing decay. Over time, smoke also damages nerve-endings in the nose, causing loss of smell. Inside the airways and lungs, smoke increases the likelihood of infections, as well as chronic diseases like bronchitis and emphysema. It does this by damaging the cilia, tiny hairlike structures whose job it is to keep the airways clean. It then fills the alveoli, tiny air sacs that enable the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide between the lungs and blood. A toxic gas called carbon monoxide crosses that membrane into the blood, binding to hemoglobin and displacing the oxygen it would usually have transported around the body. That’s one of the reasons smoking can lead to oxygen deprivation and shortness of breath. Within about 10 seconds, the bloodstream carries a stimulant called nicotine to the brain, triggering the release of dopamine and other neurotransmitters including endorphins that create the pleasurable sensations which make smoking highly addictive. Nicotine and other chemicals from the cigarette simultaneously cause constriction of blood vessels and damage their delicate endothelial lining, restricting blood flow. These vascular effects lead to thickening of blood vessel walls and enhance blood platelet stickiness, increasing the likelihood that clots will form and trigger heart attacks and strokes. Many of the chemicals inside cigarettes can trigger dangerous mutations in the body’s DNA that make cancers form. Additionally, ingredients like arsenic and nickel may disrupt the process of DNA repair, thus compromising the body’s ability to fight many cancers. In fact, about one of every three cancer deaths in the United States is caused by smoking. And it’s not just lung cancer. Smoking can cause cancer in multiple tissues and organs, as well as damaged eyesight and weakened bones. It makes it harder for women to get pregnant. And in men, it can cause erectile dysfunction. But for those who quit smoking, there’s a huge positive upside with almost immediate and long-lasting physical benefits. Just 20 minutes after a smoker’s final cigarette, their heart rate and blood pressure begin to return to normal. After 12 hours, carbon monoxide levels stabilize, increasing the blood’s oxygen-carrying capacity. A day after ceasing, heart attack risk begins to decrease as blood pressure and heart rates normalize. After two days, the nerve endings responsible for smell and taste start to recover. Lungs become healthier after about one month, with less coughing and shortness of breath. The delicate hair-like cilia in the airways and lungs start recovering within weeks, and are restored after 9 months, improving resistance to infection. By the one-year anniversary of quitting, heart disease risk plummets to half as blood vessel function improves. Five years in, the chance of a clot forming dramatically declines, and the risk of stroke continues to reduce. After ten years, the chances of developing fatal lung cancer go down by 50%, probably because the body’s ability to repair DNA is once again restored. Fifteen years in, the likelihood of developing coronary heart disease is essentially the same as that of a non-smoker. There’s no point pretending this is all easy to achieve. Quitting can lead to anxiety and depression, resulting from nicotine withdrawal. But fortunately, such effects are usually temporary. And quitting is getting easier, thanks to a growing arsenal of tools. Nicotine replacement therapy through gum, skin patches, lozenges, and sprays may help wean smokers off cigarettes. They work by stimulating nicotine receptors in the brain and thus preventing withdrawal symptoms, without the addition of other harmful chemicals. Counselling and support groups, cognitive behavioral therapy, and moderate intensity exercise also help smokers stay cigarette-free. That’s good news, since quitting puts you and your body on the path back to health. |
3 ways to make better decisions -- by thinking like a computer | {0: 'Tom Griffiths uses ideas from computer science to understand how human minds work.'} | TEDxSydney | If there's one city in the world where it's hard to find a place to buy or rent, it's Sydney. And if you've tried to find a home here recently, you're familiar with the problem. Every time you walk into an open house, you get some information about what's out there and what's on the market, but every time you walk out, you're running the risk of the very best place passing you by. So how do you know when to switch from looking to being ready to make an offer? This is such a cruel and familiar problem that it might come as a surprise that it has a simple solution. 37 percent. (Laughter) If you want to maximize the probability that you find the very best place, you should look at 37 percent of what's on the market, and then make an offer on the next place you see, which is better than anything that you've seen so far. Or if you're looking for a month, take 37 percent of that time — 11 days, to set a standard — and then you're ready to act. We know this because trying to find a place to live is an example of an optimal stopping problem. A class of problems that has been studied extensively by mathematicians and computer scientists. I'm a computational cognitive scientist. I spend my time trying to understand how it is that human minds work, from our amazing successes to our dismal failures. To do that, I think about the computational structure of the problems that arise in everyday life, and compare the ideal solutions to those problems to the way that we actually behave. As a side effect, I get to see how applying a little bit of computer science can make human decision-making easier. I have a personal motivation for this. Growing up in Perth as an overly cerebral kid ... (Laughter) I would always try and act in the way that I thought was rational, reasoning through every decision, trying to figure out the very best action to take. But this is an approach that doesn't scale up when you start to run into the sorts of problems that arise in adult life. At one point, I even tried to break up with my girlfriend because trying to take into account her preferences as well as my own and then find perfect solutions — (Laughter) was just leaving me exhausted. (Laughter) She pointed out that I was taking the wrong approach to solving this problem — and she later became my wife. (Laughter) (Applause) Whether it's as basic as trying to decide what restaurant to go to or as important as trying to decide who to spend the rest of your life with, human lives are filled with computational problems that are just too hard to solve by applying sheer effort. For those problems, it's worth consulting the experts: computer scientists. (Laughter) When you're looking for life advice, computer scientists probably aren't the first people you think to talk to. Living life like a computer — stereotypically deterministic, exhaustive and exact — doesn't sound like a lot of fun. But thinking about the computer science of human decisions reveals that in fact, we've got this backwards. When applied to the sorts of difficult problems that arise in human lives, the way that computers actually solve those problems looks a lot more like the way that people really act. Take the example of trying to decide what restaurant to go to. This is a problem that has a particular computational structure. You've got a set of options, you're going to choose one of those options, and you're going to face exactly the same decision tomorrow. In that situation, you run up against what computer scientists call the "explore-exploit trade-off." You have to make a decision about whether you're going to try something new — exploring, gathering some information that you might be able to use in the future — or whether you're going to go to a place that you already know is pretty good — exploiting the information that you've already gathered so far. The explore/exploit trade-off shows up any time you have to choose between trying something new and going with something that you already know is pretty good, whether it's listening to music or trying to decide who you're going to spend time with. It's also the problem that technology companies face when they're trying to do something like decide what ad to show on a web page. Should they show a new ad and learn something about it, or should they show you an ad that they already know there's a good chance you're going to click on? Over the last 60 years, computer scientists have made a lot of progress understanding the explore/exploit trade-off, and their results offer some surprising insights. When you're trying to decide what restaurant to go to, the first question you should ask yourself is how much longer you're going to be in town. If you're just going to be there for a short time, then you should exploit. There's no point gathering information. Just go to a place you already know is good. But if you're going to be there for a longer time, explore. Try something new, because the information you get is something that can improve your choices in the future. The value of information increases the more opportunities you're going to have to use it. This principle can give us insight into the structure of a human life as well. Babies don't have a reputation for being particularly rational. They're always trying new things, and you know, trying to stick them in their mouths. But in fact, this is exactly what they should be doing. They're in the explore phase of their lives, and some of those things could turn out to be delicious. At the other end of the spectrum, the old guy who always goes to the same restaurant and always eats the same thing isn't boring — he's optimal. (Laughter) He's exploiting the knowledge that he's earned through a lifetime's experience. More generally, knowing about the explore/exploit trade-off can make it a little easier for you to sort of relax and go easier on yourself when you're trying to make a decision. You don't have to go to the best restaurant every night. Take a chance, try something new, explore. You might learn something. And the information that you gain is going to be worth more than one pretty good dinner. Computer science can also help to make it easier on us in other places at home and in the office. If you've ever had to tidy up your wardrobe, you've run into a particularly agonizing decision: you have to decide what things you're going to keep and what things you're going to give away. Martha Stewart turns out to have thought very hard about this — (Laughter) and she has some good advice. She says, "Ask yourself four questions: How long have I had it? Does it still function? Is it a duplicate of something that I already own? And when was the last time I wore it or used it?" But there's another group of experts who perhaps thought even harder about this problem, and they would say one of these questions is more important than the others. Those experts? The people who design the memory systems of computers. Most computers have two kinds of memory systems: a fast memory system, like a set of memory chips that has limited capacity, because those chips are expensive, and a slow memory system, which is much larger. In order for the computer to operate as efficiently as possible, you want to make sure that the pieces of information you want to access are in the fast memory system, so that you can get to them quickly. Each time you access a piece of information, it's loaded into the fast memory and the computer has to decide which item it has to remove from that memory, because it has limited capacity. Over the years, computer scientists have tried a few different strategies for deciding what to remove from the fast memory. They've tried things like choosing something at random or applying what's called the "first-in, first-out principle," which means removing the item which has been in the memory for the longest. But the strategy that's most effective focuses on the items which have been least recently used. This says if you're going to decide to remove something from memory, you should take out the thing which was last accessed the furthest in the past. And there's a certain kind of logic to this. If it's been a long time since you last accessed that piece of information, it's probably going to be a long time before you're going to need to access it again. Your wardrobe is just like the computer's memory. You have limited capacity, and you need to try and get in there the things that you're most likely to need so that you can get to them as quickly as possible. Recognizing that, maybe it's worth applying the least recently used principle to organizing your wardrobe as well. So if we go back to Martha's four questions, the computer scientists would say that of these, the last one is the most important. This idea of organizing things so that the things you are most likely to need are most accessible can also be applied in your office. The Japanese economist Yukio Noguchi actually invented a filing system that has exactly this property. He started with a cardboard box, and he put his documents into the box from the left-hand side. Each time he'd add a document, he'd move what was in there along and he'd add that document to the left-hand side of the box. And each time he accessed a document, he'd take it out, consult it and put it back in on the left-hand side. As a result, the documents would be ordered from left to right by how recently they had been used. And he found he could quickly find what he was looking for by starting at the left-hand side of the box and working his way to the right. Before you dash home and implement this filing system — (Laughter) it's worth recognizing that you probably already have. (Laughter) That pile of papers on your desk ... typically maligned as messy and disorganized, a pile of papers is, in fact, perfectly organized — (Laughter) as long as you, when you take a paper out, put it back on the top of the pile, then those papers are going to be ordered from top to bottom by how recently they were used, and you can probably quickly find what you're looking for by starting at the top of the pile. Organizing your wardrobe or your desk are probably not the most pressing problems in your life. Sometimes the problems we have to solve are simply very, very hard. But even in those cases, computer science can offer some strategies and perhaps some solace. The best algorithms are about doing what makes the most sense in the least amount of time. When computers face hard problems, they deal with them by making them into simpler problems — by making use of randomness, by removing constraints or by allowing approximations. Solving those simpler problems can give you insight into the harder problems, and sometimes produces pretty good solutions in their own right. Knowing all of this has helped me to relax when I have to make decisions. You could take the 37 percent rule for finding a home as an example. There's no way that you can consider all of the options, so you have to take a chance. And even if you follow the optimal strategy, you're not guaranteed a perfect outcome. If you follow the 37 percent rule, the probability that you find the very best place is — funnily enough ... (Laughter) 37 percent. You fail most of the time. But that's the best that you can do. Ultimately, computer science can help to make us more forgiving of our own limitations. You can't control outcomes, just processes. And as long as you've used the best process, you've done the best that you can. Sometimes those best processes involve taking a chance — not considering all of your options, or being willing to settle for a pretty good solution. These aren't the concessions that we make when we can't be rational — they're what being rational means. Thank you. (Applause) |
Your fingerprints reveal more than you think | {0: 'Simona Francese is a chemist by training who is passionate about forensics. '} | TED2018 | Do you ever stop and think, during a romantic dinner, "I've just left my fingerprints all over my wine glass." (Laughter) Or do you ever worry, when you visit a friend, about leaving a little piece of you behind on every surface that you touch? And even this evening, have you paid any attention to sit without touching anything? Well, you're not alone. Thankfully, criminals underestimate the power of fingerprints, too. And I'm not just talking about the twisted parting of lines that make our fingerprint unique. I'm talking about an entire world of information hiding in a small, often invisible thing. In fact, fingerprints are made up of molecules that belong to three classes: sweat molecules that we all produce in very different amounts ... molecules that we introduce into our body and then we sweat out and molecules that we may contaminate our fingertips with when we come across substances like blood, paint, grease, but also invisible substances. And molecules are the storytellers of who we are and what we've been up to. We just need to have the right technology to make them talk. So let me take you on a journey of unthinkable capabilities. Katie has been raped and her lifeless body has been found in the woods three days later, after her disappearance. The police is targeting three suspects, having narrowed down the search from over 20 men who had been seen in that area on the same day. The only piece of evidence is two very faint, overlapping fingerprints on the tape that was found wrapped around Katie's neck. Often, faint and overlapping fingerprints cannot help the police to make an identification. And until recently, this might have been the end of the road, but this is where we can make the difference. The tape is sent to our labs, where we're asked to use our cutting-edge technology to help with the investigation. And here, we use an existing form of mass spectrometry imaging technology that we have further developed and adapted specifically for the molecular and imaging analysis of fingerprints. In essence, we fire a UV laser at the print, and we cause the desorption of the molecules from the print, ready to be captured by the mass spectrometer. Mass spectrometry measures the weight of the molecules — or as we say, the mass — and those numbers that you see there, they indicate that mass. But more crucially, they indicate who those molecules are — whether I'm seeing paracetamol or something more sinister, forensically speaking. We applied this technology to the evidence that we have and we found the presence of condom lubricants. In fact, we've developed protocols that enable us to even suggest what brand of condom might have been used. So we pass this information to the police, who, meanwhile, have obtained a search warrant and they found the same brand of condom in Dalton's premises. And with Dalton and Thomson also having records for sexual assaults, then it is Chapman that may become the less likely suspect. But is this information enough to make an arrest? Of course not, and we are asked to delve deeper with our investigation. So we found out, also, the presence of other two very interesting molecules. One is an antidepressant, and one is a very special molecule. It only forms in your body if you drink alcohol and consume cocaine at the same time. And alcohol is known to potentiate the effects of cocaine, so here, we now have a hint on the state of mind of the individual whilst perpetrating the crime. We passed this information to the police, and they found out that, actually, Thomson is a drug addict, and he also has a medical record for psychotic episodes, for which presumably the antidepressant was prescribed. So now Thomson becomes the more likely suspect. But the reality is that I still don't know where these molecules are coming from, from which fingerprint, and who those two fingerprints belong to. Fear not. Mass spectrometry imaging can help us further. In fact, the technology is so powerful that we can see where these molecules are on a fingerprint. Like you see in this video, every single one of those peaks corresponds to a mass, every mass to a molecule, and we can interrogate the software, by selecting each of those molecules, as to where they are present on a fingermark. And some images are not very revealing, some are better, some are really good. And we can create multiple images of the same mark — in theory, hundreds of images of the same fingerprint — for as many of the molecules that we have detected. So step one ... for overlapping fingerprints, chances are, especially if they come from different individuals, that the molecular composition is not identical, so let's ask the software to visualize those unique molecules just present in one fingermark and not in the other one. By doing so, that's how we can separate the two ridge patterns. And this is really important because the police now are able to identify one of the two fingerprints, which actually corresponds to Katie. And they've been able to say so because they've compared the two separate images with one taken posthumously from Katie. So now, we can concentrate on one fingerprint only — that of the killer's. So then, step two ... where are these three molecules that I've seen? Well, let's interrogate the software — show me where they are. And by doing this, only portions of the image of the killer's fingerprint show up. In other words, those substances are only present in the killer's print. So now our molecular findings start matching very nicely the police intelligence about Thomson, should that fingerprint belong to him. But the reality is that that print is still not good enough to make an identification. Step three: since we can generate hundreds of images of the same fingerprint, why don't we superimpose them, and by doing so, try to improve the rich pattern of continuity and clarity? That's the result. Striking. We now have a very clear image of the fingerprint and the police can run it through the database. The match comes out to Thomson. Thomson is our killer. (Applause) Katie, the suspects and the circumstances of the crime aren't real, but the story contains elements of the real police casework we've been confronted with, and is a composite of the intelligence that we can provide — that we have been able to provide the police. And I'm really, really thrilled that after nine years of intense research, as of 2017, we are able to contribute to police investigations. Mine is no longer a dream; it's a goal. We're going to do this wider and wider, bigger and bigger, and we're going to know more about the suspect, and we're going to build an identikit. I believe this is also a new era for criminal profiling. The work of the criminologist draws on the expert recognition of behavioral patterns that have been observed before to belong to a certain type, to a certain profile. As opposed to this expert but subjective evaluation, we're trying to do the same thing, but from the molecular makeup of the fingerprint, and the two can work together. I did say that molecules are storytellers, so information on your health, your actions, your lifestyle, your routines, they're all there, accessible in a fingerprint. And molecules are the storytellers of our secrets in just a touch. Thank you. (Audience) Wow. (Applause) |
"Rebelosis" / "Rebel Rock" / "Rebel on That Level" | {0: 'The Soul Rebels blend their New Orleans brass tradition with a modernized and contemporary approach, mixing funk, soul, hip-hop and jazz.'} | TED2018 | (Music) Erion Williams: We're kind of silent in here, aren't we? How's everybody doing? Everybody all right? (Applause) Ladies and gentlemen, live and direct from New Orleans, Louisiana, we are The Soul Rebels, and we're here to party with you. Is everybody ready to get down? (Cheers) Let's do something right here, c'mon. (Music) Ladies and gentlemen, we give you with pleasure the Soul Rebel horn. (Music) Everybody put your hands together like this here. (Clapping) (Music) (Trumpet solo) (Trombone solo) (Saxophone solo) (Trumpet solo) (Trombone solo) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) (Music) Live at TED, y'all. The Souls Rebels in the house. We're gonna do an original tune right here. We need everybody participating and getting along with this one. Let's try it. (Singing) Everybody sing rebel rock, rebel rock, rock. Sing rebel rock, rebel rock, rock. C'mon, rebel rock, rebel rock, rock. I said are you ready? C'mon, rebel rock — Get yourselves ready to get up and party, y'all. C'mon. Rebel rock, rebel rock, rock. Are you ready? C'mon, rebel rock, rebel rock — Yeah, that's what I'm talkin' about. C'mon, c'mon, c'mon. Rebel rock, rebel rock, rock. Are you ready? C'mon, rebel, rock, rebel rock, rock. Rebel rock, rebel rock, rock. Rebel rock, rebel rock, rock. Now we're at a party. Let's go! (Music) (Saxophone solo) (Music) I need everybody to get with it. Everybody, come on. (Singing) Sing soul rebel — rebel, rebel rock. Sing soul rebel — rebel, rebel rock. Sing soul rebel — rebel, rebel rock. Sing soul rebel — rebel, rebel rock. Sing soul rebel — rebel, rebel rock. Sing soul rebel — rebel, rebel rock. Sing soul rebel — rebel, rebel rock. Sing soul rebel — We're talking for a second. Everybody say, "Chuh chuh chuh chuh chuh, chuh chuh chuh, chuh chuh chuh chuh chuh chuh chuh ..." Everybody in the building say, "Rock it, don't stop it." Rock it, don't stop it. C'mon, I said the rebels be rockin'. The rebels be rockin'. Everybody say, "Kick the beat, beat, beat." Kick the beat, beat, beat. Soul Rebels rock. Soul Rebels rock. It's the hip-hop. It's the hip-hop. C'mon, Soul Rebels rock. Soul Rebels rock. It's the hip-hop. Over here at TED tonight. Everybody c'mon. (Singing) Sing Soul Rebel — rebel, rebel rock. Sing soul rebel — rebel, rebel rock. Sing soul rebel — rebel, rebel rock. Sing soul rebel — Let's go. (Music) (Applause and cheers) Yeah! Y'all give it up for Mr. Paul Robertson on the trombone. (Applause and cheers) Mr. Corey Peyton on the trombone. (Applause and cheers) Marcus "Red" Hubbard on the trumpet. (Applause and cheers) Julian Gosin on the the trumpet. (Applause and cheers) Lumar LeBlanc on the snare drum. (Applause and cheers) Manuel Perkins on the sousaphone. (Applause and cheers) Derrick "Oops" Moss on the bass drum and percussion. (Applause and cheers) Erion Williams on the tenor saxophone. Is everybody havin' a good time tonight? (Cheers) We're gonna do one more for you — original tune titled "Rebel On That Level." Keep that handclap going, y'all. I feel it, c'mon. (Clapping) (Music) (Trombone solo) (Trumpet solo) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause and cheers) Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. The Soul Rebels. Thank you! (Applause) |
What would happen if every human suddenly disappeared? | null | TED-Ed | Human beings are everywhere. With settlements on every continent, we can be found in the most isolated corners of Earth’s jungles, oceans, and tundras. Our impact is so profound, most scientists believe humanity has left a permanent mark on Earth’s geological record. So what would happen if suddenly, every human on Earth disappeared? With no one maintaining them, some of our creations backfire immediately. Hours after we disappear, oil refineries malfunction, producing month-long blazes at plants like the ones in western India, the southern United States, and South Korea. In underground rail systems like those in London, Moscow, and New York City, hundreds of drainage pumps are abandoned, flooding the tunnels in just three days. By the end of the first week, most emergency generators have shut down, and once the fires have gone out, the earth goes dark for the first time in centuries. After the first catastrophic month, changes come more gradually. Within 20 years, sidewalks have been torn apart by weeds and tree roots. Around this time, flooded tunnels erode the streets above into urban rivers. In temperate climates, the cycle of seasons freezes and thaws these waterways, cracking pavement and concrete foundations. Leaking pipes cause the same reaction in concrete buildings, and within 200 winters, most skyscrapers buckle and tumble down. In cities built in river deltas like Houston, these buildings eventually wash away completely - filling nearby tributaries with crushed concrete. Rural and suburban areas decay more slowly, but in largely unsurprising ways. Leaks, mold, bug and rodent infestations - all the usual enemies of the homeowner- now go uncontested. Within 75 years, most houses' supporting beams have rotted and sagged, and the resulting collapsed heap is now home to local rodents and lizards. But in this post-human world, “local” has a new meaning. Our cities are full of imported plants, which now run wild across their adopted homes. Water hyacinth coat the waterways of Shanghai in a thick green carpet. Poisonous giant hogweeds overgrow the banks of London’s Thames River. Chinese Ailanthus trees burst through New York City streets. And as sunken skyscrapers add crumbled concrete to the new forest floor, the soil acidity plummets, potentially allowing new plant life to thrive. This post-human biodiversity extends into the animal kingdom, as well. Animals follow the unchecked spread of native and non-native plants, venturing into new habitats with the help of our leftover bridges. In general, our infrastructure saves some animals and dooms others. Cockroaches continue to thrive in their native tropical habitats, but without our heating systems, their urban cousins likely freeze and die out in just two winters. And most domesticated animals are unable to survive without us – save for a handful of resourceful pigs, dogs, and feral housecats. Conversely, the reduced light pollution saves over a billion birds each year whose migrations were disrupted by blinking communication tower lights and high-tension wires. And mosquitos multiply endlessly in one of their favorite manmade nurseries – rubber tires, which last for almost a thousand years. As fauna and flora flourish, Earth’s climate slowly recovers from millennia of human impact. Within 35,000 years, the plant cycle removes the last traces of lead left by the Industrial Revolution from Earth’s soil, and it may take up to 65,000 years beyond that for CO2 to return pre-human levels. But even after several million years, humanity’s legacy lives on. Carved in unyielding granite, America’s Mt. Rushmore survives for 7.2 million years. The chemical composition of our bronze sculptures keeps them recognizable for over 10 million. And buried deep underground, the remnants of cities built on floodplains have been preserved in time as a kind of technofossil. Eventually, these traces, too, will be wiped from the planet’s surface. Humanity hasn’t always been here, and we won’t be here forever. But by investigating the world without us, perhaps we can learn more about the world we live in now. |
The press trampled on my privacy. Here's how I took back my story | {0: 'At Novalia, Kate Stone and her team use ordinary printing presses to manufacture interactive electronics, which combine touch-sensitive ink technology and printed circuits into unique and cost-effective products.'} | TED2018 | Five years ago, I stood on the TED stage, and I spoke about my work. But one year later, I had a terrible accident as I left a pub one dark night with friends, in Scotland. As we followed the path through a forest, I suddenly felt a massive thud, then a second thud, and I fell to the ground. I had no idea what had hit me. I later found out that when the gate was opened on a garden, a wild stag stampeded along the path and ran straight into me. Its antler penetrated my trachea and my esophagus and stopped at my spinal cord and fractured my neck. My best friend found me lying on the floor, gurgling for help through a hole in my neck. And we locked eyes, and although I couldn't speak, she could understand what I was thinking. And she told me, "Just breathe." And so, whilst focusing on my breath, I had a strong sense of calmness, but I was certain that I was going to die. Somehow, I was content with this, because I've always tried to do my best in life whenever I can. So I just continued to enjoy each breath as one more moment — one breath in and one breath out. An ambulance came, I was still fully conscious, and I analyzed everything on the journey, because I'm a scientist: the sound of the tires on the road, the frequency of the street lights and eventually, the city street lights. And I thought, "Maybe I will survive." And then I passed out. I was stabilized at a local hospital and then airlifted to Glasgow, where they reconstructed my throat and put me in a coma. And while I was in the coma, I had many alternate realities. It was like a crazy mix of "Westworld" and "Black Mirror." But that's a whole other story. My local TV station reported live from outside the hospital of a Cambridge scientist who was in a coma, and they didn't know if she would live or die or walk or talk. And a week later, I woke up from that coma. And that was the first gift. Then I had the gift to think, the gift to move, the gift to breathe and the gift to eat and to drink. That took three and a half months. But there was one thing that I never got back, though, and that was my privacy. The tabloid press made the story about gender. Look — I'm transgender, it's not that big a deal. Like, my hair color or my shoe size is way more interesting. When I last spoke here — (Applause) When I last spoke here — (Applause) at TED, I didn't talk about it, because it's boring. And one Scottish newspaper ran with the headline: "Sex Swap Scientist Gored by Stag." And five others did similar things. And for a minute, I was angry. But then I found my calm place. And what ran through my head was, "They've crossed the wrong woman, and they're not going to know what's hit them." (Laughter) I'm a kindness ninja. I don't really know what a ninja does, but to me, they slip through the shadows, crawl through the sewers, skip across the rooftops, and before you know it, they're behind you. They don't turn up with an army or complain, and they're laser-focused on a plan. So when I lay in my hospital bed, I thought of my plan to help reduce the chances of them doing this to somebody else, by using the system as is, and paying the price of sacrificing my privacy. What they told one million people, I will tell 10 million people. Because when you're angry, people defend themselves. So I didn't attack them, and they were defenseless. I wrote kind and calm letters to these newspapers. And The Sun newspaper, the kind of "Fox News" of the UK, thanked me for my "reasoned approach." I asked for no apology, no retraction, no money, just an acknowledgment that they broke their own rules, and what they did was just wrong. And on this journey, I started to learn who they are, and they began to learn who I am. And we actually became friends. I've even had a few glasses of wine with Philippa from The Sun since then. And after three months, they all agreed, and the statements were published on a Friday, and that was the end of that. Or so they thought. On the Saturday, I went on the evening news, with the headline "Six National Newspapers Admit They Were Wrong." And the anchor said to me, "But don't you think it's our job as journalists to sensationalize a story?" And I said, "I was laying on a forest floor, gored by a stag. Is that not sensational enough?" (Laughter) And I was now writing the headlines. My favorite one was, "The stag trampled on my throat, and the press trampled on my privacy." It was the most read piece of BBC News online that day. And I was kind of having fun. And by the end of my week of media, I started to use my newfound voice and platform to spread a message of love and kindness. And when I had the minute of anger and hatred towards those press and journalists, I had to identify my inner bigotry towards them. And I had to meet and speak with these people without judgment. I had to let myself understand them, and in return, they began to understand me. Well, six months later, they asked me to join the committee that regulates the press. And a few times a year, I sip tea and dip biscuits with the likes of Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre, who says to me, "So, Kate, how have your last few months been?" And I respect them. And I'm now one of three members of the public who has a seat at the table — not because I'm different, but because my voice counts, just like anybody else. And the irony is, every now and again, I'm asked to visit those printing presses of this declining industry, because some people think that the technology I spoke about here, last time at TED, my interactive print, might actually help save them. So beware of your inner bigot, and make friends from your enemies. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why we choke under pressure -- and how to avoid it | {0: 'Sian Leah Beilock studies how performance anxiety can be exacerbated or alleviated, and the simple strategies we can use to ensure success under pressure.'} | TEDMED 2017 | One of the most humiliating things that you can say about someone is "they choked." And boy, do I know that feeling. Growing up, I was an avid athlete. My main sport was soccer, and I was a goalkeeper, which is both the best and the worst position on the field. You see, when you're a goalie, you get this special uniform, you get all the glory for a great shot saved, but you also get the grief when you land a shot in the goal. When you're a goalie, all eyes are on you, and with that comes the pressure. I distinctly remember one game in high school. I was playing for the California state team which is part of the Olympic Development Program. I was having a great game ... until I realized that the national coach was standing right behind me. That's when everything changed. In a matter of seconds, I went from playing at the top to the bottom of my ability. Just knowing that I was being evaluated changed my performance and forever how I thought about the mental aspect of how we perform. All of a sudden the ball seemed to go in slow motion, and I was fixated on my every move. The next shot that came I bobbled, but thankfully it didn't land in the goal. The shot after that, I wasn't so lucky: I tipped it right into the net. My team lost; the national coach walked away. I choked under the pressure of those evaluative eyes on me. Just about everyone does it from time to time — there are so many opportunities, whether it's taking a test, giving a talk, pitching to a client or that special form of torture I like to call the job interview. (Laughter) But the question is why. Why do we sometimes fail to perform up to our potential under pressure? It's especially bewildering in the case of athletes who spend so much time physically honing their craft. But what about their minds? Not as much. This is true off the playing field as well. Whether we're taking a test of giving a talk, it's easy to feel like we're ready — at the top of our game — and then perform at our worst when it matters most. It turns out that rarely do we practice under the types of conditions we're actually going to perform under, and as a result, when all eyes are on us, we sometimes flub our performance. Of course, the question is, why is this the case? And my experience on the playing field — and in other important facets of my life — really pushed me into the field of cognitive science. I wanted to know how we could reach our limitless potential. I wanted to understand how we could use our knowledge of the mind and the brain to come up with psychological tools that would help us perform at our best. So why does it happen? Why do we sometimes fail to perform up to what we're capable of when the pressure is on? It may not be so surprising to hear that in stressful situations, we worry. We worry about the situation, the consequences, what others will think of us. But what is surprising is that we often get in our own way precisely because our worries prompt us to concentrate too much. That's right — we pay too much attention to what we're doing. When we're concerned about performing our best, we often try and control aspects of what we're doing that are best left on autopilot, outside conscious awareness, and as a result, we mess up. Think about a situation where you're shuffling down the stairs. What would happen if I asked you to think about what you're doing with your knee while you're doing that? There's a good chance you'd fall on your face. We as humans only have the ability to pay attention to so much at once, which is why, by the way, it's not a good idea to drive and talk on the cell phone. And under pressure, when we're concerned about performing at our best, we can try and control aspects of what we're doing that should be left outside conscious control. The end result is that we mess up. My research team and I have studied this phenomenon of overattention, and we call it paralysis by analysis. In one study, we asked college soccer players to dribble a soccer ball and to pay attention to an aspect of their performance that they would not otherwise attend to. We asked them to pay attention to what side of the foot was contacting the ball. We showed that performance was slower and more error-prone when we drew their attention to the step-by-step details of what they were doing. When the pressure is on, we're often concerned with performing at our best, and as a result we try and control what we're doing to force the best performance. The end result is that we actually screw up. In basketball, the term "unconscious" is used to describe a shooter who can't miss. And San Antonio Spurs star Tim Duncan has said, "When you have to stop and think, that's when you mess up." In dance, the great choreographer, George Balanchine, used to urge his dancers, "Don't think, just do." When the pressure's on, when we want to put our best foot forward, somewhat ironically, we often try and control what we're doing in a way that leads to worse performance. So what do we do? Knowing that we have this overactive attention, how do we ensure that we perform at our best? A lot of it comes down to the prefrontal cortex, that front part of our brain that sits over our eyes and usually helps us focus in positive ways. It often gets hooked on the wrong things. So how do we unhook it? Something as simple as singing a song, or paying attention to one's pinky toe, as pro golfer Jack Nicklaus was rumored to do, can help us take our mind off those pesky details. It's also true that practicing under conditions that we're going to perform under — closing the gap between training and competition can help us get used to that feeling of all eyes on us. This is true off the playing field as well. Whether it's getting ready for an exam or preparing for a big talk — one that might have a little pressure associated with it — (Laughter) getting used to the types of situations you're going to perform under really matters. When you're taking a test, close the book, practice retrieving the answer from memory under timed situations, and when you're giving a talk, practice in front of others. And if you can't find anyone who will listen, practice in front of a video camera or even a mirror. The ability to get used to what it will feel like can make the difference in whether we choke or thrive. We've also figured out some ways to get rid of those pesky worries and self-doubts that tend to creep up in the stressful situations. Researchers have shown that simply jotting down your thoughts and worries before a stressful event can help to download them from mind — make them less likely to pop up in the moment. It's kind of like when you wake up in the middle of the night and you're really worried about what you have to do the next day, you're trying to think about everything you have to accomplish, and you write it down and then you can go back to sleep. Journaling, or getting those thoughts down on paper, makes it less likely they'll pop up and distract you in the moment. The end result is that you can perform your best when it matters most. So up until now, I've talked about what happens when we put limits on ourselves and some tips we can use to help perform up to our potential. But it's important to remember that it's not just our own individual being that can put limits and that can perform poorly; our environment has an effect on whether we choke or thrive. Our parents, our teachers, our coaches, our bosses all influence whether or not we can put our best foot forward when it matters most. Take math as an example. That's right, I said it: math. Lots of people profess to choke or are anxious about doing math, whether it's taking a test or even calculating the tip on a dinner bill as our smart friends look on. And it's quite socially acceptable to talk about choking or performing poorly in math. You don't hear highly educated people walking around talking about the fact or bragging about the fact that they're not good readers, but you hear people all the time bragging about how they're not math people. And unfortunately, in the US, this tends to be more so among girls and women than boys and men. My research team and I have tried to understand where this fear of math comes from, and we've actually peered inside the brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging, of people who are worried about math. We've shown that math phobia correlates with a concrete visceral sensation such as pain, of which we have every right to feel anxious. In fact, when people who are worried about math are just getting ready to take a math test — they're not even taking it, they're just getting ready — areas of the brain known the be involved in our neural pain response are active. When we say math is painful, there's some truth to it for some people. But where does this math anxiety come from? It turns out that math anxiety is contagious. When adults are worried about math, the children around them start worrying, too. As young as first grade, when kids are in classrooms with teachers who are anxious about their own math ability, these kids learn less across the school year. And it turns out that this is more prevalent in girls than boys. At this young age, kids tend to mimic same-sex adults, and at least in the US, over 90 percent of our elementary school teachers are women. Of course, it's not just what happens in the classroom. Social media plays a big role here, too. It wasn't so long ago that you could purchase a Teen Talk Barbie that when the cord was pulled, it would say things like, "Will we ever have enough clothes?" and "Math class is tough." And just a few years ago, major retailers were marketing T-shirts at our young girls that read things like, "I'm too pretty to do math," or, "I'm too pretty to do my homework so my brother does it for me." And let's not forget about the parents. Oh, the parents. It turns out that when parents are worried about their own math ability and they help their kids a lot with math homework, their kids learn less math across the school year. As one parent put it, "I judge my first grader's math homework by whether it's a one-glass assignment or a three-glass night." (Laughter) When adults are anxious about their own math ability, it rubs off on their kids and it affects whether they choke or thrive. But just as we can put limits on others, we can take them off. My research team and I have shown that when we help parents do fun math activities with their kids — rather than, say, just doing bedtime stories or bedtime reading, they do bedtime math, which are fun story problems to do with your kids at night, not only do children's attitudes about math improve, but their math performance across the school year improves as well. Our environment matters. From the classroom to parents to media, and it can really make a difference in terms of whether we choke or thrive. Fast-forward from my high school soccer game to my freshman year in college. I was in the chemistry sequence for science majors, and boy did I not belong. Even though I studied for my first midterm exam — I thought I was ready to go — I bombed it. I literally got the worst grade in a class of 400 students. I was convinced I wasn't going to be a science major, that maybe I was dropping out of college altogether. But then I changed how I studied. Instead of studying alone, I started studying with a group of friends who at the end of the study session would close their book and compete for the right answer. We learned to practice under stress. If you could've looked inside my brain during that first midterm exam, you likely would've seen a neural pain response a lot like the math-anxious individuals I study. It was probably there during the stressful study situation as well. But when I walked into the final, my mind was quiet, and I actually got one of the highest grades in the entire class. It wasn't just about learning the material; it was about learning how to overcome my limits when it mattered most. What happens in our heads really matters, and knowing this, we can learn how to prepare ourselves and others for success, not just on the playing field but in the boardroom and in the classroom as well. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why should you read Edgar Allan Poe? | null | TED-Ed | A high forehead topped by disheveled black hair, a sickly pallor, and a look of deep intelligence and deeper exhaustion in his dark, sunken eyes. Edgar Allan Poe’s image is not just instantly recognizable – it’s perfectly suited to his reputation. From the prisoner strapped under a descending pendulum blade, to a raven who refuses to leave the narrator’s chamber, Poe’s macabre and innovative stories of gothic horror have left a timeless mark on literature. But just what is it that makes Edgar Allan Poe one of the greatest American authors? After all, horror was a popular genre of the period, with many practitioners. Yet Poe stood out thanks to his careful attention to form and style. As a literary critic, he identified two cardinal rules for the short story form: it must be short enough to read in one sitting, and every word must contribute to its purpose. By mastering these rules, Poe commands the reader’s attention and rewards them with an intense and singular experience – what Poe called the unity of effect. Though often frightening, this effect goes far beyond fear. Poe’s stories use violence and horror to explore the paradoxes and mysteries of love, grief, and guilt, while resisting simple interpretations or clear moral messages. And while they often hint at supernatural elements, the true darkness they explore is the human mind and its propensity for self-destruction. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” a ghastly murder is juxtaposed with the killer’s tender empathy towards the victim – a connection that soon returns to haunt him. The title character of "Ligeia" returns from the dead through the corpse of her husband’s second wife – or at least the opium-addicted narrator thinks she does. And when the protagonist of “William Wilson” violently confronts a man he believes has been following him, he might just be staring at his own image in a mirror. Through his pioneering use of unreliable narrators, Poe turns readers into active participants who must decide when a storyteller might be misinterpreting or even lying about the events they’re relating. Although he’s best known for his short horror stories, Poe was actually one of the most versatile and experimental writers of the nineteenth century. He invented the detective story as we know it, with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” followed by “The Mystery of Marie Roget” and “The Purloined Letter.” All three feature the original armchair detective, C. Auguste Dupin, who uses his genius and unusual powers of observation and deduction to solve crimes that baffle the police. Poe also wrote satires of social and literary trends, and hoaxes that in some cases anticipated science fiction. Those included an account of a balloon voyage to the moon, and a report of a dying patient put into a hypnotic trance so he could speak from the other side. Poe even wrote an adventure novel about a voyage to the South Pole and a treatise on astrophysics, all while he worked as an editor, producing hundreds of pages of book reviews and literary theory. An appreciation of Poe’s career wouldn’t be complete without his poetry: haunting and hypnotic. His best-known poems are songs of grief, or in his words, “mournful and never-ending remembrance.” “The Raven,” in which the speaker projects his grief onto a bird who merely repeats a single sound, made Poe famous. But despite his literary success, Poe lived in poverty throughout his career, and his personal life was often as dark as his writing. He was haunted by the loss of his mother and his wife, who both died of tuberculosis at the age of 24. Poe struggled with alcoholism and frequently antagonized other popular writers. Much of his fame came from posthumous – and very loose – adaptations of his work. And yet, if he could’ve known how much pleasure and inspiration his writing would bring to generations of readers and writers alike, perhaps it may have brought a smile to that famously brooding visage. |
