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Does time exist? | null | TED-Ed | The earliest time measurements were observations of cycles of the natural world, using patterns of changes from day to night and season to season to build calendars. More precise time-keeping, like sundials and mechanical clocks, eventually came along to put time in more convenient boxes. But what exactly is it that we’re measuring? Is time something that physically exists, or is it just in our heads? At first the answer seems obvious— of course time exists; it constantly unfolds all around us, and it’s hard to imagine the universe without it. But our understanding of time started getting complicated thanks to Einstein. His theory of relativity tells us that time passes for everyone, but doesn’t always pass at the same rate for people in different situations, like those travelling close to the speed of light or orbiting a supermassive black hole. Einstein resolved the malleability of time by combining it with space to define space-time, which can bend, but behaves in consistent, predictable ways. Einstein’s theory seemed to confirm that time is woven into the very fabric of the universe. But there’s a big question it didn’t fully resolve: why is it we can move through space in any direction, but through time in only one? No matter what we do, the past is always, stubbornly, behind us. This is called the arrow of time. When a drop of food coloring is dropped into a glass of water, we instinctively know that the coloring will drift out from the drop, eventually filling the glass. Imagine watching the opposite happen. Here, we’d recognize time as unfolding backwards. We live in a universe where the food coloring spreads out in the water, not a universe where it collects together. In physics, this is described by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that systems will gain disorder, or entropy, over time. Systems in our universe move from order to disorder, and it is that property of the universe that defines the direction of time’s arrow. So if time is such a fundamental property, it should be in our most fundamental equations describing the universe, right? We currently have two sets of equations that govern physics. General relativity describes the behavior of very large things, while quantum physics explains the very small. One of the biggest goals in theoretical physics over the last half century has been reconciling the two into one fundamental “theory of everything." There have been many attempts —none yet proven— and they treat time in different ways. Oddly enough, one contender called the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, doesn’t include time at all. Like all current theories of everything, that equation is speculative. But as a thought experiment, if it or a similarly time-starved equation turned out to be true, would that mean that time doesn’t exist, at the most fundamental level? Could time just be some sort of illusion generated by the limitations of the way we perceive the universe? We don’t yet know, but maybe that’s the wrong way of thinking about it. Instead of asking if time exists as a fundamental property, maybe it could exist as an emergent one. Emergent properties are things that don’t exist in individual pieces of a system, but do exist for the system as a whole. Each individual water molecule doesn’t have a tide, but the whole ocean does. A movie creates change through time by using a series of still images that appear to have a fluid, continuous change between them. Flipping through the images fast enough, our brains perceive the passage of time from the sequence of still images. No individual frame of the movie changes or contains the passage of time, but it’s a property that comes out of how the pieces are strung together. The movement is real, yet also an illusion. Could the physics of time somehow be a similar illusion? Physicists are still exploring these and other questions, so we’re far from a complete explanation. At least for the moment. |
How nationalism and globalism can coexist | {0: "UPS's Wanis Kabbaj seeks new ways of understanding the growing complexity of our congested cities and globalized world."} | TED@UPS | So two weeks ago, I searched the word "nationalist" on Twitter. The results were quite colorful, with expressions like, "Emboldened Racist Moron," — (Laughter) "White Supremacist Idiot," "Fascist Sock Puppets," — (Laughter) "Orwellian, Hitlerian, Terrifying." I then searched the word "globalist" and got things like, "Socialist Sell-Outs," "Disgusting Corporate Propaganda," "Elitist Financial Overlords," "Ruthless Cosmopolitan Rats." (Laughter) Even by social media standards, the words are cruel and disgusting. But they reflect the intensity of one of the most fundamental questions of our times: Nationalism or globalism — what is the best path forward? This question impacts everything we care about: our cultural identity, our prosperity, our political systems — everything — the health of our planet — everything. So on the one hand, we have nationalism. Collins defines it as a "devotion to one's nation," but also, a "doctrine that puts national interests above international considerations." For nationalists, our modern societies are built on national grounds: we share a land, a history, a culture, and we defend each other. In a big and chaotic world, they see nationalism as the only sensible way to maintain social stability. But alarmed globalists warn us: self-centered nationalism can easily turn ugly. We've seen it with 20th-century fascisms: bloody wars, millions of deaths, immeasurable destruction. On the other hand, we have globalism. The Oxford Living Dictionary defines it as: "the operation or planning of economic and foreign policy on a global basis." For nationalists, globalism is rapidly deconstructing what our ancestors took decades to build. It's like spitting on our soldiers' tombs; it's eroding our national solidarities and opening the doors to foreign invasions. But globalists make the case that reinforcing our global governance is the only way to tackle big supernational problems, like nuclear proliferation, the global refugee crisis, climate change or terrorism or even the consequences of superhuman AI. So we are at the crossroads, and we are asked to choose: nationalism or globalism? Having lived in four continents, I've always been interested in this question. But it took a whole new level when I saw this happening: the biggest surge in nationalist votes in Western democracies since World War II. All of a sudden, this isn't theory anymore. I mean, these political movements have built their success with ideas that could mean, down the road, losing my French citizenship because I'm North African or not being able to come back home to the US because I come from a Muslim-majority country. You know, when you live in a democracy, you live with this idea that your government will always protect you, as long as you abide by the laws. With the rise of national populism, despite being the best citizen I can, I now have to live with the idea that my government can hurt me for reasons I cannot control. It's very unsettling. But it forced me to rethink and rethink this question and try to think deeper. And the more I thought about it, the more I started questioning the question. Why would we have to choose between nationalism and globalism, between loving our country and caring for the world? There's no reason for that. We don't have to choose between family and country or region or religion and country. We already have multiple identities, and we live with them very well. Why would we have to choose between country and world? What if, instead of accepting this absurd choice, we took it on ourselves to fight this dangerous, binary thinking? So for all the globalists in the audience, I want to ask: When I say the word "nationalist," what image comes to your mind? Something like this? Believe me, I think of that, too. But I'd like you to remember that for most people, nationalism feels more like this. Or maybe like that. You know, it's that thing inside you when you accidentally watch an obscure Olympic sport on TV — (Laughter) wait — and the mere sight of an unknown athlete wearing your national colors gets you all excited. Your heartbeat goes up, your stress level goes up, and you're standing in front of the TV and screaming with passion for that athlete to win. That's nationalism. It's people happy to be together, happy to belong to a large national community. Why would it be wrong? You know, globalists, you may think of nationalism as an old, 19th-century idea that is destined to fade. But I'm sorry to tell you that the facts are not on your side. When the World Values Survey asked more than 89,000 people across 60 countries how proud they felt about their country, 88.5 percent said "very proud" or "quite proud" — 88.5 percent. Nationalism is not going away anytime soon. It's a powerful feeling that, according to another study, is a strong predictor of individual happiness. It's crazy, but your happiness is more correlated with national satisfaction than with things you would expect, like household income or your job satisfaction or your health satisfaction. So if nationalism makes people happy, why would anybody take it away from them? Fellow globalists, if you are like me, you may be attached to globalization for humanistic reasons. And you may take great joy in some of its accomplishments since 1945. After all, major regions of the world have been exceptionally peaceful; extreme poverty rates around the globe are trending down; and more than two billion people, most notably in Asia, show spectacular improvements in their standards of living. But studies also show that globalization has a dark side. And left on the side of the road are hundreds of millions of people in Western middle classes with anemic income growth for more than two decades, possibly three decades, according to some studies. We cannot ignore this elephant in our room. If anything, our collective energy would be better used finding ways to fix this aspect of globalization, instead of fighting this polarizing battle against nationalism. So now, the nationalists in the audience, I have some crusty, nonbinary nuggets for you. (Laughter) When I say the word "globalist," what comes to your mind? Out-of-touch, one-percent plutocrats? (Laughter) Or maybe the heartless, greedy Wall Street type, right? Or maybe people like me, with multiple origins, living in a big, cosmopolitan metropolis. Well, you remember that World Values Survey that I mentioned earlier? It showed another fascinating finding: 71 percent of the world population agreed with the statement, "I am a citizen of the world." Do you know what it means? Most of us are simultaneously proud of our country and citizens of the world. And it gets even better. The citizens of the world in the survey show a higher level of national pride than the ones that rejected that label. So once and for all, being a globalist doesn't mean betraying your country. It just means that you have enough social empathy, and you project some of it outside your national borders. Now, I know that when I dig into my own nationalist feelings, one of my anxieties versus the globalized world is national identity: How are we going to preserve what makes us special, what makes us different, what brings us together? And as I started thinking about it, I realized something really strange, which is that a lot of the key ingredients of our national identities actually come from outside our national borders. Like, think of the letters that we use every day. I don't know if you realize, but the Latin script, the Latin alphabet that we use has its origins thousands of years ago, near the Nile River. It all started with a cow just like this, that was captured by a scribe into an elegant hieroglyph. That hieroglyph was transcribed by a Semite in the Sinai into the letter aleph. Aleph traveled with Phoenicians and reached the European shores in Greece, where it became alpha, the mother of our letter A. So that's how an Egyptian cow became our letter A. (Laughter) And same thing with the Egyptian house that became bet, beta and B. And the Egyptian fish that became daleth, delta and D. Our most fundamental texts are full of Egyptian cows, houses and fish. (Laughter) And there are so many other examples. Take the United Kingdom and its monarchy. Queen Elizabeth II? German ancestry. The mottos on the royal coat of arms? All written in French, not a single word of English. Take France and it's iconic Eiffel Tower. The inspiration? The United States of America — and I don't mean Las Vegas, I mean 19th-century New York. (Laughter) This was the tallest building in New York in the mid-19th century. Does it remind you of something? And you may think of China as a self-contained civilization, protected behind its Great Wall. But think twice. The Chinese official ideology? Marxism, made in Germany. One of China's biggest religions? Buddhism, imported from India. India's favorite pastime? Cricket. I really love this quote from Ashis Nandy, who said, "Cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the British." (Laughter) So these are good reminders that a lot of what we love in our national traditions actually come from previous waves of globalization. And beyond individual symbols, there are whole national traditions that could not have existed without globalization. And the example that comes to my mind is a world-beloved national tradition: Italian cuisine. My friends, if you ever have a chance to go to a superauthentic Italian restaurant that only serves ancient Roman recipes, my advice for you is: don't go. (Laughter) You'd get very, very disappointed. No spaghetti, no pasta — that really started in Sicily in the eighth century, when it was under Arabian rule. No perfect espresso, no creamy cappuccino — that came from Abyssinia via Yemen in the 17th century. And of course, no perfect pizza Napoletana — how would you make it without the tomatoes of the New World? No, instead, you would be served probably a lot of porridge, some vegetable — mostly cabbage — some cheese, and maybe if you're lucky, the absolute delicacy of that time — mmm, perfectly cooked fattened dormice. (Laughter) Thankfully, it was not a close tradition preserved by fanatic watchdogs. No, it was an open process, nourished by explorers, traders, street sellers and innovative home cooks. And in many ways, globalization is a chance for our national traditions to be questioned, regenerated, reinterpreted, to attract new converts to stay vibrant and relevant over time. So just remember this: most of us nationalists in the world are globalists, and most of us globalists in the world are nationalists. A lot of what we like in our national traditions come from outside our national borders. And the reason we venture outside our national borders is to discover these other national traditions. So the real question should not be to choose between nationalism and globalism. The real questions is: How can we do both better? It's a complex question for a complex world that calls for creative, nonbinary solutions. What are you waiting for? Thank you. (Applause) |
How we can help young people build a better future | {0: 'UNICEF executive director Henrietta Fore is a champion of economic development, education, health and humanitarian assistance.'} | We the Future | Today, there are 1.8 billion young people between the ages of 10 and 24 in the world. It is the largest cohort in human history. Meeting their needs will be a big challenge. But it's also a big opportunity. They hold our shared future in their hands. Every day, we read about young people lending their ideas and passions to fighting for change, social change, political change, change in their communities. Imagine what they'll create: breakthroughs, inventions. Maybe new medicines, new modes of transportation, new ways to communicate, sustainable economies and maybe even a world at peace. But this opportunity, this youth dividend, is not a given. One point eight billion young women and young men are standing at the door of adulthood. Are they ready? Right now, too few of them are. My favorite part of my job at UNICEF is a chance to talk to, meet with and hear from young people all around the world. And they tell me about their hopes and dreams. And they have amazing hopes and dreams for what they'll accomplish in their lives. But what they're also telling me is that they have fears. They feel that they're facing a series of urgent crises. A crisis of demographics, a crisis of education, a crisis of employment, a crisis of violence and a crisis for girls. If you look at these crises, you realize that they're urgent and they need to be addressed now. Because they tell us that they're worried. They're worried that they might not get the education that they need. And you know what? They're right. Two hundred million adolescents are out of school worldwide, about the population of Brazil. And those that are in school feel that they may not be getting the right skills. Globally, six in 10 children and young people do not meet the minimum proficiency level for reading and mathematics. No country can be successful if nearly half of its population of young people are unable to read or write. And what about the lucky few who are in secondary school? Many of them are dropping out because they're worried that they're not getting skills that they can use to make a livelihood. And sometimes, their parents can no longer afford the fees. It's a tragedy. And young people are also telling me that they're worried about employment, that they won't be able to find a job. And again, they're right. Every month, 10 million young people reach working age. It's a staggering number. Some will go on for further education, but many will enter the workforce. And our world is not creating 10 million new jobs each month. The competition is fierce for the jobs that are available. So, imagine being a young person today, needing a job, seeking a livelihood, ready to build a future, and opportunities are hard to find. Young people are also telling me that they're worried that they're not getting the skills that they need. And again, they're right. We are finding ourselves at a time in the world when the world is changing so fast for work. We're in the fourth industrial revolution. Young people do not want to be on the farms and in rural communities. They want to go to the cities. They want to learn future skills for future work. They want to learn digital technology and green technologies. They want to have a chance to learn modern agriculture. They want to learn business and entrepreneurship, so that they can create a business of their own. They want to be nurses and radiologists and pharmacists and doctors. And they want to have all of the skills that they'll need for the future. They also want to learn the trades, like construction and electricians. These are all the professions that a country needs, as well as the professions that have not been invented yet. And young people are also telling me that they're worried about violence. At home, online, in school, in their communities. And again, they're right. A young person can have hundreds of friends on social media, but when they need to find a friendly face, someone who can be there as their friend, to talk to, they do not find one. They face bullying, harassment and more. And hundreds of millions are facing exploitation and abuse, and violence. Every seven minutes, an adolescent boy or girl somewhere in the world is killed by an act of violence. And girls are telling me that they're especially worried about their futures. And sadly, they're right, too. Girls face prejudice and discrimination. They face early childhood marriage and they face life-threatening early pregnancy. Imagine a population of the United States. Now double it. That's the number of women who were married before their 18th birthday. Six hundred and fifty million. And many were mothers while they were still children themselves. One out of every three women will face physical abuse or sexual abuse in her lifetime. So, no wonder girls are worried about their futures. These urgent crises may not be a reality in your life or in your neighborhood. And perhaps you've had opportunities for a good education and for marketable skills, and for getting a job. And maybe you've never faced violence, or prejudice, or discrimination. But there are tens of millions of young people who are not so lucky. And they are sounding the alarm for their futures. And that is why UNICEF and our many public and private partners are launching a new global initiative. Young people themselves have named it. And it's called Generation Unlimited or Gen-U or Gen you. So, what they're saying is, it's our time, it's our turn, it's our future. Our goal is very straightforward. We want every young person in school, learning, training, or age-appropriate employment by the year 2030. This goal is urgent, it's necessary, it's ambitious. But we think it's also achievable. So we're calling out for cutting-edge solutions and new ideas. Ideas that will give young people a fighting chance for their futures. We don't know all the answers, so we're reaching out to businesses and governments, and nonprofits, and academia, and communities, and innovators for help. Gen-U is to be an open platform, where people can come and share their ideas and solutions about what works, what does not work, and importantly, what might work. So if we can take these ideas and add a little bit of seed money, and add some good partners, and add good political will, we think they can scale up to reach thousands and millions of people around the world. And with this project, we're also going to do something new. We're going to co-design and co-create with young people. So with Gen-U, they're going to be in the driver's seat, steering us all along the way. In Argentina, there's a program where we connect students who are in rural, remote, hard to reach mountainous communities, with something they've seldom seen: a secondary school teacher. So these students come to a classroom, they're joined by a community teacher and they're connected to urban schools online. And there is the secondary school teacher, who is teaching them about digital technology and a good secondary school education, without them ever having to leave their own communities. And in South Africa, there's a program called Techno Girls. And these are girls from disadvantaged neighborhoods who are studying the STEM program area: science, technology, engineering and math. And they have a chance to job shadow. This is the way that they then can see themselves in jobs that are in engineering, in science, and maybe in the space program. In Bangladesh, we have partners who are training tens of thousands of young people in the trades, so that they can become motorcycle repair people, or mobile phone service people. But these are a chance to see their own livelihoods. And maybe even to have a business of their own. And in Vietnam, there's a program where we are pairing young entrepreneurs with the needs in their own local communities. So with this program, a group gathered and they decided that they would solve the problem of transportation for people with disabilities in their communities. So with a mentor and a bit of seed funding, they've now developed a new app to help the whole community. And I've seen how these programs can make a difference. When I was in Lebanon, I visited a program called Girls Got IT, or Girls Got It. And in this program, girls who have been studying computer skills and the STEM program have a chance to work side by side with young professionals, so that they can learn firsthand what it's like to be an architect, a designer or a scientist. And when you see these girls, smiles on their faces, the hot lights in their eyes, they are so excited, they have hope for the future. They want to change the world. And now, with this program and these mentors, they'll be able to do it. But these ideas and programs are just a start. They'll only reach a fraction of the young people that we need to reach. We want to take these ideas and find ways to scale them up. To reach more young people in more communities, in more places around the world. And we want to dream big. Could every school, everywhere in the world, no matter how remote or mountainous, or even if it's in a refugee camp, could they be connected to the internet? Could we have instant translation for young people, so that you could get a good education in your own language, anywhere in the world? And would it be possible that we could connect the education in your school with skills that you're going to need to get a job in your own community? So that you actually can move from school to work. And more. Can each one of us help? In our everyday lives and in our workplaces, are there ways that we could support young people? Young people are asking us for apprenticeships, for job shadowing, for internships. Could we do this? Young people are also asking us for work-study programs, places where they can learn and earn. Could we do this and could we reach out to a community that's nearby, that's less advantaged, and help them? Young people are also saying that they want to help other young people. They want more space and more voice, so that they can gather to help each other. In HIV centers, in refugee camps, but also to stop online bullying and early child marriage. We need ideas, we need ideas that are big and small, ideas that are local and global. This, in the end, is our responsibility. A massive generation of young people are about to inherit our world. It is our duty to leave a legacy of hope and opportunity for them but also with them. Young people are 25 percent of our population. But they are 100 percent of our future. And they're calling out for a fighting chance to build a better world. So their call should be our calling. The calling of our time. The time is now, the need is urgent. And 1.8 billion young people are waiting. Thank you. (Applause) |
How revenge porn turns lives upside down | {0: 'Darieth Chisolm is an Emmy-winning television personality, former NBC News Anchor, entrepreneur, author, international speaker and life and business coach.'} | TEDxPittsburgh | I had about five minutes before I was set to deliver a talk to a bunch of business owners about visibility and being on camera. After all, I was the so-called expert there, the former 20-year television news anchor and life and business coach. I happened to take a look down at my cell phone just to catch the time, and I noticed that I had a missed call from my ex-husband. I can still hear his voice. "Darieth, what is going on? I just got a call from some strange man who told me to go to this website, and now I'm looking at all of these photos of you naked. Your private parts are all over this website. Who's seen this?" I couldn't think. I couldn't breathe. I was so humiliated and so embarrassed and so ashamed. I felt like my world was coming to an end. And yet, this began for me months of pain and depression and anger and confusion and silence. My manipulative, jealous, stalker ex-boyfriend did exactly what he said he would do: he put up a website with my name on it, and he posted this. And this. And several explicit photos that he had taken of me while I was asleep, living with him in Jamaica. For months prior to that, he had been sending me threatening text messages like this. He was trying to make me out to be some sleazy, low-life slut. He had even threatened to kill me. He told me that he would shoot me in my head and stab me in my heart, simply because I wanted to end the controlling relationship. I couldn't believe this was happening to me. I didn't even know what to call it. You might know it as cyberharassment or cyberbullying. The media calls it "revenge porn." I now call it "digital domestic violence." It typically stems from a relationship gone bad, where a controlling, jilted ex-lover can't handle rejection, so when they can't physically put their hands on you, they use different weapons: cell phones and laptops. The ammunition? Photos, videos, explicit information, content — all posted online, without your consent. I mean, let's face it — we all live our lives online. And the internet is a really small world. We show off our baby photos, we start and grow our businesses, we make new relationships, we let the world in, one Facebook like at a time. And you know what I found? An even smaller world. One in 25 women say they have been impacted by revenge porn. For women under the age of 30, that number looks like one in 10. And that leaves a few of you in this audience as potential victims. You want to know what's even more alarming? Lack of legislation and laws to adequately protect victims and punish perpetrators. There's only one federal bill pending; it's called the ENOUGH Act, by Senator Kamala Harris. It would criminalize revenge porn. But that could take years to pass. So what are we left with in the meantime? Flimsy civil misdemeanors. Currently, only 40 states and DC have some laws in place for revenge porn. And those penalties vary — we're talking $500 fines. Five hundred dollars? Are you kidding me? Women are losing their jobs. They're suffering from damaged relationships and damaged reputations. They're falling into illness and depression. And the suicide rates are climbing. You're looking at a woman who spent 11 months in court, thirteen trips to the courthouse and thousands of dollars in legal fees, just to get two things: a protection from cyberstalking and cyberabuse, otherwise known as a PFA, and language from a judge that would force a third-party internet company to remove the content. It's expensive, complicated and confusing. And worse, legal loopholes and jurisdictional issues drag this out for months, while my private parts were on display for months. How would you feel if your naked body was exposed for the world to see, and you waited helplessly for the content to be removed? Eventually, I stumbled upon a private company to issue a DMCA notice to shut the website down. DMCA — Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It's a law that regulates digital material and content. Broadly, the aim of the DMCA is to protect both copyright owners and consumers. So get this: people who take and share nude photos own the rights to those selfies, so they should be able to issue a DMCA to have the content removed. But not so fast — because the other fight we're dealing with is noncompliant and nonresponsive third-party internet companies. And oh — by the way, even in consenting relationships, just because you get a nude photo or a naked pic, does not give you the right to share it, even [without] the intent to do harm. Back to my case, which happens to be further complicated because he was stalking and harassing me from another country, making it nearly impossible to get help here. But wait a minute — isn't the internet international? Shouldn't we have some sort of policy in place that broadly protects us, regardless to borders or restrictions? I just couldn’t give up; I had to keep fighting. So I willingly, on three occasions, allowed for the invasion of both my cell phone and my laptop by the Department of Homeland Security and the Jamaican Embassy for thorough forensic investigation, because I had maintained all of the evidence. I painstakingly shared my private parts with the all-male investigative team. And it was an embarrassing, humiliating additional hoop to jump through. But then something happened. Jamaican authorities actually arrested him. He's now facing charges under their malicious communications act, and if found guilty, could face thousands of dollars in fines and up to 10 years in prison. And I've also learned that my case is making history — it is the first international case under this new crime. Wow, finally some justice. But this got me to thinking. Nobody deserves this. Nobody deserves this level of humiliation and having to jump through all of these hoops. Our cyber civil rights are at stake. Here in the United States, we need to have clear, tough enforcement; we need to demand the accountability and responsiveness from online companies; we need to promote social responsibilities for posting, sharing and texting; and we need to restore dignity to victims. And what about victims who neither have the time, money or resources to wage war, who are left disempowered, mislabeled and broken? Two things: release the shame and end the silence. Shame is at the core of all of this. And for every silent prisoner of shame, it's the fear of judgment that's holding you hostage. And the price to pay is the stripping away of your self-worth. The day I ended my silence, I freed myself from shame. And I freed myself from the fear of judgment from the one person who I thought would judge me the most — my son, who actually told me, "Mom, you are the strongest person that I know. You can get through this. And besides, mom — he chose the wrong woman to mess with." (Laughter) (Applause) It was on that day that I decided to use my platform and my story and my voice. And to get started, I asked myself this one simple question: Who do I need to become now? That question, in the face of everything that I was challenged with, transformed my life and had me thinking about all kinds of possibilities. I now own my story, I speak my truth, and I'm narrating a new chapter in my life. It's called "50 Shades of Silence." It's a global social justice project, and we're working to film an upcoming documentary to give voice and dignity to victims. If you are a victim or you know someone who is, know this: in order to be empowered, you have to take care of yourself, and you have to love yourself. You have to turn your anger into action, your pain into power and your setback into a setup for what's next for your life. This is a process, and it's a journey of self-discovery that might include forgiveness. But it definitely requires bravery, confidence and conviction. I call it: finding your everyday courage. Thank you. (Applause) |
Can you solve the stolen rubies riddle? | null | TED-Ed | One of the kingdom’s most prosperous merchants has been exposed for his corrupt dealings. Nearly all of his riches are invested in a collection of 30 exquisite Burmese rubies, and the crowd in the square is clamoring for their confiscation to reimburse his victims. But the scoundrel and his allies at court have made a convincing case that at least some of his wealth was obtained legitimately, and through good service to the crown. The king ponders for a minute and announces his judgment. Because there’s no way to know which portion of the rubies were bought with ill-gotten wealth, the fine will be determined through a game of wits between the merchant and the king’s most clever advisor – you. You’re both told the rules in advance. The merchant will be allowed to discreetly divide his rubies among three boxes, which will then be placed in front of you. You will be given three cards, and must write a number between 1 and 30 on each, before putting a card in front of each of the boxes. The boxes will then all be opened. For each box, you will receive exactly as many rubies as the number written on the corresponding card, if the box has that many. But if your number is greater than the number of rubies actually there, the scoundrel gets to keep the entire box. The king puts just two constraints on how the scoundrel distributes his rubies. Each box must contain at least two rubies and one of the boxes must contain exactly six more rubies than another— but you won’t know which boxes those are. After a few minutes of deliberation, the merchant hides the gems, and the boxes are brought in front of you. Which numbers should you choose in order to guarantee the largest possible fine for the scoundrel and the greatest compensation for his victims? Pause the video now if you want to figure it out for yourself. Answer in 3 Answer in 2 Answer in 1 You don’t want to overshoot by being too greedy. But there is a way you can guarantee to get more than half of the scoundrel’s stash. The situation resembles an adversarial game like chess – only here you can’t see the opponent’s position. To figure out the minimum number of rubies you’re guaranteed to win, you need to look for the worst case scenario, as if the merchant already knew your move and could arrange the rubies to minimize your winnings. Because you have no way of knowing which boxes will have more or fewer rubies, you should pick the same number for each. Suppose you write three 9’s. The scoundrel might have allocated the rubies as 8, 14 and 8. In that case, you’d receive 9 from the middle box and no others. On the other hand, you can be sure that at least two boxes have a minimum of 8 rubies. Here’s why. We’ll start by assuming the opposite, that two boxes have 7 or fewer. Those could not be the two that differ by 6, because every box must have at least 2 rubies. In that case, the third box would have at most 13 rubies—that’s 7 plus 6. Add up all three of those boxes, and the most that could equal is 27. Since that’s less than 30, this scenario isn’t possible. You now know, by what’s called a proof by contradiction, that two of the boxes have 8 or more rubies. If you ask for 8 from all three boxes you’ll receive at least 16— and that’s the best you can guarantee, as you can see by thinking again about the 8, 14, 8 scenario. You’ve recovered more than half the scoundrel’s fortune as restitution for the public. And though he’s managed to hold on to some of his rubies, his fortune has definitely lost some of its shine. |
My quest to defy gravity and fly | {0: 'Elizabeth Streb is an extreme action specialist who flies, crash-lands and invents hardware to get higher, faster, sooner, harder.'} | TED2018 | Come on: Hasn't everyone here dreamt of flying? So why haven't humans flown yet? I've been obsessed with learning to fly my whole life. I grew up a feral, adopted child on the northern shore of Lake Ontario, following my bricklayer/fisherman father around. I was always fascinated by things that moved, catching small animals, holding them in my hands, feeling the magic of their movement; playing with fire, thrilled and terrified at its unrelenting force, accidentally burning my father's barn down — just once. (Laughter) That was my first brush with real danger, the fire and my father. When I was about eight or nine years old, I caught a fly in a mason jar. Studying that fly, I thought, "Wow, it's changing directions in midair with acute angles, and it's going so fast, it's a blur. Why can't we do that? Can we?" Everywhere I looked, there were things moving. And these things moved with their very own causal rhythms, their very own mechanistic anatomies. It was clear to me — and to Newton — that things move based on their component parts: worms squirmed, birds flew, kangaroos hopped. And a human's first bout with flying was falling accidentally, tripping, or slipping on that fabled banana peel. Once your ground is dragged out from under you, a world of wonder comes rushing in. I had found my territory. I was seized with a compulsion, a primordial urge to learn how to fly, like a human. For the next 10 years, I did my experiments alone, on my own body. I drove my Honda 350 across the United States in an "Easy Rider" kind of way. I got my degree in modern dance. I mimicked that fly in the box. I dove horizontally through glass; on the way, I punched a hole in it. I was trying to figure out something about flight. When I was 27 years old, I found myself in a rat-infested New York City loft, getting ready to hurl myself off a ladder. I climbed higher, higher, higher, and I jumped. Wham-o! I landed. That hurt. (Laughter) And it occurred to me that people didn't really enjoy getting hurt, and that maybe the reason that we weren't flying yet is that we were still attached to that false idea that we would fly the way birds do, or butterflies. Maybe we needed to assumption-bust, to ask a different kind of question — about duration, for instance. Humans in the air? A few seconds. Birds and butterflies? Minutes, maybe hours. And what about fear? I think fear is complex and personal. I really think it has to do with curiosity and not taking yourself so seriously. We might need to get a little hurt, just not too hurt. And pain: redefine it. Rather than "pain," say, "another rather interesting, foreign sensation." Something like that. I realized then that to learn to fly, we were going to have to learn to land. My hero, Evel Knievel — one of them — said, "Anyone can jump a motorcycle. The trouble begins when you try to land it." (Laughter) Landing hurts. I was curious, though. I thought, "Well, why don't we invent an impact technique? Why don't we just expand our base of support?" I had seen pieces of plywood fall, and they didn't flinch on the way down. So I made my body into a perfect line and tilted back. Whaft! It was a totally different sound than "wham-o." And I rushed out onto the streets of New York City and went up to complete strangers, and I said — well, I thought — "I did a backfall today. Did you?" In 1985, we started to tour all over the world a little bit, and I started my company, called STREB EXTREME ACTION. In 2003, we were invited to go to Kitty Hawk to celebrate the 100th anniversary of flight with the Wright Brothers. We had gotten very good at landing; now we needed to get up into the air. And like them, we wanted to stay there longer. I came across this quote by Wilbur: "If you are looking for perfect safety, you will do well to sit on a fence and watch the birds; but if you really wish to learn, you must mount a machine and become acquainted with its tricks by actual trial." Ah, machines. It incited the hardware junkie inside of me. And if we did want to go or travel to unhabitual places in space — to that banana peel spot that confuses us; to that place outside our vertical comfort zone, where we encounter unexpected turbulence and get accelerated oddly, where the ground changes and moves out from under us — like the composer who is trying to hit a note higher than the human voice can sing, he invents a piccolo or a flute, I set about the invention of my prototypic machines. And if we wanted to go higher, faster, sooner, harder, it was necessary that we create our very own spaceships. And we did. And we did travel to unknown, invisible, dangerous territories, and it changed us. If any of you want to try this, let me know. (Laughter) In 2012, we brought all of our best machines to London and put them in their most iconic places. We got on the London Eye. It was 443 feet above the earth. And as we reached the zenith, we unlocked our brake and fell — 200 feet on the radius, on the spoke that we were attached to. We reached as far up as heaven that day, I'm pretty sure of it. And then I and two of my dancers walked down the outside of London's City Hall. As I stood up there, 300 feet above the ground, and looked down, I saw 2,000 eyes staring up at me, and they saw what they usually do — the sky, a bird, a plane — and then us. And we were just a tiny speck up there. And I realized that action is for everybody. Now we have our very own mason jar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It's called SLAM: STREB Lab for Action Mechanics. It was a former mustard seed factory. And I designed it after the use of a petri dish, and in that petri dish, I put Kid Action, STREB EXTREME ACTION and circus arts, and we all learned to fly, fall and land and invent extreme action together. And you know what we found? In comes everyone — every size, shape, age, capacity, every nationality, every race, every class, all genders, the timid and the bold, the outcast and the cool, the risk avoiders and the risk obsessives. And these buildings exist all over the world, and every one of them can be a flying training center. And you know, as it turns out, people don't want to just dream about flying, nor do they want to watch us fly. They want to do it, too, and they can. And with a little training, they learn to relish the hit and the impact, and, I guess even more, getting up afterwards. I've found that the effect of flying causes smiles to get more common, self-esteem to blossom, and people get just a little bit braver. And people do learn to fly, as only humans can. So can you. Come fly with us. (Applause) (Music) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why I came out as a gay football coach | {0: 'Shane is a strong believer in the power of sports to bridge social gaps. He was born in Reno, Nevada. As a walk-on football player for Boise State University he was inspired to become a coach after his playing career came to an end.\n\nReturning home to Reno he quickly got back into the saddle and started coaching at his high school Alma mater. Recently he fulfilled his dream of being the Varsity Offensive Line Coach and at the age of 21 became the youngest Line Coach in the school’s history. A senior at the University of Nevada, Reno, Shane is majoring in Finance and Economics. In addition to school and coaching, he currently works as the Marketing Manager at Oliver Wickes and Associates® and he is the author of the blog Faith, Family, Football.\n\nHe loves the game. Coaching is a strong passion for Shane and it has given him the ability to do what he loves most – have a meaningful impact on the lives of others.'} | TEDxUniversityofNevada | I love football. I started playing when I was 12 years old. It has been a dominant presence in my life ever since. From youth football, to high-school, and college, and now as a coach. Football has played a huge role in shaping me as a person. Recently, I achieved my dream job of becoming varsity line coach at my high-school alma mater. Last March I was at a coaching clinic. It was late in the afternoon and I was tired. These coaching clinics can tend to be a bit of a drag at times. Hours and hours, and days and days of the presentations on the x's and o's of football. There was one presentation, though, that looked interesting. It was titled "Disneyland." This presentation changed my life. This talk was not about the x's and o's of football. But rather about the emotional truth of why we coaches coach. We are coaches so that we can have a meaningful impact on young people's lives, and help them become better people. As coaches, we want to have the kind of impact that assure that one day our players can hold hands with their children and walk into Disneyland. The moral of this incredible message was this: as coaches, we can preach to our players that it is more important for them be better people than it is great football players. But if we are not honest with them and do not practice what we preach, it will never work. In other words, teenagers are adept at sensing bullshit. (Laughter) As coaches, we must be willing to share our truth. And sharing our truth is the only way we can have the kind of impact we truly want to have. The coach who gave this presentation, his truth was that his son became a drug addict due to the bullying and pressure he was subjected to from his dad being the head football coach at his school in Eagle, Idaho, a program that at the time was not very succesful. I went from a presentation on how to run the power against a 3-4 defense to the most honest, emotional and inspirational talks on coaching philosophy I'd ever heard. So it got me thinking. What's my bullshit? What is unique about me that I bring to the table that will have a meaningful impact? What is my truth? My truth is this. I'm a former college football player. I'm a current high-school football coach. And I am gay. I battled with this truth for a long time. Personally, professionally and certainly in my coaching and athletic career. It was an identity crisis that had a tremendous impact on my life. Long before I heard this presentation on Disneyland I thought about coming out in football. In the beginning, I told myself "You're gay and you will take it to the grave." Now, I've come a long way since that day. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) (Cheers) Thank you. I've come a long way since that day, but the process almost cost me my life. I chose to come out to family and friends starting in August of 2014. I told my immediate family first, and then I carefully picked my way through family and friends, trying to choose the right time and place. Only being part way out of the closet meant that I had to be two different people and always be very aware of where I was and whom I was with. It caused a constant state of panic and anxiety. So the question became, "Is it important for me to come out publicly?" Yes it is, and here is why. My time in-and-out of the closet helped my realize that there are other people in my situation. And it is not a pretty one. It also helped me realize that coming out is not about sharing my bedroom habits, but about giving myself permission to live my life in its entirety. Let me explain. After talking to one of my fellow coaches, he told me: "I don't talk about my sex life with players, why would you?" And it's a legitimate question, but a common misconception about coming out. Again, I'm not talking about my sex life. I'm talking about my life. It's often said that your private life is your private life. But imagine you are put in a situation where going virtually anywhere and doing very normal, healthy, human activities with your significant other could have substantial consequences on your life, reputation and career. You gain a very new perspective on what your private life actually is. That's how being in the closet affected my life. It was quite literally a closet. No space, no freedom and no comfort. It's a suffocating lifestyle with measurable effects. It wore me down until eventually I was abusing alcohol and prescription medications to keep my anxiety in check. It was a horrible time in my life. When you are put in a situation of having to live a double life, it strips you off dignity and normal coping mechanisms. At that time the only place I felt somewhat safe was at home. I was living with my parents, who had been nothing but supportive, but I did not feel comfortable bringing guys around them yet. So there I was. No safe place, no place to be myself, facing a new lifestyle I did not know how to navigate, the anxiety and depression were inescapable. And I responded the only way I felt I could at the time. Drugs and alcohol. Football teaches so many great life lessons to those who play or coach. Perseverance, toughness, respect, self-esteem. But the one negative thing that it does teach is that being gay is not OK. To be frank, the word "faggot" is used almost as much as the word "football." There is a misconception about the prominence of gay men in football, and it has serious consequences. I'm the perfect example of this issue. An all-state player in high-school. A two-year varsity captain among a select few in school history to go play for a top tier division 1 football program. The youngest line coach in the history of the school. And I was ready to kill myself. Because I thought that even though this program was like a second family to me, I feared they would shun me. It was a crushing weight that I was carrying with me all the time. Months and months of sleep deprivation, severe anxiety and depression. And honestly, a lack of the will to live began to catch up with me. It was too much. I was desperate for a way out. Any way out. One night I reached for a bottle of vodka and a couple of pills. I didn't see a way out. I just wanted it to be over. If I couldn't be me and still live my life, what was the point? I passed out on the bathroom floor, and my mom found me. I was fortunate to wake up the next day. I escaped an overdose. It was the scariest moment of my life. When I woke up the next day, I knew I really wasn't ready to give up. And when I heard that talk on Disneyland, I knew how, when and why it was important for me to share my story. I worried for so long about how the football community would react. And while at this point only time will tell, my experience has given me a theory. It's simple. One day, being gay in football will be normal. But in order for that to happen, those of us who are gay need to stand up and own it. The coaches I know are perfect examples of this. I have been met with nothing but love and support from my fellow coaching friends. But now the challenge is to change this. And not just on the private level. The odds of a gay teen or young adult abusing drugs, alcohol, or experiencing anxiety, depression, or even attempting suicide are drastically high. When it comes to football, the social norm that we've created leaves many without hope. We've made incredible progress in the equal rights movement under the law. But now we must tackle a different problem. Social equality and the message we send to young people who play football. Continue to use sports to inspire, connect and to share a positive message. A healthy person cannot live life in the dark. And if you are out there, stand up and own it. Thank you. (Applause) |
"We Are the Halluci Nation" | {0: 'Bursting forth from Canada’s capital, native producer and DJ crew A Tribe Called Red is making an impact on the global electronic scene with a truly unique sound.'} | TED2018 | (Music) We are the tribe that they cannot see We live on an industrial reservation We are the Halluci Nation We have been called the Indians We have been called Native American We have been called hostile We have been called pagan We have been called militant We have been called many names We are the Halluci Nation We are the human beings The callers of names cannot see us but we can see them We are the Halluci Nation Our DNA is of earth and sky Our DNA is of past and future We are the Halluci Nation We are the evolution, the continuation The Halluci Nation (Music) The virus took on many shapes The bear, the elk, the antelope, the elephant, the deer The mineral, the iron, the copper, the coltan, the rubber The coffee, the cotton, the sugar The people The germ traveled faster than the bullet They harvest the mountainside, protect the crops, herd the cattle The people The women and children were separated from the men They divided us according to the regional filters of their minds The violence of arrogance crawls into the air, nestles into the geospatial cortex We are not a conquered people The compound was on fire The missionaries never hid their perspective Prospectors of land would rather see us disappear Recyclable prayers The people This is my body which is given for you The people This is my blood We are not a conquered people (Electronic music and chanting) I was wakened by my elder brother The compound was on fire Awakened by my elder brother The compound was on fire (Music) The compound was on fire The compound was on fire The Halluci Nation The human beings The people See the spiritual in the natural Through sense and feeling Everything is related All the things of earth And in the sky have spirit Everything is sacred Confronted by the ALie Nation The subjects and the citizens See the material religions Through trauma and numb Nothing is related All the things of the earth and in the sky have energy to be exploited Even themselves, mining their spirits into souls sold Into nothing is sacred Not even their self The ALie Nation Alienation Ancestors Live in the DNA In genetic memory The evolution of descendants Human being is our natural identity Natural identity is where the power of being Waits for human recognition To understand Not to just know But to understand sacred Without religion we evolve Back into our ancestors With religion we disappear Into religious heaven and hell (Electronic music and chanting) Human beings We are human, we are of the earth (Electronic music and chanting) Human beings We are human We are of the earth Our bone, flesh, blood, metals, minerals, liquids, of earth We are earth We are being We are of the sky The sun, moon, stars A reality of how ancestors live We are the children of earth and sky We are the Halluci Nation (Applause) (Cheering) (Applause) |
Redefining manhood—one locker room talk at a time | {0: 'Alexis Jones is the co-founder of the non-profit I Am That Girl, and author of the book by the same name. After years of traveling and speaking to hundreds of thousands of girls and women, her most recent project is ProtectHer: a campaign created out of an urgency to address the ever-growing issue of domestic abuse and sexual assault on campuses.'} | TEDxUniversityofNevada | That's a long walk. I feel like we have to practice with that. So, first off, what an honor, what a privilege to be on this stage, getting to have this conversation with you all. The truth is that I've spent the past three years in college locker rooms, having conversations with young men about the importance of respecting women. I was recently invited to a major university, and as I was being "debriefed" on the way in, they were telling me what was going on specific to their locker room. I was informed that there was one player who had punched his baby mama; that there were four other players that were facing rape allegations with four separate women; that there were another two players who had filmed and watched one of the rapes of an unconscious girl; and knowing all of this, one of the head coaches came in the day after the election, and he started the chant, "We can grab women by the pussy because this is America." Well, that is not the America that I know, and the truth is that sexual assault is but a symptom of the problem. The problem is the mindset of how these young men are being programmed to think about, to talk about, and to treat women. Before I dive into the whole talk, I feel like I have to preface a few disclaimers. Number one: I'm going to mess up. I just accepted that that's going to happen. I'm probably going to blank out at some point, so please be gentle with me. On top of it, there are brilliant people who have dedicated their entire lives to this conversation, and institutions who have paved the way, so I am but offering my humble two cents. Number two: ProtectHer is but a starting place for us. We recognize that men are also sexually assaulted, one in 16. We know that the LGBT community is also assaulted, and while those communities absolutely deserve our attention, for the sake of this conversation, I am going to be speaking about "her," because violence against women is a house on fire, and I will be speaking in heterosexual stereotypes. Number three: ProtectHer is not implying that women are weak and that we can't protect ourselves, so we need men to come and help protect us. ProtectHer is an invitation for all of humanity to better prioritize the women and girls. Now, what's interesting is that some schools call me because, you know, at the end of the day, they care about what's going on in their locker rooms. But before I ever started in locker rooms, I worked in girl empowerment for a decade. When I was 19 years old, I founded a nonprofit called I AM THAT GIRL. We're basically a bad-ass version of scout girls for college girls. (Laughter) We have about a million girls involved now, and we just opened up a chapter in our 20th country. So the truth is - thank you, man ! I dig that! (Applause) So, the truth is that I have a name, and a face, and a story for every time someone talks about girls in statistic form. And it wasn't until three years ago that Yogi Roth and Trent Dilfer called me, and they asked me to come and give a talk to the top 18 high school quarterbacks for a TV show called "Elite Eleven." What I didn't realize was that when it aired on ESPN, a week later, everything with Ray Rice would come out. And suddenly, I was that girl in the locker room, having tough love conversations with men about the importance of respecting women. It probably helped that I worked at FOX Sports and ESPN, and that I grew up in Texas where football is a religion, that I grew up with four older brothers. My father's the very best man that I know, my husband was a professional athlete for nine years. What's interesting is all of a sudden being hired by division one schools all over the country, that I was invited behind the velvet curtain to better understand what was going on with them. Like I said, some schools were hiring me because they had an incident going on in their locker rooms, and other schools were just legitimately concerned, and I had one head coach call me, and he said he was worried because he had a daughter, and the way in which these young men were talking about women, that was so disrespectful. Sure enough, I fly out and I am sitting there, and halfway through my talk - we're sitting in a circle in the locker, you can imagine, the only girl - and halfway through my talk, one of the guys raises his hand and he says: "You know, I get it, it's important to 'respect' chicks, but it's cool to fuck chicks." You can imagine, the coach is like, "You gotta be kidding me." (Laughter) He is sitting there, shaking his head, looking down at the ground. And so, I look up at this kid, and I said, "Okay, says who?" There is this long pause, and immediately he is looking at his boys left and right who are equally mortified, staring down at the ground like, "You gotta be kidding me. We're for sure running sprints now." (Laughter) And so, after a minute of awkward silence goes by, I look up and I say, "Here is the thing, I am not necessarily disagreeing, I'm just saying you made a really opinionated statement, you said, 'It's cool to fuck girls,' I'm just saying, 'Says who?'" And finally, he looks up at me and he says, "I don't know." And I said, "Yeah, that's the problem: you're on autopilot and you've been programmed to think that way; you were handed a script; someone gave you a definition of cool that's not even yours, and you have the audacity to pawn it off as though you're being original." Mother, father, preacher, teacher, I'm not here to tell you how to live your life, I am simply inviting you to be brave enough to author your own life, to come up with your own definitions, and to think for yourself. He came up to me after the talk, and he gave me a really awkward hug, and he said, "Thank you," and I looked at him, and I said, "For what?" And he said, "No one has ever asked me to think for myself. I want to thank you for the invitation." Now, I have a thousand stories of adventures, being the only girl in the locker room. I have stories that would make you laugh, and make you cry, and they would make you cringe, and they would break your heart. But more than anything else, they would leave you hopeful. You see, I was put on the planet to empower women. I was made known of that at a really young age, but it wasn't until I stood in a room full of alpha dudes that I realized that I'd been missing the point, only preaching to half the sky. That violence against women is not a women's issue, although we are incredibly capable creatures. Violence against women is a human issue, and it requires all of us participating. And the truth is, the majority of these young men feel that they have never been invited to sit at our table. And because I'm not Santa, and I can't fly to every single school - although Lord knows I have tried, I have spent 220 days a year on the road for the past three years. So, we created the first ever ProtectHer program, that can be integrated into college locker rooms, to invite young men to broaden their definition of manhood. Because we believe that in order to protect the dorm rooms, that we have to activate the hearts and the minds of the locker rooms. A few things that I have learned being in the trenches with these guys is first and foremost, we have to make them aware of their programming. We have to get the most distracted generation in history to pause long enough to be introspective, to ask the hard questions: "Says who?" We know that they consume ten hours of media a day. Media that glorifies violence against women, that's inherently disrespectful, that's hyper sexualizing and objectifying. We know that they consume 3,000 brand images every day, spoon-feeding them a definition of manhood that's been hijacked by a cheap cologne-wearing Ken doll, lacking a moral constitution, self-respect, and authentic confidence. We know that the majority of these young men learn about sex through porn. So, maybe we can stop being so shocked because they're doing exactly what we, as a society, are programming them to do, and they're doing it very well. So maybe, as a society, we can better educate them on sex and healthy relationships. We need to have a conversation about identity. We have to broaden their definition of manhood because the consensus in the locker room, right now, is very easy and pretty achievable. It's be as rich as you can, be as famous as you can, and bang as many girls as you can. Now, it's interesting, because my husband had a brilliant idea, he said, "What we have to do" - and my husband is here, he is a 6'9" poster boy of feminism - (Laughter) (Applause) And his brilliant suggestion was, "We have to get these young men to stop viewing women just as sexual objects, but to remind them that women are human beings, too." He said, "So honestly, if I were you, I would just pull pictures of their girlfriends, and sisters, and moms from social media. I'd put it in your presentation." That's my husband voice, by the way. (Laughter) It was this brilliant idea. So, for the first talk that I ever gave for Elite Eleven, I pulled pictures of all the women that they love, and I put up a slide, and it says, "One in four girls will be sexually assaulted on a college campus." And of course, their eyes glazed over, like, "Here we go, we're going to have this conversation." Then I click the next slide, and I said, "But it's different when it's her." And I memorized ten to fifteen names, I said, "It's different when it's Sarah, and when it's Lauren, and when it's Jenny." And now these guys are looking at their 16-year-old sister. Half the guys in the room started crying. We have to reframe this issue to make this extremely personal to them. Number three, we have to have a conversation about respect. You can't give something that you don't have. We have to imbue these young men with more self-respect, so that they're able to treat others with more dignity. What dawned on me was that we are not teaching enough emotional education in school right now, we are certainly not teaching these young men how to create an authentic confidence, so they are sourcing it from exactly where they know how. Through performance, through popularity, and through possessions. We have to broaden a definition of confidence that is not contingent on social media highlight reels and external validation. Number four: We have to have real talk with these guys. I have yet to come into a locker room where they use words like "consent" and "bystander." Those are words that we use, in our shiny star studded PSAs. I have yet to hear of a guy come in, and raise his hand, and be like, "There's this really great opportunity for us, bystanders, to intervene." (Laughter) I have never heard of a guy be like, "We were in the middle of hooking up, I'm not gonna lie, I paused, I was like, 'I just wanna make sure that I officially have your consent moving forward.'" (Laughter) That's not me poking fun at the intention behind these words. That's just we have to give them real language and real tools for the moments that we are asking them to be brave. We have to work with them, and be in conversation with them, to offer them language when they see something sketchy, being able to say, "Yo, we don't do that." That in the middle of hooking up, to give them language like, "Yo, I just wanna make sure that you're cool with us having sex." Because as long as we're talking to them like academic robots, I think we're setting them up to fail. And as far as a few calls to action, anyone in media, please stop crucifying coaches and universities when this stuff happens in their locker room; we're at pandemic levels, this is happening everywhere. Instead, just celebrate the universities who are doing it right, so that we can inspire others to follow suit. For coaches and educators, please invest in programs like these, that are preventative medicine, we cannot continue to triage these symptoms, putting band-aids on bullet wounds. For parents out there, you hold all the power in your wallets. Demand that, in order for you to pay tuition, these schools have to invest in the safety of both your daughters and your sons. For students out there, ask your administration to invest in these kinds of programs. And for student athletes out there, say that you are not going to sign with any university that isn't making prevention a priority. For policy makers out there, if you have to have a driver's license to drive a car, why would you not have to take a mandatory sexual assault prevention program, in order to attend a college or play sports? For the National League team owners, would you be so audacious as to sign a ProtectHer pledge that says that you won't draft any students who have sexual assault convictions. To be a professional athlete is a privilege, it's a real-life superhero in this country, and you literally have the ability to change the entire game with those kinds of standards. Lastly, ProtectHer is a battle cry, it's a belief system, it is a cultural identity that is rooted in the inherent respect for women. Right now, as we sit in this auditorium, we have women and bad-ass men all over the country, marching, standing at their capital, saying that this is the shift - (Applause) (Cheers) saying that this is the shift that our country wants to make, and it's easy for us to sit in an auditorium, and it's easy for us to hear these different talks and to be inspired by them, but the truth is, this kind of audacious shift in culture is going to demand that the warrior, that the gladiator, that the protector in you and in me rises to the occasion to create a new definition of normal, where girls, and women, and all people are treated with dignity and respect. Because the truth is that men are not simply the problem when it comes to violence against women, they're also the cure, and we have never needed them so much. So, for the real men out there, consider this your invitation. Thank you so much. (Applause) (Cheers) |