Why the hospital of the future will be your own home | {0: 'Niels van Namen leads the global CEVA Healthcare team as the Executive Vice President for Healthcare in BD.'} | TED@UPS | Probably not a surprise to you, but I don't like to be in a hospital or go to a hospital. Do you? I'm sure many of you feel the same way, right? But why? Why is it that we hate hospitals so much? Or is it just a fact of life we have to live with? Is it the crappy food? Is it the expensive parking? Is it the intense smell? Or is it the fear of the unknown? Well, it's all of that, and it's more. Patients often have to travel long distances to get to their nearest hospital, and access to hospital care is becoming more and more an issue in rural areas, in the US, but also in sparsely populated countries like Sweden. And even when hospitals are more abundant, typically the poor and the elderly have trouble getting care because they lack transportation that is convenient and affordable to them. And many people are avoiding hospital care altogether, and they miss getting proper treatment due to cost. We see that 64 percent of Americans are avoiding care due to cost. And even when you do get treatment, hospitals often make us sicker. Medical errors are reported to be the third cause of death in the US, just behind cancer and heart disease, the third cause of death. I'm in health care for over 20 years now, and I witness every day how broken and how obsolete our hospital system is. Let me give you two examples. Four in 10 Japanese medical doctors and five in 10 American medical doctors are burnt out. In my home country, the Netherlands, only 17 million people live there. We are short 125,000 nurses over the coming years. But how did we even end up here, in this idea of placing all kinds of sick people together in one big building? Well, we have to go back to the Ancient Greeks. In 400 BC, temples for cure were erected where people could go to get their diagnosis, their treatment and their healing. And then really for about 2,000 years, we've seen religious care centers all the way up to the Industrial Revolution, where we've seen hospitals being set up as assembly lines based on the principles of the Industrial Revolution, to produce efficiently and get the products, the patients in this case, out of the hospital as soon as possible. Over the last century, we've seen lots of interesting innovations. We figured out how to make insulin. We invented pacemakers and X-ray, and we even came into this wonderful new era of cell and gene therapies. But the biggest change to fix our hospital system altogether is still ahead of us. And I believe it's time now, we have the opportunity, to revolutionize the system altogether and forget about our current hospital system. I believe it's time to create a new system that revolves around health care at home. Recent research has shown that 46 percent of hospital care can move to the patient's home. That's a lot. And that's mainly for those patients who suffer from chronic diseases. With that, hospitals can and should reduce to smaller, agile and mobile care centers focused on acute care. So things like neonatology, intensive care, surgery and imaging will still remain at the hospitals, at least I believe for the foreseeable future. A few weeks ago, I met a colleague whose mom was diagnosed with incurable cancer, and she said, "Niels, it's hard. It's so hard when we know that she's got only months to live. Instead of playing with the grandchildren, she now has to travel three times a week two hours up and down to Amsterdam just to get her treatment and tests." And that really breaks my heart, because we all know that a professional nurse could draw her blood at home as well, right? And if she could get her tests and treatment at home as well, she could do the things that are really important to her in her last months. My own mom, 82 years old now — God bless her — she's avoiding to go to the hospital because she finds it difficult to plan and manage the journey. So my sisters and I, we help her out. But there's many elderly people who are avoiding care and are waiting that long that it becomes life-threatening, and it's straight to the costly, intensive care. Dr. Covinsky, a clinical researcher at the University of California, he concludes that a third of patients over 70 and more than half of patients over 85, leave the hospital more disabled than when they came in. And a very practical problem that many patients face when they have to go to a hospital is: Where do I go with my main companion in life, where do I go with my dog? That's our dog, by the way. Isn't she cute? (Laughter) But it's not only about convenience. It's also about unnecessary health care stays and costs. A friend of mine, Art, he recently needed to be hospitalized for just a minor surgery, and he had to stay in the hospital for over two weeks, just because he needed a specific kind of IV antibiotics. So he occupied a bed for two weeks that cost over a thousand euros a day. It's just ridiculous. And these costs are really at the heart of the issue. So we've seen over many of our global economies, health care expense grow as a percentage of GDP over the last years. So here we see that over the last 50 years, health care expense has grown from about five percent in Germany to about 11 percent now. In the US, we've seen growth from six percent to over 17 percent now. And a large portion of these costs are driven by investments in large, shiny hospital buildings. And these buildings are not flexible, and they maintain a system where hospital beds need to be filled for a hospital to run efficiently. There's no incentive for a hospital to run with less beds. Just the thought of that makes you sick, right? And here's the thing: the cost for treating my buddy Art at home can be up to 10 times cheaper than hospital care. And that is where we're headed. The hospital bed of the future will be in our own homes. And it's already starting. Global home care is growing 10 percent year over year. And from my own experience, I see that logistics and technology are making these home health care solutions work. Technology is already allowing us to do things that were once exclusive to hospitals. Diagnosis tests like blood, glucose tests, urine tests, can now be taken in the comfort of our homes. And more and more connected devices we see like pacemakers and insulin pumps that will proactively signal if help is needed soon. And all that technology is coming together in much more insights into the patients' health, and that insight and all of the information leads to better control and to less medical errors — remember, the third cause of death in the US. And I see it every day at work. I work in logistics and for me, home health care works. So we see a delivery driver deliver the medicine to the patient's home. A nurse joins him and actually administers the drug at the patient's home. It's that simple. Remember my buddy, Art? He can now get the IV antibiotics in the comfort of his home: no hospital pajamas, no crappy food and no risk of these antibiotic-resistant superbugs that only bite you in these hospitals. And it goes further. So now the elderly people can get the treatment that they need in the comfort of their own home while with their best companion in life. And there's no need anymore to drive hours and hours just to get your treatment and tests. In the Netherlands and in Denmark, we've seen very good successes in cancer clinics organizing chemotherapies at the patient's homes, sometimes even together with fellow patients. The best improvements for these patients have been improvements in reduction in stress, anxiety disorders and depression. Home health care also helped them to get back a sense of normality and freedom in their lives, and they've actually helped them to forget about their disease. But home health care, Niels — what if I don't even have a home, when I'm homeless, or when I do have a home but there's no one to take care of me or even open up the door? Well, in comes our sharing economy, or, as I like to call it, the Airbnb for home care. In the Netherlands, we see churches and care organizations match people in need of care and company with people who actually have a home for them and can provide care and company to them. Home health care is cheaper, it's easier to facilitate, and it's quick to set up — in these rural areas we talked about, but also in humanitarian crisis situations where it's often safer, quicker and cheaper to set things up at home. Home health care is very applicable in prosperous areas but also very much in underserved communities. Home health care works in developed countries as well as in developing countries. So I'm passionate to help facilitate improvements in patients' lives due to home health care. I'm passionate to help facilitate that the elderly people get the treatment that they need in the comfort of their own homes, together with their best companion in life. I'm passionate to make the change and help ensure that patients, and not their disease, are in control of their lives. To me, that is health care delivered at home. Thank you. (Applause) |
How we could teach our bodies to heal faster | {0: 'Kaitlyn Sadtler researches how our body can regenerate tissue through instructions from our immune system. '} | TED2018 | What if you could take a pill or a vaccine and, just like getting over a cold, you could heal your wounds faster? Today, if we have an operation or an accident, we're in the hospital for weeks, and often left with scars and painful side effects of our inability to regenerate or regrow healthy, uninjured organs. I work to create materials that instruct our immune system to give us the signals to grow new tissues. Just like vaccines instruct our body to fight disease, we could instead instruct our immune system to build tissues and more quickly heal wounds. Now, regrowing body parts out of nowhere might seem like magic, but there are several organisms that can achieve this feat. Some lizards can regrow their tails, the humble salamander can completely regenerate their arm, and even us mere humans can regrow our liver after losing more than half of its original mass. To make this magic a bit closer to reality, I'm investigating how our body can heal wounds and build tissue through instructions from the immune system. From a scrape on your knee to that annoying sinus infection, our immune system defends our body from danger. I'm an immunologist, and by using what I know about our body's defense system, I was able to identify key players in our fight to build back our cuts and bruises. When looking at materials that are currently being tested for their abilities to help regrow muscle, our team noticed that after treating an injured muscle with these materials, there was a large number of immune cells in that material and the surrounding muscle. So in this case, instead of the immune cells rushing off towards infection to fight bacteria, they're rushing toward an injury. I discovered a specific type of immune cell, the helper T cell, was present inside that material that I implanted and absolutely critical for wound healing. Now, just like when you were a kid and you'd break your pencil and try and tape it back together again, we can heal, but it might not be in the most functional way, and we'll get a scar. So if we don't have these helper T cells, instead of healthy muscle, our muscle develops fat cells inside of it, and if there's fat in our muscle, it isn't as strong. Now, using our immune system, our body could grow back without these scars and look like what it was before we were even injured. I'm working to create materials that give us the signals to build new tissue by changing the immune response. We know that any time a material is implanted in our body, the immune system will respond to it. This ranges from pacemakers to insulin pumps to the materials that engineers are using to try and build new tissue. So when I place that material, or scaffold, in the body, the immune system creates a small environment of cells and proteins that can change the way that our stem cells behave. Now, just like the weather affects our daily activities, like going for a run or staying inside and binge-watching an entire TV show on Netflix, the immune environment of a scaffold affects the way that our stem cells grow and develop. If we have the wrong signals, say the Netflix signals, we get fat cells instead of muscle. These scaffolds are made of a variety of different things, from plastics to naturally derived materials, nanofibers of varying thicknesses, sponges that are more or less porous, gels of different stiffnesses. And researchers can even make the materials release different signals over time. So in other words, we can orchestrate this Broadway show of cells by giving them the correct stage, cues and props that can be changed for different tissues, just like a producer would change the set for "Les Mis" versus "Little Shop of Horrors." I'm combining specific types of signals that mimic how our body responds to injury to help us regenerate. In the future, we could see a scar-proof band-aid, a moldable muscle filler or even a wound-healing vaccine. Now, we aren't going to wake up tomorrow and be able to heal like Wolverine. Probably not next Tuesday, either. But with these advances, and working with our immune system to help build tissue and heal wounds, we could begin seeing products on the market that work with our body's defense system to help us regenerate, and maybe one day be able to keep pace with a salamander. Thank you. (Applause) |
Could the Earth be swallowed by a black hole? | null | TED-Ed | From asteroids capable of destroying entire species, to gamma-ray bursts and supernovae that could exterminate life on Earth, outer space has no shortage of forces that could wreak havoc on our tiny planet. But there’s something in space that seems more terrifying than any of these – something that wipes out everything it comes near. Could the Earth be swallowed by a black hole? A black hole is an object so dense that space and time around it are inescapably modified, warped into an infinite sink. Nothing, not even light, can move fast enough to escape a black hole’s gravitational pull once it passes a certain boundary, known as the event horizon. Thus, a black hole is like a cosmic vacuum cleaner with infinite capacity, gobbling up everything in its path, and letting nothing out. To determine whether a black hole could swallow the Earth, we first have to figure out where they are. But since they don’t emit light, how’s that possible? Fortunately, we’re able to observe their effect on the space around them. When matter approaches a black hole, the immense gravitational field accelerates it to high speed. This emits an enormous amount of light. And for objects too far away to be sucked in, the massive gravitational force still affects their orbits. If we observe several stars orbiting around an apparently empty point, a black hole could be leading the dance. Similarly, light that passes close enough to an event horizon will be deflected in a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. Most of the black holes that we’ve found can be thought of as two main types. The smaller ones, called stellar mass black holes, have a mass up to 100 times larger than that of our sun. They’re formed when a massive star consumes all its nuclear fuel and its core collapses. We’ve observed several of these objects as close as 3000 light-years away, and there could be up to 100 million small black holes just in the Milky Way galaxy. So should we be worried? Probably not. Despite their large mass, stellar black holes only have a radius of around 300 kilometers or less, making the chances of a direct hit with us miniscule. Although because their gravitational fields can affect a planet from a large distance, they could be dangerous even without a direct collision. If a typical stellar-mass black hole were to pass in the region of Neptune, the orbit of the Earth would be considerably modified, with dire results. Still, the combination of how small they are and how vast the galaxy is means that stellar black holes don’t give us much to worry about. But we still have to meet the second type: supermassive black holes. These have masses millions or billions times greater than that of our sun and have event horizons that could span billions of kilometers. These giants have grown to immense proportions by swallowing matter and merging with other black holes. Unlike their stellar cousins, supermassive black holes aren’t wandering through space. Instead, they lie at the center of galaxies, including our own. Our solar system is in a stable orbit around a supermassive black hole that resides at the center of the Milky Way, at a safe distance of 25,000 light-years. But that could change. If our galaxy collides with another, the Earth could be thrown towards the galactic center, close enough to the supermassive black hole to be eventually swallowed up. In fact, a collision with the Andromeda Galaxy is predicted to happen 4 billion years from now, which may not be great news for our home planet. But before we judge them too harshly, black holes aren’t simply agents of destruction. They played a crucial role in the formation of galaxies, the building blocks of our universe. Far from being shadowy characters in the cosmic play, black holes have fundamentally contributed in making the universe a bright and astonishing place. |
Why museums are returning cultural treasures | {0: 'Chip Colwell is an archaeologist who tries to answer the tangled question: Who owns the past?'} | TEDxMileHigh | A confession: I am an archaeologist and a museum curator, but a paradoxical one. For my museum, I collect things, but I also return things back to where they came from. I love museums because they're social and educational, but I'm most drawn to them because of the magic of objects: a one-million-year-old hand axe, a totem pole, an impressionist painting all take us beyond our own imaginations. In museums, we pause to muse, to gaze upon our human empire of things in meditation and wonder. I understand why US museums alone host more than 850 million visits each year. Yet, in recent years, museums have become a battleground. Communities around the world don't want to see their culture in distant institutions which they have no control over. They want to see their cultural treasures repatriated, returned to their places of origin. Greece seeks the return of the Parthenon Marbles, a collection of classical sculptures held by the British Museum. Egypt demands antiquities from Germany. New Zealand's Maori want to see returned ancestral tattooed heads from museums everywhere. Yet these claims pale in comparison to those made by Native Americans. Already, US museums have returned more than one million artifacts and 50,000 sets of Native American skeletons. To illustrate what's at stake, let's start with the War Gods. This is a wood carving made by members of the Zuni tribe in New Mexico. In the 1880s, anthropologists began to collect them as evidence of American Indian religion. They came to be seen as beautiful, the precursor to the stark sculptures of Picasso and Paul Klee, helping to usher in the modern art movement. From one viewpoint, the museum did exactly as it's supposed to with the War God. It helped introduce a little-known art form for the world to appreciate. But from another point of view, the museum had committed a terrible crime of cultural violence. For Zunis, the War God is not a piece of art, it is not even a thing. It is a being. For Zunis, every year, priests ritually carve new War Gods, the Ahayu:da, breathing life into them in a long ceremony. They are placed on sacred shrines where they live to protect the Zuni people and keep the universe in balance. No one can own or sell a War God. They belong only to the earth. And so Zunis want them back from museums so they can go to their shrine homes to fulfill their spiritual purpose. What is a curator to do? I believe that the War Gods should be returned. This might be a startling answer. After all, my conclusion contradicts the refrain of the world's most famous archaeologist: "That belongs in a museum!" (Laughter) is what Indiana Jones said, not just to drive movie plots, but to drive home the unquestionable good of museums for society. I did not come to my view easily. I grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and fell in love with the Sonoran Desert's past. I was amazed that beneath the city's bland strip malls was 12,000 years of history just waiting to be discovered. When I was 16 years old, I started taking archaeology classes and going out on digs. A high school teacher of mine even helped me set up my own laboratory to study animal bones. But in college, I came to learn that my future career had a dark history. Starting in the 1860s, Native American skeletons became a tool for science, collected in the thousands to prove new theories of social and racial hierarchies. Native American human remains were plundered from graves, even taken fresh from battlefields. When archaeologists came across white graves, the skeleton was often quickly reburied, while Native bones were deposited as specimens on museum shelves. In the wake of war, stolen land, boarding schools, laws banning religion, anthropologists collected sacred objects in the belief that Native peoples were on the cusp of extinction. You can call it racism or colonialism, but the labels don't matter as much as the fact that over the last century, Native American rights and culture were taken from them. In 1990, after years of Native protests, the US government, through the US Congress, finally passed a law that allowed Native Americans to reclaim cultural items, sacred objects and human remains from museums. Many archaeologists were panicked. For scientists, it can be hard to fully grasp how a piece of wood can be a living god or how spirits surround bones. And they knew that modern science, especially with DNA, can provide luminous insights into the past. As the anthropologist Frank Norwick declared, "We are doing important work that benefits all of mankind. We are not returning anything to anyone." As a college student, all of this was an enigma that was hard to decipher. Why did Native Americans want their heritage back from the very places preserving it? And how could scientists spend their entire lives studying dead Indians but seem to care so little about living ones? I graduated but wasn't sure what to do next, so I traveled. One day, in South Africa, I visited Nelson Mandela's former prison cell on Robben Island. I had an epiphany. Here was a man who helped a country bridge vast divides to seek, however imperfectly, reconciliation. I'm no Mandela, but I ask myself: Could I, too, plant seeds of hope in the ruins of the past? In 2007, I was hired as a curator at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Our team agreed that unlike many other institutions, we needed to proactively confront the legacy of museum collecting. We started with the skeletons in our closet, 100 of them. After months and then years, we met with dozens of tribes to figure out how to get these remains home. And this is hard work. It involves negotiating who will receive the remains, how to respectfully transfer them, where will they go. Native American leaders become undertakers, planning funerals for dead relatives they had never wanted unearthed. A decade later, the Denver Museum and our Native partners have reburied nearly all of the human remains in the collection. We have returned hundreds of sacred objects. But I've come to see that these battles are endless. Repatriation is now a permanent feature of the museum world. Hundreds of tribes are waiting their turn. There are always more museums with more stuff. Every catalogued War God in an American public museum has now been returned — 106, so far — but there are more beyond the reach of US law, in private collections and outside our borders. In 2014, I had the chance to travel with a respected religious leader from the Zuni tribe named Octavius Seowtewa to visit five museums in Europe with War Gods. At the Ethnological Museum of Berlin, we saw a War God with a history of dubious care. An overly enthusiastic curator had added chicken feathers to it. Its necklace had once been stolen. At the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, an official told us that the War God there is now state property with no provisions for repatriation. He insisted that the War God no longer served Zunis but museum visitors. He said, "We give all of the objects to the world." At the British Museum, we were warned that the Zuni case would establish a dangerous precedent for bigger disputes, such as the Parthenon Marbles, claimed by Greece. After visiting the five museums, Octavius returned home to his people empty-handed. He later told me, "It hurts my heart to see the Ahayu:da so far away. They all belong together. It's like a family member that's missing from a family dinner. When one is gone, their strength is broken." I wish that my colleagues in Europe and beyond could see that the War Gods do not represent the end of museums but the chance for a new beginning. When you walk the halls of a museum, you're likely just seeing about one percent of the total collections. The rest is in storage. Even after returning 500 cultural items and skeletons, my museum still retains 99.999 percent of its total collections. Though we no longer have War Gods, we have Zuni traditional pottery, jewelry, tools, clothing and arts. And even more precious than these objects are the relationships that we formed with Native Americans through the process of repatriation. Now, we can ask Zunis to share their culture with us. Not long ago, I had the chance to visit the returned War Gods. A shrine sits up high atop a mesa overlooking beautiful Zuni homeland. The shrine is enclosed by a roofless stone building threaded at the top with barbed wire to ensure that they're not stolen again. And there they are, inside, the Ahayu:da, 106 War Gods amid offerings of turquoise, cornmeal, shell, even T-shirts ... a modern gift to ancient beings. And standing there, I got a glimpse at the War Gods' true purpose in the world. And it occurred to me then that we do not get to choose the histories that we inherit. Museum curators today did not pillage ancient graves or steal spiritual objects, but we can accept responsibility for correcting past mistakes. We can help restore dignity, hope and humanity to Native Americans, the very people who were once the voiceless objects of our curiosity. And this doesn't even require us to fully understand others' beliefs, only that we respect them. Museums are temples to things past. Now they must also become places for living cultures. As I turned to walk away from the shrine, I drank in the warm summer air, and I watched an eagle turn lazy circles high above. I thought of the Zunis, whose offerings ensure that their culture is not dead and gone but alive and well, and I could think of no better place for the War Gods to be. Thank you. (Applause) |
"Afterneath" / "Killing Me" | {0: 'Luke Sital-Singh plumbs emotional depths to write tender, tuneful songs.'} | TED2018 | (Piano) (Singing) It was done When the benediction had been sung Firelight gently woke us from our golden night My surprise I can turn to see your open eyes And I know You are alive I know that smile Nothing more In the after There is waking from your sleep And your lover Is the only face you see We are after Ever after There is laughter Afterneath The war Nobody ever even asked what for Up above Nothing matters but the ones you love So get out with me Now you've got enough with me Just the two of us you see And nothing more In the after There is waking from your sleep And your lover Is the only face you see We are after Ever after There is laughter Afterneath Oh, we after Ever after There is laughter Afterneath Oh Oh Oh Oh Thank you. (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) Thanks. I love a depressing song ... (Laughter) you know? I've been writing them for 15 years now, and to be honest, over that time, I've come to kind of believe that they're not really depressing at all. In fact, I think they're kind of the most important songs we have. Songs that sing of sorrow, of grief, of longing, of the darker side of love, the underside of being alive, these are the songs I just never tire of hearing and I never tire of writing, because they make me feel less alone. They speak to a very real part of being human that can often be hidden in fear and shame and pushed deep down where it lingers and rots. But I think in listening to these songs — really listening — can allow us to refeel these hard emotions, but in a cathartic and healing way. In a way that reminds us, as we listen, that we're not alone in darkness. There's a Japanese phrase known as "mono no aware," which roughly translates as "the bittersweet poignancy of things," or the pathos or "ahness" of things. It's a valuable awareness of impermanence, both a kind of gentle, transient sadness as things pass by in life, but also a deeper, softly lingering sadness about the impermanence of all reality. "Mono no aware" can be manifest in lots of life stories and moments and songs. One example in Japanese culture is the celebration of the cherry blossom. The cherry blossom in and of itself is no more impressive than that of an apple or orange tree, but what sets it apart is its brevity. Cherry blossoms fall within a single week — can be whisked away on the gentlest breeze — and it's this that makes it more beautiful. It's utterly fragile, and fragility gives life its poignancy. Now, being a cheery chap, nothing speaks to me more than this, and — (Laughter) you know, I think it's been the essence of my songwriting for years, of what moves me to write, what inspires me to sing. Because pain and grief and doubt, when it's made manifest in music, in song — when it's made beautiful in poetry and painting, it can build a community and a kinship in the knowledge that we are none of us alone in darkness. My next song is one that I call "Killing Me," and as the name suggests, it's not a dance floor favorite. (Laughter) But it isn't miserable. It's full of love and hope. And I think it exemplifies everything I've been talking about. And it's the first song I've written from the perspective of somebody else, specifically my grandmother, as she lives on without my late grandfather, as she experiences new things in her life — her grandchildren getting married, having their own children, speaking at TED — all the while she lives without, and all the while she misses her soul mate. Thank you. (Piano) (Singing) Sweetheart would you wake up today? I promise you would recognize my faith I want to show you how I've grown in this place In this place I'm not alone And I know I'll be OK But it's always harder When the winter comes to stay And I can't help remember all the words I never said And it's killing me That you're not here with me I'm living happily But I'm feeling guilty And you won't believe The wonders I can see This world is changing me But I will love you faithfully. (Piano) Oh, everything is taller these days Maybe I feel smaller and time rushes away So much I could show you How all the great-grandchildren Have been laughing like we did when we were young I've been laughing like we did when we were young Oh, it's killing me that you're not here with me I'm living happily But I'm feeling guilty Oh, you won't believe The wonders I can see This world is changing me I will love you faithfully Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh, it's killing me That you're not here with me I'm living happily But I'm feeling guilty Oh, you won't believe The wonders I can see This world is changing me I will love you faithfully Oh, it's killing me That you're not here with me I'm living happily But I'm feeling guilty Oh, you won't believe The wonders I can see This world is changing me But I will love you faithfully Thank you very much. (Applause and cheering) |
How I became part sea urchin | {0: "Catherine Mohr loves what she does -- she's just not ever sure what it will be next. "} | TED2018 | My story starts in the northern Galapagos Islands, under 50 feet of water and a big school of sharks. I'd been scuba diving with a group of friends for about a week, and it had been glorious: manta rays, whale sharks, penguins and, of course, hammerhead sharks. Today's dive was particularly tricky. The surge was terrible. You had to have your camera rig tight in and your arm out, because the surge kept throwing you into the rocks while you're scanning up for that beautiful photograph. It was going OK, until ... not OK. Something was terribly, terribly wrong. I pulled my hand back, and I had long, black sea urchin spines all the way through my gloves, which meant all the way through my hand. Now, this is bad. I mean, obviously when you have something all the way through your hand, it's kind of bad anyway, but in this case, sea urchins have a venom on them that, if you've ever tangled with them, you know that a sea urchin spine in you gives you horrible, painful inflammation. But that wasn't even topmost in my mind at this point. This did not look real. I could not believe that this was my hand. Now, in a crisis, I tend to disassociate into, like, little scientists, and I start talking very analytically. All analysis was gone, adrenaline brain kicked in, and I just yanked the spines out. I don't remember doing it. I just remember thinking, "I can't get my glove off with these in here." I do remember taking the glove off and a big plume of black coming up in front of my face. And biologist brain now shows up and starts freaking out. "How could all that toxin have gotten into that wound already?" Well, physicist brain then shows up and very calmly explains, "No, no, no, we're at 50 feet, red wavelengths are attenuated. That's blood — not black. And sharks. So what are you gonna do?" Well, I cranked my cummerbund down really hard over my hand, and I simply swam away. "Let's let that big old cloud of blood dissipate a bit before we have to surface through all of these sharks." So when I did surface, my warm-blooded-mammal brain was in an absolute gibbering panic: "They don't feed when they're schooling. They don't feed when they're schooling. All the way up." And they didn't. So apparently, they have read the same books that I have. (Laughter) Now, it turns out, when you've been stabbed with sea urchin spines, and you're two days away from any medical help, the thing that you've got to do is, unfortunately, cook your hand. So you put it in water as hot as you can stand, and you keep adding boiling water until you think you will go absolutely insane. Now, it worked — the hand itself did not work so well for several weeks after that, but eventually, fine motor skills returned. All except for one spot, that stayed stiff and painful for weeks after the other things had gotten better. So it turned out, I'd broken off a tip of the urchin spine in the joint itself, and that's why it wasn't getting better. So the orthopedist says, "You know, we should get this out. Nothing too urgent, not an emergency." So we scheduled a small surgery for a few weeks out on a Monday. And on the Friday before, I broke my pelvis in a horseback riding accident. (Laughter) Yeah. So we kind of postponed that surgery. My broken pelvis and I were now facing six weeks on the couch, and I would have gone absolutely insane if it hadn't been for my friends. Spontaneous parties broke out at my house every night for weeks. I was fed. I was entertained. It was great. But that kind of enthusiasm is sort of hard to sustain over the long term, and eventually it petered down to just one friend, who would send me jokes during the day and come and keep me company in the evenings — someone I got to know a whole lot better during this period of convalescence. And when I was finally pronounced well enough to do weight-bearing activities, we loaded a telescope in the car and drove up into the mountains to look at the Hale–Bopp comet. Yes, we are geeks. And got caught in a landslide. (Laughter) I know — like, really? No. Just kidding. (Laughter) No more disasters. No. Just the opposite, in fact. That was 21 years ago, and for 19 of those years, I have been married to that marvelous introvert who never in a million years would have approached me under other circumstances. We have a wonderful 14-year-old daughter, who did all my illustrations. (Cheers and applause) Yeah. So, pro tip: apparently, nothing makes you sexier than needing a walker on your first date. So this isn't a story about piercings or sharks or boilings or breakings. It's a love story. It's a love story with a funny little epilogue. Now I was weight-bearing again, I could reschedule that surgery, get the spine out. But I didn't need it anymore. Turns out, when you break a bone, your body scavenges calcium from all the bones in your body — and from the little sea urchin spine that you happen to have lodged in the joint of your finger. So yes, my pelvis is now part sea urchin. (Laughter) So to biology brain, physicist brain, adrenaline brain, warm-blooded-mammal brain, I get to add "urchin brain," with all of the superpowers that that confers. You don't need to worry, though: that I am not fully human is one of the things that my family loves the most about me. (Laughter) Thank you very much. (Applause) |
¿Por qué nos emociona la música? | {0: 'Elogiado por el compositor George Crumb por su "interpretación sensible y profunda", el joven y aplaudido director de orquesta chileno Paolo Bortolameolli se ha consagrado como uno de los talentos musicales latinoamericanos más sobresalientes y versátiles del último tiempo. Es el Director Asistente de la Filarmónica de los Ángeles donde trabaja cercanamente con directores como Gustavo Dudamel o Esa-Pekka Salonen. Con una carrera en acenso y dirigiendo en importantes escenarios, es también un innovador en materias de creación de nuevas audiencias. \r\n\r\n'} | TED en Español en NYC | When I was seven, my father took me to a classical music concert for the first time and I went out crying. They performed Beethoven's 5th Symphony. (Music) How do you prepare a child to attend a classical music concert for the first time? A few days before, we sat down and listened to a recording he had. There, he explained a couple of simple things to me, for instance, the insistence of "ta-ta-ta-tan" throughout the first movement. But that it also comes back later in the symphony. He explained that this symphony had four movements. Or that the end of it would be a victory. A human, musical, concrete or abstract kind of victory. He explained that what starts with an insistent and sententious call, becomes a triumph, full of validation and optimism. We even played a game: every time a section started, of which we had spoken about, I would squeeze his hand as a sign of recognition. With this information I arrived at the theater. This, and my natural curiosity filled me with expectations. I was so focused enjoying the music, but also the experience of being there: the public paying attention, the orchestra, the passionate sound. Everything was like what I anticipated, until something incredible happened. Something that to this day I consider one of the most perfect musical moments ever written. A miracle. The music had been repeating a gesture for quite a while, (Plays the piano) Do you recognize it? But also, a progression of chords that made me think that after this, surely, this would come. A kind of "musical common sense." But there is no miracle on that. Humbly, I could have written that resolution myself, so we would've finished the movement, and let people cough happily and compulsively, or check their phones. But I didn't write this piece of music. And Beethoven is Beethoven for a reason. Let's go back a few seconds: (Music) All this follows a pattern and we already know how it should end. And this? This is not what I expected. A child would say: it's like cheating you. That note coming from another musical universe surprises us. The music, the rhythm, barely beats on the edge of its extinction. Little by little it stabilizes, showing vital signs. From that pulse, the violins sprout and an erratic intermittent melodic line, until both find consistency, too. In that way the music captures our attention. A moment charged with the promise of an imminent outcome. That something that we know will happen; that without realizing it, we already expected it. (Music) After that my father looked at me and hugged me, deeply moved. I was crying. I looked at him and said: "I don't know why I'm crying, for it is not sadness what I feel." That moment marked my life. At that moment, being seven years old, I decided to dedicate my life to music. Because I wanted to recreate that moment, understand it and then share and spread it. Let's see if we can do it here now, I think it's contagious. When I talked about this unexpected note, that key to new options that finally become the door to this great musical triumph, I was pointing to a very simple and common phenomenon of life itself: expectations. Had the third movement effectively finished like this, (Plays the piano) our perception of what happened would've stayed within certain range of expectations. We basically receive what we expect. The music ends, the audience coughs and accommodates their seats. (Laughter) The musicians relax for a second until the director raises his hands again in a sign of onslaught to conquest the last movement. It works. The music impacts anyway. But it's not the same. This transition Beethoven wrote not only succeeds in connecting one music with another, but it creates another kind of expectations. From that unexpected note, until the search for new stability in the rhythm, the melody, the harmony and the texture that grows to end up in something even greater. But in the meantime, our mind reacts. It starts looking for alternatives, possible scenarios. And Beethoven knows it. That's why that dissolution and rambling of the music confuses us. And that confusion brings on expectations which are a mix of prediction and willingness to keep on being surprised, since the same music showed us that everything is possible. On another extra musical level it looks like my own attitude before and during the concert. The information from my father was an incentive to get to the theater full of expectations. To recognize what I already knew, to verify it. But once I was surprised, everything was possible. The evocative power of music comes to an extent from its ability to create, prolong, suspend, or even betray expectations. But what do we expect from it, from music itself? A melody and an accompaniment. An idea that presents itself, talks and finds a closure. A new, more happy idea. Everything peaceful and expected. Expectations fulfilled. Aha! An unexpected turn ... Drama! Opera! You didn't see that coming. Because it is easier to predict from consistency. Like in this prelude from Bach. We are designed to look for stability and reaffirm a prediction. Associations are triggered and our memory draws conclusions. Consistency allows us anticipate and guess rightly. And one of the sources of pleasure when listening to music is when our expectations are met. But, what happens when we lose control on the predictions? When they are not met? A great tool of Romanticism. Franz Liszt plays with surprises. A passionate, raptured melody, that begins a journey. But comes back. And then, when everything seems to go on the same, safe and predictable path, this! A door opens, another alternative. Which destabilizes, but fascinates. One more! It was like finding options that were not possible. And that challenge to our expectations seduces us. Or a contrast. Mahler declares: "Dark is life. Dark is death." Serious and hopeless, the music takes a new turn. But also, this music has a hint of movement, of a dance, of a waltz. Of course! The style, tradition and heritage also generate expectations. Because Mahler is an heir of a whole Viennese tradition where this music is part of its DNA. And of ours? Didn't some of you smile when recognizing this waltz from Strauss? Which is also full of small games of expectations. Like these subtle changes in tempo. That coming and going, that brings about so much grace. Or more radical surprises. A new waltz! Like I told you, tradition lies in the collective unconscious and through gestures like this: one two three, one two three ... we can even recognize a distorted and decadent waltz written before the First World War. Isn't it like a spooky echo of that Viennese waltz? Those notes, apparently unconnected, are the product of years of transformation of musical rules. Wagner was one who contributed, in his case, by being a great manipulator of expectations. Suggestive music, full of eroticism where each note, each sound clings to the next one, crawling and sticking to it. But, permanently changing direction. Not everything that sounds can be unexpected. A silence can also be provocative and leave open questions. The deafening silence ... Debussy and his sensual "Prelude to the afternoon of a faun" and that suggestive silence at the beginning. Silence, that essential element of music. More than an absence of sound, it is a fundamental expressive resource. And one of my favorite silences is that complicit silence. Loaded with expectations. The one that happens before music is. (Music) But also every new silence. Giving moments of lucubration. Being part of the speech and connecting ideas that can continue to grow. Contrasts, stability and instability. By the way, the stability of the pulse, and how we group it is an instinctive reaction we have as soon as we identify regularity. One, two, one, two ... But, what happens when we can't even anticipate this grouping? And we are just left at the mercy of the unstable? Listening to music can be like reading a good detective story. Like those in which you even doubt the dead. (Laughter) Where the plot and the impending outcome will make you more sensitive to how the thickness of the pages decreases. Expectations on the weight over the tip of your fingers. The state of attention changes, it's active and increasingly speculative. It is no longer, "if this, then that." But, "and if this, then that? This other or that one?" Like everything in life, in the nature of art it is also present this idea that you have to expect the unexpected. But notice that the unexpected doesn't just taste like first time. That's why we read a book or watch a movie many times, or we listen to that music we like so much on repeat. Partly, this is because we like to experiment from security. Like a child who reads the same story tale every night, with the relief of knowing how it ends. But also rereading through memory gives us other details. It makes us pay attention to other places. We listen now not to the melody, but the accompaniment for example, to discover that beautiful music that had gone unnoticed, even when it was always there. To recognize, but also to rediscover. An infinite game of expectations. Or the relationship between the performer and the listener, "How will he do it? Surely different from the recordings that I know!" But that's the idea! Because music is an organism, that breathes and it's alive at the very moment it sounds. Only there music is. And listening to it live allows us to live that moment full of expectations. When the concert ended, my dad took me to meet the director. I saw him and I started crying again. (Laughter) Without saying anything, I thought: you are responsible for these tears! He gave me a puzzled look. He asked if anything had happened, for many reasons can make a seven-year-old boy cry. My father, still moved, summed it up and understanding now the impact that music had had me, the director hugged me and said: "Well, that's why we do what we do." That day changed my life. Ever since, my expectations are to change yours. Thank you. (Applause) |
The simple genius of a good graphic | {0: 'Tommy McCall specializes in presenting complex and rich data sets.'} | TED2018 | I love infographics. As an information designer, I've worked with all sorts of data over the past 25 years. I have a few insights to share, but first: a little history. Communication is the encoding, transmission and decoding of information. Breakthroughs in communication mark turning points in human culture. Oracy, literacy and numeracy were great developments in communication. They allow us to encode ideas into words and quantities into numbers. Without communication, we'd still be stuck in the Stone Ages. Although humans have been around for a quarter million years, it was only 8,000 years ago that proto-writings began to surface. Nearly 3,000 years later, the first proper writing systems took shape. Maps have been around for millennia and diagrams for hundreds of years, but representing quantities through graphics is a relatively new development. It wasn't until 1786 that William Playfair invented the first bar chart, giving birth to visual display of quantitative information. Fifteen years later, he introduced the first pie and area charts. His inventions are still the most commonly used chart forms today. Florence Nightingale invented the coxcomb in 1857 for a presentation to Queen Victoria on troop mortality. Highlighted in blue, she showed how most troops' deaths could have been prevented. Shortly after, Charles Minard charted Napoleon's march on Moscow, illustrating how an army of 422,000 dwindled to just 10,000 as battles, geography and freezing temperatures took their toll. He combined a Sankey diagram with cartography and a line chart for temperature. I get excited when I get lots of data to play with, especially when it yields an interesting chart form. Here, Nightingale's coxcomb was the inspiration to organize data on thousands of federal energy subsidies, scrutinizing the lack of investment in renewables over fossil fuels. This Sankey diagram illustrates the flow of energy through the US economy, emphasizing how nearly half of the energy used is lost as waste heat. I love it when data can be sculpted into beautiful shapes. Here, the personal and professional connections of the women of Silicon Valley can be woven into arcs, same as the collaboration of inventors birthing patents across the globe can be mapped. I've even made charts for me. I'm a numbers person, so I rarely win at Scrabble. I made this diagram to remember all the two- and three-letter words in the official Scrabble dictionary. (Laughter) Knowing these 1,168 words certainly is a game changer. (Laughter) Sometimes I produce code to quickly generate graphics from thousands of data points. Coding also enables me to produce interactive graphics. Now we can navigate information on our own terms. Exotic chart forms certainly look cool, but something as simple as a little dot may be all you need to solve a particular thinking task. In 2006, the "New York Times" redesigned their "Markets" section, cutting it down from eight pages of stock listings to just one and a half pages of essential market data. We listed performance metrics for the most common stocks, but I wanted to help investors see how the stocks are doing. So I added a simple little dot to show the current price relative to its one-year range. At a glance, value investors can pick out stocks trading near their lows by looking for dots to the left. Momentum investors can find stocks on an upward trajectory via dots to the right. Shortly after, the "Wall Street Journal" copied the design. Simplicity is often the goal for most graphics, but sometimes we need to embrace complexity and show large data sets in their full glory. Alec Gallup, the former chairman of the Gallup Organization, once handed me a very thick book. It was his family's legacy: hundreds of pages covering six decades of presidential approval data. I told him the entire book could be graphed on a single page. "Impossible," he said. And here it is: 25,000 data points on a single page. At a glance, one sees that most presidents start with a high approval rating, but few keep it. Events like wars initially boost approval; scandals trigger declines. These major events were annotated in the graphic but not in the book. The point is, graphics can transmit data with incredible efficiency. Graphicacy — the ability to read and write graphics — is still in its infancy. New chart forms will emerge and specialized dialects will evolve. Graphics that help us think faster or see a book's worth of information on a single page are the key to unlocking new discoveries. Our visual cortex was built to decode complex information and is a master at pattern recognition. Graphicacy enables us to harness our built-in GPU to process mountains of data and find the veins of gold hiding within. Thank you. (Applause and cheers) |
Can you solve the alien probe riddle? | null | TED-Ed | The discovery of an alien monolith on planet RH-1729 has scientists across the world racing to unlock its mysteries. Your engineering team has developed an elegant probe to study it. The probe is a collection of 27 cube modules capable of running all the scientific tests necessary to analyze the monolith. The modules can self-assemble into a large 3x3x3 cube, with each individual module placed anywhere in the cube, and at any orientation. It can also break itself apart and reassemble into any other orientation. Now comes your job. The probe will need a special protective coating for each of the extreme environments it passes through. The red coating will seal it against the cold of deep space, the purple coating will protect it from the intense heat as it enters the atmosphere of RH-1729, and the green coating will shield it from the alien planet’s electric storms. You can apply the coatings to each of the faces of all 27 of the cubic modules in any way you like, but each face can only take a single color coating. You need to figure out how you can apply the colors so the cubes can re-assemble themselves to show only red, then purple, then green. How can you apply the colored coatings to the 27 cubes so the probe will be able to make the trip? Pause here if you want to figure it out yourself. You can start by painting the outside of the complete cube red, since you’ll need that regardless. Then you can break it into 27 pieces, and look at what you have. There are 8 corner cubes, which each have three red faces, 12 edge cubes, which have two red faces, 6 face cubes, which have 1 red face, and a single center cube, which has no red faces. You’ve painted a total of 54 faces red at this point, so you’ll need the same number of faces for the green and purple cubes, too. When you’re done, you’ll have painted 54 faces red, 54 faces green, and 54 faces purple. That’s 162 faces, which is precisely how many the cubes have in total. So there’s no margin for waste. If there’s any way to do this, it’ll probably be highly symmetrical. Maybe you can use that to help you. You look at the center cube. You’d better paint it half green and half purple, so you can use it as a corner for each of those cubes, and not waste a single face. There’ll need to be center cubes with no green and no purple too. So you take 2 corner cubes from the red cube and paint the 3 blank faces of 1 purple, and the 3 blank faces of the other green. Now you’ve got the 6 face cubes that each have 1 face painted red. That leaves 5 empty faces on each. You can split them in half. In the first group, you paint 3 faces green and 2 faces purple; In the second group, paint 3 faces purple and 2 green. Counting on symmetry, you replicate these piles again with the colors rearranged. That gives you 6 with 1 green face, 6 with 1 red face, and 6 with 1 purple face. Counting up what you’ve completely painted, you see 8 corner cubes in each color, 6 edge cubes in each color, 6 face cubes in each color, and 1 center cube. That means you just need 6 more edge cubes in green and purple. And there are exactly 6 cubes left, each with 4 empty faces. You paint 2 faces of each green and 2 faces of each purple. And now you have a cube that’s perfectly painted to make an incredible trip. It rearranges itself to be red in deep space, purple as it enters RH-1729’s atmosphere, and green when it flies through the electric storms. As it reaches the monolith, you realize you’ve achieved something humans have dreamt of for eons: alien contact. |
How police and the public can create safer neighborhoods together | {0: 'Dr. Tracie Keesee is committed to making the New York Police Department the most diverse and inclusive police department in the world.'} | TED Salon Brightline Initiative | You know, my friends, I look at this photograph and I have to ask myself, you know, I think I've seen this somewhere before. People marching in the street for justice. But I know it's not the same photograph that I would have seen, because I wouldn't take my oath to be a police officer until 1989. And I've been in the business for over 25 years. And identifying as an African-American woman, I know things have gotten better. But even as I learned about public safety, I wondered if what I was doing on the street was hurting or harming the community. And I often wondered if, you know, how did they perceive me, this woman in uniform? But there is one thing that I knew. I knew there was a way that we could do this, probably, different or better. A way that preserved dignity and guaranteed justice. But I also knew that police could not do it alone. It's the coproduction of public safety. There is a lot of history with us. You know, we know loss. The relationship between the African American community and the police is a painful one. Often filled with mistrust. It has been studied by social scientists, it has been studied by government, all both promising, you know, hopeful new ways and long-term fixes. But all we want is to be safe. And our safety is intertwined. And that we know, in order to have great relationships and relationships built on trust, that we're going to have to have communication. And in this advent and this text of the world that we've got going on, trying to do this with social media, it's a very difficult thing to do. We also have to examine our current policing practices, and we have to set those things aside that no longer serve us. So, in New York, that meant "stop, question and frisk." That meant really holding up the numbers as opposed to relationships. And it really didn't allow the officers the opportunity to get to know the community in which they serve. But you see, there is a better way. And we know — it's called coproduction. So in the 1970s, Elinor Ostrom came up with this theory, really called coproduction, and this is how it works. You bring people into the space that come with separate expertise, and you also come with new ideas and lived experience, and you produce a new knowledge. And when you produce that new knowledge, and you apply this theory to public safety, you produce a new type of public safety. And so, in New York, it feels like this. It is called building relationships, literally one block at a time. And it's "Build the Block." So this is how it works. You go to buildtheblock.nyc, you put in your address. And up pops location, date and time of your neighborhood meeting. The important part of this is you've got to go to the meeting. And once you go to that meeting, there, of course, will be NYPD, along with officers and other community members. What's important about bringing, now, the lived experience into this space to produce new knowledge is that we have to have a new way of delivering it. So the new way of delivering it is through what we call neighborhood coordinating officers, or NCOs. And so, also in this meeting are the NCOs, the what we call 911 response cars, sector cars, detectives, all of us working together to collaborate in this new way to reduce crime. And what's interesting about this is that we know that it works. So, for example, in Washington Heights. At a community meeting, there was a bar, up in Washington Heights, and the neighbors were complaining about outcry and noises. So in their conversations with their NCO, they talked about, you know, sound barriers, different ways to sort of approach this. Is there a different way we can direct traffic? And of course now they have relatively quieter bar nights. So, another issue that always comes up in neighborhoods is speeding. How many of you in here have ever had a speeding ticket? Raise your hand. Oh, higher, come on! There's more than that, this is New York. So those are other issues that brought to the NCO. Speeding — what the NCOs do is they collaborate with the Department of Transportation, they look at issues such as speed bumps and signage and all types of things. And when we come together to create this different type of policing, it also feels different. The coproduction of public safety also means that officers need to understand the history and the power of their uniforms. They're going to have to set aside old historical narratives that do not serve them well. And that means they have to learn about implicit bias. Implicit biases are shortcuts the brain makes without us really knowing it. They're stereotypes that often influence our decision making. And so, you can imagine, for police officers who have to make split-second decisions can be a very detrimental decision-making point. That's why the NYPD, along with other departments throughout the United States, are training all of their officers in implicit bias. They have to understand that learning about their implicit biases, having good training, tactics and deescalation and understanding how it impacts your decision making makes us all safer. We also know how officers are treated inside the organization impacts how they're going to behave with the community at large. This is critical. Especially if you want to have a new way forward. And we know that we have to care for those folks that are on the frontline. And they have to recognize their own trauma. And in order to do that, us as leaders have to lift them up and let them know that the narratives of being strong men and women — you can set those aside, and it's OK to say you need help. And we do that by providing peer support, employee assistance, mental health services. We make sure all of those things are in place, because without it — it's a critical component to the coproduction of public safety. Equally as important is that we also have social issues that are often laid at the feet of law enforcement. So, for example, mental health and education. Historically, we've been pulled into those spaces where we have not necessarily provided public safety but have enforced long, historical legislative racial desegregation. We have to own our part in history. But we also have to have those folks at the table when we're talking about how do we move forward with coproduction. But understanding this, we also have to understand that we need to have voices come to us in a different way. We also have to recognize that the community may not be willing or ready to come to the table to have the conversation. And that's OK. We have to be able to accept that. By acknowledging it, it also means that we care for the community's health and for their resiliency as well. That's another key component. We also have to acknowledge that there are those folks that are in our community that are here — they do want to do us harm. We also have to recognize that we have community members who did not get the benefits of a long-ago dream. We also have to acknowledge that we have put faith in a system that sometimes is broken, hoping that it would give us solutions for better. But we cannot walk away. Because there is a better way. And we know this because the NYPD's neighborhood policing philosophy is grounded in the coproduction of public safety. And in order for us to move forward together, with our family, our friends and for our health, we have to make sure that we focus this way. And in order to do that, there are three fundamental ideologies that we must all agree to. Are you ready? Oh, I'm sorry, one more time — are you ready? Audience: Yes! Tracie Keesee: Now, that's better, alright. The first one: There's no more wallowing in the why. We know why. We must move forward together. There's no more us versus them. Number two: We must embrace the lived experience and our histories, and we must make sure we never go back to a place where we cannot move forward. And number three: We must also make sure that truth and telling facts is painful. But we also know that no action is no longer acceptable. And agree? Audience: Yes. TK: Oh, I'm sorry, I can't hear you, do you agree? Audience: Yes! TK: So we do know there is a better way. And the better way is the coproduction of public safety. Thank you. (Applause) |
The myth of Hercules | null | TED-Ed | Hercules, son of Zeus and champion of humankind, gazed in horror as he realized he had just committed the most unspeakable crime imaginable. The goddess Hera, who hated Hercules for being born of her husband’s adultery, had stricken him with a temporary curse of madness. And his own family were the casualties. Consumed by grief, Hercules sought out the Oracle of Delphi, who told him the path to atonement lay with his cousin, King Eurystheus of Tiryns, a favorite of Hera’s. Eurystheus hoped to humiliate Hercules with ten impossible tasks that pitted him against invincible monsters and unfathomable forces. Instead, the king set the stage for an epic series of adventures that would come to be known as the Labors of Hercules. The first labor was to slay the Nemean Lion, who kidnapped women and devoured warriors. Its golden fur was impervious to arrows, but Hercules cornered the lion in its dark cave, stunned it with a club, and strangled it with his bare hands. He found no tool sharp enough to skin the beast, until the goddess Athena suggested using one of its own claws. Hercules returned to Tiryns wearing the lion’s hide, frightening King Eurystheus so much that he hid in a wine jar. From then on, Hercules was ordered to present his trophies at a safe distance. The second target was the Lernaean Hydra, a giant serpent with many heads. Hercules fought fiercely, but every time he cut one head off, two more grew in its place. The battle was hopeless until his nephew Iolaus thought to cauterize the necks with fire, keeping the heads from regrowing. The dead serpent’s remains became the Hydra constellation. Instead of slaying a beast, Hercules next had to catch one, alive. The Ceryneian Hind was a female deer so fast it could outrun an arrow. Hercules tracked it for a year, finally trapping it in the northern land of Hyperborea. The animal turned out to be sacred to Artemis, goddess of the hunt, and Hercules swore to return it. When Eurystheus saw the hind, he demanded to keep it instead, but as soon as Hercules let go, the animal ran to its mistress. Thus, Hercules completed his task without breaking his promise. The fourth mission was to capture the Erymanthian boar, which had ravaged many fields. Advised by the wise centaur Chiron, Hercules trapped it by chasing it into thick snow. For the fifth task, there were no animals, just their leftovers. The stables where King Augeas kept his hundreds of divine cattle had not been maintained in ages. Hercules promised to clean them in one day if he could keep one-tenth of the livestock. Augeas expected the hero to fail. Instead, Hercules dug massive trenches, rerouting two nearby rivers to flow through the stables until they were spotless. Next came three more beastly foes, each requiring a clever strategy to defeat. The carnivorous Stymphalian birds nested in an impenetrable swamp, but Hercules used Athena’s special rattle to frighten them into the air, at which point he shot them down. No mortal could stand before the Cretan bull’s mad rampage, but a chokehold from behind did the trick. And the mad King Diomedes, who had trained his horses to devour his guests, got a taste of his own medicine when Hercules wrestled him into his own stables. The ensuing feast calmed the beasts enough for Hercules to bind their mouths. But the ninth labor involved someone more dangerous than any beast, Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. Hercules was to retrieve the belt given to her by her father Ares, the god of war. He sailed to the Amazon land of Themyscira prepared for battle, but the queen was so impressed with the hero and his exploits that she gave the belt willingly. For his tenth labor, Hercules had to steal a herd of magical red cattle from Geryon, a giant with three heads and three bodies. On his way, Hercules was so annoyed by the Libyan desert heat that he shot an arrow at the Sun. The sun god Helios admired the hero’s strength and lent his chariot for the journey to the island of Erytheia. There, Hercules fought off Geryon’s herdsman and his two-headed dog, before killing the giant himself. That should have been the end. But Eurystheus announced that two labors hadn’t counted: the Hydra, because Iolaus had helped Hercules kill it, and the stables, because he’d accepted payment. And so, the hero set about his eleventh task, obtaining golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides nymphs. Hercules began by catching the Old Man of the Sea and holding the shape-shifting water-god until he revealed the garden’s location. Once there, the hero found the titan Atlas holding up the heavens. Hercules offered to take his place if Atlas would retrieve the apples. Atlas eagerly complied, but Hercules then tricked him into trading places again, escaping with apples in hand. The twelfth and final task was to bring back Cerberus, the three-headed hound guarding the underworld. Helped by Hermes and Athena, Hercules descended and met Hades himself. The lord of the dead allowed Hercules to take the beast if he could do it without weapons, which he achieved by grabbing all three of its heads at once. When he presented the hound to a horrified Eurystheus, the king finally declared the hero’s service complete. After 12 years of toil, Hercules had redeemed the tragic deaths of his family and earned a place in the divine pantheon. But his victory held an even deeper importance. In overcoming the chaotic and monstrous forces of the world, the hero swept away what remained of the Titans’ primordial order, reshaping it into one where humanity could thrive. Through his labors, Hercules tamed the world’s madness by atoning for his own. |
What happened when we tested thousands of abandoned rape kits in Detroit | {0: 'Kym Loren Worthy is the prosecutor of Wayne County, Michigan, home to Detroit.'} | TED@UPS | In 2009, in August, my office weathered two major scandals. The first was the arrest, trying and conviction and subsequent incarceration of Detroit's very popular mayor. The second caused the Detroit police department crime lab to be closed. I thought nothing else could go wrong. And then the phone rang. (Laughter) It was the deputy chief of my special victim's unit, who was breathless on the other end of the line. He said, "Boss, you are never going to believe what I just saw." I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, because I knew instinctively that Detroit was getting ready to suffer its third major scandal, in just over one year. He told me that he had just visited what he thought was an abandoned warehouse where the Detroit police department was storing evidence. Inside were 11,341 abandoned, untested rape kits. Some of them went back to the 1980s. And some of them now are over 40 years old. These kits were spilling out of large, black garbage bags and empty oil drums. Each kit represented a victim, mostly a female, that had suffered a violent sexual assault. Each of them voluntarily endured an hours-long rape kit process, with the hopes that as a result of that they would find their perpetrator. And unbeknownst to all of them, all 11,341, those kits were never tested. I cannot even begin to describe — oh! And by the way, before I move on, in the interim of those 40 years, those perpetrators were allowed to continue to offend with impunity. I cannot tell you or describe to you how outraged, mad and angry I was. I myself was a victim of sexual assault, back many decades ago, when I was in law school. I also am the mother of three girls, a 21-year-old and nine-year-old twins. I was even more horrified to learn — if I could be more horrified — that the oldest of those kits — one of the oldest of those kits — belonged to an eight-year-old girl. I'm going to tell you her story, but I'm going to call her Natasha. On January 2, 1990, Natasha was at home and a man knocked on her door. This man was familiar with her neighborhood and was familiar with the comings and goings of her family, but Natasha did not know him. He told her that her grandmother, the only mother that she had ever known, had been in a terrible accident and was laying on a couch in his house, calling for her. Terrified that Natasha was going to lose her grandmother, she went with him. But of course, we all know her grandmother was not there. Once he had isolated Natasha, who was eight years old, he began to rape her violently. He raped her with his mouth, his fingers and his penis. And he even forced his penis into her mouth. When he was done, he ordered Natasha to get dressed, he got dressed himself, and he put a blindfold across her head. And walked her to a factory area on the edge of the neighborhood. He asked her if she knew — he removed the blindfold, and asked her if she knew how to get home from there. And when she indicated that she did, he let her go and he walked off. Natasha's rape was reported immediately, and a rape kit was done. Now, the rape kit process terrifies and traumatizes adult women. Can you imagine what it was like for a little second-grader, who still wore pigtails and still believed in Santa Claus, going through this exam? Natasha's kit sat on the shelf in that abandoned warehouse for 26 years. Pamela, 19 years old — I'll call her Pamela, that's not her real name — nineteen years old, was walking down the street after she had come from visiting her boyfriend. She was grabbed from behind, and she felt what she thought was a gun, in her side. She was taken to an abandoned house, to a bedroom in that house, that was filled with trash. Every time she tried to resist, he would hit her about the face and the head. He violently raped her on the floor of that bedroom that was filled with garbage. When he was done, he put on his clothes, he stole her money, and he just walked away. Pamela also reported her rape right away. She also had a rape kit done. And like Natasha's, her kit sat on the shelf for 15 years. Now, criminals, like people who raped Natasha and Pamela, often leave their DNA at a crime scene. But for a rape victim, their body is the crime scene. So many elect to go through this hours-long rape kit process that requires every inch and orifice of a victim's body to be combed, swabbed and photographed. All right after a violent sexual assault. The reason that most people do this, who have a rape kit, is because they want the forensic scientists to study that rape kit. And hopefully come up with a genetic profile that will help identify their perpetrator. Once forensic scientists come up with this genetic profile, they enter it into CODIS, hopefully have a match. CODIS is filled with DNA profiles of people who are arrested and/or convicted of certain prescribed offenses. If in fact a profile is made and entered into CODIS, it can help identify a perpetrator in the matter of minutes. CODIS stands for Combined DNA Index System. Now, how did we get here? Detroit had no money. It cost, at that time that these kits were found, up to 1,500 dollars per kit to have it tested. So, you do the math about how much that was going to cost. In addition to that, within four years of these kits being found in 2009, Detroit would be the largest municipality in the history of the United States to declare bankruptcy. We didn't know what we were going to do. But not only that. As we began to study and investigate how this possibly could have happened, we discovered there were other issues besides just financial ones. During the course of these decades where these kits sat in that warehouse, we discovered there had been multiple changes of police leadership, with different priorities and different agendas. There was woefully inadequate training for sex crimes officers in the police department in general. They were chronically understaffed, and they had other resource issues. And there was perpetual victim blaming when these victims came to report their crimes. That's the rape culture. And because of this victim blaming of someone that had been violently assaulted, some of these victim were even ridiculed into not continuing to proceed with their case. The bottom line is, that 11,341 rape kits sat on that shelf. I wanted transparency. I asked myself: How in the world can we stop this from spreading? I don't want to go through all this work and five, 10 years down the line, figure we have the same issue. At that time, police officers had the sole discretion about whether and when and if they were going to submit the rape kits for testing — any rape kit in their jurisdiction — for testing. That had to change. We had to take that discretion away from police officers, and pass state laws to ensure that every rape kit released by the victim to law enforcement is tested immediately. I also knew that there had to be some kind of system to keep everybody honest and to keep everybody accountable, put in place, where we knew where these rape kits were, at any given time. The answer was simple. Think about all of the hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of packages, that are moved by a logistics company every day. They are scanned and tracked, and they know where they are, at every bend and turn, from the time that they're stored in the warehouse, until the time that that package arrives on the purchaser's front steps. Why couldn't we do that for rape kits? I had no desire to reinvent the wheel. So I contacted UPS. UPS, within two weeks — two weeks — of our first meeting with UPS, they had come up with a major plan where they involved all the stakeholders — the police officers, the prosecutors, the medical facilities, the forensic nurses, the hospitals, the lab personnel and the victim advocates, could know where the rape kits were at any given time. They sent a team of experts out and fanned the Detroit area, talked to all the stakeholders and developed a plan, and studied the life of a rape kit, from the time the rape kit was collected, through to the time that it was tested in the lab and returned to the police personnel. They also developed a web-based portal that all the stakeholders could look into and see where any given rape kit was at any given time. UPS had the technology, UPS knew how to use that technology to solve our problem, and we didn't. We launched — we, we — UPS and the prosecutor's office — (Laughter) launched this pilot program in Detroit. And we started this process on January 28, 2015, through to May 25 of 2016. And during that period of time — remember, we're not dealing with the ones we found, because they'd already been stored — we're dealing with any new kit that came in as of January 28, 2015. And we knew where that rape kit was. For the 16 months of this project, we didn't lose a single rape kit. Not a single one. We knew where they all were. (Applause) This project went on until the state of Michigan, the elected officials in state government, took notice of everything that UPS was doing. And everything that my office was doing. And they decided that they were going to use state funds to develop a state-wide tracking system. Not in just Detroit, but state-wide tracking system. Hopefully, that system will be up and running soon. But I loved working with UPS. I loved their innovation, I loved how fast they worked, I loved their unorthodox approach to ideas to solve an everyday, common problem, whose solution should be simple. So, after working with them I knew that even with one company, working on one issue, the progress that could be made. We've been at this now for nine years. And it was nine years ago that we rescued those rape kits from the warehouse. That warehouse has since been torn down. But all of the kits have either been tested, or are in the final stages of being tested. We still have a lot of work to do in terms of investigation and prosecution of those cases, but our rape kit issue, in terms of testing, is done. As of June 28, 2018, our CODIS hits have showed us and identified 2,600 suspects. We have identified 861 serial rapists. Just within this project. That means 861 potential defendants that have raped within the project two or more times. And 50 to 75 of them have raped 10 to 15 times a piece. In one city, in one state. Also, the CODIS results that we have have tentacles to crime scenes, have linkages in 40 states in the United States. Forty of the 50 states have tentacles to our crime testing of these rape kits. From Alaska to Florida and from Maine to the most southern parts of California. A sea to shining sea, string of CODIS hits. Natasha is now 36 years old. When she heard about the work that we were doing with the rape kits, she contacted my office, the Wayne County prosecutor's office. Her kit was eventually tested. And it had identified Paul Warwick. In the interim, Paul Warwick had raped two more women. One in the state of Colorado. Paul Warwick is now serving a sentence in the Michigan Department of Corrections, in prison, of 15 to 40 years. (Applause) Pamela's kit was also tested. And her kit led to the identification — her CODIS hit on her kit — led to the identification of Bernard Peterson. In the interim, Bernard Peterson raped 10 more women. Each of those women had a rape kit done. And each of those women's rape kits sat on that shelf next to Pamela's. For a varying number of years. Bernard Peterson is now serving a sentence in the Michigan Department of Corrections, concurrently — that means at the same time — of 60 to 90 years, and 90 years to 125 years, for the rapes that he committed. (Applause) We still have a lot of work to be done. And we desperately need the help of the private sector. We need the help of the tech industry. To help us develop — not help us, we want them to develop — information management systems, so we can all talk to each other and stop these perpetrators from raping and maiming and killing with impunity. We also need help from those of you with marketing and advertisement backgrounds. We need you, desperately we need you, to develop campaigns for our children and other people to listen to, so we can stop the culture, change the culture of rape victims being too afraid to come forward because of what may happen to them. UPS was one company, as I said. They helped us with their innovation, and they revolutionized the way that we can track rape kits. Every single aspect of our lives is tracked. Every like, every mood, shopping history, browsing history, reading history, our entire web history is tracked these days. What if we could track the activities and the comings and goings of criminals who commit crimes? Just like people track every aspect of our lives. In 2015, the Obama White House and the US Department of Justice put the number of untested, abandoned rape kits at 400,000, across this country. Four hundred thousand. That's a national pandemic. We know where a lot of those kits are. Our testing showed that women were raped waiting in their cars, waiting for friends, on their way to work, on their way from work, at gas stations, at shopping malls. And even one of the first cases that we did when these rape kits were starting to be tested, was a man who came into the window and got into the bed and raped a woman who was in bed with her two children. He raped her while he was in bed with her two children. Every time I look at a rape victim that comes into my office, because their case is being called or they're being interviewed by the prosecutor, they are being prepped for case, I look into their eyes and I think to myself, they didn't have to be one of the ones that was raped. They didn't have to be one of those victims. And maybe they would not have been, if these rape kits had been tested timely. How many more Pamelas are in this world? How many more Natashas are in this world? We may never know. But what I do know is that you have the technology, you know how to use it and you can help us solve the problem of rape kits being stockpiled. Thank you. (Applause) |
How to build a thriving music scene in your city | {0: 'Elizabeth Cawein is dedicated to the belief that smart cities are music cities.'} | TEDxMemphis | Each of these songs represents a scene, a movement, in some cases, a sonic revolution that completely altered the course of popular music. They're all also calling cards, almost, for those cities, songs totally linked with their city's identity, and it might be why you probably consider them to be music cities. Now, the magical mythical thing, the thing we kind of all love about stories like these is that those cities weren't doing anything in particular to make those moments happen. There's no formula for capturing lightning in a bottle. A formula didn't give us grunge music or introduce Tupac to Dr. Dre, and there's definitely no blueprint for how to open your record business in a South Memphis neighborhood that, turns out, is home to Booker T. Jones, William Bell and Albert King. So this is just something that happens, then, right? When the stars perfectly align, great music just happens. And in the meantime, New York and Nashville can churn out the hits that come through our radios, define our generations and soundtrack our weddings and our funerals and everything in between. Well, I don't know about you, but the very idea of that is just deadly boring to me. There are musicians all around you, making powerful, important music, and thanks to the internet and its limitless possibilities for creators to create music and fans to discover that music, those zeitgeist songs don't have to be handed down to us from some conference room full of songwriters in a corporate high-rise. But also, and more importantly, we can't decide that it's just something that happens, because music is about so much more than hits, those big, iconic moments that change everything. It's more than just entertainment. For so many of us, music is truly a way to navigate life. A means of self-expression, sure, but it also helps us find our self-worth and figure out who we are. It connects us with other people as almost nothing else can, across language barriers, across social and cultural and economic divides. Music makes us smarter and healthier and happier. Music is necessary. What if you lived in a city that believed that, that said, "We're not waiting for that hit song to define us. We're a music city because music is necessary." By seeing music as necessary, a city can build two things: first, an ecosystem to support the development of professional musicians and music business; and second, a receptive and engaged audience to sustain them. And those are the two critical elements of a music city, a city whose leaders recognize the importance of music for our development as individuals, our connection as a community and our viability as a vibrant place to live. See, smart cities, music cities, know that thriving nightlife, a creative class, culture is what attracts young, talented people to cities. It's what brings that lightning. And no, we can't predict the next egg that will hatch, but we can create a city that acts like an incubator. To do that, first, we've got to know what we've got. That means identifying and quantifying our assets. We need to know them backward and forward, from who and what and where they are to what their impact is on the economy. Let's count our recording studios and our record labels, our historic landmarks and our hard-core punk clubs. We should count monthly free jazz nights and weekly folk jams, music schools, artist development, instrument shops, every lathe and every luthier, music museums open year round and music festivals open just one weekend a year. Now, ideally through this process, we'll create an actual asset map, dropping a pin for each one, allowing us to see exactly what we've got and where organic momentum is already happening. Because it's not enough to paint in broad strokes here. When it comes to specific support for music locally and a broad understanding of a music brand nationally, you've got to have the receipts. Next, we'll need to identify our challenges. Now, it's important to know that, for the most part, this won't be just the opposite of step one. We won't gain a whole lot by simply thinking about what's missing from our map. Instead, we need to approach this more holistically. There are lots of music venues on our map. Awesome. But are they struggling? Do we have a venue ladder, which just means, can an artist starting out at a coffee house open mic see a clear path for how they'll grow from that 25-seat room to a hundred-seat room and so on? Or are we expecting them to go from a coffeehouse to a coliseum? Maybe our challenges lie in city infrastructure: public transportation, affordable housing. Maybe, like in London, where the number of music venues went from 400 in 2010 to 100 in 2015, we need to think about protections against gentrification. The mayor of London, in December of last year, actually added something called the "Agent of Change" principle to the city's comprehensive plan. And the name says it all. If a real-estate developer wants to build condos next to an existing music venue, the developer is the agent of change. They have to take the necessary steps for noise mitigation. Next, and this is a very big one, we need leadership, and we need a strategy. Now we know there's a lot of magic in this mix: a lot of right people, right place, right time. And that will never stop being an important element of the way music is made, the way some of the best, most enduring music is made. But there cannot be a leadership vacuum. In 2018, thriving music cities don't often happen and don't have to happen accidentally. We need elected officials who recognize the power of music and elevate the voices of creatives, and they're ready to put a strategy in place. In music cities, from Berlin to Paris to Bogotá, music advisory councils ensure that musicians have a seat at the table. They're volunteer councils, and they work directly with a designated advocate inside of city hall or even the chamber of commerce. The strongest strategies will build music community supports like this one inward while also exporting music outward. They go hand in hand. When we look inward, we create that place that musicians want to live. And when we look outward, we build opportunities for them to advance their career while also driving attention back to our city and leveraging music as a talent-attraction tool. And here's something else that will help with that: we've got to figure out who we are. Now, when I say Austin, you probably think "live music capital." And why? Because in 1991, leadership in Austin saw something percolating with an existing asset, and they chose to own it. By recognizing that momentum, naming it and claiming it, they inevitably caused more live music venues to open, existing spaces to add live music to their repertoire, and they created a swell of civic buy-in around the idea, which meant that it wasn't just a slogan in some tourism pamphlet. It was something that locals really started to believe and take pride in. Now, generally speaking, what Austin created is just an assets-based narrative. And when we think back to step one, we know that every city will not tick every box. Many cities won't have recording studios like Memphis or a songwriter and publishing scene like Nashville, and that's not a dealbreaker. We simply have to find the momentum happening in our city. What are our unique assets in comparison to no other place? So, if all of that sounds like something you'd like to happen where you live, here are three things you can do to move the needle. First, you can use your feet, your ears and your dollars. Show up. Be that receptive and engaged audience that is so necessary for a music city to thrive. Pay a cover charge. Buy a record. Discover new music, and please, take your friends. Two, you can use your voice. Buy into the assets-based narrative. Talk about and celebrate what your city has. And three, you can use your vote. Seek out leadership that doesn't just pay lip service to your city's music, but recognizes its power and is prepared to put a strategy in place to elevate it, grow it and build collaboration. There really is no telling what city could be defined by a certain scene or a certain song in the next decade, but as much as we absolutely cannot predict that, what we absolutely can predict is what happens when we treat music as necessary and we work to build a music city. And that is a place where I want to live. Thank you. (Applause) |
"Chasms" | {0: 'Asali DeVan Ecclesiastes imagines equitable solutions to community and societal problems and works with her community to implement those solutions.'} | TEDWomen 2017 | There are some chasms so deep and so wide, we find it hard to imagine how we'll ever make it to the other side. That space between who we are and who we want to be, the gaps between our high ideals and our base realities. The distance between what we say and what we really mean. The raging river that flows between what actually happened and our convenient memories. The lies we tell ourselves are lakes, overflowing their banks, flooding our speech with waters, caustic and rank. The only bridge is the truth, passing through me and you, as we look one another eye to eye. But so often, that look is filled with our hesitations, and we can't help but glance to the side. See, we've long ago let go of the language with which we describe our softer parts. We learn early that those with softer hearts suffer. So we allow lean emotion to reign, never noticing that only strain has been the fruit of our restraints. We haven't escaped pain. And our battle scars are far from faint. Yet and still, despite our desire and willingness to heal, we often find ourselves fighting hard in the paint, holding onto false images of everything we ain't. So while our dream coincide, our fears collide. And we want to know one another, but think we can't. The gulf between empathy and equity is as unfathomable as the fissures that line our collective integrity. And we spend eternal eternities trying to translate that into virtue. Perhaps you have met one or two of the virtuous on your path. They are only very few, and I know that I have, from time to time, mistaken pretenders for real, yet still make room for the possibility that it's I who's been pretending. Please, bear with me, I'm still mending, but I'm no longer bending to the will of my injuries, nor my injurers. I much prefer to stretch my arms like Nüt until I become the sky. I'd rather stretch my tongue with truth, our bridge to cross when we look one another in the eye. But the tongue, like the heart, gets tired. The weak make it hard for the strong to stay inspired, like the lost prevent the found from escaping the mire, and the degraded stop the enlightened from taking us higher. But no matter what you hear from the mouths of these liars, we are one people with one destiny and the common enemy, that's why it really stresses me to see our hearts so tattered, our minds so scattered, our egos so easily flattered. We're enslaved, yet think of our shackles as gifts. Rather than resist our masters, we let them widen our rifts, like mindless, material junkies, we seek that which lowers, not lifts. But somewhere in our midst, there's been a paradigm shift. Justice is getting restless in its chains. Our youth find it useless to separate their souls from their brains, their truth is ingrained, their integrity insustained. Let me call your attention to those who serve as examples. Those who daily give their all, but their reserves are still ample. Those who battle friend and foe, yet their hope is never trampled, they make music, never sample, and the world's ugly could never cancel the fullness and the sweetness of their composition. Nor the unadulterated truth of their mission. It's time we shut our mouths and listen. Close our eyes and pray for the humility and the guidance to follow them to the way. Thank you. (Applause) (Cheers) Thank you. (Applause) (Cheers) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you all so much, you have no idea how fulfilling and energizing that is. For the past three years, I've had the privilege of codesigning with my neighbors a space in New Orleans known as Under the Bridge. In 1966, Interstate 10 landed on the Tremé neighborhood, displacing 326 black-owned businesses, over 300 live oak trees, effectively destroying the region's most successful black commercial district, disrupting intergenerational wealth and truly unraveling the fabric of the nation's oldest African American neighborhood. Today, after 45 years of community advocacy, after 500 hours of community engagement and 80 hours of community design, we are so excited that in 2018, after capturing the voices of thousands of residents and the support of our local, federal and philanthropic partners, as the city celebrates 300 years of transforming the world, we will get to transform 19 blocks under the Interstate into community space, into black-owned businesses, in the form of the Claiborne Corridor Cultural Innovation District. (Cheers) (Applause) We will be bridging time, we will bridge memory, we will bridge disparity and injustice, and we can't wait to see you all on the other side. Thank you. (Applause) |