How will we survive when the population hits 10 billion? | {0: 'Charles C. Mann calls himself "a fella who tries to find out interesting things and tell others about them."'} | TED2018 | How are we doing? No, no, no, by that, I meant, how are we, homo sapiens "we" ... (Laughter) doing as a species? (Laughter) Now the typical way to answer that question is this. You choose some measure of human physical well-being: average longevity, average calories per day, average income, overall population, that sort of thing, and draw a graph of its value over time. In almost every case, you get the same result. The line skitters along at a low level for millennia, then rockets up exponentially in the 19th and 20th century. Or choose a measure of consumption: consumption of energy, consumption of fresh water, consumption of the world's photosynthesis, and draw a graph of its value over time. In the same way, the line skitters along at a low level for millennia, then rockets up exponentially in the 19th and 20th century. Biologists have a word for this: outbreak. An outbreak is when a population or species exceeds the bounds of natural selection. Natural selection ordinarily keeps populations and species within roughly defined limits. Pests, parasites, lack of resources prevent them from expanding too much. But every now and then, a species escapes its bounds. Crown-of-thorns starfish in the Indian Ocean, zebra mussels in the Great Lakes, spruce budworm here in Canada. Populations explode, a hundredfold, a thousandfold, a millionfold. So here's a fundamental lesson from biology: outbreaks in nature don't end well. (Laughter) Put a couple of protozoa into a petri dish full of nutrient goo. In their natural habitat, soil or water, their environment constrains them. In the petri dish, they have an ocean of breakfast and no natural enemies. They eat and reproduce, eat and reproduce, until bang, they hit the edge of the petri dish, at which point they either drown in their own waste, starve from lack of resources, or both. The outbreak ends, always, badly. Now, from the viewpoint of biology, you and I are not fundamentally different than the protozoa in the petri dish. We're not special. All the things that we, in our vanity, think make us different — art, science, technology, and so forth, they don't matter. We're an outbreak species, we're going to hit the edge of the petri dish, simple as that. Well, the obvious question: Is this actually true? Are we in fact doomed to hit the edge of the petri dish? I'd like to set aside this question for a moment and ask you guys another one. If we are going to escape biology, how are we going to do it? In the year 2050, there will be almost 10 billion people in the world, and all of those people will want the things that you and I want: nice cars, nice clothes, nice homes, the odd chunk of Toblerone. I mean, think of it: Toblerone for 10 billion people. How are we going to do this? How are we going to feed everybody, get water to everybody, provide power to everybody, avoid the worst impacts of climate change? I'm a science journalist, and I've been asking these questions to researchers for years, and in my experience, their answers fall into two broad categories, which I call "wizards" and "prophets." Wizards, techno-whizzes, believe that science and technology, properly applied, will let us produce our way out of our dilemmas. "Be smart, make more," they say. "That way, everyone can win." Prophets believe close to the opposite. They see the world as governed by fundamental ecological processes with limits that we transgress to our peril. "Use less, conserve," they say. "Otherwise, everybody's going to lose." Wizards and prophets have been butting their heads together for decades, but they both believe that technology is key to a successful future. The trouble is, they envision different types of technology and different types of futures. Wizards envision a world of glittering, hyperefficient megacities surrounded by vast tracts of untouched nature, economies that have transitioned from atoms to bits, dematerialized capitalist societies that no longer depend on exploiting nature. Energy, to wizards, comes from compact nuclear plants; food from low-footprint farms with ultraproductive, genetically modified crops tended by robots; water from high-throughput desalination plants, which means we no longer exploit rivers and aquifers. Wizards envision all 10 billion of us packed into ultradense but walkable megacities, an urbanized world of maximum human aspiration and maximum human liberty. Now, prophets object to every bit of this. You can't dematerialize food and water, they point out. They say, you can't eat bits, and industrial agriculture has already given us massive soil erosion, huge coastal dead zones and ruined soil microbiomes. And you wizards, you want more of this? And those giant desalination plants? You know they generate equally giant piles of toxic salt that are basically impossible to dispose of. And those megacities you like? Can you name me an actually existing megacity that really exists in the world today, except for possibly Tokyo, that isn't a cesspool of corruption and inequality? Instead, prophets pray for a world of smaller, interconnected communities, closer to the earth, a more agrarian world of maximum human connection and reduced corporate control. More people live in the countryside in this vision, with power provided by neighborhood-scale solar and wind installations that disappear into the background. Prophets don't generate water from giant desalination plants. They capture it from rainfall, and they reuse and recycle it endlessly. And the food comes from small-scale networks of farms that focus on trees and tubers rather than less productive cereals like wheat and rice. Above all, though, prophets envision people changing their habits. They don't drive to work, they take their renewable-powered train. They don't take 30-minute hot showers every morning. They eat, you know, like Michael Pollan says, real food, mostly plants, not too much. Above all, prophets say submitting to nature's restraints leads to a freer, more democratic, healthier way of life. Now, wizards regard all this as hooey. They see it as a recipe for narrowness, regression, and global poverty. Prophet-style agriculture, they say, only extends the human footprint and shunts more people into low-wage agricultural labor. Those neighborhood-run solar facilities, they sound great, but they depend on a technology that doesn't exist yet. They're a fantasy. And recycling water? It's a brake on growth and development. Above all, though, wizards object to the prophets' emphasis on wide-scale social engineering, which they see as deeply anti-democratic. If the history of the last two centuries was one of unbridled growth, the history of the coming century may well be the choice we make as a species between these two paths. These are the arguments that will be resolved, in one way or another, by our children's generation, the generation that will come into the world of 10 billion. Now, but wait, by this point, biologists should be rolling their eyes so loud you can barely hear me speak. They should be saying, all of this, wizards, prophets, it's a pipe dream. It doesn't matter which illusory path you think you're taking. Outbreaks in nature don't end well. I mean, you think the protozoa see the edge of the petri dish approaching and say, "Hey guys, time to change society"? No. They just let her rip. That's what life does, and we're part of life. We'll do the same thing. Deal with it. Well, if you're a follower of Darwin, you have to take this into consideration. I mean, the basic counterargument boils down to: "We're special." How lame is that? (Laughter) I mean, we can accumulate and share knowledge and use it to guide our future. Well, are we actually doing this? Is there any evidence that we're actually using our accumulated, shared knowledge to guarantee our long-term prosperity? It's pretty easy to say no. If you're a wizard, and you believe that hyperproductive, genetically engineered crops are key to feeding everyone in tomorrow's world, you have to worry that 20 years of scientists demonstrating that they are safe to consume has failed to convince the public to embrace this technology. If you're a prophet and you believe that key to solving today's growing shortage of fresh water is to stop wasting it, you have to worry that cities around the world, in rich places as well as poor, routinely lose a quarter or more of their water to leaky and contaminated pipes. I mean, Cape Town, just a little while ago, almost ran out of water. Cape Town loses a third of its water to leaky pipes. This problem has been getting worse for decades, and remarkably little has been done about it. If you're a wizard, and you think that clean, abundant, carbon-free nuclear power is key to fighting climate change, then you have to worry that the public willingness to build nukes is going down. If you're a prophet, and you think that the solution to the same problem is these neighborhood-run solar facilities shuttling power back and forth, you have to worry that no nation anywhere in the world has devoted anything like the resources necessary to develop this technology and deploy it in the time that we need it. And if you're on either side, wizard or prophet, you have to worry that, despite the massive alarm about climate change, the amount of energy generated every year from fossil fuels has gone up by about 30 percent since the beginning of this century. So, still think we're different than the protozoa? Still think we're special? Actually, it's even worse than that. (Laughter) We're not in the streets. No seriously, if there's a difference between us and the protozoa, a difference that matters, it's not just our art and science and technology and so forth — it's that we can yell and scream, we can go out into the streets, and, over time, change the way society works, but we're not doing it. Wizards have been arguing literally for decades that nuclear power is key to resolving climate change. But the first pro-nuke march in history occurred less than two years ago, and it was dwarfed by the anti-nuke marches of the past. Prophets have been arguing, again literally for decades, that conservation is key to keeping freshwater supplies without destroying the ecosystems that generate those freshwater supplies. But in the history of humankind, there has never been a street full of angry protesters waving signs about leaky pipes. In fact, most of the political activity in this sphere has been wizards and prophets fighting each other, protesting each other rather than recognizing that they are, fundamentally, on the same side. After all, these people are concerned about the same thing: How are we going to make our way in the world of 10 billion? The first step towards generating that necessary social movement, creating that critical mass and getting that yelling and screaming going seems obvious: wizards and prophets join together. But how are you going to do this, given the decades of hostility? One way might be this: Each side agrees to accept the fundamental premises of the other. Accept that nuclear power is safe and carbon-free, and that uranium mines can be hideously dirty and that putting large volumes of toxic waste on rickety trains and shuttling them around the countryside is a terrible idea. To me, this leads rather quickly to a vision of small, neighborhood scale, temporary nukes, nuclear power as a bridge technology while we develop and deploy renewables. Or accept that genetically modified crops are safe and that industrial agriculture has caused huge environmental problems. To me, this leads rather quickly to a vision of plant scientists devoting much more of their attention to tree and tuber crops, which can be much more productive than cereals, use much less water than cereals, and cause much less erosion than cereals. These are just ideas from a random journalist. I'm sure there's a hundred better ones right here in this room. The main point is, wizards and prophets working together have many paths to success. And success would mean much more than mere survival, important though that is. I mean, if humankind somehow survives its own outbreak, if we get food to everybody, get water to everybody, get power to everybody, if we avoid the worst effects of climate change, if we somehow safeguard the biome, it would be amazing. It would say, I think, even to a hardened cynic like me, maybe we really are special. Thank you. (Applause) |
How isolation fuels opioid addiction | {0: 'Through her nonprofit SeekHealing, Rachel Wurzman aims to reduce opioid overdose rates by building communities that are inherently resilient to addiction.'} | TEDxMidAtlantic | What does it mean to be normal? And what does it mean to be sick? I've asked myself this question from the time I was about seven, when I was diagnosed with Tourette syndrome. Tourette's is a neurological disorder characterized by stereotyped movements I perform against my will, called tics. Now, tics are technically involuntary, in the sense that they occur without any conscious attention or intention on my part. But there's a funny thing about how I experience tics. They feel more unvoluntary than involuntary, because I still feel like it's me moving my shoulder, not some external force. Also, I get this uncomfortable sensation, called premonitory urge, right before tics happen, and particularly when I'm trying to resist them. Now, I imagine most of you out there understand what I'm saying, but unless you have Tourette's, you probably think you can't relate. But I bet you can. So, let's try a little experiment here and see if I can give you a taste of what my experience feels like. Alright, ready? Don't blink. No, really, don't blink. And besides dry eyes, what do you feel? Phantom pressure? Eyelids tingling? A need? Are you holding your breath? (Laughter) Aha. (Laughter) That's approximately what my tics feels like. Now, tics and blinking, neurologically speaking, are not the same, but my point is that you don't have to have Tourette's to be able to relate to my experience of my premonitory urges, because your brain can give you similar experiences and feelings. So, let's shift the conversation from what it means to be normal versus sick to what it means that a majority of us are both normal and sick. Because in the final analysis, we're all humans whose brains provide for a spectrum of experiences. And everything on that spectrum of human experiences is ultimately produced by brain systems that assume a spectrum of different states. So again, what does it mean to be normal, and what does it mean to be sick, when sickness exists on the extreme end of a spectrum of normal? As both a researcher who studies differences in how individuals' brains wire and rewire themselves, and as a Touretter with other related diagnoses, I have long been fascinated by failures of self-regulation on the impulsive and compulsive behavioral spectrums. Because so much of my own experience of my own body and my own behavior has existed all over that map. So with the spotlight on the opioid crisis, I've really found myself wondering lately: Where on the spectrum of unvoluntary behavior do we put something like abusing opioid painkillers or heroin? By now, we all know that the opioid crisis and epidemic is out of control. Ninety-one people die every day in this country from overdose. And between 2002 and 2015, the number of deaths from heroin increased by a factor of six. And something about the way that we treat addiction isn't working, at least not for everyone. It is a fact that people suffering from addiction have lost free will when it comes to their behavior around drugs, alcohol, food or other reward-system stimulating behaviors. That addiction is a brain-based disease state is a medical, neurobiological reality. But how we relate to that disease — indeed, how we relate to the concept of disease when it comes to addiction — makes an enormous difference for how we treat people with addictions. So, we tend to think of pretty much everything we do as entirely voluntary. But it turns out that the brain's default state is really more like a car idling in drive than a car in park. Some of what we think we choose to do is actually things that we have become programmed to do when the brakes are released. Have you ever joked that your brain was running on autopilot? Guess what? It probably was. OK? And the brain's autopilot is in a structure called the striatum. So the striatum detects emotional and sensory motor conditions and it knows to trigger whatever behavior you have done most often in the past under those same conditions. Do you know why I became a neuroscientist? Because I wanted to learn what made me tick. (Laughter) Thank you, thank you. (Laughter) I've been wanting to use that one in front of an audience for years. (Applause) So in graduate school, I studied genetic factors that orchestrate wiring to the striatum during development. And yes, that is my former license plate. (Laughter) And for the record, I don't recommend any PhD student get a license plate with their thesis topic printed on it, unless they're prepared for their experiments not to work for the next two years. (Laughter) I eventually did figure it out. So, my experiments were exploring how miswiring in the striatum relates to compulsive behaviors. Meaning, behaviors that are coerced by uncomfortable urges you can't consciously resist. So I was really excited when my mice developed this compulsive behavior, where they were rubbing their faces and they couldn't seem to stop, even when they were wounding themselves. OK, excited is the wrong word, I actually felt terrible for them. I thought that they had tics, evidence of striatal miswiring. And they were compulsive, but it turned out, on further testing, that these mice showed an aversion to interacting and getting to know other unfamiliar mice. Which was unusual, it was unexpected. The results implied that the striatum, which, for sure, is involved in compulsive-spectrum disorders, is also involved in human social connection and our ability to — not human social connection, but our ability to connect. So I delved deeper, into a field called social neuroscience. And that is a newer, interdisciplinary field, and there I found reports that linked the striatum not just to social anomalies in mice, but also in people. As it turns out, the social neurochemistry in the striatum is linked to things you've probably already heard of. Like oxytocin, which is that hormone that makes cuddling feel all warm and fuzzy. But it also implicates signaling at opioid receptors. There are naturally occurring opioids in your brain that are deeply linked to social processes. Experiments with naloxone, which blocks opioid receptors, show us just how essential this opioid-receptor signaling is to social interaction. When people are given naloxone — it's an ingredient in Narcan, that reverses opioid overdoses to save lives. But when it's given to healthy people, it actually interfered with their ability to feel connected to people they already knew and cared about. So, something about not having opioid-receptor binding makes it difficult for us to feel the rewards of social interaction. Now, for the interest of time, I've necessarily gotten rid of some of the scientific details, but briefly, here's where we're at. The effects of social disconnection through opioid receptors, the effects of addictive drugs and the effects of abnormal neurotransmission on involuntary movements and compulsive behaviors all converge in the striatum. And the striatum and opioid signaling in it has been deeply linked with loneliness. When we don't have enough signaling at opioid receptors, we can feel alone in a room full of people we care about and love, who love us. Social neuroscientists, like Dr. Cacioppo at the University of Chicago, have discovered that loneliness is very dangerous. And it predisposes people to entire spectrums of physical and mental illnesses. Think of it like this: when you're at your hungriest, pretty much any food tastes amazing, right? So similarly, loneliness creates a hunger in the brain which neurochemically hypersensitizes our reward system. And social isolation acts through receptors for these naturally occurring opioids and other social neurotransmitters to leave the striatum in a state where its response to things that signal reward and pleasure is completely, completely over the top. And in this state of hypersensitivity, our brains signal deep dissatisfaction. We become restless, irritable and impulsive. And that's pretty much when I want you to keep the bowl of Halloween chocolate entirely across the room for me, because I will eat it all. I will. And that brings up another thing that makes social disconnection so dangerous. If we don't have the ability to connect socially, we are so ravenous for our social neurochemistry to be rebalanced, we're likely to seek relief from anywhere. And if that anywhere is opioid painkillers or heroin, it is going to be a heat-seeking missile for our social reward system. Is it any wonder people in today's world are becoming addicted so easily? Social isolation — excuse me — contributes to relapse. Studies have shown that people who tend to avoid relapse tend to be people who have broad, reciprocal social relationships where they can be of service to each other, where they can be helpful. Being of service lets people connect. So — if we don't have the ability to authentically connect, our society increasingly lacks this ability to authentically connect and experience things that are transcendent and beyond ourselves. We used to get this transcendence from a feeling of belonging to our families and our communities. But everywhere, communities are changing. And social and economic disintegration is making this harder and harder. I'm not the only person to point out that the areas in the country most economically hard hit, where people feel most desolate about their life's meaning, are also the places where there have been communities most ravaged by opioids. Social isolation acts through the brain's reward system to make this state of affairs literally painful. So perhaps it's this pain, this loneliness, this despondence that's driving so many of us to connect with whatever we can. Like food. Like handheld electronics. And for too many people, to drugs like heroin and fentanyl. I know someone who overdosed, who was revived by Narcan, and she was mostly angry that she wasn't simply allowed to die. Imagine for a second how that feels, that state of hopelessness, OK? But the striatum is also a source of hope. Because the striatum gives us a clue of how to bring people back. So, remember that the striatum is our autopilot, running our behaviors on habit, and it's possible to rewire, to reprogram that autopilot, but it involves neuroplasticity. So, neuroplasticity is the ability of brains to reprogram themselves, and rewire themselves, so we can learn new things. And maybe you've heard the classic adage of plasticity: neurons that fire together, wire together. Right? So we need to practice social connective behaviors instead of compulsive behaviors, when we're lonely, when we are cued to remember our drug. We need neuronally firing repeated experiences in order for the striatum to undergo that necessary neuroplasticity that allows it to take that "go find heroin" autopilot offline. And what the convergence of social neuroscience, addiction and compulsive-spectrum disorders in the striatum suggests is that it's not simply enough to teach the striatum healthier responses to compulsive urges. We need social impulses to replace drug-cued compulsive behaviors, because we need to rebalance, neurochemically, our social reward system. And unless that happens, we're going to be left in a state of craving. No matter what besides our drug we repeatedly practice doing. I believe that the solution to the opioid crisis is to explore how social and psychospiritual interventions can act as neurotechnologies in circuits that process social and drug-induced rewards. One possibility is to create and study scalable tools for people to connect with one another over a mutual interest in recovery through psychospiritual practices. And as such, psychospiritual practice could involve anything from people getting together as megafans of touring jam bands, or parkour jams, featuring shared experiences of vulnerability and personal growth, or more conventional things, like recovery yoga meetups, or meetings centered around more traditional conceptions of spiritual experiences. But whatever it is, it needs to activate all of the neurotransmitter systems in the striatum that are involved in processing social connection. Social media can't go deep enough for this. Social media doesn't so much encourage us to share, as it does to compare. It's the difference between having superficial small talk with someone and authentic, deeply connected conversation with eye contact. And stigma also keeps us separate. There's a lot of evidence that it keeps us sick. And stigma often makes it safer for addicts to connect with other addicts. But recovery groups centered around reestablishing social connections could certainly be inclusive of people who are seeking recovery for a range of mental health problems. My point is, when we connect around what's broken, we connect as human beings. We heal ourselves from the compulsive self-destruction that was our response to the pain of disconnection. When we think of neuropsychiatric illnesses as a spectrum of phenomenon that are part of what make us human, then we remove the otherness of people who struggle with self-destruction. We remove the stigma between doctors and patients and caregivers. We put the question of what it means to be normal versus sick back on the spectrum of the human condition. And it is on that spectrum where we can all connect and seek healing together, for all of our struggles with humanness. Thank you for letting me share. (Applause) |
How rollercoasters affect your body | null | TED-Ed | In the summer of 1895, crowds flooded the Coney Island boardwalk to see the latest marvel of roller coaster technology: the Flip Flap Railway. This was America’s first-ever looping coaster – but its thrilling flip came at a price. The ride caused numerous cases of severe whiplash, neck injury and even ejections, all due to its signature loop. Today, coasters can pull off far more exciting tricks, without resorting to the “thrill” of a hospital visit. But what exactly are roller coasters doing to your body, and how have they managed to get scarier and safer at the same time? At the center of every roller coaster design is gravity. Unlike cars or transit trains, most coasters are propelled around their tracks almost entirely by gravitational energy. After the coaster crests the initial lift hill, it begins an expertly engineered cycle – building potential energy on ascents and expending kinetic energy on descents. This rhythm repeats throughout the ride, acting out the coaster engineer’s choreographed dance of gravitational energy. But there’s a key variable in this cycle that wasn’t always so carefully considered: you. In the days of the Flip-Flap, ride designers were most concerned with coasters getting stuck somewhere along the track. This led early builders to overcompensate, hurling trains down hills and pulling on the brakes when they reached the station. But as gravity affects the cars, it also affects the passengers. And under the intense conditions of a coaster, gravity’s effects are multiplied. There’s a common unit used by jet pilots, astronauts, and coaster designers called “g force”. One G force is the familiar tug of gravity you feel when standing on Earth – this is the force of Earth’s gravitational pull on our bodies. But as riders accelerate and decelerate, they experience more or less gravitational force. Modern ride designers know that the body can handle up to roughly 5 Gs, but the Flip-Flap and its contemporaries routinely reached up to 12 Gs. At those levels of gravitational pressure, blood is sent flying from your brain to your feet, leading to light-headedness or blackouts as the brain struggles to stay conscious. And oxygen deprivation in the retinal cells impairs their ability to process light, causing greyed out vision or temporary blindness. If the riders are upside down, blood can flood the skull, causing a bout of crimson vision called a “redout”. Conversely, negative G’s create weightlessness. Within the body, short-term weightlessness is mostly harmless. It can contribute to a rider’s motion sickness by suspending the fluid in their inner ears which coordinates balance. But the bigger potential danger – and thrill – comes from what ride designers call airtime. This is when riders typically experience seat separation, and, without the proper precautions, ejection. The numerous belts and harnesses of modern coasters have largely solved this issue, but the passenger’s ever-changing position can make it difficult to determine what needs to be strapped down. Fortunately, modern ride designers are well aware of what your body, and the coaster, can handle. Coaster engineers play these competing forces against each other, to relieve periods of intense pressure with periods of no pressure at all. And since a quick transition from positive to negative G-force can result in whiplash, headaches, and back and neck pain, they avoid the extreme changes in speed and direction so common in thrill rides of old. Modern rides are also much sturdier, closely considering the amount of gravity they need to withstand. At 5 G’s, your body feels 5 times heavier; so if you weigh 100lbs, you’d exert the weight of 500 lbs on the coaster. Engineers have to account for the multiplied weight of every passenger when designing a coaster’s supports. Still, these rides aren’t for everyone. The floods of adrenaline, light-headedness, and motion sickness aren’t going anywhere soon. But today’s redundant restraints, 3D modeling and simulation software have made roller coasters safer and more thrilling than ever. Our precise knowledge about the limits of the human body have helped us build coasters that are faster, taller, and loopier – and all without going off the rails. |
What everyday citizens can do to claim power on the internet | {0: 'Fadi Chehadé is focused on finding ways for society to benefit from technology and strengthening international cooperation in the digital space.', 1: 'Bryn Freedman helps those who want to give the "talk of their lives" in a clear, passionate and authentic way.'} | TED Salon Verizon | Bryn Freedman: So you said that in the 20th century, global power was in the hands of government. At the beginning of this digital century, it really moved to corporations and that in the future, it would move to individuals. And I've interviewed a lot of people, and they say you're wrong, and they are betting on the companies. So why are you right, and why are individuals going to win out? Fadi Chehadé: Because companies cater to individuals, and we as the citizenry need to start understanding that we have a big role in shaping how the world will be governed, moving forward. Yes, indeed, the tug of war right now is between governments, who lost much of their power to companies because the internet is not built around the nation-state system around which governments have power. The internet is transnational. It's not international, and it's not national, and therefore the companies became very powerful. They shape our economy. They shape our society. Governments don't know what to do. Right now, they're reacting. And I fear that if we do not, as the citizenry — which are, in my opinion, the most important leg of that stool — don't take our role, then you are right. The detractors, or the people telling you that businesses will prevail, are right. It will happen. BF: So are you saying that individuals will force businesses or business will be forced to be responsive, or is there a fear that they won't be? FC: I think they will be. Look at two weeks ago, a small company called Skip winning over Uber and Lyft and everyone to actually get the license for the San Francisco scooter business. And if you read why did Skip win, because Skip listened to the people of San Francisco, who were tired of scooters being thrown everywhere, and actually went to the city and said, "We will deploy the service, but we will respond to the people's requirements that we organize ourselves around a set of rules." They self-governed their behavior, and they won the contract over some very powerful companies. BF: So speaking of guidelines and self-governance, you've spent an entire lifetime creating guidelines and norms for the internet. Do you think those days are over? Who is going to guide, who is going to control, and who is going to create those norms? FC: The rules that govern the technology layers of the internet are now well put in place, and I was very busy for a few years setting those rules around the part of the internet that makes the internet one network. The domain-name system, the IP numbers, all of that is in place. However, as we get now into the upper layers of the internet, the issues that affect me and you every day — privacy, security, etc. — the system to create norms for those unfortunately is not in place. So we do have an issue. We have a system of cooperation and governance that really needs to be created right now so that companies, governments and the citizenry can agree how this new digital world is going to advance. BF: So what gives a digital company any incentive? Let's say — Facebook comes to mind — they would say they have their users' best interests at heart, but I think a lot of people would disagree with that. FC: It's been very difficult to watch how tech companies have reacted to the citizenry's response to their technologies. And some of them, two or three years ago, basically dismissed it. The word that I heard in many board rooms is, "We're just a technology platform. It's not my issue if my technology platform causes families to go kill their girls in Pakistan. It's not my issue. It's their problem. I just have a technology platform." Now, I think we are now entering a stage where companies are starting to realize this is no longer sustainable, and they're starting to see the pushback that's coming from people, users, citizens, but also governments that are starting to say, "This cannot be." So I think there is a maturity that is starting to set, especially in that Silicon Valley area, where people are beginning to say, "We have a role." So when I speak to these leaders, I say, "Look, you could be the CEO, a very successful CEO of a company, but you could also be a steward." And that's the key word. "You could be a steward of the power you have to shape the lives and the economies of billions of people. Which one do you want to be?" And the answer is, it's not one or the other. This is what we are missing right now. So when an adult like Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, said a few months ago, "We need a new set of Geneva Conventions to manage the security of the digital space," many of the senior leaders in Silicon Valley actually spoke against his words. "What do you mean, Geneva Convention? We don't need any Geneva Conventions. We self-regulate." But that mood is changing, and I'm starting to see many leaders say, "Help us out." But here lies the conundrum. Who is going to help those leaders do the right thing? BF: So who is going to help them? Because I'd love to interview you for an hour, but give me your biggest fear and your best hope for how this is going to work out. FC: My biggest hope is that we will become each stewards of this new digital world. That's my biggest hope, because I do think, often, we want to put the blame on others. "Oh, it's these CEOs. They're behaving this way." "These governments are not doing enough." But how about us? How is each of us actually taking the responsibility to be a steward of the digital space we live in? And one of the things I've been pushing on university presidents is we need every engineering and science and computer science student who is about to write the next line of code or design the next IoT device to actually have in them a sense of responsibility and stewardship towards what they're building. So I suggested we create a new oath, like the Hippocratic Oath, so that every student entering an engineering program takes a technocratic oath or a wisdom oath or some oath of commitment to the rest of us. That's my best hope, that we all rise. Because governments and businesses will fight over this power game, but where are we? And unless we play into that power table, I think we'll end up in a bad place. My biggest fear? My biggest fear, to be very tactical today, what is keeping me up at night is the current war between the West, the liberal world, and China, in the area of artificial intelligence. There is a real war going on, and for those of us who have lived through the nuclear nonproliferation age and saw how people agreed to take some very dangerous things off the table, well, the Carnegie Endowment just finished a study. They talked to every country that made nuclear weapons and asked them, "Which digital 'weapon' would you take off the table against somebody else's schools or hospitals?" And the answer — from every nuclear power — to this question was, nothing. That's what I'm worried about ... The weaponization of the digital space, and the race to get there. BF: Well, it sounds like you've got a lot of work to do, and so do the rest of us. Fadi, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. FC: Thank you. (Applause) |
Is war between China and the US inevitable? | {0: 'Graham Allison is a leading analyst of US national security and defense policy with a special interest in China, nuclear weapons and decision-making.'} | We the Future | So, let me thank you for the opportunity to talk about the biggest international story of your professional lifetime, which is also the most important international challenge the world will face for as far as the eye can see. The story, of course, is the rise of China. Never before have so many people risen so far so fast, on so many different dimensions. The challenge is the impact of China's rise — the discombobulation this will cause the Unites States and the international order, of which the US has been the principal architect and guardian. The past 100 years have been what historians now call an "American Century." Americans have become accustomed to their place at the top of every pecking order. So the very idea of another country that could be as big and strong as the US — or bigger — strikes many Americans as an assault on who they are. For perspective on what we're now seeing in this rivalry, it's useful to locate it on the larger map of history. The past 500 years have seen 16 cases in which a rising power threatened to displace a ruling power. Twelve of those ended in war. So just in November, we'll all pause to mark the 100th anniversary of the final day of a war that became so encompassing, that it required historians to create an entirely new category: world war. So, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, the guns of World War I fell silent, but 20 million individuals lay dead. I know that this is a sophisticated audience, so you know about the rise of China. I'm going to focus, therefore, on the impact of China's rise, on the US, on the international order and on the prospects for war and peace. But having taught at Harvard over many years, I've learned that from time to time, it's useful to take a short pause, just to make sure we're all on the same page. The way I do this is, I call a time-out, I give students a pop quiz — ungraded, of course. So, let's try this. Time-out, pop quiz. Question: forty years ago, 1978, China sets out on its march to the market. At that point, what percentage of China's one billion citizens were struggling to survive on less than two dollars a day? Take a guess — 25 percent? Fifty? Seventy-five? Ninety. What do you think? Ninety. Nine out of every 10 on less than two dollars a day. Twenty eighteen, 40 years later. What about the numbers? What's your bet? Take a look. Fewer than one in 100 today. And China's president has promised that within the next three years, those last tens of millions will have been raised up above that threshold. So it's a miracle, actually, in our lifetime. Hard to believe. But brute facts are even harder to ignore. A nation that didn't even appear on any of the international league tables 25 years ago has soared, to rival — and in some areas, surpass — the United States. Thus, the challenge that will shape our world: a seemingly unstoppable rising China accelerating towards an apparently immovable ruling US, on course for what could be the grandest collision in history. To help us get our minds around this challenge, I'm going to introduce you to a great thinker, I'm going to present a big idea, and I'm going to pose a most consequential question. The great thinker is Thucydides. Now, I know his name is a mouthful, and some people have trouble pronouncing it. So, let's do it, one, two, three, together: Thucydides. One more time: Thucydides. So who was Thucydides? He was the father and founder of history. He wrote the first-ever history book. It's titled "The History of the Peloponnesian War," about the war in Greece, 2500 years ago. So if nothing else today, you can tweet your friends, "I met a great thinker. And I can even pronounce his name: Thucydides." So, about this war that destroyed classical Greece, Thucydides wrote famously: "It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made the war inevitable." So the rise of one and the reaction of the other create a toxic cocktail of pride, arrogance, paranoia, that drug them both to war. Which brings me to the big idea: Thucydides's Trap. "Thucydides's Trap" is a term I coined several years ago, to make vivid Thucydides's insight. Thucydides's Trap is the dangerous dynamic that occurs when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, like Athens — or Germany 100 years ago, or China today — and their impact on Sparta, or Great Britain 100 years ago, or the US today. As Henry Kissinger has said, once you get this idea, this concept of Thucydides's Trap in your head, it will provide a lens for helping you look through the news and noise of the day to understand what's actually going on. So, to the most consequential question about our world today: Are we going to follow in the footsteps of history? Or can we, through a combination of imagination and common sense and courage find a way to manage this rivalry without a war nobody wants, and everybody knows would be catastrophic? Give me five minutes to unpack this, and later this afternoon, when the next news story pops up for you about China doing this, or the US reacting like that, you will be able to have a better understanding of what's going on and even to explain it to your friends. So as we saw with this flipping the pyramid of poverty, China has actually soared. It's meteoric. Former Czech president, Vaclav Havel, I think, put it best. He said, "All this has happened so fast, we haven't yet had time to be astonished." (Laughter) To remind myself how astonished I should be, I occasionally look out the window in my office in Cambridge at this bridge, which goes across the Charles River, between the Kennedy School and Harvard Business School. In 2012, the State of Massachusetts said they were going to renovate this bridge, and it would take two years. In 2014, they said it wasn't finished. In 2015, they said it would take one more year. In 2016, they said it's not finished, we're not going to tell you when it's going to be finished. Finally, last year, it was finished — three times over budget. Now, compare this to a similar bridge that I drove across last month in Beijing. It's called the Sanyuan Bridge. In 2015, the Chinese decided they wanted to renovate that bridge. It actually has twice as many lanes of traffic. How long did it take for them to complete the project? Twenty fifteen, what do you bet? Take a guess — OK, three — Take a look. (Laughter) The answer is 43 hours. (Audience: Wow!) (Laughter) Graham Allison: Now, of course, that couldn't happen in New York. (Laughter) Behind this speed in execution is a purpose-driven leader and a government that works. The most ambitious and most competent leader on the international stage today is Chinese President Xi Jinping. And he's made no secret about what he wants. As he said when he became president six years ago, his goal is to make China great again — (Laughter) a banner he raised long before Donald Trump picked up a version of this. To that end, Xi Jinping has announced specific targets for specific dates: 2025, 2035, 2049. By 2025, China means to be the dominant power in the major market in 10 leading technologies, including driverless cars, robots, artificial intelligence, quantum computing. By 2035, China means to be the innovation leader across all the advanced technologies. And by 2049, which is the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic, China means to be unambiguously number one, including, [says] Xi Jinping, an army that he calls "Fight and Win." So these are audacious goals, but as you can see, China is already well on its way to these objectives. And we should remember how fast our world is changing. Thirty years ago, the World Wide Web had not yet even been invented. Who will feel the impact of this rise of China most directly? Obviously, the current number one. As China gets bigger and stronger and richer, technologically more advanced, it will inevitably bump up against American positions and prerogatives. Now, for red-blooded Americans — and especially for red-necked Americans like me; I'm from North Carolina — there's something wrong with this picture. The USA means number one, that's who we are. But again, to repeat: brute facts are hard to ignore. Four years ago, Senator John McCain asked me to testify about this to his Senate Armed Services Committee. And I made for them a chart that you can see, that said, compare the US and China to kids on opposite ends of a seesaw on a playground, each represented by the size of their economy. As late as 2004, China was just half our size. By 2014, its GDP was equal to ours. And on the current trajectory, by 2024, it will be half again larger. The consequences of this tectonic change will be felt everywhere. For example, in the current trade conflict, China is already the number one trading partner of all the major Asian countries. Which brings us back to our Greek historian. Harvard's "Thucydides's Trap Case File" has reviewed the last 500 years of history and found 16 cases in which a rising power threatened to displace a ruling power. Twelve of these ended in war. And the tragedy of this is that in very few of these did either of the protagonists want a war; few of these wars were initiated by either the rising power or the ruling power. So how does this work? What happens is, a third party's provocation forces one or the other to react, and that sets in motion a spiral, which drags the two somewhere they don't want to go. If that seems crazy, it is. But it's life. Remember World War I. The provocation in that case was the assassination of a second-level figure, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which then led the Austro-Hungarian emperor to issue an ultimatum to Serbia, they dragged in the various allies, within two months, all of Europe was at war. So imagine if Thucydides were watching planet Earth today. What would he say? Could he find a more appropriate leading man for the ruling power than Donald J Trump? (Laughter) Or a more apt lead for the rising power than Xi Jinping? And he would scratch his head and certainly say he couldn't think of more colorful provocateur than North Korea's Kim Jong-un. Each seems determined to play his assigned part and is right on script. So finally, we conclude again with the most consequential question, the question that will have the gravest consequences for the rest of our lives: Are Americans and Chinese going to let the forces of history drive us to a war that would be catastrophic for both? Or can we summon the imagination and courage to find a way to survive together, to share the leadership in the 21st century, or, as Xi Jinping [said], to create a new form of great power relations? That's the issue I've been pursuing passionately for the last two years. I've had the opportunity to talk and, indeed, to listen to leaders of all the relevant governments — Beijing, Washington, Seoul, Tokyo — and to thought leaders across the spectrum of both the arts and business. I wish I had more to report. The good news is that leaders are increasingly aware of this Thucydidean dynamic and the dangers that it poses. The bad news is that nobody has a feasible plan for escaping history as usual. So it's clear to me that we need some ideas outside the box of conventional statecraft — indeed, from another page or another space — which is what brings me to TED today and which brings me to a request. This audience includes many of the most creative minds on the planet, who get up in the morning and think not only about how to manage the world we have, but how to create worlds that should be. So I'm hopeful that as this sinks in and as you reflect on it, some of you are going to have some bold ideas, actually some wild ideas, that when we find, will make a difference in this space. And just to remind you if you do, this won't be the first time. Let me remind you of what happened right after World War II. A remarkable group of Americans and Europeans and others, not just from government, but from the world of culture and business, engaged in a collective surge of imagination. And what they imagined and what they created was a new international order, the order that's allowed you and me to live our lives, all of our lives, without great power war and with more prosperity than was ever seen before on the planet. So, a remarkable story. Interestingly, every pillar of this project that produced these results, when first proposed, was rejected by the foreign policy establishment as naive or unrealistic. My favorite is the Marshall Plan. After World War II, Americans felt exhausted. They had demobilized 10 million troops, they were focused on an urgent domestic agenda. But as people began to appreciate how devastated Europe was and how aggressive Soviet communism was, Americans eventually decided to tax themselves a percent and a half of GDP every year for four years and send that money to Europe to help reconstruct these countries, including Germany and Italy, whose troops had just been killing Americans. Amazing. This also created the United Nations. Amazing. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The World Bank. NATO. All of these elements of an order for peace and prosperity. So, in a word, what we need to do is do it again. And I think now we need a surge of imagination, creativity, informed by history, for, as the philosopher Santayana reminded us, in the end, only those who refuse to study history are condemned to repeat it. Thank you. (Applause) |
The fascinating history of cemeteries | null | TED-Ed | Spindly trees, rusted gates, crumbling stone, a solitary mourner— these things come to mind when we think of cemeteries. But not so long ago, many burial grounds were lively places, with blooming gardens and crowds of people strolling among the headstones. How did our cemeteries become what they are today? Some have been around for centuries, like the world’s largest, Wadi al-Salaam, where more than five million people are buried. But most of the places we’d recognize as cemeteries are much younger. In fact, for much of human history, we didn’t bury our dead at all. Our ancient ancestors had many other ways of parting with the dead loved ones. Some were left in caves, others in trees or on mountaintops. Still others were sunk in lakes, put out to sea, ritually cannibalized, or cremated. All of these practices, though some may seem strange today, were ways of venerating the dead. By contrast, the first known burials about 120,000 years ago were likely reserved for transgressors, excluding them from the usual rites intended to honor the dead. But the first burials revealed some advantages over other practices: they protected bodies from scavengers and the elements, while shielding loved ones from the sight of decay. These benefits may have shifted ancient people’s thinking toward graves designed to honor the dead, and burial became more common. Sometimes, these graves contained practical or ritual objects, suggesting belief in an afterlife where the dead might need such tools. Communal burials first appeared in North Africa and West Asia around 10 to 15,000 years ago, around the same time as the first permanent settlements in these areas. These burial grounds created permanent places to commemorate the dead. The nomadic Scythians littered the steppes with grave mounds known as kurgans. The Etruscans built expansive necropoles, their grid-patterned streets lined with tombs. In Rome, subterranean catacombs housed both cremation urns and intact remains. The word cemetery, or “sleeping chamber,” was first used by ancient Greeks, who built tombs in graveyards at the edges of their cities. In medieval European cities, Christian churchyards provided rare, open spaces that accommodated the dead, but also hosted markets, fairs, and other events. Farmers even grazed cattle in them, believing graveyard grass made for sweeter milk. As cities grew during the industrial revolution, large suburban cemeteries replaced smaller urban churchyards. Cemeteries like the 110-acre Père-Lachaise in Paris or the 72-acre Mt. Auburn in Cambridge, Massachusetts were lushly landscaped gardens filled with sculpted stones and ornate tombs. Once a luxury reserved for the rich and powerful, individually marked graves became available to the middle and working classes. People visited cemeteries for funerals, but also for anniversaries, holidays, or simply an afternoon outdoors. By the late 19th century, as more public parks and botanical gardens appeared, cemeteries began to lose visitors. Today, many old cemeteries are lonely places. Some are luring visitors back with tours, concerts, and other attractions. But even as we revive old cemeteries, we’re rethinking the future of burial. Cities like London, New York, and Hong Kong are running out of burial space. Even in places where space isn’t so tight, cemeteries permanently occupy land that can’t be otherwise cultivated or developed. Traditional burial consumes materials like metal, stone, and concrete, and can pollute soil and groundwater with toxic chemicals. With increasing awareness of the environmental costs, people are seeking alternatives. Many are turning to cremation and related practices. Along with these more conventional practices, people can now have their remains shot into space, used to fertilize a tree, or made into jewelry, fireworks, and even tattoo ink. In the future, options like these may replace burial completely. Cemeteries may be our most familiar monuments to the departed, but they’re just one step in our ever-evolving process of remembering and honoring the dead. |
How tech companies deceive you into giving up your data and privacy | {0: 'Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad leads the development of better, more ethical digital policies and standards at the Norwegian Consumer Council.'} | TED Salon Samsung | Do you remember when you were a child, you probably had a favorite toy that was a constant companion, like Christopher Robin had Winnie the Pooh, and your imagination fueled endless adventures? What could be more innocent than that? Well, let me introduce you to my friend Cayla. Cayla was voted toy of the year in countries around the world. She connects to the internet and uses speech recognition technology to answer your child's questions, respond just like a friend. But the power doesn't lie with your child's imagination. It actually lies with the company harvesting masses of personal information while your family is innocently chatting away in the safety of their home, a dangerously false sense of security. This case sounded alarm bells for me, as it is my job to protect consumers' rights in my country. And with billions of devices such as cars, energy meters and even vacuum cleaners expected to come online by 2020, we thought this was a case worth investigating further. Because what was Cayla doing with all the interesting things she was learning? Did she have another friend she was loyal to and shared her information with? Yes, you guessed right. She did. In order to play with Cayla, you need to download an app to access all her features. Parents must consent to the terms being changed without notice. The recordings of the child, her friends and family, can be used for targeted advertising. And all this information can be shared with unnamed third parties. Enough? Not quite. Anyone with a smartphone can connect to Cayla within a certain distance. When we confronted the company that made and programmed Cayla, they issued a series of statements that one had to be an IT expert in order to breach the security. Shall we fact-check that statement and live hack Cayla together? Here she is. Cayla is equipped with a Bluetooth device which can transmit up to 60 feet, a bit less if there's a wall between. That means I, or any stranger, can connect to the doll while being outside the room where Cayla and her friends are. And to illustrate this, I'm going to turn Cayla on now. Let's see, one, two, three. There. She's on. And I asked a colleague to stand outside with his smartphone, and he's connected, and to make this a bit creepier ... (Laughter) let's see what kids could hear Cayla say in the safety of their room. Man: Hi. My name is Cayla. What is yours? Finn Myrstad: Uh, Finn. Man: Is your mom close by? FM: Uh, no, she's in the store. Man: Ah. Do you want to come out and play with me? FM: That's a great idea. Man: Ah, great. FM: I'm going to turn Cayla off now. (Laughter) We needed no password or to circumvent any other type of security to do this. We published a report in 20 countries around the world, exposing this significant security flaw and many other problematic issues. So what happened? Cayla was banned in Germany, taken off the shelves by Amazon and Wal-Mart, and she's now peacefully resting at the German Spy Museum in Berlin. (Laughter) However, Cayla was also for sale in stores around the world for more than a year after we published our report. What we uncovered is that there are few rules to protect us and the ones we have are not being properly enforced. We need to get the security and privacy of these devices right before they enter the market, because what is the point of locking a house with a key if anyone can enter it through a connected device? You may well think, "This will not happen to me. I will just stay away from these flawed devices." But that won't keep you safe, because simply by connecting to the internet, you are put in an impossible take-it-or-leave-it position. Let me show you. Like most of you, I have dozens of apps on my phone, and used properly, they can make our lives easier, more convenient and maybe even healthier. But have we been lulled into a false sense of security? It starts simply by ticking a box. Yes, we say, I've read the terms. But have you really read the terms? Are you sure they didn't look too long and your phone was running out of battery, and the last time you tried they were impossible to understand, and you needed to use the service now? And now, the power imbalance is established, because we have agreed to our personal information being gathered and used on a scale we could never imagine. This is why my colleagues and I decided to take a deeper look at this. We set out to read the terms of popular apps on an average phone. And to show the world how unrealistic it is to expect consumers to actually read the terms, we printed them, more than 900 pages, and sat down in our office and read them out loud ourselves, streaming the experiment live on our websites. As you can see, it took quite a long time. It took us 31 hours, 49 minutes and 11 seconds to read the terms on an average phone. That is longer than a movie marathon of the "Harry Potter" movies and the "Godfather" movies combined. (Laughter) And reading is one thing. Understanding is another story. That would have taken us much, much longer. And this is a real problem, because companies have argued for 20 to 30 years against regulating the internet better, because users have consented to the terms and conditions. As we've shown with this experiment, achieving informed consent is close to impossible. Do you think it's fair to put the burden of responsibility on the consumer? I don't. I think we should demand less take-it-or-leave-it and more understandable terms before we agree to them. (Applause) Thank you. Now, I would like to tell you a story about love. Some of the world's most popular apps are dating apps, an industry now worth more than, or close to, three billion dollars a year. And of course, we're OK sharing our intimate details with our other half. But who else is snooping, saving and sharing our information while we are baring our souls? My team and I decided to investigate this. And in order to understand the issue from all angles and to truly do a thorough job, I realized I had to download one of the world's most popular dating apps myself. So I went home to my wife ... (Laughter) who I had just married. "Is it OK if I establish a profile on a very popular dating app for purely scientific purposes?" (Laughter) This is what we found. Hidden behind the main menu was a preticked box that gave the dating company access to all my personal pictures on Facebook, in my case more than 2,000 of them, and some were quite personal. And to make matters worse, when we read the terms and conditions, we discovered the following, and I'm going to need to take out my reading glasses for this one. And I'm going to read it for you, because this is complicated. All right. "By posting content" — and content refers to your pictures, chat and other interactions in the dating service — "as a part of the service, you automatically grant to the company, its affiliates, licensees and successors an irrevocable" — which means you can't change your mind — "perpetual" — which means forever — "nonexclusive, transferrable, sublicensable, fully paid-up, worldwide right and license to use, copy, store, perform, display, reproduce, record, play, adapt, modify and distribute the content, prepare derivative works of the content, or incorporate the content into other works and grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing in any media now known or hereafter created." That basically means that all your dating history and everything related to it can be used for any purpose for all time. Just imagine your children seeing your sassy dating photos in a birth control ad 20 years from now. But seriously, though — (Laughter) what might these commercial practices mean to you? For example, financial loss: based on your web browsing history, algorithms might decide whether you will get a mortgage or not. Subconscious manipulation: companies can analyze your emotions based on your photos and chats, targeting you with ads when you are at your most vulnerable. Discrimination: a fitness app can sell your data to a health insurance company, preventing you from getting coverage in the future. All of this is happening in the world today. But of course, not all uses of data are malign. Some are just flawed or need more work, and some are truly great. And there is some good news as well. The dating companies changed their policies globally after we filed a legal complaint. But organizations such as mine that fight for consumers' rights can't be everywhere. Nor can consumers fix this on their own, because if we know that something innocent we said will come back to haunt us, we will stop speaking. If we know that we are being watched and monitored, we will change our behavior. And if we can't control who has our data and how it is being used, we have lost the control of our lives. The stories I have told you today are not random examples. They are everywhere, and they are a sign that things need to change. And how can we achieve that change? Well, companies need to realize that by prioritizing privacy and security, they can build trust and loyalty to their users. Governments must create a safer internet by ensuring enforcement and up-to-date rules. And us, the citizens? We can use our voice to remind the world that technology can only truly benefit society if it respects basic rights. Thank you so much. (Applause) |
How an algorithm can fight election bias so every vote counts | {0: 'Brian Olson is currently a software engineer at PatientsLikeMe. Since learning to program at age 9, he has worked on software of all kinds at many levels from embedded microcontrollers to server farms. He’s worked at startups, major companies, and independently.\n\nBrian has worked on redistricting software for over a decade, resulting in an efficient system that can solve for compact, impartial, non-gerrymandered districts on a home computer. This work has been cited in the Washington Post and scholarly journals. The software is Free and Open Source allowing anyone to verify its function or tinker with it to make it better.\n\nBrian earned a B.S. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.'} | TEDxCambridge | If you've ever had the suspicion that your vote doesn't really count and the deck might be stacked against you, you might be right. In many places in this country, we don't have a functioning democracy. People might go to the polls, but they might not have a real choice when they get there. In 2010, the people of Florida were trying to do something about this. They passed a ballot initiative with almost two-thirds of the vote: a new state constitutional amendment requiring that districts be fair and not biased based on race or party. It didn't work. The state legislature sued to try and get out of these new requirements, and in subsequent court battles, the maps they made were found to be racially and partisan biased. Florida is just one example of our national problem with gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is when you take a few people from one place and a few people from another place and draw a line around them on the map to create a district with some specific demographic goal. Here's an example world with 25 people: 60% green people and 40% purple people. If you split that up into five simple districts of five people each, you can preserve that ratio in the outcome and have three districts won by green people and two districts won by purple people. But if you pack enough green people into just two districts, then you can flip that outcome and wind up with three districts where there's a purple majority. Or you can crack the purple people and split them up just right so that they don't have a majority anywhere. These strategies of packing and cracking are being used in dozens of districts throughout the country. That bright blue district in northeast Florida was found to be racially biased because it packs too many black people into one district, diminishing their influence elsewhere. That was Florida in 2012, but gerrymandering has been going on for a long time, since at least 1812, when Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry signed into law a map that was drawn into a political cartoon as a monstrous, dragonesque salamander, and thus was born the gerrymander. But it's gotten a lot worse lately. The joke is that instead of voters picking their politicians, politicians are picking their voters. Why is this a problem? When you have too many seats that are gerrymandered to be safe for one party or another, the political process breaks down in some ways. I have one personal example. In 2006, I was a webmaster for a congressional campaign in California. We were in a district that was gerrymandered, say, for the other party. And the incumbent in that party didn't feel the need to take part in the campaign and wouldn't agree to show up for any debates. He just felt he didn't have to. And our party wouldn't send any help; they figured we were a lost cause. Come election day, the incumbent got the expected 60/40 result. In other places, it's even worse. In 2014, there were 32 congressional districts that went unopposed - no one else on the ballot. That's over 20 million Americans with no effective choice over who their representative in Congress is. In some places, the incumbent faces a more extreme challenger from within their own party. And whether you have an extremist upstart or a long incumbent safe seat, that politician might not feel the need to reach out across the aisle and compromise on anything because they're safe, and the legislative process grinds to a halt, and voters get more cynical. What if we could have impartial districts? What if we defined what a good district was mathematically and didn't let anyone else's agenda interfere? Florida's map might look something like this. About 10 years ago, computers got powerful enough to solve for this kind of map that follows the legal requirements of having equal population per district, contiguous districts that are each all one piece, and in this case, solving for compact districts that try to tightly represent one location or region. But I didn't know it would work when I started. Previous work in this area had been on tiny toy maps like the one I showed you earlier, and they didn't think it would scale up to a full state worth of data. But I figured I was a pretty good engineer and I'd give it a shot, and I think it worked out pretty well. So, when the 2010 census data starting coming out, I set my home computer to work, and over the next six months, it came up with 137 maps for state legislature and congressional districts all over the country. And I think the results are pretty good. Let's see another one. First, the old way. North Carolina has also been in almost constant legal battles since their maps came out a little over four years ago. Most recently, they were thrown out for racial bias just as primary season was spinning up. New maps were hastily drawn up, and the primary had to be pushed back from March until June. Voters and candidates were left in disarray. That red district in the northeast reaches into and around three other districts. That pink district in the middle pinches down as narrow as possible while reaching out to grab other areas. This is nuts. These are the visual telltales of districts that have been distorted toward some political end. The opposite of a sprawling, non-local gerrymandered map is a compact map, like this. I hope you can see the difference. You can also measure it. I measure compactness as the average distance per person to the center of their district. In the old North Carolina map, that distance was 38 miles; in my map, it's 25 miles. You can measure how sprawling and non-local a gerrymandered map is and how compact a compact map is. So, it's technically possible. How's the political situation? You might expect that there would be some resistance to this kind of change, and there is, but there is also some demand for it. The republican governor of Maryland has recently called out for national help in overturning his state's democratic gerrymander. That is one of the more contorted messes of tentacled horrors of districts I have seen in any map. (Laughter) I don't know if this is the best map, but I submit that it is a legally viable map, without some of the obvious runaround and drawbacks of the old map. There are a lot of states with divided government, with the two parties fighting over redistricting. But this shouldn't be something to fight about. Redistricting should be a bureaucratic, boring process, where you get in new census data, you turn the crank, and you get out new maps for the next 10 years. In the last few years, California, Arizona, Ohio, and Florida have passed reform of one kind or another. That shows that it's possible. Those reforms might not be perfect, and they might still need some tinkering, but we can do it. This is technically possible. Open-source software, free and verifiable, running on home computers that anyone can use can solve for these kinds of impartial maps, and the results are pretty good. This is politically possible. People want reform - even some elected officials want it. And the legal mechanisms are achievable. If we could have a change now, we could have a big effect on the future of our political process. If reform comes to enough places, enough states, we might even be able to get a national standard. And a national standard might let us really hold up our core value of equal protection under the law for all. (Applause) |
How to let go of being a "good" person -- and become a better person | {0: 'Dolly Chugh is a social scientist of who studies the psychology of good people.'} | TED@BCG Toronto | So a friend of mine was riding in a taxi to the airport the other day, and on the way, she was chatting with the taxi driver, and he said to her, with total sincerity, "I can tell you are a really good person." And when she told me this story later, she said she couldn't believe how good it made her feel, that it meant a lot to her. Now that may seem like a strong reaction from my friend to the words of a total stranger, but she's not alone. I'm a social scientist. I study the psychology of good people, and research in my field says many of us care deeply about feeling like a good person and being seen as a good person. Now, your definition of "good person" and your definition of "good person" and maybe the taxi driver's definition of "good person" — we may not all have the same definition, but within whatever our definition is, that moral identity is important to many of us. Now, if somebody challenges it, like they question us for a joke we tell, or maybe we say our workforce is homogenous, or a slippery business expense, we go into red-zone defensiveness a lot of the time. I mean, sometimes we call out all the ways in which we help people from marginalized groups, or we donate to charity, or the hours we volunteer to nonprofits. We work to protect that good person identity. It's important to many of us. But what if I told you this? What if I told you that our attachment to being good people is getting in the way of us being better people? What if I told you that our definition of "good person" is so narrow, it's scientifically impossible to meet? And what if I told you the path to being better people just begins with letting go of being a good person? Now, let me tell you a little bit about the research about how the human mind works to explain. The brain relies on shortcuts to do a lot of its work. That means a lot of the time, your mental processes are taking place outside of your awareness, like in low-battery, low-power mode in the back of your mind. That's, in fact, the premise of bounded rationality. Bounded rationality is the Nobel Prize-winning idea that the human mind has limited storage resources, limited processing power, and as a result, it relies on shortcuts to do a lot of its work. So for example, some scientists estimate that in any given moment ... Better, better click, right? There we go. (Laughter) At any given moment, 11 million pieces of information are coming into your mind. Eleven million. And only 40 of them are being processed consciously. So 11 million, 40. I mean, has this ever happened to you? Have you ever had a really busy day at work, and you drive home, and when you get in the door, you realize you don't even remember the drive home, like whether you had green lights or red lights. You don't even remember. You were on autopilot. Or have you ever opened the fridge, looked for the butter, swore there is no butter, and then realized the butter was right in front of you the whole time? These are the kinds of "whoops" moments that make us giggle, and this is what happens in a brain that can handle 11 million pieces of information coming in with only 40 being processed consciously. That's the bounded part of bounded rationality. This work on bounded rationality is what's inspired work I've done with my collaborators Max Bazerman and Mahzarin Banaji, on what we call bounded ethicality. So it's the same premise as bounded rationality, that we have a human mind that is bounded in some sort of way and relying on shortcuts, and that those shortcuts can sometimes lead us astray. With bounded rationality, perhaps it affects the cereal we buy in the grocery store, or the product we launch in the boardroom. With bounded ethicality, the human mind, the same human mind, is making decisions, and here, it's about who to hire next, or what joke to tell or that slippery business decision. So let me give you an example of bounded ethicality at work. Unconscious bias is one place where we see the effects of bounded ethicality. So unconscious bias refers to associations we have in our mind, the shortcuts your brain is using to organize information, very likely outside of your awareness, not necessarily lining up with your conscious beliefs. Researchers Nosek, Banaji and Greenwald have looked at data from millions of people, and what they've found is, for example, most white Americans can more quickly and easily associate white people and good things than black people and good things, and most men and women can more quickly and easily associate men and science than women and science. And these associations don't necessarily line up with what people consciously think. They may have very egalitarian views, in fact. So sometimes, that 11 million and that 40 just don't line up. And here's another example: conflicts of interest. So we tend to underestimate how much a small gift — imagine a ballpoint pen or dinner — how much that small gift can affect our decision making. We don't realize that our mind is unconsciously lining up evidence to support the point of view of the gift-giver, no matter how hard we're consciously trying to be objective and professional. We also see bounded ethicality — despite our attachment to being good people, we still make mistakes, and we make mistakes that sometimes hurt other people, that sometimes promote injustice, despite our best attempts, and we explain away our mistakes rather than learning from them. Like, for example, when I got an email from a female student in my class saying that a reading I had assigned, a reading I had been assigning for years, was sexist. Or when I confused two students in my class of the same race — look nothing alike — when I confused them for each other more than once, in front of everybody. These kinds of mistakes send us, send me, into red-zone defensiveness. They leave us fighting for that good person identity. But the latest work that I've been doing on bounded ethicality with Mary Kern says that we're not only prone to mistakes — that tendency towards mistakes depends on how close we are to that red zone. So most of the time, nobody's challenging our good person identity, and so we're not thinking too much about the ethical implications of our decisions, and our model shows that we're then spiraling towards less and less ethical behavior most of the time. On the other hand, somebody might challenge our identity, or, upon reflection, we may be challenging it ourselves. So the ethical implications of our decisions become really salient, and in those cases, we spiral towards more and more good person behavior, or, to be more precise, towards more and more behavior that makes us feel like a good person, which isn't always the same, of course. The idea with bounded ethicality is that we are perhaps overestimating the importance our inner compass is playing in our ethical decisions. We perhaps are overestimating how much our self-interest is driving our decisions, and perhaps we don't realize how much our self-view as a good person is affecting our behavior, that in fact, we're working so hard to protect that good person identity, to keep out of that red zone, that we're not actually giving ourselves space to learn from our mistakes and actually be better people. It's perhaps because we expect it to be easy. We have this definition of good person that's either-or. Either you are a good person or you're not. Either you have integrity or you don't. Either you are a racist or a sexist or a homophobe or you're not. And in this either-or definition, there's no room to grow. And by the way, this is not what we do in most parts of our lives. Life, if you needed to learn accounting, you would take an accounting class, or if you become a parent, we pick up a book and we read about it. We talk to experts, we learn from our mistakes, we update our knowledge, we just keep getting better. But when it comes to being a good person, we think it's something we're just supposed to know, we're just supposed to do, without the benefit of effort or growth. So what I've been thinking about is what if we were to just forget about being good people, just let it go, and instead, set a higher standard, a higher standard of being a good-ish person? A good-ish person absolutely still makes mistakes. As a good-ish person, I'm making them all the time. But as a good-ish person, I'm trying to learn from them, own them. I expect them and I go after them. I understand there are costs to these mistakes. When it comes to issues like ethics and bias and diversity and inclusion, there are real costs to real people, and I accept that. As a good-ish person, in fact, I become better at noticing my own mistakes. I don't wait for people to point them out. I practice finding them, and as a result ... Sure, sometimes it can be embarrassing, it can be uncomfortable. We put ourselves in a vulnerable place, sometimes. But through all that vulnerability, just like in everything else we've tried to ever get better at, we see progress. We see growth. We allow ourselves to get better. Why wouldn't we give ourselves that? In every other part of our lives, we give ourselves room to grow — except in this one, where it matters most. Thank you. (Applause) |