The "End of History" Illusion | null | TED-Ed | When trains began to shuttle people across the coutryside, many insisted they would never replace horses. Less than a century later, people repeated that same prediction about cars, telephones, radio, television, and computers. Each had their own host of detractors. Even some experts insisted they wouldn’t catch on. Of course, we can’t predict exactly what the future will look like or what new inventions will populate it. But time and time again, we’ve also failed to predict that the technologies of the present will change the future. And recent research has revealed a similar pattern in our individual lives: we’re unable to predict change in ourselves. Three psychologists documented our inability to predict personal change in a 2013 paper called, “The End of History Illusion.” Named after political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s prediction that liberal democracy was the final form of government, or as he called it, “the end of history,” their work highlights the way we see ourselves as finished products at any given moment. The researchers recruited over 7,000 participants ages 18 to 68. They asked half of these participants to report their current personality traits, values, and preferences, along with what each of those metrics had been ten years before. The other half described those features in their present selves, and predicted what they would be ten years in the future. Based on these answers, the researchers then calculated the degree of change each participant reported or predicted. For every age group in the sample, they compared the predicted changes to the reported changes. So they compared the degree to which 18-year-olds thought they would change to the degree to which 28-year-olds reported they had changed. Overwhelmingly, at all ages, people’s future estimates of change came up short compared to the changes their older counterparts recalled. 20-year-olds expected to still like the same foods at 30, but 30-year-olds no longer had the same tastes. 30-year-olds predicted they’d still have the same best friend at 40, but 40-year-olds had lost touch with theirs. And 40-year-olds predicted they’d maintain the same core values that 50-year-olds had reconsidered. While older people changed less than younger people on the whole, they underestimated their capacity for change just as much. Wherever we are in life, the end of history illusion persists: we tend to think that the bulk of our personal change is behind us. One consequence of this thinking is that we’re inclined to overinvest in future choices based on present preferences. On average, people are willing to pay about 60% more to see their current favorite musician ten years in the future than they’d currently pay to see their favorite musician from ten years ago. While the stakes involved in concert-going are low, we’re susceptible to similar miscalculations in more serious commitments, like homes, partners, and jobs. At the same time, there’s no real way to predict what our preferences will be in the future. Without the end of history Illusion, it would be difficult to make any long-term plans. So the end of history illusion applies to our individual lives, but what about the wider world? Could we be assuming that how things are now is how they will continue to be? If so, fortunately, there are countless records to remind us that the world does change, sometimes for the better. Our own historical moment isn’t the end of history, and that can be just as much a source of comfort as a cause for concern. |
Intimate photos of a senior love triangle | {0: 'Isadora Kosofsky embeds herself in the lives of others, documenting them in their most fragile moments.'} | TED2018 | Jeanie, Will and Adina are three senior citizens connected by a special relationship. They view their bond as a shield from the loneliness of aging. I first met them at a retirement home in Los Angeles, where I had been photographing for three years. I saw as they approached the gate one night, and felt an immediate connection to them. Although I didn't know the details of their love triangle, I intuitively felt that I had to find out who they were. Questioning a nurse a day later, she said to me, "Oh, you're talking about the threesome." (Laughter) I was intrigued. (Laughter) The trio set out on a daily adventure to coffee and doughnut shops, bus stops and street corners. I soon learned that the purpose of these outings was solace and a search for meaning. The trio sought to combat their alienation by literally integrating themselves in public streets. Yet, even when arm in arm, no one saw them. We often think that as we age, we lose the desires held in our youth. Actually, as a teenage photojournalist when I met the trio, I saw their behavior as a mirror to the fears of exclusion and desires for intimacy that I also carried. I related to their invisibility, which pained me during my childhood but has become my greatest asset as an immersive documentarian, because I can just fade into my empathy. As we walked down the streets of Hollywood, in a neighborhood of screenwriters, actors and filmmakers, the trio assumed the invisibility that each senior does. I would ask myself, "How is it that no one else sees these three human beings? Why is it that I am the only one who sees them?" Years later, as I began to share this work with the public, I noticed that people are largely uncomfortable with this story. Perhaps it is because the trio doesn't assume conventional notions associated with love, romance or partnership. They were unseen in public and shunned by their peers. They wanted to belong somewhere but only seemed to belong with each other. I wanted to belong somewhere, too. And my camera has been a catalyst for me to belong everywhere. But beyond challenging sociocultural norms about the elderly, the trio sheds light on fear of remoteness. At the end of each day, they return to their respective retirement homes. Under the surface of their aloneness, there is a desire for community, for their people. There was a sense that they were each yearning for their tribe, but that comfort comes with compromise, because Will cannot commit to one woman. Sitting with Jeanie one day in her apartment, she said to me, "Sharing Will is a thorn in your side. A relationship between a man and a woman is private. It is a couple, not a trio." My process is to essentially become the people I document by spending years with them as an observer-occupant, to create a safe space, to then become hidden in plain sight. I was about 17 when I met the trio, and I shadowed them for four years. We actually see, in the breakdown of social development, that adolescence and old age look strikingly alike, because both are periods of identity confusion. I identified with the women. But also with Will, who made me aware of the divide in me. The schism that we each often have about what we crave and the actuality of our situation. Before shooting this series, I was also in love with two different people who knew about each other, being the object over which they fought. But I also knew what it was like to be at the base of the triangle, like Jeanie or Adina, asking myself, "Why aren't I enough?" I would look through my viewfinder and see three elderly figures, and it became impossible to deny that regardless of age, we were each in pursuit of filling the proverbial hole through other people. Perhaps the discomfort of looking at Jeanie, Will and Adina's story is truly a reminder that even at the end of life, we may never reach the fantasy we have envisioned for ourselves. Thank you for listening. (Applause) |
3 lessons on decision-making from a poker champion | {0: 'Liv Boeree investigates how we make better decisions in an uncertain world.'} | TED2018 | So I'm a professional poker player, and today, I want to talk about three things that the game has taught me around decision-making that I find apply to everyday life. Now the first of these things is about luck. Now, like poker, life is also a game of skill and luck, and when it comes to the biggest things we care about — health, wealth and relationships — these outcomes don't only depend on the quality of our decision-making, but also the roll of life's dice. For example, we can be perfectly health-conscious and still get unlucky with something like cancer. Or we can smoke 20 a day and live to a ripe old age, and this kind of ambiguity can make it hard for us to know how good our strategies are, sometimes, especially when we're experiencing a lot of success. For example, back in 2010, I won a really big poker tournament known as the European Poker Tour. And because I'd only been playing full-time for about a year, when I won, I assumed I must be rather brilliant. In fact, I thought I was so brilliant that I not only got rather lazy with studying the game, but I also got more risky, started playing in the biggest tournaments I could against the very best in the world. And then my profit graph went from a thing of beauty to something kind of sad, with this worrying downhill trend for a long time, until I finally realized that I was overestimating my skill level, and got my act together. And this kind of reminds me of what we've been seeing in the cryptocurrency space, at least in 2017, where the only thing that's been going up faster than the markets themselves is the number of "senior investment specialists" who have been appearing out of nowhere. Now I'm not saying it's not possible to have a strategic edge, but at the same time, it's very easy to feel like a genius when you're in a market that's going up so fast that even the worst strategies are making a profit. So when we're experiencing success, it's important to take a moment to really ask ourselves how much of it is truly down to us, because our egos love to downplay the luck factor when we're winning. Now, a second thing poker taught me is the importance of quantifying my thinking. When you're playing, you can't just get away with going, "Eh, they're probably bluffing." That's just going to lose you a bunch of money, because poker is a game of probabilities and precision, and so you have to train yourself to think in numbers. So now, whenever I catch myself thinking vaguely about something really important, like, "It's unlikely I'll forget what I want to say in my TED Talk," I now try to estimate it numerically. (Laughter) Trust me, it helps a lot with the planning process. And the thing is, almost anything that could possibly happen here today, or at any point in the future, can also be expressed as a probability, too. (Laughter) So now I also try to speak in numbers as well. So if someone asks me, "Hey, Liv, do you think you're going to come along to that thing tonight?" instead of just saying to them, "Yeah, probably," I actually give them my best estimate — say, 60 percent. Because — I know that sounds a little odd — but the thing is, I ran a poll on Twitter of what people understand the word "probably" to mean, and this was the spread of answers. Enormous! So apparently, it's absolutely useless at actually conveying any real information. So if you guys catch yourselves using these vague words, like "probably" or "sometimes," try, instead, using numbers, because when we speak in numbers, we know what lands in the other person's brain. Now, the third thing I want to touch on today is intuition. How often have you seen these kinds of inspirational memes in your Facebook feed? [Always trust your gut feeling and never second-guess.] They're nice, right? It's lovely. Yes. "Trust your soul." Well, they're terrible advice. These are some of the best poker players in the world right now. Do they look like people who live purely off feelings and intuitions? (Laughter) Look at them! Obviously, these guys are about slow, careful analysis, and that's because the game has outgrown the days where pure street smarts and people-reading can get you to the top. And that's because our intuitions aren't nearly as perfect as we'd like to believe. I mean, it'd be great, whenever we're in a tough spot, to just have an answer appear to us from some magical source of inspiration. But in reality, our gut is extremely vulnerable to all kinds of wishful thinking and biases. So then, what is our gut good for? Well, all the studies I've read conclude that it's best-suited for everyday things that we have lots and lots of experience in, like how we just know that our friend is mad at us before we've even said anything to them, or whether we can fit our car into a tight parking spot. But when it comes to the really big stuff, like what's our career path going to be or who should we marry, why should we assume that our intuitions are better calibrated for these than slow, proper analysis? I mean, they don't have any data to be based off. So my third lesson is, while we shouldn't ignore our intuitions, we shouldn't overprivilege them either. And I'd like to summarize these three lessons today with my own set of memes, with more of a poker-player twist. "Success is sweetest when you achieve it across a large sample size." (Laughter) "Your gut is your friend and so is a cost-benefit analysis. (Laughter) "The future is unknown, but you can damn well try and estimate it." Thank you. (Applause) |
What's a smartphone made of? | null | TED-Ed | As of 2018, there are around 2.5 billion smartphone users in the world. If we broke open all their newest phones, which are just a fraction of the total that’ve been built, and split them into their component parts, that would produce around 85,000 kilograms of gold, 875,000 of silver, and 40 million kilograms of copper. How did this precious cache get into our phones, and can we reclaim it? Gold, silver, and copper are actually just a few of the 70 or so chemical elements that make up the average smartphone. These can be divided into different groups, two of the most critical being rare earth elements and precious metals. Rare earths are a selection of 17 elements that are actually common in Earth’s crust and are found in many areas across the world in low concentrations. These elements have a huge range of magnetic, phosphorescent, and conductive properties that make them crucial to modern technologies. In fact, of the 17 types of rare earth metals, phones and other electronics may contain up to 16. In smartphones, these create the screen and color display, aid conductivity, and produce the signature vibrations, amongst other things. And yet, crucial as they are, extracting these elements from the earth is linked to some disturbing environmental impacts. Rare earth elements can often be found, but in many areas, it’s not economically feasible to extract them due to low concentrations. Much of the time, extracting them requires a method called open pit mining that exposes vast areas of land. This form of mining destroys huge swaths of natural habitats, and causes air and water pollution, threatening the health of nearby communities. Another group of ingredients in smartphones comes with similar environmental risks: these are metals such as copper, silver, palladium, aluminum, platinum, tungsten, tin, lead, and gold. We also mine magnesium, lithium, silica, and potassium to make phones, and all of it is associated with vast habitat destruction, as well as air and water pollution. Mining comes with worrying social problems, too, like large-scale human and animal displacement to make way for industrial operations, and frequently, poor working conditions for laborers. Lastly, phone production also requires petroleum, one of the main drivers of climate change. That entwines our smartphones inextricably with this growing planetary conundrum. And, what’s more, the ingredients we mine to make our phones aren’t infinite. One day, they’ll simply run out, and we haven’t yet discovered effective replacements for some. Despite this, the number of smartphones is on a steady increase; by 2019 it’s predicted that there’ll be close to 3 billion in use. This means that reclaiming the bounty within our phones is swiftly becoming a necessity. So, if you have an old phone, you might want to consider your options before throwing it away. To minimize waste, you could donate it to a charity for reuse, take it to an e-waste recycling facility, or look for a company that refurbishes old models. However, even recycling companies need our scrutiny. Just as the production of smartphones comes with social and environmental problems, dismantling them does too. E-waste is sometimes intentionally exported to countries where labor is cheap but working conditions are poor. Vast workforces, often made up of women and children, may be underpaid, lack the training to safely disassemble phones, and be exposed to elements like lead and mercury, which can permanently damage their nervous systems. Phone waste can also end up in huge dump sites, leaching toxic chemicals into the soil and water, mirroring the problems of the mines where the elements originated. A phone is much more than it appears to be on the surface. It’s an assemblage of elements from multiple countries, linked to impacts that are unfolding on a global scale. So, until someone invents a completely sustainable smartphone, we’ll need to come to terms with how this technology affects widespread places and people. |
How we can make energy more affordable for low-income families | {0: 'DeAndrea Salvador reshapes the way we use and engage with energy.'} | TED2018 | So, as a child, I used to spend all of my time at my great-grandmother's house. On hot, humid, summer days, I would dash across the floor and stick my face in front of her only air conditioner. But I didn't realize that that simple experience, though brief, was a privileged one in our community. Growing up, stories of next-door neighbors having to set up fake energy accounts or having to steal energy seemed normal to me. During the winter, struggling to get warm, my neighbors would have no choice but to bypass the meter after their heat was shut off, just to keep their family comfortable for one more day. These kinds of dangerous incidents can take root when people are faced with impossible choices. In the US, the average American spends three percent of their income on energy. In contrast, low-income and rural populations can spend 20, even 30 percent of their income on energy. In 2015, this caused over 25 million people to skip meals to provide power to their homes. This is when energy becomes a burden. But energy burdens are so much more than just a number. They present impossible and perilous choices: Do you take your child to get her flu medicine, or do you feed her? Or do you keep her warm? It's an impossible choice, and nearly every month, seven million people choose between medicine and energy. This exposes a much larger and systemic issue. Families with high energy burdens are disproportionately people of color, who spend more per square foot than their white counterparts. But it's also nurses, veterans and even schoolteachers who fall into the mass of 37 million people a year who are unable to afford energy for their most basic needs. As a result, those with high energy burdens have a greater likelihood of conditions like heart disease and asthma. Look — given our rockets to Mars and our pocket-sized AI, we have the tools to address these systemic inequities. The technology is here. Cost of renewables, insulation, microgrids and smart home technology are all decreasing. However, even as we approach cost parity, the majority of those who own solar earn much more than the average American. This is why, when I was 22, I founded the nonprofit RETI. Our mission is to alleviate energy burdens by working with communities, utilities and government agencies alike to provide equitable access to clean energy, energy efficiency and energy technology. But there's no one way to solve this. I believe in the power of local communities, in the transforming effect of relationships. So we start by working directly with the communities that have the highest energy burdens. We host workshops and events for communities to learn about energy poverty, and how making even small updates to their homes like better insulation for windows and water heaters can go a long way to maximize efficiency. We're connecting neighborhoods to community solar and spearheading community-led smart home research and installation programs to help families bring down their energy bills. We're even working directly with elected officials, advocating for more equitable pricing, because to see this vision of energy equity and resilience succeed, we have to work together sustainably. Now, the US spends over three billion a year on energy bill payment assistance. And these programs do help millions of people, but they're only able to help a fraction of those in need. In fact, there is a 47-billion-dollar home-energy affordability gap, so assistance alone is not sustainable. But by building energy equity and resilience into our communities, we can assure fair and impartial access to energy that is clean, reliable and affordable. At scale, microgrid technology, clean technology and energy efficiency dramatically improve public health. And for those with high energy burdens, it can help them reclaim 20 percent of their income — 20 percent of a person's income who's struggling to make ends meet. This is life-changing. This is an opportunity for families to use their energy savings to sponsor their future. I think back to my great-grandmother and her neighbors, the impossible choices that they had to make and the effect it had on our whole community. But this is not just about them. There are millions nationwide having to make the same impossible choices today. And I know high energy burdens are a tremendous barrier to overcome, but through relationships with communities and technology, we have the paths to overcome them. And when we do, we will all be more resilient. Thank you. (Applause) |
What playing Monopoly with real money taught me about my kids--and humanity | {0: 'Adam Carroll is quickly being recognized as one of the top transformational trainers in the country.\xa0Having presented at over 500 colleges and Universities nationwide, hundreds of leadership symposiums, and countless local and regional organizations, Adam Carroll’s message of Building A Bigger Life, Not a Bigger Lifestyle has been heard by over 200,000+ people.\r\nIn early 2014, Adam successfully crowd-funded a documentary on student loan debt, raising nearly $70,000 in 45 days. The film, Broke Busted & Disgusted is due out in early 2015 and is already garnering critical acclaim. The mission of the film is to start a national debate about changing the way we fund college and not crippling 20 somethings with mountains of debt.\r\nAdam’s core message is we are all after the same thing – to relentlessly pursue our passions, live simply and happily, and make a difference to those around us.'} | TEDxLondonBusinessSchool | I recently completed an unsanctioned, unsupervised psychological experiment on my children, (Laughter) the premise of which was $10,000 in cash on the kitchen table and a sign next to it that said 'Don't touch the money yet!', and before I dive into it, you should know that we are a game-playing family. We play ball games, board games, dice games, card games, all sorts of games, but the games that my children love to play most are games like Monopoly, and when they play Monopoly, they play marathon games of Monopoly that last hours and hours over days of play. Each of my kids has a unique strategy and personality when they play Monopoly. My daughter, who is 11, she is always the dog. She plays entirely for Chance and Community Chest cards; (Laughter) you can say that she uses the 'luck' strategy. My 9-year-old son is always the car - a very strategic player. He buys all of the Railroads and all of the Utilities and then proceeds to put houses and hotels on the most expensive properties - very savvy. And then his younger brother, who is seven, he buys everything that he lands on with no exception, which is fitting because he is the wheelbarrow. Now, before I tell you how my experiment unfolded, I have to share an observation that led me to the creation of it. One Monopoly marathon, Saturday morning, I was playing with my kids and noticed that they were all playing just outside of the rules of the game. So they were doing things like buying each other out of jail and lending each other money to buy properties, and I found myself going, 'Guys, this is not how this game is played!' to which they'd say, 'Dad, it's fine! We just want her on the board with us', or, 'He can pay me back at the end of the game, when he's flush with cash', and I'm thinking again, 'What am I teaching these kids?' So, I started watching how they were playing - listening to their banter, getting a feel for how they were making decisions - and I had this thought: 'What if they're playing this way because the money isn't real?' It's a concept I've been reading a lot about, lately, 'Financial abstraction', the notion that when money becomes more and more of an idea, less tangible and therefore more abstract, it changes the way we interact with it on a regular basis, and there's anecdotal evidence of abstraction everywhere around us. All you have to do is listen carefully to people who say, 'I loaned my child or grandchild the phone, and a month later, all these errant in-app charges showed up on my bill.' In 2014, Apple reimbursed customers for in-app purchases that were unapproved, mostly by children, to the tune of $32.5 million. This is in a US FTC settlement. In the documentation, it said it was just too easy for kids to make an in-app purchase. The Imagineers at Disney were charged with making the parks 'frictionless' - is what they called it - so they invested a billion dollars in a MagicBand. It's a wearable device that functions as your room key, your park ticket, and your ID and wallet when you're on park property. So if your child wants a set of ears and a dessert in the Magic Kingdom, 'bibbidi-bobbidi-boo' - (Laughter) your vacation just cost a whole lot more, magically. Magically. Lastly, I had a conversation with some teenagers who told me that $100,000 a year really wasn't that much money. I said, 'Really? Why do you think that?' They said, 'Well, we both have $500,000 in our ATM machines on Grand Theft Auto', (Laughter) which is a very popular and somewhat sketchy video game. So as I'm playing with my kids and I'm watching them play, listening to them talk, I thought, 'What if the money were real on the table? Would they play differently?' And so I calculated quickly on the box, 'How much would it take in capital, in currency, to play a physical game of Monopoly with my kids so that they actually tangibly got to feel the money in their hands?' And I estimated, for four or five players, it's about $10,000. So one Friday, I stopped at the bank, I got all the denominations of bills on a Monopoly board with the exception of a $500 bill - hard to get - and on Sunday, I rounded the family up for a high-stakes game of Monopoly, (Laughter) where the winner takes all. All of $20, by the way. All of $20. You have never seen kids' eyes light up the way mine did when I handed each of them $1,500 in starter capital, and you have never seen anyone's eyes light up like my wife's when I took it back on Monday. (Laughter) All of it. Our marathon game only lasted two and a half hours - far shorter and more strategic than most of the games they normally play. True to my hypothesis, two of my three kids actually played differently; my daughter still played the 'luck' card. She was the first one bankrupted, (Laughter) and she happily retired to the living room to read a book. My youngest son, the wheelbarrow, did not buy everything he landed on; instead, he carefully calculated how many rolls away he was from one of his brother's properties and how much he would owe his brother if he landed on said property, and made his decisions based on that. In effect, having real money on the table and a cash prize at the end made him more conservative. And my middle son - very strategic - still bought all of the Railroads, still bought all of the Utilities, but did not buy Boardwalk and Park Place or Mayfair and Park Lane, but instead, he put hotels immediately on Oriental and Baltic Avenue, or Coventry and Leicester Square on the UK version. When I asked him why, in his own words, he said, 'Dad, they're just more affordable properties.' (Laughter) At which point, I cried a tear of pride. (Laughter) So he got it! In the end, my son finished with 28 properties, more cash than he'd ever seen and held in his entire life, and he now knows the meaning of the phrase 'making it rain'. (Laughter) Look how happy he is, (Laughter) and how annoyed his brother and sister are. In the confines of my experiment, there is an idea worth spreading, and it is this: I believe kids today are being raised in a world where money is no longer real; it's actually an illusion, but it has very real consequences. Peter Drucker, famed leadership guru, said banking and finance industries today are less about money and more about information, and yet young people today don't get that information; they don't get the experiences of money, early on. Three researchers from the Centre for Creative Leadership, in a study done two decades ago that's been replicated many, many times, they interviewed over 200 executives in a report called 'Key events in executives' lives'. In this report, they found that of the 200 top-level executives who were the top of their game, all of them had similar characteristics. One of them was that early on in their career, they had been thrust into a leadership role that required them to make decisions that had serious consequences. They also had a mentor in place that helped them appreciate the lessons they were supposed to learn from those experiences. The study created a leadership framework that said, in essence, that someone with potential, if given the opportunity to engage in strategically relevant experiences and given the ability to learn the lessons from those experiences, would have a higher likelihood of success in their career in a leadership capacity. Now if you took that study framework and my $10,000 experiment and looked at it through the kaleidoscope, you would get a statement like this: if kids are given financially-relevant experiences in their life and someone is there to help them learn the lessons from those experiences, they have a higher likelihood of achieving financial success later in life, and in my humble opinion, they need to have them early, and they need to have them often. We under this not-so-subtle societal shift in the way that we pay each other, today. It's estimated there are trillions of dollars circling the globe in our global economy every single day, yet only four percent of that money is actually in coin or currency. The rest is all digital, data packets, ones and zeroes, and today's digital-native youth - they don't see people paying with cash or cheques. In fact, if ever you're in a line, and someone in front pulls out their chequebook to pay, you are liable to say to yourself, 'Really, a chequebook? This is going to take forever.' You're laughing because it's true. The currency of today is digital. Many of these kids equate spending with credit and debit cards, with Google Wallet and Paypal and Zap. All of these are what they equate spending to, and by the way, I am not pooh-poohing the technological advancements in payment technology today - far from it. I think tokenisation and randomisation and biometrics are the wave of the future. The first time that I used Apple Pay, it was like showing the caveman fire. It was amazing. But what snapped me back to reality was hearing my son behind me say, 'I sure wish I had a phone so I could buy stuff.' (Laughter) You see, money, to a young person, is somewhat abstract, anyway, and when we further the abstraction by waving a MagicBand or putting our phone over a sensor and giving the thumbprint, all it does is further the abstraction. It's a recipe for financial disaster later in life to the uneducated because, to a young person, they see money as limitless because they have no concept of the backend until it comes around to bite them in the back end. I've seen this firsthand in my work with university students - young people who borrow and spend untold amounts of money, having no concept or understanding of the increase in payments, the decrease in lifestyle, and the challenges they'll face later on. In the UK and the US, student debt is ballooning problem. In the US, we're at $1.2 trillion in student loan debt, second only to mortgage debt in the US. One in three students is delinquent. One in five is in default. It's a huge problem, and the reason that this is concerning for all of us as a global economy is this: Dun & Bradstreet found that people spend 12 to 18 percent more when using credit cards over cash. They have yet to do a study how much more we'll spend with a MagicBand or a phone, but I can imagine it would be 15 to 20 percent, or 18 to 25 percent, and all you need to do is read the headlines in the newspapers and magazines across the world today. Places like The Guardian, The Washington Post, Fortune, Forbes - these are the headlines we're seeing: 'New consumer debt reaching a seven-year high' in the UK, 'Consumer debt hitting an all-time high' in the US, 'Choking on credit card debt', 'The credit card debt crisis: the next economic domino'. It's what happens when people overspend and get in over their head with money. Unfortunately, The Money Charity says that in the UK right now, one person every five minutes and three seconds is either declared insolvent or bankrupt. To put this into perspective, since I started speaking today, two people in this country have declared bankruptcy. In the UK, Demos.org says that Americans aged 25 to 34 have the second highest rate of bankruptcy. 25-year-olds. Everyone's question should be, 'Why? Why is this happening?', and in my simplistic view, it is this: because the money they're spending isn't real - it's an abstraction. So to stem this tide with the next generation, we have to bring them up to understand that they are living in a world where they have to make very real money decisions, in a world money is largely an illusion but has very, very real consequences. Because I want your children and mine to be super successful financially, consider any of the following: If you are going to spend money on children, give them a set amount of money and let them spend it. Let them tangibly feel the money go through their hands. Let them succeed or fail with minor consequences so that later in life, when they're making the major decisions, they understand there are major consequences that go along. For older kids, it's this: set a budgeted amount for school clothes, supplies and what-have-you, give them that amount, and when they are done spending it, it's done. And here's the key; they get to spend it with your subtle guidance, your subtle mentorship, your subtle supervision, and whether you call it an allowance, you call it commission for chores or you call it a weekly stipend, every single child, from the age of five on up, needs to be given some tangible amount of money on a weekly basis so that they understand how to function in a cashless society someday. Better to teach the young the habit of saving when they have a little bit of money to save than try to teach savings when they have no money because they're in over their head. I met an American named José. He was a 20-year-old student at an American university. He was the child of two Cuban-born parents. At the age of 15, his parents told him, 'José, we will give you food, we will give you shelter and we will give you $50 a month, but the rest is up to you.' I asked him, 'What was that like?' He said, 'Clothing, toiletries, school supplies, entertainment, gas - it was all on me. I resented my parents for a year. But you know what? I realised it was the single best thing they could have ever done for me.' When I met José at 20, he was on a full-ride scholarship at the university he attended. He had $20,000 saved in a savings account from working part-time in high school, and this kid exuded financial prowess and unmistakable leadership potential. At the heart of my message today is this: it does not take a $10,000 board game and it doesn't take cutting kids off financially to make a difference. The first step is, honestly, quite easy. It's about educating the next generation to make decisions in a world where money is largely an illusion but has very, very real consequences, and the reason it's so important for all of us, as a global society, to do this is this next generation coming up will inherit the global economy that we are handing to them, and we will precariously place it on their shoulders. We owe it to them to set them up for financial success. Thank you. (Applause) Thanks. (Applause) |
What doctors should know about gender identity | {0: 'Kristie Overstreet works with individuals to help strengthen their relationship with themselves and others.'} | TEDxLivoniaCCLibrary | About six months into my career as a therapist, I was working at a drug and alcohol rehab facility. I got a call from one of the nurses down at the detox unit. She asked me to come down and assess one of the new patients that had arrived earlier in the day. So I went down to the unit and had the pleasure of meeting Anne. Anne's a transgender female, and as her and I started talking, she was sharing with me about what brought her into treatment, but I could hear this fear in her voice, and I could see this worry in her eyes, and she began to tell me that she didn't fear coming into rehab and having to give up drugs and alcohol. Her fear was that the doctors that were going to be treating her would not treat her as her female self. She then told me about this ongoing pain that she has experienced her whole life of being assigned male but knowing she's female. And what she meant by that is, when she was born, the doctor held her up to her parents and based on her genitalia said, "It's a boy." She always knew she wasn't a boy. Many years passed and the feelings that she was feeling and holding all this in grew and grew, and she knew she had to come out to her family. And when she did, it didn't go over so well. Her parents said, "Absolutely not. You're not a girl. This is not how we raised you. We don't know what you're thinking. Get out." So Anne then found herself on the streets and in and out of homeless shelters, and it's here where she started using drugs and alcohol to numb this pain she felt inside. She told me about her journey of being in and out of hospitals and rehabs trying to get sober, and when she did, the health care providers and doctors wouldn't use the correct female name or pronouns. This caused her pain. You see, when I was studying to become a therapist, I wasn't taught how to work with transgender patients. I had no idea these would be the patients I'd be working with. But the more I worked with Anne and other patients like Anne, I began to see my mission evolve, and that was to make sure that the transgender community got their health care needs met. The more I looked into this, I saw how this very real fear of violence, discrimination and this lack of acceptance caused so many of these patients to turn to alcohol and drugs. And I also heard these horror stories of when these patients were seeking medical care and how they were treated, and how a lot of their medical needs were ignored. Now let me tell you about Leah. I had the pleasure of meeting Leah a few years back. She's a female and she has a wife and a child. See, Leah was also assigned male at birth and she knew since she was a young child that she was not a male, that she was a female. She hid it from herself and from everyone she knew, especially from her wife, until the age of 50. She couldn't take it anymore. She was like, I can't keep living like this. I gotta get honest. She was extremely scared to tell her wife. What if her wife said, "This is unacceptable, I want a divorce, get out"? To her surprise, her wife was accepting. She said, "I love you regardless of who you are. I want to help you in every way I can." So she talked with her wife, and she made the decision that she wanted to medically transition, and she was interested in being assessed for hormone replacement therapy, otherwise known as HRT. So she made an appointment with her doctor. She arrived on the day of her appointment early. She filled out all the paperwork, put the name correctly down there and waited patiently. A little bit of time passed and a nurse called her back to the exam room. When she got back there, she took a deep breath, and the doctor and the nurse walked in. She extended her hand to the doctor and said, "Hi, I'm Leah." The doctor looked at her, didn't shake her hand and said, "Why are you here?" She took another deep breath and said, "Well, I'm a transgender female. I've known this my whole life, I've hid it from everyone, but I can't do it anymore. My wife's supportive, I can financially afford it, I've got to make these changes. Please consider me, and let's evaluate me for HRT." The doctor said, "We can't do anything today. You need to go get an HIV test." She couldn't believe it. She was furious. She was angry. She was disappointed. If her doctor treated her this way, how would the rest of the world treat her? First, he wouldn't shake her hand, and second, when he heard she was transgender, all he cared about was getting an HIV test and ending the appointment. He didn't even ask her any other questions. See, I can understand where Leah's coming from, because the years that I've worked with the community, I hear myths every single day that aren't true at all. A couple of those are: every transgender person wants to transition with medication or surgery; transgender people are mentally ill, this is a disorder; and: these people aren't real men and women. These are all myths and untrue. As this community expands and grows older, it is imperative that all health care providers be trained on how to take care of their health care needs. Back in 2015, a survey was done and found that 72 percent of health care providers did not feel well-informed on the health care needs of the LGBT community. There's a huge gap in the education and training. Today, in this talk, I want to offer a new way of thinking for three groups of people: doctors, the transgender community and, well, the rest of us. But before we do, I want to cover a couple of definitions that's going to help you wrap your head around gender identity a little bit more. So I hope you've got your paper and pen. Get ready to take some notes. So let's start out with this idea of a binary system. And what this means is, before, we always thought there was only two, male and female. Get it? Binary? Right? So we've come to find out that this isn't true. Gender identity is a spectrum with maleness on one side and femaleness over here on the other side. This spectrum of identities include identities such as gender-nonconforming, gender-affirming, gender-nonbinary, two-spirited, three-spirited, as well as people that are intersex. The term transgender is this umbrella term that encompasses all these different types of identities. But for today's talk, I want you to think about transgender as someone who is assigned a sex at birth that doesn't match with who they are as a person and their sense of self. Now, this is very different than biological sex. So gender identity is sense of self. So think of it as what's between your ears: sense of self, who you are. This is very different than biological sex, right? Hormones, genitalia, chromosomes: that's what's between our legs. Now, you may be thinking, "Dr. Kristie, I have never questioned who I am. I know I'm a man, or I know I'm a woman." I get it. You know who you are. This is how many transgender individuals feel. They just know who they are with that same conviction. It's important to know that there are many different types of identities, and I identify as a cisgender female. Now, for all y'all out there that like to know how to spell things, cis is spelled "c-i-s." It's the Latin term for "on the same side of." When I was born, the doctor held me up to my parents and said, "It's a girl." All this, based on my genitalia. Even though I grew up in a small farm town in Georgia, very much a tomboy, I never questioned that I was a female. I've always known I was a girl, regardless of how I was as a kid. Now, this is very different than someone who's transgender. Now, trans is a Latin term for "on the other side of" — think about transcontinental airlines, across, on the other side of — someone that's assigned a sex at birth and they identify on the other side of the spectrum. A transgender male is someone who was assigned female at birth, but their sense of self, who they are, how they live their life, is as a male. And the opposite is, as we talked earlier, a transgender female, someone that's assigned male at birth but lives their live and sense of self as a female. It's also important to point out here that not everyone that has a nonbinary identity identifies with the term "transgender." Just so nobody gets confused, I want to point out sexual identity, or orientation. That is simply who we're attracted to, physically, emotionally, sexually, spiritually. It's got nothing to do with gender identity. So just for a quick recap, before we continue on: gender identity between the ears, biological sex, just think of it between your legs, and then sexual identity, well, sometimes we use our heart, but it's here. Three very different identity spectrums. Now, the average medical student spends about five hours learning about the LGBT health-related needs while they're in medical school. Now, this is despite us knowing that there are unique health risks to this community. And there's an estimated 10 million American adults that identify as LGBT. Most doctors that work with transgender patients, they learn trial by fire. That means they figure it out as they go along, or the patient ends up spending their time trying to teach the doctor how to take care of them. Many doctors don't feel comfortable asking about gender identities. Some don't feel like it's relevant at all to their medical care and others just don't want to say the wrong thing. Many doctors who say something inappropriate or they say something negative, they may not be coming from a malicious or mean place, they may have never been trained on how to care for these individuals. But this can't be accepted as a norm anymore either. So what happens to a transgender male — for a quick recap, that's someone who is assigned female at birth but lives their life as a male — what happens when this transgender male goes for their yearly gynecological visit? How that doctor treats that patient will set the whole tone for the office. If that doctor treats that male with the correct pronouns, correct name, gives dignity and respect, it's highly likely that the rest of the staff will too. So that's a little bit about my thoughts on doctors, and now let's move on to the transgender community. I'm here talking about fear, but y'all know who is really fearful, right? It's the transgender community. Earlier I shared the story about Anne and how she was so worried about going into treatment and not being respected as her female self, and then Leah who was scared about how her doctor would react, and the second that he didn't shake her hand and ordered that HIV test, her fears came true. The transgender community needs to be empowered to speak up for their health care needs. The days of remaining silent and taking whatever treatment you can get are over. If you don't speak up for your health care needs, no one's going to do it for you. So what about the rest of us? A lot of y'all, maybe in the next week or a couple of months, are going to have a doctor's appointment, right? So let's say you go to your doctor's appointment and when it's over, you feel worse than you did when you got there. What if you felt dismissed by the doctor, that they ignored your needs, or you even felt judged? That's what happens for many of the 1.4 million transgender adults here in the US if they're lucky enough to get an appointment. Now, you may be thinking, "Why is this important to me? I'm not transgender. I don't know anybody that's transgender. Why should I even care?" Think of it this way. A transgender individual is human, just like you and me. They deserve competent and trained health care providers, just like you and me. So let me ask, if you don't mind raising your hand: Do you know or have you met anyone who is transgender, gender-nonconforming, agender, intersex, two-spirited, three-spirited? Thank y'all so much. Lovely. Thank y'all. Every one of y'all who did not raise your hand, in the very near future you will get the opportunity to meet someone that falls into one of these identities, I guarantee it. The number of this community is increasing. That's not because it's a fad or the new thing to do. It's safer to come out. There's more awareness. There's more visibility. There's more safety, so people are speaking up about their true self like never before. That's why it's so important that our health care system get on board and make sure that our doctors and health care providers are trained to approach these patients with dignity and respect, just like we expect. I remember being in my 11th grade literature class, with one of my favorite teachers, Mr. McClain, and he shared this quote by Heraclitus that sticks with me to this day. Y'all may have even heard it. It's, "The only thing that is constant is that things will change." Familiar, right? Every single one of us face changes in our lives, and often when we're faced with these changes, we've got some difficult decisions to make. Will we remain in fear, stay stuck and not grow? Or, will we face fear with bravery, evolve, take the opportunity to grow? Every one of us face new things. What will you do? Will you remain in fear, or will you grow? I invite each of you, doctors, the transgender community and you and I, to face fear together as we walk into this brave new world. Thank you. (Applause) |
Everything you need to know to read "The Canterbury Tales" | null | TED-Ed | A portly Miller, barely sober enough to sit on his horse, rambles on about the flighty wife of a crotchety old carpenter and the scholar she takes as her lover. To get some time alone together, the scholar and the wife play various tricks that involve feigning madness, staging a biblical flood, and exposing themselves in public. But the parish clerk is also lusting after the wife, and comes by every night to sing outside her house. This becomes so tiresome that she tries to scare him away by hanging her rear end out the window for him to kiss. When this appears not to work, her scholar decides to try farting in the same position, but this time, the clerk is waiting with a red-hot poker. This might all sound like a bawdy joke, but it’s part of one of the most esteemed works of English literature ever created: The Canterbury Tales, which seamlessly blends the lofty and the lowly. The work consists of 24 stories, each told by one of Chaucer’s spirited characters. Narrators include familiar Medieval figures such as a Knight, a Clerk, and a Nun, and the less recognizable Reeve, and Mancible, and others. The Tales are written in Middle English, which often looks entirely different from the language spoken today. It was used between the 12th and 15th centuries, and evolved from Old English due to increased contact with European romantic languages after the Norman Conquest of 1066. Most of the Middle English alphabet is still familiar today, with the inclusion of a few archaic symbols, such as yogh, which denotes the y, j, or gh sound. The loquacious cast of the Tales first meet at the Tabard Inn in Southwark. They have a journey in common: a pilgrimage to Canterbury to visit the shrine of St. Thomas Beckett, a martyred archbishop who was murdered in his own Cathedral. Eager and nosy for some personal details, the host of the Inn proposes a competition: whoever tells the best tale will be treated to dinner. If not for their pilgrimage, many of these figures would never have had the chance to interact. This is because Medieval society followed a feudal system that divided the clergy and nobility from the working classes, made up of peasants and serfs. By Chaucer’s time, a professional class of merchants and intellectuals had also emerged. Chaucer spent most of his life as a government official during the Hundred Years' War, traveling throughout Italy and France, as well as his native England. This may have influenced the panoramic vision of his work, and in the Tales, no level of society is above mockery. Chaucer uses the quirks of the characters’ language – the ribald humor of the Cook, the solemn prose of the Parson, and the lofty notions of the Squire – to satirize their worldviews. The varied dialects, genres, and literary tropes also make the work a vivid record of the different ways Medieval audiences entertained themselves. For instance, the Knight’s tale of courtly love, chivalry, and destiny riffs on romance, while the tales of working-class narrators are generally comedies filled with scatological language, sexual deviance, and slapstick. This variation includes something for everyone, and that’s one reason why readers continue to delight in the work in both Middle English and translation. While the narrative runs to over 17,000 lines, it's apparently unfinished, as the prologue ambitiously introduces 29 pilgrims and promises four stories apiece, and the innkeeper never crowns a victor. It’s possible that Chaucer was so caught up in his sumptuous creations that he delayed picking a winner - or perhaps he was so fond of each character that he just couldn’t choose. Whatever the reason, this means that every reader is free to judge; the question of who wins is up to you. |
Why being respectful to your coworkers is good for business | {0: 'Christine Porath helps organizations build thriving workplaces.'} | TEDxUniversityofNevada | Who do you want to be? It's a simple question, and whether you know it or not, you're answering it every day through your actions. This one question will define your professional success more than any other, because how you show up and treat people means everything. Either you lift people up by respecting them, making them feel valued, appreciated and heard, or you hold people down by making them feel small, insulted, disregarded or excluded. And who you choose to be means everything. I study the effects of incivility on people. What is incivility? It's disrespect or rudeness. It includes a lot of different behaviors, from mocking or belittling someone to teasing people in ways that sting to telling offensive jokes to texting in meetings. And what's uncivil to one person may be absolutely fine to another. Take texting while someone's speaking to you. Some of us may find it rude, others may think it's absolutely civil. So it really depends. It's all in the eyes of the beholder and whether that person felt disrespected. We may not mean to make someone feel that way, but when we do, it has consequences. Over 22 years ago, I vividly recall walking into this stuffy hospital room. It was heartbreaking to see my dad, this strong, athletic, energetic guy, lying in the bed with electrodes strapped to his bare chest. What put him there was work-related stress. For over a decade, he suffered an uncivil boss. And for me, I thought he was just an outlier at that time. But just a couple years later, I witnessed and experienced a lot of incivility in my first job out of college. I spent a year going to work every day and hearing things from coworkers like, "Are you an idiot? That's not how it's done," and, "If I wanted your opinion, I'd ask." So I did the natural thing. I quit, and I went back to grad school to study the effects of this. There, I met Christine Pearson. And she had a theory that small, uncivil actions can lead to much bigger problems like aggression and violence. We believed that incivility affected performance and the bottom line. So we launched a study, and what we found was eye-opening. We sent a survey to business school alumni working in all different organizations. We asked them to write a few sentences about one experience where they were treated rudely, disrespectfully or insensitively, and to answer questions about how they reacted. One person told us about a boss that made insulting statements like, "That's kindergartner's work," and another tore up someone's work in front of the entire team. And what we found is that incivility made people less motivated: 66 percent cut back work efforts, 80 percent lost time worrying about what happened, and 12 percent left their job. And after we published these results, two things happened. One, we got calls from organizations. Cisco read about these numbers, took just a few of these and estimated, conservatively, that incivility was costing them 12 million dollars a year. The second thing that happened was, we heard from others in our academic field who said, "Well, people are reporting this, but how can you really show it? Does people's performance really suffer?" I was curious about that, too. With Amir Erez, I compared those that experienced incivility to those that didn't experience incivility. And what we found is that those that experience incivility do actually function much worse. "OK," you may say. "This makes sense. After all, it's natural that their performance suffers." But what about if you're not the one who experiences it? What if you just see or hear it? You're a witness. We wondered if it affected witnesses, too. So we conducted studies where five participants would witness an experimenter act rudely to someone who arrived late to the study. The experimenter said, "What is it with you? You arrive late, you're irresponsible. Look at you! How do you expect to hold a job in the real world?" And in another study in a small group, we tested the effects of a peer insulting a group member. Now, what we found was really interesting, because witnesses' performance decreased, too — and not just marginally, quite significantly. Incivility is a bug. It's contagious, and we become carriers of it just by being around it. And this isn't confined to the workplace. We can catch this virus anywhere — at home, online, in schools and in our communities. It affects our emotions, our motivation, our performance and how we treat others. It even affects our attention and can take some of our brainpower. And this happens not only if we experience incivility or we witness it. It can happen even if we just see or read rude words. Let me give you an example of what I mean. To test this, we gave people combinations of words to use to make a sentence. But we were very sneaky. Half the participants got a list with 15 words used to trigger rudeness: impolitely, interrupt, obnoxious, bother. Half the participants received a list of words with none of these rude triggers. And what we found was really surprising, because the people who got the rude words were five times more likely to miss information right in front of them on the computer screen. And as we continued this research, what we found is that those that read the rude words took longer to make decisions, to record their decisions, and they made significantly more errors. This can be a big deal, especially when it comes to life-and-death situations. Steve, a physician, told me about a doctor that he worked with who was never very respectful, especially to junior staff and nurses. But Steve told me about this one particular interaction where this doctor shouted at a medical team. Right after the interaction, the team gave the wrong dosage of medication to their patient. Steve said the information was right there on the chart, but somehow everyone on the team missed it. He said they lacked the attention or awareness to take it into account. Simple mistake, right? Well, that patient died. Researchers in Israel have actually shown that medical teams exposed to rudeness perform worse not only in all their diagnostics, but in all the procedures they did. This was mainly because the teams exposed to rudeness didn't share information as readily, and they stopped seeking help from their teammates. And I see this not only in medicine but in all industries. So if incivility has such a huge cost, why do we still see so much of it? I was curious, so we surveyed people about this, too. The number one reason is stress. People feel overwhelmed. The other reason that people are not more civil is because they're skeptical and even concerned about being civil or appearing nice. They believe they'll appear less leader-like. They wonder: Do nice guys finish last? Or in other words: Do jerks get ahead? (Laughter) It's easy to think so, especially when we see a few prominent examples that dominate the conversation. Well, it turns out, in the long run, they don't. There's really rich research on this by Morgan McCall and Michael Lombardo when they were at the Center for Creative Leadership. They found that the number one reason tied to executive failure was an insensitive, abrasive or bullying style. There will always be some outliers that succeed despite their incivility. Sooner or later, though, most uncivil people sabotage their success. For example, with uncivil executives, it comes back to hurt them when they're in a place of weakness or they need something. People won't have their backs. But what about nice guys? Does civility pay? Yes, it does. And being civil doesn't just mean that you're not a jerk. Not holding someone down isn't the same as lifting them up. Being truly civil means doing the small things, like smiling and saying hello in the hallway, listening fully when someone's speaking to you. Now, you can have strong opinions, disagree, have conflict or give negative feedback civilly, with respect. Some people call it "radical candor," where you care personally, but you challenge directly. So yes, civility pays. In a biotechnology firm, colleagues and I found that those that were seen as civil were twice as likely to be viewed as leaders, and they performed significantly better. Why does civility pay? Because people see you as an important — and a powerful — unique combination of two key characteristics: warm and competent, friendly and smart. In other words, being civil isn't just about motivating others. It's about you. If you're civil, you're more likely to be seen as a leader. You'll perform better, and you're seen as warm and competent. But there's an even bigger story about how civility pays, and it ties to one of the most important questions around leadership: What do people want most from their leaders? We took data from over 20,000 employees around the world, and we found the answer was simple: respect. Being treated with respect was more important than recognition and appreciation, useful feedback, even opportunities for learning. Those that felt respected were healthier, more focused, more likely to stay with their organization and far more engaged. So where do you start? How can you lift people up and make people feel respected? Well, the nice thing is, it doesn't require a huge shift. Small things can make a big difference. I found that thanking people, sharing credit, listening attentively, humbly asking questions, acknowledging others and smiling has an impact. Patrick Quinlan, former CEO of Ochsner Health [System], told me about the effects of their 10-5 way, where if you're within 10 feet of someone, you make eye contact and smile, and if you're within five feet, you say hello. He explained that civility spread, patient satisfaction scores rose, as did patient referrals. Civility and respect can be used to boost an organization's performance. When my friend Doug Conant took over as CEO of Campbell's Soup Company in 2001, the company's market share had just dropped in half. Sales were declining, lots of people had just been laid off. A Gallup manager said it was the least engaged organization that they had surveyed. And as Doug drove up to work his first day, he noticed that the headquarters was surrounded by barbwire fence. There were guard towers in the parking lot. He said it looked like a minimum security prison. It felt toxic. Within five years, Doug had turned things around. And within nine years, they were setting all-time performance records and racking up awards, including best place to work. How did he do it? On day one, Doug told employees that he was going to have high standards for performance, but they were going to do it with civility. He walked the talk, and he expected his leaders to. For Doug, it all came down to being tough-minded on standards and tenderhearted with people. For him, he said it was all about these touch points, or these daily interactions he had with employees, whether in the hallway, in the cafeteria or in meetings. And if he handled each touch point well, he'd make employees feel valued. Another way that Doug made employees feel valued and showed them that he was paying attention is that he handwrote over 30,000 thank-you notes to employees. And this set an example for other leaders. Leaders have about 400 of these touch points a day. Most don't take long, less than two minutes each. The key is to be agile and mindful in each of these moments. Civility lifts people. We'll get people to give more and function at their best if we're civil. Incivility chips away at people and their performance. It robs people of their potential, even if they're just working around it. What I know from my research is that when we have more civil environments, we're more productive, creative, helpful, happy and healthy. We can do better. Each one of us can be more mindful and can take actions to lift others up around us, at work, at home, online, in schools and in our communities. In every interaction, think: Who do you want to be? Let's put an end to incivility bug and start spreading civility. After all, it pays. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why it's too hard to start a business in Africa -- and how to change it | {0: 'Magatte Wade creates jobs in Africa -- and calls attention to the obstacles to job creation on the continent.'} | TEDGlobal 2017 | Today, what I want to share with you is something that happened to me, actually, around four weeks ago, it happened. Words were said to me that I never thought I would ever hear it said to my face by another human being. And those words, they shattered my heart. And at the same time, they filled it with so much hope. And the whole experience renewed my commitment to the idea that I came to share with you today. You see, I tell everyone that I am a haunted person. What haunts me is the impossible stories, story after story after story after story of young people, my people, people like me dying out there on the ocean, right now, laying at the bottom of the ocean, serving as fish food. Do you really think that's the best we can do? To serve as fish food? And for those of them who are trying to migrate to Europe — because that's what it is all about, they are trying to migrate to Europe to find a job. Going through Libya. Do you know what happens to us when we're trying to cross through Libya and we're trapped over there? Well, we're being sold as slaves. For 300 dollars, maybe sometimes 500 dollars. Sometimes I hear stories of bodies that fall off an airplane. Somebody hid in the landing gear of a plane or in the cargo section of a plane, and then you find them frozen to death. Wouldn't you be haunted if, like me, from the moment you were a little girl, you hear these stories and they keep repeating themselves, over and over and over? Wouldn't you be haunted? That's my case. And at the same time, you know, as my people are dying, my culture is also dying. There, I said it. Because, you know, we have this culture inferiority, which means that anything that comes from us is not good enough. But you know, in my situation, and because I was raised to criticize by creating, it's Michelangelos. My father said, "Do not come to me with problems unless you thought of a couple alternatives. They don't have to be right, but I just want to know that you thought of something." So, I have this attitude in life — something is wrong, find a way to fix it. And that's why I start the businesses that I start, that's usually consumer brands, that have embedded in them the very best of my African culture. And what I do is it's all packaged, 21st century, world-class tendered, and I bring that to one of the most sophisticated markets in the world, which is the US. First company was a beverage company, second one is a skin care company, third one is launching next month, and they all have that in common. So, why are these people leaving? They're leaving because they have no jobs. They're leaving because where they are, there's no jobs. So ... But poverty, that's really striking them, is the root cause of why they're leaving. Now, why are people poor? People are poor because they have no money. You have no money because you have no source of income. And for most of us, what is a source of income? For most of us, what is our source of income, what is it, tell me? Jobs, thank you. Where do jobs come from? Come from where? Businesses, thank you. Now, if jobs is what fixes poverty, and jobs come from businesses, don't you think — especially, they come from small and medium size enterprises, SMEs — then don't you think, maybe for a second, that we should focus on making it easy for a small-business person to start and run their business? Don't you think that it makes sense? Why is it that when I look at the Doing Business index ranking of the World Bank, that ranks every country in the world in terms of how easy or hard it is to start a company, you tell me why African countries, all 50 of them, are basically at the bottom of that list? That's why we're poor. We're poor because it is literally impossible to do businesses in these countries of ours. But I'm going to tell you exactly what it means on the ground for someone like me. I have a manufacturing facility in Senegal. Did you know that for all my raw material that I can't find in the country, I have to pay a 45 percent tariff on everything that comes in? Forty-five percent tariff. Do you know that, even to look for fine cardboard to ship my finished products to the US, I can't find new, finished cardboard? Impossible. Because the distributors are not going to come here to start their business, because it makes no sense, either. So right now, I have to mobilize 3000 dollars' worth of cardboard in my warehouse, so that I can have cardboard, and they won't arrive for another five weeks. The fact that we are stifled with the most nonsensical laws out there. That's why we can't run businesses. It's like swimming through molasses. So, what can you do about that? I told you today that someone said to me words that marked me, because I explained the same thing to my employees in Senegal. And one of them started crying — her name is Yahara. She started crying. I said, "Why are you crying?" She said, "I'm crying because I had come to believe — always seeing us represented as poor people — I had come to believe that maybe, yes, maybe we are inferior. Because, otherwise, how do you explain that we're always in the begging situation?" That's what broke my heart. But at the same time that she said that, because of how I explained just what I explained to you, she said, "But now, I know that I am not the problem. It is my environment in which I live, that's my problem." I said, "Yes." And that's what gave me hope — that once people get it, they now change their outlook on life. Here, what are some of our solutions, then? If jobs is a solution, don't you think, then, that we should be simplifying the business environment of all of these countries? Don't you think? And along with you, I would like for all of your friends from the other 50 countries that are on the bottom of that list to do the same thing. You do that, we do the rest of the job. I'm doing my part of the game, what are you doing? (Applause) What are you doing? (Applause) What are you doing? (Applause) And as for you, everybody here in this room, I leave you with two marching orders. Get in the game, and the way you get in it is educate yourself, build awareness around yourself, and then also advocate for e-government solutions. He said, "Oh, corruption, how do we fight corruption?" Well, as a matter of fact, I'm here to tell you that yes, you can do it by the stroke of a pen. You do not need anyone to tell you when and how to do that. It is one thing, actually, that you don't need to wait for anyone to do, so do it. Otherwise, don't come and tell me that you want to fix corruption. You and your other 50 friends from the other 50 countries that are at the bottom of that list. That's how you fight corruption. If you were only charging me 5 percent to get my stuff in the country, my raw material, instead of the 45 percent, do you really think that I would have to go a pay a bribe? That's what breeds corruption. Bad laws, sets of horrible, nonsense laws. (Applause) (Cheers) Right? (Applause) You want to fight corruption? That's what you do. And again, remember, you don't need to wait for anyone. You can do that by yourself. Unless you're telling me that maybe you have no sovereignty, and that's a whole other problem. OK, so, from here on, I have simple words for our "leaders." This can go two ways. It can go the nasty way, because we have hundreds of millions of young people coming to life right now, here, and if they don't have an outlook in life, they are going to go for a revolution. They're going to go for violence. And none of us wants that. None, none of us. That's the one way it can go. Or the second way it can go is, all this happens peacefully, productively, and everything is good, and you do what you need to do, you get out of my way, you let people like me do our job, we create all these jobs we need, and then Africa becomes this very prosperous country that it's designed to be, it should have been for a long time. It happens like that, everybody's happy, we move on with our lives. It can happen in two ways — pick violence or you pick the calm, productive way. I want the calm, productive way. None of us should ever, ever even try to think about what else could happen if we don't go there. So, please. And the time has come. This type of picture — prosperity, happiness, human flourishing — that's what I see if we do our job. Thank you. (Applause) (Cheering) Thank you. (Applause) |
3 ways to be a better ally in the workplace | {0: 'Melinda Epler works with the tech industry to solve diversity and inclusion together.'} | TED Salon Brightline Initiative | In 2013, I was an executive at an international engineering firm in San Francisco. It was my dream job. A culmination of all the skills that I've acquired over the years: storytelling, social impact, behavior change. I was the head of marketing and culture and I worked with the nation's largest health care systems, using technology and culture change to radically reduce their energy and water use and to improve their social impact. I was creating real change in the world. And it was the worst professional experience of my life. I hit the glass ceiling hard. It hurt like hell. While there were bigger issues, most of what happened were little behaviors and patterns that slowly chipped away at my ability to do my work well. They ate away at my confidence, my leadership, my capacity to innovate. For example, my first presentation at the company. I walk up to the front of the room to give a presentation on the strategy that I believe is right for the company. The one they hired me to create. And I look around the room at my fellow executives. And I watch as they pick up their cell phones and look down at their laptops. They're not paying attention. As soon as I start to speak, the interruptions begin and people talk over me again and again and again. Some of my ideas are flat out dismissed and then brought up by somebody else and championed. I was the only woman in that room. And I could have used an ally. Little behaviors and pattern like this, every day, again and again, they wear you down. Pretty soon, my energy was absolutely tapped. At a real low point, I read an article about toxic workplace culture and microaggressions. Microaggressions — everyday slights, insults, negative verbal and nonverbal communication, whether intentional or not, that impede your ability to do your work well. That sounded familiar. I started to realize that I wasn't failing. The culture around me was failing me. And I wasn't alone. Behaviors and patterns like this every day affect underrepresented people of all backgrounds in the workplace. And that has a real impact on our colleagues, on our companies and our collective capacity to innovate. So, in the tech industry, we want quick solutions. But there is no magic wand for correcting diversity and inclusion. Change happens one person at a time, one act at a time, one word at a time. We make a mistake when we see diversity and inclusion as that side project over there the diversity people are working on, rather than this work inside all of us that we need to do together. And that work begins with unlearning what we know about success and opportunity. We've been told our whole lives that if we work hard, that hard work pays off, we'd get what we deserve, we'd live our dream. But that isn't true for everyone. Some people have to work 10 times as hard to get to the same place due to many barriers put in front of them by society. Your gender, your race, your ethnicity, your religion, your disability, your sexual orientation, your class, your geography, all of these can give you more of fewer opportunities for success. And that's where allyship comes in. Allyship is about understanding that imbalance in opportunity and working to correct it. Allyship is really seeing the person next to us. And the person missing, who should be standing next to us. And first, just knowing what they're going through. And then, helping them succeed and thrive with us. When we work together to develop more diverse and inclusive teams, data shows we will be more innovative, more productive and more profitable. So, who is an ally? All of us. We can all be allies for each other. As a white, cisgendered woman in the United States, there are many ways I'm very privileged. And some ways I'm not. And I work hard every day to be an ally for people with less privilege than me. And I still need allies, too. In the tech industry, like in many industries, there are many people who are underrepresented, or face barriers and discrimination. Women, people who are nonbinary — so people who don't necessarily identify as man or woman — racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQIA, people with disabilities, veterans, anybody over age 35. (Laughter) We have a major bias toward youth in the tech industry. And many others. There is always someone with less privilege than you. On this stage, in this room. At your company, on your team, in your city or town. So, people are allies for different reasons. Find your reason. It could be for the business case, because data shows diverse and inclusive teams will be more productive, more profitable and more innovative. It could be for fairness and social justice. Because we have a long history of oppression and inequity that we need to work on together. Or it could be for your kids, so your kids grow up with equal opportunities. And they grow up creating equal opportunities for others. Find your reason. For me, it's all three. Find your reason and step up to be there for someone who needs you. So, what can you do as an ally? Start by doing no harm. It's our job as allies to know what microaggressions are and to not do them. It's our job as allies to listen, to learn, to unlearn and to relearn, and to make mistakes and to keep learning. Give me your full attention. Close your laptops, put down your cellphones and pay attention. If somebody is new or the only person in the room like them, or they're just nervous, this is going to make a huge difference in how they show up. Don't interrupt. Underrepresented people are more likely to be interrupted, so just take a step back and listen. Echo and attribute. If I have a great idea, echo my idea and then attribute it to me, and we thrive together. Learn the language I use to describe my identity. Know how to pronounce my name. Know my pronouns — he, she, they. Know the language I use to describe my disability, my ethnicity, my religion. This really matters to people, so if you don't know, just ask. Listen and learn. An executive told me recently that after doing allyship on his team, the whole team started to normalize calling themselves out and each other out for interrupting. "I'm so sorry I'm interrupting you right now, carry on." "Hey, she's got a great idea, let's listen." Number two, advocate for underrepresented people in small ways. Intervene; you can change the power dynamics in the room. If you see somebody is the only person in the room like them and they are being belittled, they are being interrupted, do something, say something. Invite underrepresented people to speak. And say no to panels without underrepresented speakers. Refer someone for a job and encourage them to take that job and to take new opportunities. And this one's really important — help normalize allyship. If you're a person with privilege, it's easier for you to advocate for allies. So use that privilege to create change. Three, change someone's life significantly. So, be there for somebody throughout their career. Mentor or sponsor them, give them opportunities as they grow. Volunteer — volunteer for a STEM program, serving underserved youth. Transform your team to be more diverse and inclusive. And make real commitments to creating change here. Hold yourself and your team accountable for creating change. And lastly, help advocate for change across your company. When companies teach their people to be allies, diversity and inclusion programs are stronger. You and I can be allies for each other, whether we're inside or outside of work. So, I realized recently that I still have lingering shame and fear from that moment in my career when I felt utterly alone, shut out and unsupported. There are millions of people out there, like me, right now, feeling that way. And it doesn't take much for us to be there for each other. And when we're there for each other, when we support one another, we thrive together. And when we thrive, we build better teams, better products and better companies. Allyship is powerful. Try it. Thank you. (Applause) |
The fascinating science of phantom limbs | null | TED-Ed | The vast majority of people who’ve lost a limb can still feel it— not as a memory or vague shape, but in complete lifelike detail. They can flex their phantom fingers and sometimes even feel the chafe of a watchband or the throb of an ingrown toenail. And astonishingly enough, occasionally even people born without a limb can feel a phantom. So what causes phantom limb sensations? The accuracy of these apparitions suggests that we have a map of the body in our brains. And the fact that it’s possible for someone who’s never had a limb to feel one implies we are born with at least the beginnings of this map. But one thing sets the phantoms that appear after amputation apart from their flesh and blood predecessors: the vast majority of them are painful. To fully understand phantom limbs and phantom pain, we have to consider the entire pathway from limb to brain. Our limbs are full of sensory neurons responsible for everything from the textures we feel with our fingertips to our understanding of where our bodies are in space. Neural pathways carry this sensory input through the spinal cord and up to the brain. Since so much of this path lies outside the limb itself, most of it remains behind after an amputation. But the loss of a limb alters the way signals travel at every step of the pathway. At the site of an amputation, severed nerve endings can thicken and become more sensitive, transmitting distress signals even in response to mild pressure. Under normal circumstances, these signals would be curtailed in the dorsal horn of the spinal cord. For reasons we don’t fully understand, after an amputation, there is a loss of this inhibitory control in the dorsal horn, and signals can intensify. Once they pass through the spinal cord, sensory signals reach the brain. There, the somatosensory cortex processes them. The entire body is mapped in this cortex. Sensitive body parts with many nerve endings, like the lips and hands, are represented by the largest areas. The cortical homunculus is a model of the human body with proportions based on the size of each body part’s representation in the cortex, The amount of cortex devoted to a specific body part can grow or shrink based on how much sensory input the brain receives from that body part. For example, representation of the left hand is larger in violinists than in non-violinists. The brain also increases cortical representation when a body part is injured in order to heighten sensations that alert us to danger. This increased representation can lead to phantom pain. The cortical map is also most likely responsible for the feeling of body parts that are no longer there, because they still have representation in the brain. Over time, this representation may shrink and the phantom limb may shrink with it. But phantom limb sensations don’t necessarily disappear on their own. Treatment for phantom pain usually requires a combination of physical therapy, medications for pain management, prosthetics, and time. A technique called mirror box therapy can be very helpful in developing the range of motion and reducing pain in the phantom limb. The patient places the phantom limb into a box behind a mirror and the intact limb in front of the mirror. This tricks the brain into seeing the phantom rather than just feeling it. Scientists are developing virtual reality treatments that make the experience of mirror box therapy even more lifelike. Prosthetics can also create a similar effect— many patients report pain primarily when they remove their prosthetics at night. And phantom limbs may in turn help patients conceptualize prosthetics as extensions of their bodies and manipulate them intuitively. There are still many questions about phantom limbs. We don’t know why some amputees escape the pain typically associated with these apparitions, or why some don’t have phantoms at all. And further research into phantom limbs isn’t just applicable to the people who experience them. A deeper understanding of these apparitions will give us insight into the work our brains do every day to build the world as we perceive it. They’re an important reminder that the realities we experience are, in fact, subjective. |
The secrets of spider venom | {0: 'Michel Dugon researches the potential of spider venom as a source of novel therapeutic agents.'} | TEDxGalway | Well, hello. This is Sophie. It's all right, don't worry, everything's going to be fine. (Laughter) There are some people on the balcony that are very happy to be up there now. (Laughter) So this is Sophie — not Sophia — no, Sophie. She has a French name. And you wonder why? (Laughter) So Sophie, for most people, is the incarnation of terror, really. She's far too leggy, she's far too hairy, and she's far too big to ever be trusted. But to me, Sophie is a fantastic feat of bioengineering. You see, Sophie is a testimony to all those creatures that have managed to survive since the beginning of time; all those animals that have managed to have offspring generation after generation, until this day. You see, over one billion years ago, the first primitive cells started to evolve on this planet. It took spiders 430 million years to become what they are now: one of the most versatile, one of the most diverse and one of the most evolved groups — (Laughter) of predators to ever walk this earth. It's actually quite sporty to give a speech while wrangling a tarantula, I have to say. (Laughter) So, we shouldn't forget that Sophie — and in fact, all of us — we all are a testimony to all those ruthless battles that actually were won consistently by all our ancestors, all our predecessors. In fact, all of us, every single one of you, is in fact an uninterrupted, one-billion-years-old success story. And in the gaze of Sophie, that success is partly due to what she has in her chest, just under her eyes. In there, she has a pair of venom glands that are attached to a pair of fangs, and those fangs are folded into her mouth. So, without those fangs and without this venom, Sophie would have never managed to survive. Now, many animals have evolved venom systems in order to survive. Nowadays, any species of venomous snakes, any species of spider, any species of scorpion, has its own venom signature, if you will, made out of dozens, if not hundreds, of chemical compounds. And all of those compounds have evolved purely for one purpose: disable and, eventually, kill. Now, venom can actually act in many different ways. Venom, believe me, can make you feel pains that you've never felt before. Venom can also make your heart stop within minutes, or it can turn your blood into jelly. Venom can also paralyze you almost instantly, or it can just eat your flesh away, like acid. Now, all of these are pretty gruesome stories, I know, but, to me, it's kind of music to my ears. It's what I love. So why is that? Well, it's not because I'm a nutcase, no. (Laughter) Just imagine what we could do if we could harvest all those super powerful compounds and use them to our benefit. That would be amazing, right? What if we could, I don't know, produce new antibiotics with those venoms? What if we could actually help people that are suffering from diabetes or hypertension? Well, in fact, all those applications are already being developed by scientists just like me everywhere around the world, as I speak. You see, hypertension is actually treated regularly with a medication that has been developed from the toxin that is produced by a South American viper. People that have type 2 diabetes can be monitored using, actually, the toxin produced by a lizard from North America. And in hospitals all around the world, a new protocol is being developed to use a toxin from a marine snail for anesthetics. You see, venom is that kind of huge library of chemical compounds that are available to us, that are produced by hundreds of thousands of live creatures. And — Oh, sorry, she just wants to go for a little walk. (Laughter) Spiders alone are actually thought to produce over 10 million different kinds of compounds with potential therapeutic application. 10 million. And do you know how many scientists actually have managed to study so far? About 0.01 percent. So that means that there is still 99.99 percent of all those compounds that are out there, completely unknown, and are just waiting to be harvested and tested, which is fantastic. You see, so far, scientists have concentrated their efforts on very charismatic, very dangerous animals — vipers and cobras or scorpions and black widows. But what about all those little bugs that we actually have all around us? You know, like that spider that lives behind your couch? You know, the one that decides to just shoot through the floor when you're watching TV and freaks you out? Ah, you have that one at home as well. (Laughter) Well, what about those guys? Do they actually produce some kind of amazing compound in their tiny body as well? Well, an honest answer a few months ago would have been, "We have no clue." But now that my students and myself have started to look into it, I can tell you those guys actually are producing very, very interesting compounds. And I'm going to tell you more about that in a second, but first, I would like to tell you more about this "we are looking into it." How does one look into it? Well, first of all, my students and I have to capture a lot of spiders. So how do we do that? Well, you'd be surprised. Once one starts to look, one finds a lot of spiders. They actually live everywhere around us. Within a couple of hours, we are capable of catching maybe two, three, four hundred spiders, and we bring them back to my laboratory, and we house each of them in its own individual home. And we give each of them a little meal. So now I know what you're thinking: "This guy's nuts. He has a spider B&B at work ..." (Laughter) No, no it's not exactly that, and it's not the kind of venture I would advise you to start. No, once we're done with that, we wait a few days, and then, we anesthetize those spiders. Once they're asleep, we run a tiny little electric current through their body and that contracts their venom glads. Then, under a microscope, we can see a tiny little droplet of venom appearing. So we take a hair-thin glass tube, a capillary, and we collect that tiny droplet. Then, we take the spider and we put it back into its home, and we start again with another one. Because spiders are completely unharmed during the process, it means that a few days later, once they've produced a little bit of venom again and they've recovered, we can release them back into the wild. It takes literally hundreds of spiders to just produce the equivalent of one raindrop of venom. So that drop is incredibly precious to us. And once we have it, we freeze it, and we then pass it in a machine that will separate and purify every chemical compound that is in that venom. We're speaking about tiny amounts. We're actually speaking about a tenth of a millionth of a liter of compound, but we can dilute that compound several thousand times in its own volume of water and then test it against a whole range of nasty stuff, like cancer cells or bacteria. And this is when the very exciting part of my job starts, because this is pure scientific gambling. It's kind of "Las Vegas, baby," for me. (Laughter) We spend so many hours, so much resources, so much time trying to get those compounds ready, and then we test them. And most of the time, nothing happens. Nothing at all. But once in a while — just once in a while, we get that particular compound that has absolutely amazing effects. That's the jackpot. And when I'm saying that, actually, I should take out something else from my pocket — be afraid, be very afraid. (Laughter) Now, in that little tube, I have, actually, a very common spider. The kind of spider that you could find in your shed, that you could find in your basement or that you could find in your sewer pipe, understand: in your toilet. Now, that little spider happens to produce amazingly powerful antimicrobial compounds. It is even capable of killing those drug-resistant bacteria that are giving us so much trouble, that are often making media headlines. Now, honestly, if I was living in your sewer pipe, I'd produce antibiotics, too. (Laughter) But that little spider, may actually hold the answer to a very, very serious concern we have. You see, around the world, every single day, about 1,700 people die because of antimicrobial-resistant infections. Multiply that by 365, and you're reaching the staggering number of 700,000 people dead every single year because antibiotics that were efficient 30, 20 or 10 years ago are not capable of killing very common bugs. The reality is that the world is running out of antibiotics, and the pharmaceutical industry does not have any answer, actually, any weapon to address that concern. You see, 30 years ago, you could consider that 10 to 15 new kinds of antibiotics would hit the market every couple of years. Do you know how many of them hit the market in the past five years? Two. The reality is that if we continue this way, we are a few decades away from being completely helpless in front of infections, just like we were before the discovery of penicillin 90 years ago. So you see, the reality is that we are at war against an invisible enemy that adapts and evolves a lot quicker than we do. And in that war, this little spider might be one of our greatest secret weapons. Just a half a millionth of a liter of a venom, diluted 10,000 times, is still capable of killing most bacteria that are resistant to any other kind of antibiotics. It's absolutely amazing. Every time I repeat this experiment, I just wonder: How is that possible? How many other possibilities and secrets do the siblings actually have? What kind of wonderful product can we really find, if we care to look? So when people ask me, "Are bugs really the future of therapeutic drugs?" my answer is, "Well, I really believe that they do hold some key answers." And we need to really give ourselves the means to investigate them. So when you head back home later tonight, and you see that spider in the corner of your room ... (Laughter) don't squash it. (Laughter) Just look at it, admire it and remember that it is an absolutely fantastic creature, a pure product of evolution, and that maybe that very spider, one day, will hold the answer, will hold the key to your very own survival. You see, she's not so insignificant anymore now, is she? (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) |