What causes heartburn? | null | TED-Ed | Just between your chest and abdomen is where you’ll find one of the most important muscles you probably didn't know you had: the lower esophageal sphincter, or LES. When functioning properly, this ring of tissue plays a crucial role in helping us eat. But when the LES malfunctions, it becomes the main player in heartburn —a searing, sometimes sour-tasting chest-spasm that many people will experience at some point in their lives. We know that humans have been battling heartburn for hundreds, if not thousands of years. But recently the incidence has risen, making it a common stomach complaint worldwide. When the symptoms of heartburn become more more regular and intense —such as twice a week or more— it’s diagnosed as Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease, or GERD. But what causes this problem, and how can it be stopped? Heartburn starts in an area called the gastroesophageal junction, where the LES resides. This smooth, muscular ring of the LES is moderated by an intricate tree of nerve roots that connect to the brain, the heart, and the lungs. After food enters the stomach from the esophagus, the muscle’s task is to stop it from surging back up again. The LES contracts, squeezing the stomach entrance and creating a high pressure zone that prevents digestive acids from seeping out. But if the LES relaxes at the wrong moment or gradually weakens, it becomes like a faulty, ill-fitting lid, causing the area to depressurize. That allows burning stomach acid— and even chunks of food—to spurt into the esophagus, sometimes going as far up as the mouth. The cause of all this internal drama has long been put down to diet. Foods like caffeine and peppermint contain ingredients that may have a relaxing affect on the LES, which makes it incapable of doing its job. Other acidic foods, like citrus and tomatoes, can worsen irritation of the esophagus when they leach out with stomach acid. Carbonated beverages can similarly bubble up in the stomach, forcing open the valve. But researchers have discovered that food isn’t the only trigger. Smoking poses a risk, because the nicotine in cigarettes relaxes the LES. Consuming excessive amounts of alcohol may have a similar effect. Pregnant women often experience more heartburn due to the pressure of a growing baby on their stomachs. and the levels of certain hormones in their bodies. Obesity can cause hernias that disrupt the anti-reflux barrier of the gastroesophageal junction that normally protects against heartburn. Numerous medications, including those for asthma, high blood pressure, birth control, and depression can also have unintended effects on the LES. An occasional bout of heartburn isn't necessarily something to worry about. But, if heartburn starts happening regularly, it can weaken the LES muscle over time, letting more and more acid escape. And if it goes untreated, this can cause bigger problems. Over time, constant acid leakage from heartburn may form scar tissue which narrows the esophageal tube, making it harder to swallow food. Ongoing reflux can also damage the cells lining the esophagus—a rare condition called Barrett’s esophagus, which can elevate the risk of esophageal cancer. Luckily, heartburn is often treatable with a range of medicines that can help neutralize or reduce stomach acid. In extreme cases, some people have surgery to tighten the LES to minimize their distress. But we can often stop heartburn before it reaches that point. Reducing the consumption of certain foods, not smoking, and maintaining a healthy weight can all dramatically reduce reflux. With proper care we can help our LES’s keep the chemical fountain of our stomachs in proper order and avoid having to feel the burn. |
A memory scientist's advice on reporting harassment and discrimination | {0: 'Julia Shaw is best known for her work in the areas of memory and criminal psychology.'} | TEDxLondon | Me Too and Time's Up have highlighted that harassment and discrimination are a shockingly common part of many people's lived reality, and that this reality extends into the workplace. Whether in tech or finance, sports or the service industry, every day we seem to hear another story about an abuse of power or another grossly inappropriate workplace behavior. People are furious. They're taking to Twitter and social media to voice that this must change. But it's time to move beyond the hashtag. It's time for us to report harassment and discrimination to those who can fix this mess. And it's time for us to talk about harassment in a more inclusive way: not just about sexual harassment, but to encourage people to come forward about harassment and discrimination based on other characteristics such as age, disability or ethnicity. Because only together can we fix the underlying causes and consequences of harassment. You see, most of us will, at some point in our lives, experience workplace harassment or discrimination. Research shows that particularly women, people of color and people who openly identify as LGBTQI are likely to be targeted, and for some people, this is a pervasive and persistent part of their reality. And for most of these people — 98 percent according to some studies — most of these people will never speak up and tell their employer. Too often, harassment and discrimination is a lonely and isolating experience, but we need to help people out from under their desks. We need to empower people to have a voice. The reasonable first question that everybody asks once they've been harassed is "What do I do now?" And this is what I want to help you with. Navigating the barriers to reporting can be absolutely dizzying. How can we speak up in a society that too often discredits or diminishes our experiences? How can we speak up in a society that is likely to be retributive towards us? How can we deal with the silencing that goes on all around us? Making matters worse, often our memories are the only evidence we have of what happened. Now, here's where I can come in. I'm a memory scientist, and I specialize in how we remember important emotional events. I've particularly focused on how the memory interview process can severely impact the evidentiary quality of reports that we produce. A bad interview can lead you to forget details or misremember them while a good interview can forever change your life for the better. After looking at lab reports and working, studying this issue both in the courtroom and in research settings, I've dissected all the different things that can go wrong with our memories that can really threaten your case. And now I'm turning my attention to helping people tackle recording and reporting of workplace harassment and discrimination. There's three things that I've learned from my research on this that you can immediately apply if you've been harassed or discriminated against at work. I want to help you turn your memory into evidence — evidence that even a memory skeptic like me is unlikely to find fault with. First of all, James Comey had it right. The former head of the FBI used to sit in his car, lock himself in after meetings with the president and write down absolutely everything he could remember about what happened. The now-famous recordings proved to be quite useful later on. Be like Comey. Now, you don't need to lock yourself into your car to do this, but please, immediately after something happens, I want you to contemporaneously record what happened. And do this before talking to anyone else about it. Because as soon as your share your story with friends or family or colleagues or therapists, you have the potential to distort or change your memory of the event. Uncontaminated, contemporaneous evidence is worth gold. Second: the type of evidence matters. Sure, you can do a handwritten note of what happens, but how do you prove when you wrote it? Instead, pull out your computer or smartphone and make a note that's time-stamped, where you can prove this was recorded at this time. Contemporaneous, time-stamped evidence is better. Finally, make sure what you're writing down is actually relevant. Too often, we see that people bring out Facebook messages, they bring out time-stamped pieces of evidence, but sure, they're not particularly relevant, they're not particularly useful. It's easy to write an emotional, unstructured account of what happened — understandable because it's an emotional experience — but those might not actually be the details that matter later on for an investigation. Write down this list. I want you to keep track of this and simply fill in the blanks. First of all, what happened? In as much detail as possible, describe the situation, and do it on the day it happened if at all possible. Second, who was there? Were there any witnesses? This becomes crucial potentially later on. What exact time and date did this happen? What location? Where did this happen? Who did you tell after the event? How did it make you feel during and after it happened? And is there any other evidence such as WhatsApps, photos or emails that might lend more credibility to your case. These are all details that are incredibly easy to record contemporaneously but are also incredibly easy to forget later on. Humans, according to research, often overestimate their ability to remember important emotional details later on. Assume that you're going to forget. Assume you have to write it down. Now, these three pieces of advice are a good start, but of course they don't overcome a lot of the other barriers to reporting. According to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which published a report in 2018, there's one key recommendation to overcome some of the other fears often associated with reporting these kinds of incidents to your employer. One piece of advice that they made? Have an online, anonymous reporting tool. Only that way, they say, can you truly overcome many of the fears associated with reporting. Now, in line with this, and informed by what was happening all around me and taking and applying the memory science, the science that I had been doing for many years, I sat down with a number of people and we together created TalkToSpot.com. Spot is an online, anonymous reporting tool that helps you record and report workplace harassment and discrimination. It allows you to do it anonymously, it allows you to do it for free, and it's completely evidence-based. You don't have to talk to a person, there's no fear of judgment, and you can do it whenever and wherever you need. Now you have the power to walk through an evidence-based memory interview. Now, this is called a cognitive interview. This is the same technique that police use when they're doing their job properly. So in best-case scenarios, people who are being asked about important emotional events are being asked in line with the cognitive interview. Now, this walks you through all the relevant information so that at the end, after you've talked to the bot — which is an automatic messaging system — after you've talked to the bot, it generates a PDF record that's time-stamped and securely signed that you can keep for yourself as evidence in case you want to share it later, or you can submit it to your employer right away. And in line with recommendations, you can submit it to your employer anonymously. But a reporting tool is only as useful as the audience that's listening. So if your employer is truly committed to change, we've decided to also offer them the tool to respond. So if organizations work with us and are truly committed to doing something about workplace harassment and discrimination, they're also able to respond to you even if you've chosen to stay anonymous. We think it's important that you can work together with your employer to tackle this issue. We think that everybody wins when we bring light into this dark issue. Whether it happens to you or to someone you know, recording and reporting what happened can really improve how we talk about these issues. And if you're an organization, this is a call to give your employees access to better and more effective reporting mechanisms. We know that the current methods that are used in most organizations don't work effectively. It's time to change that if you're committed to inclusion and diversity. It's time for us to celebrate our diversity. It's time for us to give a voice to those who have for too long been denied one. It's time for us to celebrate those who come forward, even if they feel they need to stay anonymous — to stay masked to do so. It's time for a reporting revolution. Thank you. (Applause) |
The case for curiosity-driven research | {0: 'Dr. Suzie Sheehy uses accelerator physics to help reinvent technology for applications in medicine, energy and beyond.'} | TEDxSydney | In the late 19th century, scientists were trying to solve a mystery. They found that if they had a vacuum tube like this one and applied a high voltage across it, something strange happened. They called them cathode rays. But the question was: What were they made of? In England, the 19th-century physicist J.J. Thompson conducted experiments using magnets and electricity, like this. And he came to an incredible revelation. These rays were made of negatively charged particles around 2,000 times lighter than the hydrogen atom, the smallest thing they knew. So Thompson had discovered the first subatomic particle, which we now call electrons. Now, at the time, this seemed to be a completely impractical discovery. I mean, Thompson didn't think there were any applications of electrons. Around his lab in Cambridge, he used to like to propose a toast: "To the electron. May it never be of use to anybody." (Laughter) He was strongly in favor of doing research out of sheer curiosity, to arrive at a deeper understanding of the world. And what he found did cause a revolution in science. But it also caused a second, unexpected revolution in technology. Today, I'd like to make a case for curiosity-driven research, because without it, none of the technologies I'll talk about today would have been possible. Now, what Thompson found here has actually changed our view of reality. I mean, I think I'm standing on a stage, and you think you're sitting in a seat. But that's just the electrons in your body pushing back against the electrons in the seat, opposing the force of gravity. You're not even really touching the seat. You're hovering ever so slightly above it. But in many ways, our modern society was actually built on this discovery. I mean, these tubes were the start of electronics. And then for many years, most of us actually had one of these, if you remember, in your living room, in cathode-ray tube televisions. But — I mean, how impoverished would our lives be if the only invention that had come from here was the television? (Laughter) Thankfully, this tube was just a start, because something else happens when the electrons here hit the piece of metal inside the tube. Let me show you. Pop this one back on. So as the electrons screech to a halt inside the metal, their energy gets thrown out again in a form of high-energy light, which we call X-rays. (Buzzing) (Buzzing) And within 15 years of discovering the electron, these X-rays were being used to make images inside the human body, helping soldiers' lives being saved by surgeons, who could then find pieces of bullets and shrapnel inside their bodies. But there's no way we could have come up with that technology by asking scientists to build better surgical probes. Only research done out of sheer curiosity, with no application in mind, could have given us the discovery of the electron and X-rays. Now, this tube also threw open the gates for our understanding of the universe and the field of particle physics, because it's also the first, very simple particle accelerator. Now, I'm an accelerator physicist, so I design particle accelerators, and I try and understand how beams behave. And my field's a bit unusual, because it crosses between curiosity-driven research and technology with real-world applications. But it's the combination of those two things that gets me really excited about what I do. Now, over the last 100 years, there have been far too many examples for me to list them all. But I want to share with you just a few. In 1928, a physicist named Paul Dirac found something strange in his equations. And he predicted, based purely on mathematical insight, that there ought to be a second kind of matter, the opposite to normal matter, that literally annihilates when it comes in contact: antimatter. I mean, the idea sounded ridiculous. But within four years, they'd found it. And nowadays, we use it every day in hospitals, in positron emission tomography, or PET scans, used for detecting disease. Or, take these X-rays. If you can get these electrons up to a higher energy, so about 1,000 times higher than this tube, the X-rays that those produce can actually deliver enough ionizing radiation to kill human cells. And if you can shape and direct those X-rays where you want them to go, that allows us to do an incredible thing: to treat cancer without drugs or surgery, which we call radiotherapy. In countries like Australia and the UK, around half of all cancer patients are treated using radiotherapy. And so, electron accelerators are actually standard equipment in most hospitals. Or, a little closer to home: if you have a smartphone or a computer — and this is TEDx, so you've got both with you right now, right? Well, inside those devices are chips that are made by implanting single ions into silicon, in a process called ion implantation. And that uses a particle accelerator. Without curiosity-driven research, though, none of these things would exist at all. So, over the years, we really learned to explore inside the atom. And to do that, we had to learn to develop particle accelerators. The first ones we developed let us split the atom. And then we got to higher and higher energies; we created circular accelerators that let us delve into the nucleus and then create new elements, even. And at that point, we were no longer just exploring inside the atom. We'd actually learned how to control these particles. We'd learned how to interact with our world on a scale that's too small for humans to see or touch or even sense that it's there. And then we built larger and larger accelerators, because we were curious about the nature of the universe. As we went deeper and deeper, new particles started popping up. Eventually, we got to huge ring-like machines that take two beams of particles in opposite directions, squeeze them down to less than the width of a hair and smash them together. And then, using Einstein's E=mc2, you can take all of that energy and convert it into new matter, new particles which we rip from the very fabric of the universe. Nowadays, there are about 35,000 accelerators in the world, not including televisions. And inside each one of these incredible machines, there are hundreds of billions of tiny particles, dancing and swirling in systems that are more complex than the formation of galaxies. You guys, I can't even begin to explain how incredible it is that we can do this. (Laughter) (Applause) So I want to encourage you to invest your time and energy in people that do curiosity-driven research. It was Jonathan Swift who once said, "Vision is the art of seeing the invisible." And over a century ago, J.J. Thompson did just that, when he pulled back the veil on the subatomic world. And now we need to invest in curiosity-driven research, because we have so many challenges that we face. And we need patience; we need to give scientists the time, the space and the means to continue their quest, because history tells us that if we can remain curious and open-minded about the outcomes of research, the more world-changing our discoveries will be. Thank you. (Applause) |
Is fire a solid, a liquid, or a gas? | null | TED-Ed | Sitting around a campfire, you can feel its heat, smell the woody smoke, and hear it crackle. If you get too close, it burns your eyes and stings your nostrils. You could stare at the bright flames forever as they twist and flicker in endless incarnations. But what exactly are you looking at? The flames are obviously not solid, nor are they liquid. Mingling with the air, they’re more like a gas, but more visible—and more fleeting. And on a scientific level, fire differs from gas because gases can exist in the same state indefinitely while fires always burn out eventually. One misconception is that fire is a plasma, the fourth state of matter in which atoms are stripped of their electrons. Like fire and unlike the other kinds of matter, plasmas don’t exist in a stable state on earth. They only form when gas is exposed to an electric field or superheated to temperatures of thousands or tens of thousands of degrees. By contrast, fuels like wood and paper burn at a few hundred degrees —far below the threshold of what's usually considered a plasma. So if fire isn’t a solid, liquid, gas, or a plasma, what does that leave? It turns out fire isn’t actually matter at all. Instead, it’s our sensory experience of a chemical reaction called combustion. In a way, fire is like the leaves changing color in fall, the smell of fruit as it ripens, or a firefly’s blinking light. All of these are sensory clues that a chemical reaction is taking place. What differs about fire is that it engages a lot of our senses at the same time, creating the kind of vivid experience we expect to come from a physical thing. Combustion creates that sensory experience using fuel, heat, and oxygen. In a campfire, when the logs are heated to their ignition temperature, the walls of their cells decompose, releasing sugars and other molecules into the air. These molecules then react with airborne oxygen to create carbon dioxide and water. At the same time, any trapped water in the logs vaporizes, expands, ruptures the wood around it, and escapes with a satisfying crackle. As the fire heats up, the carbon dioxide and water vapor created by combustion expand. Now that they’re less dense, they rise in a thinning column. Gravity causes this expansion and rising, which gives flames their characteristic taper. Without gravity, molecules don’t separate by density and the flames have a totally different shape. We can see all of this because combustion also generates light. Molecules emit light when heated, and the color of the light depends on the temperature of the molecules. The hottest flames are white or blue. The type of molecules in a fire can also influence flame color. For instance, any unreacted carbon atoms from the logs form little clumps of soot that rise into the flames and emit the yellow-orange light we associate with a campfire. Substances like copper, calcium chloride, and potassium chloride can add their own characteristic hues to the mix. Besides colorful flames, fire also continues to generate heat as it burns. This heat sustains the flames by keeping the fuel at or above ignition temperature. Eventually, though, even the hottest fires run out of fuel or oxygen. Then, those twisting flames give a final hiss and disappear with a wisp of smoke as if they were never there at all. |
Why I have coffee with people who send me hate mail | {0: 'Born in Turkey with Kurdish roots, Özlem Sara Cekic was one of the first women with a Muslim immigrant background to be elected to the Danish Parliament, where she served from 2007 to 2015.'} | We the Future | My inbox is full of hate mails and personal abuse and has been for years. In 2010, I started answering those mails and suggesting to the writer that we might meet for coffee and a chat. I have had hundreds of encounters. They have taught me something important that I want to share with you. I was born in Turkey from Kurdish parents and we moved to Denmark when I was a young child. In 2007, I ran for a seat in the Danish parliament as one of the first women with a minority background. I was elected, but I soon found out that not everyone was happy about it as I had to quickly get used to finding hate messages in my inbox. Those emails would begin with something like this: "What's a raghead like you doing in our parliament?" I never answered. I'd just delete the emails. I just thought that the senders and I had nothing in common. They didn't understand me, and I didn't understand them. Then one day, one of my colleagues in the parliament said that I should save the hate mails. "When something happens to you, it will give the police a lead." (Laughter) I noticed that she said, "When something happens" and not "if." (Laughter) Sometimes hateful letters were also sent to my home address. The more I became involved in public debate, the more hate mail and threats I received. After a while, I got a secret address and I had to take extra precautions to protect my family. Then in 2010, a Nazi began to harass me. It was a man who had attacked Muslim women on the street. Over time, it became much worse. I was at the zoo with my children, and the phone was ringing constantly. It was the Nazi. I had the impression that he was close. We headed home. When we got back, my son asked, "Why does he hate you so much, Mom, when he doesn't even know you?" "Some people are just stupid," I said. And at the time, I actually thought that was a pretty clever answer. And I suspect that that is the answer most of us would give. The others — they are stupid, brainwashed, ignorant. We are the good guys and they are the bad guys, period. Several weeks later I was at a friend's house, and I was very upset and angry about all the hate and racism I had met. It was he who suggested that I should call them up and visit them. "They will kill me," I said. "They would never attack a member of the Danish Parliament," he said. "And anyway, if they killed you, you would become a martyr." (Laughter) "So it's pure win-win situation for you." (Laughter) His advice was so unexpected, when I got home, I turned on my computer and opened the folder where I had saved all the hate mail. There were literally hundreds of them. Emails that started with words like "terrorist," "raghead," "rat," "whore." I decided to contact the one who had sent me the most. His name was Ingolf. I decided to contact him just once so I could say at least I had tried. To my surprise and shock, he answered the phone. I blurted out, "Hello, my name is Özlem. You have sent me so many hate mails. You don't know me, I don't know you. I was wondering if I could come around and we can drink a coffee together and talk about it?" (Laughter) There was silence on the line. And then he said, "I have to ask my wife." (Laughter) What? The racist has a wife? (Laughter) A couple of days later, we met at his house. I will never forget when he opened his front door and reached out to shake my hand. I felt so disappointed. (Laughter) because he looked nothing like I'd imagined. I had expected a horrible person — dirty, messy house. It was not. His house smelled of coffee which was served from a coffee set identical to the one my parents used. I ended up staying for two and a half hours. And we had so many things in common. Even our prejudices were alike. (Laughter) Ingolf told me that when he waits for the bus and the bus stops 10 meters away from him, it was because the driver was a "raghead." I recognized that feeling. When I was young and I waited for the bus and it stopped 10 meters away from me, I was sure that the driver was a racist. When I got home, I was very ambivalent about my experience. On the one hand, I really liked Ingolf. He was easy and pleasant to talk to, but on the other hand, I couldn't stand the idea of having so much in common with someone who had such clearly racist views. Gradually, and painfully, I came to realize that I had been just as judgmental of those who had sent me hate mails as they had been of me. This was the beginning of what I call #dialoguecoffee. Basically, I sit down for coffee with people who have said the most terrible things to me to try to understand why they hate people like me when they don't even know me. I have been doing this the last eight years. The vast majority of people I approach agree to meet me. Most of them are men, but I have also met women. I have made it a rule to always meet them in their house to convey from the outset that I trust them. I always bring food because when we eat together, it is easier to find what we have in common and make peace together. Along the way, I have learned some valuable lessons. The people who sent hate mails are workers, husbands, wives, parents like you and me. I'm not saying that their behavior is acceptable, but I have learned to distance myself from the hateful views without distancing myself from the person who's expressing those views. And I have discovered that the people I visit are just as afraid of people they don't know as I was afraid of them before I started inviting myself for coffee. During these meetings, a specific theme keeps coming up. It shows up regardless whether I'm talking to a humanist or a racist, a man, a woman, a Muslim or an atheist. They all seem to think that other people are to blame for the hate and for the generalization of groups. They all believe that other people have to stop demonizing. They point at politicians, the media, their neighbor or the bus driver who stops 10 meters away. But when I asked, "What about you? What can you do?", the reply is usually, "What can I do? I have no influence. I have no power." I know that feeling. For a large part of my life, I also thought that I didn't have any power or influence — even when I was a member of the Danish parliament. But today I know the reality is different. We all have power and influence where we are, so we must never, never underestimate our own potential. The #dialoguecoffee meetings have taught me that people of all political convictions can be caught demonizing the others with different views. I know what I'm talking about. As a young child, I hated different population groups. And at the time, my religious views were very extreme. But my friendship with Turks, with Danes, with Jews and with racists has vaccinated me against my own prejudices. I grew up in a working-class family, and on my journey I have met many people who have insisted on speaking to me. They have changed my views. They have formed me as a democratic citizen and a bridge builder. If you want to prevent hate and violence, we have to talk to as many people as possible for as long as possible while being as open as possible. That can only be achieved through debate, critical conversation and insisting on dialogue that doesn't demonize people. I'm going to ask you a question. I invite you to think about it when you get home and in the coming days, but you have to be honest with yourself. It should be easy, no one else will know it. The question is this ... who do you demonize? Do you think supporters of American President Trump are deplorables? Or that those who voted for Turkish President Erdoğan are crazy Islamists? Or that those who voted for Le Pen in France are stupid fascists? Or perhaps you think that Americans who voted for Bernie Sanders are immature hippies. (Laughter) All those words have been used to vilify those groups. Maybe at this point, do you think I am an idealist? I want to give you a challenge. Before the end of this year, I challenge you to invite someone who you demonize — someone who you disagree with politically and/or culturally and don't think you have anything in common with. I challenge you to invite someone like this to #dialoguecoffee. Remember Ingolf? Basically, I'm asking you to find an Ingolf in your life, contact him or her and suggest that you can meet for #dialoguecofee. When you start at #dialoguecoffee, you have to remember this: first, don't give up if the person refuses at first. Sometimes it's taken me nearly one year to arrange a #dialoguecoffee meeting. Two: acknowledge the other person's courage. It isn't just you who's brave. The one who's inviting you into their home is just as brave. Three: don't judge during the conversation. Make sure that most of the conversation focuses on what you have in common. As I said, bring food. And finally, remember to finish the conversation in a positive way because you are going to meet again. A bridge can't be built in one day. We are living in a world where many people hold definitive and often extreme opinions about the others without knowing much about them. We notice of course the prejudices on the other side than in our own bases. And we ban them from our lives. We delete the hate mails. We hang out only with people who think like us and talk about the others in a category of disdain. We unfriend people on Facebook, and when we meet people who are discriminating or dehumanizing people or groups, we don't insist on speaking with them to challenge their opinions. That's how healthy democratic societies break down — when we don't check the personal responsibility for the democracy. We take the democracy for granted. It is not. Conversation is the most difficult thing in a democracy and also the most important. So here's my challenge. Find your Ingolf. (Laughter) Start a conversation. Trenches have been dug between people, yes, but we all have the ability to build the bridges that cross the trenches. And let me end by quoting my friend, Sergeot Uzan, who lost his son, Dan Uzan, in a terror attack on a Jewish synagogue in Copenhagen, 2015. Sergio rejected any suggestion of revenge and instead said this ... "Evil can only be defeated by kindness between people. Kindness demands courage." Dear friends, let's be courageous. Thank you. (Applause) |
How far would you have to go to escape gravity? | null | TED-Ed | More than six thousand light years from the surface of the earth, a rapidly spinning neutron star called the Black Widow pulsar blasts its companion brown dwarf star with radiation as the two orbit each other every 9 hours. Standing on our own planet, you might think you’re just an observer of this violent ballet. But in fact, both stars are pulling you towards them. And you’re pulling back, connected across trillions of kilometers by gravity. Gravity is the attractive force between two objects with mass— any two objects with mass. Which means that every object in the universe attracts every other object: every star, black hole, human being, smartphone, and atom are all constantly pulling on each other. So why don’t we feel pulled in billions of different directions? Two reasons: mass and distance. The original equation describing the gravitational force between two objects was written by Isaac Newton in 1687. Scientists’ understanding of gravity has evolved since then, but Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation is still a good approximation in most situations. It goes like this: the gravitational force between two objects is equal to the mass of one times the mass of the other, multiplied by a very small number called the gravitational constant, and divided by the distance between them, squared. If you doubled the mass of one of the objects, the force between them would double, too. If the distance between them doubled, the force would be one-fourth as strong. The gravitational force between you and the Earth pulls you towards its center, a force you experience as your weight. Let’s say this force is about 800 Newtons when you’re standing at sea level. If you traveled to the Dead Sea, the force would increase by a tiny fraction of a percent. And if you climbed to the top of Mount Everest, the force would decrease— but again, by a minuscule amount. Traveling higher would make a bigger dent in gravity’s influence, but you won’t escape it. Gravity is generated by variations in the curvature of spacetime— the three dimensions of space plus time— which bend around any object that has mass. Gravity from Earth reaches the International Space Station, 400 kilometers above the earth, with almost its original intensity. If the space station was stationary on top of a giant column, you’d still experience ninety percent of the gravitational force there that you do on the ground. Astronauts just experience weightlessness because the space station is constantly falling towards earth. Fortunately, it’s orbiting the planet fast enough that it never hits the ground. By the time you made it to the surface of the moon, around 400,000 kilometers away, Earth’s gravitational pull would be less than 0.03 percent of what you feel on earth. The only gravity you’d be aware of would be the moon’s, which is about one sixth as strong as the earth’s. Travel farther still and Earth’s gravitational pull on you will continue to decrease, but never drop to zero. Even safely tethered to the Earth, we’re subject to the faint tug of distant celestial bodies and nearby earthly ones. The Sun exerts a force of about half a Newton on you. If you’re a few meters away from a smartphone, you'll experience a mutual force of a few piconewtons. That’s about the same as the gravitational pull between you and the Andromeda Galaxy, which is 2.5 million light years away but about a trillion times as massive as the sun. But when it comes to escaping gravity, there’s a loophole. If all the mass around us is pulling on us all the time, how would Earth’s gravity change if you tunneled deep below the surface, assuming you could do so without being cooked or crushed? If you hollowed out the center of a perfectly spherical Earth— which it isn’t, but let’s just say it were— you’d experience an identical pull from all sides. And you’d be suspended, weightless, only encountering the tiny pulls from other celestial bodies. So you could escape the Earth’s gravity in such a thought experiment— but only by heading straight into it. |
How kids can help design cities | {0: 'Mara Mintzer thrives on engaging children, youth and underrepresented communities in participatory planning, an approach that aims to integrate the views of all community members into designing exemplary communities.'} | TEDxMileHigh | Our society routinely makes decisions without consulting a quarter of the population. We're making choices about land use, energy production and natural resources without the ideas and experiences of the full community. The car, an inanimate object, has more say over public policy than this group of citizens. Can you guess which group I'm talking about? It's children. I work in urban design, and not surprisingly, most cities are designed by adults. Urban planners, architects, developers, politicians, and occasionally, a few loud citizens. Rarely do you consider the voices of a group of four-year-olds, barely tall enough to reach the podium at city council chambers. But today, I want to ask you this: What would happen if we asked children to design our cities? (Laughter) Back in 2009, I was introduced to a small group of people who wanted to start a child-friendly city initiative in Boulder, Colorado. I come from a family of civil rights advocates, and I had spent my career until that point working with low-income children and families. But I had never heard of a child-friendly city initiative before. So I figured its purpose would be to address some of the frustrations I had encountered as the parent of a young child. Perhaps we would advocate for more changing tables in restaurants. Or create indoor play spaces for those cold and rainy days. In other words, make the city more hospitable to children and families. It wasn't until after I committed to this project that I realized I had it all wrong. We wouldn't be designing better cities for children. Children would be designing better cities for themselves, and for the rest of us, too. Now, I bet you're skeptical about this idea. And honestly, I was, too. I mean, there must be a reason the voting age is 18. (Laughter) How could children possibly understand complex ideas such as the affordable housing crisis or how to develop a transportation master plan? And even if they had ideas, wouldn't they be childish? Or unreasonable? Do our cities really need a park made out of candy? (Laughter) Or a bridge with water cannons that fire water onto unsuspecting kayakers below? (Laughter) While these concerns sound legitimate, I realized that not including children in city planning was a bigger design problem. After all, shouldn't we include end users in the design process? If we're building a park to be largely used by kids, then kids should have a say in the park's design. So with all of this in mind, we formed a program called "Growing Up Boulder," and my job is to work with children ages zero through 18 to come up with innovative city-design solutions. How do we do this, you might ask? Let me give you a real example. In 2012, the city of Boulder decided to redesign a large downtown park, known as the Civic Area. This space is bounded by a farmers' market on one end, Boulder Public Library on the other end, and by Boulder Creek, which runs through the middle. The space needed a new design to better handle the creek's inevitable flash floods, restore a sense of safety to the area and support an expanded farmers' market. So from 2012 through 2014, we engaged more than 200 young people in the process, ranging from preschool through high school students. Now, how did we do this? Let me explain. First, we visited children in their classrooms and presented the project: what it was, why their ideas mattered and what would happen with their recommendations. Before we could influence them, we asked children to record their ideas, based on their own lived experiences. Then we asked children to go on a field trip with us, to document what they liked and didn't like about the space, using photography. Through green picture frames, students highlighted what they liked about the space, such as college students, tubing down the creek. (Laughter) Then they flipped those frames over and used the red side to highlight things they didn't like, such as trash. Our sixth-grade students studied the Civic Area by researching sites with similar challenges from around the world. Then, we invited the kids to combine their original ideas with their new inspiration, to synthesize solutions to improve the space. Each class invited adult planners, city council and community members into the classroom, to share and discuss their recommendations. Boulder's senior urban planners stepped over blocks and stuffed animals to explore preschool students' full-size classroom recreation of the Civic Area. Adult planners marveled at the students' ideas as they shared a park constructed out of a jelly bracelet. It was supposed to be an ice-skating rink. And then, public art constructed from animal-shaped plastic beads. And while this may seem ridiculous, it isn't so different from the models that architects create. Now, fast-forward four years, and I am pleased to report that many of the children's ideas are being implemented in the Civic Area. For example, there will be improved access to Boulder Creek, so kids can play safely in the water. Lighting in previously dark underpasses, so high school students can walk home safely after school at night. And separated biking and walking paths, so speeding bikers won't hit young people as they stroll by the creek. My daughter and I even skated on a new, child-requested ice-skating rink, last winter. So, were all of the kids' ideas implemented at the Civic Area? Of course not. Democracy is a messy process. But just as a reasonable and well-informed adult does not expect all of her ideas to be utilized, neither does a nine-year-old. We've now been using this process for eight years, and along the way, we've found some incredible benefits to designing cities with children. First of all, kids think differently from adults. And that's a good thing. Adults think about constraints, how much time will a project take, how much money will it cost and how dangerous will it be. In other words, "Are we going to get sued?" (Laughter) It's not that these constraints aren't real, but if we kill off ideas from the beginning, it limits our creativity and dampens the design process. Kids, on the other hand, think about possibilities. For kids, the sky is the limit. Literally. When we worked with middle-school students to design teen-friendly parks, they drew pictures of skydiving, hang gliding, (Laughter) and jumping from trampolines into giant foam pits. (Laughter) Some of this sounds far-fetched, but the commonalities among the activities revealed an important story. Our adolescents wanted thrill-seeking opportunities. Which makes perfect sense, given their developmental stage in life. So our task, as connectors between inspiration and reality, was to point them towards activities and equipment that actually could be installed in a park. This is exactly what parks in Australia have done, with their extensive zip lines and their 30-foot-tall climbing towers. When kids dream up a space, they almost always include fun, play and movement in their designs. Now, this is not what adults prioritize. But research shows that fun, play and movement are exactly what adults need to stay healthy, too. (Laughter) Who wouldn't enjoy a tree house containing a little lending library and comfortable beanbag chairs for reading? Or what about a public art display that sprays paint onto a canvas each time you walk up the steps? In addition to fun and play, children value beauty in their designs. When tasked with designing dense affordable housing, kids rejected the blocks of identical, beige condominiums so many developers favor, and instead, put bright colors on everything, from housing to play equipment. They placed flowers between biking and walking paths, and placed benches along the creek, so kids could hang out with their friends and enjoy the tranquility of the water. Which leads me to nature. Children have a biological need to connect with nature, and this shows up in their designs. They want nature right in their backyards, not four blocks away. So they design communities that incorporate water, fruit trees, flowers and animals into their common spaces on site. For better or worse, this is logical, because five-year-olds today are rarely allowed to walk four blocks to access a park by themselves. And nature in one's immediate environment benefits everyone, since it has been shown to have restorative effects for all ages. It may come as a surprise, but we even take into consideration the desires or our littlest citizens, babies and toddlers. From toddlers, we learned that the joy of walking comes from what you discover along the way. When they evaluated the walkability of Boulder's 19th Street corridor, toddlers spent long stretches exploring leaves in a ditch and sparkles in the sidewalk. They reminded us to slow down and design a path where the journey is as important as the destination. In addition to trees and plants, kids almost always include animals in their designs. Insects, birds and small mammals figure prominently into children's pictures. Whether it's because they're closer to the ground and can see the grasshoppers better than we can, or simply because they have a greater sense of empathy for other beings, children almost always include non-human species in their ideal worlds. Across the board, children are inclusive in their city planning. They design for everyone, from their grandmother in a wheelchair to the homeless woman they see sleeping in the park. Children design for living creatures, not for cars, egos or corporations. The last and perhaps most compelling discovery we made is that a city friendly to children is a city friendly to all. Bogota, Colombia mayor Enrique Peñalosa observed that children are a kind of indicator species. If we can build a successful city for children, we will have a successful city for all people. Think about it. Kids can't just hop in a car and drive to the store. And most kids can't afford an expensive lunch at the nearby cafe. So if we build cities that take into the consideration their needs for alternative forms of transportation and for cheaper food venues, we meet the needs of many other populations, too. The more frequent and more affordable bus service, so desired by our youth, also supports the elderly who wish to live independently, after they can no longer drive cars. Teens' recommendations for smooth, protected walking and skateboarding paths also support the person in a wheelchair who wishes to go smoothly down the path, or the parent pushing a new stroller. So to me, all of this has revealed something important. An important blind spot. If we aren't including children in our planning, who else aren't we including? Are we listening to people of color, immigrants, the elderly and people with disabilities, or with reduced incomes? What innovative design solutions are we overlooking, because we aren't hearing the voices of the full community? We can't possibly know the needs and wants of other people without asking. That goes for kids and for everyone else. So, adults, let's stop thinking of our children as future citizens and instead, start valuing them for the citizens they are today. Because our children are designing the cities that will make us happier and healthier. Cities filled with nature, play, movement, social connection and beauty. Children are designing the cities we all want to live in. Thank you. (Applause) |
How I accidentally changed the way movies get made | {0: 'Franklin Leonard is a film producer, cultural commentator, professor, activist and entrepreneur.'} | TEDxVeniceBeach | This weekend, tens of millions of people in the United States and tens of millions more around the world, in Columbus, Georgia, in Cardiff, Wales, in Chongqing, China, in Chennai, India will leave their homes, they'll get in their cars or they'll take public transportation or they will carry themselves by foot, and they'll step into a room and sit down next to someone they don't know or maybe someone they do, and the lights will go down and they'll watch a movie. They'll watch movies about aliens or robots, or robot aliens or regular people. But they will all be movies about what it means to be human. Millions will feel awe or fear, millions will laugh and millions will cry. And then the lights will come back on, and they'll reemerge into the world they knew several hours prior. And millions of people will look at the world a little bit differently than they did when they went in. Like going to temple or a mosque or a church, or any other religious institution, movie-going is, in many ways, a sacred ritual. Repeated week after week after week. I'll be there this weekend, just like I was on most weekends between the years of 1996 and 1990, at the multiplex, near the shopping mall about five miles from my childhood home in Columbus, Georgia. The funny thing is that somewhere between then and now, I accidentally changed part of the conversation about which of those movies get made. So, the story actually begins in 2005, in an office high above Sunset Boulevard, where I was a junior executive at Leonardo DiCaprio's production company Appian Way. And for those of you who aren't familiar with how the film industry works, it basically means that I was one of a few people behind the person who produces the movie for the people behind and in front of the camera, whose names you will better recognize than mine. Essentially, you're an assistant movie producer who does the unglamorous work that goes into the creative aspect of producing a movie. You make lists of writers and directors and actors who might be right for movies that you want to will into existence; you meet with many of them and their representatives, hoping to curry favor for some future date. And you read, a lot. You read novels that might become movies, you read comic books that might become movies, you read articles that might become movies, you read scripts that might become movies. And you read scripts from writers that might write the adaptations of the novels, of the comic books, of the articles, and might rewrite the scripts that you're already working on. All this in the hope of finding the next big thing or the next big writer who can deliver something that can make you and your company the next big thing. So in 2005, I was a development executive at Leonardo's production company. I got a phone call from the representative of a screenwriter that began pretty much the way all of those conversations did: "I've got Leo's next movie." Now in this movie, that his client had written, Leo would play an oil industry lobbyist whose girlfriend, a local meteorologist, threatens to leave him because his work contributes to global warming. And this is a situation that's been brought to a head by the fact that there's a hurricane forming in the Atlantic that's threatening to do Maria-like damage from Maine to Myrtle Beach. Leo, very sad about this impending break up, does a little more research about the hurricane and discovers that in its path across the Atlantic, it will pass over a long-dormant, though now active volcano that will spew toxic ash into its eye that will presumably be whipped into some sort of chemical weapon that will destroy the world. (Laughter) It was at that point that I asked him, "So are you basically pitching me 'Leo versus the toxic superstorm that will destroy humanity?'" And he responded by saying, "Well, when you say it like that, it sounds ridiculous." And I'm embarrassed to admit that I had the guy send me the script, and I read 30 pages before I was sure that it was as bad as I thought it was. Now, "Superstorm" is certainly an extreme example, but it's also not an unusual one. And unfortunately, most scripts aren't as easy to dismiss as that one. For example, a comedy about a high school senior, who, when faced with an unplanned pregnancy, makes an unusual decision regarding her unborn child. That's obviously "Juno." Two hundred and thirty million at the worldwide box office, four Oscar nominations, one win. How about a Mumbai teen who grew up in the slums wants to become a contestant on the Indian version of "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?"? That's an easy one — "Slumdog Millionaire." Three hundred seventy-seven million worldwide, 10 Oscar nominations and eight wins. A chimpanzee tells his story of living with the legendary pop star Michael Jackson. Anyone? (Laughter) It's a trick question. But it is a script called "Bubbles," that is going to be directed by Taika Waititi, the director of "Thor: Ragnarok." So, a large part of your job as a development executive is to separate the "Superstorms" from the "Slumdog Millionaires," and slightly more generally, the writers who write "Superstorm" from the writers who can write "Slumdog Millionaire." And the easiest way to do this, obviously, is to read all of the scripts, but that's, frankly, impossible. A good rule of thumb is that the Writers Guild of America registers about 50,000 new pieces of material every year, and most of them are screenplays. Of those, a reasonable estimate is about 5,000 of them make it through various filters, agencies, management companies, screenplay compositions and the like, and are read by someone at the production company or major studio level. And they're trying to decide whether they can become one of the 300-and-dropping movies that are released by the major studios or their sub-brands each year. I've described it before as being a little bit like walking into a members-only bookstore where the entire inventory is just organized haphazardly, and every book has the same, nondescript cover. Your job is to enter that bookstore and not come back until you've found the best and most profitable books there. It's anarchic and gleefully opaque. And everyone has their method to address these problems. You know, most rely on the major agencies and they just assume that if there's great talent in the world, they've already found their way to the agencies, regardless of the structural barriers that actually exist to get into the agencies in the first place. Others also constantly compare notes among themselves about what they've read and what's good, and they just hope that their cohort group is the best, most wired and has the best taste in town. And others try to read everything, but that's, again, impossible. If you're reading 500 screenplays in a year, you are reading a lot. And it's still only a small percentage of what's out there. Fundamentally, it's triage. And when you're in triage, you tend to default to conventional wisdom about what works and what doesn't. That a comedy about a young woman dealing with reproductive reality can't sell. That the story of an Indian teenager isn't viable in the domestic marketplace or anywhere else in the world outside of India. That the only source of viable movies is a very narrow groups of writers who have already found their way to living and working in Hollywood, who already have the best representation in the business, and are writing a very narrow band of stories. And I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit, that that's where I found myself in 2005. Sitting in that office above Sunset Boulevard, staring down that metaphorical anonymized bookstore, and having read nothing but bad scripts for months. And I took this to mean one of two things: either A: I was not very good at my job, which was, ostensibly, finding good scripts, or B: reading bad scripts was the job. In which case, my mother's weekly phone calls, asking me if my law school entrance exam scores were still valid was something I should probably pay more attention to. What I also knew was that I was about to go on vacation for two weeks, and as bad as reading bad scripts is when it is your job, it's even more painful on vacation. So I had to do something. So late one night at my office, I made a list of everyone that I had had breakfast, lunch, dinner or drinks with that had jobs similar to mine, and I sent them an anonymous email. And I made a very simple request. Send me a list of up to 10 of your favorite screenplays that meet three criteria. One: you love the screenplay, two: the filmed version of that screenplay will not be in theaters by the end of that calendar year, and three: you found out about the screenplay this year. This was not an appeal for the scripts that would be the next great blockbuster, not an appeal for the scripts that will win the Academy Award, they didn't need to be scripts that their bosses loved or that their studio wanted to make. It was very simply an opportunity for people to speak their minds about what they loved, which, in this world, is increasingly rare. Now, almost all of the 75 people I emailed anonymously responded. And then two dozen other people actually emailed to participate to this anonymous email address, but I confirmed that they did in fact have the jobs they claimed to have. And I then compiled the votes into a spreadsheet, ran a pivot table, output it to PowerPoint, and the night before I left for vacation, I slapped a quasi subversive name on it and emailed it back from that anonymous email address to everyone who voted. The Black List. A tribute to those who lost their careers during the anti-communist hysteria of the 1940s and 50s, and a conscious inversion of the notion that black somehow had a negative connotation. After arriving in Mexico, I pulled out a chair by the pool, started reading these scripts and found, to my shock and joy, that most of them were actually quite good. Mission accomplished. What I didn't and couldn't have expected was what happened next. About a week into my time on vacation, I stopped by the hotel's business center to check my email. This was a pre-iPhone world, after all. And found that this list that I had created anonymously had been forwarded back to me several dozen times, at my personal email address. Everyone was sharing this list of scripts that everyone had said that they loved, reading them and then loving them themselves. And my first reaction, that I can't actually say here, but will describe it as fear, the idea of surveying people about their scripts was certainly not a novel or a genius one. Surely, there was some unwritten Hollywood rule of omertà that had guided people away from doing that before that I was simply too naive to understand, it being so early in my career. I was sure I was going to get fired, and so I decided that day that A: I would never tell anybody that I had done this, and B: I would never do it again. Then, six months later, something even more bizarre happened. I was in my office, on Sunset, and got a phone call from another writer's agent. The call began very similarly to the call about "Superstorm": "I've got Leo's next movie." Now, that's not the interesting part. The interesting part was the way the call ended. Because this agent then told me, and I quote, "Don't tell anybody, but I have it on really good authority this is going to be the number one script on next year's Black List." (Laughter) Yeah. Suffice it to say, I was dumbfounded. Here was an agent, using the Black List, this thing that I had made anonymously and decided to never make again, to sell his client to me. To suggest that the script had merit, based solely on the possibility of being included on a list of beloved screenplays. After the call ended, I sat in my office, sort of staring out the window, alternating between shock and general giddiness. And then I realized that this thing that I had created had a lot more value than just me finding good screenplays to read over the holidays. And so I did it again the next year — and the "LA Times" had outed me as the person who had created it — and the year after that, and the year after that — I've done it every year since 2005. And the results have been fascinating, because, unapologetic lying aside, this agent was exactly right. This list was evidence, to many people, of a script's value, and that a great script had greater value that, I think, a lot of people had previously anticipated. Very quickly, the writers whose scripts were on that list started getting jobs, those scripts started getting made, and the scripts that got made were often the ones that violated the assumptions about what worked and what didn't. They were scripts like "Juno" and "Little Miss Sunshine" and "The Queen" and "The King's Speech" and "Spotlight." And yes, "Slumdog Millionaire." And even an upcoming movie about Michael Jackson's chimpanzee. Now, I think it's really important that I pause here for a second and say that I can't take credit for the success of any of those movies. I didn't write them, I didn't direct them, I didn't produce them, I didn't gaff them, I didn't make food and craft service — we all know how important that is. The credit for those movies, the credit for that success, goes to the people who made the films. What I did was change the way people looked at them. Accidentally, I asked if the conventional wisdom was correct. And certainly, there are movies on that list that would have gotten made without the Black List, but there are many that definitely would not have. And at a minimum, we've catalyzed a lot of them into production, and I think that's worth noting. There have been about 1,000 screenplays on the Black List since its inception in 2005. About 325 have been produced. They've been nominated for 300 Academy Awards, they've won 50. Four of the last nine Best Pictures have gone to scripts from the Black List, and 10 of the last 20 screenplay Oscars have gone to scripts from the Black List. All told, they've made about 25 billion dollars in worldwide box office, which means that hundreds of millions of people have seen these films when they leave their homes, and sit next to someone they don't know and the lights go down. And that's to say nothing of post-theatrical environments like DVD, streaming and, let's be honest, illegal downloads. Five years ago today, October 15, my business partner and I doubled down on this notion that screenwriting talent was not where we expected to find it, and we launched a website that would allow anybody on earth who had written an English-language screenplay to upload their script, have it evaluated, and make it available to thousands of film-industry professionals. And I'm pleased to say, in the five years since its launch, we've largely proved that thesis. Hundreds of writers from across the world have found representation, have had their work optioned or sold. Seven have even seen their films made in the last three years, including the film "Nightingale," the story of a war veteran's psychological decline, in which David Oyelowo's face is the only one on screen for the film's 90-minute duration. It was nominated for a Golden Globe and two Emmy Awards. It's also kind of cool that more than a dozen writers who were discovered on the website have ended up on this end-of-year annual list, including two of the last three number one writers. Simply put, the conventional wisdom about screenwriting merit — where it was and where it could be found, was wrong. And this is notable, because as I mentioned before, in the triage of finding movies to make and making them, there's a lot of relying on conventional wisdom. And that conventional wisdom, maybe, just maybe, might be wrong to even greater consequence. Films about black people don't sell overseas. Female-driven action movies don't work, because women will see themselves in men, but men won't see themselves in women. That no one wants to see movies about women over 40. That our onscreen heroes have to conform to a very narrow idea about beauty that we consider conventional. What does that mean when those images are projected 30 feet high and the lights go down, for a kid that looks like me in Columbus, Georgia? Or a Muslim girl in Cardiff, Wales? Or a gay kid in Chennai? What does it mean for how we see ourselves and how we see the world and for how the world sees us? We live in very strange times. And I think for the most part, we all live in a state of constant triage. There's just too much information, too much stuff to contend with. And so as a rule, we tend to default to conventional wisdom. And I think it's important that we ask ourselves, constantly, how much of that conventional wisdom is all convention and no wisdom? And at what cost? Thank you. (Applause) |
How big is infinity? | null | TED-Ed | When I was in fourth grade, my teacher said to us one day: "There are as many even numbers as there are numbers." "Really?", I thought. Well, yeah, there are infinitely many of both, so I suppose there are the same number of them. But even numbers are only part of the whole numbers, all the odd numbers are left over, so there's got to be more whole numbers than even numbers, right? To see what my teacher was getting at, let's first think about what it means for two sets to be the same size. What do I mean when I say I have the same number of fingers on my right hand as I do on left hand? Of course, I have five fingers on each, but it's actually simpler than that. I don't have to count, I only need to see that I can match them up, one to one. In fact, we think that some ancient people who spoke languages that didn't have words for numbers greater than three used this sort of magic. For instance, if you let your sheep out of a pen to graze, you can keep track of how many went out by setting aside a stone for each one, and putting those stones back one by one when the sheep return, so you know if any are missing without really counting. As another example of matching being more fundamental than counting, if I'm speaking to a packed auditorium, where every seat is taken and no one is standing, I know that there are the same number of chairs as people in the audience, even though I don't know how many there are of either. So, what we really mean when we say that two sets are the same size is that the elements in those sets can be matched up one by one in some way. My fourth grade teacher showed us the whole numbers laid out in a row, and below each we have its double. As you can see, the bottom row contains all the even numbers, and we have a one-to-one match. That is, there are as many even numbers as there are numbers. But what still bothers us is our distress over the fact that even numbers seem to be only part of the whole numbers. But does this convince you that I don't have the same number of fingers on my right hand as I do on my left? Of course not. It doesn't matter if you try to match the elements in some way and it doesn't work, that doesn't convince us of anything. If you can find one way in which the elements of two sets do match up, then we say those two sets have the same number of elements. Can you make a list of all the fractions? This might be hard, there are a lot of fractions! And it's not obvious what to put first, or how to be sure all of them are on the list. Nevertheless, there is a very clever way that we can make a list of all the fractions. This was first done by Georg Cantor, in the late eighteen hundreds. First, we put all the fractions into a grid. They're all there. For instance, you can find, say, 117/243, in the 117th row and 243rd column. Now we make a list out of this by starting at the upper left and sweeping back and forth diagonally, skipping over any fraction, like 2/2, that represents the same number as one the we've already picked. We get a list of all the fractions, which means we've created a one-to-one match between the whole numbers and the fractions, despite the fact that we thought maybe there ought to be more fractions. OK, here's where it gets really interesting. You may know that not all real numbers — that is, not all the numbers on a number line — are fractions. The square root of two and pi, for instance. Any number like this is called irrational. Not because it's crazy, or anything, but because the fractions are ratios of whole numbers, and so are called rationals; meaning the rest are non-rational, that is, irrational. Irrationals are represented by infinite, non-repeating decimals. So, can we make a one-to-one match between the whole numbers and the set of all the decimals, both the rationals and the irrationals? That is, can we make a list of all the decimal numbers? Cantor showed that you can't. Not merely that we don't know how, but that it can't be done. Look, suppose you claim you have made a list of all the decimals. I'm going to show you that you didn't succeed, by producing a decimal that is not on your list. I'll construct my decimal one place at a time. For the first decimal place of my number, I'll look at the first decimal place of your first number. If it's a one, I'll make mine a two; otherwise I'll make mine a one. For the second place of my number, I'll look at the second place of your second number. Again, if yours is a one, I'll make mine a two, and otherwise I'll make mine a one. See how this is going? The decimal I've produced can't be on your list. Why? Could it be, say, your 143rd number? No, because the 143rd place of my decimal is different from the 143rd place of your 143rd number. I made it that way. Your list is incomplete. It doesn't contain my decimal number. And, no matter what list you give me, I can do the same thing, and produce a decimal that's not on that list. So we're faced with this astounding conclusion: The decimal numbers cannot be put on a list. They represent a bigger infinity that the infinity of whole numbers. So, even though we're familiar with only a few irrationals, like square root of two and pi, the infinity of irrationals is actually greater than the infinity of fractions. Someone once said that the rationals — the fractions — are like the stars in the night sky. The irrationals are like the blackness. Cantor also showed that, for any infinite set, forming a new set made of all the subsets of the original set represents a bigger infinity than that original set. This means that, once you have one infinity, you can always make a bigger one by making the set of all subsets of that first set. And then an even bigger one by making the set of all the subsets of that one. And so on. And so, there are an infinite number of infinities of different sizes. If these ideas make you uncomfortable, you are not alone. Some of the greatest mathematicians of Cantor's day were very upset with this stuff. They tried to make these different infinities irrelevant, to make mathematics work without them somehow. Cantor was even vilified personally, and it got so bad for him that he suffered severe depression, and spent the last half of his life in and out of mental institutions. But eventually, his ideas won out. Today, they're considered fundamental and magnificent. All research mathematicians accept these ideas, every college math major learns them, and I've explained them to you in a few minutes. Some day, perhaps, they'll be common knowledge. There's more. We just pointed out that the set of decimal numbers — that is, the real numbers — is a bigger infinity than the set of whole numbers. Cantor wondered whether there are infinities of different sizes between these two infinities. He didn't believe there were, but couldn't prove it. Cantor's conjecture became known as the continuum hypothesis. In 1900, the great mathematician David Hilbert listed the continuum hypothesis as the most important unsolved problem in mathematics. The 20th century saw a resolution of this problem, but in a completely unexpected, paradigm-shattering way. In the 1920s, Kurt Gödel showed that you can never prove that the continuum hypothesis is false. Then, in the 1960s, Paul J. Cohen showed that you can never prove that the continuum hypothesis is true. Taken together, these results mean that there are unanswerable questions in mathematics. A very stunning conclusion. Mathematics is rightly considered the pinnacle of human reasoning, but we now know that even mathematics has its limitations. Still, mathematics has some truly amazing things for us to think about. |
The global goals we've made progress on -- and the ones we haven't | {0: 'Michael Green is part of the team that has created the Social Progress Index, a standard to rank societies based on how they meet the needs of citizens.'} | We the Future | In 2015, the leaders of the world made a big promise. A promise that over the next 15 years, the lives of billions of people are going to get better with no one left behind. That promise is the Sustainable Development Goals — the SDGs. We're now three years in; a fifth of the way into the journey. The clock is ticking. If we offtrack now, it's going to get harder and harder to hit those goals. So what I want to do for you today is give you a snapshot on where we are today, some projections on where we're heading and some ideas on things we might need to do differently. Now, the SDGs are of course spectacularly complicated. I would expect nothing less from the United Nations. (Laughter) How many goals? Maybe something tried and tested, like three, seven or 10. No, let's pick a prime number higher than 10. Seventeen goals. I congratulate those of you who've memorized them already. For the rest of us, here they are. Seventeen goals ranging from ending poverty to inclusive cities to sustainable fisheries; all a comprehensive plan for the future of our world. But sadly, a plan without the data to measure it. So how are we going to track progress? Well, I'm going to use today the Social Progress Index. It's a measure of the quality of life of countries, ranging from the basic needs of survival — food, water, shelter, safety — through to the foundations of well-being — education, information, health and the environment — and opportunity — rights, freedom of choice, inclusiveness and access to higher education. Now, the Social Progress Index doesn't look like the SDGs, but fundamentally, it's measuring the same concepts, and the Social Progress Index has the advantage that we have the data. We have 51 indicators drawn from trusted sources to measure these concepts. And also, what we can do because it's an index, is add together all those indicators to give us an aggregate score about how we're performing against the total package of the SDGs. Now, one caveat. The Social Progress Index is a measure of quality of life. We're not looking at whether this can be achieved within the planet's environmental limits. You will need other tools to do that. So how are we doing on the SDGs? Well, I'm going to put the SDGs on a scale of zero to 100. And zero is the absolute worst score on each of those 51 indicators: absolute social progress, zero. And then 100 is the minimum standard required to achieve those SDGs. A hundred is where we want to get to by 2030. So, where did we start on this journey? Fortunately, not at zero. In 2015, the world score against the SDGs was 69.1. Some way on the way there but quite a long way to go. Now let me also emphasize that this world forecast, which is based on data from 180 countries, is population weighted. So China has more weight in than Comoros; India has more weight in than Iceland. But we could unpack this and see how the countries are doing. And the country today that is closest to achieving the SDGs is Denmark. And the country with the furthest to go is Central African Republic. And everyone else is somewhere in between. So the challenge for the SDGs is to try and sweep all these dots across to the right, to 100 by 2030. Can we get there? Well, with the Social Progress Index, we've got some time series data. So we have some idea of the trend that the countries are on, on which we can build some projections. So let's have a look. Let's start with our top-performing country, Denmark. And yes, I'm pleased to say that Denmark is forecast to achieve the SDGs by 2030. Maybe not surprising, but I'll take a win. Let's look at some of the other richer countries of the world — the G7. And we find that Germany and Japan will get there or thereabouts. But Canada, France, the UK and Italy are all going to fall short. And the United States? Quite some way back. Now, this is sort of worrying news. But these are the richest countries in the world, not the most populous. So let's take a look now at the biggest countries in the world, the ones that will most affect whether or not we achieve the SDGs. And here they are — countries in the world with a population of higher than 100 million, ranging from China to Ethiopia. Obviously, the US and Japan would be in that list, but we've looked at them already. So here we are. The biggest countries in the world; the dealbreakers for the SDGs. And the country that's going to make most progress towards the SDGs is Mexico. Mexico is going to get to about 87, so just shy of where the US is going to get but quite some way off our SDG target. Russia comes next. Then China and Indonesia. Then Brazil — might've expected Brazil to do a bit better. Philippines, and then a step down to India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, and then Ethiopia. So none of these countries are going to hit the SDGs. And we can then take these numbers in all the countries of the world to give ourselves a world forecast on achieving that total package of the SDGs. So remember, in 2015 we started at 69.1. I'm pleased to say that over the last three years, we have made some progress. In 2018, we've hit 70.5, and if we project that rate of progress forward to 2030, that's going to get us to 75.2, which is obviously a long way short of our target. Indeed, on current trends, we won't hit the 2030 targets until 2094. Now, I don't know about you, but I certainly don't want to wait that long. So what can we do about this? Well, the first thing to do is we've got to call out the rich countries. Here are the countries closest to the SDGs, with the greatest resources, and they're falling short. Maybe they think that this is like the Old World where goals for the UN are just for poor countries and not for them. Well, you're wrong. The SDGs are for every country, and it's shameful that these wealthy countries are falling short. Every country needs a plan to implement the SDGs and deliver them for their citizens. G7, other rich countries — get your act together. The second thing we can do is look a bit further into the data and see where there are opportunities to accelerate progress or there are negative trends that we can reverse. So I'm going to take you into three areas. One where we're doing quite well, one where we really should be doing better and another where we've got some real problems. Let's start with the good news, and I want to talk about what we call nutrition and basic medical care. This covers SDG 2 on no hunger and the basic elements of SDG 3 on health, so maternal and child mortality, infectious diseases, etc ... This is an area where most of the rich world has hit the SDGs. And we also find, looking at our big countries, that the most advanced have got pretty close. Here are our 11 big countries, and if you look at the top, Brazil and Russia are pretty close to the SDG target. But at the bottom — Ethiopia, Pakistan — a long way to go. That's where we are in 2018. What's our trajectory? On the current trajectory, how far are we going to get by 2030? Well, let's have a look. Well, what we see is a lot of progress. See Bangladesh in the middle. If Bangladesh maintains its current rate of progress, it could get very close to that SDG target. And Ethiopia at the bottom is making a huge amount of progress at the moment. If that can be maintained, Ethiopia could get a long way. We add this all up for all the countries of the world and our projection is a score of 94.5 by 2030. And if countries like the Philippines, which have grown more slowly, could accelerate progress, then we could get a lot closer. So there are reasons to be optimistic about SDGs 2 and 3. But there's another very basic area of the SDGs where we're doing less well, which is SDG 6, on water and sanitation. Again, it's an SDG where most of the rich countries have already achieved the targets. And again, for our big countries — our big 11 emerging countries, we see that some of the countries, like Russia and Mexico, are very close to the target, but Nigeria and other countries are a very long way back. So how are we doing on this target? What progress are we going to make over the next 12 years based on the current direction of travel? Well, here we go ... and yes, there is some progress. Our top four countries are all hitting the SDG targets — some are moving forward quite quickly. But it's not enough to really move us forward significantly. What we see is that for the world as a whole, we're forecasting a score of around 85, 86 by 2030 — not fast enough. Now, obviously this is not good news, but I think what this data also shows is that we could be doing a lot better. Water and sanitation is a solved problem. It's about scaling that solution everywhere. So if we could accelerate progress in some of those countries who are improving more slowly — Nigeria, the Philippines, etc. — then we could get a lot closer to the goal. Indeed, I think SDG 6 is probably the biggest opportunity of all the SDGs for a step change. So that's an area we could do better. Let's look finally at an area where we are struggling, which is what we call personal rights and inclusiveness. This is covering concepts across a range of SDGs. SDG 1 on poverty, SDG 5 on gender equality, SDG 10 on inequality, SDG 11 on inclusive cities and SDG 16 on peace and justice. So across those SDGs there are themes around rights and inclusiveness, and those may seem less immediate or pressing than things like hunger and disease, but rights and inclusion are critical to an agenda of no one left behind. So how are we doing on those issues? Let's start off with personal rights. What I'm going to do first is show you our big countries in 2015. So here they are, and I've put the USA and Japan back in, so it's our 13 biggest countries in the world. And we see a wide range of scores. The United States at the top with Japan hitting the goals; China a long way behind. So what's been our direction of travel on the rights agenda over the last three years? Let's have a look. Well, what we see is actually pretty ugly. The majority of the countries are standing still or moving backwards, and big countries like Brazil, India, China, Bangladesh have all seen significant declines. This is worrying. Let's have a look now at inclusiveness. And inclusiveness is looking at things like violence and discrimination against minorities, gender equity, LGBT inclusion, etc... And as a result, we see that the scores for our big countries are generally lower. Every country, rich and poor alike, is struggling with building an inclusive society. But what's our direction of travel? Are we building more inclusive countries? Let's have a look — progress to 2018. And again we see the world moving backwards: most countries static, a lot of countries going backwards — Bangladesh moving backwards — but also, two of the countries that were leading — Brazil and the United States — have gone backwards significantly over the last three years. Let's sum this up now for the world as a whole. And what we see on personal rights for the whole world is we're forecasting actually a decline in the score on personal rights to about 60, and then this decline in the score of inclusiveness to about 42. Now, obviously these things can change quite quickly with rights and with changes in law, changes in attitudes, but we have to accept that on current trends, this is probably the most worrying aspect of the SDGs. How I've depressed you ... (Laughter) I hope not because I think what we do see is that progress is happening in a lot of places and there are opportunities for accelerating progress. We are living in a world that is tantalizingly close to ensuring that no one need die of hunger or malaria or diarrhea. If we can focus our efforts, mobilize resources, galvanize the political will, that step change is possible. But in focusing on those really basic, solvable SDGs, we mustn't forget the whole package. The goals are an unwieldy set of indicators, goals and targets, but they also include the challenges our world faces. The fact that the SDGs are focusing attention on the fact that we face a crisis in personal rights and inclusiveness is a positive. If we forget that, if we choose to double down on the SDGs that we can solve, if we go for SDG à la carte and pick the most easy SDGs, then we will have missed the point of the SDGs, we will miss the goals and we will have failed on the promise of the SDGs. Thank you. (Applause) |
Can you solve the secret werewolf riddle? | null | TED-Ed | You’re on the trail of a werewolf that’s been terrorizing your town. After months of detective work, you’ve narrowed your suspects to one of five people: the mayor, the tailor, the baker, the grocer, or the carpenter. You’ve invited them to dinner with a simple plan: you’ll slip a square of a rare werewolf antidote into each of their dinners. Unfortunately, your pet goat just ate four of the squares, and you only have one left. Luckily, the remaining square is 50 grams, and the minimum effective dose is 10 grams. If you can precisely divide the square into fifths you’ll have just enough antidote for everyone. You’ll have to use a laser-cutting tool to cut up the square; every other means available to you isn’t precise enough. There are 8 points that can act as starting or ending points for each cut. To use the device, you’ll have to input pairs of points that tell the laser where to begin and end each cut, and then the laser executes all the cuts simultaneously. It’s okay to cut the square into as many pieces as you want, as long as you can group them into 10 gram portions. But you can’t fold the square or alter it otherwise, and you only get one shot at using the laser cutter. The full moon is rising, and in a moment someone will transform and tear you all apart unless you can cure them first. How can you divide the antidote into perfect fifths, cure the secret werewolf, and save everyone? Pause the video now if you want to figure it out for yourself. Answer in 3 Answer in 2 Answer in 1 When it comes to puzzles that involve cutting and rearranging, it’s often helpful to actually take a piece of paper and try cutting it up to see what you can get. If we cut BF and DH we’d get fourths, but we need fifths. Maybe there’s a way to shave a bit off of a quarter to get exactly one fifth. Cutting BE looks good at first, but that last cut takes a off a quarter of a quarter, leaving us with a portion of 3/16: just smaller than a fifth, and not enough to cure a werewolf. What if we started with BE instead? That would also give us a quarter. And is there a way to shave just a bit more off? Both DG and CH look promising. If we make one more cut, from A to F, we may start to notice something. With these four cuts—from B to E, D to G, F to A, and H to C—we’ve got four triangles and a square in the middle. But the pieces that make each triangle can also be rearranged to make a square identical to the middle one. This means that we’ve split the antidote into perfect fifths! What’s interesting about this sort of problem is that while it’s possible to solve it by starting from the geometry, it’s actually easier to start experimenting and see where that gets you. That wouldn’t be as viable if the square had, say, 24 cut points, but with just 8 there are only so many reasonable options. You secretly dose each of the townspeople as the full moon emerges in the sky. And just as you do, a terrible transformation begins. Then, just as suddenly, it reverses. Your measurements were perfect, and the people and animals of the town can rest a little easier. |
The case for a decentralized internet | {0: 'Tamas Kocsis is a self-taught web developer who was always obsessed by new technologies.'} | TED Salon Samsung | Three years ago, I started building a decentralized web because I was worried about the future of our internet. The current internet we are using is about gatekeepers. If you want to reach something on the web, then you need to go through multiple middlemen. First, a domain name server, then a server hosting company, which usually points you to a third party, to a web hosting service. And this happens every time you want to reach a website on the web. But these gatekeepers are vulnerable to internet attacks and also makes the censorship and the surveillance easier. And the situation is getting worse. Everything is moving to the cloud, where the data is hosted by giant corporations. This move creates much, much more powerful middlemen. Now, move to the cloud makes sense because this way it's easier and cheaper for the developers and the service operators. They don't have to worry about maintaining the physical servers. I can't blame them, but I found this trend to be very dangerous, because this way, these giant corporations have unlimited control over the hosting services. And it's very easy to abuse this power. For example, last year, a CEO of a company that acts as a gatekeeper for nine million websites decided, after some public pressure, that one of the sites it manages, a far right page, should be blocked. He then sent an internal email to his coworkers. "This was an arbitrary decision. I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet." Even he admits, "No one should have this power." As a response, one of the employees asked him, "Is this the day the Internet dies?" I don't think we are actually killing the internet, but I do think that we are in the middle of a kind of irresponsible centralization process that makes our internet more fragile. The decentralized, people-to-people web solves this problem by removing the central points, the web-hosting services. It empowers the users to have host sites they want to preserve. On this network, the sites get downloaded directly from other visitors. This means, if you have a site with 100 visitors, then it's hosted [by] 100 computers around the world. Basically, this is a people-powered version of the internet. The security of the network is provided by public-key cryptography. This makes sure that no one can modify the sites but only the real owner. Think of it like instead of getting electricity from big power plants, you put solar panels on top of your house, and if your neighbor down the street needs some extra energy, then they can just download some from your house. So by using the decentralized web, we can help to keep content accessible for other visitors. And by that, it means that we can also fight against things that we feel are unjust, like censorship. In China, the internet is tightly controlled. They can't criticize the government, organize a protest, and it's also forbidden to post a kind of emoticon to remember the victims of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. With the decentralized web, it's not the government that decides what gets seen and what doesn't. It's the people, which makes the web more democratic. But at the same time, it's hard to use this network to do something that is clearly illegal everywhere in the world, as the users probably don't want to endanger themselves hosting these kinds of problematic content. Another increasing threat to internet freedom is overregulation. I have the impression that our delegates who vote on the internet regulation laws are not fully aware of their decisions. For example, the European Parliament has a new law on the table, a new copyright protection law, that has a part called Article 13. If it passes, it would require every big website to implement a filter that automatically blocks content based on rules controlled by big corporations. The original idea is to protect copyrighted materials, but it would endanger many other things we do on the internet: blogging, criticizing, discussing, linking and sharing. Google and YouTube already have similar systems and they are receiving 100,000 takedown requests every hour. Of course, they can't process this amount of data by hand, so they are using machine learning to decide if it's really a copyright violation or not. But these filters do make mistakes. They're removing everything from documentation of human rights abuses, lectures about copyrights and search results that point to criticism of this new Article 13. Beside of that, they are also removing many other things. And sometimes, these filters aren't just removing the specific content, but it could also lead to loss of your linked accounts: your email address, your documents, your photos, or your unfinished book, which happened with the writer Dennis Cooper. It's not hard to see how a system like this could be abused by politicians and corporate competitors. This Article 13, the extension of these automated filters to the whole internet, got strong opposition from Wikipedia, Github, Mozilla, and many others, including the original founders of the internet and the World Wide Web, Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee. But despite this strong opposition, on the last European Parliament vote, two thirds of the representatives supported this law. The final vote will be early 2019. The result is important, but whatever happens, I'm pretty sure it will be followed by many other similar proposals around the world. These kinds of regulations would be very hard to enforce through a decentralized web, as there is no hosting companies. The websites are served by the visitors themselves. I started to build this network three years ago. Since then, I've spent thousands, tens of thousands of hours on the development. Why? Why would anyone spend thousands of hours on something anyone can freely copy, rename, or even sell? Well, in my case, one of the reasons was to do something meaningful. During my daily regular job as a web developer, I didn't have the feeling that I'm working on something that had a chance to be a bigger than me. Simply, I just wanted to make my short presence in this world to be meaningful. Last year, the Great Firewall of China started blocking this network I created. This move officially made me the enemy of the government-supported internet censorship. Since then, it's been really a game of cat and mouse. They make new rules in the firewall and I try to react to it as fast as I can so the users can keep hosting content and create websites that otherwise would be censored by the centralized Chinese internet. My other motivation to create this network was worry. I fear that the future of our internet is out of our control. The increasing centralization and the proposed laws are threatening our freedom of speech and, by that, our democracy. So for me, building a decentralized web means creating a safe harbor, a space where the rules are not written by big corporations and political parties, but by the people. Thank you. (Applause) |
How folding paper can get you to the moon | null | TED-Ed | How many times can you fold a piece of paper? Assume that one had a piece of paper that was very fine, like the kind they typically use to print the Bible. In reality, it seems like a piece of silk. To qualify these ideas, let's say you have a paper that's one-thousandth of a centimeter in thickness. That is 10 to the power of minus three centimeters, which equals .001 centimeters. Let's also assume that you have a big piece of paper, like a page out of the newspaper. Now we begin to fold it in half. How many times do you think it could be folded like that? And another question: If you could fold the paper over and over, as many times as you wish, say 30 times, what would you imagine the thickness of the paper would be then? Before you move on, I encourage you to actually think about a possible answer to this question. OK. After we have folded the paper once, it is now two thousandths of a centimeter in thickness. If we fold it in half once again, the paper will become four thousandths of a centimeter. With every fold we make, the paper doubles in thickness. And if we continue to fold it again and again, always in half, we would confront the following situation after 10 folds. Two to the power of 10, meaning that you multiply two by itself 10 times, is one thousand and 24 thousandths of a centimeter, which is a little bit over one centimeter. Assume we continue folding the paper in half. What will happen then? If we fold it 17 times, we'll get a thickness of two to the power of 17, which is 131 centimeters, and that equals just over four feet. If we were able to fold it 25 times, then we would get two to the power of 25, which is 33,554 centimeters, just over 1,100 feet. That would make it almost as tall as the Empire State Building. It's worthwhile to stop here and reflect for a moment. Folding a paper in half, even a paper as fine as that of the Bible, 25 times would give us a paper almost a quarter of a mile. What do we learn? This type of growth is called exponential growth, and as you see, just by folding a paper we can go very far, but very fast too. Summarizing, if we fold a paper 25 times, the thickness is almost a quarter of a mile. 30 times, the thickness reaches 6.5 miles, which is about the average height that planes fly. 40 times, the thickness is nearly 7,000 miles, or the average GPS satellite's orbit. 48 times, the thickness is way over one million miles. Now, if you think that the distance between the Earth and the Moon is less than 250,000 miles, then starting with a piece of Bible paper and folding it 45 times, we get to the Moon. And if we double it one more time, we get back to Earth. |
What to trust in a "post-truth" world | {0: 'Alex Edmans uses rigorous academic research to influence real-life business practices -- in particular, how companies can pursue purpose as well as profit.'} | TEDxLondonBusinessSchool | Belle Gibson was a happy young Australian. She lived in Perth, and she loved skateboarding. But in 2009, Belle learned that she had brain cancer and four months to live. Two months of chemo and radiotherapy had no effect. But Belle was determined. She'd been a fighter her whole life. From age six, she had to cook for her brother, who had autism, and her mother, who had multiple sclerosis. Her father was out of the picture. So Belle fought, with exercise, with meditation and by ditching meat for fruit and vegetables. And she made a complete recovery. Belle's story went viral. It was tweeted, blogged about, shared and reached millions of people. It showed the benefits of shunning traditional medicine for diet and exercise. In August 2013, Belle launched a healthy eating app, The Whole Pantry, downloaded 200,000 times in the first month. But Belle's story was a lie. Belle never had cancer. People shared her story without ever checking if it was true. This is a classic example of confirmation bias. We accept a story uncritically if it confirms what we'd like to be true. And we reject any story that contradicts it. How often do we see this in the stories that we share and we ignore? In politics, in business, in health advice. The Oxford Dictionary's word of 2016 was "post-truth." And the recognition that we now live in a post-truth world has led to a much needed emphasis on checking the facts. But the punch line of my talk is that just checking the facts is not enough. Even if Belle's story were true, it would be just as irrelevant. Why? Well, let's look at one of the most fundamental techniques in statistics. It's called Bayesian inference. And the very simple version is this: We care about "does the data support the theory?" Does the data increase our belief that the theory is true? But instead, we end up asking, "Is the data consistent with the theory?" But being consistent with the theory does not mean that the data supports the theory. Why? Because of a crucial but forgotten third term — the data could also be consistent with rival theories. But due to confirmation bias, we never consider the rival theories, because we're so protective of our own pet theory. Now, let's look at this for Belle's story. Well, we care about: Does Belle's story support the theory that diet cures cancer? But instead, we end up asking, "Is Belle's story consistent with diet curing cancer?" And the answer is yes. If diet did cure cancer, we'd see stories like Belle's. But even if diet did not cure cancer, we'd still see stories like Belle's. A single story in which a patient apparently self-cured just due to being misdiagnosed in the first place. Just like, even if smoking was bad for your health, you'd still see one smoker who lived until 100. (Laughter) Just like, even if education was good for your income, you'd still see one multimillionaire who didn't go to university. (Laughter) So the biggest problem with Belle's story is not that it was false. It's that it's only one story. There might be thousands of other stories where diet alone failed, but we never hear about them. We share the outlier cases because they are new, and therefore they are news. We never share the ordinary cases. They're too ordinary, they're what normally happens. And that's the true 99 percent that we ignore. Just like in society, you can't just listen to the one percent, the outliers, and ignore the 99 percent, the ordinary. Because that's the second example of confirmation bias. We accept a fact as data. The biggest problem is not that we live in a post-truth world; it's that we live in a post-data world. We prefer a single story to tons of data. Now, stories are powerful, they're vivid, they bring it to life. They tell you to start every talk with a story. I did. But a single story is meaningless and misleading unless it's backed up by large-scale data. But even if we had large-scale data, that might still not be enough. Because it could still be consistent with rival theories. Let me explain. A classic study by psychologist Peter Wason gives you a set of three numbers and asks you to think of the rule that generated them. So if you're given two, four, six, what's the rule? Well, most people would think, it's successive even numbers. How would you test it? Well, you'd propose other sets of successive even numbers: 4, 6, 8 or 12, 14, 16. And Peter would say these sets also work. But knowing that these sets also work, knowing that perhaps hundreds of sets of successive even numbers also work, tells you nothing. Because this is still consistent with rival theories. Perhaps the rule is any three even numbers. Or any three increasing numbers. And that's the third example of confirmation bias: accepting data as evidence, even if it's consistent with rival theories. Data is just a collection of facts. Evidence is data that supports one theory and rules out others. So the best way to support your theory is actually to try to disprove it, to play devil's advocate. So test something, like 4, 12, 26. If you got a yes to that, that would disprove your theory of successive even numbers. Yet this test is powerful, because if you got a no, it would rule out "any three even numbers" and "any three increasing numbers." It would rule out the rival theories, but not rule out yours. But most people are too afraid of testing the 4, 12, 26, because they don't want to get a yes and prove their pet theory to be wrong. Confirmation bias is not only about failing to search for new data, but it's also about misinterpreting data once you receive it. And this applies outside the lab to important, real-world problems. Indeed, Thomas Edison famously said, "I have not failed, I have found 10,000 ways that won't work." Finding out that you're wrong is the only way to find out what's right. Say you're a university admissions director and your theory is that only students with good grades from rich families do well. So you only let in such students. And they do well. But that's also consistent with the rival theory. Perhaps all students with good grades do well, rich or poor. But you never test that theory because you never let in poor students because you don't want to be proven wrong. So, what have we learned? A story is not fact, because it may not be true. A fact is not data, it may not be representative if it's only one data point. And data is not evidence — it may not be supportive if it's consistent with rival theories. So, what do you do? When you're at the inflection points of life, deciding on a strategy for your business, a parenting technique for your child or a regimen for your health, how do you ensure that you don't have a story but you have evidence? Let me give you three tips. The first is to actively seek other viewpoints. Read and listen to people you flagrantly disagree with. Ninety percent of what they say may be wrong, in your view. But what if 10 percent is right? As Aristotle said, "The mark of an educated man is the ability to entertain a thought without necessarily accepting it." Surround yourself with people who challenge you, and create a culture that actively encourages dissent. Some banks suffered from groupthink, where staff were too afraid to challenge management's lending decisions, contributing to the financial crisis. In a meeting, appoint someone to be devil's advocate against your pet idea. And don't just hear another viewpoint — listen to it, as well. As psychologist Stephen Covey said, "Listen with the intent to understand, not the intent to reply." A dissenting viewpoint is something to learn from not to argue against. Which takes us to the other forgotten terms in Bayesian inference. Because data allows you to learn, but learning is only relative to a starting point. If you started with complete certainty that your pet theory must be true, then your view won't change — regardless of what data you see. Only if you are truly open to the possibility of being wrong can you ever learn. As Leo Tolstoy wrote, "The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already. But the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already." Tip number two is "listen to experts." Now, that's perhaps the most unpopular advice that I could give you. (Laughter) British politician Michael Gove famously said that people in this country have had enough of experts. A recent poll showed that more people would trust their hairdresser — (Laughter) or the man on the street than they would leaders of businesses, the health service and even charities. So we respect a teeth-whitening formula discovered by a mom, or we listen to an actress's view on vaccination. We like people who tell it like it is, who go with their gut, and we call them authentic. But gut feel can only get you so far. Gut feel would tell you never to give water to a baby with diarrhea, because it would just flow out the other end. Expertise tells you otherwise. You'd never trust your surgery to the man on the street. You'd want an expert who spent years doing surgery and knows the best techniques. But that should apply to every major decision. Politics, business, health advice require expertise, just like surgery. So then, why are experts so mistrusted? Well, one reason is they're seen as out of touch. A millionaire CEO couldn't possibly speak for the man on the street. But true expertise is found on evidence. And evidence stands up for the man on the street and against the elites. Because evidence forces you to prove it. Evidence prevents the elites from imposing their own view without proof. A second reason why experts are not trusted is that different experts say different things. For every expert who claimed that leaving the EU would be bad for Britain, another expert claimed it would be good. Half of these so-called experts will be wrong. And I have to admit that most papers written by experts are wrong. Or at best, make claims that the evidence doesn't actually support. So we can't just take an expert's word for it. In November 2016, a study on executive pay hit national headlines. Even though none of the newspapers who covered the study had even seen the study. It wasn't even out yet. They just took the author's word for it, just like with Belle. Nor does it mean that we can just handpick any study that happens to support our viewpoint — that would, again, be confirmation bias. Nor does it mean that if seven studies show A and three show B, that A must be true. What matters is the quality, and not the quantity of expertise. So we should do two things. First, we should critically examine the credentials of the authors. Just like you'd critically examine the credentials of a potential surgeon. Are they truly experts in the matter, or do they have a vested interest? Second, we should pay particular attention to papers published in the top academic journals. Now, academics are often accused of being detached from the real world. But this detachment gives you years to spend on a study. To really nail down a result, to rule out those rival theories, and to distinguish correlation from causation. And academic journals involve peer review, where a paper is rigorously scrutinized (Laughter) by the world's leading minds. The better the journal, the higher the standard. The most elite journals reject 95 percent of papers. Now, academic evidence is not everything. Real-world experience is critical, also. And peer review is not perfect, mistakes are made. But it's better to go with something checked than something unchecked. If we latch onto a study because we like the findings, without considering who it's by or whether it's even been vetted, there is a massive chance that that study is misleading. And those of us who claim to be experts should recognize the limitations of our analysis. Very rarely is it possible to prove or predict something with certainty, yet it's so tempting to make a sweeping, unqualified statement. It's easier to turn into a headline or to be tweeted in 140 characters. But even evidence may not be proof. It may not be universal, it may not apply in every setting. So don't say, "Red wine causes longer life," when the evidence is only that red wine is correlated with longer life. And only then in people who exercise as well. Tip number three is "pause before sharing anything." The Hippocratic oath says, "First, do no harm." What we share is potentially contagious, so be very careful about what we spread. Our goal should not be to get likes or retweets. Otherwise, we only share the consensus; we don't challenge anyone's thinking. Otherwise, we only share what sounds good, regardless of whether it's evidence. Instead, we should ask the following: If it's a story, is it true? If it's true, is it backed up by large-scale evidence? If it is, who is it by, what are their credentials? Is it published, how rigorous is the journal? And ask yourself the million-dollar question: If the same study was written by the same authors with the same credentials but found the opposite results, would you still be willing to believe it and to share it? Treating any problem — a nation's economic problem or an individual's health problem, is difficult. So we must ensure that we have the very best evidence to guide us. Only if it's true can it be fact. Only if it's representative can it be data. Only if it's supportive can it be evidence. And only with evidence can we move from a post-truth world to a pro-truth world. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
My journey to thank all the people responsible for my morning coffee | {0: "Immersing himself in alternate lifestyles and hilarious experiments (usually with himself as the guinea pig), writer A.J. Jacobs tests the limits of behavior, customs, culture -- and reports back on the wisdom and practical knowledge he's gained."} | TED Salon Brightline Initiative | So, I don't like to boast, but I am very good at finding things to be annoyed about. It is a real specialty of mine. I can hear 100 compliments and a single insult, and what do I remember? The insult. And according to the research, I'm not alone. Unfortunately, the human brain is wired to focus on the negative. Now, this might have been helpful when we were cave people, trying to avoid predators, but now it's a terrible way to go through life. It is a real major component of anxiety and depression. So how can we fight the brain's negative bias? According to a lot of research, one of the best weapons is gratitude. So knowing this, I started a new tradition in our house a couple of years ago. Before a meal with my wife and kids, I would say a prayer of thanksgiving. Prayer is not quite the right word. I'm agnostic, so instead of thanking God, I would thank some of the people who helped make my food a reality. I'd say, "I'd like to thank the farmer who grew these tomatoes, and the trucker who drove these tomatoes to the store, and the cashier who rang these tomatoes up." And I thought it was going pretty well, this tradition. Then one day, my 10-year-old son said, "You know, Dad, those people aren't in our apartment. They can't hear you. If you really cared, you would go and thank them in person." And I thought, "Hmm. That's an interesting idea." (Laughter) Now I'm a writer, and for my books I like to go on adventures. Go on quests. So I decided I'm going to take my son up on his challenge. It seemed simple enough. And to make it even simpler, I decided to focus on just one item. An item I can't live without: my morning cup of coffee. Well, it turned out to be not so simple at all. (Laughter) This quest took me months. It took me around the world. Because I discovered that my coffee would not be possible without hundreds of people I take for granted. So I would thank the trucker who drove the coffee beans to the coffee shop. But he couldn't have done his job without the road. So I would thank the people who paved the road. (Laughter) And then I would thank the people who made the asphalt for the pavement. And I came to realize that my coffee, like so much else in the world, requires the combined work of a shocking number of people from all walks of life. Architects, biologists, designers, miners, goat herds, you name it. I decided to call my project "Thanks a Thousand." Because I ended up thanking over a thousand people. And it was overwhelming, but it was also wonderful. Because it allowed me to focus on the hundreds of things that go right every day, as opposed to the three or four that go wrong. And it reminded me of the astounding interconnectedness or our world. I learned dozens of lessons during this project, but let me just focus on five today. The first is: look up. I started my trail of gratitude by thanking the barista at my local coffee shop, Joe Coffee in New York. Her name is Chung, and Chung is one of the most upbeat people you will ever meet. Big smiler, enthusiastic hugger. But even for Chung, being a barista is hard. And that's because you are encountering people in a very dangerous state. (Laughter) You know what it is — precaffeination. (Laughter) So, Chung has had people yell at her until she cried, including a nine-year-old girl, who didn't like the whipped cream design that Chung did on her hot chocolate. So I thanked Chung, and she thanked me for thanking her. I cut it off there. I didn't want to go into an infinite thanking loop. (Laughter) But Chung said that the hardest part is when people don't even treat her like a human being. They treat her like a vending machine. So, they'll hand her their credit card without even looking up from their phone. And while she's saying this, I'm realizing I've done that. I've been that a-hole. And at that moment, I pledged: when dealing with people, I'm going to take those two seconds and look at them, make eye contact. Because it reminds you, you're dealing with a human being who has family and aspirations and embarrassing high school memories. And that little moment of connection is so important to both people's humanity and happiness. Alright, second lesson was: smell the roses. And the dirt. And the fertilizer. After Chung, I thanked this man. This is Ed Kaufmann. And Ed is the one who chooses which coffee they serve at my local coffee shop. He goes around the world, to South America, to Africa, finding the best coffee beans. So I thanked Ed. And in return, Ed showed me how to taste coffee like a pro. And it is quite a ritual. You take your spoon and you dip it in the coffee and then you take a big, loud slurp. Almost cartoonishly loud. This is because you want to spray the coffee all over your mouth. You have taste buds in the side of your cheeks, in the roof of your mouth, you've got to get them all. So Ed would do this and he would — his face would light up and he would say, "This coffee tastes of Honeycrisp apple and notes of soil and maple syrup." And I would take a sip and I'd say, "I'm picking up coffee. (Laughter) It tastes to me like coffee." (Laughter) But inspired by Ed, I decided to really let the coffee sit on my tongue for five seconds — we're all busy, but I could spare five seconds, and really think about the texture and the acidity and the sweetness. And I started to do it with other foods. And this idea of savoring is so important to gratitude. Psychologists talk about how gratitude is about taking a moment and holding on to it as long as possible. And slowing down time. So that life doesn't go by in one big blur, as it often does. Number three is: find the hidden masterpieces all around you. Now, one of my favorite conversations during this year was with the guy who invented my coffee cup lid. And until this point, I had given approximately zero thought to coffee cup lids. But I loved talking to this inventor, Doug Fleming, because he was so passionate. And the blood and sweat and tears he put into this lid, and that I had never even considered. He says a bad lid can ruin your coffee. That it can block the aroma, which is so important to the experience. So he — he's very innovative. He's like the Elon Musk of coffee lids. (Laughter) So he designed this lid that's got an upside-down hexagon so you can get your nose right in there and get maximum aroma. And so I was delighted talking to him, and it made me realize there are hundreds of masterpieces all around us that we totally take for granted. Like the on-off switch on my desk lamp has a little indentation for my thumb that perfectly fits my thumb. And when something is done well, the process behind it is largely invisible. But paying attention to it can tap into that sense of wonder and enrich our lives. Number four is: fake it till you feel it. By the end of the project, I was just in a thanking frenzy. So I was — I would get up and spend a couple hours, I'd write emails, send notes, make phone calls, visit people to thank them for their role in my coffee. And some of them, quite honestly — not that into it. They would be like, "What is this? Is this a pyramid scheme, what do you want, what are you selling?" But most people were surprisingly moved. I remember, I called the woman who does the pest control for the warehouse where my coffee is served — I'm sorry — where my coffee is stored. And I said, "This may sound strange, but I want to thank you for keeping the bugs out of my coffee." And she said, "Well, that does sound strange, but you just made my day." And it was like an anti-crank phone call. And it didn't just affect her, it affected me. Because I would wake up every morning in my default mood, which is grumpiness, but I would force myself to write a thank-you note and then another and then another. And what I found was that if you act as if you're grateful, you eventually become grateful for real. The power of our actions to change our mind is astounding. So, often we think that thought changes behavior, but behavior very often changes our thought. And finally, the last lesson I want to tell you about is: practice six degrees of gratitude. And every place, every stop on this gratitude trail would give birth to 100 other people that I could thank. So I went down to Colombia to thank the farmers who grow my coffee beans. And it was in a small mountain town, and I was driven there along these curvy, cliffside roads. And every time we went around a hairpin turn the driver would do the sign of the cross. And I was like, "Thank you for that. (Laughter) But can you do that while keeping your hands on the wheel? Because I am terrified." But we made it. And I met the farmers, the Guarnizo brothers. It's a small farm, they make great coffee, they're paid above fair-trade prices for it. And they showed me how the coffee is grown. The bean is actually inside this fruit called the coffee cherry. And I thanked them. And they said, "Well, we couldn't do our job without 100 other people." The machine that depulps the fruit is made in Brazil, and the pickup truck they drive around the farm, that is made from parts from all over the world. In fact, the US exports steel to Colombia. So I went to Indiana, and I thanked the steel makers. And it just drove home that it doesn't take a village to make a cup of coffee. It takes the world to make a cup of coffee. And this global economy, this globalization, it does have downsides. But I believe the long-term upsides are far greater, that progress is real. We have made improvements in the last 50 years, poverty worldwide has gone down. And that we should resist the temptation to retreat into our silos. And we should resist this upsurge in isolationism and jingoism. Which brings me to my final point. Which is my hope that we use gratitude as a spark to action. Some people worry that gratitude has a downside. That we'll be so grateful, that we'll be complacent. We'll be so, "Oh, everything's wonderful, I'm so grateful." Well, it turns out, the opposite is true. The research shows that the more grateful you are, the more likely you are to help others. When you're in a bad state, you're often more focused on your own needs. But gratitude makes you want to pay it forward. And I experienced this personally. I mean, I'm not Mother Teresa, I'm still a selfish bastard a huge amount of the time. But I'm better than I was before this project. And that's because it made me aware of the exploitation on the supply chain. It reminded me that what I take for granted is not available to millions of people around the world. Like water. Coffee is 98.8 percent water. So I figured I should go and thank the people at the New York reservoir, hundreds of them, who provide me water, and this miracle that I can turn a lever and get safe water. And that millions of people around the world don't have this luxury and have to walk hours to get safe water. It inspired me to see what I could do to help people get more access, and I did research and found a wonderful group called Dispensers for Safe Water. And I got involved. And I'm not expecting the Nobel Prize committee to knock down my door, but it's a baby step, it's a little something. And it's all because of gratitude. And it's why I encourage people, friends, family, to follow gratitude trails of their own. Because it's a life-transforming experience. And it doesn't have to be coffee. It could be anything. It could be a pair of socks, it could be a light bulb. And you don't have to go around the world, you can just do a little gesture, like make eye contact or send a note to the designer of a logo you love. It's more about a mindset. Being aware of the thousands of people involved in every little thing we do. Remembering that there's someone in a factory who made the fabric for the chairs you're sitting in right now. That someone went into a mine and got the copper for this microphone so that I could say my final thank you, which is to thank you. Thank you a thousand for listening to my story. (Applause) (Cheering) |
History vs. Henry VIII | null | TED-Ed | He was a powerful king whose break with the church of Rome would forever change the course of English history. But was he a charismatic reformer or a bullying tyrant? Find out on History versus Henry VIII. Judge: Order, order. Now, who do we have here? Looks like quite the dashing fellow. Defense: Indeed, your honour. This is Henry VIII, the acclaimed king who reformed England's religion and government and set it on course to becoming a modern nation. Prosecutor: I beg to differ. This is a cruel, impulsive, and extravagant king who had as little regard for his people as he did for his six wives. Judge: Six wives? Defense: Your honor, Henry's first marriage was arranged for him when he was only a child. He only married Catherine of Aragon to strengthen England’s alliance with Spain. Prosecutor: An alliance he was willing to toss aside with no regard for the nation. Defense: Henry had every regard for the nation. It was imperative to secure the Tudor dynasty by producing a male heir – something Catherine failed to do in over twenty years of marriage. Prosecutor: It takes two to make an heir, your honor. Defense: Ahem. Regardless, England needed a new queen to ensure stability, but the Pope refused to annul the union and let the king remarry. Judge: Sounds like quite a pickle. Can’t argue with the Pope. Prosecutor: And yet that’s exactly what the king decided to do. He uprooted the country’s religious foundations and broke the Church of England away from Rome, leading to centuries of strife. Defense: All Henry did was give the Church honest domestic leadership. He freed his subjects from the corrupt Roman Catholic establishment. And by rejecting the more radical changes of the Protestant reformation, he allowed his people to preserve most of their religious traditions. Prosecutor: Objection! The Church had been a beloved and popular institution that brought comfort and charity to the masses. Thanks to Henry, church property was seized; hospitals closed, and precious monastic libraries lost forever, all to enrich the Crown. Defense: Some of the funds were used to build new cathedrals and open secular schools. And it was necessary for England to bring its affairs under its own control rather than Rome’s. Prosecutor: You mean under Henry’s control. Defense: Not true. All of the king’s major reforms went through Parliament. No other country of the time allowed its people such a say in government. Prosecutor: He used Parliament as a rubber stamp for his own personal will. Meanwhile he ruled like a tyrant, executing those he suspected of disloyalty. Among his victims were the great statesman and philosopher Thomas More – once his close friend and advisor – and Anne Boleyn, the new queen Henry had torn the country apart to marry. Judge: He executed his own wife? Defense: That…wasn’t King Henry’s initiative. She was accused of treason in a power struggle with the King’s minister, Thomas Cromwell. Prosecutor: The trial was a sham and she wouldn’t have been convicted without Henry’s approval. Besides, he wasn’t too upset by the outcome - he married Jane Seymour just 11 days later! Defense: A marriage that, I note, succeeded in producing a male heir and guaranteeing a stable succession… though the new queen tragically died in childbirth. Prosecutor: This tragedy didn’t deter him from an ill conceived fourth marriage to Anne of Cleves, which Henry then annulled on a whim and used as an excuse to execute Cromwell. As if that weren’t enough, he then married Catherine Howard – a cousin of Anne Boleyn – before having her executed too. Defense: She was engaged in adultery to which she confessed! Regardless, Henry’s final marriage to Catherine Parr was actually very successful. Prosecutor: His sixth! It only goes to show he was an intemperate king who allowed faction and intrigue to rule his court, concerned only with his own pleasure and grandiosity. Defense: That grandiosity was part of the king’s role as a model for his people. He was a learned scholar and musician who generously patronized the arts, as well as being an imposing warrior and sportsman. And the lavish tournaments he hosted enhanced England’s reputation on the world stage. Prosecutor: And yet both his foreign and domestic policies were a disaster. His campaigns in France and his brutal invasion of Scotland drained the treasury, and his attempt to pay for it by debasing the coinage led to constant inflation. The lords and landowners responded by removing access to common pastures and turning the peasant population into beggars. Defense: Beggars who would soon become yeomen farmers. The enclosures made farming more efficient, and created a labor surplus that laid the foundation for the Industrial Revolution. England would never have become the great power that it did without them …and without Henry. Judge: Well, I think no matter what, we can all agree he looks great in that portrait. A devout believer who broke with the Church. A man of learning who executed scholars. A king who brought stability to the throne, but used it to promote his own glory, Henry VIII embodied all the contradictions of monarchy on the verge of the modern era. But separating the ruler from the myth is all part of putting history on trial. |
The myth of Sisyphus | null | TED-Ed | Whether it’s being chained to a burning wheel, turned into a spider, or having an eagle eat one’s liver, Greek mythology is filled with stories of the gods inflicting gruesome horrors on mortals who angered them. Yet one of their most famous punishments is not remembered for its outrageous cruelty, but for its disturbing familiarity. Sisyphus was the first king of Ephyra, now known as Corinth. Although a clever ruler who made his city prosperous, he was also a devious tyrant who seduced his niece and killed visitors to show off his power. This violation of the sacred hospitality tradition greatly angered the gods. But Sisyphus may still have avoided punishment if it hadn’t been for his reckless confidence. The trouble began when Zeus kidnapped the nymph Aegina, carrying her away in the form of a massive eagle. Aegina’s father, the river god Asopus, pursued their trail to Ephyra, where he encountered Sisyphus. In exchange for the god making a spring inside the city, the king told Asopus which way Zeus had taken the girl. When Zeus found out, he was so furious that he ordered Thanatos, or Death, to chain Sisyphus in the underworld so he couldn’t cause any more problems. But Sisyphus lived up to his crafty reputation. As he was about to be imprisoned, the king asked Thanatos to show him how the chains worked – and quickly bound him instead, before escaping back among the living. With Thanatos trapped, no one could die, and the world was thrown into chaos. Things only returned to normal when the god of war Ares, upset that battles were no longer fun, freed Thanatos from his chains. Sisyphus knew his reckoning was at hand. But he had another trick up his sleeve. Before dying, he asked his wife Merope to throw his body in the public square, from where it eventually washed up on the shores of the river Styx. Now back among the dead, Sisyphus approached Persephone, queen of the Underworld, and complained that his wife had disrespected him by not giving him a proper burial. Persephone granted him permission to go back to the land of living and punish Merope, on the condition that he would return when he was done. Of course, Sisyphus refused to keep his promise, now having twice escaped death by tricking the gods. There wouldn’t be a third time, as the messenger Hermes dragged Sisyphus back to Hades. The king had thought he was more clever than the gods, but Zeus would have the last laugh. Sisyphus’s punishment was a straightforward task – rolling a massive boulder up a hill. But just as he approached the top, the rock would roll all the way back down, forcing him to start over …and over, and over, for all eternity. Historians have suggested that the tale of Sisyphus may stem from ancient myths about the rising and setting sun, or other natural cycles. But the vivid image of someone condemned to endlessly repeat a futile task has resonated as an allegory about the human condition. In his classic essay The Myth of Sisyphus, existentialist philosopher Albert Camus compared the punishment to humanity’s futile search for meaning and truth in a meaningless and indifferent universe. Instead of despairing, Camus imagined Sisyphus defiantly meeting his fate as he walks down the hill to begin rolling the rock again. And even if the daily struggles of our lives sometimes seem equally repetitive and absurd, we still give them significance and value by embracing them as our own. |
What makes a superhero? | {0: 'Stan Lee was a comic book writer, artist, creator and publisher. He was the editor-in-chief and chairman emeritus of Marvel Comics. '} | TEDxGateway | First of all, I really want to thank you for letting me speak to TEDxGateway in India about superheroes. I wish I could be there in person, but this is the next best thing. I would really love to share some of the things I've learned over the years and share them with any artists and writers in India who might be wanting to create new superheroes and new superhero adventures. India has been on my mind a lot lately because I've been working with my good friend Sharad Devarajan and with Graphic India to create a new Indian superhero named Chakra The Invincible, who lives in Mumbai. My goal with Chakra was really simple. I wanted to bring an Eastern concept, like the chakras, to the Western world of superheroes. And for me, superheroes will always spark the imagination of people around the world regardless of their background, because I think that people are always looking for something that represents the ideal person or the ideal situation. Almost all of us have loved fairy tales when we were young. Just remember stories of giants and witches and wizards and monsters and things that were so colorful and bigger than life. But then, you get a little older and you're too old to read fairy tales. But you never outgrow your love of that type of story. And if you think about it, superheroes stories today are really like fairy tales for grown-ups. The characters are bigger than life, just like in fairy tales. They have the same type of superpowers: some can fly, some are extra-strong, some can be invisible. It gives the viewer and the reader a chance to relive the excitement he or she had when they were young. They're really reading fairy tales for grown-ups when they read or when they see superhero stories today, and that's why I love them so. To me, the human aspect of superheroes has always been, perhaps, the most important part. By that, I mean: OK, we assume your superhero might be extra-strong, or might be able to fly or run as fast as a comet, but unless you care about the superhero's personal life, you're just reading a shallow story. Just because a person has a superpower doesn't mean he might not have the same personal problems that you or I might have. Maybe he doesn't have enough money, maybe he has a family problem, maybe the girl he loves doesn't love him. Or maybe the girl he loves doesn't want to be involved with a superhero. There are so many things you can think of that round out the character and the personality, so the superhero isn't just one or two dimensional. You want a three-dimensional superhero who lives and breathes and worries and experiences things just the way you and I do except for the fact that she or he has a superpower. One thing I might mention, most writers - and I think it's an unfortunate thing - they try to write something that they think a certain audience might enjoy. I've never been able to do that because I can't put myself in the mind of other people. I only know what I enjoy, so every time I've written a story, I've always tried to write the sort of story that I, myself would enjoy reading, a story that would interest me while I'm writing it as I'm waiting to find out what happens next. And I can't know what other people think, but I can know what I think, and I feel I'm not that unusual; if there's a type of story I like, there must be lots of people who like the same type of stories. Therefore, I have always written to please myself, not to please a certain type of audience, because you can't know the audience as well as you know yourself. And if I write a story that I'm enjoying while I'm writing it and I can't wait to see what happens next, then I'm hoping that a large proportion of the public will feel the same way, and they'll enjoy it too. So to sum it up, I have always tried to please myself, not other people, and somehow, it seems to have worked because I guess I'm not that different than other people. So, to wrap it up, what I suggest is, use your imagination, don't be afraid to come up with the wildest thought in the world. If what you create is truly different and colorful, and if it's written well, people will enjoy it. Now when I say "written well," what I mean is you might have the most fantastic notion in the world, suddenly you have a man who can fly faster than the speed of light. That could be interesting, but you have to make him believable, you have to give the reader or the audience some reason to think he really has the ability to do that. How did he get that power? Origins of superpowers are always very interesting. If you get the right origin, like, for example, Spiderman being bitten by a radioactive spider, at least, then the viewer has something to hold on to and to say, "Well, it might have happened, now I'll enjoy it." So even though you're writing what amounts to a fairy tale for grown-ups, try to keep enough facts and try to give enough detail that the reader or the audience will say, "Well, it could have happened," and then your public goes along with the fun. But if you make it too wild, and you don't give any reason why it is as wild as it is, then sometimes it can be overkill. So what I'm trying to say is, let your imagination flow freely, but always base what happens on some sort of provable fact so that the reader or the viewer will go along with it and enjoy it as much as you enjoy writing it. So good luck to you! Thanks for listening and I really enjoyed talking to you. Excelsior! |
The importance of diversity in the comic book universe | {0: 'Sana Amanat is the Director of Character and Content Development at Marvel Comics.'} | TEDxTeen | Now, I am actually going to do something that you guys do every single day. I'm going to ask you guys to judge me right now. The Bumbys were just doing it; it's very appropriate. Take a good look, and describe me in your head. Now, based on those descriptions, how would you categorize me? By my height? By my skin color? By my hair? Now, would any of those descriptions scream comic-book editor? Maybe my t-shirt, actually; I think that might have given it away. But no, probably not. I'm actually one of the few South Asian, female comic-book editors out there. I think, actually, I might be the only one, so for any of you South Asian females interested, it's a good gig. I highly recommend it. Holler at my ladies? No? All right, that's cool. Now, what I do as a comic-book editor is I make things up. I work with creators to tell the most uncanny, amazing, sensational stories about seemingly ordinary individuals who come to possess extraordinary identities. We call them superheroes. Now, when I was first asked to speak at this event, it was actually after the announcement of a character I had co-created: Ms. Marvel, the all-new Ms. Marvel, was the first Muslim American superhero to have her own series. It really was the most obvious thing in the world in my mind. I had created a character that I could identify with. And yet it was quite possibly the biggest publicity that Marvel had seen in quite some time. Parents called us, thanking us for creating a book that they could finally share with their daughter. Fans called us thanking us for creating a character that they could finally relate to. We'd clearly tapped into something really powerful, something people had been craving for quite some time. And yet it was the simplest idea, just masked as the craziest. Now, to understand the origins of Ms. Marvel, we have to take a trip to a land far, far away, [It was New Jersey] (Laughter) a long, long time ago, where - come on - where a young girl with a cowlick and bad taste in clothes never felt like she could fit in. She didn't look like the other girls in her class, couldn't eat the delicious, delicious BLTs that they could eat. She began to become fascinated with bacon. What is that delicious meat? She had no idea. Her parents weren't on the PTA. She didn't get Christmas presents. And in fact, she had to wear a t-shirt over her bathing suit every single time she swam. So clearly this girl was different. But she did have an outlet, and it wasn't her parents, who she adored, who just didn't quite understand her yet, or her three older brothers, who were too busy with hair gel and light sabers to pay any attention to her. It was something else altogether different. It was the X-Men. Yes! Yes! (Applause) The X-Men were mutants, individuals with mutated and enhanced genes that triggered in adolescence, giving them superpowers. It was the coolest thing in the world. A woman with brown skin and white hair who can manipulate the weather, a gigantic beast of a man with blue fur, a shy girl with a Southern drawl who couldn't touch anyone. So these people were that little girl's safe place. These people she understood because they, too, were different. And it also helped that they also wore ridiculous-looking outfits. I don't know, Mom, I have no idea what you were doing in that picture. I apologize. So, the X-Men embraced who they are. Adamantium claws, weird weather-controlling habits, mutations. They owned it: they knew who they were, and they would defend it, no matter what. So every Saturday morning, when this little girl used to rush down the stairs to watch that show, she felt a little less alone because they had fulfilled a need to see herself in the world outside. So, let's talk about why that need existed in the first place. Now, remember when I was asking you guys earlier about categories? Why don't you guys think about the categories that you all belong to. I'm going to do that up here for myself. So, I am a Muslim, a woman, an American, a comic book editor, a short person, a lazy person, a nerd - you can ignore that, though. Now, the strange thing about defining yourself in this way is that it simplifies who you are. How can everything that I am be encompassed into a label? Now, some of these labels we choose for ourselves, others we're born into and others are assigned for us. But regardless, all of them come with preconceived notions - assumptions and expectations - of what they mean. So if I'm Muslim, people may expect that I cover my head, that I don't associate with men, that I don't drink alcohol. Others may assume that I'm a terrorist - I'm not - that I hate Americans. Well, I'm an American, so I certainly don't hate myself, sometimes. I'm an oppressed woman. I'm way too stubborn for that. You can ask my poor parents; they deal with it every day. Now, because we allow others to create these definitions for us, we inherently accept them to be true, whether it's a conscious decision or not. So at some point, the line between perspective and reality begins to blur. When we are told by others, constantly and incessantly, who we are, when we allow others to define ourselves - whether it's the media, our parents, our friends - we begin to accept a standard of self that is not of our own choosing. We become a splintered version of the person we are destined to be. I remember in junior high school - it was actually right after the first World Trade Center bombing, and it was a very confusing time for me for a bunch of reasons, but in particular because it was the first time my religion was made synonymous with violence in such a public way. I'd walked into school the next morning, and a classmate who I'd never actually talked to before tapped me on the shoulder, and he said, "Hey, tell your people to stop attacking us." I was confused, hurt, stunned. "Us?" I thought I was "us." I certainly wasn't "them," was I? That would be the first time that I saw the way the world viewed the category I belonged to. Names like Muhammed, Ahmed, Sharif, names I had grown up with all of my life were equated with terms like "terrorist," "hate monger," "enemy." I was angry at those men who had warped my faith into a vengeful weapon, and at the same time at the media for propagating those stereotypes. I swung from self-defense to self-doubt, pride to shame. Who was I? What side was I on? Where did I fit in? I had no idea. For years, I had constantly measured myself against images that looked nothing like me. I didn't see myself in the TV, in the classroom or in magazines. And suddenly, my face was everywhere with a big red X painted over it. Why did I feel so uncertain and insecure about my identity? I'm going to throw some social-psychological jargon out at you to make myself sound really smart. There's something called a "stereotype threat," and what it says is that individuals of a particular group internalize and react to the negative stereotypes associated with that group. So because I'm so afraid of everybody thinking that all those bad things that people say about me are true, sometimes, I don't act to the best of my abilities. I underperform. Whether it's academically, socially - I was definitely an introvert for a reason. And basically what that means is that you act against your true nature because you're constantly trying to live up to other people's expectations or deny their assumptions. You mask who you truly are. So, how to we deflect these threats? Yes, you're right: with more jargon! There is something called a "mirror-neuron theory." What it means is that your brain neurons react in the same way, whether or not you are the one doing the action. So, if I'm watching you eat a really delicious cheeseburger, my brain is reacting in the same way as if I was eating that really delicious cheeseburger myself. Which is why the Food Network is quite possibly the greatest programming of all time. Only show I watch! Now, imagine if what we saw on the media reflected a positive portrayal of the group that we belonged to. How would our brains react? How would our perceptions change? That was the secret of the success of the show "The Cosby Show," the groundbreaking and intelligent sitcom that truly helped to adjust perception of African Americans. It was the first of its kind. By focusing on the comedic trials and tribulations of a successful and lovable family that just happened to be African American, it took away those limiting qualifiers of race and helped to redefine what it meant to just be an American family, all through the power of story. Now while we look to the media to bring us the stark realities of humankind, we seek stories to find some emotional connectivity with it. Stories give us a glimpse into the inner workings of the human spirit, its pitfalls and its potentials. And they stir within us a desire to reach the excesses of our imagination. They challenge us and force us to look at one another for who we truly are in the hopes of possibly connecting our souls, and for that reason, they are sacred. And at the same time, they can be the shields against the threats to our soul, threats to our identity. So what the mirror-neuron theory is saying is that it's human nature to follow the actions of the masses. We repeat and/or believe what people tell us to believe - about others and about ourselves. So why not tell stories that are empowering and aspirational and challenge us to be better? (Applause) That is exactly what superhero stories do. The history of comics is about the misfit, the unlikely hero, the ability to create greatness where there was once doubt. The unassuming Peter Parker, the wallflower who's picked on and misunderstood, gets bitten by a radioactive spider that gives him extraordinary powers and extraordinary responsibilities. Yet his path is filled with villains who would doubt his determination, who would threaten those he loves, threaten his life choices. And yet Spider-Man, being the hero that he is, would always swing back, he'd always beat the bad guy and he'd always get the girl. Or girls, in Spider-Man's case. Lots of love drama there. For 75 years, Marvel has been telling the tale of the outcast behind the mask. It's through his flaws and desires that we connect with the heart of the character so that when he emerges as a hero, we have a real reason to champion him because we understand those struggles too, don't we? And we also want to move past them. Heroes make a choice to fight injustice, to protect the innocent, to put the balance back on the side of the good, no matter how much they sacrifice of themselves. They're willing to die for it because they've chosen who they are. And they will defend it no matter what. So when that little girl sat rapt to attention, all those years ago at her television screen, watching the X-Men, it wasn't just because they had taken her on an astonishing adventure. It's because they told her that it was okay to be different. In fact, you had to fight for it. Because we all want to be heroes, don't we? And wouldn't it be amazing if heroes looked just like us? So why does a character like Kamala Khan resonate with so many people? Like the first African-American and Latino Spider-Man, Miles Morales, Kamala Khan is so much larger than just a pop-culture icon. She came together in response to that global subconscious desire for representation for those Muslim American, bacon-sniffing, short, nerdy girls like me and for anyone else, regardless of their gender, sexuality, race, religion, who just feel like misfits themselves. In the actual Ms. Marvel series, Kamala Khan is just a girl trying to fit in. She's constantly negotiating, renegotiating who she is and all of the rules that come with it. Where does she belong? She has no idea. She's still figuring out that journey to her authentic self. But all she knows is that she does not want to be limited by the labels imposed upon her. So really, Kamala Khan's story is everyone's. It's about confronting the labels you've been assigned and sculpting them and redefining them until you figure out who you truly are and what you actually believe. One of my favorite mottos - actually I have it written on a post-it over my computer. I look at it every single day, and it was said by a poet named Rumi. And it goes, "Do not be satisfied with stories, that which has come before. Unfold your own myth." And that is our challenge. Every single one of us, no matter the categories we've inherited, we must unfold our own myth. And it won't be easy. We're constantly navigating, rearranging, reinventing others' expectations of ourselves every day. But every word we write in the narrative of our own lives, we come closer to uncovering what's beneath our own masks, maybe even embracing that true misfit, that true crazy one within. Oh, it'll be a fight, that's for sure. But that battle for your soul, for your authentic self, it's worth it, isn't it? It's bold; it's brave. In fact, I would say it's heroic. So now it's your turn. Tell me your story. Thank you. (Applause) |