How I climbed a 3,000-foot vertical cliff -- without ropes | {0: "Alex Honnold is a professional rock climber whose audacious free-solo ascents of\r\nAmerica's biggest cliffs have made him one of the world's most recognized climbers."} | TED2018 | Hello. I'd like to show you guys 30 seconds of the best day of my life. (Applause) So that was El Capitan in California's Yosemite National Park, and in case you couldn't tell, I was climbing by myself without a rope, a style of a climbing known as free soloing. That was the culmination of a nearly decade-long dream, and in the video I'm over 2,500 feet off the ground. Seems scary? Yeah, it is, which is why I spent so many years dreaming about soloing El Cap and not actually doing it. But on the day that that video was taken, it didn't feel scary at all. It felt as comfortable and natural as a walk in the park, which is what most folks were doing in Yosemite that day. Today I'd like to talk about how I was able to feel so comfortable and how I overcame my fear. I'll start with a very brief version of how I became a climber, and then tell the story of my two most significant free solos. They were both successful, which is why I'm here. (Laughter) But the first felt largely unsatisfying, whereas the second, El Cap, was by far the most fulfilling day of my life. Through these two climbs, you'll see my process for managing fear. So I started climbing in a gym when I was around 10 years old, which means that my life has been centered on climbing for more than 20 years. After nearly a decade of climbing mostly indoors, I made the transition to the outdoors and gradually started free soloing. I built up my comfort over time and slowly took on bigger and more challenging walls. And there have been many free soloists before me, so I had plenty of inspiration to draw from. But by 2008, I'd repeated most of their previous solos in Yosemite and was starting to imagine breaking into new terrain. The obvious first choice was Half Dome, an iconic 2,000-foot wall that lords over the east end of the valley. The problem, though also the allure, was that it was too big. I didn't really know how to prepare for a potential free solo. So I decided to skip the preparations and just go up there and have an adventure. I figured I would rise to the occasion, which, unsurprisingly, was not the best strategy. I did at least climb the route roped up with a friend two days before just to make sure that I knew roughly where to go and that I could physically do it. But when I came back by myself two days later, I decided that I didn't want to go that way. I knew that there was a 300-foot variation that circled around one of the hardest parts of the climb. I suddenly decided to skip the hard part and take the variation, even though I'd never climbed it before, but I immediately began to doubt myself. Imagine being by yourself in the dead center of a 2,000-foot face, wondering if you're lost. (Laughter) Thankfully, it was pretty much the right way and I circled back to the route. I was slightly rattled, I was pretty rattled, but I tried not to let it bother me too much because I knew that all the hardest climbing was up at the top. I needed to stay composed. It was a beautiful September morning, and as I climbed higher, I could hear the sounds of tourists chatting and laughing on the summit. They'd all hiked up the normal trail on the back, which I was planning on using for my descent. But between me and the summit lay a blank slab of granite. There were no cracks or edges to hold on to, just small ripples of texture up a slightly less than vertical wall. I had to trust my life to the friction between my climbing shoes and the smooth granite. I carefully balanced my way upward, shifting my weight back and forth between the small smears. But then I reached a foothold that I didn't quite trust. Two days ago, I'd have just stepped right up on it, but that would have been with a rope on. Now it felt too small and too slippery. I doubted that my foot would stay on if I weighted it. I considered a foot further to the side, which seemed worse. I switched my feet and tried a foot further out. It seemed even worse. I started to panic. I could hear people laughing on the summit just above me. I wanted to be anywhere but on that slab. My mind was racing in every direction. I knew what I had to do, but I was too afraid to do it. I just had to stand up on my right foot. And so after what felt like an eternity, I accepted what I had to do and I stood up on the right foot, and it didn't slip, and so I didn't die, and that move marked the end of the hardest climbing. And so I charged from there towards the summit. And so normally when you summit Half Dome, you have a rope and a bunch of climbing gear on you, and tourists gasp and they flock around you for photos. This time I popped over the edge shirtless, panting, jacked. I was amped, but nobody batted an eye. (Laughter) I looked like a lost hiker that was too close to the edge. I was surrounded by people talking on cell phones and having picnics. I felt like I was in a mall. (Laughter) I took off my tight climbing shoes and started hiking back down, and that's when people stopped me. "You're hiking barefoot? That's so hard-core." (Laughter) I didn't bother to explain, but that night in my climbing journal, I duly noted my free solo of Half Dome, but I included a frowny face and a comment, "Do better?" I'd succeeded in the solo and it was celebrated as a big first in climbing. Some friends later made a film about it. But I was unsatisfied. I was disappointed in my performance, because I knew that I had gotten away with something. I didn't want to be a lucky climber. I wanted to be a great climber. I actually took the next year or so off from free soloing, because I knew that I shouldn't make a habit of relying on luck. But even though I wasn't soloing very much, I'd already started to think about El Cap. It was always in the back of my mind as the obvious crown jewel of solos. It's the most striking wall in the world. Each year, for the next seven years, I'd think, "This is the year that I'm going to solo El Cap." And then I would drive into Yosemite, look up at the wall, and think, "No frickin' way." (Laughter) It's too big and too scary. But eventually I came to accept that I wanted to test myself against El Cap. It represented true mastery, but I needed it to feel different. I didn't want to get away with anything or barely squeak by. This time I wanted to do it right. The thing that makes El Cap so intimidating is the sheer scale of the wall. Most climbers take three to five days to ascend the 3,000 feet of vertical granite. The idea of setting out up a wall of that size with nothing but shoes and a chalk bag seemed impossible. 3,000 feet of climbing represents thousands of distinct hand and foot movements, which is a lot to remember. Many of the moves I knew through sheer repetition. I'd climbed El Cap maybe 50 times over the previous decade with a rope. But this photo shows my preferred method of rehearsing the moves. I'm on the summit, about to rappel down the face with over a thousand feet of rope to spend the day practicing. Once I found sequences that felt secure and repeatable, I had to memorize them. I had to make sure that they were so deeply ingrained within me that there was no possibility of error. I didn't want to be wondering if I was going the right way or using the best holds. I needed everything to feel automatic. Climbing with a rope is a largely physical effort. You just have to be strong enough to hold on and make the movements upward. But free soloing plays out more in the mind. The physical effort is largely the same. Your body is still climbing the same wall. But staying calm and performing at your best when you know that any mistake could mean death requires a certain kind of mindset. (Laughter) That's not supposed to be funny, but if it is, it is. (Laughter) I worked to cultivate that mindset through visualization, which basically just means imagining the entire experience of soloing the wall. Partially, that was to help me remember all the holds, but mostly visualization was about feeling the texture of each hold in my hand and imagining the sensation of my leg reaching out and placing my foot just so. I'd imagine it all like a choreographed dance thousands of feet up. The most difficult part of the whole route was called the Boulder Problem. It was about 2,000 feet off the ground and consisted of the hardest physical moves on the whole route: long pulls between poor handholds with very small, slippery feet. This is what I mean by a poor handhold: an edge smaller than the width of a pencil but facing downward that I had to press up into with my thumb. But that wasn't even the hardest part. The crux culminated in a karate kick with my left foot over to the inside of an adjacent corner, a maneuver that required a high degree of precision and flexibility, enough so that I'd been doing a nightly stretching routine for a full year ahead of time to make sure that I could comfortably make the reach with my leg. As I practiced the moves, my visualization turned to the emotional component of a potential solo. Basically, what if I got up there and it was too scary? What if I was too tired? What if I couldn't quite make the kick? I had to consider every possibility while I was safely on the ground, so that when the time came and I was actually making the moves without a rope, there was no room for doubt to creep in. Doubt is the precursor to fear, and I knew that I couldn't experience my perfect moment if I was afraid. I had to visualize and rehearse enough to remove all doubt. But beyond that, I also visualized how it would feel if it never seemed doable. What if, after so much work, I was afraid to try? What if I was wasting my time and I would never feel comfortable in such an exposed position? There were no easy answers, but El Cap meant enough to me that I would put in the work and find out. Some of my preparations were more mundane. This is a photo of my friend Conrad Anker climbing up the bottom of El Cap with an empty backpack. We spent the day climbing together to a specific crack in the middle of the wall that was choked with loose rocks that made that section difficult and potentially dangerous, because any missed step might knock a rock to the ground and kill a passing climber or hiker. So we carefully removed the rocks, loaded them into the pack and rappelled back down. Take a second to imagine how ridiculous it feels to climb 1,500 feet up a wall just to fill a backpack full of rocks. (Laughter) It's never that easy to carry a pack full of rocks around. It's even harder on the side of a cliff. It may have felt silly, but it still had to get done. I needed everything to feel perfect if I was ever going to climb the route without a rope. After two seasons of working specifically toward a potential free solo of El Cap, I finally finished all my preparations. I knew every handhold and foothold on the whole route, and I knew exactly what to do. Basically, I was ready. It was time to solo El Cap. On June 3, 2017, I woke up early, ate my usual breakfast of muesli and fruit and made it to the base of the wall before sunrise. I felt confident as I looked up the wall. I felt even better as I started climbing. About 500 feet up, I reached a slab very similar to the one that had given me so much trouble on Half Dome, but this time was different. I'd scouted every option, including hundreds of feet of wall to either side. I knew exactly what to do and how to do it. I had no doubts. I just climbed right through. Even the difficult and strenuous sections passed by with ease. I was perfectly executing my routine. I rested for a moment below the Boulder Problem and then climbed it just as I had practiced so many times with the rope on. My foot shot across to the wall on the left without hesitation, and I knew that I had done it. Climbing Half Dome had been a big goal and I did it, but I didn't get what I really wanted. I didn't achieve mastery. I was hesitant and afraid, and it wasn't the experience that I wanted. But El Cap was different. With 600 feet to go, I felt like the mountain was offering me a victory lap. I climbed with a smooth precision and enjoyed the sounds of the birds swooping around the cliff. It all felt like a celebration. And then I reached the summit after three hours and 56 minutes of glorious climbing. It was the climb that I wanted, and it felt like mastery. Thank you. (Applause) |
How cryptocurrency can help start-ups get investment capital | {0: 'Ashwini Anburajan using blockchain to democratize access to capital.'} | TED Residency | When I was raising investment for my startup, a venture capitalist said to me, "Ashwini, I think you're going to raise a few million dollars. And your company — it's going to sell for 50 to 70 million. You're going to be really excited. Your early investors are going to be really excited. And I'm going to be really upset. So I'm not going to invest in this deal." I remember just being dumbstruck. Who would be unhappy with putting four or five million dollars into a company and having it sell for 50 to 70 million? I was a first-time founder. I didn't have a wealthy network of individuals to turn to for investment, so I went to venture capitalists the most common form of investor in a technology company. But I'd never taken the time to understand what was motivating that VC to invest. I believe we're living in a golden era of entrepreneurship. There is more opportunity to build companies than ever before. But the financial systems designed to fund that innovation, venture capital, they haven't evolved in the past 20 to 30 years. Venture capital was designed to pour large sums of money into a small number of companies that can sell for over a billion dollars. It was not designed to sprinkle capital across many companies that have the potential to succeed but for less, like my own. That limits the number of ideas that get funded, the number of companies that are created and who can actually receive that funding to grow. And I think it inspires a tough question: What's our goal with entrepreneurship? If our goal is to create a tiny number of billion-dollar companies, let's stick with venture capital, it's working. But if our goal is to inspire innovation and empower more people to build companies of all sizes, we need a new way to fund those ideas. We need a more flexible system that doesn't squeeze entrepreneurs and investors into one rigid financial outcome. We need to democratize access to capital. In the summer of 2017, I went out to San Francisco, to join a tech accelerator with 30 other companies. The accelerator was supposed to teach us how to raise venture capital. But when I got out there, the startup community was buzzing about ICOs, or Initial Coin Offerings. For the first time, ICOs had raised more money for young startups than venture capital had. It was the first week of the program. Tequila Friday. And the founders couldn't stop talking. "I'm going to raise an ICO." "I'm going to raise an ICO." Until one guy goes, "How cool if we did this all together? We should do an ICO that combines the value of all of our companies and raise money as a group." At that point, I had to ask the obvious question, "Guys, what's an ICO?" ICOs were a way for young companies to raise money by issuing a digital currency tied to the value and services that the company provides. The currency acts similar to shares in a company, like on the public stock market, increasing in value as it's traded online. Most important, ICOs expanded the investor pool, from a few hundred venture capital firms to millions of everyday people, excited to invest. This market represented more money. It represented more investors. Which meant a greater likelihood to get funded. I was sold. The idea, though, of doing it together still seemed a little crazy. Startups compete with each other for investment, it takes hundreds of meetings to get a check. That I would spend my precious 15 minutes in front of an investor talking not just about my own company, but all the companies in the batch, was unprecedented. But the idea caught on. And we decided to cooperate, rather than compete. Every company put 10 percent of their equity into a communal pool that we then split into tradable cryptocurrency that investors could buy and sell. Six months and four law firms later — (Laughter) in January 2018, we launched the very first ICO that represented the value of nearly 30 companies and an entirely new way to raise capital. We got a lot of press. My favorite headline about us read, "VCs, read this and weep." (Laughter) Our fund was naturally more diverse. Twenty percent of the founders were women. Fifty percent were international. The investors were more excited, too. They had a chance to get better returns, because we took out the middleman fees of venture capital. And they could take their money and reinvest it, potentially funding more new ideas faster. I believe this creates a virtuous cycle of capital that allows many more entrepreneurs to succeed. Because access to capital is access to opportunity. And we have only just begun to imagine what democratizing access to capital will do. I would have never thought that my own search for funding would lead me to this stage, having helped nearly 30 companies get investment. Imagine if other entrepreneurs tried to invent new ways to access capital rather than following the traditional route. It would change what gets built, who builds it and the long-term impact on the economy. And I believe that's way more exciting than just trying to invest in the next billion-dollar startup. Thank you. (Applause) |
Can you solve the killer robo-ants riddle? | null | TED-Ed | The good news is that your experimental robo-ants are a success! The bad news is that you accidentally just gave them the ability to shoot deadly lasers …and you can’t turn it off. You have five minutes to stop them before the lasers go online. Until then, all of your robo-ants will walk inside their habitat at a speed of exactly 1 meter per minute. If they bump into each other or hit a dead end, they’ll instantly turn around and walk back the way they came. When five minutes are up, they’ll turn on their lasers, break free, and stream out into the world, carving a path of destruction as they go. Your one chance to stop them is to insert the two emergency vacuum nozzles into the habitat and suck the ants up before they break free. The nozzles can press into any one location in the habitat through a membrane covering its front side, and any ants that walk past will be sucked up and deactivated. You can’t move the nozzles once they’re placed without leaving a hole that the robo-ants would pour out of, so choosing the right spots will be key. The habitat is made out of meter-long tubes. When the robots reach an intersection, they will pick randomly whether to go left, right, or forward. They only go backward if they hit hit another robo-ant or a dead end. Unfortunately, there are hundreds of them inside the habitat, and if even one escapes, it’ll do a lot of damage. With just less than five minutes remaining, where should you place the 2 vacuum nozzles to suck up all the robo-ants? Pause the video now if you want to figure it out for yourself. Answer in: 3 Answer in: 2 Answer in: 1 With robo-ants ricocheting all over the habitat, it might seem impossible to stop them before they break free. But this situation is simpler than it seems. Here's why. Imagine just two robo-ants crawling toward each other. When they collide, they immediately reverse directions. And what would that sequence of events look like if they crawled past each other instead? It would look exactly the same before and after their collision, but with their positions swapped. This is true every time a pair of robo-ants meet. Because the identities of individual ants don’t matter, you just need to figure out where you should put the nozzles to capture any single ant walking without interruption for less than 5 minutes, starting from any point in the habitat. That’s much easier to conceptualize and solve. Placing the nozzles at intersections where three or four tubes meet seems like your best bet since that’s where the robo-ants might otherwise change directions and miss your nozzles. There are only four intersections… which two should you pick? The top right intersection has to be one of them. If it isn’t, an ant crawling down from this intersection toward the dead end would crawl for four minutes to get back to the intersection, and then go in any of three directions, walking for at least another minute. Once you’ve placed a nozzle in the top right, the only other choice that has a chance to work is the bottom left. To see that this works, imagine an ant anywhere else in the habitat. Worst case scenario, the ant would start right next to the vacuum nozzle, marching away from it. But in all those worst cases, the ant would march for at most 4 meters before being sucked up into the vacuum. No other choice of two intersection points is guaranteed to get all the robo-ants within five minutes. Having vacuumed them all up, you’ve averted a major crisis. Before you mess with robo-ants again, you’ll want to have a robo-anteater ready. And wouldn’t it be cool if it could fly and breathe fire? There’s no way that could go wrong! |
3 ways to create a space that moves you, from a Broadway set designer | {0: 'David Korins develops and designs innovative experiences.'} | TEDxBroadway | You're sitting there, and it's incredibly frustrating. It's maddening. You've been sitting there for hours, filling in those little tiny circles with your No. 2 pencil — this is a standardized test. You look up, half-erased chalkboard, you can see that perfectly written cursive alphabet, the pull-down maps, you can hear, tick, tick, tick, ticking on the wall, that industrial clock. But most importantly, you can feel that oppressive fluorescent light, that death ray over your head. Bzzzzzz. And you can't take it anymore, but you don't have to, because Miss Darling says, "OK, boys and girls, you're done." So you jump up — I mean, there is nothing left of you but a vapor trail. You move so quickly, you slam that little molded plastic chair, and you sprint down the hallway; you go past the Lysol smell and the BO smell and the cubbies, and you push the door — (Inhales deeply) and finally, you're outside. Oh, you can feel the wind on your face, then the sun on your skin and most importantly, the big blue sky. That is a revelation of space. Making revelations of space is what I do; I'm a designer and creative director, and that's what I do for a living. I do it for all sorts of people in all kinds of different ways, and it might seem complicated, but it's not. And over the next couple of minutes, I'm going to give you three ways that I think you can move through your world so that you, too, can make revelations of space, or at least reveal them. Step one: therapy. I know, I know, I know: blah, blah, blah, New Yorker, blah, blah, blah, therapy. But seriously, therapy — you have to know why you're doing these things, right? When I got the job of designing "Hamilton," I sat with Lin-Manuel Miranda, writer, Tommy Kail, director, and I said, "Why are we telling this 246-year-old story? What is it about the story that you want to say, and what do you want people to feel like when they experience the show?" It's important. When we get that, we move into step two: the design phase. And I'll give you some little tricks about that, but the design phase is important because we get to make these cool toys. I reach into Lin's brain, he reaches into mine, this monologue becomes a dialogue. And I make these cool toys, and I say, "Does this world look like the world that you think could be a place where we could house your show?" If the answer is yes — and when the answer is yes — we move into what I think is the most terrifying part, which is the execution phase. The execution phase is when we get to build this thing, and when this conversation goes from a few people to a few hundred people now translating this idea. We put it in this beautiful little thing, put it in the "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" super-sizer machine and blow it up full-scale, and we never know if we did it right until we show up onstage and go, "Is it OK? Is it OK?" Here's the thing: you don't have to be Lin, you don't have to have a book that you want to turn into a show in order to do this in your real life. You're already starring in a show, by the way. It's called your life. Congratulations. (Laughter) But seriously, Shakespeare said it: "All the world's a stage." He nailed that part. What he screwed up royally was that part where he said, "And we are merely players." It's ridiculous. We're not merely players. We are the costume designers and the lighting designers and the makeup artists in our own world, and I want to get you to think about being the set designer in your world. Because I think you can leave here if you do these three steps and a couple of little tricks, as I said, I'm going to tell you, and you can begin to change the world the way you want to. You want to do it? OK. Everybody write a show. (Laughter) No. Just kidding. OK. Step one: therapy. Right? How are you feeling? That's what the therapist says: "How are you feeling today?" It's important to remember that, because when we design the world for you, the therapy is important. It tells you that emotion is going to become light and color. A good example of that light and color is a show I designed called "Dear Evan Hansen." (Cheers) "Dear Evan Hansen" exists — oh my God — "Dear Evan Hansen" exists in a world of almost all light and color. So I chose a color: inky-black darkness. (Laughter) Inky-black darkness is a color the way that sadness is an emotion. And this show transforms people, but not before it wrecks people. I bet you're wondering, "How expensive could the set possibly be to transform you if you sit for two hours and 20 minutes in inky-black darkness?" The answer is: cheap! Inky-black darkness, turn the lights on at the right time. Seriously, think about leaving Miss Darling's class. Inky-black darkness gives way at the right moment, we fly away that wall and reveal a beautiful blue sky. It blows people away and it transports them, and it makes them feel hopeful. And we know this because color is emotion, and when you paint with color, you're painting with feelings. So think about that emotion, the one I had you file away in your mental Rolodex. What color is it? Where in your wardrobe does it exist, and where in your home does it exist? When we design the show for you, we're going to use that color to tell you how you feel in certain times. But also, you know this exists because you put the hero in white, you put the lead character in red, you put the villain in all black. It's typecasting. You know that. So think about it. But there's also something else that happens in the world that helps us move through the world in a safe way. They're called architectural standards. They make us not fall down and go boom. Doorknobs are all at the same height. Light switches are all at the same height. Toilet bowls are always — thank God — at the same height, because no one ever misses the toilet bowl. But seriously, what would happen if we started to tweak those architectural standards to get what we wanted? It reminds me of the stairs I made for Pee-Wee Herman. Pee-Wee Herman is a child, and his entire world is created so that we perceive Pee-Wee as a child. The architecture and the furniture and everything come to life, but nothing more important than those stairs. Those stairs are 12 inches high, so when Pee-Wee clomps up and down those stairs, he interacts with them like a kid. You can't fake that kind of interaction, and that's the exact opposite of what we ask people in opera to do. In opera, we shrink those stairs so that our main characters can glide up and down effortlessly without ever breaking their voice. You could never put an opera singer in Pee-Wee's Playhouse, (Sings in Pee-Wee's voice) or they wouldn't be able to do their job. (Laughter) But you couldn't put Pee-Wee in an opera set. He couldn't climb up and down those stairs. There'd be no Pee-Wee. He'd be like James Bond slinking elegantly up and down the stairs. It wouldn't work. (Laughter) Now think of your set, your home, what you exist in every single day. If you're anything like me, the trash can is just too small for the amount of takeout that you buy every night, right? And I find myself jamming like I'm kneading dough at a pizza place, I'm jamming it in because I don't understand. Or, maybe the light switch in your foyer is just stashed behind too many precariously placed coats, and so you don't even go for it. Therefore, day after day, you wind up walking in and out of a chasm of darkness. (Laughter) It's true. But what would happen if the space revealed something about yourself that you didn't even know? Kanye never told me specifically that he wanted to be God. But — (Laughter) when we started working together, we were sending images back and forth, and he sent me a picture of the aurora borealis with lightning strikes through it. And he sent me pictures from a mountaintop looking down at a smoke-filled canyon, or smoke underneath the surface of water — like, epic stuff. So the first set I designed for him was a huge light box with the name of his record label. He would stand triumphantly in front of it, and it would flash lights like a lightning bolt. And it was epic, but, like, starter-kit epic. We moved on to a large swath of sky with a tear down the middle, and through the tear, you could see deep parts of the cosmos. Getting closer. We evolved to standing on top of an obelisk, standing on top of a mountainside, standing on top of boxes. You know, he was evolving as an artist through space, and it was my job to try and keep up. When we did Coachella, there he was, standing in front of an 80-foot-wide by 40-foot-tall ancient artifact, literally handed down from God to man. He was evolving, and we were all witness to it. And in his last show, which I didn't design but I witnessed, he had self-actualized. He was literally standing on a floating plexiglass deck over his adoring fans, who had no choice but to praise to Yeezus up above. (Laughter) He had deified himself. You can't become Yeezus in your living room. The space told him who he was about himself, and then he delivered that to us. When I was 20 years old, I was driving through a parking lot, and I saw a puddle. I thought, "I'm going to veer to the left. No — I'm going through it." And I hit the puddle, and — ffftt! — all the water underneath my car, and instantly, I have an aha moment. Light bulb goes off. Everything in the world needs to be designed. I mean, I'm sure I was thinking, "The drainage needs to be designed in this parking lot." But then I was like, "Everything in the world needs to be designed." And it's true: left to its own devices, Mother Nature isn't going to carve an interesting or necessarily helpful path for you. I've spent my career reaching into people's minds and creating worlds out here that we can all interact with. And yeah, you might not get to do this with fancy collaborators, but I think if you leave here, those three easy steps — therapy, who do I want to be, why do I do the things that I do; design, create a plan and try and follow through with it, what can I do; execute it — I think if you add that with a little color theory — (Laughter) some cool design choices and a general disrespect for architectural standards, you can go out and create the world that you want to live in, and I am going to go home and buy a new trash can. Thank you. (Applause) |
What Americans agree on when it comes to health | {0: 'Rebecca Onie is a nationally recognized leader in the intersection of social determinants, population health and health care delivery'} | TED Salon Optum | Today, we are a country divided, or at least that's what we're told. We are torn apart by immigration, education, guns and health care. Health care is ugly and it is loud, so loud that it threatens to drown out everything else. (Voice-over) Protesters: Health care is a human right! Fight, fight, fight! Protesters: Hey hey! Ho ho! Obamacare has got to go! Rebecca Onie: But what if underneath all the noise, we're not divided? What if the things that we don't ask about are the things that we most agree upon? It turns out that when we ask the right questions, the answers are startling, because we agree, not on health care, but on something more important: we agree on health. For 20 years, I've been obsessed with one question: What do we, what do all of us need in order to be healthy? As a college student in 1995, I spent months talking to physicians at a chaotic hospital in Boston, asking them, "What's the one thing your patients most need to be healthy?" They shared the same story again and again, one that I've heard hundreds of variations of since. They say, "Every day I see a patient with an asthma exacerbation, and I prescribe a controller medication. But I know she is living in a mold-infested apartment. Or I see a kid with an ear infection, and I prescribe antibiotics, but I know there is no food at home. And I don't ask about those issues, because there's nothing I can do." Now, it seemed that it shouldn't be so complicated to design a doctor's visit around what people actually need to be healthy. So I created Health Leads, an organization enabling thousands of physicians and other caregivers to ask their patients, "What do you need to be healthy?" and then prescribe those things — fruits and vegetables, heat in the winter, electricity to refrigerate their medication — and we then navigated patients to those resources in their communities. The model works. A Mass General Hospital study found that navigating patients to essential resources is associated with improvements in blood pressure and cholesterol levels similar to introducing a new drug, but without all the side effects. So two decades later, what's changed? It's now widely recognized that just 20 percent of health outcomes are tied to medical care, whereas up to 70 percent are tied to healthy behaviors and what's called the social determinants of health — basically, everything that happens to us for that vast majority of time when we're not in the doctor's office or the hospital. Health care executives now routinely remind us that our zip code matters more than our genetic code. And one health care publication even recently had the audacity to describe the social determinants of health as "the feel-good buzzword of the year." Now, there's been some action, too. Over the past decade, six major health care providers and insurers have committed over 600 million dollars to affordable housing, recognizing that it reduces infant mortality and increases life expectancy. But let's be honest. Is our 3.5 trillion dollar health care system fundamentally designed to create health? Absolutely not. Take access to healthy food. Not long ago, a teenage boy shows up at a hospital in Baltimore, losing weight. Just as his doctors are huddled up figuring out which metabolic panels and blood tests to run, one of my colleagues asks out loud, "Do you think he might be hungry?" It turned out that this kid had been kicked out of his housing and literally hadn't had a meal in weeks. He said he was "... so relieved that somebody finally asked me." Somehow, we've created a health care system where asking a patient "Are you hungry?" is so far outside the bounds of what counts as health care that we mostly fail or forget to ask altogether; where doctors lament a hospital's "no third sandwich policy," meaning that if you're a hungry patient in the ER, you can have only two free sandwiches, but as many MRIs as the doctor orders; where, in 2016 in the state of Texas, they spent 1.2 billion dollars on the medical costs of malnutrition instead of on access to healthy food; where a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services program stratifies hungry patients, so that some get access to food and some get information about food, with the justification that doing nothing for hungry patients is standard and usual care in this country. And that's just food. The same is true for housing, electricity ... The bottom line is, health care may be changing, but not by enough and certainly not fast enough. We ask the wrong questions of our doctors, of our patients, but also of our citizens. We ask about and argue about health care, but how do voters think about health? No one could tell us the answer to that question, so we launched a new initiative and hired a polling firm to ask voters across the country: What do you need to be healthy? What was so striking about this was that no one has any clue what we are talking about in health care. Voters do not think the social determinants of health is a feel-good phrase. They actually hate it. "What uneducated person came up with that language?" one of the voters said. Or my favorite was the guy who said, "You're killing me." But when you strip away all the ridiculousness of our language in health care, we know exactly what creates health. So take Charlotte, North Carolina. We had two focus groups, one of African American Democratic women and one of white Republican women. And we asked them, "If you had a hundred dollars, how would you spend it to buy health in your community? Turns out, they agree nearly to the last percentage point. First, they agree that health care only sort of impacts health. So they choose to spend the majority of their dollars outside of hospitals and clinics. And second, they agree on what creates health, spending 19 percent on affordable housing and about 25 percent on access to healthy food. So I am sure you are thinking, "This has got to be a fluke." But it's not. White and Latino male swing voters in Seattle, white and African American Democratic voters in Cleveland, white male Republicans in Dallas, low-income white Democrats in Hendersonville, North Carolina: their answers are strikingly similar, with all of them choosing to spend more money on healthy food and safe housing than they would on hospitals and health centers. When you ask the right questions, it becomes pretty clear: we may be fractured on health care in this country, but we are unified on health. The thing that I've been struggling with is why. Why do we agree on health? We agree on health because it is common sense. We all know that the things we need to get healthy — medicine and medical care — are not the things we need to be healthy, to not get sick in the first place. But we also agree because of common experience. In a study of 5,000 patients, 24 percent of the patients with commercial health insurance — meaning, they had a job — still ran out of food or struggled to find housing or transportation or other essential resources. Twenty-four percent. And we saw the same thing in our focus groups. Nearly every voter knew what it meant to struggle, either themselves or their families or their neighbors. One of those white Republican women in Charlotte was a waitress struggling to stay awake with an enormous Big Gulp soda. She just looked exhausted. And she was. She told us that she worked two jobs but still could not afford a membership to the Y, but it was OK that she couldn't go to the gym, she said, because she also could not afford gas and walked 10 miles to and from work every single day. Listening to her, I felt this familiar panic rise in me, the residue of my own childhood. When I was 10 years old, my father lay on the living room floor in the grips of one of his many depressions. As I crouched next to him, he told me that he wanted to kill himself. My father lived, but he struggled to work. And my family survived, but we teetered, down one paycheck, relying on my mom's schoolteacher salary. Even as a little kid, I knew we lived in the shadow of financial and emotional collapse. This is really hard to say, because it's taken me 25 years to be honest with myself that this is why I do this work: knowing that my father needed health care to recover, but to be healthy, my family needed something else, we needed a decent income; and knowing, as so many do more than I, that panic when the basics threaten to slip away. To the voters in our focus groups, the solutions were straightforward. As one of those white Republican women in Charlotte said, "Instead of putting all this money into health care, put it into affordable housing. You know, like, take it and distribute it differently." It turns out that when you have the right language and you ask the right questions, the answers become remarkably clear and unanimous. What we know is that, despite all the noise, the plan for health care in this country is that there is no plan. But we have something more powerful than any politician's bill, any candidate's platform, any think tank's policy statement. We have our common sense and our common experience. So I ask, if you are a health care executive: Do you know how many of your patients run out of food or struggle to pay the rent at the end of the month? Is that data on your scorecard, shaping your business and your bonuses? If you are a politician: Will you continue to fight on the scorched earth of health care, or will you act on what your voters, what Democratic and Republican voters alike, already know, which is that good wages, healthy food and safe housing are health? And for the rest of us, for the citizens of this country: Will we demand accountability to what we know to be true, which is that our common sense, our common experience, makes us the experts in what it takes to be healthy? This moment, as it turns out, is not about changing minds. It is about something more powerful. It is about changing the questions we ask and quieting the noise to hear each other's answers. It is about the radical possibility that we the patients, we the physicians, we the caregivers, we the health care executives and yes, even we the people, that we agree. And it is now time — in fact, long overdue — for us to marshal the courage to hear those answers and to act upon them. Thank you. (Applause) |
What baby boomers can learn from millennials at work -- and vice versa | {0: 'Chip Conley disrupted the hospitality industry -- twice.'} | TED Salon Verizon | It was my third day on the job at a hot Silicon Valley start-up in early 2013. I was twice the age of the dozen engineers in the room. I'd been brought in to the company because I was a seasoned expert in my field, but in this particular room, I felt like a newbie amongst the tech geniuses. I was listening to them talk and thinking that the best thing I could do was be invisible. And then suddenly, the 25-year-old wizard leading the meeting stared at me and asked, "If you shipped a feature and no one used it, did it really ship?" (Laughter) "Ship a feature"? In that moment, Chip knew he was in deep ship. (Laughter) I had no idea what he was talking about. I just sat there awkwardly, and mercifully, he moved on to someone else. I slid down in my chair, and I couldn't wait for that meeting to end. That was my introduction to Airbnb. I was asked and invited by the three millennial cofounders to join their company to help them take their fast-growing tech start-up and turn it into a global hospitality brand, as well as to be the in-house mentor for CEO Brian Chesky. Now, I'd spent from age 26 to 52 being a boutique hotel entrepreneur, and so I guess I'd learned a few things along the way and accumulated some hospitality knowledge. But after my first week, I realized that the brave new home-sharing world didn't need much of my old-school bricks-and-mortar hotel insights. A stark reality rocked me: What do I have to offer? I'd never been in a tech company before. Five and a half years ago, I had never heard of the "sharing economy," nor did I have an Uber or Lyft app on my phone. This was not my natural habitat. So, I decided at that moment that I could either run for the hills, or cast judgment on these young geniuses, or instead, turn the judgment into curiosity and actually see if I could match my wise eyes with their fresh eyes. I fancied myself a modern Margaret Mead amongst the millennials, and I quickly learned that I had as much to offer them as they did to me. The more I've seen and learned about our respective generations, the more I realize that we often don't trust each other enough to actually share our respective wisdom. We may share a border, but we don't necessarily trust each other enough to share that respective wisdom. I believe, looking at the modern workplace, that the trade agreement of our time is opening up these intergenerational pipelines of wisdom so that we can all learn from each other. Almost 40 percent of us in the United States have a boss that's younger than us, and that number is growing quickly. Power is cascading to the young like never before because of our increasing reliance on DQ: digital intelligence. We're seeing young founders of companies in their early 20s scale them up to global giants by the time they get to 30, and yet, we expect these young digital leaders to somehow miraculously embody the relationship wisdoms we older workers have had decades to learn. It's hard to microwave your emotional intelligence. There's ample evidence that gender- and ethnically diverse companies are more effective. But what about age? This is a very important question, because for the first time ever, we have five generations in the workplace at the same time, unintentionally. Maybe it's time we got a little more intentional about how we work collectively. There have been a number of European studies that have shown that age-diverse teams are more effective and successful. So why is that only eight percent of the companies that have a diversity and inclusion program have actually expanded that strategy to include age as just as important of a demographic as gender or race? Maybe they didn't get the memo: the world is getting older! One of the paradoxes of our time is that baby boomers are more vibrant and healthy longer into life, we're actually working later into life, and yet we're feeling less and less relevant. Some of us feel like a carton of milk — an old carton of milk — with an expiration date stamped on our wrinkled foreheads. For many of us in midlife, this isn't just a feeling, it is a harsh reality, when we suddenly lose our job and the phone stops ringing. For many of us, justifiably, we worry that people see our experience as a liability, not an asset. You've heard of the old phrase — or maybe the relatively new phrase — "Sixty is the new forty, physically." Right? When it comes to power in the workplace today, 30 is the new 50. All right, well, this is all pretty exciting, right? (Laughter) Truthfully, power is moving 10 years younger. We're all going to live 10 years longer. Do the math. Society has created a new 20-year irrelevancy gap. Midlife used to be 45 to 65, but I would suggest it now stretches into a midlife marathon 40 years long, from 35 to 75. But wait — there is a bright spot. Why is it that we actually get smarter and wiser about our humanity as we age? Our physical peak may be our 20s, our financial and salary peak may be age 50, but our emotional peak is in midlife and beyond, because we have developed pattern recognition about ourselves and others. So how can we get companies to tap into that wisdom of the midlife folks, just as they nurture their digital young geniuses as well? The most successful companies today and in the future will actually learn how to create a powerful alchemy of the two. Here's how the alchemy worked for me at Airbnb: I was assigned a young, smart partner, who helped me develop a hospitality department. Early on, Laura Hughes could see that I was a little lost in this habitat, so she often sat right next to me in meetings so she could be my tech translator, and I could write her notes and she could tell me, "That's what that means." Laura was 27 years old, she'd worked for Google for four years and then for a year and a half at Airbnb when I met her. Like many of her millennial cohorts, she had actually grown into a managerial role before she'd gotten any formal leadership training. I don't care if you're in the B-to-B world, the B-to-C world, the C-to-C world or the A-to-Z world, business is fundamentally H-to-H: human to human. And yet, Laura's approach to leadership was really formed in the technocratic world, and it was purely metric driven. One of the things she said to me in the first few months was, "I love the fact that your approach to leadership is to create a compelling vision that becomes a North Star for us." Now, my fact knowledge, as in, how many rooms a maid cleans in an eight-hour shift, might not be all that important in a home-sharing world. My process knowledge of "How do you get things done?" based upon understanding the underlying motivations of everybody in the room, was incredibly valuable, in a company where most people didn't have a lot of organizational experience. As I spent more time at Airbnb, I realized it's possible a new kind of elder was emerging in the workplace. Not the elder of the past, who actually was regarded with reverence. No, what is striking about the modern elder is their relevance, their ability to use timeless wisdom and apply it to modern-day problems. Maybe it's time we actually valued wisdom as much as we do disruption. And maybe it's time — not just maybe, it is time — for us to definitely reclaim the word "elder" and give it a modern twist. The modern elder is as much an intern as they are a mentor, because they realize, in a world that is changing so quickly, their beginners' mind and their catalytic curiosity is a life-affirming elixir, not just for themselves but for everyone around them. Intergenerational improv has been known in music and the arts: think Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga or Wynton Marsalis and the Young Stars of Jazz. This kind of riffing in the business world is often called "mutual mentorship": millennial DQ for Gen X and boomer EQ. I got to experience that kind of intergenerational reciprocity with Laura and our stellar data science team when we were actually remaking and evolving the Airbnb peer-to-peer review system, using Laura's analytical mind and my human-centered intuition. With that perfect alchemy of algorithm and people wisdom, we were able to create and instantaneous feedback loop that helped our hosts better understand the needs of our guests. High tech meets high touch. At Airbnb, I also learned as a modern elder that my role was to intern publicly and mentor privately. Search engines are brilliant at giving you an answer, but a wise, sage guide can offer you just the right question. Google does not understand, at least not yet, nuance like a finely attuned human heart and mind. Over time, to my surprise, dozens and dozens of young employees at Airbnb sought me out for private mentoring sessions. But in reality, we were often just mentoring each other. In sum, CEO Brian Chesky brought me in for my industry knowledge, but what I really offered was my well-earned wisdom. Maybe it's time we retire the term "knowledge worker" and replaced it with "wisdom worker." We have five generations in the workplace today, and we can operate like separate isolationist countries, or we can actually start to find a way to bridge these generational borders. And it's time for us to actually look at how to change up the physics of wisdom so it actually flows in both directions, from old to young and from young to old. How can you apply this in your own life? Personally, who can you reach out to to create a mutual mentorship relationship? And organizationally, how can you create the conditions to foster an intergenerational flow of wisdom? This is the new sharing economy. Thank you. (Applause) |
History through the eyes of a chicken | null | TED-Ed | The annals of Ancient Egyptian king Thutmose III described a marvelous foreign bird that “gives birth daily.” Zoroastrians viewed them as spirits whose cries told of the cosmic struggle between darkness and light. Romans brought them on their military campaigns to foretell the success of future battles. And today, this bird still occupies an important, though much less honorable position – on our dinner plates. The modern chicken is descended primarily from the Red Junglefowl, and partially from three other closely related species, all native to India and Southeast Asia. The region’s bamboo plants produce massive amounts of fruit just once every few decades. Junglefowls’ ability to lay eggs daily may have evolved to take advantage of these rare feasts, increasing their population when food was abundant. This was something humans could exploit on a consistent basis, and the birds’ weak flight capabilities and limited need for space made them easy to capture and contain. The earliest domesticated chickens, dating at least back to 7,000 years ago, weren’t bred for food, but for something considered less savory today. The aggressiveness of breeding males, armed with natural leg spurs, made cockfighting a popular entertainment. By the second millennium BCE, chickens had spread from the Indus Valley to China and the Middle East to occupy royal menageries and to be used in religious rituals. But it was in Egypt where the next chapter in the bird’s history began. When a hen naturally incubates eggs, she will stop laying new ones and sit on a “clutch” of 6 or more eggs for 21 days. By the middle of the 1st millennium BCE, the Egyptians had learned to artificially incubate chicken eggs by placing them in baskets over hot ashes. That freed up hens to continue laying daily, and what had been a royal delicacy or religious offering became a common meal. Around the same time as Egyptians were incubating eggs, Phoenician merchants introduced chickens to Europe, where they quickly became an essential part of European livestock. However, for a long time, the chicken’s revered status continued to exist alongside its culinary one. The Ancient Greeks used fighting roosters as inspirational examples for young soldiers. The Romans consulted chickens as oracles. And as late as the 7th Century, the chicken was considered a symbol for Christianity. Over the next few centuries, chickens accompanied humans wherever they went, spreading throughout the world through trade, conquest, and colonization. After the Opium Wars, Chinese breeds were brought to England and crossed with local chickens. This gave rise to a phenomenon called “Hen Fever” or “The Fancy”, with farmers all over Europe striving to breed new varieties with particular combinations of traits. This trend also caught the attention of a certain Charles Darwin, who wondered if a similar selective breeding process occurred in nature. Darwin would observe hundreds of chickens while finalizing his historic work introducing the theory of Evolution. But the chicken’s greatest contribution to science was yet to come. In the early 20th century, a trio of British scientists conducted extensive crossbreeding of chickens, building on Gregor Mendel’s studies of genetic inheritance. With their high genetic diversity, many distinct traits, and only 7 months between generations, chickens were the perfect subject. This work resulted in the famous Punnett Square, used to show the genotypes that would result from breeding a given pairing. Since then, numerous breeding initiatives have made chickens bigger and meatier, and allowed them to lay more eggs than ever. Meanwhile, chicken production has shifted to an industrial, factory-like model, with birds raised in spaces with a footprint no larger than a sheet of paper. And while there’s been a shift towards free-range farming due to animal rights and environmental concerns, most of the world’s more than 22 billion chickens today are factory farmed. From gladiators and gifts to the gods, to traveling companions and research subjects, chickens have played many roles over the centuries. And though they may not have come before the proverbial egg, chickens’ fascinating history tells us a great deal about our own. |