Is civility a sham? | {0: 'Teresa Bejan writes about political theory, bringing historical perspectives to bear on contemporary questions.'} | TED Salon Brightline Initiative | This talk contains mature language Viewer discretion is advised Let's get this out of the way. I'm here because I wrote a book about civility, and because that book came out right around the 2016 American presidential election, I started getting lots of invitations to come and talk about civility and why we need more of it in American politics. So great. The only problem was that I had written that book about civility because I was convinced that civility is ... bullshit. (Laughter) Now, that may sound like a highly uncivil thing to say, and lucky for you, and for my publisher, I did eventually come to change my mind. In the course of writing that book and studying the long history of civility and religious tolerance in the 17th century, I came to discover that there is a virtue of civility, and far from being bullshit, it's actually absolutely essential, especially for tolerant societies, so societies like this one, that promise not only to protect diversity but also the heated and sometimes even hateful disagreements that that diversity inspires. You see, the thing about disagreement is that there is a reason that "disagreeable" is a synonym for "unpleasant." As the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes pointed out all the way back in 1642, that's because the mere act of disagreement is offensive. And Hobbes is still right. It works like this: so, if you and I disagree, and I'm right, because I always am, how am I to make sense of the fact that you are so very, very wrong? It couldn't possibly be that you've just come to a different conclusion in good faith? No, you must be up to something, you must be stupid, bigoted, interested. Maybe you're insane. And the same goes the other way. Right? So the mere fact of your disagreeing with me is implicitly an insult not only to my views, but to my intelligence, too. And things only get worse when the disagreements at stake are the ones that we somehow consider to be fundamental, whether to our worldviews or to our identities. You know the kinds of disagreement I mean. One doesn't discuss religion or politics or increasingly, the politics of popular culture, at the dinner table, because these are the disagreements, these are the things that people really, seriously disagree about, and they define themselves against their opponents in the controversy. But of course those fundamental disagreements are precisely the ones that tolerant societies like the United States propose to tolerate, which perhaps explains why, historically, at least, tolerant societies haven't been the happy-clappy communities of difference that you sometimes hear about. No, they tend to be places where people have to hold their noses and rub along together despite their mutual contempt. That's what I learned from studying religious tolerance in early modern England and America. And I also learned that the virtue that makes that un-murderous coexistence, if you will, possible, is the virtue of civility, because civility makes our disagreements tolerable so that we can share a life together even if we don't share a faith — religious, political or otherwise. Still, I couldn't help but notice that when most people talk about civility today — and boy, do they talk about civility a lot — they seem to have something else in mind. So if civility is the virtue that makes it possible to tolerate disagreement so that we can actually engage with our opponents, talking about civility seems to be mainly a strategy of disengagement. It's a little bit like threatening to take your ball and go home when the game isn't going your way. Because the funny thing about incivility is that it's always the sin of our opponents. It's funny. When it comes to our own bad behavior, well, we seem to develop sudden-onset amnesia, or we can always justify it as an appropriate response to the latest outrage from our opponents. So, "How can I be civil to someone who is set out to destroy everything I stand for? And by the way, they started it." It's all terrifically convenient. Also convenient is the fact that most of today's big civility talkers tend to be quite vague and fuzzy when it comes to what they think civility actually entails. We're told that civility is simply a synonym for respect, for good manners, for politeness, but at the same time, it's clear that to accuse someone of incivility is much, much worse than calling them impolite, because to be uncivil is to be potentially intolerable in a way that merely being rude isn't. So to call someone uncivil, to accuse them of incivility, is a way of communicating that they are somehow beyond the pale, that they're not worth engaging with at all. So here's the thing: civility isn't bullshit, it's precious because it's the virtue that makes fundamental disagreement not only possible but even sometimes occasionally productive. It's precious, but it's also really, really difficult. Civility talk, on the other hand, well, that's really easy, really easy, and it also is almost always complete bullshit, which makes things slightly awkward for me as I continue to talk to you about civility. (Laughter) Anyway, we tend to forget it, but politicians and intellectuals have been warning us for decades now that the United States is facing a crisis of civility, and they've tended to blame that crisis on technological developments, on things like cable TV, talk radio, social media. But any historian will tell you that there never was a golden age of disagreement, let alone good feelings, not in American politics. In my book, though, I argue that the first modern crisis of civility actually began about 500 years ago, when a certain professor of theology named Martin Luther took advantage of a recent advancement in communications technology, the printing press, to call the Pope the Antichrist, and thus inadvertently launch the Protestant Reformation. So think of the press, if you will, as the Twitter of the 16th century, and Martin Luther as the original troll. And I'm not exaggerating here. He once declared himself unable to pray without at the same time cursing his "anti-Christian," i.e. Catholic, opponents. And of course, those Catholic opponents clutched their pearls and called for civility then, too, but all the while, they gave as good as they got with traditional slurs like "heretic," and, worst of all, "Protestant," which began in the 16th century as an insult. The thing about civility talk, then as now, was that you could call out your opponent for going low, and then take advantage of the moral high ground to go as low or lower, because calling for civility sets up the speaker as a model of decorum while implicitly, subtly stigmatizing anyone with the temerity to disagree as uncivil. And so civility talk in the 17th century becomes a really effective way for members of the religious establishment to silence, suppress, exclude dissenters outside of the established church, especially when they spoke out against the status quo. So Anglican ministers could lecture atheists on the offensiveness of their discourse. Everyone could complain about the Quakers for refusing to doff and don their hats or their "uncouth" practice of shaking hands. But those accusations of incivility pretty soon became pretexts for persecution. So far, so familiar, right? We see that strategy again and again. It's used to silence civil rights protesters in the 20th century. And I think it explains why partisans on both sides of the aisle keep reaching for this, frankly, antiquated, early modern language of civility precisely when they want to communicate that certain people and certain views are beyond the pale, but they want to save themselves the trouble of actually making an argument. So no wonder skeptics like me tend to roll our eyes when the calls for conversational virtue begin, because instead of healing our social and political divisions, it seems like so much civility talk is actually making the problem worse. It's saving us the trouble of actually speaking to each other, allowing us to speak past each other or at each other while signaling our superior virtue and letting the audience know which side we're on. And given this, I think one might be forgiven, as I did, for assuming that because so much civility talk is bullshit, well then, the virtue of civility must be bullshit, too. But here, again, I think a little historical perspective goes a long way. Because remember, the same early modern crisis of civility that launched the Reformation also gave birth to tolerant societies, places like Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and indeed, eventually the United States, places that at least aspired to protect disagreement as well as diversity, and what made that possible was the virtue of civility. What made disagreement tolerable, what it made it possible for us to share a life, even when we didn't share a faith, was a virtue, but one, I think, that is perhaps less aspirational and a lot more confrontational than the one that people who talk about civility a lot today tend to have in mind. So I like to call that virtue "mere civility." You may know it as the virtue that allows us to get through our relations with an ex-spouse, or a bad neighbor, not to mention a member of the other party. Because to be merely civil is to meet a low bar grudgingly, and that, again, makes sense, because civility is a virtue that's meant to help us disagree, and as Hobbes told us all those centuries ago, disagreeable means unpleasant for a reason. But if it isn't bullshit, what exactly is civility or mere civility? What does it require? Well, to start, it is not and cannot be the same thing as being respectful or polite, because we need civility precisely when we're dealing with those people that we find it the most difficult, or maybe even impossible, to respect. Similarly, being civil can't be the same as being nice, because being nice means not telling people what you really think about them or their wrong, wrong views. No, being civil means speaking your mind, but to your opponent's face, not behind her back. Being merely civil means not pulling our punches, but at the same time, it means maybe not landing all those punches all at once, because the point of mere civility is to allow us to disagree, to disagree fundamentally, but to do so without denying or destroying the possibility of a common life tomorrow with the people that we think are standing in our way today. And in that sense, I think civility is actually closely related to another virtue, the virtue of courage. So mere civility is having the courage to make yourself disagreeable, and to stay that way, but to do so while staying in the room and staying present to your opponents. And it also means that, sometimes, calling bullshit on people's civility talk is really the only civil thing to do. At least that's what I think. But look, if I've learned anything from studying the long history of religious tolerance in the 17th century, it's this: if you're talking about civility as a way to avoid an argument, to isolate yourself in the more agreeable company of the like-minded who already agree with you, if you find yourself never actually speaking to anyone who really, truly, fundamentally disagrees with you, well, you're doing civility wrong. Thank you. (Applause) |
A librarian's case against overdue book fines | {0: 'Dawn Wacek advocates for equitable library service for all community members.'} | TEDxUWLaCrosse | Hello, friends. I'm happy to see all of you here today. This is actually exactly what I say to the people who visit us at the La Crosse Public Library. And I say it because I mean it. The children who come into our library are my friends in that I care about their needs and their futures. I want them to be happy and successful. I hope that they'll find great books or a movie that delights them. Or the solution to a tricky problem. Libraries in general have this wonderful reputation of really caring about our communities. We put out mission statements and statements of purpose that say that we connect our community to the broader world. We engage minds, we create lifelong learners. And these ideals are really important to us as libraries, because we know the power they have to create a better world. A more connected world, a more engaged and empathetic world. Books have power, information has power. And for the powerless in our communities, being able to connect to that is even more important. In 1995, Betty Hart and Todd Risley published a study that found that working class families and those being served by welfare experience what we now refer to as the "30 million word gap." Essentially, what they learned is that children in these families are hearing so many fewer words each day that by the time they are three years old, there's this enormous disparity in their learned language. And that gap in words follows them as they enter school, and it results in later reading, poorer reading skills, a lack of success overall. Children need to hear words every day and they need to hear not just our day-to-day conversation, they have to hear rare words: those outside the common lexicon we share, of around 10,000. I'm going to read you a short snippet from a children's book by one of our favorite authors in the children's room, Eric Carle. Some of you might know his work "The Very Hungry Caterpillar." But this is from "'Slowly, Slowly, Slowly,' said the Sloth." "Finally, the sloth replied, 'It is true that I am slow, quiet and boring. I am lackadaisical, I dawdle and I dillydally. I am also unflappable, languid, stoic, impassive, sluggish, lethargic, placid, calm, mellow, laid-back and, well, slothful! I am relaxed and tranquil, and I like to live in peace. But I am not lazy.' Then the sloth yawned and said, 'That's just how I am. I like to do things slowly, slowly, slowly.'" So you can see from this very brief example from one book in our library how Eric Carle used 20 different words to get the same idea across to children. Now we know that a lot of the families visiting us at the library, a lot of our friends, are struggling financially. We know that some of them are living in poverty, and don't have enough to eat or anywhere safe to live. We know that our friend James, who comes in after school and is staying at a local shelter, isn't reading at grade level and has probably never read at grade level. We know we have that 30 million word gap and a corresponding achievement gap by the time kids enter the third grade, both of which directly correlate to income level. So what's the responsibility of libraries in addressing these gaps? How can we help our friends be more successful, more educated and some day, better global citizens? It starts with ensuring free and equitable access to everything libraries offer them. Books level the playing field by exposing children of every socioeconomic background to words. At the library, we provide programs that are based on the five tenants of early literacy: playing, singing, talking, reading and writing. We offer programs for adults on computer classes and job-skills training. Business start-ups. We do all of this great work for our community members and at the same time, we counteract it by charging fines and fees of our patrons. Today in La Crosse, 10,000 of our users are unable to check out library materials because of fines and fees. If we narrow in on our neighborhoods experiencing the most poverty, those where 82 percent of the student body is considered economically disadvantaged, the number rises to 23 percent of the neighborhood. And these are local numbers, it's true, but they hold true nationwide. In libraries across the country that charge fines, the poorest neighborhoods have the most number of people blocked from use. In fact, the Colorado State Library was so worried about this, they published a white paper and they stated unequivocally that it's the fear of fines that keeps poor families out of libraries. A colleague of mine took a ride in a Lyft in Atlanta last year, and he started chatting with his driver about libraries, as we do. And she told him she grew up visiting her local library, she loved it. But now that she's a parent with three children of her own, there's no way she would allow them to get a library card, because of the strict deadlines libraries impose. She said, "It would be like another credit card that I can't pay." Meanwhile, when other libraries have experimented with eliminating fines, like one in San Rafael that took away children's fines, they had a 126-percent increase in child card applications within the first few months. When people aren't afraid of the fines they might accrue, they line up to access what we have to offer. So what are we telling people, then? We have these two disparate ideas. On the one hand, we're champions of democracy and we claim that we're there so that every citizen can educate themselves. We're advocates for the power early literacy has to reduce that achievement gap and eliminate the word gap. We tell people, "We're here to help you." On the other hand, if you're struggling financially, and you make a mistake, the kind of mistake that anyone in this room could make — your tote bag that belongs to the library sits by your back door for a couple of weeks longer than it should, you lose a CD, you spill your coffee on a book, suddenly, we're not here for you so much anymore, because if that happens, we're going to make you pay for it. And if you can't pay for it, you're out of luck. I have been a librarian for a lot of years. And in the past few years, I myself have paid over 500 dollars in late fines. Now, you might wonder why, I mean, I'm there every day, and I certainly know how the system works. But like all of our friends at the library, I am busy, I lose track of things, my house is sometimes messy, and I have lost a DVD or two under the sofa. And I have been fortunate enough to be able to pay that 500 dollars over the last several years. If not happily, I at least had the means to do it. So is that fair and equitable service if some of us can pay our fines and continue to operate as we always have, and others of us make one mistake and no longer are welcome back? It's simply not. Now, why would we continue to operate under a model that hurts our most vulnerable patrons the most? There are reasons. There are reasons like responsibility. There are some libraries that really feel that it's our job to teach people responsibility. And they haven't figured out that there might be ways to do that that don't equate to dollars. There's also this idea that we share the resources collectively in a community, and so we have to take turns. If I keep my "My Little Pony" movie for too long, and somebody else wants to watch it, it's not fair. And then, there's the money. Community members often love their libraries, and they don't want us to not be able to sustain the services we offer. Luckily, we can address all of these things in a variety of ways without scaring away our most vulnerable populations. Some libraries have gone to a Netflix model. You might be familiar with this: you check things out, when you're done with them, you return them. If you don't return them, you can't check more things out, but once you do, it's all forgiven, it's fine. You can check out again. Others continue to charge fines, but they want to offer alternatives to their library patrons, and so they do things like food for fines, where you bring in canned goods, or read away your fines, where you can read off your fines. There's even another library in Wisconsin that offers scratch-off tickets at their counter, so you can scratch off and get 10 or 20 percent off your fines that day. And there are amnesty days. One day a year, you bring back your late materials and all is forgiven. There was a library in San Francisco that did an amnesty day last year, and they welcomed back 5,000 users who had been blocked. That same day, they received more than 700,000 items that were overdue. Among them was one book that was 100 years overdue. So I know that sounds ridiculous, but I know from experience that people will stay away from the library rather than face the authority of the librarian when they have late items. As Michael might have mentioned, I've been a librarian for 15 years and my mom hasn't been in a library in decades, because when she was young, she lost a book. So, these are great baby steps. But they don't go far enough, because they make people jump through hoops. They have to come on the right days, at the right times. They might have to have extra food to share. They want to read away their fines, they need to be literate. If we want people to use the library again, we should just get rid of fines altogether. Now, you might think I've forgotten a money piece, where we need to finance libraries, right? But there's a couple of things to consider when we think about how fines function in library budgets. The first is that fines have never been a stable source of revenue. They've always fluctuated, and in fact, they've continued to go down over the last few decades. When the recession hit, especially, people's ability to pay was hit, as well. So for a lot of those 10,000 friends that we've got at the library that aren't able to use it, they might never be able to pay us. When we talk about eliminating their fines, we're not losing money so much as the idea of money. And thirdly, you might be surprised to know fines on average, nationally, are about one and a half percent of a library's operating budget. Now that can still be a lot of money. If you're looking at a large library or a large library system, the dollar amount can be high. But it's an achievable cut for most libraries to absorb. And finally, and maybe most importantly, fines cost us money to collect. When you start to factor in all of the ways that we collect fines, supplies like mailers that we send out to remind people of their fines, services, like collections management services, even telephone and email notifications can cost libraries money. And staff time is a huge cost for libraries. So that our frontline staff is standing there, talking to people about their fines, sometimes arguing with people about fines. When we eliminate all of those pieces, if we got rid of fines, we might actually save money in our libraries. Or at the very least, we would be able to reallocate our staff time to pursuits that better fit those missions we talked about. The other thing I want everybody to come away understanding is that fines don't actually work to do what we think they do. The debate about fines — whether we should fine, how much we should fine, it isn't new. We've been talking about it for almost 100 years. As long as that book was overdue. Study after study has shown that the reason libraries fine is because of strongly held beliefs about the effectiveness of getting materials back on time backed by no evidence. Basically, we fine because we've always fined. So, the best option for your libraries is to put their mission first. And they will do that if their community members ask it of them. When you leave here, I hope you'll visit your public library and talk to your librarians, talk to your neighbors and community members who serve on library boards. Tell them that you know how important literacy is to everyone in your community. That if our libraries are truly for everyone, that they have to get rid of fines and embrace their entire community. Thank you. (Applause) |
What's the smallest thing in the universe? | null | TED-Ed | If you were to take any everyday object, say a coffee cup, and break it in half, then in half again, and keep carrying on, where would you end up? Could you keep on going forever? Or would you find a set of indivisible building blocks out of which everything is made? Physicists have found the latter- that matter is made of fundamental particles, the smallest things in the universe. Particles interact with each other according to a theory called the “Standard Model”. The Standard Model is a remarkably elegant encapsulation of the strange quantum world of indivisible, infinitely small particles. It also covers the forces that govern how particles move, interact, and bind together to give shape to the world around us. So how does it work? Zooming in on the fragments of the cup, we see molecules, made of atoms bound up together. A molecule is the smallest unit of any chemical compound. An atom is the smallest unit of any element in the periodic table. But the atom is not the smallest unit of matter. Experiments found that each atom has a tiny, dense nucleus, surrounded by a cloud of even tinier electrons. The electron is, as far as we know, one of the fundamental, indivisible building blocks of the universe. It was the first Standard Model particle ever discovered. Electrons are bound to an atom’s nucleus by electromagnetism. They attract each other by exchanging particles called photons, which are quanta of light that carry the electromagnetic force, one of the fundamental forces of the Standard Model. The nucleus has more secrets to reveal, as it contains protons and neutrons. Though once thought to be fundamental particles on their own, in 1968 physicists found that protons and neutrons are actually made of quarks, which are indivisible. A proton contains two “up” quarks and one “down” quark. A neutron contains two down quarks and one up. The nucleus is held together by the strong force, another fundamental force of the Standard Model. Just as photons carry the electromagnetic force, particles called gluons carry the strong force. Electrons, together with up and down quarks, seem to be all we need to build atoms and therefore describe normal matter. However, high energy experiments reveal that there are actually six quarks– down & up, strange & charm, and bottom & top - and they come in a wide range of masses. The same was found for electrons, which have heavier siblings called the muon and the tau. Why are there three (and only three) different versions of each of these particles? This remains a mystery. These heavy particles are only produced, for very brief moments, in high energy collisions, and are not seen in everyday life. This is because they decay very quickly into the lighter particles. Such decays involve the exchange of force-carrying particles, called the W and Z, which – unlike the photon – have mass. They carry the weak force, the final force of the Standard Model. This same force allows protons and neutrons to transform into each other, a vital part of the fusion interactions that drive the Sun. To observe the W and Z directly, we needed the high energy collisions provided by particle accelerators. There’s another kind of Standard Model particle, called neutrinos. These only interact with other particles through the weak force. Trillions of neutrinos, many generated by the sun, fly through us every second. Measurements of weak interactions found that there are different kinds of neutrinos associated with the electron, muon, and tau. All these particles also have antimatter versions, which have the opposite charge but are otherwise identical. Matter and antimatter particles are produced in pairs in high-energy collisions, and they annihilate each other when they meet. The final particle of the Standard Model is the Higgs boson – a quantum ripple in the background energy field of the universe. Interacting with this field is how all the fundamental matter particles acquire mass, according to the Standard Model. The ATLAS Experiment on the Large Hadron Collider is studying the Standard Model in-depth. By taking precise measurements of the particles and forces that make up the universe, ATLAS physicists can look for answers to mysteries not explained by the Standard Model. For example, how does gravity fit in? What is the real relationship between force carriers and matter particles? How can we describe “Dark Matter”, which makes up most of the mass in the universe but remains unaccounted for? While the Standard Model provides a beautiful explanation for the world around us, there is still a universe’s worth of mysteries left to explore. |
The survival of the sea turtle | null | TED-Ed | Sea turtles are miraculous. First, they've been around since the late Jurassic, roughly 150 million years ago. Cohorts of the dinosaurs, sea turtles have survived through the challenges of eons, existing still today, where many others have ended their evolutionary run. Second, throughout the centuries and up till today, every living adult sea turtle has overcome the odds, existing as a consequence of chance, skill, and capability. The gauntlet each sea turtle faces in the course of its lifetime goes thus: First, deposited as a clutch of leathery, ping-pong ball-sized eggs into a nesting pit dug by its mother high on the beach, of the 50 to 200 eggs laid, roughly 20 percent will never hatch. Roughly a month and a half after having been laid, the surviving eggs hatch, and the young turtles, each small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, squirm to the surface, emerging from the sand en masse, and making their desperate dash for the sea. Along the way, debris, pitfalls, crabs, gulls, raccoons, and other threats will claim roughly 50 percent of those who rose from the sand. For those that actually reach the surf, they trade one set of threats for another, as they first face the repelling force of the waves, and then find a whole new host of predators awaiting them: Various fish, dolphins, sharks, and sea birds, as the young turtles come to the surface for air. For their first few days of life, should they count themselves amongst the living, the vulnerable turtles swim frantically forward. Ultimately, they will often look to settle in a patch of flotsam, preferably a patch of floating seaweed. Now for the next several months, they will seek to avoid those that would eat them, find that which they might eat themselves, and not fall to the pressures of challenging weather or unfortunate currents. In this phase, roughly 50 percent of those who reach the surf will perish. Ultimately, with the passage of years, the survivors will increase in size, from that of a dinner plate at year one to that of a dinner table, in the case of one species at least, the leatherback, a decade or so later. With size comes some measure of protection. The only truly worrisome predators now are some of the larger shark species— bulls, tigers, and whites — and the occasional killer whale. At approximately two decades of age, the survivors will be old enough themselves to breed, and continue the cycle which their very existence heralds. Of those that began as eggs on a distant beach, now less than 10 percent remain, at least, those were the odds prior to significant human interference. Over the past century, and in particular in the last several decades, human endeavors, from beach development to plastic refuse to poaching, long lines, nets, and even noxious chemicals, including oil, have upped the ante for sea turtles, causing their survival rate to drop to around one percent or less, from each nesting cycle. It is this added human pressure which has pushed each of the eight sea turtle species into either a threatened or endangered state. For while they have evolved to overcome a host of obstacles, the most recent has arisen so quickly and at such scale that the species find themselves overwhelmed. So let's quickly recap this cycle of odds. Using a hypothetical nesting season, for females may nest multiple times in a single year, of 1,000 eggs, for sake of ease. 1000 eggs laid. 800 hatch. 400 make it to the water. 200 progress toward adulthood. 20 survive to breeding age — that is, without human interference. Two survive to breeding age with human interference. So a breeding adult sea turtle is the very embodiment of a long shot. It is the exception, not the rule. A jackpot. It is, in a very real sense, a miracle. |
How a long-forgotten virus could help us solve the antibiotics crisis | {0: 'Alexander Belcredi studies how viruses can help in the fight against superbugs.'} | TED@BCG Toronto | Take a moment and think about a virus. What comes to your mind? An illness? A fear? Probably something really unpleasant. And yet, viruses are not all the same. It's true, some of them cause devastating disease. But others can do the exact opposite — they can cure disease. These viruses are called "phages." Now, the first time I heard about phages was back in 2013. My father-in-law, who's a surgeon, was telling me about a woman he was treating. The woman had a knee injury, required multiple surgeries, and over the course of these, developed a chronic bacterial infection in her leg. Unfortunately for her, the bacteria causing the infection also did not respond to any antibiotic that was available. So at this point, typically, the only option left is to amputate the leg to stop the infection from spreading further. Now, my father-in-law was desperate for a different kind of solution, and he applied for an experimental, last-resort treatment using phages. And guess what? It worked. Within three weeks of applying the phages, the chronic infection had healed up, where before, no antibiotic was working. I was fascinated by this weird conception: viruses curing an infection. To this day, I am fascinated by the medical potential of phages. And I actually quit my job last year to build a company in this space. Now, what is a phage? The image that you see here was taken by an electron microscope. And that means what we see on the screen is in reality extremely tiny. The grainy thing in the middle with the head, the long body and a number of feet — this is the image of a prototypical phage. It's kind of cute. (Laughter) Now, take a look at your hand. In our team, we've estimated that you have more than 10 billion phages on each of your hands. What are they doing there? (Laughter) Well, viruses are good at infecting cells. And phages are great at infecting bacteria. And your hand, just like so much of our body, is a hotbed of bacterial activity, making it an ideal hunting ground for phages. Because after all, phages hunt bacteria. It's also important to know that phages are extremely selective hunters. Typically, a phage will only infect a single bacterial species. So in this rendering here, the phage that you see hunts for a bacterium called Staphylococcus aureus, which is known as MRSA in its drug-resistant form. It causes skin or wound infections. The way the phage hunts is with its feet. The feet are actually extremely sensitive receptors, on the lookout for the right surface on a bacterial cell. Once it finds it, the phage will latch on to the bacterial cell wall and then inject its DNA. DNA sits in the head of the phage and travels into the bacteria through the long body. At this point, the phage reprograms the bacteria into producing lots of new phages. The bacteria, in effect, becomes a phage factory. Once around 50-100 phages have accumulated within the bacteria cell, the phages are then able to release a protein that disrupts the bacteria cell wall. As the bacteria bursts, the phages move out and go on the hunt again for a new bacteria to infect. Now, I'm sorry, this probably sounded like a scary virus again. But it's exactly this ability of phages — to multiply within the bacteria and then kill them — that make them so interesting from a medical point of view. The other part that I find extremely interesting is the scale at which this is going on. Now, just five years ago, I really had no clue about phages. And yet, today I would tell you they are part of a natural principle. Phages and bacteria go back to the earliest days of evolution. They have always existed in tandem, keeping each other in check. So this is really the story of yin and yang, of the hunter and the prey, at a microscopic level. Some scientists have even estimated that phages are the most abundant organism on our planet. So even before we continue talking about their medical potential, I think everybody should know about phages and their role on earth: they hunt, infect and kill bacteria. Now, how come we have something that works so well in nature, every day, everywhere around us, and yet, in most parts of the world, we do not have a single drug on the market that uses this principle to combat bacterial infections? The simple answer is: no one has developed this kind of a drug yet, at least not one that conforms to the Western regulatory standards that set the norm for so much of the world. To understand why, we need to move back in time. This is a picture of Félix d'Herelle. He is one of the two scientists credited with discovering phages. Except, when he discovered them back in 1917, he had no clue what he had discovered. He was interested in a disease called bacillary dysentery, which is a bacterial infection that causes severe diarrhea, and back then, was actually killing a lot of people, because after all, no cure for bacterial infections had been invented. He was looking at samples from patients who had survived this illness. And he found that something weird was going on. Something in the sample was killing the bacteria that were supposed to cause the disease. To find out what was going on, he did an ingenious experiment. He took the sample, filtered it until he was sure that only something very small could have remained, and then took a tiny drop and added it to freshly cultivated bacteria. And he observed that within a number of hours, the bacteria had been killed. He then repeated this, again filtering, taking a tiny drop, adding it to the next batch of fresh bacteria. He did this in sequence 50 times, always observing the same effect. And at this point, he made two conclusions. First of all, the obvious one: yes, something was killing the bacteria, and it was in that liquid. The other one: it had to be biologic in nature, because a tiny drop was sufficient to have a huge impact. He called the agent he had found an "invisible microbe" and gave it the name "bacteriophage," which, literally translated, means "bacteria eater." And by the way, this is one of the most fundamental discoveries of modern microbiology. So many modern techniques go back to our understanding of how phages work — in genomic editing, but also in other fields. And just today, the Nobel Prize in chemistry was announced for two scientists who work with phages and develop drugs based on that. Now, back in the 1920s and 1930s, people also immediately saw the medical potential of phages. After all, albeit invisible, you had something that reliably was killing bacteria. Companies that still exist today, such as Abbott, Squibb or Lilly, sold phage preparations. But the reality is, if you're starting with an invisible microbe, it's very difficult to get to a reliable drug. Just imagine going to the FDA today and telling them all about that invisible virus you want to give to patients. So when chemical antibiotics emerged in the 1940s, they completely changed the game. And this guy played a major role. This is Alexander Fleming. He won the Nobel Prize in medicine for his work contributing to the development of the first antibiotic, penicillin. And antibiotics really work very differently than phages. For the most part, they inhibit the growth of the bacteria, and they don't care so much which kind of bacteria are present. The ones that we call broad-spectrum will even work against a whole bunch of bacteria out there. Compare that to phages, which work extremely narrowly against one bacterial species, and you can see the obvious advantage. Now, back then, this must have felt like a dream come true. You had a patient with a suspected bacterial infection, you gave him the antibiotic, and without really needing to know anything else about the bacteria causing the disease, many of the patients recovered. And so as we developed more and more antibiotics, they, rightly so, became the first-line therapy for bacterial infections. And by the way, they have contributed tremendously to our life expectancy. We are only able to do complex medical interventions and medical surgeries today because we have antibiotics, and we don't risk the patient dying the very next day from the bacterial infection that he might contract during the operation. So we started to forget about phages, especially in Western medicine. And to a certain extent, even when I was growing up, the notion was: we have solved bacterial infections; we have antibiotics. Of course, today, we know that this is wrong. Today, most of you will have heard about superbugs. Those are bacteria that have become resistant to many, if not all, of the antibiotics that we have developed to treat this infection. How did we get here? Well, we weren't as smart as we thought we were. As we started using antibiotics everywhere — in hospitals, to treat and prevent; at home, for simple colds; on farms, to keep animals healthy — the bacteria evolved. In the onslaught of antibiotics that were all around them, those bacteria survived that were best able to adapt. Today, we call these "multidrug-resistant bacteria." And let me put a scary number out there. In a recent study commissioned by the UK government, it was estimated that by 2050, ten million people could die every year from multidrug-resistant infections. Compare that to eight million deaths from cancer per year today, and you can see that this is a scary number. But the good news is, phages have stuck around. And let me tell you, they are not impressed by multidrug resistance. (Laughter) They are just as happily killing and hunting bacteria all around us. And they've also stayed selective, which today is really a good thing. Today, we are able to reliably identify a bacterial pathogen that's causing an infection in many settings. And their selectivity will help us avoid some of the side effects that are commonly associated with broad-spectrum antibiotics. But maybe the best news of all is: they are no longer an invisible microbe. We can look at them. And we did so together before. We can sequence their DNA. We understand how they replicate. And we understand the limitations. We are in a great place to now develop strong and reliable phage-based pharmaceuticals. And that's what's happening around the globe. More than 10 biotech companies, including our own company, are developing human-phage applications to treat bacterial infections. A number of clinical trials are getting underway in Europe and the US. So I'm convinced that we're standing on the verge of a renaissance of phage therapy. And to me, the correct way to depict the phage is something like this. (Laughter) To me, phages are the superheroes that we have been waiting for in our fight against multidrug-resistant infections. So the next time you think about a virus, keep this image in mind. After all, a phage might one day save your life. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why is meningitis so dangerous? | null | TED-Ed | In 1987, tens of thousands of people gathered in Saudi Arabia for the annual Hajj pilgrimage. But what started out as a celebration led to a health crisis: just a few days after the pilgrimage, more than 2,000 cases of meningitis broke out spreading across Saudi Arabia and the rest of the world. The outbreak was so fierce that it was believed to have sparked a wave of deadly meningitis epidemics that ultimately infected tens of thousands of people worldwide. Meningitis is the inflammation of the meninges, three tissue layers responsible for protecting the brain and spinal cord. What makes meningitis so dangerous compared to other diseases is the sheer speed with which it invades a person’s body. In the worst cases, it causes death within a day. Fortunately, that’s rare for patients who receive early medical treatment. The disease primarily comes in three forms: fungal, viral, and bacterial— the last being the most deadly by far, and what we’ll focus on. People usually contract bacterial meningitis by breathing in tiny particles of mucus and saliva that spray into the air when an infected person sneezes or coughs. It can also be transmitted through kissing, or sharing cigarettes, toothbrushes or utensils. Some people can be infected and carry the disease without showing symptoms or getting sick, which helps the disease spread quickly to others. Once the bacteria enter the nose, mouth, and throat, they cross the surrounding membranes and enter the bloodstream. From there, bacteria have rapid access to the body’s tissues —including a membrane called the blood-brain barrier. This is made of a tight mesh of cells which separate blood vessels from the brain, and block everything except for a specific set of particles, including water molecules and some gases. But in ways that scientists are still trying to understand, meningitis bacteria can trick the barrier into letting them through. Inside the brain, the bacteria swiftly infect the meninges. This triggers inflammation as the body’s immune response kicks into overdrive, bringing on fever and intense headaches. As swelling in the meninges worsens, the neck begins to stiffen. Swelling in the brain disrupts its normal function— causing symptoms like hearing loss and extreme light sensitivity. As pressure increases in the cranium, it may also make the person confused— one of the hallmarks of the disease. A few hours in, the rapidly multiplying bacteria start to release toxins, leading to septicemia, also known as blood poisoning. This breaks down blood vessels, letting blood seep out and form what starts out looking like a rash, and evolves into big discoloured blots beneath the skin. At the same time, these toxins burn through oxygen in the blood, reducing the amount that gets to major organs like the lungs and kidneys. That increases the chance of organ shut down —and alongside spreading septicemia, threatens death. That all sounds scary, but doctors are so good at treating meningitis that a visit to the hospital can drastically reduce an adult’s risk of dying from it. The longer it’s left untreated, though, the more likely it will lead to lasting damage. If declining oxygen levels cause cell death in extreme parts of the body —like fingers, toes, arms and legs— the risk of amputation goes up. And if bacterial toxins accumulate in the brain and trigger cell death, meningitis could also cause long-term brain damage and memory loss. So fast treatment, or better yet, prevention, is critical. That's why most countries have vaccines that defend against the disease in its deadliest forms. Those are usually given to the people who are most at risk—like young children, people with weak immune systems, or people who gather in large groups where an outbreak of meningitis could potentially happen. In addition to those gatherings, meningitis is most common in a region called the meningitis belt that stretches across Africa, though cases do happen all over the world. If you’re concerned that you or someone you know may have meningitis, get to the doctor as soon as possible; quick action could save your life. |
How to disagree productively and find common ground | {0: "BCG's Julia Dhar is a champion of ideas, facts and constructive disagreement."} | TED@BCG Toronto | Some days, it feels like the only thing we can agree on is that we can't agree on anything. Public discourse is broken. And we feel that everywhere — panelists on TV are screaming at each other, we go online to find community and connection, and we end up leaving feeling angry and alienated. In everyday life, probably because everyone else is yelling, we are so scared to get into an argument that we're willing not to engage at all. Contempt has replaced conversation. My mission in life is to help us disagree productively. To find ways to bring truth to light, to bring new ideas to life. I think — I hope — that there is a model for structured disagreement that's kind of mutually respectful and assumes a genuine desire to persuade and be persuaded. And to uncover it, let me take you back a little bit. So, when I was 10 years old, I loved arguing. This, like, tantalizing possibility that you could convince someone of your point of view, just with the power of your words. And perhaps unsurprisingly, my parents and teachers loved this somewhat less. (Laughter) And in much the same way as they decided that four-year-old Julia might benefit from gymnastics to burn off some energy, they decided that I might benefit from joining a debate team. That is, kind of, go somewhere to argue where they were not. (Laughter) For the uninitiated, the premises of formal debate are really straightforward: there's a big idea on the table — that we support civil disobedience, that we favor free trade — and one group of people who speaks in favor of that idea, and one against. My first debate in the cavernous auditorium of Canberra Girls Grammar School was kind of a bundle of all of the worst mistakes that you see on cable news. It felt easier to me to attack the person making the argument rather than the substance of the ideas themselves. When that same person challenged my ideas, it felt terrible, I felt humiliated and ashamed. And it felt to me like the sophisticated response to that was to be as extreme as possible. And despite this very shaky entry into the world of debate, I loved it. I saw the possibility, and over many years worked really hard at it, became really skilled at the technical craft of debate. I went on to win the World Schools Debating Championships three times. I know, you're just finding out that this is a thing. (Laughter) But it wasn't until I started coaching debaters, persuaders who are really at the top of their game, that I actually got it. The way that you reach people is by finding common ground. It's by separating ideas from identity and being genuinely open to persuasion. Debate is a way to organize conversations about how the world is, could, should be. Or to put it another way, I would love to offer you my experience-backed, evidence-tested guide to talking to your cousin about politics at your next family dinner; reorganizing the way in which your team debates new proposals; thinking about how we change our public conversation. And so, as an entry point into that: debate requires that we engage with the conflicting idea, directly, respectfully, face to face. The foundation of debate is rebuttal. The idea that you make a claim and I provide a response, and you respond to my response. Without rebuttal, it's not debate, it's just pontificating. And I had originally imagined that the most successful debaters, really excellent persuaders, must be great at going to extremes. They must have some magical ability to make the polarizing palatable. And it took me a really long time to figure out that the opposite is actually true. People who disagree the most productively start by finding common ground, no matter how narrow it is. They identify the thing that we can all agree on and go from there: the right to an education, equality between all people, the importance of safer communities. What they're doing is inviting us into what psychologists call shared reality. And shared reality is the antidote to alternative facts. The conflict, of course, is still there. That's why it's a debate. Shared reality just gives us a platform to start to talk about it. But the trick of debate is that you end up doing it directly, face to face, across the table. And research backs up that that really matters. Professor Juliana Schroeder at UC Berkeley and her colleagues have research that suggests that listening to someone's voice as they make a controversial argument is literally humanizing. It makes it easier to engage with what that person has to say. So, step away from the keyboards, start conversing. And if we are to expand that notion a little bit, nothing is stopping us from pressing pause on a parade of keynote speeches, the sequence of very polite panel discussions, and replacing some of that with a structured debate. All of our conferences could have, at their centerpiece, a debate over the biggest, most controversial ideas in the field. Each of our weekly team meetings could devote 10 minutes to a debate about a proposal to change the way in which that team works. And as innovative ideas go, this one is both easy and free. You could start tomorrow. (Laughter) And once we're inside this shared reality, debate also requires that we separate ideas from the identity of the person discussing them. So in formal debate, nothing is a topic unless it is controversial: that we should raise the voting age, outlaw gambling. But the debaters don't choose their sides. So that's why it makes no sense to do what 10-year-old Julia did. Attacking the identity of the person making the argument is irrelevant, because they didn't choose it. Your only winning strategy is to engage with the best, clearest, least personal version of the idea. And it might sound impossible or naive to imagine that you could ever take that notion outside the high school auditorium. We spend so much time dismissing ideas as democrat or republican. Rejecting proposals because they came from headquarters, or from a region that we think is not like ours. But it is possible. When I work with teams, trying to come up with the next big idea, or solve a really complex problem, I start by asking them, all of them, to submit ideas anonymously. So by way of illustration, two years ago, I was working with multiple government agencies to generate new solutions to reduce long-term unemployment. Which is one of those really wicked, sticky, well-studied public policy problems. So exactly as I described, right at the beginning, potential solutions were captured from everywhere. We aggregated them, each of them was produced on an identical template. At this point, they all look the same, they have no separate identity. And then, of course, they are discussed, picked over, refined, finalized. And at the end of that process, more than 20 of those new ideas are presented to the cabinet ministers responsible for consideration. But more than half of those, the originator of those ideas was someone who might have a hard time getting the ear of a policy advisor. Or who, because of their identity, might not be taken entirely seriously if they did. Folks who answer the phones, assistants who manage calendars, representatives from agencies who weren't always trusted. Imagine if our news media did the same thing. You can kind of see it now — a weekly cable news segment with a big policy proposal on the table that doesn't call it liberal or conservative. Or a series of op-eds for and against a big idea that don't tell you where the writers worked. Our public conversations, even our private disagreements, can be transformed by debating ideas, rather than discussing identity. And then, the thing that debate allows us to do as human beings is open ourselves, really open ourselves up to the possibility that we might be wrong. The humility of uncertainty. One of the reasons it is so hard to disagree productively is because we become attached to our ideas. We start to believe that we own them and that by extension, they own us. But eventually, if you debate long enough, you will switch sides, you'll argue for and against the expansion of the welfare state. For and against compulsory voting. And that exercise flips a kind of cognitive switch. The suspicions that you hold about people who espouse beliefs that you don't have, starts to evaporate. Because you can imagine yourself stepping into those shoes. And as you're stepping into those, you're embracing the humility of uncertainty. The possibility of being wrong. And it's that exact humility that makes us better decision-makers. Neuroscientist and psychologist Mark Leary at Duke University and his colleagues have found that people who are able to practice — and it is a skill — what those researchers call intellectual humility are more capable of evaluating a broad range of evidence, are more objective when they do so, and become less defensive when confronted with conflicting evidence. All attributes that we want in our bosses, colleagues, discussion partners, decision-makers, all virtues that we would like to claim for ourselves. And so, as we're embracing that humility of uncertainty, we should be asking each other, all of us, a question. Our debate moderators, our news anchors should be asking it of our elective representatives and candidates for office, too. "What is it that you have changed your mind about and why?" "What uncertainty are you humble about?" And this by the way, isn't some fantasy about how public life and public conversations could work. It has precedent. So, in 1969, beloved American children's television presenter Mister Rogers sits impaneled before the United States congressional subcommittee on communications, chaired by the seemingly very curmudgeonly John Pastore. And Mister Rogers is there to make a kind of classic debate case, a really bold proposal: an increase in federal funding for public broadcasting. And at the outset, committee disciplinarian Senator Pastore is not having it. This is about to end really poorly for Mister Rogers. But patiently, very reasonably, Mister Rogers makes the case why good quality children's broadcasting, the kinds of television programs that talk about the drama that arises in the most ordinary of families, matters to all of us. Even while it costs us. He invites us into a shared reality. And on the other side of that table, Senator Pastore listens, engages and opens his mind. Out loud, in public, on the record. And Senator Pastore says to Mister Rogers, "You know, I'm supposed to be a pretty tough guy, and this is the first time I've had goosebumps in two days." And then, later, "It looks like you just earned the 20 million dollars." We need many more Mister Rogers. People with the technical skills of debate and persuasion. But on the other side of that table, we need many, many, many more Senator Pastores. And the magic of debate is that it lets you, it empowers you to be both Mister Rogers and Senator Pastore simultaneously. When I work with those same teams that we talked about before, I ask them at the outset to pre-commit to the possibility of being wrong. To explain to me and to each other what it would take to change their minds. And that's all about the attitude, not the exercise. Once you start thinking about what it would take to change your mind, you start to wonder why you were quite so sure in the first place. There is so much that the practice of debate has to offer us for how to disagree productively. And we should bring it to our workplaces, our conferences, our city council meetings. And the principles of debate can transform the way that we talk to one another, to empower us to stop talking and to start listening. To stop dismissing and to start persuading. To stop shutting down and to start opening our minds. Thank you so much. (Applause) |
How a fleet of wind-powered drones is changing our understanding of the ocean | {0: 'Sebastien de Halleux is a technology entrepreneur with a lifelong passion for building impactful businesses.'} | TEDxSanFrancisco | We know more about other planets than our own, and today, I want to show you a new type of robot designed to help us better understand our own planet. It belongs to a category known in the oceanographic community as an unmanned surface vehicle, or USV. And it uses no fuel. Instead, it relies on wind power for propulsion. And yet, it can sail around the globe for months at a time. So I want to share with you why we built it, and what it means for you. A few years ago, I was on a sailboat making its way across the Pacific, from San Francisco to Hawaii. I had just spent the past 10 years working nonstop, developing video games for hundreds of millions of users, and I wanted to take a step back and look at the big picture and get some much-needed thinking time. I was the navigator on board, and one evening, after a long session analyzing weather data and plotting our course, I came up on deck and saw this beautiful sunset. And a thought occurred to me: How much do we really know about our oceans? The Pacific was stretching all around me as far as the eye could see, and the waves were rocking our boat forcefully, a sort of constant reminder of its untold power. How much do we really know about our oceans? I decided to find out. What I quickly learned is that we don't know very much. The first reason is just how vast oceans are, covering 70 percent of the planet, and yet we know they drive complex planetary systems like global weather, which affect all of us on a daily basis, sometimes dramatically. And yet, those activities are mostly invisible to us. Ocean data is scarce by any standard. Back on land, I had grown used to accessing lots of sensors — billions of them, actually. But at sea, in situ data is scarce and expensive. Why? Because it relies on a small number of ships and buoys. How small a number was actually a great surprise. Our National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, better known as NOAA, only has 16 ships, and there are less than 200 buoys offshore globally. It is easy to understand why: the oceans are an unforgiving place, and to collect in situ data, you need a big ship, capable of carrying a vast amount of fuel and large crews, costing hundreds of millions of dollars each, or, big buoys tethered to the ocean floor with a four-mile-long cable and weighted down by a set of train wheels, which is both dangerous to deploy and expensive to maintain. What about satellites, you might ask? Well, satellites are fantastic, and they have taught us so much about the big picture over the past few decades. However, the problem with satellites is they can only see through one micron of the surface of the ocean. They have relatively poor spatial and temporal resolution, and their signal needs to be corrected for cloud cover and land effects and other factors. So what is going on in the oceans? And what are we trying to measure? And how could a robot be of any use? Let's zoom in on a small cube in the ocean. One of the key things we want to understand is the surface, because the surface, if you think about it, is the nexus of all air-sea interaction. It is the interface through which all energy and gases must flow. Our sun radiates energy, which is absorbed by oceans as heat and then partially released into the atmosphere. Gases in our atmosphere like CO2 get dissolved into our oceans. Actually, about 30 percent of all global CO2 gets absorbed. Plankton and microorganisms release oxygen into the atmosphere, so much so that every other breath you take comes from the ocean. Some of that heat generates evaporation, which creates clouds and then eventually leads to precipitation. And pressure gradients create surface wind, which moves the moisture through the atmosphere. Some of the heat radiates down into the deep ocean and gets stored in different layers, the ocean acting as some kind of planetary-scale boiler to store all that energy, which later might be released in short-term events like hurricanes or long-term phenomena like El Niño. These layers can get mixed up by vertical upwelling currents or horizontal currents, which are key in transporting heat from the tropics to the poles. And of course, there is marine life, occupying the largest ecosystem in volume on the planet, from microorganisms to fish to marine mammals, like seals, dolphins and whales. But all of these are mostly invisible to us. The challenge in studying those ocean variables at scale is one of energy, the energy that it takes to deploy sensors into the deep ocean. And of course, many solutions have been tried — from wave-actuated devices to surface drifters to sun-powered electrical drives — each with their own compromises. Our team breakthrough came from an unlikely source — the pursuit of the world speed record in a wind-powered land yacht. It took 10 years of research and development to come up with a novel wing concept that only uses three watts of power to control and yet can propel a vehicle all around the globe with seemingly unlimited autonomy. By adapting this wing concept into a marine vehicle, we had the genesis of an ocean drone. Now, these are larger than they appear. They are about 15 feet high, 23 feet long, seven feet deep. Think of them as surface satellites. They're laden with an array of science-grade sensors that measure all key variables, both oceanographic and atmospheric, and a live satellite link transmits this high-resolution data back to shore in real time. Our team has been hard at work over the past few years, conducting missions in some of the toughest ocean conditions on the planet, from the Arctic to the tropical Pacific. We have sailed all the way to the polar ice shelf. We have sailed into Atlantic hurricanes. We have rounded Cape Horn, and we have slalomed between the oil rigs of the Gulf of Mexico. This is one tough robot. Let me share with you recent work that we did around the Pribilof Islands. This is a small group of islands deep in the cold Bering Sea between the US and Russia. Now, the Bering Sea is the home of the walleye pollock, which is a whitefish you might not recognize, but you might likely have tasted if you enjoy fish sticks or surimi. Yes, surimi looks like crabmeat, but it's actually pollock. And the pollock fishery is the largest fishery in the nation, both in terms of value and volume — about 3.1 billion pounds of fish caught every year. So over the past few years, a fleet of ocean drones has been hard at work in the Bering Sea with the goal to help assess the size of the pollock fish stock. This helps improve the quota system that's used to manage the fishery and help prevent a collapse of the fish stock and protects this fragile ecosystem. Now, the drones survey the fishing ground using acoustics, i.e., a sonar. This sends a sound wave downwards, and then the reflection, the echo from the sound wave from the seabed or schools of fish, gives us an idea of what's happening below the surface. Our ocean drones are actually pretty good at this repetitive task, so they have been gridding the Bering Sea day in, day out. Now, the Pribilof Islands are also the home of a large colony of fur seals. In the 1950s, there were about two million individuals in that colony. Sadly, these days, the population has rapidly declined. There's less than 50 percent of that number left, and the population continues to fall rapidly. So to understand why, our science partner at the National Marine Mammal Laboratory has fitted a GPS tag on some of the mother seals, glued to their furs. And this tag measures location and depth and also has a really cool little camera that's triggered by sudden acceleration. Here is a movie taken by an artistically inclined seal, giving us unprecedented insight into an underwater hunt deep in the Arctic, and the shot of this pollock prey just seconds before it gets devoured. Now, doing work in the Arctic is very tough, even for a robot. They had to survive a snowstorm in August and interferences from bystanders — that little spotted seal enjoying a ride. (Laughter) Now, the seal tags have recorded over 200,000 dives over the season, and upon a closer look, we get to see the individual seal tracks and the repetitive dives. We are on our way to decode what is really happening over that foraging ground, and it's quite beautiful. Once you superimpose the acoustic data collected by the drones, a picture starts to emerge. As the seals leave the islands and swim from left to right, they are observed to dive at a relatively shallow depth of about 20 meters, which the drone identifies is populated by small young pollock with low calorific content. The seals then swim much greater distance and start to dive deeper to a place where the drone identifies larger, more adult pollock, which are more nutritious as fish. Unfortunately, the calories expended by the mother seals to swim this extra distance don't leave them with enough energy to lactate their pups back on the island, leading to the population decline. Further, the drones identify that the water temperature around the island has significantly warmed. It might be one of the driving forces that's pushing the pollock north, and to spread in search of colder regions. So the data analysis is ongoing, but already we can see that some of the pieces of the puzzle from the fur seal mystery are coming into focus. But if you look back at the big picture, we are mammals, too. And actually, the oceans provide up to 20 kilos of fish per human per year. As we deplete our fish stocks, what can we humans learn from the fur seal story? And beyond fish, the oceans affect all of us daily as they drive global weather systems, which affect things like global agricultural output or can lead to devastating destruction of lives and property through hurricanes, extreme heat and floods. Our oceans are pretty much unexplored and undersampled, and today, we still know more about other planets than our own. But if you divide this vast ocean in six-by-six-degree squares, each about 400 miles long, you'd get about 1,000 such squares. So little by little, working with our partners, we are deploying one ocean drone in each of those boxes, the hope being that achieving planetary coverage will give us better insights into those planetary systems that affect humanity. We have been using robots to study distant worlds in our solar system for a while now. Now it is time to quantify our own planet, because we cannot fix what we cannot measure, and we cannot prepare for what we don't know. Thank you. (Applause) |
How video games turn players into storytellers | {0: 'The creator of emotional, immersive games like "Heavy Rain," "BEYOND: Two Souls" and "Detroit: Become Human," David Cage uses games to push the boundaries of storytelling.'} | TED2018 | The way we tell stories has naturally changed since Aristotle defined the rules of tragedy about 2,500 years ago. According to him, the role of storytelling is to mimic life and make us feel emotions. And that's exactly what storytelling as we know it has done very well since then. But there is a dimension of life that storytelling could never really reproduce. It is the notion of choices. Choices are a very important part of our lives. We as individuals are defined by the choices we make. Some of our decisions can have very significant consequences and totally change the courses of our lives. But in a play, a novel or a film, the writer makes all the decisions in advance for the characters, and as the audience, we can only watch, passively, the consequences of his decisions. As a storyteller, I've always been fascinated with the idea of recreating this notion of choices in fiction. My dream was to put the audience in the shoes of the main protagonists, let them make their own decisions, and by doing so, let them tell their own stories. Finding a way to achieve this is what I did in the past 20 years of my life. Today, I would like to introduce you to this new way of telling stories, a way that has interactivity at its heart. Rather than exposing the theory behind it, which could have been kind of abstract and probably a little bit boring, I thought it would be a great opportunity to do a little experiment. I would like you, the people here at TED, to tell your own story. So I came with an interactive scene that we are going to play together. I've asked Vicky — hello, Vicky — to control the main character for us. And your role — you, the audience — will be to make the choices. So Vicky and I don't know what's going to happen, because it will all be based on your decisions. This scene comes from our next game, called "Detroit: Become Human," and we are in the near future, where technology made possible the creation of androids that look exactly like human beings. We are in the shoes of this character called Connor, who is an android, and he can do very fancy things with coins, as you can see. He has this blue triangle on this chest, as all androids do, and now Vicky is in control of this character. She can walk around, she can go anywhere, she can look around, she can interact with her environment, and now she can tell her own stories by making choices. So here we have our first choice. There is a fish on the ground. What should we do? Should we save it or should we leave it? Remember, we are under time pressure, so we'd better be fast. What should we do? Audience: Save it! David Cage: Save it? Save the fish? (Video) (Fish plops) DC: There we go. OK, we have an android who likes animals. OK, let's move on. Remember, we have a hostage situation. (Video) Woman: Please, please, you've got to save my little girl! Wait — you're sending an android? Officer: All right, ma'am, you need to go. W: You can't do that! Why aren't you sending a real person? DC: OK, she's not really happy. Her daughter's been taken hostage by an android, and of course, she's in a state of shock. Now we can continue to explore this apartment. We see all the SWAT forces in place. But we need to find this Captain Allen first. That's the first thing we need to do. So, again, we can go anywhere. Vicky's still in control of the character. Let's see — oh, I think this is Captain Allen. He's on the phone. (Video) Connor: Captain Allen, my name is Connor. I'm the android sent by CyberLife. Captain Allen: Let's fire at everything that moves. It already shot down two of my men. We could easily get it, but they're on the edge of the balcony — it if falls, she falls. DC: OK, now we need to decide what we want to ask the captain. What should be our choice? Deviant's name? Deviant's behavior? Emotional shock? (Video) C: Has it experienced an emotional shock recently? Capt A: I haven't got a clue. Does it matter? C: I need information to determine the best approach. DC: OK, a second choice. Maybe we can learn something. What should we choose? Audience: Behavior. DC: OK, deviant behavior, Vicky. (Video) C: Do you know if it's been behaving strangely before this? Capt A: Listen ... saving that kid is all that matters. DC: OK, we are not going to learn anything from this guy. We need to do something. Let's try to go back in the lobby. Oh, wait — there's a room over there on your right, Vicky, I think. Maybe there's something we can learn here. Oh, there's a tablet. Let's have a look. (Video) Girl: This is Daniel, the coolest android in the world. Say "Hi," Daniel. Daniel: Hello! G: You're my bestie, we'll always be together! DC: That was just one way of playing the scenes, but there are many other ways of playing it. Depending on the choices you make, we could have seen many different actions, many different consequences, many different outcomes. So that gives you an idea of what my work is about as an interactive writer. Where a linear writer needs to deal with time and space, as an interactive writer, I need to deal with time, space and possibilities. I have to manage massive tree structures, where each branch is a new variation of the story. I need to think about all the possibilities in a given scene and try to imagine everything that can happen. I need to deal with thousands and thousands of variables, conditions and possibilities. As a consequence, where a film script is about 100 pages, an interactive script like this is between four and five thousand pages. So that gives you an idea of what this work is about. But I think, in the end, the experience is very unique, because it is the result of the collaboration between a writer creating this narrative landscape and the player making his own decisions, telling his own story and becoming the cowriter but also the coactor and the codirector of the story. Interactive storytelling is a revolution in the way we tell stories. With the emergence of new platforms like interactive television, virtual reality and video games, it can become a new form of entertainment and maybe even a new form of art. I am convinced that in the coming years, we will see more and more moving and meaningful interactive experiences, created by a new generation of talents. This is a medium waiting for its Orson Welles or its Stanley Kubrick, and I have no doubt that they will soon emerge and be recognized as such. I believe that interactive storytelling can be what cinema was in the 20th century: an art that deeply changes its time. Thank you. (Applause) |
How my mom inspired my approach to the cello | {0: 'TED Fellow Paul Rucker creates art that explores issues related to mass incarceration, racially-motivated violence, police brutality and the continuing impact of slavery in the US.'} | TED2018 | (Cello music) (Music ends) On the flight here, I was reminded about my mom. I'm a self-taught cellist, I've never had a lesson. I studied double bass, but I just picked up the cello and started playing because I love doing it. But my mom was an inspiration to me. I did not realize she was an inspiration, because she got her music degree through a mail-order course, the US School of Music. While raising two kids, she received a lesson a week in the mail, and practiced. And at the end of a couple of years, she put on a recital. And I'll be 50 this month, and it took me that long to realize that she was that big of an inspiration. I'm just going to keep — yeah, thanks, mom. (Applause) She's also one of the most extraordinary people I know, beyond being a wonderful musician. I want to play a little bit for mom and your moms as well, actually. (Cello music) (Music ends) You know, when you normally hear a cello, you think of this. (Plays Bach Cello Suite No.1) We're not going to do that today. (Laughter and applause) (Drums) (Cello) Hey! (Looped samples of onstage sounds) (Cello music and looped samples) (Music ends) (Applause and cheers) |
Where do your online returns go? | {0: "UPS's Aparna Mehta works with the top-tier retail customers to develop innovative, profitable solutions that enhance customer experiences."} | TED@UPS | Hi. My name is Aparna. I am a shopaholic — (Laughter) and I'm addicted to online returns. (Laughter) Well, at least I was. At one time, I had two or three packages of clothing delivered to me every other day. I would intentionally buy the same item in a couple different sizes and many colors, because I did not know what I really wanted. So I overordered, I tried things on, and then I sent what didn't work back. Once my daughter was watching me return some of those packages back, and she said, "Mom, I think you have a problem." (Laughter) I didn't think so. I mean, it's free shipping and free returns, right? (Laughter) I didn't even think twice about it, until I heard a statistic at work that shocked me. You see, I'm a global solutions director for top-tier retail, and we were in a meeting with one of my largest customers, discussing how to streamline costs. One of their biggest concerns was managing returns. Just this past holiday season alone, they had 7.5 million pieces of clothing returned to them. I could not stop thinking about it. What happens to all these returned clothes? So I came home and researched. And I learned that every year, four billion pounds of returned clothing ends up in the landfill. That's like every resident in the US did a load of laundry last night and decided to throw it in the trash today. I was horrified. I'm like, "Of all people, I should be able to help prevent this." (Laughter) My job is to find solutions to logistical issues like these — not create them. So this issue became very personal to me. I said, "You know what? We have to solve this." And we can, with some of the existing systems we already have in place. And then I started to wonder: How did we get here? I mean, it was only like six years ago when a study recommended that offering free online returns would drive customers to spend more. We started seeing companies offering free online returns to drive more sales and provide a better experience. What we didn't realize is that this would lead to more items being returned as well. In the US, companies lost $351 billion in sales in 2017 alone. Retailers are scrambling to recover their losses. They try to place that returned item online to be sold again, or they'll sell it to a discount partner or a liquidator. Basically, if companies cannot find a place for this item quickly and economically, its place becomes the trash. Suddenly, I felt very guilty for being that shopper, somebody who contributes to this. Who would have thought my innocent shopping behavior would be hurting not only me, but our planet as well? And as I thought about what to do, I kept thinking: Why does the item have to be returned to the retailer in the first place? What if there was another way, a win-win for everyone? What if when a person is trying to return something, it could go to the next shopper who wants it, and not the retailer? What if, instead of a return, they could do what I call a "green turn"? Consumers could use an app to take pictures of the item and verify the condition while returning it. Artificial intelligence systems could then sort these clothes by condition — mint condition or slightly used — and direct it to the next appropriate person. Mint-condition clothes could automatically go to the next buyer, while slightly used clothes could be marked down and offered online again. The retailer can decide the business rules on the number of times a particular item can be resold. All that the consumer would need to do is obtain a mobile code, take it to the nearest shipping place to be packed and shipped, and off it goes from one buyer to the next, not the landfill. Now you will ask, "Would people really go through all this trouble?" I think they would if they had incentives, like loyalty points or cash back. Let's call it "green cash." There would be a whole new opportunity to make money from this new customer base looking to buy these returns. This system would make a fun thing like shopping a spiritual experience that helps save our planet. (Applause) This is doable and would probably take six months to weave some of our existing systems and run a pilot. Even before any of these logistical systems are in place, each of us shoppers can act now, if every single adult in the US made a few small changes to our shopping behavior. Take the extra time to research and think — Do I really need this item? No: Do I really want this item? — before making a purchase. And if every one of us adults in the US returned five less items this year, we would keep 240 million pounds of clothes out of the landfill. Six percent reduction, just like that. This environmental problem that we have created is not thousands of years away; it's happening today, and must stop now to prevent growing landfills across the globe. I want to leave my daughter and my daughter's daughter a better and cleaner place than I found it, so I have not only stopped overordering, I recycle religiously as well. And you can, too. It's not difficult. Before we fill our shopping carts and our landfills with extra items that we don't want, let's pause next time we are shopping online and think twice about what we all hopefully really do want: a beautiful Earth to call home. Thank you. (Applause) |
How do pain relievers work? | null | TED-Ed | Say you're at the beach, and you get sand in your eyes. How do you know the sand is there? You obviously can't see it, but if you are a normal, healthy human, you can feel it, that sensation of extreme discomfort, also known as pain. Now, pain makes you do something, in this case, rinse your eyes until the sand is gone. And how do you know the sand is gone? Exactly. Because there's no more pain. There are people who don't feel pain. Now, that might sound cool, but it's not. If you can't feel pain, you could get hurt, or even hurt yourself and never know it. Pain is your body's early warning system. It protects you from the world around you, and from yourself. As we grow, we install pain detectors in most areas of our body. These detectors are specialized nerve cells called nociceptors that stretch from your spinal cord to your skin, your muscles, your joints, your teeth and some of your internal organs. Just like all nerve cells, they conduct electrical signals, sending information from wherever they're located back to your brain. But, unlike other nerve cells, nociceptors only fire if something happens that could cause or is causing damage. So, gently touch the tip of a needle. You'll feel the metal, and those are your regular nerve cells. But you won't feel any pain. Now, the harder you push against the needle, the closer you get to the nociceptor threshold. Push hard enough, and you'll cross that threshold and the nociceptors fire, telling your body to stop doing whatever you're doing. But the pain threshold isn't set in stone. Certain chemicals can tune nociceptors, lowering their threshold for pain. When cells are damaged, they and other nearby cells start producing these tuning chemicals like crazy, lowering the nociceptors' threshold to the point where just touch can cause pain. And this is where over-the-counter painkillers come in. Aspirin and ibuprofen block production of one class of these tuning chemicals, called prostaglandins. Let's take a look at how they do that. When cells are damaged, they release a chemical called arachidonic acid. And two enzymes called COX-1 and COX-2 convert this arachidonic acid into prostaglandin H2, which is then converted into a bunch of other chemicals that do a bunch of things, including raise your body temperature, cause inflammation and lower the pain threshold. Now, all enzymes have an active site. That's the place in the enzyme where the reaction happens. The active sites of COX-1 and COX-2 fit arachidonic acid very cozily. As you can see, there is no room to spare. Now, it's in this active site that aspirin and ibuprofen do their work. So, they work differently. Aspirin acts like a spine from a porcupine. It enters the active site and then breaks off, leaving half of itself in there, totally blocking that channel and making it impossible for the arachidonic acid to fit. This permanently deactivates COX-1 and COX-2. Ibuprofen, on the other hand, enters the active site, but doesn't break apart or change the enzyme. COX-1 and COX-2 are free to spit it out again, but for the time that that ibuprofen is in there, the enzyme can't bind arachidonic acid, and can't do its normal chemistry. But how do aspirin and ibuprofen know where the pain is? Well, they don't. Once the drugs are in your bloodstream, they are carried throughout your body, and they go to painful areas just the same as normal ones. So that's how aspirin and ibuprofen work. But there are other dimensions to pain. Neuropathic pain, for example, is pain caused by damage to our nervous system itself; there doesn't need to be any sort of outside stimulus. And scientists are discovering that the brain controls how we respond to pain signals. For example, how much pain you feel can depend on whether you're paying attention to the pain, or even your mood. Pain is an area of active research. If we can understand it better, maybe we can help people manage it better. |
The radical possibilities of man-made DNA | {0: 'Floyd E. Romesberg uses chemistry, biology and physics to study how biomolecules work and to create biomolecules with new forms and functions.'} | TED2018 | All life, every living thing ever, has been built according to the information in DNA. What does that mean? Well, it means that just as the English language is made up of alphabetic letters that, when combined into words, allow me to tell you the story I'm going to tell you today, DNA is made up of genetic letters that, when combined into genes, allow cells to produce proteins, strings of amino acids that fold up into complex structures that perform the functions that allow a cell to do what it does, to tell its stories. The English alphabet has 26 letters, and the genetic alphabet has four. They're pretty famous. Maybe you've heard of them. They are often just referred to as G, C, A and T. But it's remarkable that all the diversity of life is the result of four genetic letters. Imagine what it would be like if the English alphabet had four letters. What sort of stories would you be able to tell? What if the genetic alphabet had more letters? Would life with more letters be able to tell different stories, maybe even more interesting ones? In 1999, my lab at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California started working on this question with the goal of creating living organisms with DNA made up of a six-letter genetic alphabet, the four natural letters plus two additional new man-made letters. Such an organism would be the first radically altered form of life ever created. It would be a semisynthetic form of life that stores more information than life ever has before. It would be able to make new proteins, proteins built from more than the 20 normal amino acids that are usually used to build proteins. What sort of stories could that life tell? With the power of synthetic chemistry and molecular biology and just under 20 years of work, we created bacteria with six-letter DNA. Let me tell you how we did it. All you have to remember from your high school biology is that the four natural letters pair together to form two base pairs. G pairs with C and A pairs with T, so to create our new letters, we synthesized hundreds of new candidates, new candidate letters, and examined their abilities to selectively pair with each other. And after about 15 years of work, we found two that paired together really well, at least in a test tube. They have complicated names, but let's just call them X and Y. The next thing we needed to do was find a way to get X and Y into cells, and eventually we found that a protein that does something similar in algae worked in our bacteria. So the final thing that we needed to do was to show that with X and Y provided, cells could grow and divide and hold on to X and Y in their DNA. Everything we had done up to then took longer than I had hoped — I am actually a really impatient person — but this, the most important step, worked faster than I dreamed, basically immediately. On a weekend in 2014, a graduate student in my lab grew bacteria with six-letter DNA. Let me take the opportunity to introduce you to them right now. This is an actual picture of them. These are the first semisynthetic organisms. So bacteria with six-letter DNA, that's really cool, right? Well, maybe some of you are still wondering why. So let me tell you a little bit more about some of our motivations, both conceptual and practical. Conceptually, people have thought about life, what it is, what makes it different from things that are not alive, since people have had thoughts. Many have interpreted life as being perfect, and this was taken as evidence of a creator. Living things are different because a god breathed life into them. Others have sought a more scientific explanation, but I think it's fair to say that they still consider the molecules of life to be special. I mean, evolution has been optimizing them for billions of years, right? Whatever perspective you take, it would seem pretty impossible for chemists to come in and build new parts that function within and alongside the natural molecules of life without somehow really screwing everything up. But just how perfectly created or evolved are we? Just how special are the molecules of life? These questions have been impossible to even ask, because we've had nothing to compare life to. Now for the first time, our work suggests that maybe the molecules of life aren't that special. Maybe life as we know it isn't the only way it could be. Maybe we're not the only solution, maybe not even the best solution, just a solution. These questions address fundamental issues about life, but maybe they seem a little esoteric. So what about practical motivations? Well, we want to explore what sort of new stories life with an expanded vocabulary could tell, and remember, stories here are the proteins that a cell produces and the functions they have. So what sort of new proteins with new types of functions could our semisynthetic organisms make and maybe even use? Well, we have a couple of things in mind. The first is to get the cells to make proteins for us, for our use. Proteins are being used today for an increasingly broad range of different applications, from materials that protect soldiers from injury to devices that detect dangerous compounds, but at least to me, the most exciting application is protein drugs. Despite being relatively new, protein drugs have already revolutionized medicine, and, for example, insulin is a protein. You've probably heard of it, and it's manufactured as a drug that has completely changed how we treat diabetes. But the problem is that proteins are really hard to make and the only practical way to get them is to get cells to make them for you. So of course, with natural cells, you can only get them to make proteins with the natural amino acids, and so the properties those proteins can have, the applications they could be developed for, must be limited by the nature of those amino acids that the protein's built from. So here they are, the 20 normal amino acids that are strung together to make a protein, and I think you can see, they're not that different-looking. They don't bring that many different functions. They don't make that many different functions available. Compare that with the small molecules that synthetic chemists make as drugs. Now, they're much simpler than proteins, but they're routinely built from a much broader range of diverse things. Don't worry about the molecular details, but I think you can see how different they are. And in fact, it's their differences that make them great drugs to treat different diseases. So it's really provocative to wonder what sort of new protein drugs you could develop if you could build proteins from more diverse things. So can we get our semisynthetic organism to make proteins that include new and different amino acids, maybe amino acids selected to confer the protein with some desired property or function? For example, many proteins just aren't stable when you inject them into people. They are rapidly degraded or eliminated, and this stops them from being drugs. What if we could make proteins with new amino acids with things attached to them that protect them from their environment, that protect them from being degraded or eliminated, so that they could be better drugs? Could we make proteins with little fingers attached that specifically grab on to other molecules? Many small molecules failed during development as drugs because they just weren't specific enough to find their target in the complex environment of the human body. So could we take those molecules and make them parts of new amino acids that, when incorporated into a protein, are guided by that protein to their target? I started a biotech company called Synthorx. Synthorx stands for synthetic organism with an X added at the end because that's what you do with biotech companies. (Laughter) Synthorx is working closely with my lab, and they're interested in a protein that recognizes a certain receptor on the surface of human cells. But the problem is that it also recognizes another receptor on the surface of those same cells, and that makes it toxic. So could we produce a variant of that protein where the part that interacts with that second bad receptor is shielded, blocked by something like a big umbrella so that the protein only interacts with that first good receptor? Doing that would be really difficult or impossible to do with the normal amino acids, but not with amino acids that are specifically designed for that purpose. So getting our semisynthetic cells to act as little factories to produce better protein drugs isn't the only potentially really interesting application, because remember, it's the proteins that allow cells to do what they do. So if we have cells that make new proteins with new functions, could we get them to do things that natural cells can't do? For example, could we develop semisynthetic organisms that when injected into a person, seek out cancer cells and only when they find them, secrete a toxic protein that kills them? Could we create bacteria that eat different kinds of oil, maybe to clean up an oil spill? These are just a couple of the types of stories that we're going to see if life with an expanded vocabulary can tell. So, sounds great, right? Injecting semisynthetic organisms into people, dumping millions and millions of gallons of our bacteria into the ocean or out on your favorite beach? Oh, wait a minute, actually it sounds really scary. This dinosaur is really scary. But here's the catch: our semisynthetic organisms in order to survive, need to be fed the chemical precursors of X and Y. X and Y are completely different than anything that exists in nature. Cells just don't have them or the ability to make them. So when we prepare them, when we grow them up in the controlled environment of the lab, we can feed them lots of the unnatural food. Then, when we deploy them in a person or out on a beach where they no longer have access that special food, they can grow for a little bit, they can survive for a little, maybe just long enough to perform some intended function, but then they start to run out of the food. They start to starve. They starve to death and they just disappear. So not only could we get life to tell new stories, we get to tell life when and where to tell those stories. At the beginning of this talk I told you that we reported in 2014 the creation of semisynthetic organisms that store more information, X and Y, in their DNA. But all the motivations that we just talked about require cells to use X and Y to make proteins, so we started working on that. Within a couple years, we showed that the cells could take DNA with X and Y and copy it into RNA, the working copy of DNA. And late last year, we showed that they could then use X and Y to make proteins. Here they are, the stars of the show, the first fully-functional semisynthetic organisms. (Applause) These cells are green because they're making a protein that glows green. It's a pretty famous protein, actually, from jellyfish that a lot of people use in its natural form because it's easy to see that you made it. But within every one of these proteins, there's a new amino acid that natural life can't build proteins with. Every living cell, every living cell ever, has made every one of its proteins using a four-letter genetic alphabet. These cells are living and growing and making protein with a six-letter alphabet. These are a new form of life. This is a semisynthetic form of life. So what about the future? My lab is already working on expanding the genetic alphabet of other cells, including human cells, and we're getting ready to start working on more complex organisms. Think semisynthetic worms. The last thing I want to say to you, the most important thing that I want to say to you, is that the time of semisynthetic life is here. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: I mean, Floyd, this is so remarkable. I just wanted to ask you, what are the implications of your work for how we should think about the possibilities for life, like, in the universe, elsewhere? It just seems like so much of life, or so much of our assumptions are based on the fact that of course, it's got to be DNA, but is the possibility space of self-replicating molecules much bigger than DNA, even just DNA with six letters? Floyd Romesberg: Absolutely, I think that's right, and I think what our work has shown, as I mentioned, is that there's been always this prejudice that sort of we're perfect, we're optimal, God created us this way, evolution perfected us this way. We've made molecules that work right alongside the natural ones, and I think that suggests that any molecules that obey the fundamental laws of chemistry and physics and you can optimize them could do the things that the natural molecules of life do. There's nothing magic there. And I think that it suggests that life could evolve many different ways, maybe similar to us with other types of DNA, maybe things without DNA at all. CA: I mean, in your mind, how big might that possibility space be? Do we even know? Are most things going to look something like a DNA molecule, or something radically different that can still self-reproduce and potentially create living organisms? FR: My personal opinion is that if we found new life, we might not even recognize it. CA: So this obsession with the search for Goldilocks planets in exactly the right place with water and whatever, that's a very parochial assumption, perhaps. FR: Well, if you want to find someone you can talk to, then maybe not, but I think that if you're just looking for any form of life, I think that's right, I think that you're looking for life under the light post. CA: Thank you for boggling all our minds. Thank so much, Floyd. (Applause) |
Who decides what art means? | null | TED-Ed | Imagine you and a friend are strolling through an art exhibit and a striking painting catches your eye. The vibrant red appears to you as a symbol of love, but your friend is convinced it's a symbol of war. And where you see stars in a romantic sky, your friend interprets global warming-inducing pollutants. To settle the debate, you turn to the internet, where you read that the painting is a replica of the artist's first-grade art project: Red was her favorite color and the silver dots are fairies. You now know the exact intentions that led to the creation of this work. Are you wrong to have enjoyed it as something the artist didn’t intend? Do you enjoy it less now that you know the truth? Just how much should the artist's intention affect your interpretation of the painting? It's a question that's been tossed around by philosophers and art critics for decades, with no consensus in sight. In the mid-20th century, literary critic W.K. Wimsatt and philosopher Monroe Beardsley argued that artistic intention was irrelevant. They called this the Intentional Fallacy: the belief that valuing an artist's intentions was misguided. Their argument was twofold: First, the artists we study are no longer living, never recorded their intentions, or are simply unavailable to answer questions about their work. Second, even if there were a bounty of relevant information, Wimsatt and Beardsley believed it would distract us from the qualities of the work itself. They compared art to a dessert: When you taste a pudding, the chef's intentions don't affect whether you enjoy its flavor or texture. All that matters, they said, is that the pudding "works." Of course, what "works" for one person might not "work" for another. And since different interpretations appeal to different people, the silver dots in our painting could be reasonably interpreted as fairies, stars, or pollutants. By Wimsatt and Beardsley's logic, the artist's interpretation of her own work would just be one among many equally acceptable possibilities. If you find this problematic, you might be more in line with Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, two literary theorists who rejected the Intentional Fallacy. They argued that an artist's intended meaning was not just one possible interpretation, but the only possible interpretation. For example, suppose you're walking along a beach and come across a series of marks in the sand that spell out a verse of poetry. Knapp and Michaels believed the poem would lose all meaning if you discovered these marks were not the work of a human being, but an odd coincidence produced by the waves. They believed an intentional creator is what makes the poem subject to understanding at all. Other thinkers advocate for a middle ground, suggesting that intention is just one piece in a larger puzzle. Contemporary philosopher Noel Carroll took this stance, arguing that an artist's intentions are relevant to their audience the same way a speaker's intentions are relevant to the person they’re engaging in conversation. To understand how intentions function in conversation, Carroll said to imagine someone holding a cigarette and asking for a match. You respond by handing them a lighter, gathering that their motivation is to light their cigarette. The words they used to ask the question are important, but the intentions behind the question dictate your understanding and ultimately, your response. So which end of this spectrum do you lean towards? Do you, like Wimsatt and Beardsley, believe that when it comes to art, the proof should be in the pudding? Or do you think that an artist's plans and motivations for their work affect its meaning? Artistic interpretation is a complex web that will probably never offer a definitive answer. |
When technology can read minds, how will we protect our privacy? | {0: 'Nita A. Farahany is a leading scholar on the ethical, legal, and social implications of biosciences and emerging technologies, particularly those related to neuroscience and behavioral genetics.'} | TED Salon Zebra Technologies | In the months following the 2009 presidential election in Iran, protests erupted across the country. The Iranian government violently suppressed what came to be known as the Iranian Green Movement, even blocking mobile signals to cut off communication between the protesters. My parents, who emigrated to the United States in the late 1960s, spend substantial time there, where all of my large, extended family live. When I would call my family in Tehran during some of the most violent crackdowns of the protest, none of them dared discuss with me what was happening. They or I knew to quickly steer the conversation to other topics. All of us understood what the consequences could be of a perceived dissident action. But I still wish I could have known what they were thinking or what they were feeling. What if I could have? Or more frighteningly, what if the Iranian government could have? Would they have arrested them based on what their brains revealed? That day may be closer than you think. With our growing capabilities in neuroscience, artificial intelligence and machine learning, we may soon know a lot more of what's happening in the human brain. As a bioethicist, a lawyer, a philosopher and an Iranian-American, I'm deeply concerned about what this means for our freedoms and what kinds of protections we need. I believe we need a right to cognitive liberty, as a human right that needs to be protected. If not, our freedom of thought, access and control over our own brains and our mental privacy will be threatened. Consider this: the average person thinks thousands of thoughts each day. As a thought takes form, like a math calculation or a number, a word, neurons are interacting in the brain, creating a miniscule electrical discharge. When you have a dominant mental state, like relaxation, hundreds and thousands of neurons are firing in the brain, creating concurrent electrical discharges in characteristic patterns that can be measured with electroencephalography, or EEG. In fact, that's what you're seeing right now. You're seeing my brain activity that was recorded in real time with a simple device that was worn on my head. What you're seeing is my brain activity when I was relaxed and curious. To share this information with you, I wore one of the early consumer-based EEG devices like this one, which recorded the electrical activity in my brain in real time. It's not unlike the fitness trackers that some of you may be wearing to measure your heart rate or the steps that you've taken, or even your sleep activity. It's hardly the most sophisticated neuroimaging technique on the market. But it's already the most portable and the most likely to impact our everyday lives. This is extraordinary. Through a simple, wearable device, we can literally see inside the human brain and learn aspects of our mental landscape without ever uttering a word. While we can't reliably decode complex thoughts just yet, we can already gauge a person's mood, and with the help of artificial intelligence, we can even decode some single-digit numbers or shapes or simple words that a person is thinking or hearing, or seeing. Despite some inherent limitations in EEG, I think it's safe to say that with our advances in technology, more and more of what's happening in the human brain can and will be decoded over time. Already, using one of these devices, an epileptic can know they're going to have an epileptic seizure before it happens. A paraplegic can type on a computer with their thoughts alone. A US-based company has developed a technology to embed these sensors into the headrest of automobilies so they can track driver concentration, distraction and cognitive load while driving. Nissan, insurance companies and AAA have all taken note. You could even watch this choose-your-own-adventure movie "The Moment," which, with an EEG headset, changes the movie based on your brain-based reactions, giving you a different ending every time your attention wanes. This may all sound great, and as a bioethicist, I am a huge proponent of empowering people to take charge of their own health and well-being by giving them access to information about themselves, including this incredible new brain-decoding technology. But I worry. I worry that we will voluntarily or involuntarily give up our last bastion of freedom, our mental privacy. That we will trade our brain activity for rebates or discounts on insurance, or free access to social-media accounts ... or even to keep our jobs. In fact, in China, the train drivers on the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail, the busiest of its kind in the world, are required to wear EEG devices to monitor their brain activity while driving. According to some news sources, in government-run factories in China, the workers are required to wear EEG sensors to monitor their productivity and their emotional state at work. Workers are even sent home if their brains show less-than-stellar concentration on their jobs, or emotional agitation. It's not going to happen tomorrow, but we're headed to a world of brain transparency. And I don't think people understand that that could change everything. Everything from our definitions of data privacy to our laws, to our ideas about freedom. In fact, in my lab at Duke University, we recently conducted a nationwide study in the United States to see if people appreciated the sensitivity of their brain information. We asked people to rate their perceived sensitivity of 33 different kinds of information, from their social security numbers to the content of their phone conversations, their relationship history, their emotions, their anxiety, the mental images in their mind and the thoughts in their mind. Shockingly, people rated their social security number as far more sensitive than any other kind of information, including their brain data. I think this is because people don't yet understand or believe the implications of this new brain-decoding technology. After all, if we can know the inner workings of the human brain, our social security numbers are the least of our worries. (Laughter) Think about it. In a world of total brain transparency, who would dare have a politically dissident thought? Or a creative one? I worry that people will self-censor in fear of being ostracized by society, or that people will lose their jobs because of their waning attention or emotional instability, or because they're contemplating collective action against their employers. That coming out will no longer be an option, because people's brains will long ago have revealed their sexual orientation, their political ideology or their religious preferences, well before they were ready to consciously share that information with other people. I worry about the ability of our laws to keep up with technological change. Take the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which protects freedom of speech. Does it also protect freedom of thought? And if so, does that mean that we're free to alter our thoughts however we want? Or can the government or society tell us what we can do with our own brains? Can the NSA spy on our brains using these new mobile devices? Can the companies that collect the brain data through their applications sell this information to third parties? Right now, no laws prevent them from doing so. It could be even more problematic in countries that don't share the same freedoms enjoyed by people in the United States. What would've happened during the Iranian Green Movement if the government had been monitoring my family's brain activity, and had believed them to be sympathetic to the protesters? Is it so far-fetched to imagine a society in which people are arrested based on their thoughts of committing a crime, like in the science-fiction dystopian society in "Minority Report." Already, in the United States, in Indiana, an 18-year-old was charged with attempting to intimidate his school by posting a video of himself shooting people in the hallways ... Except the people were zombies and the video was of him playing an augmented-reality video game, all interpreted to be a mental projection of his subjective intent. This is exactly why our brains need special protection. If our brains are just as subject to data tracking and aggregation as our financial records and transactions, if our brains can be hacked and tracked like our online activities, our mobile phones and applications, then we're on the brink of a dangerous threat to our collective humanity. Before you panic, I believe that there are solutions to these concerns, but we have to start by focusing on the right things. When it comes to privacy protections in general, I think we're fighting a losing battle by trying to restrict the flow of information. Instead, we should be focusing on securing rights and remedies against the misuse of our information. If people had the right to decide how their information was shared, and more importantly, have legal redress if their information was misused against them, say to discriminate against them in an employment setting or in health care or education, this would go a long way to build trust. In fact, in some instances, we want to be sharing more of our personal information. Studying aggregated information can tell us so much about our health and our well-being, but to be able to safely share our information, we need special protections for mental privacy. This is why we need a right to cognitive liberty. This right would secure for us our freedom of thought and rumination, our freedom of self-determination, and it would insure that we have the right to consent to or refuse access and alteration of our brains by others. This right could be recognized as part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which has established mechanisms for the enforcement of these kinds of social rights. During the Iranian Green Movement, the protesters used the internet and good old-fashioned word of mouth to coordinate their marches. And some of the most oppressive restrictions in Iran were lifted as a result. But what if the Iranian government had used brain surveillance to detect and prevent the protest? Would the world have ever heard the protesters' cries? The time has come for us to call for a cognitive liberty revolution. To make sure that we responsibly advance technology that could enable us to embrace the future while fiercely protecting all of us from any person, company or government that attempts to unlawfully access or alter our innermost lives. Thank you. (Applause) |
100 solutions to reverse global warming | {0: 'Chad Frischmann is working to get humanity to "drawdown," the point in time when the concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases begins to decline on a year-to-year basis.'} | We the Future | Hello. I'd like to introduce you to a word you may never have heard before, but you ought to know: drawdown. Drawdown is a new way of thinking about and acting on global warming. It's a goal for a future that we want, a future where reversing global warming is possible. Drawdown is that point in time when atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases begin to decline on a year-to-year basis. More simply, it's that point when we take out more greenhouse gases than we put into Earth's atmosphere. Now, I know we're all concerned about climate change, but climate change is not the problem. Climate change is the expression of the problem. It's the feedback of the system of the planet telling us what's going on. The problem is global warming, provoked by the increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases caused by human activity. So how do we solve the problem? How do we begin the process of reversing global warming? The only way we know how is to draw down, to avoid putting greenhouse gases up and to pull down what's already there. I know. Given the current situation, it sounds impossible, but humanity already knows what to do. We have real, workable technologies and practices that can achieve drawdown. And it's already happening. What we need is to accelerate implementation and to change the discourse from one of fear and confusion, which only leads to apathy, to one of understanding and possibility, and, therefore, opportunity. I work for an organization called Project Drawdown. And for the last four years, together with a team of researchers and writers from all over the world, we have mapped, measured and detailed 100 solutions to reversing global warming. Eighty already exist today, and when taken together, those 80 can achieve drawdown. And 20 are coming attractions, solutions on the pipeline, and when they come online, will speed up our progress. These are solutions that are viable, scalable and financially feasible. And they do one or more of three things: replace existing fossil fuel-based energy generation with clean, renewable sources; reduce consumption through technological efficiency and behavior change; and to biosequester carbon in our plants' biomass and soil through a process we all learn in grade school, the magic of photosynthesis. It's through a combination of these three mechanisms that drawdown becomes possible. So how do we get there? Well, here's the short answer. This is a list of the top 20 solutions to reversing global warming. Now, I'll go into some detail, but take a few seconds to look over the list. It's eclectic, I know, from onshore wind turbines to educating girls, from plant-rich diets to rooftop solar technology. So let's break it down a little bit. To the right of the slide, you'll see figures in gigatons, or billions of tons. That represents the total equivalent carbon dioxide reduced from the atmosphere when the solution is implemented globally over a 30-year period. Now, when we think about climate solutions, we often think about electricity generation. We think of renewable energy as the most important set of solutions, and they are incredibly important. But the first thing to notice about this list is that only five of the top 20 solutions relate to electricity. What surprised us, honestly, was that eight of the top 20 relate to the food system. The climate impact of food may come as a surprise to many people, but what these results show is that the decisions we make every day about the food we produce, purchase and consume are perhaps the most important contributions every individual can make to reversing global warming. And how we manage land is also very important. Protecting forests and wetlands safeguards, expands and creates new carbon sinks that directly draw down carbon. This is how drawdown can happen. And when we take food and land management together, 12 of the top 20 solutions relate to how and why we use land. This fundamentally shifts traditional thinking on climate solutions. But let's go to the top of the list, because I think what's there may also surprise you. The single most impactful solution, according to this analysis, would be refrigeration management, or properly managing and disposing of hydrofluorocarbons, also known as HFCs, which are used by refrigerators and air conditioners to cool the air. We did a great job with the Montreal Protocol to limit the production of chlorofluorocarbons, CFCs, because of their effect on the ozone layer. But they were replaced by HFCs, which are hundreds to thousands of times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. And that 90 gigatons reduced is a conservative figure. If we were to account for the impact of the Kigali agreement of 2016, which calls for the phaseout of hydrofluorocarbons and replace them with natural refrigerants, which exist today, this number could increase to 120, to nearly 200 gigatons of avoided greenhouse gases. Maybe you're surprised, as we were. Now, before going into some details of specific solutions, you may be wondering how we came to these calculations. Well, first of all, we collected a lot of data, and we used statistical analysis to create ranges that allow us to choose reasonable choices for every input used throughout the models. And we chose a conservative approach, which underlies the entire project. All that data is entered in the model, ambitiously but plausibly projected into the future, and compared against what we would have to do anyway. The 84 gigatons reduced from onshore wind turbines, for example, results from the electricity generated from wind farms that would otherwise be produced from coal or gas-fired plants. We calculate all the costs to build and to operate the plants and all the emissions generated. The same process is used to compare recycling versus landfilling, regenerative versus industrial agriculture, protecting versus cutting down our forests. The results are then integrated within and across systems to avoid double-counting and add it up to see if we actually get to drawdown. OK, let's go into some specific solutions. Rooftop solar comes in ranked number 10. When we picture rooftop solar in our minds we often envision a warehouse in Miami covered in solar panels. But these are solutions that are relevant in urban and rural settings, high and low-income countries, and they have cascading benefits. This is a family on a straw island in Lake Titicaca receiving their first solar panel. Before, kerosene was used for cooking and lighting, kerosene on a straw island. So by installing solar, this family is not only helping to reduce emissions, but providing safety and security for their household. And tropical forests tell their own story. Protecting currently degraded land in the tropics and allowing natural regeneration to occur is the number five solution to reversing global warming. We can think of trees as giant sticks of carbon. This is drawdown in action every year, as carbon is removed from the atmosphere through photosynthesis, which converts carbon dioxide to plants' biomass and soil organic carbon. And we need to rethink how we produce our food to make it more regenerative. There are many ways to do this, and we researched over 13 of them, but these aren't new ways of producing food. They have been practiced for centuries, for generations. But they are increasingly displaced by modern agriculture, which promotes tillage, monocropping and the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides which degrade the land and turn it into a net emitter of greenhouse gases. Regenerative agriculture, on the other hand, restores soil health and productivity, increases yield, improves water retention, benefits smallholder farmers and large farming operations alike and brings carbon back to the land. It's a win-win-win-win-win. (Laughter) And it's not just how we produce food, but what we consume that has a massive impact on global warming. A plant-rich diet is not a vegan or a vegetarian diet, though I applaud any who make those choices. It's a healthy diet in terms of how much we consume, and particularly how much meat is consumed. In the richer parts of the world, we overconsume. However, low-income countries show an insufficient caloric and protein intake. That needs rebalancing, and it's in the rebalancing that a plant-rich diet becomes the number four solution to reversing global warming. Moreover, approximately a third of all food produced is not eaten, and wasted food emits an astounding eight percent of global greenhouse gases. We need to look where across the supply chain these losses and wastage occurs. In low-income countries, after food leaves the farm, most food is wasted early in the supply chain due to infrastructure and storage challenges. Food is not wasted by consumers in low-income countries which struggle to feed their population. In the developed world, instead, after food leaves the farm, most food is wasted at the end of the supply chain by markets and consumers, and wasted food ends up in the landfill where it emits methane as it decomposes. This is a consumer choice problem. It's not a technology issue. Preventing food waste from the beginning is the number three solution. But here's the interesting thing. When we look at the food system as a whole and we implement all the production solutions like regenerative agriculture, and we adopt a plant-rich diet, and we reduce food waste, our research shows that we would produce enough food on current farmland to feed the world's growing population a healthy, nutrient-rich diet now until 2050 and beyond. That means we don't need to cut down forests for food production. The solutions to reversing global warming are the same solutions to food insecurity. Now, a solution that often does not get talked enough about, family planning. By providing men and women the right to choose when, how and if to raise a family through reproductive health clinics and education, access to contraception and freedom devoid of persecution can reduce the estimated global population by 2050. That reduced population means reduced demand for electricity, food, travel, buildings and all other resources. All the energy and emissions that are used to produce that higher demand is reduced by providing the basic human right to choose when, how and if to raise a family. But family planning cannot happen without equal quality of education to girls currently being denied access. Now, we've taken a small liberty here, because the impact of universal education and family planning resources are so inextricably intertwined that we chose to cut it right down the middle. But taken together, educating girls and family planning is the number one solution to reversing global warming, reducing approximately 120 billion tons of greenhouse gases. So is drawdown possible? The answer is yes, it is possible, but we need all 80 solutions. There are no silver bullets or a subset of solutions that are going to get us there. The top solutions would take us far along the pathway, but there's no such thing as a small solution. We need all 80. But here's the great thing. We would want to implement these solutions whether or not global warming was even a problem, because they have cascading benefits to human and planetary well-being. Renewable electricity results in clean, abundant access to energy for all. A plant-rich diet, reduced food waste results in a healthy global population with enough food and sustenance. Family planning and educating girls? This is about human rights, about gender equality. This is about economic improvement and the freedom of choice. It's about justice. Regenerative agriculture, managed grazing, agroforestry, silvopasture restores soil health, benefits farmers and brings carbon back to the land. Protecting our ecosystems also protects biodiversity and safeguards planetary health and the oxygen that we breathe. Its tangible benefits to all species are incalculable. But one last point, because I know it's probably on everybody's mind; how much is this going to cost? Well, we estimate that to implement all 80 solutions would cost about 29 trillion dollars over 30 years. That's just about a trillion a year. Now, I know that sounds like a lot, but we have to remember that global GDP is over 80 trillion every year, and the estimated savings from implementing these solutions is 74 trillion dollars, over double the costs. That's a net savings of 44 trillion dollars. So drawdown is possible. We can do it if we want to. It's not going to cost that much, and the return on that investment is huge. Here's the welcome surprise. When we implement these solutions, we shift the way we do business from a system that is inherently exploitative and extractive to a new normal that is by nature restorative and regenerative. We need to rethink our global goals, to move beyond sustainability towards regeneration, and along the way reverse global warming. Thank you. (Applause) |
Can you solve the giant iron riddle? | null | TED-Ed | The family of giants you work for is throwing a fancy dinner party, and they all want to look their best. But there’s a problem – the elder giant’s favorite shirt is wrinkled! To fix it, you’ll need to power up… the Giant Iron. The iron needs two giant batteries to work. You just had 4 working ones and 4 dead ones in separate piles, but it looks like the baby giant mixed them all up. You need to get the iron working and press the giant shirt, fast – or you’ll end up being the main course tonight! How can you test the batteries so that you’re guaranteed to get a working pair in 7 tries or less? Pause the video now if you want to figure it out for yourself Answer in 3 Answer in 2 Answer in 1 You could, of course, take all eight batteries and begin testing the 28 possible combinations. You might get lucky within the first few tries. But if you don’t, moving the giant batteries that many times will take way too long. You can’t rely on luck – you need to assume the worst possibility and plan accordingly. However, you don’t actually need to test every possible combination. Remember – there are four good batteries in total, meaning that any pile of six you choose will have at least two good batteries in it. That doesn’t help you right away, since testing all six batteries could still take as many as 15 tries. But it does give you a clue to the solution – dividing the batteries into smaller subsets narrows down the possible results. So instead of six batteries, let’s take any three. This group has a total of three possible combinations. Since both batteries have to be working for the iron to power up, a single failure can’t tell you whether both batteries are dead, or just one. But if all three combinations fail, then you’ll know this group has either one good battery, or none at all. Now you can set those three aside and repeat the process for another three batteries. You might get a match, but if every combination fails again, you’ll know this set can have no more than one good battery. That would leave only two batteries untried. Since there are four good batteries in total and you’ve only accounted for two so far, both of these remaining ones must be good. Dividing the batteries into sets of 3, 3, and 2 is guaranteed to get a working result in 7 tries or less, no matter what order you test the piles in. With no time to spare, the iron comes to life, and you manage to get the shirt flawlessly ironed. The pleased elder and his family show up to the party dressed to the nines … well, almost. |
The story of Marvel's first queer Latina superhero | {0: 'Gabby Rivera is a Bronx-born, queer Latinx writer.'} | TED Salon: Radical Craft | At no point did I think superheroes would become such a huge part of my life. As a kid, I looked at them, and I saw everything I wasn't. They had big muscles, supermodel good looks, and phenomenal cosmic powers. And me? I kind of looked like this, except shorter and with frizzier hair, and I never felt powerful. I was always just one big ball of nervous, soft energy, and superheroes, much like the bullies at school, didn't seem to have a lot of room for that, for me. So I stayed away. And besides, who needs superheroes when you're surrounded by Puerto Rican women from the Bronx? (Laughter) My tías were cops and paramedics, my abuelas were seamstresses and sold jewelry up the street, and my mom got her master's degree in education and taught kindergarten in New York City public schools for over 30 years. So my superheroes were sitting around the dinner table with me. And I don't know how much time you've spent with Puerto Rican women from the Bronx, but we're also some of the world's greatest storytellers. And I'd sit there at my grandmother's dining room table and I'd listen to the women in my family tell these wild, rambunctious tales about navigating their lives in the Bronx. And I wanted to be them so bad. But I wasn't tough like them either. So mostly, I listened, and I soaked it in, and I found myself gravitating to the soft threads in their stories, and I wrote those down. The funny, the goofy, the gentle — those were my in to storytelling, so much so that I wrote a young-adult novel called "Juliet Takes a Breath," about a chubby, queer Puerto Rican girl from the Bronx navigating sexuality, family and identity. And on the strength of "Juliet," Marvel Comics tapped me to write the solo series for their first-ever Latina lesbian superhero, America Chavez. Yeah! (Cheers) (Laughter) Listen, OK. Created by Joe Casey and Nick Dragotta for the Marvel miniseries "Vengeance," America Chavez has been in the Marvel Universe for over seven years. She's tough, Latina, and she's so strong that she can punch portals into other dimensions. (Laughter) I know, right? (Laughter) And people were so excited, because finally, someone who shared her identities — queer and Latina — would be writing her story. And I saw that, right? And also, when I looked at America, I saw a young Latina in survival mode. See, because her moms had sacrificed themselves to the universe when she was a kid, and she'd been on her own ever since. No wonder she had to be tough. And that link, that link of having to be tough, that rested heavy with me. Like I said, I'm from the Bronx, and the Bronx is tough, tough like walking past sidewalk memorials and dodging cop towers on your way to the train type of tough. When stuff happens that's bad, people are like, "Yo, you gotta keep it moving. You gotta keep trucking. Don't cry. Don't let it get to you." And my mom and my tías and my abuelas, I never saw them take a moment to rest or to invest in self-care. And their soft? It never left the house. And so that was the first thing that I wanted to give to America, the thing that I wished I'd been able to give to my abuelas and my tías, the thing that I'm trying to give to my mom now: permission to be soft. Like, it's OK to sit in silence and go on a journey just to discover yourself, and your pain will make you crumble and you will fall and you will need to ask people for help, and that's OK, and that being vulnerable is good for us. But see, I didn't come to all this compassion and healing stuff like, you know, out of nowhere, and so when it came to America's story, I wanted to give her the space to be human, to mess up, and to find soft on her own. So she kind of had to quit her day job. You know what I'm saying? I had to give her a superhero sabbatical, (Laughter) and the first thing I did was enroll her in Justice Sonia Sotomayor University. (Laughter) (Applause) Because where else would she feel safe and represented and liberated but a university dedicated to the first Puerto Rican woman nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States? And her first class is "Intergalactic Revolutionaries and You," and America is so excited, she's ready to show off her strength, she's ready to show off her portal-punching skills, (Laughter) and I stripped that safety net from her right away. And I limited her powers, and I changed up her location and shook up her world, because that is what college is like, (Laughter) especially if you're alone. But I didn't want America to be alone for long, and so in a homework assignment gone totally wrong, she lands on a battlefield with the X-Men. (Laughter) Because, when I was in college, the Reverend Kelly Brown Douglas was my mentor, and I knew that America Chavez needed one, too. And who better to mentor America Chavez than Storm, the first black female superhero and one of the most powerful members of the X-Men? Nobody, that's who. (Laughter) And Storm teaches America how to quiet her mind inside of a star portal, and when America quiets her mind, she opens up the dimensions, and in that silence, she can listen for anything and anyone. And no one has ever offered her silence and deep reflection as a way to be powerful. And at first, she rejects it, but with Storm's encouragement, it clicks, and America quiets the world around her, and she leans into a deep vulnerability. I mean, her and Storm even hug. I know. And that's because my mentors loved me enough to encourage me to investigate myself and my ancestors, and when you're 19, how do you even know what that means? I didn't learn about the history of my people in college. I learned about the history of my people sitting on my grandmother's lap when she pulled out the photo album and she named everyone that was here and everyone still left on the island. So obviously, I had to crash-land a grandma on America Chavez, and not just any grandma — a big, strong, luchador grandma, one that loved her enough to take her to the ancestral plain, where America Chavez could see the history of her people play out in the skies above. And America gets to see Planeta Fuertona, the birth planet of her grandmother, and she sees it get invaded, and she sees her grandmother and her mom flee. And she also sees the joy that they experience when their new homeland accepts them openly and offers them tremendous care. She gets to see great pain met with even greater compassion, and that's right alongside the tremendous strength of her family. And so everywhere that I could, right, I wrote her little love notes for her and for all the other queer kids of color trying to be magnificent. Like, when you lose yourself, dig deep into your ancestry, because you will find the pieces there. And also, reminders that soft is not a pass to duck, to hide, to be silent, to cower. Soft is also a push to hold ourselves accountable. Kind of like when America lands in World War II and comes face-to-face with Hitler, and she knocks him the hell out ... (Laughter) just like Captain America did in 1941, and who knew we'd need America Chavez to punch Nazis in 2018. (Laughter) (Applause) (Laughter) And even that, that justified act kind of wrecks her a little bit, so I made sure that she linked up with her best friend, and they talk feelings and they go on a road trip and they sing "Just a Girl" by No Doubt at the top of their lungs. (Laughter) And when Midas, a sinister corporation, takes control of Sotomayor, threatens to ban portals and almost kills America ... her ancestors reach for her ... because they know that she needs to heal. And it is that burst of care, that healing, that gives her the fuel to defeat Midas and reclaim herself. See, because that myth of having to go it alone and having to be tough ... doesn't serve us. America Chavez is a whole superhero, and she still needed a team of support to help her find herself. And she needed that gentleness, the type of gentleness that is rooted in compassion and still very much invested in justice and liberation. Because it's in that space where softness and vulnerability meet strength that we transcend our everyday selves, that we become something greater, something majestic, maybe even something super. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why should you read Kurt Vonnegut? | null | TED-Ed | Billy Pilgrim can’t sleep because he knows aliens will arrive to abduct him in one hour. He knows the aliens are coming because he has become “unstuck” in time, causing him to experience events out of chronological order. Over the course of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-five, he hops back and forth between a childhood trip to the Grand Canyon, his life as a middle-aged optometrist, his captivity in an intergalactic zoo, the humiliations he endured as a war prisoner, and more. The title of Slaughterhouse-five and much of its source material came from Vonnegut’s own experiences in World War II. As a prisoner of war, he lived in a former slaughterhouse in Dresden, where he took refuge in an underground meat locker while Allied forces bombed the city. When he and the other prisoners finally emerged, they found Dresden utterly demolished. After the war, Vonnegut tried to make sense of human behavior by studying an unusual aspect of anthropology: the shapes of stories, which he insisted were just as interesting as the shapes of pots or spearheads. To find the shape, he graphed the main character’s fortune from the beginning to the end of a story. The zany curves he generated revealed common types of fairy tales and myths that echo through many cultures. But this shape can be the most interesting of all. In a story like this, it’s impossible to distinguish the character’s good fortune from the bad. Vonnegut thought this kind of story was the truest to real life, in which we are all the victims of a series of accidents, unable to predict how events will impact us long term. He found the tidy, satisfying arcs of many stories at odds with this reality, and he set out to explore the ambiguity between good and bad fortune in his own work. When Vonnegut ditched clear-cut fortunes, he also abandoned straightforward chronology. Instead of proceeding tidily from beginning to end, in his stories “All moments, past, present and future always have existed, always will exist.” Tralfamadorians, the aliens who crop up in many of his books, see all moments at once. They “can see where each star has been and where it is going, so that the heavens are filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti.” But although they can see all of time, they don’t try to change the course of events. While the Trafalmadorians may be at peace with their lack of agency, Vonnegut’s human characters are still getting used to it. In The Sirens of Titan, when they seek the meaning of life in the vastness of the universe, they find nothing but “empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.” Then, from their vantage point within a “chrono-synclastic infundibulum,” a man and his dog see devastating futures for their earthly counterparts, but can’t change the course of events. Though there aren’t easy answers available, they eventually conclude that the purpose of life is “to love whoever is around to be loved.” In Cat’s Cradle, Vonnegut’s characters turn to a different source of meaning: Bokonism, a religion based on harmless lies that all its adherents recognize as lies. Though they’re aware of Bokonism’s lies, they live their lives by these tenets anyway, and in so doing develop some genuine hope. They join together in groups called Karasses, which consist of people we “find by accident but […] stick with by choice”— cosmically linked around a shared purpose. These are not to be confused with Granfalloons, groups of people who appoint significance to actually meaningless associations, like where you grew up, political parties, and even entire nations. Though he held a bleak view of the human condition, Vonnegut believed strongly that “we are all here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is." We might get pooped and demoralized, but Vonnegut interspersed his grim assessments with more than a few morsels of hope. His fictional alter ego, Kilgore Trout, supplied this parable: two yeast sat “discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.” In spite of his insistence that we’re all here to fart around, in spite of his deep concerns about the course of human existence, Vonnegut also advanced the possibility, however slim, that we might end up making something good. And if that isn’t nice, what is? |