How whistle-blowers shape history | {0: 'Kelly Richmond Pope researches organizational misconduct, ethics and fraud.'} | TEDxDePaulUniversity | How many of us have ever seen something, thought that we should report it, but decided not to? And not that I need to see a show of hands, but I'm sure this has happened to someone in this room before. In fact, when this question was asked to a group of employees, 46 percent of them responded by saying that they had seen something and decided not to report it. So if you raised your hand, or quietly raised your hand, don't feel bad, you're not alone. This message of if you see something to say something is really all around us. Even when driving down the highway, you see billboards like this, encouraging us to report crime without revealing ourselves. But I still feel like a lot of us are really uncomfortable coming forward in the name of the truth. I'm an accounting professor, and I do fraud research. And in my class, I encourage my students to come forward with information if they see it. Or in other words, encouraging my students to become whistle-blowers. But if I'm being completely honest with myself, I am really conflicted with this message that I'm sending to my students. And here's why. Whistle-blowers are under attack. Headline after headline shows us this. Many people choose not to become whistle-blowers due to the fear of retaliation. From demotions to death threats, to job loss — perpetual job loss. Choosing to become a whistle-blower is an uphill battle. Their loyalty becomes into question. Their motives, their trustworthiness. So how can I, as a professor who really cares about her students encourage them to become whistle-blowers, when I know how the world truly feels about them? So, one day I was getting ready for my annual whistle-blower lecture with my students. And I was working on an article for "Forbes," entitled "Wells Fargo and Millennial Whistle-blowing. What Do We Tell Them?" And as I was working on this piece and reading about the case, I became outraged. And what made me angry was when I came to the fact and realized that the employees that tried to whistle-blow were actually fired. And it really made me think about the message that I was sharing with my students. And it made me think: What if my students had been Wells Fargo employees? On the one hand, if they whistle-blew, they would have gotten fired. But on the other hand, if they didn't report the frauds that they knew, the way current regulation is written, employees are held responsible if they knew something and didn't report it. So criminal prosecution is a real option. What's a person supposed to do with those type of odds? I of all people know the valuable contributions that whistle-blowers make. In fact, most frauds are discovered by them. Forty two percent of frauds are discovered by a whistle-blower in comparison to other methods, like measurement review and external audit. And when you think about some of the more classic or historical fraud cases, it always is around a whistle-blower. Think Watergate — discovered by a whistle-blower. Think Enron — discovered by a whistle-blower. And who can forget about Bernard Madoff, discovered by a whistle-blower? It takes a tremendous amount of courage to come forward in the name of the truth. But when we think about the term whistle-blower, we often think of some very descriptive words: rat, snake, traitor, tattletale, weasel. And those are the nice words, the ones I can say from the stage. And so when I'm not in class, I go around the country and I interview white-collar felons, whistle-blowers and victims of fraud. Because really I'm trying to understand what makes them tick and to bring those experiences back into the classroom. But it's my interviews with whistle-blowers that really stick with me. And they stick with me, because they make me question my own courage. When given the opportunity, would I actually speak up? And so, this is a couple stories that I want to share with you. This is Mary. Mary Willingham is the whistle-blower from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, academic fraud case. And Mary was a learning specialist at the university, and she worked with students, primarily student athletes. And what she noticed, when she was working with students, is they were turning in term papers that seemed well beyond their reading levels. She started to ask a couple of questions and she found out that there was a database where the student athletes could retrieve papers and turn them in. And then she found out that some of her colleagues were funneling students into fake classes, just to keep them eligible to play. Now, when Mary found this out, she was outraged. And so what she tried to do was go to her direct supervisor. But they didn't do anything. And then Mary tried to go to some internal university administrators. And they didn't do anything. So, what happens when nobody listens? You blog. So Mary decided to develop a blog. Her blog went viral within 24 hours, and she was contacted by a reporter. Now, when she was contacted by this reporter, her identity was known. She was exposed. And when she was exposed, she received a demotion, death threats, over collegiate sports. Mary didn't do anything wrong. She didn't participate in the fraud. She really thought that she was giving voice to students that were voiceless. But her loyalty was questioned. Her trustworthiness and her motives. Now, whistle-blowing doesn't always have to end in demotions or death threats. Actually, in 2002, this was the cover of "Time" magazine, where we were actually honoring three brave whistle-blowers for their decision to come forward in the name of the truth. And when you look at the research, 22 percent of whistle-blowers actually report retaliation. So there is a huge population of people that report and are not retaliated against and that gives me hope. So this is Kathe. Kathe Swanson is a retired city clerk from the city of Dixon. And one day, Kathe was doing her job, just like she always did, and she stumbled upon a pretty interesting case. See, Kathe was at the end of the month, and she was doing her treasures report for the city, and typically, her boss, Rita Crundwell, gave her a list of accounts and said, "Kathe, call the bank and get these specific accounts." And Kathe did her job. But this particular day, Rita was out of town, and Kathe was busy. She picks up the phone, she calls the bank and says, "Fax me all of the accounts." And when she gets the fax, she sees that there is an account that has some withdrawals and deposits in it that she did not know about. It was an account controlled only by Rita. So Kathe looked at the information, she reported it to her direct supervisor, which was then-mayor Burke, and this led into a huge investigation, a six-month investigation. Come to find out, Kathe's boss, Rita Crundwell, was embezzling money. Rita was embezzling 53 million dollars over a 20-year period, and Kathe just happened to stumble upon it. Kathe is a hero. And actually, I had the opportunity of interviewing Kathe for my documentary, "All the Queen's Horses." And Kathe wasn't seeking fame. In fact, she really didn't want to talk to me for a really long time, but through strategic stalking, she ended up doing the interview. (Laughter) But she was seeking fairness, not fame. And if it wasn't for Kathe, who's to say this fraud would have ever been discovered? So, remember that "Forbes" article I was talking about, that I was working on before my lecture? Well, I posted it and something really fantastic happened. I started receiving emails from whistle-blowers all over the world. And as I was receiving these emails and responding back to them, there was a common theme in the message that I received, and this is what it was: they all said this, "I blew the whistle, people really hate me now. I got fired, but guess what? I would do it all over again if I could." And so as I kept reading this message, all these messages, I wanted to think, what could I share with my students? And so, I pulled it all together and this is what I learned. It's important for us to cultivate hope. Whistle-blowers are hopeful. Despite popular belief, they're not all disgruntled employees that have a beef with the company. Their hopefulness really is what drives them to come forward. We also have to cultivate commitment. Whistle-blowers are committed. And it's that passion to their organization that makes them want to come forward. Whistle-blowers are humble. Again, they're not seeking fame, but they are seeking fairness. And we need to continue to cultivate bravery. Whistle-blowers are brave. Often, they underestimated the impact whistle-blowing had on their family, but what they continue to comment on is how hard it is to withhold the truth. With that, I want to leave you with one additional name: Peter Buxtun. Peter Buxtun was a 27-year-old employee for the US Public Health Service. And he was hired to interview people that had sexually transmitted diseases. And through the course of his work, he noticed a clinical study that was going on within the organization. And it was a study that was looking at the progression of untreated syphilis. And so, there were 600 African American males that were in this study. They were enticed into the study through being given free medical exams, burial insurance. And so, what happened through the course of this study, is penicillin was discovered to help treat syphilis. And what Peter noticed was, the participants in this study were not given the penicillin to treat their syphilis. And the participants didn't know. So similar to Mary, Peter tried to report and talk to his internal supervisors, but no one listened. And so Peter thought this was completely unfair and he tried to report again, and finally talked to a reporter — very similar to Mary. And in 1972, this was the front page of the "New York Times": "Syphilis Victims in US Study Went Untreated for 40 Years." This is known to us today as the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. And Peter was the whistle-blower. What happened to the 600 men, you may wonder, the 600 original men? Twenty eight men died from syphilis. One hundred died from syphilis complications, forty wives were infected and 10 children were born with congenital syphilis. Who's to say what these numbers would be if it wasn't for the brave, courageous act of Peter? We're all connected to Peter, actually. If you know anybody that's in a clinical trial, the reason why we have informed consent today is because of Peter's courageous act. So let me ask you a question. That original question, a variation of the original question. How many of us have ever used the term snitch, rat tattletale, snake, weasel, leak? Anybody? Before you get the urge to do that again, I want you to think a little bit. It might be the Mary, the Peter, the Kathes of the world. You might be the person that could shape history, or they could be the person that shapes yours. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why should you read "Waiting for Godot"? | null | TED-Ed | A shabby man named Estragon, sits near a tree at dusk and struggles to remove his boot. He’s soon joined by his friend Vladimir, who reminds his anxious companion that they must wait here for someone called Godot. So begins a vexing cycle in which the two debate when Godot will come, why they’re waiting, and whether they’re even at the right tree. From here, Waiting for Godot only gets stranger - but it’s considered a play that changed the face of modern drama. Written by Samuel Beckett between 1949 and 1955, it offers a simple but stirring question - what should the characters do? Estragon: Don’t let's do anything. It's safer. Vladimir: Let’s wait and see what he says. Estragon: Who? Vladimir: Godot. Estragon: Good idea. Such cryptic dialogue and circular reasoning are key features of the Theatre of the Absurd, a movement which emerged after the Second World War and found artists struggling to find meaning in devastation. The absurdists deconstructed plot, character and language to question their meaning and share their profound uncertainty on stage. While this may sound grim, the absurd blends its hopelessness with humor. This is reflected in Beckett’s unique approach to genre in Waiting for Godot, which he branded “a tragicomedy in two acts." Tragically, the characters are locked in an existential conundrum: they wait in vain for an unknown figure to give them a sense of purpose, but their only sense of purpose comes from the act of waiting, While they wait, they sink into boredom, express religious dread and contemplate suicide. But comically, there is a jagged humor to their predicament, which comes across in their language and movements. Their interactions are filled with bizarre wordplay, repetition and double entendres, as well as physical clowning, singing and dancing, and frantically swapping their hats. It’s often unclear whether the audience is supposed to laugh or cry - or whether Beckett saw any difference between the two. Born in Dublin, Beckett studied English, French and Italian before moving to Paris, where he spent most of his life writing theatre, poetry and prose. While Beckett had a lifelong love of language, he also made space for silence by incorporating gaps, pauses and moments of emptiness into his work. This was a key feature of his trademark uneven tempo and black humor, which became popular throughout the Theatre of the Absurd. He also cultivated a mysterious persona, and refused to confirm or deny any speculations about the meaning of his work. This kept audiences guessing, increasing their fascination with his surreal worlds and enigmatic characters. The lack of any clear meaning makes Godot endlessly open to interpretation. Critics have offered countless readings of the play, resulting in a cycle of ambiguity and speculation that mirrors the plot of the drama itself. It's been read as an allegory of the Cold War, the French Resistance, and Britain’s colonization of Ireland. The dynamic of the two protagonists has also sparked intense debate. They’ve been read as survivors of the apocalypse, an aging couple, two impotent friends, and even as personifications of Freud’s ego and id. Famously, Beckett said the only thing he could be sure of was that Vladimir and Estragon were "wearing bowler hats." Like the critical speculation and maddening plot, their language often goes in circles as the two bicker and banter, lose their train of thought, and pick up right where they left off: Vladimir: We could start all over again perhaps Estragon: That should be easy Vladimir: It’s the start that’s difficult Estragon: You can start from anything Vladimir: Yes, but you have to decide. Beckett reminds us that just like our daily lives, the world onstage doesn’t always make sense. It can explore both reality and illusion, the familiar and the strange. And although a tidy narrative still appeals, the best theatre keeps us thinking – and waiting. |
Let's protect the oceans like national parks | {0: 'David Lang is the cofounder and CEO of OpenROV, designing and manufacturing underwater drones.'} | TEDxBerkeley | So, of all my childhood memories, there is one that stands above the rest. And that is the time that my brave parents rented an RV, packed it with me and my brothers, and drove west from our house in Minneapolis, out to Yellowstone National Park. We saw all the sights, like the geysers, we stopped at the Badlands, but more than any of the places, I remember this as an adventure. This was my introduction to the Wild West. But it wasn't until I got older and I learned more about the National Park System that I realized just how lucky I was. One, to have that experience, but also that, hundreds of years ago, people had the foresight to set aside the very best places, the very best ecosystems in the country, for everyone. And for future generations. And to really appreciate just how prescient that idea was, you have to go back and you have to look at the history of the National Parks Service. So, a lot of people know, the first national park was Yellowstone, in 1872. A lot of people think of John Muir, the poet, naturalist, who was such a visionary in getting people inspired by the idea of conservation — that we need to take the best places and protect them. He had an audience in very high places — there's a great story of Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir going hiking, in Yosemite, during his presidency, four days, completely off the grid, just the two of them. Can you imagine a president actually just going completely off the grid for four days? (Laughter) No tweeting. (Laughter) (Applause) Like that idea. (Applause) But he had a great impact on Theodore Roosevelt. And he created dozens of national parks, hundreds of thousands of square acres of national wildlife refuges. It was an important administration, but it wasn't a done deal. Even less than 10 years after he created all of those new places, the future of those places was very much in doubt. And it wasn't until this guy, Stephen Mather, a businessman from Chicago, wrote an angry letter to the Department of the Interior, saying, "You guys aren't doing a good enough job protecting and preserving these places." Then, something was done about it. The Department of the Interior wrote him back. "Mr. Mather, if you care so much about this, why don't you come to Washington and do it yourself?" (Laughter) And he did. He took a job at the Department of the Interior, but more importantly, he started a campaign. He actually had a meeting two blocks from here, in 1914, in California Hall, and he brought together the park superintendents and a few other people who cared about this idea of conservation. And they put together a plan, they hatched a campaign that eventually led to the National Park Service in 1916. And that's really important. Because it went from an idea that we should protect these places to an actual plan, a way for people to enlist and carry that idea forward for future generations, so little kids like me can go and have these amazing experiences. That is the history of the National Parks on land. The ocean, what I want to talk to you about today, is a completely different story. And we are almost precisely 100 years behind. So, the first marine sanctuary was in 1972, after the oil spill in Santa Barbara, people got interested in taking that concept and applying it to underwater environments. We've had our own John Muir, who's Dr. Sylvia Earle, who's been a tireless advocate for creating these marine protected areas around the world. So, I know there's a lot of bad news about the ocean, there's plastic pollution, coral bleaching, over-fishing — it's hard to take it all in sometimes. But this idea of setting aside places for nature is working. Science tells us that if you set these places aside, nature will come back and we can keep the oceans healthy. So we know this idea works. And Dr. Sylvia Earl has been influential, like John Muir, with administrations — George W. Bush and Obama were both fantastic ocean presidents, creating marine protected areas all around the country. This is not a conservative idea or a liberal idea, it's not even an American idea, it's just a good idea. (Laughter) (Applause) But — (Applause) Here we are, a few years later. And now the administration is proposing to roll back a lot of the progress we've made in the past 20 years. So, so, don't mourn — organize. We need to do what Stephen Mather did 100 years ago. We need to start a campaign to get people engaged with this idea. And I think we need a league of citizen scientists for the ocean. And I've seen glimpses of this future, and I know that it's possible. My friend Erik and I started building underwater robots, these little swimming cameras with lights that you can see underwater. We started building these in his garage five years ago, and we've watched that grow into this community of thousands of people around the world, who believe that everybody should have access to these places. We all deserve the tools to go and explore. There's stories like Laura James, who used her robot to find out that sea stars in her area were dying. And she started this whole citizen science campaign, collected data and drove awareness for sea-star wasting syndrome, to try and figure out what was happening there. There are stories of fishermen in Mexico, who used the robot to create marine protected areas where Nassau grouper were spawning, to protect the future of this species. It's really amazing stuff. We found that if you give people the tools, they'll do the right thing. But we need to take it a step further. And, actually, I think we can dust off Stephen Mather's playbook. So what did he do? So, the first thing that he did was he focused on infrastructure. So 1914 wasn't just a time for the parks, it was also a time for the automobile, the Model T was rolling off the line, and Stephen Mather understood that this was going to be an important part of American culture. And so he partnered with highway associations around the country to build big, beautiful highways out to these parks. And it worked, he's basically invented car camping. And he knew that if people didn't go to these places, that they wouldn’t fall in love with them and they wouldn't care. So that was a really insightful idea that he had. The second thing they did, was they focused on visionary philanthropy. So, Stephen Mather was a successful businessman from Chicago, and anytime there was a parks association that needed funding, anytime there was a highway association that needed funding, they'd step in, write the checks, make it happen. There's a great story of his friend William Kent, who recognized there was a small patch of redwoods left on the base of Mount Tam, and so he quickly bought the land and donated it to this National Parks effort. That's Muir Woods today — it's one of the most popular national parks in the whole country. My parents are visiting here from Minnesota, and they don't really even care about this talk, all they're talking about is going to Muir Woods. (Laughter) But the last thing is critical — Stephen Mather focused on engagement. In one of the first meetings that they had around this new system, he said, "If you're a writer, I want you to write about this. If you're a business owner, I want you to tell your clubs and your organizations. If you work for the government, I want you to pass regulation." Everybody had a job. "Each of you, all of you, have a role to play in protecting these places for future generations." Each of you, all of you. I love that. That's the plan — simple, three-point plan. I think we can do the same. So, this was the headline when Obama created the Papahanaumokuakea National Monument: "Lots to see, but good luck trying to get there." But like Mather, we should focus on the technology of our time, all of this new, amazing, digital infrastructure can be built to engage people with the oceans. So, the National Marine Sanctuary has created all these wonderful VR 360 videos, where you can actually go and see what these places look like. Our team is continuing to build new tools, this is our latest, this is the trident underwater drone, it's a diving submarine, it's sleek, you can fit it in a backpack, it can go down to 100 meters, deeper than most divers can go. It can see these environments that most people have never had access to. New tools are coming and we need even better tools. We can also use more visionary philanthropists. So, when Erik and I started this, we didn't have any money, we were building this in his garage. But we went to Kickstarter. And we found over 1,800 people, almost a million dollars we've raised on Kickstarter, finding other people who think, "Yeah, that's a good idea. I want to be a part of that." We need more ways for people to get engaged and become visionary philanthropists themselves. We've also had traditional philanthropists, who've stepped up to fund us in the SEE initiative — the Science Education and Exploration, who are going to help us get donated units out to people on the frontlines, people who are doing the science, people who are telling the stories, inspiring communities. You can go on to OpenExplorer.com and see what people are doing, it's hugely inspirational. And it will also, hopefully, spur you to get involved. Because there is plenty of room to get involved. We want to hear what ideas you have for telling these stories. Because that's just it — this is all about engagement. There's all sorts of interesting, new ways for people to participate in the protection of these places. And the understanding. Like, Reef Check — scuba divers are going down and swimming transects and counting fish and biodiversity data. They're getting the information we need to protect these places. If you're going down to the beach, participate in MPA Watch. Document what activities you see going on in these different areas. There is room for everybody to participate here. And that's just it, that's what we need. We need to build a future for our grandkids' grandkids. Last month, I went out sailing, and we got out to the Farallon Islands, 25 miles off the Gate. And most people think of this as kind of a bird sanctuary, but we took our robot, and we sent it in. And the people on the boat were astonished at the life beneath the surface. I mean, these are really, really important ecosystems. Really, and this is a whole wild world we haven't yet explored. And we have an opportunity right now, just as they did 100 years ago, to protect these places, to put in a plan, to keep people engaged. So last year, when the executive order came out, putting all of the progress we've made, all of these new marine protected areas, under review, there were over 100,000 people who commented online. Almost all of these letters were saying, "Don't do it; protecting these places is the right thing to do." My message to those 100,000 people, those 100,000 letters is: don't wait for Washington. We can do this ourselves. Thank you. (Applause) |
The key to a better malaria vaccine | {0: 'Faith Osier is studying how humans acquire immunity to malaria and developing new malaria vaccines.'} | TED2018 | There are 200 million clinical cases of falciparum malaria in Africa every year, resulting in half a million deaths. I would like to talk to you about malaria vaccines. The ones that we have made to date are simply not good enough. Why? We've been working at it for 100 plus years. When we started, technology was limited. We could see just a tiny fraction of what the parasite really looked like. Today, we are awash with technology, advanced imaging and omics platforms — genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics. These tools have given us a clearer view of just how complex the parasite really is. However, in spite of this, our approach to vaccine design has remained pretty rudimentary. To make a good vaccine, we must go back to basics to understand how our bodies handle this complexity. People who are frequently infected with malaria learn to deal with it. They get the infection, but they don't get ill. The recipe is encoded in antibodies. My team went back to our complex parasite, probed it with samples from Africans who had overcome malaria to answer the question: "What does a successful antibody response look like?" We found over 200 proteins, many of which are not on the radar for malaria vaccines. My research community may be missing out important parts of the parasite. Until recently, when one had identified a protein of interest, they tested whether it might be important for a vaccine by conducting a cohort study. This typically involved about 300 participants in a village in Africa, whose samples were analyzed to see whether antibodies to the protein would predict who got malaria and who did not. In the past 30 years, these studies have tested a small number of proteins in relatively few samples and usually in single locations. The results have not been consistent. My team essentially collapsed 30 years of this type of research into one exciting experiment, conducted over just three months. Innovatively, we assembled 10,000 samples from 15 locations in seven African countries, spanning time, age and the variable intensity of malaria experienced in Africa. We used omics intelligence to prioritize our parasite proteins, synthesize them in the lab and in short, recreated the malaria parasite on a chip. We did this in Africa, and we're very proud of that. (Applause) The chip is a small glass slide, but it gives us incredible power. We simultaneously gathered data on over 100 antibody responses. What are we looking for? The recipe behind a successful antibody response, so that we can predict what might make a good malaria vaccine. We're also trying to figure out exactly what antibodies do to the parasite. How do they kill it? Do they attack from multiple angles? Is there synergy? How much antibody do you need? Our studies suggest that having a bit of one antibody won't be enough. It might take high concentrations of antibodies against multiple parasite proteins. We're also learning that antibodies kill the parasite in multiple ways, and studying any one of these in isolation may not adequately reflect reality. Just like we can now see the parasite in greater definition, my team and I are focused on understanding how our bodies overcome this complexity. We believe that this could provide the breakthroughs that we need to make malaria history through vaccination. Thank you. (Applause) (Cheers) (Applause) Shoham Arad: OK, how close are we actually to a malaria vaccine? Faith Osier: We're just at the beginning of a process to try and understand what we need to put in the vaccine before we actually start making it. So, we're not really close to the vaccine, but we're getting there. SA: And we're hopeful. FO: And we're very hopeful. SA: Tell me about SMART, tell me what does it stand for and why is it important to you? FO: So SMART stands for South-South Malaria Antigen Research Partnership. The South-South is referring to us in Africa, looking sideways to each other in collaboration, in contrast to always looking to America and looking to Europe, when there is quite some strength within Africa. So in SMART, apart from the goal that we have, to develop a malaria vaccine, we are also training African scientists, because the burden of disease in Africa is high, and you need people who will continue to push the boundaries in science, in Africa. SA: Yes, yes, correct. (Applause) OK, one last question. Tell me, I know you mentioned this a little bit, but how would things actually change if there were a malaria vaccine? FO: We would save half a million lives every year. Two hundred million cases. It's estimated that malaria costs Africa 12 billion US dollars a year. So this is economics. Africa would simply thrive. SA: OK. Thank you, Faith. Thank you so much. (Applause) |
What if cracks in concrete could fix themselves? | null | TED-Ed | Concrete is the most widely used construction material in the world. It can be found in swathes of city pavements, bridges that span vast rivers, and the tallest skyscrapers on earth. But this sturdy substance does have a weakness: it’s prone to catastrophic cracking that costs tens of billions of dollars to repair each year. But what if we could avoid that problem, by creating concrete that heals itself? This idea isn’t as far-fetched as it may seem. It boils down to an understanding of how concrete forms, and how to exploit that process to our benefit. Concrete is a combination of coarse stone and sand particles, called aggregates, that mix with cement, a powdered blend of clay and limestone. When water gets added to this mix, the cement forms a paste and coats the aggregates, quickly hardening through a chemical reaction called hydration. Eventually, the resulting material grows strong enough to prop up buildings that climb hundreds of meters into the sky. While people have been using a variety of recipes to produce cement for over 4,000 years, concrete itself has a surprisingly short lifespan. After 20 to 30 years, natural processes like concrete shrinkage, excessive freezing and thawing, and heavy loads can trigger cracking. And it’s not just big breaks that count: tiny cracks can be just as dangerous. Concrete is often used as a secondary support around steel reinforcements. In this concrete, even small cracks can channel water, oxygen, and carbon dioxide that corrode the steel and lead to disastrous collapse. On structures like bridges and highways that are constantly in use, detecting these problems before they lead to catastrophe becomes a huge and costly challenge. But not doing so would also endanger thousands of lives. Fortunately, we’re already experimenting with ways this material could start fixing itself. And some of these solutions are inspired by concrete’s natural self-healing mechanism. When water enters these tiny cracks, it hydrates the concrete’s calcium oxide. The resulting calcium hydroxide reacts with carbon dioxide in the air, starting a process called autogenous healing, where microscopic calcium carbonate crystals form and gradually fill the gap. Unfortunately, these crystals can only do so much, healing cracks that are less than 0.3mm wide. Material scientists have figured out how to heal cracks up to twice that size by adding hidden glue into the concrete mix. If we put adhesive-filled fibers and tubes into the mixture, they’ll snap open when a crack forms, releasing their sticky contents and sealing the gap. But adhesive chemicals often behave very differently from concrete, and over time, these adhesives can lead to even worse cracks. So perhaps the best way to heal large cracks is to give concrete the tools to help itself. Scientists have discovered that some bacteria and fungi can produce minerals, including the calcium carbonate found in autogenous healing. Experimental blends of concrete include these bacterial or fungal spores alongside nutrients in their concrete mix, where they could lie dormant for hundreds of years. When cracks finally appear and water trickles into the concrete, the spores germinate, grow, and consume the nutrient soup that surrounds them, modifying their local environment to create the perfect conditions for calcium carbonate to grow. These crystals gradually fill the gaps, and after roughly three weeks, the hard-working microbes can completely repair cracks up to almost 1mm wide. When the cracks seal, the bacteria or fungi will make spores and go dormant once more— ready to start a new cycle of self-healing when cracks form again. Although this technique has been studied extensively, we still have a ways to go before incorporating it in the global production of concrete. But, these spores have huge potential to make concrete more resilient and long-lasting— which could drastically reduce the financial and environmental cost of concrete production. Eventually, these microorganisms may force us to reconsider the way we think about our cities, bringing our inanimate concrete jungles to life. |
Why we have an emotional connection to robots | {0: 'Kate Darling investigates the relationship between humans and robots -- now, and in the future. '} | TED Salon Samsung | There was a day, about 10 years ago, when I asked a friend to hold a baby dinosaur robot upside down. It was this toy called a Pleo that I had ordered, and I was really excited about it because I've always loved robots. And this one has really cool technical features. It had motors and touch sensors and it had an infrared camera. And one of the things it had was a tilt sensor, so it knew what direction it was facing. And when you held it upside down, it would start to cry. And I thought this was super cool, so I was showing it off to my friend, and I said, "Oh, hold it up by the tail. See what it does." So we're watching the theatrics of this robot struggle and cry out. And after a few seconds, it starts to bother me a little, and I said, "OK, that's enough now. Let's put him back down." And then I pet the robot to make it stop crying. And that was kind of a weird experience for me. For one thing, I wasn't the most maternal person at the time. Although since then I've become a mother, nine months ago, and I've learned that babies also squirm when you hold them upside down. (Laughter) But my response to this robot was also interesting because I knew exactly how this machine worked, and yet I still felt compelled to be kind to it. And that observation sparked a curiosity that I've spent the past decade pursuing. Why did I comfort this robot? And one of the things I discovered was that my treatment of this machine was more than just an awkward moment in my living room, that in a world where we're increasingly integrating robots into our lives, an instinct like that might actually have consequences, because the first thing that I discovered is that it's not just me. In 2007, the Washington Post reported that the United States military was testing this robot that defused land mines. And the way it worked was it was shaped like a stick insect and it would walk around a minefield on its legs, and every time it stepped on a mine, one of the legs would blow up, and it would continue on the other legs to blow up more mines. And the colonel who was in charge of this testing exercise ends up calling it off, because, he says, it's too inhumane to watch this damaged robot drag itself along the minefield. Now, what would cause a hardened military officer and someone like myself to have this response to robots? Well, of course, we're primed by science fiction and pop culture to really want to personify these things, but it goes a little bit deeper than that. It turns out that we're biologically hardwired to project intent and life onto any movement in our physical space that seems autonomous to us. So people will treat all sorts of robots like they're alive. These bomb-disposal units get names. They get medals of honor. They've had funerals for them with gun salutes. And research shows that we do this even with very simple household robots, like the Roomba vacuum cleaner. (Laughter) It's just a disc that roams around your floor to clean it, but just the fact it's moving around on its own will cause people to name the Roomba and feel bad for the Roomba when it gets stuck under the couch. (Laughter) And we can design robots specifically to evoke this response, using eyes and faces or movements that people automatically, subconsciously associate with states of mind. And there's an entire body of research called human-robot interaction that really shows how well this works. So for example, researchers at Stanford University found out that it makes people really uncomfortable when you ask them to touch a robot's private parts. (Laughter) So from this, but from many other studies, we know, we know that people respond to the cues given to them by these lifelike machines, even if they know that they're not real. Now, we're headed towards a world where robots are everywhere. Robotic technology is moving out from behind factory walls. It's entering workplaces, households. And as these machines that can sense and make autonomous decisions and learn enter into these shared spaces, I think that maybe the best analogy we have for this is our relationship with animals. Thousands of years ago, we started to domesticate animals, and we trained them for work and weaponry and companionship. And throughout history, we've treated some animals like tools or like products, and other animals, we've treated with kindness and we've given a place in society as our companions. I think it's plausible we might start to integrate robots in similar ways. And sure, animals are alive. Robots are not. And I can tell you, from working with roboticists, that we're pretty far away from developing robots that can feel anything. But we feel for them, and that matters, because if we're trying to integrate robots into these shared spaces, we need to understand that people will treat them differently than other devices, and that in some cases, for example, the case of a soldier who becomes emotionally attached to the robot that they work with, that can be anything from inefficient to dangerous. But in other cases, it can actually be useful to foster this emotional connection to robots. We're already seeing some great use cases, for example, robots working with autistic children to engage them in ways that we haven't seen previously, or robots working with teachers to engage kids in learning with new results. And it's not just for kids. Early studies show that robots can help doctors and patients in health care settings. This is the PARO baby seal robot. It's used in nursing homes and with dementia patients. It's been around for a while. And I remember, years ago, being at a party and telling someone about this robot, and her response was, "Oh my gosh. That's horrible. I can't believe we're giving people robots instead of human care." And this is a really common response, and I think it's absolutely correct, because that would be terrible. But in this case, it's not what this robot replaces. What this robot replaces is animal therapy in contexts where we can't use real animals but we can use robots, because people will consistently treat them more like an animal than a device. Acknowledging this emotional connection to robots can also help us anticipate challenges as these devices move into more intimate areas of people's lives. For example, is it OK if your child's teddy bear robot records private conversations? Is it OK if your sex robot has compelling in-app purchases? (Laughter) Because robots plus capitalism equals questions around consumer protection and privacy. And those aren't the only reasons that our behavior around these machines could matter. A few years after that first initial experience I had with this baby dinosaur robot, I did a workshop with my friend Hannes Gassert. And we took five of these baby dinosaur robots and we gave them to five teams of people. And we had them name them and play with them and interact with them for about an hour. And then we unveiled a hammer and a hatchet and we told them to torture and kill the robots. (Laughter) And this turned out to be a little more dramatic than we expected it to be, because none of the participants would even so much as strike these baby dinosaur robots, so we had to improvise a little, and at some point, we said, "OK, you can save your team's robot if you destroy another team's robot." (Laughter) And even that didn't work. They couldn't do it. So finally, we said, "We're going to destroy all of the robots unless someone takes a hatchet to one of them." And this guy stood up, and he took the hatchet, and the whole room winced as he brought the hatchet down on the robot's neck, and there was this half-joking, half-serious moment of silence in the room for this fallen robot. (Laughter) So that was a really interesting experience. Now, it wasn't a controlled study, obviously, but it did lead to some later research that I did at MIT with Palash Nandy and Cynthia Breazeal, where we had people come into the lab and smash these HEXBUGs that move around in a really lifelike way, like insects. So instead of choosing something cute that people are drawn to, we chose something more basic, and what we found was that high-empathy people would hesitate more to hit the HEXBUGS. Now this is just a little study, but it's part of a larger body of research that is starting to indicate that there may be a connection between people's tendencies for empathy and their behavior around robots. But my question for the coming era of human-robot interaction is not: "Do we empathize with robots?" It's: "Can robots change people's empathy?" Is there reason to, for example, prevent your child from kicking a robotic dog, not just out of respect for property, but because the child might be more likely to kick a real dog? And again, it's not just kids. This is the violent video games question, but it's on a completely new level because of this visceral physicality that we respond more intensely to than to images on a screen. When we behave violently towards robots, specifically robots that are designed to mimic life, is that a healthy outlet for violent behavior or is that training our cruelty muscles? We don't know ... But the answer to this question has the potential to impact human behavior, it has the potential to impact social norms, it has the potential to inspire rules around what we can and can't do with certain robots, similar to our animal cruelty laws. Because even if robots can't feel, our behavior towards them might matter for us. And regardless of whether we end up changing our rules, robots might be able to help us come to a new understanding of ourselves. Most of what I've learned over the past 10 years has not been about technology at all. It's been about human psychology and empathy and how we relate to others. Because when a child is kind to a Roomba, when a soldier tries to save a robot on the battlefield, or when a group of people refuses to harm a robotic baby dinosaur, those robots aren't just motors and gears and algorithms. They're reflections of our own humanity. Thank you. (Applause) |