Cómo usar el arte de la fotografía para restaurar la memoria | {0: 'Alejandro Chaskielberg is a photographer, videographer, and teacher based in Buenos Aires. In 2011, he was named Photographer of the Year at the Sony World Photography Awards.'} | TEDxRiodelaPlata | Recently, my daughter and I decided to give away some toys she no longer used. She's six years old, and asked me for a camera to take a picture of them. It was easier for her to farewell her toys if she could take a picture before giving them away. Because she doesn't want to forget them. Because pictures help us remember. We grab our cell phones to snap when we feel something is special. When something moves us, we feel the urge to capture what we feel and keep it in an image, in a picture. However, we don't print photos on paper like we used to do, we share them in social networks, or we upload them to the cloud. Photography turned into something intangible, something virtual. But, what happens when we lose or erase our digital photos? Those in your computer, in that hard disk or in your phone. Is there anybody here who never lost a photo? What would happen if, for some reason we would lose all of our parents' photos or other loved ones who are no longer with us? How are we to remember them? Going back to our photos from the past is like opening the doors to a dimension where lots of memories we seem to forget still remain. And those images from the past, those cherished treasures can help us propel ourselves into the future, as well. I am a nighttime photographer. I make portraits under moonlight, in nature, close to the water. I ask the people I photograph to remain still and silent for several minutes amidst darkness. Meanwhile, I walk around them to light them up and light up the landscape with lanterns. It's a moment of quietness and connection. I went off to live in the islands of the Paraná River Delta for two years. I took with me an old camera without knowing very well where I was going, neither what was I to find there. And in time I came to know the islanders, and I invited them to be photographed under the full moon to recreate their daily life routines and jobs, but at night. And I took photos of loggers, hunters and dreamers. People living in isolation, whose only direct relationship is with water, to the rhythm of the river highs and lows. And that visual work in the Delta led me to travel around the world, and took me to Japan. I was searching for a new story to tell. I wanted to work again with a community which had some connection with water. And it happened that the curator of my exhibition, Ihiro Hayami, had relatives in a small fisher town and went with me for a visit. Ōtsuchi is located between the mountains and the sea. It's a fifteen-thousand-people town that in March 2011 went through the worst tragedy in its history. It was washed off by a tsunami with waves tall as a five-story building. Even though the alarms went off many people didn't believe it would be so strong, and remain in their homes. As a consequence many people died, close to a 10 percent of the population. And 70 percent of houses were washed away. This is why every local in Ōtsuchi has either friends or family who died in the tsunami. The power of the waves pulled the houses off their base and the sea gulped them up. Survivors were left with no shelter and had to endure a winter with temperatures below zero Celsius. Amidst this chaos and total destruction many people were trying to save their family photos. An officer of Japan's Self Defense Forces recovers a photo album inside a house in total ruin. There it was the picture of a child. The officer holds the album as if he were holding the child. I traveled to Ōtsuchi with my daughter who was five month old at the time. And the contrast of a baby in the middle of such desolation was impressive. People would take her off of my arms in order to kiss her. And I'd wonder how to tell this story that happened a year and a half ago. What could be positive out of such level of destruction. The first thing I found were big piles of rubble made of all kind of things. Twisted objects that speak about life as it used to be in Ōtsuchi. Like this vending machine or this fishing elements, car remains ... or what's left of a house. A lamp turned into a Moebius strip, the symbol of infinite time. As a contrast to these mountains of rubble there was this town flattened by water. The skeletons of the houses, marked on the ground were empty spaces, filled with stories. So I invited the survivors to go back to those spaces where their houses or workplaces used to exist. And many accepted, but in general, the kids didn't want to. I photographed them during the night as they remained silent and still during the ten minutes each photo took. The scenes were so sad, nothing had color. She is Haruko Okano, a librarian, and she's sitting on the remains of Ōtsuchi's Library, where she worked. This is the Second Volunteers Firefighters Squad of Ōtsuchi inside of what was the fire station. The fireman standing up was in charge of closing the anti-tsunami gates. This is Yoshihiro Ogayu, monk of Kogan-ji temple. The temple was a refuge in case of tsunami but even so it was destroyed. His dad and his son died there. When that first trip to Ōtsuchi was over I found a photo album in the middle of the street. It had laid there for a year and a half without having anyone pick it up. It was all wet, heavy and it stank just like a dead animal. It was tainted with color bubbles gushing from the photos that blended together. I took a picture of it without giving it much of a thought and I came back. Once in Buenos Aires, the Ōtsuchi experience felt much like a far away dream. It filled me up with doubt: Why did I have to tell this story, if I came from the other end of the world? What did it had to do with me? Why had I photographed the survivors in black and white if the reference of my work is color? And while I made myself these questions, my own life began to crumble. Soon after breakup, my daughter's mother went off to live in another country. So I took on myself Lara's upbringing, she was a one-year-old baby. Project Ōtsuchi was put on hold, because now it was me the one who had to survive and reinvent myself. And some months later, revisiting the work the family photo album image popped up again. But in this second view I grasped it in a different way. I thought I saw a painter's palette. So I took the main colors of that album to create my own color palette. And I used those colors created by the force of the tsunami to color the images of the survivors. And little by little, all the gray scenes turned into something colorful. I used color as a bridge to connect the present and the past, as the hub between their photos and mine. Now I was feeling connected with Ōtsuchi once again. Two years passed since until I was able to return to Japan to search for other recovered photos and find new colors to paint with. There I met Mikio Komukai, a nice man who had this NGO that was recovering family photos to send them back to their owners. And with his help and the permission of Ōtsuchi's government I gained access to that impressive archive of thousand of destroyed photos. Contemplating those pictures I realized the intangible damage the people of Ōtsuchi were facing; the damage to their memory and identity. Those blurred images were the measure of their loss. The firefighters of Ōtsuchi. I traveled a total of six times to finish the project and publish a book. And this is the last picture I took with my two assistants, Mayumi Suzuki and Kazuhiko Chikaoka, who both lost their parents to the tsunami. We built an arch with plastic tubes which they arranged in different positions over the remains of this house. And if you look carefully at the photo you will see that their hands are holding this house of light. In 2016 the government of Ōtsuchi invited me to show my project, but I had a feeling that it was not over. There was something left to do. So I suggested that we put together a collective exhibition which we set up in the gymnasium of a temporary school. And we invited high school students and the people in town to take photos. Now the kids did want to join in. We gave them disposable cameras with one assignment: to tell their lives in pictures, their intimate whereabouts. Five years away from the tsunami there were children back in the streets taking photos, recording its life. And together, in community, we created a small photo archive of what Ōtsuchi is today. The people in town took pictures to create new memories: The memories of the future of Ōtsuchi. As for me, I started my own photo album telling my life and my travels with Lara. And here we are in Japan, saying goodbye to the sea of Ōtsuchi. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Me Too is a movement, not a moment | {0: 'For more than 25 years, activist and advocate Tarana J. Burke has worked at the intersection of racial justice and sexual violence.'} | TEDWomen 2018 | I've been trying to figure out what I was going to say here for months. Because there's no bigger stage than TED, it felt like getting my message right in this moment was more important than anything. And so I searched and searched for days on end, trying to find the right configuration of words. And although intellectually, I could bullet point the big ideas that I wanted to share about Me Too and this movement that I founded, I kept finding myself falling short of finding the heart. I wanted to pour myself into this moment and tell you why even the possibility of healing or interrupting sexual violence was worth standing and fighting for. I wanted to rally you to your feet with an uplifting speech about the important work of fighting for the dignity and humanity of survivors. But I don't know if I have it. The reality is, after soldiering through the Supreme Court nomination process and attacks from the White House, gross mischaracterizations, internet trolls and the rallies and marches and heart-wrenching testimonies, I'm faced with my own hard truth. I'm numb. And I'm not surprised. I've traveled all across the world giving talks, and like clockwork, after every event, more than one person approaches me so that they can say their piece in private. And I always tried to reassure them. You know, I'd give them local resources and a soft reassurance that they're not alone and this is their movement, too. I'd tell them that we're stronger together and that this is a movement of survivors and advocates doing things big and small every day. And more and more people are joining this movement every single day. That part is clear. People are putting their bodies on the line and raising their voices to say, "Enough is enough." So why do I feel this way? Well ... Someone with credible accusations of sexual violence against him was confirmed to the Supreme Court of the United States of America, again. The US President, who was caught on tape talking about how he can grab women's body parts wherever he wants, however he wants, can call a survivor a liar at one of his rallies, and the crowds will roar. And all across the world, where Me Too has taken off, Australia and France, Sweden, China and now India, survivors of sexual violence are all at once being heard and then vilified. And I've read article after article bemoaning ... wealthy white men who have landed softly with their golden parachutes, following the disclosure of their terrible behavior. And we're asked to consider their futures. But what of survivors? This movement is constantly being called a watershed moment, or even a reckoning, but I wake up some days feeling like all evidence points to the contrary. It's hard not to feel numb. I suspect some of you may feel numb, too. But let me tell you what else I know. Sometimes when you hear the word "numb," you think of a void, an absence of feelings, or even the inability to feel. But that's not always true. Numbness can come from those memories that creep up in your mind that you can't fight off in the middle of the night. They can come from the tears that are locked behind your eyes that you won't give yourself permission to cry. For me, numbness comes from looking in the face of survivors and knowing everything to say but having nothing left to give. It's measuring the magnitude of this task ahead of you versus your own wavering fortitude. Numbness is not always the absence of feeling. Sometimes it's an accumulation of feelings. And as survivors, we often have to hold the truth of what we experience. But now, we're all holding something, whether we want to or not. Our colleagues are speaking up and speaking out, industries across the board are reexamining workplace culture, and families and friends are having hard conversations about closely held truths. Everybody is impacted. And then, there's the backlash. We've all heard it. "The Me Too Movement is a witch hunt." Right? "Me Too is dismantling due process." Or, "Me Too has created a gender war." The media has been consistent with headline after headline that frames this movement in ways that make it difficult to move our work forward, and right-wing pundits and other critics have these talking points that shift the focus away from survivors. So suddenly, a movement that was started to support all survivors of sexual violence is being talked about like it's a vindictive plot against men. And I'm like, "Huh?" (Laughter) How did we get here? We have moved so far away from the origins of this movement that started a decade ago, or even the intentions of the hashtag that started just a year ago, that sometimes, the Me Too movement that I hear some people talk about is unrecognizable to me. But be clear: This is a movement about the one in four girls and the one in six boys who are sexually assaulted every year and carry those wounds into adulthood. It's about the 84 percent of trans women who will be sexually assaulted this year and the indigenous women who are three-and-a-half times more likely to be sexually assaulted than any other group. Or people with disabilities, who are seven times more likely to be sexually abused. It's about the 60 percent of black girls like me who will be experiencing sexual violence before they turn 18, and the thousands and thousands of low-wage workers who are being sexually harassed right now on jobs that they can't afford to quit. This is a movement about the far-reaching power of empathy. And so it's about the millions and millions of people who, one year ago, raised their hands to say, "Me too," and their hands are still raised while the media that they consume erases them and politicians who they elected to represent them pivot away from solutions. It's understandable that the push-pull of this unique, historical moment feels like an emotional roller-coaster that has rendered many of us numb. This accumulation of feelings that so many of us are experiencing together, across the globe, is collective trauma. But ... it is also the first step towards actively building a world that we want right now. What we do with this thing that we're all holding is the evidence that this is bigger than a moment. It's the confirmation that we are in a movement. And the most powerful movements have always been built around what's possible, not just claiming what is right now. Trauma halts possibility. Movement activates it. Dr. King famously quoted Theodore Parker saying, "The arc of the moral universe is long, and it bends toward justice." We've all heard this quote. But somebody has to bend it. The possibility that we create in this movement and others is the weight leaning that arc in the right direction. Movements create possibility, and they are built on vision. My vision for the Me Too Movement is a part of a collective vision to see a world free of sexual violence, and I believe we can build that world. Full stop. But in order to get there, we have to dramatically shift a culture that propagates the idea that vulnerability is synonymous with permission and that bodily autonomy is not a basic human right. In other words, we have to dismantle the building blocks of sexual violence: power and privilege. So much of what we hear about the Me Too Movement is about individual bad actors or depraved, isolated behavior, and it fails to recognize that anybody in a position of power comes with privilege, and it renders those without that power more vulnerable. Teachers and students, coaches and athletes, law enforcement and citizen, parent and child: these are all relationships that can have an incredible imbalance of power. But we reshape that imbalance by speaking out against it in unison and by creating spaces to speak truth to power. We have to reeducate ourselves and our children to understand that power and privilege doesn't always have to destroy and take — it can be used to serve and build. And we have to reeducate ourselves to understand that, unequivocally, every human being has the right to walk through this life with their full humanity intact. Part of the work of the Me Too Movement is about the restoration of that humanity for survivors, because the violence doesn't end with the act. The violence is also the trauma that we hold after the act. Remember, trauma halts possibility. It serves to impede, stagnate, confuse and kill. So our work rethinks how we deal with trauma. For instance, we don't believe that survivors should tell the details of their stories all the time. We shouldn't have to perform our pain over and over again for the sake of your awareness. We also try to teach survivors to not lean into their trauma, but to lean into the joy that they curate in their lives instead. And if you don't find it, create it and lean into that. But when your life has been touched by trauma, sometimes trying to find joy feels like an insurmountable task. Now imagine trying to complete that task while world leaders are discrediting your memories or the news media keeps erasing your experience, or people continuously reduce you to your pain. Movement activates possibility. There's folklore in my family, like most black folks, about my great-great-grandaddy, Lawrence Ware. He was born enslaved, his parents were enslaved, and he had no reason to believe that a black man in America wouldn't die a slave. And yet, legend has it that when he was freed by his enslavers, he walked from Georgia to South Carolina so that he could find the wife and child that he was separated from. And every time I hear this story, I think to myself, "How could he do this? Wasn't he afraid that he would be captured and killed by white vigilantes, or he would get there and they would be gone?" And so I asked my grandmother once why she thought that he took this journey up, and she said, "I guess he had to believe it was possible." I have been propelled by possibility for most of my life. I am here because somebody, starting with my ancestors, believed I was possible. In 2006, 12 years ago, I laid across a mattress on my floor in my one-bedroom apartment, frustrated with all the sexual violence that I saw in my community. I pulled out a piece of paper, and I wrote "Me Too" on the top of it, and I proceeded to write out an action plan for building a movement based on empathy between survivors that would help us feel like we can heal, that we weren't the sum total of the things that happened to us. Possibility is a gift, y'all. It births new worlds, and it births visions. I know some of y'all are tired, because I'm tired. I'm exhausted, and I'm numb. Those who came before us didn't win every fight, but they didn't let it kill their vision. It fueled it. So I can't stop, and I'm asking you not to stop either. We owe future generations a world free of sexual violence. I believe we can build that world. Do you? Thank you. (Applause) |
Confessions of a recovering micromanager | {0: "Chieh Huang is cofounder and CEO of Boxed.com, a company that's disrupting the wholesale shopping club experience."} | TED@BCG Toronto | What I'm really here to do today is talk to you about micromanagement and what I learned about micromanagement by being a micromanager over the last few years of my life. But first off, what is micromanagement? How do we really define it? Well, I posit that it's actually taking great, wonderful, imaginative people — like all of you — bringing them in into an organization and then crushing their souls — (Laughter) by telling them what font size to use. In the history of mankind, has anyone ever said this? "John, we were never going to close that deal with Times New Roman, but because you insisted on Helvetica — bam! Dotted line — millions of dollars started to flow. That was the missing piece!" No one's ever said that, right? There's actually physical manifestations that we probably see in ourselves by being micromanaged. Think about the most tired you've ever been in your life, right? It probably wasn't when you stayed the latest at work, or it wasn't when you came home from a road trip, it was probably when you had someone looking over your shoulder, watching your each and every move. Kind of like my mother-in-law when she's over right? (Laughter) I'm like, "I got this," you know? And so there's actually data to support this. There was a recent study in the UK. They took 100 hospital employees, put an activity tracker on them and then let them go about their next 12-hour shift all alone, just a regular 12-hour shift. At the end of the shift, they asked them, "Do you feel fatigued?" And what they found was actually really interesting. It wasn't necessarily the people who moved the most that felt the most fatigued, but it was the folks that didn't have control over their jobs. So if we know that micromanagement isn't really effective, why do we do it? Is it that the definition is wrong? I posited that micromanagement is just bringing in great, wonderful, imaginative people and then crushing their souls, so is it that we actually want to hire — deep down inside of us — dull and unimaginative people? It's one of those questions you probably don't even need to ask. It's like, "Do you want to get your luggage stolen at the airport?" Probably not, but I've never been asked, right? So has anyone asked you, as a manager, "Do you want to hire dull and unimaginative people?" So, I don't know, this is TED, we better back it up with data. We actually asked hundreds of people around the country — hundreds of managers across the country — do you want to hire dull and unimaginative people? Alright, it's an interesting question. Well, interesting results as well. So, 94% said no — (Laughter) we don't want to hire dull and unimaginative people. Six percent probably didn't understand the question — (Laughter) but, bless their hearts, maybe they do just want to hire dull and unimaginative people. But 94 percent said they did not, and so why do we do this still then? Well, I posit that it's something really, really simple that all of us deep down inside know and have actually felt. So when we get hired into an organization — it could be a club, it could be a law firm, it could be a school organization, it could be anything — no one ever jumps to the top of the totem pole, right? You start at the very bottom. Doing what? Doing work. You actually do the work, right? And if you're really good at doing the work, what do you get rewarded with? More work, right? Yeah, that's right, you guys are all great micromanagers. (Laughter) You do more work, and then pretty soon, if you're really good at it, you do a little bit of work still, but actually, you start to manage people doing the work. And if you're really good at that, what happens after that? You start managing the people who manage the people doing the work, and it's at that point in time, you start to lose control over the output of your job. I've actually witnessed this firsthand. So, I started a company called Boxed in our garage, and this was it — I know it doesn't seem like much — you know, there's a pressure washer in the back — this is "living the dream." And my wife was really proud of me when we started this, or that's what she said, she was really proud of me — and so she would give me a hug, and I'm pretty sure she had her phone up and she was thinking, "Oh, is John from Harvard still single?" It was kind of like a lemonade stand gone wrong in the beginning, but we actually went up and said mobile commerce is going to be big, and actually consumer packaged goods were going to change over time, so let's take these big, bulky packs that you don't want to lug home — so not the two-pack of Oreo cookies but the 24-pack and not the 24-pack of toilet paper but the 48-pack — and let's ship it to you much like a warehouse club would do except they wouldn't ship it to you. So that's what we basically did. We had a really slow printer and what we did was actually say, "OK, this printer is taking forever, man. Let's scribble something that would delight the customer on the back of these invoices." So we'd say, "Hey, keep smiling," you know? "Hey, you're awesome," or, "Hey, enjoy the Doritos," or, "We love Gatorade, too." Stuff like that. And so it started breaking up the monotony of the job as well because I was picking and packing all of the boxes, and that's all you basically do for eight, nine, 10, 12 hours a day when you're sitting in the garage. And so an interesting thing happened. So we actually started to grow. And so, you know, over the last — actually just even 36 months after that, we ended up selling hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stuff, and we actually grew really, really quickly. But during that time, my role started to change, too. So, yes, I was the CEO in the garage; I was picking and packing, doing all the work, but then I graduated to actually managing the people who picked and packed, and then pretty soon I managed the people who managed the people picking and packing. And even now, I manage the C-staff who manage the departments who manage the people who manage the people picking and packing. And it is at that point in time, I lost control. So I thought, OK, we were delighting all of these customers with these notes. They loved them, but I can't write these notes anymore, so you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to tell these folks how to write these notes. What pen to use, what color to use, what you should write, what font you should use, don't mess up the margins, this has to be this big, this has to be that big. And pretty soon this goal of raising morale by breaking up the monotony in the fulfillment center actually became micromanagement, and people started complaining to HR. It's like, "Dude, this CEO guy has got to get out of my hair, OK? I know how to write a damn note." (Laughter) So it was at that point in time, we said, "OK, you know? We hired these great, wonderful people, let's give them the mission that's 'delight the customer,' let's give them the tool to do so, and that's these notes — have at it." And so what we found was actually pretty startling. Some folks actually took the notes and actually started drawing these really ornate minimurals on them. When folks ordered diapers, you'd get really fun notes like this: "Say 'hi' to the baby for us!" And you know, the next size up, if they bought a bigger size, they'd write, "Growing up so fast." And so people really, really took to it. But it was at that time that it also went off the rails a few times. And so we had someone just writing, "Thx, thx," all the time, and it's like, "Alright, dude, my boss used to write that to me," so, let's not write "Thx" anymore. But you also had interesting things on the other side. People got a little too creative. And so, like I said before, we sell everything in bulk: the big packs of diapers, big packs of toilet paper, the big packs of Doritos and Oreo cookies. We also sell the big packs of contraception, and so — this is getting a little hairy. (Laughter) So we sell the 40-pack of condoms, right? We're all adults in this room — 40-pack of condoms. So, someone ordered four 40-packs of condoms — (Laughter) And that's all they ordered, so, 160 condoms, the packer was like, "I know how to delight the customer." (Laughter) "This guy ..." This is what they wrote: [Everyone loves an optimist] (Laughter) (Applause) We didn't know whether to fire him or to promote him, but he's still there. So, "Everyone loves an optimist." But here is where it went a little bit off the rails and I felt a little bit conflicted in all of this. And — oh, there's a really bad typo — so if there was only a red T-E-D on stage that I counted on being here, it wouldn't be a typo, right? (Laughter) (Applause) I promised you I had a really bad sense of humor, and now I'm gratifying that. So I told you. But I really was conflicted, right? At this point in time, we started doing things that actually weren't part of our core mission and people started failing at it. And so, I thought, should we let them fail? Should we continue to let them do this? I don't know — I didn't know at that moment, but I thought this: Is failure really that bad? I'm not saying we should celebrate failure. There's a lot of talk in Silicon Valley that says, "Let's celebrate failure." No, I don't know if we would go all the way there, because like, in our board meetings, our board members are never like, "Hey, Chieh, you failed last quarter, keep doing that, buddy, OK?" No one's ever said that. If you're part of an organization like that, give me a call, I want to sit in on that meeting. In private, I don't think many people celebrate failure, but failure, I posit, is actually pretty necessary for the folks truly in the long-term, for the smart and imaginative people truly trying to fulfill the mission that you give them at hand. And so failure can actually be seen as a milestone along that mission towards success. And if the downside of not micromanaging is potentially this perceived notion that you might fail more often, and if it's really not that bad, what is the upside? Well, we saw the upside and it's pretty great. We tasked our engineers and said, "Hey, some of our fulfillment centers cost millions of dollars to build, there's miles and miles of conveyor, and so, can you do the same thing, can you make them efficient without spending millions of dollars?" So, they got to work: they actually did this — this is not photoshopped, the guy is really grinding. They built an autonomous guided vehicle. We didn't tell them what to build, what format it needed to be. In 90 days they produced the first prototype: powered off Tesla batteries, stereoscopic cameras, lidar systems. It basically replicates the efficiency of a conveyor belt without the actual capex of a conveyor belt. So it doesn't actually just stop with engineers. Our marketing department — we told them, "Hey, get the word out; do the right thing." We have this wonderful lady, Nitasha, on the marketing team. She stopped me in the morning, she's like, "Chieh, what are we doing about the pink tax?" I went and got my coffee, I sat down, I said, "OK, Nitasha, what is this pink tax?" And so she told me, it's really interesting. So, some of you might know that in 32 states across America, we actually charge a luxury goods tax on women's products like feminine care products, so tampons and pads are taxed like luxury goods items. So I would never dare call my wife — or if she called me and said, "Hey, hon, bring some pads on the way home," and I said, "Babe, you know, there's a trade war going on, the economy's not that good, so no luxury goods this month but next month I promise — (Laughter) I'll take a look at it." I'd be single pretty quickly, right? But what's super interesting is now — we didn't tell them what to do — but now, working with finance, they rebate the tax back to customers all around the country that we unfairly have to collect. And so at this point in time, you might be thinking, "OK, what is the real, real upside of not micromanaging?" and it's this: I didn't do any of these projects. I didn't make the AGV. I didn't do the "Rethink the Pink Tax" campaign. I didn't do any of this, but I'm standing here on a TED stage taking all the credit for it. (Laughter) "This guy does nothing and takes all the credit for it. He's a real CEO, this guy. He's really got it down." (Laughter) But the reality is this. I don't have the CEO thing down 100 percent pat, but I've actually learned the most fundamentally challenging lesson I've ever had to learn, and that's this. There is only one solution to micromanagement ... and that's to trust. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why should you read "A Midsummer Night's Dream?" | null | TED-Ed | By the light of the moon, a group of youths sneak into the woods, where they take mind-altering substances, switch it up romantically, and brush up against creatures from another dimension. "A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream" sees Shakespeare get psychedelic – and the result is a treat in the theatre and on the page. First performed in the 1590's, this play is one of Shakespeare’s friskiest works, filled with trickery, madness and magic. Set over the course of one night, Midsummer progresses at a rollicking pace. The plot is structured around patterns of collision and dissolution, where characters from different worlds are thrown together and torn apart. Shakespeare uses these patterns to mock the characters’ self-obsession and question authority with a comic twist. The action is set in Ancient Greece, but like many of Shakespeare’s plays it reflects his contemporary concerns. The magical setting of the woods at night disrupts the boundaries between separate groups, with bizarre results. Here, the bard plays with the rigid class system of his own time, taking three distinct groups and turning their society upside-down in a world where no mortal is in control. The play opens with young Hermia raging at her father Egeus and Theseus, the King of Athens, who have forbidden her to marry her lover Lysander. Hermia has no interest in her father's choice for her of Demetrius – but her best friend Helena definitely does. Furious at their elders, Hermia and Lysander elope under cover of darkness, with Demetrius in hot pursuit. This is further complicated by Helena’s decision to follow them all into the woods, in the hope of winning Demetrius’ heart. At this point, the woods are getting crowded, as the lovers are sharing the space with a group of “rude mechanicals”— a troupe of workers drunkenly rehearsing a play, led by the jovial Nick Bottom. Unbeknownst to them, the humans have entered into the world of the fairies. Despite their magical splendor, Oberon and Titania, the king and queen of the fairies, have their own romantic problems. Furious at his inability to control Titania, the jealous Oberon commands the trickster Puck to squeeze the juice of a magical flower over her eyes. When she wakes up, she’ll fall in love with the first thing she sees. On his mission, Puck gleefully sprinkles the juice over the eyes of the napping Demetrius and Lysander, and transforms Bottom’s head into that of a donkey for good measure. As eyes flicker open, a night of chaos commences that includes broken hearts, mistaken identity, and transformations. Out of all the characters, Bottom probably fares the best – when the bewitched Titania lays eyes on him, she calls on her fairies to lavish him with wine and treasures and sweeps the transfigured donkeyman off his feet: “pluck the wings from painted butterflies/ To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes. Nod to him, elves, and do him courtesies.” While magic is the catalyst to the action, the play reflects the real drama of the things we do for love – and the nonsensical behavior of the people under its spell. The moon overlooks the action “like a silver bow,” signifying erratic behavior, the dark side of love, and the bewitching allure of a world where the usual rules don’t apply. Although the characters eventually come to their senses, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" raises the question of how much agency we have over our own daily lives. But it’s not the more realistically rendered lovers, rulers or workers who have the last word, but the impish Puck who queries whether we can ever truly trust what we see: If we shadows have offended, Think but this and all is mended: That you have but slumbered here While these visions did appear. And in so doing, he evokes the effect of entering into the magical world of great theatre that plays with the boundary between illusion and reality – and dramatizes the possibility that life is but a dream. |
3 questions to ask yourself about everything you do | {0: 'Former Georgia House Democratic Leader Stacey Abrams made history in 2018 when she earned the Democratic nomination for governor of Georgia. '} | TEDWomen 2018 | When I was in high school at the age of 17 — I graduated from high school in Decatur, Georgia, as valedictorian of my high school — I was very proud of myself. I was from a low-income community, I had grown up in Mississippi, we'd moved from Mississippi to Georgia so my parents could pursue their degrees as United Methodist ministers. We were poor, but they didn't think we were poor enough, so they were going for permanent poverty. (Laughter) And so, while they studied at Emory, I studied at Avondale, and I became valedictorian. Well, one of the joys of being valedictorian in the state of Georgia is that you get invited to meet the governor of Georgia. I was mildly interested in meeting him. It was kind of cool. I was more intrigued by the fact that he lived in a mansion, because I watched a lot of "General Hospital" and "Dynasty" as a child. (Laughter) And so I got up that morning, ready to go to visit the governor. My mom and my dad, who were also invited, got up, and we went outside. But we didn't get in our car. And in the south, a car is a necessary thing. We don't have a lot of public transit, there aren't a lot of options. But if you're lucky enough to live in a community where you don't have a car, the only option is public transit. And that's what we had to take. And so we got on the bus. And we took the bus from Decatur all the way to Buckhead, where the Governor's Mansion sat on this really beautiful acreage of land, with these long black gates that ran the length of the property. We get to the Governor's Mansion, we pull the little lever that lets them know this is our stop, we get off the bus, my mom, my dad and I, we walk across the street. We walk up the driveway, because there are cars coming up, cars bringing in students from all across the state of Georgia. So we're walking along the side. And as we walk single file along the side, my mom and dad sandwiching me to make sure I don't get hit by one of the cars bringing in the other valedictorians, we approach the guard gate. When we get to the guard gate, the guard comes out. He looks at me, and he looks at my parents, and he says, "You don't belong here, this is a private event." My dad says, "No, this is my daughter, Stacey. She's one of the valedictorians." But the guard doesn't look at the checklist that's in his hands. He doesn't ask my mom for the invitation that's at the bottom of her very voluminous purse. Instead, he looks over our shoulder at the bus, because in his mind, the bus is telling him a story about who should be there. And the fact that we were too poor to have our own car — that was a story he told himself. And he may have seen something in my skin color, he may have seen something in my attire; I don't know what went through his mind. But his conclusion was to look at me again, and with a look of disdain, say, "I told you, this is a private event. You don't belong here." Now, my parents were studying to become United Methodist ministers, but they were not pastors yet. (Laughter) And so they proceeded to engage this gentleman in a very robust discussion of his decision-making skills. (Laughter) My father may have mentioned that he was going to spend eternity in a very fiery place if he didn't find my name on that checklist. And indeed, the man checks the checklist eventually, and he found my name, and he let us inside. But I don't remember meeting the governor of Georgia. I don't recall meeting my fellow valedictorians from 180 school districts. The only clear memory I have of that day was a man standing in front of the most powerful place in Georgia, looking at me and telling me I don't belong. And so I decided, 20-some-odd years later, to be the person who got to open the gates. (Cheers) (Applause) Unfortunately, you may have read the rest of the story. It didn't quite work out that way. And now I'm tasked with figuring out: How do I move forward? Because, you see, I didn't just want to open the gates for young black women who had been underestimated and told they don't belong. I wanted to open those gates for Latinas and for Asian Americans. I wanted to open those gates for the undocumented and the documented. I wanted to open those gates as an ally of the LGBTQ community. I wanted to open those gates for the families that have to call themselves the victims of gun violence. I wanted to open those gates wide for everyone in Georgia, because that is our state, and this is our nation, and we all belong here. (Cheers) (Applause) But what I recognized is that the first try wasn't enough. And my question became: How do I move forward? How do I get beyond the bitterness and the sadness and the lethargy and watching an inordinate amount of television as I eat ice cream? (Laughter) What do I do next? And I'm going to do what I've always done. I'm going to move forward, because going backwards isn't an option and standing still is not enough. (Applause) You see, I began my race for governor by analyzing who I was and what I wanted to be. And there are three questions I ask myself about everything I do, whether it's running for office or starting a business; when I decided to start the New Georgia Project to register people to vote; or when I started the latest action, Fair Fight Georgia. No matter what I do, I ask myself three questions: What do I want? Why do I want it? And how do I get it? And in this case, I know what I want. I want change. That is what I want. But the question is: What change do I want to see? And I know that the questions I have to ask myself are: One, am I honest about the scope of my ambition? Because it's easy to figure out that once you didn't get what you wanted, then maybe you should have set your sights a little lower, but I'm here to tell you to be aggressive about your ambition. Do not allow setbacks to set you back. (Applause) Number two, let yourself understand your mistakes. But also understand their mistakes, because, as women in particular, we're taught that if something doesn't work out, it's probably our fault. And usually, there is something we could do better, but we've been told not to investigate too much what the other side could have done. And this isn't partisan — it's people. We're too often told that our mistakes are ours alone, but victory is a shared benefit. And so what I tell you to do is understand your mistakes, but understand the mistakes of others. And be clearheaded about it. And be honest with yourself and honest with those who support you. But once you know what you want, understand why you want it. And even though it feels good, revenge is not a good reason. (Laughter) Instead, make sure you want it because there's something not that you should do, but something you must do. It has to be something that doesn't allow you to sleep at night unless you're dreaming about it; something that wakes you up in the morning and gets you excited about it; or something that makes you so angry, you know you have to do something about it. But know why you're doing it. And know why it must be done. You've listened to women from across this world talk about why things have to happen. But figure out what the "why" is for you, because jumping from the "what" to the "do" is meaningless if you don't know why. Because when it gets hard, when it gets tough, when your friends walk away from you, when your supporters forget you, when you don't win your first race — if you don't know why, you can't try again. So, first know what you want. Second, know why you want it, but third, know how you're going to get it done. I faced a few obstacles in this race. (Laughter) Just a few. But in the pursuit, I became the first black woman to ever become the nominee for governor in the history of the United States of America for a major party. (Cheers) (Applause) But more importantly, in this process, we turned out 1.2 million African American voters in Georgia. That is more voters than voted on the Democratic side of the ticket in 2014. (Applause) Our campaign tripled the number of Latinos who believed their voices mattered in the state of Georgia. We tripled the number of Asian Americans who stood up and said, "This is our state, too." Those are successes that tell me how I can get it done. But they also let me understand the obstacles aren't insurmountable. They're just a little high. But I also understand that there are three things that always hold us hostage. The first is finances. Now, you may have heard, I'm in a little bit of debt. If you didn't hear about it, you did not go outside. (Laughter) And finances are something that holds us back so often, our dreams are bounded by how much we have in resources. But we hear again and again the stories of those who overcome those resource challenges. But you can't overcome something you don't talk about. And that's why I didn't allow them to debt-shame me in my campaign. I didn't allow anyone to tell me that my lack of opportunity was a reason to disqualify me from running. And believe me, people tried to tell me I shouldn't run. Friends told me not to run. Allies told me not to run. "USA Today" mentioned maybe I shouldn't run. (Laughter) But no matter who it was, I understood that finances are often a reason we don't let ourselves dream. I can't say that you will always overcome those obstacles, but I will tell you, you will be damned if you do not try. (Applause) The second is fear. And fear is real. It is paralyzing. It is terrifying. But it can also be energizing, because once you know what you're afraid of, you can figure out how to get around it. And the third is fatigue. Sometimes you just get tired of trying. You get tired of reading about processes and politics and the things that stop you from getting where you want to be. Sometimes, fatigue means that we accept position instead of power. We let someone give us a title as a consolation prize, rather than realizing we know what we want and we're going to get it, even if we're tired. That's why God created naps. (Laughter) But we also learn in those moments that fatigue is an opportunity to evaluate how much we want it. Because if you are beaten down, if you have worked as hard as you can, if you have done everything you said you should, and it still doesn't work out, fatigue can sap you of your energy. But that's why you go back to the "why" of it. Because I know we have to have women who speak for the voiceless. I know we have to have people of good conscience who stand up against oppression. I know we have to have people who understand that social justice belongs to us all. And that wakes me up every morning, and that makes me fight even harder. Because I am moving forward, knowing what is in my past. I know the obstacles they have for me. I know what they're going to do, and I'm fairly certain they're energizing and creating new obstacles now. But they've got four years to figure it out. (Laughter) (Applause) Maybe two. (Cheers) (Applause) But here's my point: I know what I want, and that is justice. I know why I want it, because poverty is immoral, and it is a stain on our nation. And I know how I'm going to get it: by moving forward every single day. Thank you so much. (Cheers) (Applause) |
Can you solve the time travel riddle? | null | TED-Ed | Your internship in Professor Ramsey’s physics lab has been amazing. Until, that is, the professor accidentally stepped through a time portal. You’ve got just a minute to jump through the portal to save him before it closes and leaves him stranded in history. Once you’re through it, the portal will close, and your only way back will be to create a new one using the chrono-nodules from your lab. Activated nodules connect to each other via red or blue tachyon entanglement. Activate more nodules and they’ll connect to all other nodules in the area. As soon as a red or blue triangle is created with a nodule at each point, it opens a doorway through time that will take you back to the present. But the color of each individual connection manifests at random, and there’s no way to choose or change its color. And there’s one more problem: each individual nodule creates a temporal instability that raises the chances the portal might collapse as you go through it. So the fewer you bring, the better. The portal’s about to close. What’s the minimum number of nodules you need to bring to be certain you’ll create a red or blue triangle and get back to the present? Pause here if you want to figure it out for yourself! Answer in: 3 Answer in: 2 Answer in: 1 This question is so rich that an entire branch of mathematics known as Ramsey Theory developed from it. Ramsey Theory is home to some famously difficult problems. This one isn’t easy, but it can be handled if you approach it systematically. Imagine you brought just three nodules. Would that be enough? No - for example, you might have two blue and one red connection, and be stuck in the past forever. Would four nodules be enough? No - there are many arrangements here that don’t give a blue or red triangle. What about five? It turns out there is an arrangement of connections that avoids creating a blue or red triangle. These smaller triangles don’t count because they don’t have a nodule at each corner. However, six nodules will always create a blue triangle or a red triangle. Here’s how we can prove that without sorting through every possible case. Imagine activating the sixth nodule, and consider how it might connect to the other five. It could do so in one of six ways: with five red connections, five blue connections, or some mix of red and blue. Notice that every possibility has at least three connections of the same color coming from this nodule. Let’s look at just the nodules on the other end of those same three color connections. If the connections were blue, then any additional blue connection between those three would give us a blue triangle. So the only way we could get in trouble is if all the connections between them were red. But those three red connections would give us a red triangle. No matter what happens, we’ll get a red or a blue triangle, and open our doorway. On the other hand, if the original three connections were all red instead of blue, the same argument still works, with all the colors flipped. In other words, no matter how the connections are colored, six nodules will always create a red or blue triangle and a doorway leading home. So you grab six nodules and jump through the portal. You were hoping your internship would give you valuable life experience. Turns out, that didn’t take much time. |
Why do competitors open their stores next to one another? | null | TED-Ed | Why are gas stations always built right next to other gas stations? Why can I drive for a mile without finding a coffee shop and then stumble across three on the same corner? Why do grocery stores, auto repair shops and restaurants always seem to exist in groups instead of being spread evenly throughout a community? While there are several factors that might go into deciding where to place your business, clusters of similar companies can be explained by a very simple story called Hotelling's Model of Spatial Competition. Imagine that you sell ice cream at the beach. Your beach is one mile long and you have no competition. Where would you place your cart in order to sell the most product? In the middle. The one-half-mile walk may be too far for some people at each end of the beach, but your cart serves as many people as possible. One day you show up at work just as your cousin Teddy is arriving at the beach with his own ice cream cart. In fact, he's selling exactly the same type of ice cream as you are. You agree that you will split the beach in half. In order to ensure that customers don't have to walk too far you set up your cart a quarter mile south of the beach center, right in the middle of your territory. Teddy sets up a quarter mile north of the center, in the middle of Teddy territory. With this agreement, everyone south of you buys ice cream from you. Everyone north of Teddy buys from him, and the 50% of beachgoers in between walk to the closest cart. No one walks more than a quarter of a mile, and both vendors sell to half of the beachgoers. Game theorists consider this a socially optimal solution. It minimizes the maximum number of steps any visitor must take in order to reach an ice cream cart. The next day, when you arrive at work, Teddy has set up his cart in the middle of the beach. You return to your location a quarter mile south of center and get the 25% of customers to the south of you. Teddy still gets all of the customers north in Teddy territory, but now you split the 25% of people in between the two carts. Day three of the ice cream wars, you get to the beach early, and set up right in the center of Teddy territory, assuming you'll serve the 75% of beachgoers to your south, leaving your cousin to sell to the 25% of customers to the north. When Teddy arrives, he sets up just south of you stealing all of the southerly customers, and leaving you with a small group of people to the north. Not to be outdone, you move 10 paces south of Teddy to regain your customers. When you take a mid-day break, Teddy shuffles 10 paces south of you, and again, steals back all the customers to the far end of the beach. Throughout the course of the day, both of you continue to periodically move south towards the bulk of the ice cream buyers, until both of you eventually end up at the center of the beach, back to back, each serving 50% of the ice-cream-hungry beachgoers. At this point, you and your competitive cousin have reached what game theorists call a Nash Equilibrium - the point where neither of you can improve your position by deviating from your current strategy. Your original strategy, where you were each a quarter mile from the middle of the beach, didn't last, because it wasn't a Nash Equilibrium. Either of you could move your cart towards the other to sell more ice cream. With both of you now in the center of the beach, you can't reposition your cart closer to your furthest customers without making your current customers worse off. However, you no longer have a socially optimal solution, since customers at either end of the beach have to walk further than necessary to get a sweet treat. Think about all the fast food chains, clothing boutiques, or mobile phone kiosks at the mall. Customers may be better served by distributing services throughout a community, but this leaves businesses vulnerable to aggressive competition. In the real world, customers come from more than one direction, and businesses are free to compete with marketing strategies, by differentiating their product line, and with price cuts, but at the heart of their strategy, companies like to keep their competition as close as possible. |
How to motivate people to do good for others | {0: "Erez Yoeli's research focuses on altruism: understanding how it works and how to promote it."} | TEDxCambridge | How can we get people to do more good, to go to the polls, give to charity, conserve resources, or even to do something as simple as washing their mugs at work so that the sink isn't always full of dirty dishes? (Laughter) (Applause) When I first started working on this problem, I collaborated with a power company to recruit customers for a program that prevents blackouts by reducing energy demand during peaks. The program is based on a tried-and-true technology. It's one the Obama administration even called "the cornerstone to modernizing America's electrical grid." But, like so many great technological solutions, it has a key weakness: people. People need to sign up. To try to get people to sign up, the power company sent them a nice letter, told them about all the program's benefits, and it asked them to call into a hotline if they were interested. Those letters went out, but the phones, they were silent. So when we got involved, we suggested one small change. Instead of that hotline, we suggested that they use sign-up sheets that they'd post near the mailboxes in people's buildings. This tripled participation. Why? Well, we all know people care deeply about what others think of them, that we try to be seen as generous and kind, and we try to avoid being seen as selfish or a mooch. Whether we are aware of it or not, this is a big part of why people do good, and so small changes that give people more credit for doing good, those changes can make a really big difference. Small changes like switching from a hotline, where nobody will ever find out about your good deed, to a sign-up sheet where anyone who walks by can see your name. In our collaborations with governments, nonprofits, companies, when we're trying to get people to do more good, we harness the power of reputations. And we have a simple checklist for this. And in fact, you already know the first item on that checklist. It's to increase observability, to make sure people find out about good deeds. Now, wait a minute, I know some of you are probably thinking, there's no way people here thought, "Oh, well, now that I'm getting credit for my good deed, now it's totally worth it." And you're right. Usually, people don't. Rather, when they're making decisions in private, they worry about their own problems, about what to put on the table for dinner or how to pay their bills on time. But, when we make their decision more observable, they start to attend more to the opportunity to do good. In other words, what's so powerful about our approach is that it could turn on people's existing desire to do good, in this case, to help to prevent a blackout. Back to observability. I want to give you another example. This one is from a collaboration with a nonprofit that gets out the vote, and it does this by sending hundreds of thousands of letters every election in order to remind people and try to motivate them to go to the polls. We suggested adding the following sentence: "Someone may call you to find out about your experience at the polls." This sentence makes it feel more observable when you go to the polls, and it increased the effect of the letter by 50 percent. Making the letter more effective reduced the cost of getting an additional vote from 70 dollars down to about 40 dollars. Observability has been used to do things like get people to donate blood more frequently by listing the names of donors on local newsletters, or to pay their taxes on time by listing the names of delinquents on a public website. (Laughter) What about this example? Toyota got hundreds of thousands of people to buy a more fuel-efficient car by making the Prius so unique ... (Laughter) that their good deed was observable from a mile away. (Laughter) Alright, so observability is great, but we all know, we've all seen people walk by an opportunity to do good. They'll see somebody asking for money on the sidewalk and they'll pull out their phones and look really busy, or they'll go to the museum and they'll waltz right on by the donation box. Imagine it's the holiday season and you're going to the supermarket, and there's a Salvation Army volunteer, and he's ringing his bell. A few years ago, researchers in San Diego teamed up with a local chapter from the Salvation Army to try to find ways to increase donations. What they found was kind of funny. When the volunteer stood in front of just one door, people would avoid giving by going out the other door. Why? Well, because they can always claim, "Oh, I didn't see the volunteer," or, "I wanted to get something from over there," or, "That's where my car is." In other words, there's lots of excuses. And that brings us to the second item on our checklist: to eliminate excuses. In the case of the Salvation Army, eliminating excuses just means standing in front of both doors, and sure enough, when they did this, donations rose. But that's when things got kind of funny, even funnier. The researchers were out in the parking lot, and they were counting people as they came in and out of the store, and they noticed that when the volunteers stood in front of both doors, people stopped coming out of the store at all. (Laughter) Obviously, they were surprised by this, so they decided to look into it further, and that's when they found that there was actually a third, smaller utility door usually used to take out the recycling — (Laughter) and now people were going out that door in order to avoid the volunteers. (Laughter) This teaches us an important lesson though. When we're trying to eliminate excuses, we need to be very thorough, because people are really creative in making them. (Laughter) Alright, I want to switch to a setting where excuses can have deadly consequences. What if I told you that the world's deadliest infectious disease has a cure, in fact, that it's had one for 70 years, a good one, one that works almost every time? It's incredible, but it's true. The disease is tuberculosis. It infects some 10 million people a year, and it kills almost two million of them. Like the blackout prevention program, we've got the solution. The problem is people. People need to take their medication so that they're cured, and so that they don't get other people sick. For a few years now, we've been collaborating with a mobile health startup called Keheala to support TB patients as they undergo treatment. Now, you have to understand, TB treatment, it's really tough. We're talking about taking a really strong antibiotic every single day for six months or more. That antibiotic is so strong that it will make you feel sick. It will make you feel nauseous and dizzy. It will make your pee turn funny colors. It's also a problem because you have to go back to the clinic about every week in order to get more pills, and in sub-Saharan Africa or other places where TB is common, now you're talking about going someplace pretty far, taking tough and slow public transport, maybe the clinic is inefficient. So now you're talking about taking a half day off of work every week from a job you desperately can't afford to lose. It's even worse when you consider the fact that there's a terrible stigma, and you desperately don't want people to find that you have the disease. Some of the toughest stories we hear are actually from women who, in these places where domestic violence can be kind of common, they tell us that they have to hide it from their husbands that they're coming to the clinic. So it's no surprise that people don't complete treatment. Can our approach really help them? Can we really get them to stick it out? Yeah. Every day, we text patients to remind them to take their medication, but if we stopped there, there'd be lots of excuses. "Well, I didn't see the text." Or, "You know, I saw the text, but then I totally forgot, put the phone down and I just forgot about it." Or, "I lent the phone out to my mom." We have to eliminate these excuses and we do that by asking patients to log in and verify that they've taken their medication. If they don't log in, we text them again. If they don't log in, we text them yet again. If, after three times, they still haven't verified, we notify a team of supporters and that team will call and text them to try to get them back on the wagon. No excuses. Our approach, which, admittedly, uses all sorts of behavioral techniques, including, as you've probably noticed, observability, it was very effective. Patients without access to our platform were three times more likely not to complete treatment. Alright, you've increased observability, you've eliminated excuses, but there's still a third thing you need to be aware of. If you've been to Washington, DC or Japan or London, you know that metro riders there will be very careful to stand on the right-hand side of the escalator so that people can go by on the left. But unfortunately, not everywhere is that the norm, and there's plenty of places where you can just stand on both sides and block the escalator. Obviously, it's better for others when we stand on the right and let them go by, but we're only expected to do that some places. This is a general phenomenon. Sometimes we're expected to do good and sometimes not, and it means that people are really sensitive to cues that they're expected to do good in a particular situation, which brings us to the third and final item on our checklist: to communicate expectations, to tell people, "Do the good deed right now." Here's a simple way to communicate expectations; simply tell them, "Hey, everybody else is doing the good deed." The company Opower sends people in their electricity bill a small insert that compares their energy consumption with that of people with similarly sized homes. And when people find out that their neighbors are using less electricity, they start to consume less. That same approach, it's been used to get people to vote or give to charity or even reuse their towels in hotels. What about this one? Here's another way to communicate expectations; simply do it by saying, "Do the good deed" just at the right time. What about this one? This ticker reframes the kind of mundane task of turning off the lights and turns it instead into an environmental contribution. The bottom line is, lots of different ways to do this, lots of ways to communicate expectations. Just don't forget to do it. And that's it. That's our checklist. Many of you are working on problems with important social consequences, and sometimes you might need to motivate people to do more good. The tools you learned today can help you with this. And these tools, they don't require that you raise additional funds or that you develop any more fancy technologies. They just require harnessing reputations by increasing observability, eliminating excuses and communicating expectations. Thank you. (Applause) |
The four things you need to know about the energy you use | {0: 'A passionate storyteller who loves finding elegant ways of communicating complex issues, Jordan finds narratives where others might see only chaos. A reporter for Inside Energy, Jordan has covered everything from gas leaks to garbage to dairy farming over the course of her career. She spends her free time brewing beer and running ultramarathons.'} | TEDxMileHighWomen | I'm an energy journalist and a self-proclaimed energy nerd, but today, if you're cool with it, I'd like to try out a new career, and you guys are going to be my guinea pigs. I'll be taking on the role of relationship counselor. Okay, okay. I'm talking about our relationship with energy, with electricity, gasoline, wind turbines, all of it. Or rather, for most of us, it's a lack of a relationship. See, us and energy, we don't talk. We're disconnected, estranged. Here's an example: When I first started covering energy, I asked a bunch of friends what questions they had. And one of my best friends, a physics professor, super smart, asked: "Are we still burning coal?" And I was like, huh. Are we still burning coal? Here we were, a physics PhD and an energy journalist with an engineering degree, stumped. Because here's the thing, "Are we still burning coal?" is a totally reasonable question. It's so easy to go through life using energy every day, every moment, while knowing next to nothing about it. Energy makes everything we do possible, and yet we treat it as an insignificant other. And because us and energy, we don't really talk, we're embarrassed to even ask questions like, "Are we still burning coal?" And in case you're curious, yes, we are; a lot of it. As a journalist, though, I get this amazing license to ask questions, however basic. And I've spent nearly three years asking questions to everyone from power grid engineers to energy economists. What have I learned? It's a problem that most of us are on the outs with energy. I don't have to remind you that we're facing some major energy challenges, and we can't solve them if we treat energy as an insignificant other. But there's good news. The tools we need to rekindle the relationship are already here. So, to kick off our counseling session, let's take a step back and figure out how we ended up with this energy estrangement, this communication breakdown. What is energy, anyway? That's a good place to start. The physics definition in five words: energy is the capacity to do work. All that means is anything that has to move or change, energy is the stuff that makes it possible. It comes in many forms. Chilling a beer in your fridge, that takes energy. The beer itself: energy too, calories. While drinking said beer, brainstorming what you're going to be for Halloween, neurons are moving around in your brain using energy. And making that sweet Oompa Loompa costume - (Laughter) more energy. Yeah, that's me. (Laughter) No, this is important: We can move energy around, change it from one form to another, like when we burn coal to make electricity, but we can never create or destroy it. Pending advancements in space travel, what's here on earth and what's coming from the sun, that's all we got. Okay, on to our relationship history, the movie montage version. Jumping to pre-agricultural humans, 50,000 years ago or so, we took in energy as food, plants and animals, and we used it by doing stuff: chopping wood, going for a walk. We straight-up humans were our own industrial complex. A power plant, factory, supercomputer all rolled into one kick-ass body. And our energy use was limited by how much we could eat and how much we could move: a few thousand calories a day. Then, big breakthrough: we domesticated animals, using them as batteries, essentially storing energy for us. Now, we're commanding energy outside our bodies. Then comes the water wheel, the windmill, we invent the steam engine, we're burning coal, and by 1900, not that long ago, we're here, using about 12,000 calories a day per person. Then we built the modern electric grid, the world's largest machine, we figure out nuclear power, we've got the ability to send humans to the freaking moon, finally the digital revolution, those giant data servers off in the desert, and boom: here we are in 2016, where each American uses the equivalent of 208,000 calories a day. Seriously. It's like we've each got a 100-person battalion at our disposal. It's on the order of the energy in a lightning bolt. We're all Zeuses! And most of this change happened in barely more than a century. So, as we turned into Zeuses, how did our relationship change? Well, I can tell you exactly what it felt like in the pre-Zeus era. No, I'm not a time traveler, but I do run ultramarathons. Last month, I- woo, yeah! I ran a hundred mile race in the mountains of Idaho, up and down mountains, over scree, through mud. (Applause) Thank you! (Applause) (Cheers) For almost 29 hours, burning 15,000 calories, give or take. And during that ordeal, energy and me, we were super tight. I had my caloric intake planned out to the minute, and I was constantly checking in. Eat this gel now, back off the pace, drink more water, go hard down that hill, no, not that hard, now you're getting bloated, and oh! There comes the vomit! (Laughter) You can only ramp up a human power plant so much before it breaks down. And to avoid that, I had to be intimately connected with my energy. I imagine maybe that's what it was like to be a human, hundreds of years ago. But now, as our energy use skyrocketed, we grew less aware of it. We stopped constantly checking in, and we began to blindly trust our energy. We went from using things we could see and touch, to using machines operating hundreds of miles away. Say you want to make a peanut butter banana smoothie and you turn on a blender. That blender is connected to the outlet, the substation down the street, the transmission lines; it's an uninterrupted chain all the way back to a power plant. And when you hit blend, a generator in that power plant spins slightly faster or slower to accommodate you. For real! But you don't see that, right? You just see the smoothie. That invisible system, it's like magic. You trust that it'll work. Over the past century, we left that close, instinctual energy awareness behind, and we began to blindly trust our energy. And as we did, we took that relationship for granted. And that's how energy became our insignificant other. So, implications... Well, as we grew to think about our energy systems less, we also grew to depend on them more. And that dependency only shows itself when energy's gone, when the power goes out and you find yourself eating a cold can of beans for dinner. Now here's what's dangerous: not just that our energy appetites have grown, but that most of us don't realize how much they've grown, or what our energy appetites even are, so that when we need to tackle challenges involving our energy, we're so disengaged, we've got no idea where to start. When I was running that hundred mile race, I hit some energy complications. Remember the vomit? But, I was able to handle them because I was dialed in to my energy. In any relationship, problems will pop up. With energy, these involve climate change, the economy, geopolitics, energy poverty. The crux of a good relationship is being able to face problems, together. But when it comes to our energy, how can we face problems if we're not even on speaking terms? There are all kinds of technological fixes out there, but they'll be rendered useless if we can't change the relationship. Relax, take a breath. I'm not going to leave you with bleakness. As your energy relationship counselor, I've got some practical advice, but as I said, this is a new role for me, so I consulted the WikiHow illustrated guide on how to fix a relationship in four easy steps. Because of course that exists, right? Okay. Step one: understand the problem. Well, just by being here, you've got a great start. With energy, a key problem is that we've grown habituated to having such a fabulous, reliable partner, a partner we took for granted, so we stopped checking in. Which brings us to step two: learn to discuss better. (Laughter) There's no need to bottle up those energy questions. It's okay to ask, "Are we still burning coal?" or "Can I put a wind turbine on my house?" And you can practice some listening skills too. Maybe next month actually read your utility bill, the one you've got setup on auto-pay. (Laughter) It's okay, I do too. So, communication, it takes two sides, and that poor communication we're accustomed to, it's not actually your fault. Until recently, it was nearly impossible to have a real discussion with your energy even in your own home. Utilities track every bit of electricity from a power plant to your house, but your house itself is a black box. There's no itemized list on that bill you get, so how much goes to your computer, your lights, or poof! just dissipated as lost heat, who knows? That's changing. Advancements like smart meters and smart appliances, these let us peek inside the black box. But, information alone will not repair our broken relationship, so step three: you've got to reconnect. Things like holding hands and gazing into each others' eyes, these can go a long way toward rekindling the flame. Let's be real, energy is not the only relationship in our lives so those ways to reconnect need to be simple, and they can't add to our information overload. Here's a fun one I've been trying: going back to those 208,000 calories a day we each consume, pick an activity, say, binge-watching the latest season of Orange is the New Black. And now think, if I had to eat the amount of calories that matched the energy my TV uses, it would be a nice big slice of chocolate cake, and that's not even counting those data servers off in the desert. So, you don't need cutting edge technology to reconnect, you just need a creative, open mind. Slipping on your energy goggles and starting to see those connections out in the world, it will change your relationship. So, we've understood the problem, we're discussing better, we're practicing that connection. Now we're ready for step four: figuring out how to move forward. I'm really excited for the future. Our relationship with energy is changing on a personal level and a societal one too. The 20th century grid was designed to be magic and invisible, to keep energy at a distance. But innovations happening now can bring you back into the relationship. Things like electricity prices that change dynamically, the ability to generate and store power in your own home, detailed data on our energy behavior, these things can drastically reduce our energy use and costs, but getting them right requires us all taking a more active role in our relationship. You don't have to be like me running a hundred mile race and constantly obsessing over your energy. But you can check in every once and a while. Because when we treat energy as a significant other, a true partner, instead of just seeing energy problems, we're able to see energy solutions. Thank you! (Applause) (Cheers) |