5 transformational policies for a prosperous and sustainable world | {0: 'Johan Rockström works to redefine sustainable development.'} | We the Future | In 2015, we saw two fantastic, hopeful breakthroughs for humanity. First, the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals, the collective, universal plan for humanity to eradicate hunger, [promote] good economic development and good health, within global environmental targets. Secondly, after 21 years of negotiations, we adopted the legally binding Paris Agreement, all nations in the world keeping global warming under two degrees Celsius, aiming at 1.5 degrees Celsius. Today, three years down the line, we're still in the hand-waving business. Now, I think it's time to step back one step and recognize that I wonder if the world leaders really knew what they signed at the General Assembly three years ago. These are universal, aspirational, transformational goals for inclusive, prosperous humanity on a stable earth system. But there are underlying problems. We have inherent contradictions between these goals, where there's the risk of pursuing one favored goal at the expense of others. Take, for example, Goal 8, on decent work and economic growth. If we continue doing that by exploiting natural resources and burning fossil fuels, it will be impossible to reach Goal 13. Three years down the line, we simply must admit we're seeing limited action to really, really address this as an inclusive, collective, universal package. Now, this requires us to step back one step. I think we have to ask ourselves some hard questions: Do we have any chance of accomplishing the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030? Are there actually inherent trade-offs that are not compatible with our current development paradigm? But are there, perhaps, synergies where we can really accelerate change? And is it really a people-planet agenda, really taking seriously the social and economic aspirational goals within the life-support systems on earth? Now, citizens across the world have started to recognize that we're facing global rising environmental risks; in fact, that a stable planet is a prerequisite to have good human well-being on earth. We need to define a safe operating space on a stable earth system, and the planetary boundary framework was introduced by the scientific community in 2009 to do exactly that. It has now been widely embraced across the world in policy, business and communities as a framework for sustainable development in the Anthropocene. This slide really shows the framework with the nine environmental processes that regulate the stability of the earth system, providing a safe operating space, where we'll have a high chance of having good human well-being and prosperity and equity. If we move into the yellow zone, we enter a dangerous uncertainty zone; and into the red, we have a high likelihood of crossing tipping points that could take us irreversibly away from the ability of the earth system to provide social and economic well-being for humanity. Now, we can today, scientifically, quantify these boundaries, providing us a stable earth system for humanity. But we have to go beyond this and recognize the Sustainable Development Goals — if we really want to seriously accomplish them — must now occur within this safe operating space. We need to achieve SDGs within PBs. But dear friends, not even this is enough. We need to recognize that the Sustainable Development Goals is 12 years away. It's only a milestone. It is the bull's-eye that we need to go through and zoom ourselves towards transformations where we can have a good future for all co-citizens on earth, nine billion plus, within a stable earth system in 2050 and beyond. This is a quest, and in order to really explore this and not have only opinions about it, we gathered the scientific community, the best thinkers and modelers and started to develop a completely new complex systems dynamic model, the Earth-3 model, building on models that have been around for the last 50 years. And here it is. This is a fantastic piece of work. This has a climate module, a biosphere module, a global economic model; it has algorithms, it has the whole room of fantastic accomplishments. This is what turns us scientists on. (Laughter) I mean, this is just a beautiful piece of work? And I'd just love to spend the whole evening walking this through with you, but I'll make you disappointed. I cannot do that. In fact, the only thing I can do with you is just to assure you that this is the first time it's done. Nobody has ever tried to really analytically combine the Sustainable Development Goals with planetary boundaries. And we were able to find patterns and really convergent trends that gives us a lot of confidence in our ability to now project economic development, resources use from water, food and energy, population growth, income per person, yet along these consistent and systemic pathways. So, it's the first time we have a robust opportunity to really explore the futures of ability of attaining the SDGs within PBs. Now, how do we do this? Well, look at this. Here, you have the data coming from the real world, calibrated from 1970-2015: 100,000 data points around the world, building on seven regions' ability, of really picking on all these Sustainable Development Goals. Now, one example of how we calibrated this, here you have [data] for Sustainable Development Goals on eradicating poverty, health, education and food. And here you have in the bubbles the seven regions of the world, how they move up until 2015 in our empirical observations in relation to GDP per capita, giving these universal convergent trends, which enabled us to create regressions that could make us able to do simulations into the future, all the way until 2050, showing the ability along the lines here to attain the SDGs. Now, this gave us the opportunity of doing several scenarios, testing different possible futures: business as usual, global transformations, investment schemes in business, different governance options, policies, finance — really, to explore what the future can look like in our ability to attain the SDGs within PBs. And the results, I can tell you, really surprised us. And this will be the first time it's shown. It should actually not even be referenced outside of this room. Now, it actually is presented along two axes. The y-axis here shows our ability to stay within planetary boundaries. The higher up, the closer you are to the safe operating space. On the x-axis are the Sustainable Development Goals; the further to the right, the more of the SDGs we fulfill. We all want to be in the upper right-hand corner, the safe and just world for the future. Now, the point you see there is 1980. We were in a situation where we actually were in a safe operating space but not meeting so many of the SDGs. Here's the trend up until 2015. So this is the conventional world, which is actually delivering on an increasing number of SDGs, lifting millions of people out of poverty, but doing it at the expense of the safe operating space on earth. Now, this is the scenario business as usual, into the future. If we just move on as today, we will be able to deliver on some of the SDGs, but we'll do it at the expense of the stability of the earth system. Now, what if we go faster on economic growth and really ally on one percent increase per year of income and an even tripling of the world economy by 2050? That would give us the following trajectory. We would, yes, go a little bit further on SDG accomplishments, but still at the expense of the risk of destabilizing the planet. But what if we really go harder? What if we increase our ability to deliver on our promises by 30 percent across all sectors in society, from climate to our trade agreements? A harder scenario would take us a little bit better, but still, we're failing on the SDGs, and we are not accomplishing a safe operating space for humanity. So this really led us to a quite disappointing conclusion, that we will actually, even if we go conventional futures, fail on the SDGs and transgress planetary boundaries. We need some radical thinking. We need to go into a transformative, disruptive future, where we start thinking outside of the box. The modeling and engagement and dialogues enable us to identify five transformations that could actually potentially take us there. The first one is to cut emissions by half every decade along the scientific pathway to Paris, doubling investments in renewable energy, creating a global energy democracy, allowing us to meet several of the SDGs. The second is a rapid shift towards sustainable food systems, investing one percent per year in sustainable intensification and really moving towards implementing and investing in solutions that we already have available today. The third is really to shift our development paradigm and learn from many of the developing countries that have moved very fast. What if we could have an economic growth such as in China, while doing it within the environmental parameters of an ecological civilization? Fourth, a redistribution of wealth. What if we could [agree] that the richest 10 percent could not allow themselves to amass more than 40 percent, maximum, of national incomes — a drastic redistribution of wealth, reforming the ability of equity across regions? And finally, fifth, a radical increase in more education, health, access to work, contraception, investing largely in women across the world, allowing us to deliver on SDGs on gender, inequality, economics and urban development. Now, if we would push ourselves across all these five — we tested this, and it would give us an amazing journey towards the safe and just operating space on earth. It shows us that even with a conservative, empirically based, complex system dynamics model, we are at a state where we can actually think of transformations over the next 12 years and beyond that can take us up into the safe operating space and deliver on aspirational social and economic goals. This is actually quite uplifting, despite the fact that we're not moving along this trajectory. So, in summary: we now, three years into the operational delivery on the SDGs, must draw a line and conclude that we're not delivering on our promises, and not only that, we're running the risks of future generations having an even tougher ability, because of the risk of pushing the earth system beyond tipping points. In fact, we are facing even a risk of a hothouse earth, where we will undermine and create geopolitical instabilities that could actually make life even more tough for billions of people on earth. This, in all honesty, really, really scares me. But that's also why I'm standing here tonight, because the window of success is still open. The earth system is still resilient. She is still providing us with ecosystem services and functions that can allow us a transition back into a safe operating space. But we need radically different thinking. We need to see this as an incredible wake-up call but also an opportunity for transformative change, where we shift gears and really start thinking of the SDGs as a transformative agenda within a safe operating space on earth. In other words, we can build a safe and just world. We just have to really, really get on with it. And let's do it. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why can't some birds fly? | null | TED-Ed | In the lush rainforests of Australia, birds roost in the low branches and amble across the forest floor, enjoying the shade and tropical fruits. But the jungle isn’t theirs alone. A dingo is prowling in the shadows, and fruit won’t satisfy his appetite. The birds flee to safety all but the cassowary, who can’t clear the ground on her puny wings. Instead, she attacks, sending the dingo running for cover with one swipe of her razor-sharp toe claws. The cassowary is one of approximately 60 living species of flightless birds. These earthbound avians live all over the world, from the Australian outback to the African savanna to Antarctic shores. They include some species of duck and all species of penguin, secretive swamp dwellers and speedy ostriches, giant emus, and tiny kiwis. Though the common ancestor of all modern birds could fly, many different bird species have independently lost their flight. Flight can have incredible benefits, especially for escaping predators, hunting, and traveling long distances. But it also has high costs: it consumes huge amounts of energy and limits body size and weight. A bird that doesn’t fly conserves energy, so it may be able to survive on a scarcer or less nutrient-rich food source than one that flies. The Takahe of New Zealand, for example, lives almost entirely on the soft base of alpine grasses. For birds that nest or feed on the ground, this predisposition to flightlessness can be even stronger. When a bird species doesn’t face specific pressures to fly, it can stop flying in as quickly as a few generations. Then, over thousands or millions of years, the birds’ bodies change to match this new behavior. Their bones, once hollow to minimize weight, become dense. Their sturdy feathers turn to fluff. Their wings shrink, and in some cases disappear entirely. And the keel-like protrusion on their sternums, where the flight muscles attach, shrinks or disappears, except in penguins, who repurpose their flight muscles and keels for swimming. Most often, flightlessness evolves after a bird species flies to an island where there are no predators. As long as these predator-free circumstances last, the birds thrive, but they are vulnerable to changes in their environment. For instance, human settlers bring dogs, cats, and stowaway rodents to islands. These animals often prey on flightless birds and can drive them to extinction. In New Zealand, stoats introduced by European settlers have threatened many native species of flightless bird. Some have gone extinct while others are endangered. So in spite of the energy-saving advantages of flightlessness, many flightless bird species have only a short run before going the way of the dodo. But a few flightless birds have survived on mainlands alongside predators aplenty. Unlike most small flightless species that come and go quickly, these giants have been flightless for tens of millions of years. Their ancestors appeared around the same time as the first small mammals, and they were probably able to survive because they were evolving— and growing—at the same time as their mammalian predators. Most of these birds, like emus and ostriches, ballooned in size, weighing hundreds of pounds more than wings can lift. Their legs grew thick, their feet sturdy, and newly developed thigh muscles turned them into formidable runners. Though they no longer use them to fly, many of these birds repurpose their wings for other means. They can be spotted tucking their heads beneath them for warmth, flashing them at prospective mates, sheltering eggs with them, or even using them to steer as they charge across the plains. They may be flightless, but they’re still winging it. |
The pharmacy of the future? Personalized pills, 3D printed at home | {0: 'Daniel Kraft explores the impact and potential of rapidly developing technologies as applied to health and medicine.'} | TED Salon Optum | We live in a medication nation. 4.5 billion drug prescriptions will be prescribed by doctors like me this year, in the United States alone. That's 15 for every man, woman and child. And for most of us, our experience with this medication is often a confusing number of pills, instructions, side effects, one-size-fits-all dosing, which all too often we aren't taking as prescribed. And this comes at tremendous expense, costing us our time, our money and our health. And in our now exponential, connected, data-driven age, I think we can and we must do better. So let's take a dive at some of the challenges we have and some potential solutions. Let's start with the fact that many drugs don't work for those who are prescribed them. The top 10 grossing drugs in the United States this year, they only benefit one in four to one in 23 of who take them. That's great if you're number one, but what about everybody else? And what's worse, drugs, when they sometimes don't work, can still cause side effects. Take aspirin — about one in four of us who take aspirin to reduce our risk of cardiovascular disease are unknowingly aspirin-resistant and still have the same risks of gastrointestinal bleeds that kill thousands every year. It's adverse drug reactions like these that are, by some estimates, the number four leading cause of death in the United States. My own grandfather passed away after a single dose of antibiotic caused his kidneys to fail. Now, adverse drug reactions and side effects are often tied to challenges in dosing. I trained in pediatrics (little people) and internal medicine (big people). So one night I might have been on call in the NICU, carefully dosing to the fraction of a milligram a medication for a NICU baby. The next night — on call in the emergency room, treating a 400-pound lineman or a frail nursing-home patient who, by most accounts, usually would get the same dose of medications from the formulary. Which would mean, most of the time I would be underdosing the lineman and overdosing the nursing-home patient. And beyond age and weight, we tend to ignore differences in sex and race in dosing. Now, beyond this, we know we have a massive challenge with noncompliance or low adherence. Many of us who need to take our medications aren't taking them or are taking them incorrectly. You know, 40 percent of adults in the US over 65 are on five or more prescription medications. Sometimes 15 or more. And even small improvements in adherence can dramatically save dollars and lives. So, as we think into the future, you think that where we are today, as we often hear about smart, personalized, targeted drugs, Internet of Things, gene therapy, AI, that we'd already arrived in this era of precision medicine. In reality, we still live in an age of empiric, trial-and-error, imprecision medicine. I think we can do better. What if we could reimagine ways to help make your medicine-taking easier? To get the right doses and combinations to match you? What if we could move beyond today's literal cutting edge of pill cutters and fax machines, to an era where we could have better outcomes, lower costs, saving lives and space in your medicine cabinet? Well, I think part of the solution is all the emerging ways that we can measure and connect our health care information. Today, we pretty much live in a reactive, sick-care world, siloed information that doesn't flow. We have the potential to move into a more continuous, real-time proactive world of true health care. And part of that starts with the emerging world of quantified self. We can measure so much of our physiology and behaviors today, and often it's siloed on our phones and scales, but it's starting to connect to our clinicians, our caregivers, so they can better optimize prevention, diagnostics and therapy. And when we can do that, we can do some interesting things. Take, for example, hypertension. It's the number one risk factor for early death and morbidity worldwide. Half of adult Americans, on approximation, have hypertension. Less than half have it well-controlled. It's often because it takes two or three different classes of medications. It's tough to do adherence and adjust your blood pressure medications. We have 500 preventable deaths from noncontrolled hypertension in the US every day. But now we're in the era of connected blood pressure cuffs — the FDA just approved a blood pressure cuff that can go into your watch. There are now prototypes of cuffless radar-based blood pressure devices that can continuously stream your blood pressure. So, in the future, I could — instead of spot-checking my blood pressure in the clinic, my doctor could see my real-time numbers and my trends, and adjust them as necessary, with the help of a blood pressure dosing algorithm or using the Internet of Things. Now, technology today can do even more. My smartwatch, already today, has an EKG built in that can be read by artificial intelligence. I'm wearing a small, Band-Aid-sized patch, that is live-streaming my vital signs right now. Let's take a look. They're actually a little concerning at the moment. (Laughter) Now, it's not just my real-time vitals that can be seen by my medical team or myself, it could be my retrospective data, and again, that'd be used to modify dosing and medication going forward. Even my weight can be super-quantified; my weight, now my shape, how much body mass, fat, muscle mass I might have, and use that to optimize my prevention or therapy. And it's not just for the tech-savvy. Now, MIT engineers have modified wifi so we can seamlessly connect and collect our vital signs from our connected rings and smart mattresses. We can start to share this digital exhaust, our digitome, and even potentially crowdsource it, sharing our health information just like we share with our Google Maps and driving, to improve our — not our driving, but our health experience globally. So, that's great. We can potentially now collect this information. What if your labs can go from the central lab to your home, to your phone, to even inside our bodies to measure drug levels or other varieties? And of course, we're in the age of genomics. I've been sequenced, it's just less than $1,000 today. And I can start to understand my pharmacogenomics — how my genes impact whether I need high dose, low dose, or maybe a different medication altogether. Let's imagine if your physician or your pharmacist had this information integrated into their workflow, augmented with artificial intelligence, AI, or as I like to refer to it, IA — intelligence augmentation, to leverage that information; to understand, of the 18,000 or more approved drugs, which would be the right dose and combination for you. So great, now maybe we can optimize your drugs and your doses, but the problem today is, we're still using this amazing technology to keep track of our drugs. And of course, these technologies evolve, there's connected dispensers, reminder apps, smart pill bottle caps that can text or tweet you or your mother if you haven't taken your medications. PillPack was just acquired by Amazon, so soon we may have same-day delivery of our drugs, delivered by drone. So, all these things are possible today, but we're still taking multiple pills. What if we can make it simpler? I think one of the solutions is to make better use of the polypill. A polypill is the integration of multiple medications into a single pill. And we have these today in common over-the-counter cold and flu remedies. And there have been prevention polypill studies done, giving combinations of statins, blood pressure, aspirin, which in randomized studies have been shown to dramatically reduce risk, compared to placebo. But these polypills weren't personalized, they weren't optimized to the individual. What if we could optimize your personalized polypill? So it would be built for you, based on you, it could adapt to you, even every single day. Well, we're now in the era of 3D printing. You can print personalized braces, hearing aids, orthopedic devices, even I've been scanned and had my jeans tailored to fit to me. So this got me thinking, what if we could 3D-print your personalized polypill? So instead of taking six medications, for example, I could integrate them into one. So it would be easier to take, improve adherence and potentially, it could even integrate in supplements, like vitamin D or CoQ10. So with some help — I call these "IntelliMeds" — and with the help of my IntelliMedicine engineering team, we built the first IntelliMedicine prototype printer. And here's how it works: instead of full tablets, we have small micromeds, one or two milligrams each, which are sorted and selected based on the dose and combination needed for an individual. And of course, these would be doses and combinations you could already take together, FDA-approved drugs. We could change the pharmacokinetics by professionally layering on different elements to the individual micromeds. And when we hit print, you print your combination of medications that might be needed by you on any individual day. And we'd start with, again, generic drugs for the most common problems. About 90 percent of prescribed drugs today are low-cost generics. And once we've printed the pill, we can do some fun bells and whistles. We could print the name of the patient, the date, the day of the week, a QR code. We could print different meds for tapering for a patient on a steroid taper, or tapering from pain medications. So, this is actually a look at our prototype IntelliMedicine printer. See, I'll unveil it here. It has about 16 different silos, each containing individual micromeds. And I can now adjust on the software individual dosings. And when I do that, the robotic arm will adjust the height of these spansules and the micromeds will release. I can now — The automated process would rotate and cycle through, to make sure the micromeds are loaded. And when I hit print, these will all fall through the device, I now pull out my personalized printed polypill with the doses and medications meant for me. And we can take a look, if you look back to the slides, you can see the whole process, we can see the drug silos being selected, the pills doing down the different silos, and being collected in the individual capsule. Now, this is great, I can potentially print my meds based on me, instead of taking six pills. I can now be looking at my individual dosing. My smartwatch is looking at my blood pressure: I needed an adjustment in my blood pressure medicines, my coumadin level. My blood is too thin, so I lower my micromed dose of coumadin, a blood thinner. So, this could be smartly adapted, day to day, programmed by my physician or cardiologist. And you can imagine that larger printers, fast printers like this, could be in your corner pharmacy, in your doctor's office, in a rural clinic. But it could eventually merge and shrink to small ones that could be in your home with integrated cartridges like this that are delivered by drone. Could print your personalized polypill, each morning on your kitchen or your bathroom cabinet. And this could evolve, I think, into an incredible way to improve adherence in medications across the globe. So, I hope we can reimagine the future of medicine in new ways, moving from polypharmacy, one-size-fits-all, low adherence, complications to an era of personalized, precise, on-demand medications that can take us and individualize our own health and health and medicine around the planet. Thank you very much. (Applause) Host: Daniel, that's kind of awesome. Really cool. Question for you, though. How long is it until, say, that nursing-home patient that you mentioned is able to print their pills in their home? Daniel Kraft: Well, again, this is just a prototype. We think that the regulatory route [may] be automated compounding, and especially in nursing homes, folks are taking multiple medications, and they're often mixed up, so it would be a perfect place to start with these technologies. These aren't going to evolve and start with printers on your bathroom counter. We need to be intelligent and smart about how we roll these things out, but realizing there's so many challenges with dosing, adherence and precision, and now that we have all these amazing new technologies that can integrate and be leveraged, I think we need approaches like this to really catalyze and foster a true future of health and medicine. Host: Great, thank you. DK: Thanks. (Applause) |
What does the universe sound like? A musical tour | {0: 'Matt Russo is an astrophysicist and musician who translates the rhythm and harmony of the cosmos into music and sound.'} | TEDxUofT | I'd like you all to close your eyes, please ... and imagine yourself sitting in the middle of a large, open field with the sun setting on your right. And as the sun sets, imagine that tonight you don't just see the stars appear, but you're able to hear the stars appear with the brightest stars being the loudest notes and the hotter, bluer stars producing the higher-pitched notes. (Music) And since each constellation is made up of different types of stars, they'll each produce their own unique melody, such as Aries, the ram. (Music) Or Orion, the hunter. (Music) Or even Taurus, the bull. (Music) We live in a musical universe, and we can use that to experience it from a new perspective, and to share that perspective with a wider range of people. Let me show you what I mean. (Music ends) Now, when I tell people I'm an astrophysicist, they're usually pretty impressed. And then I say I'm also a musician — they're like, "Yeah, we know." (Laughter) So everyone seems to know that there's this deep connection between music and astronomy. And it's actually a very old idea; it goes back over 2,000 years to Pythagoras. You might remember Pythagoras from such theorems as the Pythagorean theorem — (Laughter) And he said: "There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres." And so he literally thought that the motions of the planets along the celestial sphere created harmonious music. And if you asked him, "Why don't we hear anything?" he'd say you can't hear it because you don't know what it's like to not hear it; you don't know what true silence is. It's like how you have to wait for your power to go out to hear how annoying your refrigerator was. Maybe you buy that, but not everybody else was buying it, including such names as Aristotle. (Laughter) Exact words. (Laughter) So I'll paraphrase his exact words. He said it's a nice idea, but if something as large and vast as the heavens themselves were moving and making sounds, it wouldn't just be audible, it would be earth-shatteringly loud. We exist, therefore there is no music of the spheres. He also thought that the brain's only purpose was to cool down the blood, so there's that ... (Laughter) But I'd like to show you that in some way they were actually both right. And we're going to start by understanding what makes music musical. It may sound like a silly question, but have you ever wondered why it is that certain notes, when played together, sound relatively pleasing or consonant, such as these two — (Music) while others are a lot more tense or dissonant, such as these two. (Music) Right? Why is that? Why are there notes at all? Why can you be in or out of tune? Well, the answer to that question was actually solved by Pythagoras himself. Take a look at the string on the far left. If you bow that string, it will produce a note as it oscillates very fast back and forth. (Musical note) But now if you cut the string in half, you'll get two strings, each oscillating twice as fast. And that will produce a related note. Or three times as fast, or four times — (Musical notes) And so the secret to musical harmony really is simple ratios: the simpler the ratio, the more pleasing or consonant those two notes will sound together. And the more complex the ratio, the more dissonant they will sound. And it's this interplay between tension and release, or consonance and dissonance, that makes what we call music. (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) But there's more. (Laughter) So the two features of music we like to think of as pitch and rhythms, they're actually two versions of the same thing, and I can show you. (Slow rhythm) That's a rhythm right? Watch what happens when we speed it up. (Rhythm gets gradually faster) (High pitch) (Lowering pitch) (Slow Rhythm) So once a rhythm starts happening more than about 20 times per second, your brain flips. It stops hearing it as a rhythm and starts hearing it as a pitch. So what does this have to do with astronomy? Well, that's when we get to the TRAPPIST-1 system. This is an exoplanetary system discovered last February of 2017, and it got everyone excited because it is seven Earth-sized planets all orbiting a very near red dwarf star. And we think that three of the planets have the right temperature for liquid water. It's also so close that in the next few years, we should be able to detect elements in their atmospheres such as oxygen and methane — potential signs of life. But one thing about the TRAPPIST system is that it is tiny. So here we have the orbits of the inner rocky planets in our solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, and all seven Earth-sized planets of TRAPPIST-1 are tucked well inside the orbit of Mercury. I have to expand this by 25 times for you to see the orbits of the TRAPPIST-1 planets. It's actually much more similar in size to our planet Jupiter and its moons, even though it's seven Earth-size planets orbiting a star. Another reason this got everyone excited was artist renderings like this. You got some liquid water, some ice, maybe some land, maybe you can go for a dive in this amazing orange sunset. It got everyone excited, and then a few months later, some other papers came out that said, actually, it probably looks more like this. (Laughter) So there were signs that some of the surfaces might actually be molten lava and that there were very damaging X-rays coming from the central star — X-rays that will sterilize the surface of life and even strip off atmospheres. Luckily, just a few months ago in 2018, some new papers came out with more refined measurements, and they found actually it does look something like that. (Laughter) So we now know that several of them have huge supplies of water — global oceans — and several of them have thick atmospheres, so it's the right place to look for potential life. But there's something even more exciting about this system, especially for me. And that's that TRAPPIST-1 is a resonant chain. And so that means for every two orbits of the outer planet, the next one in orbits three times, and the next one in four, and then six, nine, 15 and 24. So you see a lot of very simple ratios among the orbits of these planets. Clearly, if you speed up their motion, you can get rhythms, right? One beat, say, for every time a planet goes around. But now we know if you speed that motion up even more, you'll actually produce musical pitches, and in this case alone, those pitches will work together, making harmonious, even human-like harmony. So let's hear TRAPPIST-1. The first thing you'll hear will be a note for every orbit of each planet, and just keep in mind, this music is coming from the system itself. I'm not creating the pitches or rhythms, I'm just bringing them into the human hearing range. And after all seven planets have entered, you're going to see — well, you're going to hear a drum for every time two planets align. That's when they kind of get close to each other and give each other a gravitational tug. (Tone) (Two tones) (Three tones) (Four tones) (Five tones) (Six tones) (Seven tones) (Drum beats) (Music ends) And that's the sound of the star itself — its light converted into sound. So you may wonder how this is even possible. And it's good to think of the analogy of an orchestra. When everyone gets together to start playing in an orchestra, they can't just dive into it, right? They have to all get in tune; they have to make sure their instruments resonate with their neighbors' instruments, and something very similar happened to TRAPPIST-1 early in its existence. When the planets were first forming, they were orbiting within a disc of gas, and while inside that disc, they can actually slide around and adjust their orbits to their neighbors until they're perfectly in tune. And it's a good thing they did because this system is so compact — a lot of mass in a tight space — if every aspect of their orbits wasn't very finely tuned, they would very quickly disrupt each other's orbits, destroying the whole system. So it's really music that is keeping this system alive — and any of its potential inhabitants. But what does our solar system sound like? I hate to be the one to show you this, but it's not pretty. (Laughter) So for one thing, our solar system is on a much, much larger scale, and so to hear all eight planets, we have to start with Neptune near the bottom of our hearing range, and then Mercury's going to be all the way up near the very top of our hearing range. But also, since our planets are not very compact — they're very spread out — they didn't have to adjust their orbits to each other, so they're kind of just all playing their own random note at random times. So, I'm sorry, but here it is. (Tone) That's Neptune. (Two tones) Uranus. (Three tones) Saturn. (Four tones) Jupiter. And then tucked in, that's Mars. (Five tones) (Six tones) Earth. (Seven tones) Venus. (Eight tones) And that's Mercury — OK, OK, I'll stop. (Laughter) So this was actually Kepler's dream. Johannes Kepler is the person that figured out the laws of planetary motion. He was completely fascinated by this idea that there's a connection between music, astronomy and geometry. And so he actually spent an entire book just searching for any kind of musical harmony amongst the solar system's planets and it was really, really hard. It would have been much easier had he lived on TRAPPIST-1, or for that matter ... K2-138. This is a new system discovered in January of 2018 with five planets, and just like TRAPPIST, early on in their existence, they were all finely tuned. They were actually tuned into a tuning structure proposed by Pythagoras himself, over 2,000 years before. But the system's actually named after Kepler, discovered by the Kepler space telescope. And so, in the last few billion years, they've actually lost their tuning, quite a bit more than TRAPPIST has, and so what we're going to do is go back in time and imagine what they would've sounded like just as they were forming. (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) Thank you. Now, you may be wondering: How far does this go? How much music actually is out there? And that's what I was wondering last fall when I was working at U of T's planetarium, and I was contacted by an artist named Robyn Rennie and her daughter Erin. Robyn loves the night sky, but she hasn't been able to fully see it for 13 years because of vision loss. And so they wondered if there was anything I could do. So I collected all the sounds I could think of from the universe and packaged them into what became "Our Musical Universe." This is a sound-based planetarium show exploring the rhythm and harmony of the cosmos. And Robyn was so moved by this presentation that when she went home, she painted this gorgeous representation of her experience. And then I defaced it by putting Jupiter on it for the poster. (Laughter) So ... in this show, I take people of all vision levels and bring them on an audio tour of the universe, from the night sky all the way out to the edge of the observable universe. But even this is just the start of a musical odyssey to experience the universe with new eyes and with new ears, and I hope you'll join me. Thank you. (Applause) |
How conscious investors can turn up the heat and make companies change | {0: "BCG's Vinay Shandal is passionate about the role of capital in creating impact."} | TED@BCG Toronto | We love to engage on the issues of the day. We love it. We comment on the news, we post our views on social media, we march, we protest ... But who among us is working on solutions, big solutions to big issues, like gun violence, mistreatment of workers, flood, famine, drought? Who is on it? Boom! These guys. (Laughter) What? You were hoping for Peter Parker? The Avengers? You don't expect this beacon of diversity, these good-looking, nicely dressed dudes just oozing charisma to solve the issues? Well good, because they're actually not going to solve the issues. But before you dismiss them, let me say, they're not going to solve the issues, but they will show us how. So who are they? They're activist investors: Carl Icahn, Dan Loeb, Paul Singer, Barry Rosenstein. These are the modern-day OGs of Wall Street. (Laughter) These are scary dudes. I don't mean Green Goblin scary. I mean real scary. The fear they strike in the hearts of a company's CEO and board when they enter its stock is the same fear you feel when you hear a bear outside your tent, and it's dark, and you're sitting there with a mouthful of Doritos — (Laughter) that just moments ago, you had snuck out of the tent to pull down from the bear hang, because you had the munchies. That fear. And in that moment, you are praying, "Oh Lord, please let this bear be passing through." That bear is not passing through! That bear made a detour for you. Bears like Doritos! (Laughter) Activists like money. Some activists also like Doritos, but they definitely want money. And the way they make money, the way they create value, is by getting management of corporations to make changes. Now, some will argue that the changes they create, the value they create, is too short-term in nature. And others will say the tactics they use are egregious. I agree. Long, drawn-out lawsuits, public smear campaigns — there is no need for that. But I must say, there's a small handful of activists, very small, that go to great lengths to be constructive and collaborative. And overall, we have to give credit where credit is due. As a group, they have managed to catalyze large-scale change in large corporations, and that's no small feat. Now, imagine a world where all investors were working with management to make change, not just to make more money, but to improve the environment and society. Imagine what a greener and better world this would be. Now, why? Why would an investor bother? And at first, blush I'm with you: Why would an investor care? Because if doing well on ESG issues — environmental, social and governance issues — was just an act of good corporate citizenship, then I agree, investors would not care. But the good news, and perhaps the saving grace for our collective futures, is that it's so much more than an act of good corporate citizenship. It's good business. There's now enough evidence that shows a clear correlation between ESG performance and financial performance. Companies that do good for the environment and society also do well financially. And some of the best companies are catching on. Like Adidas: Adidas is cleaning up the ocean and making money in the process. Adidas teamed up with an organization called Parley for the Oceans. Parley goes out and collects plastic waste from the ocean. Adidas uses the plastic waste to make shoes. Shoes made with plastic from the ocean: good for the environment and good for business. Because if you know that rapidly growing consumer segment known as hipsters — and I know you know hipsters — then you know that a hipster faced with the choice between a no-name shoe and an Adidas made with plastic from the ocean will pick the Adidas every day of the week and twice on Sunday, and then walk around like it's no big deal but look for every opportunity to talk about them. Like, in an Uber Pool. (Laughter) "Hey, I noticed you looking at my feet." "What? Dude, no, I'm just making slides. I'm a consultant. I make slides. I'm making PowerPoint slides, I'm not looking —" "No, it's fine. I get why you'd be looking. The plastic on my shoe must be bothering you. Well, let me talk about it for the rest of this ride. You see, the plastic on my shoe is from the ocean, on my feet, not in your fish, being walked on, not being munched on. Happy feet. Happy fish. Happy ocean. Doing my part. I got eco-shoes. I got eco-shoes. You need some eco-shoes?" And so on, just cornering him. We've all been there. "Hey, pass me your cell phone. I'll give you a discount code. Let me give you a discount code." We've all been — Folks, I have jumped out of moving Uber Pools. (Laughter) Just, moving, highway, I'm out. I'm out. But we've got to forgive the hipsters, we need to love the hipsters. We need hipsters, and we need companies like Adidas, and what we need most is for investors to convince other companies to behave like Adidas. And herein lies the challenge. There's a growing group of investors, call them "conscious investors." Conscious investors care about ESG issues. And they talk a lot about engaging management on ESG issues. But they don't actually get management to make changes that will improve the environment and society. And this is where conscious investors can take a page from the playbook of the activist investors, because the activist investors have no issues getting management to make changes. They have no issues turning up the heat. Take Paul Singer. He's an old-school Wall Street OG, now in his 70s, loves Doritos, loves making money. Argentina owed Paul 600 million dollars and would not pay. Big mistake. You can't take money from an OG and not pay it back. Paul went to war with Argentina. I am not inventing. This is big. This was huge. This was bigger than Tyson vs Holyfield, Ali vs Foreman. This was man vs country. Paul Singer started going around the world trying to seize up Argentinian assets. At one point, he tried to seize an Argentinian navy vessel off the coast of Ghana. He tried to take over a 350-foot ship while big navy officers with big guns were on the ship. He got the police in Ghana to show up with a crane and threaten to board the ship, and it wasn't until the navy officers drew their weapons that they called off the operation. That's what I call turning up the heat. Now, you may say Paul lost the battle. And I'll say, Paul won the war, because Paul didn't get paid one time, he got paid 20 times his original investment. Then you have Barry Rosenstein. His fund, Jana Partners, started stealth-mode buying up stock in Whole Foods, at a time when Whole Foods was struggling. They got to eight percent, came out, and pushed Whole Foods to sell itself to Amazon, and not because Barry wanted same-day delivery of his organic Doritos. (Laughter) He wanted to make some money. Now, the CEO of Whole Foods, John Mackey, and the board did not want to sell themselves to Amazon, because that would be the prime example of selling out. But in the end, they caved. Why? Because Barry turned up the heat, and he made 300 million dollars in the process. And he did not leave a very nice impression on John. You're not going to see John and Barry just hugging it out at the Whole Foods café. Let's take a very different example now: the Chicago Teachers' Pension Fund, a $10 billion conscious investor. They recently came out hard against private prisons in the US, and good for them. As a new parent, I tell you, I am troubled by devastating images of young children being ripped out of the arms of their parents at the US border and being placed in private detention facilities that did too little to help the kids maintain contact with their parents. So what did the Chicago teachers do? Did they get management to make changes? Did they turn up the heat? Did they look management in the eye and say, "This is no way to run a business. There's a different way to do things. Let me show you"? No. They just sold their stock. Selling did nothing. It's not like management woke up the next day and had an epiphany and said, "Gosh, the teachers sold their stock. We'd better be nice to the kids." No. That didn't happen. And despite a decade of several high-profile divestitures in private prison stock in the US, the stock has continued to climb. The stock over that same period has outperformed the market. And the biggest issue is, we went from a set of conscious investors owning the stock to it potentially being owned by investors who don't care about these issues and don't care what you think about these issues. And this is my issue with conscious investors. Their MO is to divest or divert money into ESG-focused funds. You can't divest your way to a greener world. You can divest your way to a greener portfolio, not to a greener world. So what's it going to take? What's it going to take to flip the script, to get conscious investors to go from divesting to engaging, to go from talking about engaging to actually working with management to make changes that will improve their ESG performance? Because there's a lot suggesting they should and they could. They should, given the clear correlation between ESG performance and financial performance. They could because the activists have shown us they could. A shareholder can drive change in a company. The difference is, Paul and Barry do what they do to make money. The conscious investors would do it to improve society and the environment and make money in the process and do it a little more collaboratively and constructively. And they have the backing of the some of the largest investors. Vanguard and BlackRock — together, they manage trillions. They've been increasingly vocal about the importance of ESG. The CEO of BlackRock has been increasingly vocal in his annual letters about this issue. Even Jana Partners, the same OGs that John called "greedy bastards," recently co-wrote an open letter to the board of Apple, saying, "Hey, your smartphones are addictive for children. Fix it." Apple is working on it. So what it's going to take is some pressure. It's going to take some pressure on conscious investors to, in turn, put some pressure on management to make changes that will improve the environment and society. And where do they start? They start by picking an issue that matters to them and taking a stand on it. Take a stand on an issue that lines up with your purpose: water preservation, labor rights, diversity. As long as it lines up with your purpose, you are golden. And the biggest unlock? Get the senior-most investment professionals focused on this. Today, when an activist shows up to a campaign, it's the senior investment professional talking to the CEO and the board and everyone hears about it. When a conscious investor shows up to talk about an ESG issue, it's some junior person in the risk department talking to some junior person in the investor relations department, and nobody hears about it, and that needs to change. And it's not some massive leap. Today, when a company underperforms financially, who is on the hook? The senior investment professional. So what do they do? They drop everything and work with management, collaboratively and constructively, to make changes to improve the company's financial performance. The same should be true when the company underperforms on ESG issues. And yes, that requires standardization on how we measure ESG, but we're on it. So folks, here's my call to action: it's your money. It's your pension fund, it's your sovereign wealth fund. it's your university's endowment. It's your money. And it's your right to have your money managed in line with your values. So use your voice and trust that it matters. It was your voice that got the investors more conscious in the first place. You protested for years, because you didn't feel right about your money being invested in companies whose values don't line up with yours. It's time to use that voice again. But this time, instead of pushing them to divest, push them to engage, truly engage, truly work with management to make changes that will improve their ESG performance. You made them aware of the issues. You can now focus them on fixing them. Thank you. (Applause) |
The princess who rewrote history | null | TED-Ed | Alexios Komnenos, Byzantine emperor, led his army to meet the Scythian hordes in battle. For good luck, he carried one of the holiest relics in Christendom: the veil that had belonged to the Virgin Mary. Unfortunately, it didn’t help. Not only was his army defeated, but as they fled, the Emperor was stabbed in the buttocks. To make matters worse, a strong wind made the relic too heavy to carry, so he stashed it in some bushes as he escaped. But even as he fled, he managed to slay some Scythians and rescue a few comrades. At least, this is how Alexios' daughter Anna recounted the story, writing nearly 60 years later. She spent the last decade of her long life creating a 500-page history of her father’s reign called The Alexiad. Written in Greek, the book was modeled after ancient Greek epics and historical writings. But Anna had a different, trickier task than the writers in these traditions: as a princess writing about her own family, she had to balance her loyalty to her kin with her obligation to portray events accurately, navigating issues like Alexios’s embarrassing stab to the buttocks. A lifetime of study and participation in her father’s government prepared Anna for this undertaking. Anna was born in 1083, shortly after her father seized control of the Roman Empire following a decade of brutal civil wars and revolts. The empire was deep in decline when he came to power, and threatened from all sides: by the Seljuk Turks in the East, the Normans in the West, and Scythian raiders to the north. Over the course of Anna’s childhood and adolescence, Alexios fought constant military campaigns to secure the frontiers of his empire, even striking up an uneasy alliance with the Crusaders. Meanwhile in Constantinople, Anna fought her own battle. She was expected to study subjects considered proper for a Byzantine princess, like courtly etiquette and the Bible, but preferred classical myth and philosophy. To access this material, she had to learn to read and speak Ancient Greek, by studying secretly at night. Eventually her parents realized how serious she was, and provided her with tutors. Anna expanded her studies to classical literature, rhetoric, history, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, and medicine. One scholar even complained that her constant requests for more Aristotle commentaries were wearing out his eyes. At age fifteen, Anna married Nikephoros Bryennios to quell old conflicts between their families and strengthen Alexios’s reign. Fortunately, Anna and Nikephoros ended up sharing many intellectual interests, hosting and debating the leading scholars of the day. Meanwhile, Alexios’s military excursions began to pay off, restoring many of the empire’s former territories. As her father aged, Anna and her husband helped her parents with their imperial duties. During this time, Anna reportedly advocated for just treatment of the people in their disputes with the government. After Alexios’s death, Anna’s brother John ascended to the throne and Anna turned back to philosophy and scholarship. Her husband had written a history arguing that his grandfather would have made a better emperor than Alexios, but Anna disagreed. She began working on the Alexiad, which made the case for her father's merits as emperor. Spanning the late 11th and early 12th centuries of Byzantine history, the Alexiad recounts the tumultuous events of Alexios’s reign, and Anna’s own reactions to those events, like bursting into tears at the thought of the deaths of her parents and husband. She may have included these emotional passages in hopes that they would make her writing more palatable to a society that believed women shouldn't write about battles and empires. While her loyalty to her father was evident in her favorable account of his reign, she also included criticism and her opinions of events. In the centuries after her death, Anna’s Alexiad was copied over and over, and remains an invaluable eyewitness account of Alexios’s reign today. And through her epic historical narrative, Anna Komnene secured her own place in history. |
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