A lesson on looking | {0: 'By showing people how to look closely at painting, sculpture and photography, Amy Herman helps them hone their visual intelligence to recognize the most pertinent and useful information as well as recognize biases that impede decision making.'} | TED@BCG Toronto | Take a look at this work of art. What is it that you see? At first glance, it looks to be a grandfather clock with a sheet thrown over it and a rope tied around the center. But a first look always warrants a second. Look again. What do you see now? If you look more closely, you'll realize that this entire work of art is made from one piece of sculpture. There is no clock, there is no rope, and there is no sheet. It is one piece of bleached Honduras mahogany. Now let me be clear: this exercise was not about looking at sculpture. It's about looking and understanding that looking closely can save a life, change your company and even help you understand why your children behave the way they do. It's a skill that I call visual intelligence, and I use works of art to teach everybody, from everyday people to those for whom looking is the job, like Navy SEALs and homicide detectives and trauma nurses. The fact is that no matter how skilled you might be at looking, you still have so much to learn about seeing. Because we all think we get it in a first glance and a sudden flash, but the real skill is in understanding how to look slowly and how to look more carefully. The talent is in remembering — in the crush of the daily urgencies that demand our attention — to step back and look through those lenses to help us see what we've been missing all along. So how can looking at painting and sculpture help? Because art is a powerful tool. It's a powerful tool that engages both sight and insight and reframes our understanding of where we are and what we see. Here's an example of a work of art that reminded me that visual intelligence — it's an ongoing learning process and one that really is never mastered. I came across this quiet, seemingly abstract painting, and I had to step up to it twice, even three times, to understand why it resonated so deeply. Now, I've seen the Washington Monument in person thousands of times, well aware of the change in the color of marble a third of the way up, but I had never really looked at it out of context or truly as a work of art. And here, Georgia O'Keeffe's painting of this architectural icon made me realize that if we put our mind to it, it's possible to see everyday things in a wholly new and eye-opening perspective. Now, there are some skeptics that believe that art just belongs in an art museum. They believe that it has no practical use beyond its aesthetic value. I know who they are in every audience I teach. Their arms are crossed, their legs are crossed, their body language is saying, "What am I going to learn from this lady who talks fast about painting and sculpture?" So how do I make it relevant for them? I ask them to look at this work of art, like this portrait by Kumi Yamashita. And I ask them to step in close, and even closer still, and while they're looking at the work of art, they need to be asking questions about what they see. And if they ask the right questions, like, "What is this work of art? Is it a painting? Is it a sculpture? What is it made of?" ... they will find out that this entire work of art is made of a wooden board, 10,000 nails and one unbroken piece of sewing thread. Now that might be interesting to some of you, but what does it have to do with the work that these people do? And the answer is everything. Because we all interact with people multiple times on a daily basis, and we need to get better at asking questions about what it is that we see. Learning to frame the question in such a way as to elicit the information that we need to do our jobs, is a critical life skill. Like the radiologist who told me that looking at the negative spaces in a painting helped her discern more discreet abnormalities in an MRI. Or the police officer who said that understanding the emotional dynamic between people in a painting helped him to read body language at a domestic violence crime scene, and it enabled him to think twice before drawing and firing his weapon. And even parents can look to see absences of color in paintings to understand that what their children say to them is as important as what they don't say. So how do I — how do I train to be more visually intelligent? It comes down to four As. Every new situation, every new problem — we practice four As. First, we assess our situation. We ask, "What do we have in front of us?" Then, we analyze it. We say, "What's important? What do I need? What don't I need?" Then, we articulate it in a conversation, in a memo, in a text, in an email. And then, we act: we make a decision. We all do this multiple times a day, but we don't realize what a role seeing and looking plays in all of those actions, and how visual intelligence can really improve everything. So recently, I had a group of counterterrorism officials at a museum in front of this painting. El Greco's painting, "The Purification of the Temple," in which Christ, in the center, in a sweeping and violent gesture, is expelling the sinners from the temple of prayer. The group of counterterrorism officials had five minutes with that painting, and in that short amount of time, they had to assess the situation, analyze the details, articulate what, if anything, they would do if they were in that painting. As you can imagine, observations and insights differed. Who would they talk to? Who would be the best witness? Who was a good potential witness? Who was lurking? Who had the most information? But my favorite comment came from a seasoned cop who looked at the central figure and said, "You see that guy in the pink?" — referring to Christ — he said, "I'd collar him, he's causing all the trouble." (Laughter) So looking at art gives us a perfect vehicle to rethink how we solve problems without the aid of technology. Looking at the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, you see two clocks in perfect synchronicity. The hour, minute and second hand perfectly aligned. They are installed side by side and they're touching, and they are entitled "'Untitled' (Perfect Lovers)." But closer analysis makes you realize that these are two battery-operated clocks, which in turn makes you understand — "Hey, wait a minute ... One of those batteries is going to stop before the other. One of those clocks is going to slow down and die before the other and it's going to alter the symmetry of the artwork." Just articulating that thought process includes the necessity of a contingency plan. You need to have contingencies for the unforeseen, the unexpected and the unknown, whenever and however they may happen. Now, using art to increase our visual intelligence involves planning for contingencies, understanding the big picture and the small details and noticing what's not there. So in this painting by Magritte, noticing that there are no tracks under the train, there is no fire in the fireplace and there are no candles in the candlesticks actually more accurately describes the painting than if you were to say, "Well, there's a train coming out of a fireplace, and there are candlesticks on the mantle." It may sound counterintuitive to say what isn't there, but it's really a very valuable tool. When a detective who had learned about visual intelligence in North Carolina was called to the crime scene, it was a boating fatality, and the eyewitness told this detective that the boat had flipped over and the occupant had drowned underneath. Now, instinctively, crime scene investigators look for what is apparent, but this detective did something different. He looked for what wasn't there, which is harder to do. And he raised the question: if the boat had really tipped flipped over — as the eyewitness said that it did — how come the papers that were kept at one end of the boat were completely dry? Based on that one small but critical observation, the investigation shifted from accidental death to homicide. Now, equally important to saying what isn't there is the ability to find visual connections where they may not be apparent. Like Marie Watt's totem pole of blankets. It illustrates that finding hidden connections in everyday objects can resonate so deeply. The artist collected blankets from all different people in her community, and she had the owners of the blankets write, on a tag, the significance of the blanket to the family. Some of the blankets had been used for baby blankets, some of them had been used as picnic blankets, some of them had been used for the dog. We all have blankets in our homes and understand the significance that they play. But similarly, I instruct new doctors: when they walk into a patient's room, before they pick up that medical chart, just look around the room. Are there balloons or cards, or that special blanket on the bed? That tells the doctor there's a connection to the outside world. If that patient has someone in the outside world to assist them and help them, the doctor can implement the best care with that connection in mind. In medicine, people are connected as humans before they're identified as doctor and patient. But this method of enhancing perception — it need not be disruptive, and it doesn't necessitate an overhaul in looking. Like Jorge Méndez Blake's sculpture of building a brick wall above Kafka's book "El Castillo" shows that more astute observation can be subtle and yet invaluable. You can discern the book, and you can see how it disrupted the symmetry of the bricks directly above it, but by the time you get to the end of the sculpture, you can no longer see the book. But looking at the work of art in its entirety, you see that the impact of the work's disruption on the bricks is nuanced and unmistakable. One thought, one idea, one innovation can alter an approach, change a process and even save lives. I've been teaching visual intelligence for over 15 years, and to my great amazement and astonishment — to my never-ending astonishment and amazement, I have seen that looking at art with a critical eye can help to anchor us in our world of uncharted waters, whether you are a paramilitary trooper, a caregiver, a doctor or a mother. Because let's face it, things go wrong. (Laughter) Things go wrong. And don't misunderstand me, I'd eat that doughnut in a minute. (Laughter) But we need to understand the consequences of what it is that we observe, and we need to convert observable details into actionable knowledge. Like Jennifer Odem's sculpture of tables standing sentinel on the banks of the Mississippi River in New Orleans, guarding against the threat of post-Katrina floodwaters and rising up against adversity, we too have the ability to act affirmatively and affect positive change. I have been mining the world of art to help people across the professional spectrum to see the extraordinary in the everyday, to articulate what is absent and to be able to inspire creativity and innovation, no matter how small. And most importantly, to forge human connections where they may not be apparent, empowering us all to see our work and the world writ large with a new set of eyes. Thank you. (Applause) |
Are we running out of clean water? | null | TED-Ed | From space, our planet appears to be more ocean than Earth. But despite the water covering 71% of the planet’s surface, more than half the world’s population endures extreme water scarcity for at least one month a year. And current estimates predict that by 2040, up to 20 more countries could be experiencing water shortages. Taken together, these bleak statistics raise a startling question: are we running out of clean water? Well yes, and no. At a planetary scale, Earth can’t run out of freshwater thanks to the water cycle, a system that continuously produces and recycles water, morphing it from vapour, to liquid, to ice as it circulates around the globe. So this isn’t really a question of how much water there is, but of how much of it is accessible to us. 97% of earth’s liquid is saltwater, too loaded with minerals for humans to drink or use in agriculture. Of the remaining 3% of potentially usable freshwater, more than two-thirds is frozen in ice caps and glaciers. That leaves less than 1% available for sustaining all life on Earth, spread across our planet in rivers, lakes, underground aquifers, ground ice and permafrost. It’s these sources of water that are being rapidly depleted by humans, but slowly replenished by rain and snowfall. And this limited supply isn’t distributed evenly around the globe. Diverse climates and geography provide some regions with more rainfall and natural water sources, while other areas have geographic features that make transporting water much more difficult. And supplying the infrastructure and energy it would take to move water across these regions is extremely expensive. In many of these water-poor areas, as well as some with greater access to water, humanity is guzzling up the local water supply faster than it can be replenished. And when more quickly renewed sources can’t meet the demand, we start pumping it out of our finite underground reserves. Of Earth’s 37 major underground reservoirs, 21 are on track to be irreversibly emptied. So while it’s true that our planet isn’t actually losing water, we are depleting the water sources we rely on at an unsustainable pace. This might seem surprising – after all, on average, people only drink about two liters of water a day. But water plays a hidden role in our daily lives, and in that same 24 hours, most people will actually consume an estimated 3000 liters of water. In fact, household water – which we use to drink, cook, and clean – accounts for only 3.6% of humanity’s water consumption. Another 4.4% goes to the wide range of factories which make the products we buy each day. But the remaining 92% of our water consumption is all spent on a single industry: agriculture. Our farms drain the equivalent of 3.3 billion Olympic-sized swimming pools every year, all of it swallowed up by crops and livestock to feed Earth’s growing population. Agriculture currently covers 37% of Earth’s land area, posing the biggest threat to our regional water supplies. And yet, it’s also a necessity. So how do we limit agriculture’s thirst while still feeding those who rely on it? Farmers are already finding ingenious ways to reduce their impact, like using special irrigation techniques to grow “more crop per drop”, and breeding new crops that are less thirsty. Other industries are following suit, adopting production processes that reuse and recycle water. On a personal level, reducing food waste is the first step to reducing water use, since one-third of the food that leaves farms is currently wasted or thrown away. You might also want to consider eating less water-intensive foods like shelled nuts and red meat. Adopting a vegetarian lifestyle could reduce up to one third of your water footprint. Our planet may never run out of water, but it doesn’t have to for individuals to go thirsty. Solving this local problem requires a global solution, and small day-to-day decisions can affect reservoirs around the world. |
The work that makes all other work possible | {0: 'Ai-jen Poo has spent the last 20 years bringing care and respect to the women that care for us.'} | TEDWomen 2018 | I want to talk to you tonight about the work that makes all other work possible, about the millions of women who go to work in our homes every single day, caring for children as nannies, caring for our loved ones with disabilities and our elders, as home care workers, maintaining sanity in our homes as cleaners. It's the work that makes all other work possible. And it's mostly done by women, more than 90 percent women, disproportionately women of color. And the work itself is associated with work that women have historically done, work that's been made incredibly invisible and taken for granted in our culture. But it's so fundamental to everything else in our world. It makes it possible for all of us to go out and do what we do in the world every single day, knowing that the most precious aspects of our lives are in good hands. But we don't think about it that way. It's almost defined by its invisibility. You could go into any neighborhood and not know which homes are also workplaces. There's no sign. There's no list or registry. It's just invisible. And it's this work that is not even referred to as real work. It's referred to as "help." It's often seen as unskilled, not seen as professional. And race has played a profound role in how we value this work in our culture. Some of the first domestic workers in the United States were black women who were enslaved, and racial exclusion has shaped their conditions for generations. In the 1930s, when Congress was discussing the labor laws that would be a part of the New Deal, that would protect all workers, Southern members of Congress refused to support those labor laws if they included protections for domestic workers and farmworkers. That history of racial exclusion and our cultural devaluing of work that's associated with women now means that millions of women go to work every single day, work incredibly hard and still can't make ends meet. They earn poverty wages without a safety net, so that the women that we're counting on to take care of us and our families can't take care of their own, doing this work. But my work over the last 20 years has been about changing precisely that. It's about making these jobs good jobs that you can take pride in and support your family on. At the National Domestic Workers Alliance, we've been working hard in states to pass new laws that will protect domestic workers from discrimination and sexual harassment, that will create days of rest, paid time off, even. So far, eight states have passed domestic workers bills of rights. Yes. (Applause) And during the Obama administration, we were successful in bringing two million home care workers under minimum wage and overtime protections for the first time since 1937. (Applause) Most recently, we've been really excited to launch a new portable benefits platform for domestic workers, called "Alia," which allows for domestic workers with multiple clients to give them access to benefits for the very first time. So really important progress is being made. But I would argue tonight that one of the most important things that domestic workers can provide is actually what they can teach us about humanity itself and about what it will take to create a more humane world for our children. In the face of extreme immorality, domestic workers can be our moral compass. And it makes sense, because what they do is so fundamental to the very basics of human need and humanity. They are there when we are born into this world; they shape who we become in this world; and they are with us as we prepare to leave this world. And their experiences with families are so varied. They have some relationships with the families that they work for that are incredibly positive and mutually supportive and last for years and years. And then the opposite also happens. And we've seen cases of sexual violence and assault, of extreme forms of abuse and exploitation. We've seen cases of human trafficking. Domestic workers live in poor neighborhoods, and then they go to work in very wealthy ones. They cross cultures and generations and borders and boundaries, and their job, no matter what, is to show up and care — to nurture, to feed, to clothe, to bathe, to listen, to encourage, to ensure safety, to support dignity ... to care no matter what. I want to tell you a story of a woman I met early on in this work. Her name is Lily. Lily and her family lived in Jamaica, and when she was 15 years old, she was approached by an American couple who were looking for a live-in nanny to come live with them in the United States and help them care for their children. They offered Lily's family that if she came to work as their nanny, she would be able to have access to a US education, and she would have a weekly salary sent home to help her family financially. They decided it was a good idea and decided to take the opportunity. Lily held up her end of the bargain and helped to raise three children. But all communication with her family was severed: no letters, no phone calls. She was never allowed to go to school, and she was never paid — for 15 years. One day, she saw an article in a newspaper about another domestic worker with a really similar story to hers, another case that I was working on at the time, and she found a way to reach me. She also found a way to reach her brother, who was living in the United States at the time as well. Between the two of us, we were able to help her escape. And she had the help of one of the children. One of the children was old enough to realize that the way his nanny was being treated was wrong, and he gave her the money that he had been saving through his childhood to help her escape. But here's the thing about this story. She was essentially enslaved for 15 years. Human trafficking and slavery is a criminal offense. And so her lawyers and I asked Lily, did she want to press criminal charges for what had happened to her. And after thinking about what it would mean, she said no, because she didn't want the children to be separated from their parents. Instead, we filed a civil lawsuit, and we eventually won the case, and her case became a rallying cry for domestic workers everywhere. She was reunited with her family and went on to have a family of her own. But the thing that's so profound to me about this story is, despite having 15 years stolen from her life, it did not affect the care and compassion that she felt for the children. And I see this from domestic workers all the time. In the face of indignities and our failure to respect and value this work in our culture, they still show up, and they care. They're simply too proximate to our shared humanity. They know how your toddler likes to be held as they take their bottle before a nap. They know how your mother likes her tea, how to make her smile and tell stories despite her dementia. They are so proximate to our humanity. They know that at the end of the day, these are people who are part of families — someone's mother, someone's grandmother, someone's best friend and someone's baby; undeniably human, and therefore, not disposable. Domestic workers know that any time a single person becomes disposable, it's a slippery slope. You see, the cultural devaluing of domestic work is a reflection of a hierarchy of human value that defines everything in our world, a hierarchy that values the lives and contributions of some groups of people over others, based on race, gender, class, immigration status — any number of categories. And that hierarchy of human value requires stories about those groups of people in order to sustain itself. So these stories have seeped deep into our culture about how some people are less intelligent, some people are less intuitive, weaker, by extension, less trustworthy, less valuable and ultimately, less human. And domestic workers know it's a slippery slope when we start to see a worker as less than a real worker, to a woman as less than a woman, to a mother as less than a mother, to a child as less than a child. In the spring of 2018, the Trump administration announced a new policy at the US-Mexico border, a zero-tolerance policy, to forcibly separate all children from their parents, who were arriving at the border seeking asylum; children as young as 18 months, separated from their parents after a long and arduous journey to reach the US-Mexico border in search of safety and a new beginning. Thousands of children separated. And because they were migrants, they were treated as less than children. In response, I helped to organize the Families Belong Together Vigil at the Ursula Border Patrol Processing Center in McAllen, Texas, on Father's Day. Inside that processing center, there were hundreds of children who were being held, processed and then prepared to be shipped all over country to be jailed in facilities hundreds of miles away from their parents. I saw with my own eyes children not [old] enough for kindergarten in unmarked buses, being shipped off to jails hundreds of miles away. And as they passed us by, they reached for us through the windows, as we stood vigil to let them know that they are not alone, and we are fighting for them. Domestic workers came from all over Texas to be a part of the vigil. They saw in those families their own family stories. They had also come here in search of safety and a new beginning, a better life for their families, and they saw in the eyes of those children their own children. And through our tears, we looked at each other and we asked each other, "How did we get here, to putting children in cages and separating them from the people who love them the most in the world?" How? And what I thought to myself was: if domestic workers were in charge, this never would have happened. Our humanity would never have been so disposable that we would be treating children in this way. The Dalai Lama once said that love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive. In other words, they are fundamental to human existence. Domestic workers are in charge of the fundamentals. They love and they care, and they show compassion no matter what. We live in a time of moral choices everywhere we turn: at the border, at the ballot box, in our workplaces, right in our homes, full of moral choices. As you go about your day and you encounter these moral choices, think of Lily. Think like Lily. Think like a domestic worker who shows up and cares no matter what. Love and compassion, no matter what. Show up like a domestic worker, because our children are counting on us. Thank you. (Applause) |
Por qué deberíamos comer más bichos | {0: 'Rena es Técnica Agropecuaria y Agroalimentaria, forma parte de Expedición Ciencia y le gustan mucho los insectos… en formatos bastante particulares.'} | TEDxRiodelaPlata | I'm passionate about insects for two reasons. For one, I'm mad about the infinite diversity of this kind of little beings. 30 million; not of insects but of species. We say that humans invented the wheel. But dung beetles would move balls of dung way before we would even think of standing up straight. "Humans invented compost." Ants would make compost long before any ecologist would in their balcony. And just in case you used to think that we have invented air conditioning you are absolutely wrong. Of course, termites did it before. And there are bugs that serve as thermometers. Here you are: the crickets. The more they crick, the higher the ambient temperature. It obviously varies with the species, but it's quite accurate. And these are just some facts about four insects. Figure this multiplied by 30 million! Incredible! (Laughter) Besides, insects are delicious. (Laughter) And this is the second thing I wanted to talk to you about. (Applause) When I was 11 years old, I was eating a hamburger at a fast food restaurant when a kid approaches me and says: "Do you know that hamburgers are made of insects?" Hold on for a second! Are insects edible? I later found out that the hamburgers thing was a myth but at the time it kept me wondering and I started searching. And in effect, not only insects are edible but they have a lot of advantages to them. Compared specially with agriculture and the livestock industry, they create more food in less space and using less natural resources. A grass-fed cow needs, give or take one hectare to move. Whereas insects don't need more place than what they already take. Now, if you feed that cow 8 kg of food, it will generate 1 kg of meat; approximately an 8-to-1 ratio. If I feed the 8 kg of food to insects they will generate 4 kg: a 8-to-4 ratio. Besides, insects in general have more protein per 100 g than cows. For instance, crickets have 22 percent more protein. And if this was not enough, the livestock industry is responsible for the release of 37 percent methane due to human activities that contributes to the greenhouse effect. And, guess what? Insects create in between 10 and 100 time less methane than, say, pork. Great, well, but if insects are so cool why don't we have them in the market shelves? Precisely, for the faces I saw in most of you when I ate a cricket. We don't have it in mind here, but in the world today, 2 billion people eat insects on daily basis. As Latinamericans we used to as well, until not so long ago — Our pre-Columbian diet was made of an important variety of insects: ant larvae, worms, crickets, etc. Until the Spaniards came in and put the same face you just put. Probably, when you think about eating an insect, you will imagine yourselves biting a cockroach like this or cutting with your knife a tarantula this big, but you need not to worry. A product that's becoming widespread is insect flour. It has all the benefits I mentioned before plus, you don't even realize you are eating crickets in a slice of bread. So, how can we get the most of what insects can give to us? In 2017, we went to Chile with a group of friends. We attended the first Latinamerican Summit for Young Leaders in Biotech. There we introduced and idea I think it can work. We suggested creating insects to produce food with added value in urban areas as a way to solve the problem of the lack of space and the cost of resources. We did this thinking that if we youngsters don't tear down cultural barriers, nobody will do it. In fact, we are already doing this regarding genders. And also in Latinamerica the production of food is a neural part of our economy and we cannot stay behind amidst these changes. And to do this it's not required a huge warehouse or a big investment. For instance, I try to contribute in my own house breeding insects, studying how to cook them and transform them so they can be more edible. And if they look at insects beyond our preconceptions? What if we see them as thermometers, or as great inventors, and also as food? Nature provides with a solution that is profitable, viable and sustainable. And it's even delicious! Let's grab this chance and try to change the lens we look to insects with. (Applause) |
The dangerous race for the South Pole | null | TED-Ed | Roald Amundsen had spent nearly two years preparing his Arctic expedition. He had secured funding from the Norwegian Crown and hand-picked a trusted crew. He’d even received the blessing of the famed explorer Fridtjof Nansen, along with the use of his ship, Fram, specially constructed to withstand the ice. Now, with the voyage departing, he had one final announcement to his shipmates: They were going to head in the opposite direction. By the early 20th century, nearly every region of the globe had been visited and mapped, with only two key locations remaining: the North Pole, deep in the frozen waters of the Arctic region, and the South Pole, nestled within a recently discovered icy continent in the vast Antarctic Ocean. A veteran of several expeditions, Amundsen had long dreamed of reaching the North Pole. But in 1909, amidst his preparations, news came that the American explorers Frederick Cook and Robert Peary had staked rival claims to the achievement. Instead of abandoning the planned voyage, Amundsen decided to alter its course to what he called “the last great problem.” But Amundsen’s crew weren’t the only ones kept in the dark. British naval officer Robert F. Scott had already visited the Antarctic, and was leading his own South Pole expedition. Now, as Scott’s ship Terra Nova reached Melbourne in 1910, he was greeted with the news that Amundsen was also heading south. Reluctantly, Scott found himself pitted against the Norwegian in what the newspapers called a ‘race to the Pole.’ Yet if it was a race, it was a strange one. The expeditions left at different times from different locations, and they had very different plans for the journey. Amundsen was focused solely on reaching the Pole. Informed by his Arctic exploration, he drew on both Inuit and Norwegian experience, arriving with a small team of men and more than a hundred dogs. His explorers were clothed in sealskin and furs, as well as specially designed skis and boots. But Scott's venture was more complicated. Launching an extensive scientific research expedition, he traveled with over three times more men than Amundsen, alongside over 30 dogs, 19 Siberian ponies, and three state-of-the-art motorized sledges. But these additional tools and bodies weighed down the ship as it battled the storms of the southern ocean. And as they finally began to lay supplies, they found both their ponies and motor-sledges ineffective in the harsh ice and snow. In the spring of 1911, after waiting out the long polar night, both parties began the journey south. Scott’s team traveled over the Beardmore Glacier, following the path of Ernest Shackleton's earlier attempt to reach the pole. But although this course had been documented, it proved slow and laborious. Meanwhile, despite an initial false start, Amundsen’s five-man team made good time using a previously uncharted route through the same Transantarctic Mountains. They stayed ahead of Scott’s team, and on December 14, arrived first at their desolate destination. To avoid the ambiguity that surrounded Cook and Peary’s North Pole claims, Amundsen’s team traversed the area in a grid to make sure they covered the Pole’s location. Along with flags and a tent marker, they left a letter for Scott, which would not be found until over a month later. But when Scott’s party finally reached the pole, losing the ‘race’ was the least of their problems. On the way back towards the camp, two of the five men succumbed to frostbite starvation, and exhaustion. The remaining explorers hoped for a prearranged rendezvous with a team sent from their base, but due to a series of mishaps, misjudgements and miscommunications, their rescue never arrived. Their remains, along with Scott’s diary, would not be found until spring. Today, scientists from various countries live and work at Antarctic research stations. But the journeys of these early explorers are not forgotten. Despite their divergent fates, they are forever joined in history, and in the name of the research base that marks the South Pole. |
A needle in countless haystacks: Finding habitable worlds | {0: 'Ariel Anbar is a scientist and educator interested in Earth’s past and future evolution as an inhabited world, and the prospects for life beyond. His group’s major focus is the chemical evolution of the atmosphere and oceans, as revealed by the development of novel geochemical methods. Trained as a geologist and a chemist, Anbar is a President’s Professor at Arizona State University, where he is on the faculty of the School of Earth & Space Exploration and the School of Molecular Sciences, and a Distinguished Sustainability Scholar in the Global Institute of Sustainability. The author or co-author of over 100 refereed papers, Anbar directed ASU’s NASA-funded Astrobiology Program from 2009 – 2015, and oversees ASU’s new Center for Education Through eXploration. He is a graduate of Harvard (A.B. 1989) and Caltech (Ph.D. 1996). Before coming to ASU he was on the faculty of the University of Rochester from 1996 to 2004. Anbar is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America, which awarded him the Donath Medal in 2002. He was recognized as an HHMI Professor in 2014, and elected a Fellow of the Geochemical Society and the European Association of Geochemistry in 2015.'} | TED-Ed | The universe contains about 100 billion galaxies. Each of those galaxies contains about 100 billion stars. Many of those stars have planets orbiting them. So how do we look for life in all that immensity? It's like searching for a needle in trillions of haystacks. We might want to focus our search on planets that we know can support life as we know it — what we call habitable worlds. What do such planets look like? To answer that question, we don't look out there. Instead, we look at ourselves. At Earth. Because this is the one planet in the universe that we know for certain is habitable. When we look at Earth from space, we see a blue, watery world. It's no coincidence that three quarters of the surface is covered by oceans. Because of its unique chemical and physical properties, water is absolutely essential for all life as we know it. And so we get especially excited about other worlds on which water is abundant. Fortunately, water is very common in the universe. But life needs water in the form of liquid, not ice, and not vapor, and that's a little bit less common. For a planet to have liquid water at its surface, three things are important. First, the planet needs to be large enough that the force of gravity keeps the water molecules from flying off into space. For example, Mars is smaller than Earth, and so has less gravity, and that's one important reason that Mars has a very thin atmosphere, and no oceans at its surface. Second, the planet needs to have an atmosphere. Why? Because without an atmosphere, the planet is in a vacuum, and liquid water isn't stable in a vacuum. For example, our moon has no atmosphere, and so if you spill some water on the moon, it will either boil away as vapor, or freeze solid to make ice. Without the pressure of an atmosphere, liquid water can't survive. Third, the planet needs to be at the right distance from its star. Too close, and the surface temperature will exceed the boiling point of water, and oceans will turn to vapor. Too far, and the surface temperature will fall below the freezing point of water, causing the oceans to turn to ice. Fire or ice. For life as we know it, neither will suffice. You can imagine that the perfect zone where water stays liquid looks kind of like a belt around a star. We call that belt the habitable zone. So when we search for habitable worlds, we definitely want to look for planets in the habitable zones around their stars. Those regions are the best bets to find planets like Earth. But while habitable zones are a pretty good place to begin the search for planets with life, there are a couple of complications. First, a planet isn't necessarily habitable just because it's in the habitable zone. Consider the planet Venus in our solar system. If you were an alien astronomer, you'd think Venus is a pretty good bet for life. It's the right size, it has an atmosphere, and it's in the habitable zone of our sun. An alien astronomer might see it as Earth's twin. But Venus is not habitable, at least not at its surface. Not by life as we know it. It's too hot. That's because Venus' atmosphere is full of carbon dioxide, an important greenhouse gas. In fact, its atmosphere is almost entirely carbon dioxide, and is almost 100 times thicker than our own. As a result, the temperature on Venus is hot enough to melt lead, and the planet is dry as a bone. So finding planets of the right size and distance from their stars is only a beginning. We also want to know about the makeup of their atmospheres. The second complication emerges when we look a little more deeply at planet Earth. In the last 30 years, we've discovered microbes living in all sorts of extreme environments. We find them in fissures of rock miles beneath our feet, in boiling waters of the ocean floor, in acidic waters of thermal springs, and in cloud droplets miles above our heads. These so-called extremophiles aren't rare. Some scientists estimate that the mass of microbes living deep underground equals the mass of all the life at Earth's surface. These subterranean microbes don't need oceans or sunshine. These discoveries suggest that Earth-like planets may be only the tip of the astrobiological iceberg. It's possible that life might persist in aquifers beneath the surface of Mars. Microbes may thrive on Jupiter's moon Europa, where liquid water ocean probably lies beneath the icy crust. Another ocean beneath the surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus is the source of geysers erupting into space. Could these geysers be raining microbes? Could we fly through them to find out? And what about life as we don't know it, using a liquid other than water? Maybe we are the crazy creatures living in an unusual and extreme environment. Maybe the real habitable zone is so large that there are billions of needles in those trillions of haystacks. Maybe in the big scheme of things, Earth is only one of many different kinds of habitable worlds. The only way to find out is to go out and explore. |
How storytelling helps parents in prison stay connected to their kids | {0: 'Alan Crickmore works with Storybook Dads, a charity that promotes family ties between prisoners and their children.'} | TEDxExeter | It's story time. Settle back, and I'll begin. Once upon a time, a mother duck sat patiently on her nest of eggs, waiting for them to hatch. And then one day, she felt something move beneath her. Crack, crack! Filled with happiness, she watched as her eggs hatched one by one. I don't know about you, but when I was little, story time was always one of my favorite parts of the day. And I loved reading to my two sons when they were small, too. It's that special time when a parent and child can be totally absorbed together in mystical kingdoms, fantastical beasties or scruffy little ducks that turn out to be swans. Well, that's how it is for some children, but for other children, there isn't a parent around to read to them. I'd like to tell you about Sophie. Sophie's five years old and lives with her parents. One day, there's a bang at the door. Sophie hears lots of shouting; her mum's crying. She sees the police dragging her father away. Sophie's afraid. She starts crying, too. Weeks go by. Sophie doesn't know what's happened to her dad. When she asks her mum, her mum gets upset. So she stops asking. Sophie waits. She really misses her dad. Every day, she hurries home from school, in case he's come back. On many nights, she cries herself to sleep. Children at school start to tease her. They call her names. Somebody's mum has heard that Sophie's dad is in prison. Sophie pretends to be ill so she doesn't have to go to school. And her teacher can't understand why she's so far behind with her schoolwork. After what seems a long, long time to Sophie, a letter arrives. It's from her dad. The writing is very messy. The letter makes her mum cry, but she reads a little out to Sophie. He says that he's OK and that he's missing them. It's a short letter. Sophie says she'd like to go and see her dad, wherever he is. But her mum says it's too far away, and they can't afford the journey. Then one day the phone rings. "Sophie, come speak to daddy." Dad sounds different, far away. He says he can't talk for very long, and anyway, it's very noisy wherever he is. And Sophie doesn't know what to say to him. Well, as stories go, that's not a very nice one. In the United Kingdom, 200,000 children experience the shame and isolation of a parent in prison. Two hundred thousand. That's more than the number of children each year who are affected by their parents divorcing. And it can affect the children of prisoners very deeply. There can be problems at school, and they're three times more likely to suffer from mental health issues. In so many ways, children are the unintended victims of their parents' crimes. In so many ways, children are the overlooked victims of their parents' crimes. Until last November, I was a serving prisoner, imprisoned for fraud. I was dishonest, and I paid the penalty. Before that, I'd been a practicing solicitor for 30 years. I'd had a happy and stable upbringing, a good education, a happy marriage, which, I'm pleased to say, continues. I have two adult sons. When they were growing up, I did my best to be around for them as much as I could. And I took a careful interest in what they did. I read to my boys every night, and ironically, our favorite story was "Burglar Bill." (Laughter) But when I got to prison, it soon became apparent that my background was very different to that of most of the prisoners. Few of the men that I met had had a decent education. Indeed, many associated education with humiliation and failure. I can tell you firsthand that prison is dehumanizing. Prisoners harden up, they shut down, they close in ... just to survive. And this can be devastating for families. In fact, maintaining contact with your family from prison can be very difficult indeed. And if a child does get to see their parent in prison, they have to go through the same pat-down searches as the adults. They walk through the same detector frames, they're sniffed by the same sniffer dogs, and all because some children have been the unwitting carriers of drugs and mobile phones. And when they get through to see their parent, they may be tired from a long journey, shy, tongue-tied, even upset. And it isn't easy for the parents, who may not be getting along. For many reasons, not just these, over half of prisoners lose contact with their children and families. How can we help prisoners to stay in contact with their families? When I was a prisoner at Channings Wood Prison, I began working for a charity called Storybook Dads. Storybook Dads began in 2003, when Sharon Berry, a civilian worker in a prison, realized just how much many prisoners wanted to stay in contact with their children. And so, armed with a few storybooks, she began to help prisoners to read and record stories to send home to their children. It wasn't a new idea. Few ideas like this are new. They're great ideas. But it was an instant success. You may wonder: How does the recording of the stories work in prison? Is it difficult for prisoners? Can it be challenging? Well, the process of choosing, reading and recording a story can be very challenging for prisoners. Prison is tough, and prisoners can't afford to show any signs of weakness or vulnerability. But this, this recording process, this can be uncomfortable, upsetting, sometimes all just a bit too much. And prisoners often cry. They cry because they regret missing out on their children's lives. They cry because they're ashamed that they've let their families down. They cry because they don't know how to go about reading to their children. But because when they come to us we offer a private space, one-to-one, prisoners don't need to be tough anymore, and they can use their vulnerability as a strength when contacting with their children. I remember one prisoner who came to record. He was a big, hard man with a reputation for being tough. He came along as implacable as ever. But when the door of the recording room closed behind him, that facade began to crumble. From his pocket, he took a screwed-up piece of paper and quietly began to read the words which he'd written as a message for his two little ones. His hands were shaking. And then, in a surprisingly quiet voice, he began to sing their favorite lullaby. You see, there wasn't much that he could do from behind bars to show his children that he missed and loved them. But he could do this. Once the recording is made, it's sent to the Storybook Dads production unit at Channings Wood Prison in Devon. And that's where I worked. I was trained, along with other prisoners, to edit and produce recordings sent in from prisons all over the United Kingdom. Using audio and video software, the recordings have the mistakes taken out and sound effects and music added in. And the experience and skill which the prison editors gain helps them in their future employment. Once the recording is finalized, it's transferred to a CD or a DVD and sent out to the families so that the children can watch them whenever they feel the need. And they listen to these recordings and watch them a lot — at bedtime, in the car ... Some even take them to school to show their friends. These recordings, they show the children that they're loved and missed. And they show the prisoner that they can do something for their child, as a parent. Do you remember Sophie? Well, one day, just before Christmas, a parcel arrived, and this is what was in it. Let's listen to a little of it together. (Video) Santa: On, Comet! On, Cupid! On, Donner and Blitzen! Charlie: That's his reindeer, isn't it? Santa: It is his reindeer, yeah. Up, up, higher and higher they flew, across land, across oceans they sped. Through the magical northern lights they passed — I'd love to see the northern lights, wouldn't you? Charlie: I figure they'd probably look a bit like that snowman's belly. Santa: They probably would, yeah. That's a cool snowman, isn't it? Charlie: It's very cool indeed, I love it. Santa: They visited all the children in the world and left presents for each and every one. In the blink of an eye, they were back in Frogsbottom Field. (Charlie Laughs) Santa: You think that's well funny? Charlie: I want to live in Frogsbottom Field! Santa: Where do you live, in Frogsbottom Tree? Charlie: I don't, I live in this tree. I've made it all Christmasy-look. Santa: It's nice, that. You've done a good job, good job. Charlie: Thank you very much! (Laughter) Alan Crickmore: Sophie and her mum listened to that three times, and they haven't laughed so much in a long time. They can see that he's all right, they can see that he loves them, and the next time he rings, Sophie's got plenty to talk about: "What does Charlie the Chimp eat? Will daddy do another story very soon?" Since it began in 2003, Storybook Dads has grown and grown. It now operates as Storybook Dads and Storybook Mums in more than 100 prisons in the United Kingdom. Ninety-eight percent of the prisoners who take part say that it's improved their relationship with their child. And since 2003, over 60,000 DVDs and CDs have been sent out to the children of prisoners. For Sophie's family and for thousands of families like them, Storybook Dads has been a lifeline. Some prisoners say that it's the first time that they've begun to build a relationship with their child. And some poor readers have been so inspired by what they've been able to achieve that they've gone to education classes to improve their own reading skills. Let's go back to the story of "The Ugly Duckling." But this time, I'd like to play you a recording made by a prisoner, because it encapsulates the power of what we do. The prisoner was an Irish Traveller who couldn't read. And he wanted to send a story home to his daughter for her birthday. With the help of a mentor and some clever editing, something magical happened. This is an extract from the raw recording, where the prisoner is reading the story by repeating it, phrase at a time. (Audio) Mentor: He had nowhere to hide. Owen: He had nowhere to hide. Mentor: So one day, he ran away. Owen: Then one day, he ran away. Mentor: He ran until he came to the great marsh. Owen: He run until he come to the great marsh. Mentor: Where the wild ducks lived. Owen: Where the wild ducks lived. AC: And this is a recording — an excerpt of the recording with the mentor's voice taken out and sound effects and music added in. (Audio) Owen: He had nowhere to hide. Then one day, he run away. He run until he come to the great marsh where the wild ducks lived, and he laid in the rushes for two weeks. (Music) (Ducks quack) Some wild ducks and geese come to look at him. "You're very ugly," they said, and they laughed at him. (Ducks quack) The ugly duckling ran away from the great marsh. (Duck quacks) AC: And this is how he finished the story: (Audio) Owen: He wasn't an ugly duckling at all. During the winter, he had grown into a beautiful white swan. The other swans looked at him and thought how beautiful he was. "Come with us," they said. And he did. (Bird sounds) Well, Tiara, I hope you have enjoyed this story as much as I enjoyed reading this story to you. I cannot wait to be with you again and hold you in my arms. All my love, your daddy, Owen. Lots of love, I miss you with all my heart. Goodbye for now, my love. Bye bye. (Music) (Music ends) AC: When he listened to that recording in his cell before it was sent out to his daughter, he cried. And that's a pretty common reaction from prisoners, as they realize for the first time they've been able to do something for their child which they never thought they could. They've connected in the most fundamental way, through the medium of storytelling. And as for Sophie, she wants "The Gruffalo" next time. (Laughter) (Applause) |
3 kinds of bias that shape your worldview | {0: 'Dr. J. Marshall Shepherd is a leading international expert in weather and climate and is the Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor of Geography and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Georgia. '} | TEDxUGA | I'm a meteorologist by degree, I have a bachelor's, master's and PhD in physical meteorology, so I'm a meteorologist, card carrying. And so with that comes four questions, always. This is one prediction I will always get right. (Laughter) And those questions are, "Marshall, what channel are you on?" (Laughter) "Dr. Shepherd, what's the weather going to be tomorrow?" (Laughter) And oh, I love this one: "My daughter is getting married next September, it's an outdoor wedding. Is it going to rain?" (Laughter) Not kidding, I get those, and I don't know the answer to that, the science isn't there. But the one I get a lot these days is, "Dr. Shepherd, do you believe in climate change?" "Do you believe in global warming?" Now, I have to gather myself every time I get that question. Because it's an ill-posed question — science isn't a belief system. My son, he's 10 — he believes in the tooth fairy. And he needs to get over that, because I'm losing dollars, fast. (Laughter) But he believes in the tooth fairy. But consider this. Bank of America building, there, in Atlanta. You never hear anyone say, "Do you believe, if you go to the top of that building and throw a ball off, it's going to fall?" You never hear that, because gravity is a thing. So why don't we hear the question, "Do you believe in gravity?" But of course, we hear the question, "Do you believe in global warming?" Well, consider these facts. The American Association for the Advancement of Science, AAAS, one of the leading organizations in science, queried scientists and the public on different science topics. Here are some of them: genetically modified food, animal research, human evolution. And look at what the scientists say about those, the people that actually study those topics, in red, versus the gray, what the public thinks. How did we get there? How did we get there? That scientists and the public are so far apart on these science issues. Well, I'll come a little bit closer to home for me, climate change. Eighty-seven percent of scientists believe that humans are contributing to climate change. But only 50 percent of the public? How did we get there? So it begs the question, what shapes perceptions about science? It's an interesting question and one that I've been thinking about quite a bit. I think that one thing that shapes perceptions in the public, about science, is belief systems and biases. Belief systems and biases. Go with me for a moment. Because I want to talk about three elements of that: confirmation bias, Dunning-Kruger effect and cognitive dissonance. Now, these sound like big, fancy, academic terms, and they are. But when I describe them, you're going to be like, "Oh! I recognize that; I even know somebody that does that." Confirmation bias. Finding evidence that supports what we already believe. Now, we're probably all a little bit guilty of that at times. Take a look at this. I'm on Twitter. And often, when it snows, I'll get this tweet back to me. (Laughter) "Hey, Dr. Shepherd, I have 20 inches of global warming in my yard, what are you guys talking about, climate change?" I get that tweet a lot, actually. It's a cute tweet, it makes me chuckle as well. But it's oh, so fundamentally scientifically flawed. Because it illustrates that the person tweeting doesn't understand the difference between weather and climate. I often say, weather is your mood and climate is your personality. Think about that. Weather is your mood, climate is your personality. Your mood today doesn't necessarily tell me anything about your personality, nor does a cold day tell me anything about climate change, or a hot day, for that matter. Dunning-Kruger. Two scholars from Cornell came up with the Dunning-Kruger effect. If you go look up the peer-reviewed paper for this, you will see all kinds of fancy terminology: it's an illusory superiority complex, thinking we know things. In other words, people think they know more than they do. Or they underestimate what they don't know. And then, there's cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is interesting. We just recently had Groundhog Day, right? Now, there's no better definition of cognitive dissonance than intelligent people asking me if a rodent's forecast is accurate. (Laughter) But I get that, all of the time. (Laughter) But I also hear about the Farmer's Almanac. We grew up on the Farmer's Almanac, people are familiar with it. The problem is, it's only about 37 percent accurate, according to studies at Penn State University. But we're in an era of science where we actually can forecast the weather. And believe it or not, and I know some of you are like, "Yeah, right," we're about 90 percent accurate, or more, with weather forecast. You just tend to remember the occasional miss, you do. (Laughter) So confirmation bias, Dunning-Kruger and cognitive dissonance. I think those shape biases and perceptions that people have about science. But then, there's literacy and misinformation that keep us boxed in, as well. During the hurricane season of 2017, media outlets had to actually assign reporters to dismiss fake information about the weather forecast. That's the era that we're in. I deal with this all the time in social media. Someone will tweet a forecast — that's a forecast for Hurricane Irma, but here's the problem: it didn't come from the Hurricane Center. But people were tweeting and sharing this; it went viral. It didn't come from the National Hurricane Center at all. So I spent 12 years of my career at NASA before coming to the University of Georgia, and I chair their Earth Science Advisory Committee, I was just up there last week in DC. And I saw some really interesting things. Here's a NASA model and science data from satellite showing the 2017 hurricane season. You see Hurricane Harvey there? Look at all the dust coming off of Africa. Look at the wildfires up in northwest US and in western Canada. There comes Hurricane Irma. This is fascinating to me. But admittedly, I'm a weather geek. But more importantly, it illustrates that we have the technology to not only observe the weather and climate system, but predict it. There's scientific understanding, so there's no need for some of those perceptions and biases that we've been talking about. We have knowledge. But think about this ... This is Houston, Texas, after Hurricane Harvey. Now, I write a contribution for "Forbes" magazine periodically, and I wrote an article a week before Hurricane Harvey made landfall, saying, "There's probably going to be 40 to 50 inches of rainfall." I wrote that a week before it happened. But yet, when you talk to people in Houston, people are saying, "We had no idea it was going to be this bad." I'm just... (Sigh) (Laughter) A week before. But — I know, it's amusing, but the reality is, we all struggle with perceiving something outside of our experience level. People in Houston get rain all of the time, they flood all of the time. But they've never experienced that. Houston gets about 34 inches of rainfall for the entire year. They got 50 inches in three days. That's an anomaly event, that's outside of the normal. So belief systems and biases, literacy and misinformation. How do we step out of the boxes that are cornering our perceptions? Well we don't even have to go to Houston, we can come very close to home. (Laughter) Remember "Snowpocalypse?" (Laughter) Snowmageddon? Snowzilla? Whatever you want to call it. All two inches of it. (Laughter) Two inches of snow shut the city of Atlanta down. (Laughter) But the reality is, we were in a winter storm watch, we went to a winter weather advisory, and a lot of people perceived that as being a downgrade, "Oh, it's not going to be as bad." When in fact, the perception was that it was not going to be as bad, but it was actually an upgrade. Things were getting worse as the models were coming in. So that's an example of how we get boxed in by our perceptions. So, the question becomes, how do we expand our radius? The area of a circle is "pi r squared". We increase the radius, we increase the area. How do we expand our radius of understanding about science? Here are my thoughts. You take inventory of your own biases. And I'm challenging you all to do that. Take an inventory of your own biases. Where do they come from? Your upbringing, your political perspective, your faith — what shapes your own biases? Then, evaluate your sources — where do you get your information on science? What do you read, what do you listen to, to consume your information on science? And then, it's important to speak out. Talk about how you evaluated your biases and evaluated your sources. I want you to listen to this little 40-second clip from one of the top TV meteorologists in the US, Greg Fishel, in the Raleigh, Durham area. He's revered in that region. But he was a climate skeptic. But listen to what he says about speaking out. Greg Fishel: The mistake I was making and didn't realize until very recently, was that I was only looking for information to support what I already thought, and was not interested in listening to anything contrary. And so I woke up one morning, and there was this question in my mind, "Greg, are you engaging in confirmation bias? Are you only looking for information to support what you already think?" And if I was honest with myself, and I tried to be, I admitted that was going on. And so the more I talked to scientists and read peer-reviewed literature and tried to conduct myself the way I'd been taught to conduct myself at Penn State when I was a student, it became very difficult for me to make the argument that we weren't at least having some effect. Maybe there was still a doubt as to how much, but to say "nothing" was not a responsible thing for me to do as a scientist or a person. JMS: Greg Fishel just talked about expanding his radius of understanding of science. And when we expand our radius, it's not about making a better future, but it's about preserving life as we know it. So as we think about expanding our own radius in understanding science, it's critical for Athens, Georgia, for Atlanta, Georgia, for the state of Georgia, and for the world. So expand your radius. Thank you. (Applause) |
Inside the killer whale matriarchy | null | TED-Ed | Off the rugged coast of the pacific northwest, pods of killer whales inhabit the frigid waters. Each family is able to survive here thanks mainly to one member, its most knowledgeable hunter: the grandmother. These matriarchs can live eighty years or more, while most males die off in their thirties. Though killer whales inhabit every major ocean, until recently we knew very little about them. The details of their lives eluded scientists until an organization called the Center for Whale Research began studying a single population near Washington State and British Columbia in 1976. Thanks to their ongoing work, we’ve learned a great deal about these whales, known as the Southern Residents. And the more we learn, the more this population’s elders’ vital role comes into focus. Each grandmother starts her life as a calf born into her mother’s family group, or matriline. The family does everything together, hunting and playing, even communicating through their own unique set of calls. Both sons and daughters spend their entire lives with their mothers’ families. That doesn’t mean a young whale only interacts with her relatives. Besides their own special calls, her matriline shares a dialect with nearby families, and they socialize regularly. Once a female reaches age fifteen or so, these meetings become opportunities to mate with males from other groups. The relationships don’t go much beyond mating— she and her calves stay with her family, while the male returns to his own mother. Until approximately age forty, she gives birth every 6 years on average. Then, she goes through menopause— which is almost unheard of in the animal kingdom. In fact, humans, killer whales and a few other whales are the only species whose females continue to live for years after they stop reproducing. After menopause, grandmothers take the lead hunting for salmon, the Southern Residents’ main food source. Most of the winter they forage offshore, supplementing salmon with other fish. But when the salmon head towards shore in droves to spawn, the killer whales follow. The matriarch shows the younger whales where to find the most fertile fishing grounds. She also shares up to 90% of the salmon she catches. With each passing year, her contributions become more vital: overfishing and habitat destruction have decimated salmon populations, putting the whales at near-constant risk of starvation. These grandmothers’ expertise can mean the difference between life and death for their families– but why do they stop having calves? It’s almost always advantageous for a female to continue reproducing, even if she also cares for her existing children and grandchildren. A couple unique circumstances change this equation for killer whales. The fact that neither sons or daughters leave their families of origin is extremely rare— in almost all animal species, one or both sexes disperse. This means that as a female killer whale ages, a greater percentage of her family consists of her children and grandchildren, while more distant relatives die off. Because older females are more closely related to the group than younger females, they do best to invest in the family as a whole, whereas younger females should invest in reproducing. In the killer whale’s environment, every new calf is another mouth to feed on limited, shared resources. An older female can further her genes without burdening her family by supporting her adult sons, who sire calves other families will raise. This might be why the females have evolved to stop reproducing entirely in middle age. Even with the grandmothers’ contributions, the Southern Resident killer whales are critically endangered, largely due to a decline in salmon. We urgently need to invest in restoring salmon populations to save them from extinction. In the long term, we’ll need more studies like the Center for Whale Research’s. What we’ve learned about the Southern Residents may not hold true for other groups. By studying other populations closely, we might uncover more startling adaptations, and anticipate their vulnerabilities to human interference before their survival is at risk. |
Situational irony: The opposite of what you think | null | TED-Ed | Picture this: your friend and you are watching a sitcom and a sassy sidekick walks into a room, carrying a four-tiered wedding cake. He trips, falls, and face-plants into the cake. Your friend doubles over with laughter and says, "It's so ridiculous! So ironic!" Well, quick, what do you do? Do you laugh along with the laugh track and let this grievous misinterpretation of irony go? Or, do you throw caution to the wind and explain the true meaning of irony? If you're me, you choose the latter. Unfortunately, irony has been completely misunderstood. We tend to throw out that term whenever we see something funny or coincidental. And while many examples of true irony can be funny, that is not the driving factor of being ironic. A situation is only ironic if what happens is the exact opposite of what was expected. If you expect A, but get B, then you have irony. Let's take the slap-stick cake situation as an example. When someone walks in precariously balancing something that shouldn't be carried alone, trips, falls, and makes a mess, it is funny, but it's not ironic. In fact, you probably expect someone who is single-handedly carrying a huge cake to trip. When he does, reality aligns with expectations, and so that is not irony. But what if the sassy sidekick walked in wearing a gold medal that he'd won at the cake walking event at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996? What if that sidekick was a professional cake carrier? Then, maybe there would have been a reasonable expectation that he would have been more skilled when carrying a ridiculously large cake. Then, when that reasonable expectation was not met by the tripping sidekick, irony would have been exemplified. Another example. A senior citizen texting and blogging. The common and reasonable expectation of more mature men and women is that they don't like or know technology, that they have a hard time turning on a computer, or that they have the old brick cell phones from the 1980s. One should not expect them to be connected, high-tech, or savvy enough to text or to be blogging, which must seem like some sort of newfangled thing that "back in my day," they never had. So when Granny pulls out her smart phone to post pictures of her dentures or her grandkids, irony ensues. Reasonable expectations of the situation are not met. That is irony. So while the cake dropper might not be ironic, there are all kinds of situations in life that are. Go out, and find those true examples of irony. |
Why you should treat the tech you use at work like a colleague | {0: "BCG's Nadjia Yousif designs and implements programs for large financial services institutions to adapt and thrive in an era of technology disruption."} | TED@BCG Toronto | So, imagine a company hires a new employee, best in the business, who's on a multimillion-dollar contract. Now imagine that whenever this employee went to go meet with her team members, the appointments were ignored or dismissed, and in the meetings that did happen, she was yelled at or kicked out after a few minutes. So after a while, she just went quietly back to her desk, sat there with none of her skills being put to use, of course, being ignored by most people, and of course, still getting paid millions of dollars. This hotshot employee who can't seem to catch a break is that company's technology. This scenario is not an exaggeration. In my job as a technology advisor, I've seen so many companies make the well-meaning decisions to put huge investments into technology, only to have the benefits fail to live up to the expectation. In fact, in one study I read, 25 percent of technology projects are canceled or deliver things that are never used. That's like billions of dollars just being wasted each year. So why is this? Well, from what I've seen, the expectation from the top management is high but not unreasonable about the benefits from the technology. They expect people will use them, it will create time savings, and people will become genuinely better at their jobs. But the reality is that the people on the front line, who are supposed to be using these softwares and tools, they're skeptical or even afraid. We postpone the online trainings, we don't bother to learn the shortcuts, and we get frustrated at the number of tools we have to remember how to log into and use. Right? And that frustration, that guilt — it's racking up, the more that technology is inserting itself into our daily working lives, which is a lot. Brookings says that 70 percent of jobs today in the US require at least mid-level digital skills. So basically, to work these days, you need to be able to work with technology. But from what I've seen, we are not approaching this with the right mindset. So here's the idea that I've been toying with: What if we treated technology like a team member? I've been writing my own personal experiment about this. I've spoken to people from all different industries about how they can treat their core technologies like colleagues. I've met with people from the restaurant industry, medical professionals, teachers, bankers, people from many other sectors, and the first step with anybody that I would meet with was to draw out the structure of their teams in an organization chart. Now, I'm a total geek when it comes to organization charts. Org charts are really cool because, if they are drawn well, you can quickly get a sense of what individual roles are and also how a team works well together. But if you look at a typical org chart, it only includes the boxes and lines that represent people. None of the technology team members are there. They're all invisible. So for each of the organizations that I met with for my experiment, I had to draw a new type of org chart, one that also included the technology. And when I did this, people I spoke to could actually visualize their technologies as coworkers, and they could ask things like: "Is this software reporting to the right person?" "Does this man and machine team work well together?" "Is that technology actually the team member that everybody's awkwardly avoiding?" So I will walk you through an example of a small catering company to bring this experiment to life. This is the top layer of people who work at Bovingdons Catering Company. There's a sales director, who manages all of the customer interactions, and there's an operations director, who manages all the internal activities. And here's the people who report to the sales and operations directors. And finally, here's the view where we've overlaid the software and the hardware that's used by the Bovingdons staff. Using this amazing org chart, we can now explore how the human team members and the technology team members are interacting. So the first thing that I'm going to look for is where there's a human and machine relationship that's extra critical. Usually, it's somebody using a technology on a day-to-day basis to do his or her job. At Bovingdons, the finance director with the accounting platform would be one. Next, I would check on the status of their collaboration. Are they working well together? Getting along? In this case, it turned out to be a tenuous relationship. So, what to do? Well, if the accounting platform were actually a person, the finance director would feel responsible for managing it and taking care of it. Well, in the same way, my first suggestion was to think about a team-building activity, maybe getting together on a specialist course. My second suggestion was to think about scheduling regular performance reviews for the accounting platform, where the finance director would literally give feedback to the company who sold it. Now, there will be several of these really important human and machine teams in every organization. So if you're in one, it's worth taking the time to think about ways to make those relationships truly collaborative. Next, I'll look on the chart for any human role which might be overloaded by technology, let's say, interacting with four or more types of applications. At Bovingdons, the operations director was interacting with five technologies. Now, he told me that he'd always felt overwhelmed by his job, but it wasn't until our conversation that he thought it might be because of the technologies he was overseeing. And we were talking that, if the operations director had actually had a lot of people reporting to him, he probably would have done something about it, because it was stretching him too thin, like, move some of them to report to somebody else. So in the same way, we talked about moving some of the technologies to report to someone else, like the food inventory to go to the chef. The last thing that I'll look for is any technology that seems to be on the org chart without a real home. Sometimes they're floating around without an owner. Sometimes they're reporting to so many different areas that you can't tell who's actually using it. Now, at Bovingdons, nobody appeared to be looking after the marketing software. It was like someone had hired it and then didn't give it a desk or any instructions on what to do. So clearly, it needed a job description, maybe someone to manage it. But in other companies, you might find that a technology has been sidelined for a reason, like it's time for it to leave or be retired. Now, retiring applications is something that all companies do. But maybe taking the mindset that those applications are actually coworkers could help them to decide when and how to retire those applications in the way that would be least destructive to the rest of the team. I did this experiment with 15 different professionals, and each time it sparked an idea. Sometimes, a bit more. You remember that hotshot employee I was telling you about, that everybody was ignoring? That was a real story told to me by Christopher, a very energetic human resources manager at a big consumer goods company. Technology was a new HR platform, and it had been installed for 14 months at great expense, but nobody was using it. So we were talking about how, if this had really been such a hotshot employee with amazing credentials, you would go out of your way to get to know it, maybe invite them for coffee, get to know their background. So in the spirit of experimentation, Christopher set up one-hour appointments, coffee optional, for his team members to have no agenda but to get to know their HR system. Some people, they clicked around menu item by menu item. Other people, they searched online for things that they weren't clear about. A couple of them got together, gossiped about the new software in town. And a few weeks later, Christopher called to tell me that people were using the system in new ways, and he thought it was going to save them weeks of effort in the future. And they also reported feeling less intimidated by the software. I found that pretty amazing, that taking this mindset helped Christopher's team and others that I spoke to these past few months actually feel happier about working with technology. And I later found out this is backed up by research. Studies have shown that people who work in organizations that encourage them to talk about and learn about the technologies in the workplace have 20 percent lower stress levels than those in organizations that don't. I also found it really cool that when I started to do this experiment, I started with what was happening between a person and an individual technology, but then it ultimately led to ideas about how to manage tech across entire companies. Like, when I did this for my own job and extended it, I thought about how our data analysis tools should go on the equivalent of a job rotation program, where different parts of the company could get to know it. And I also thought about suggesting to our recruiting team that some of the technologies we work with every day should come with us on our big recruiting events. If you were a university student, how cool would it be to not only get to know the people you might be working with, but also the technologies? Now, all of this begs the question: What have we been missing by keeping the technologies that we work with day to day invisible, and what, beyond those billions of dollars in value, might we be leaving on the table? The good news is, you don't need to be an org chart geek like me to take this experiment forward. It will take a matter of minutes for most people to draw out a structure of who they work with, a little bit longer to add in the technologies to get a view of the entire team, and then you can have fun asking questions like, "Which are the technologies that I'll be taking out for coffee?" Now, I didn't do this experiment for kicks or for the coffee. I did it because the critical skill in the 21st-century workplace is going to be to collaborate with the technologies that are becoming such a big and costly part of our daily working lives. And from what I was seeing, we are struggling to cope with that. So it might sound counterintuitive, but by embracing the idea that these machines are actually valuable colleagues, we as people will perform better and be happier. So let's all share a bit of humanity towards the technologies and the softwares and the algorithms and the robots who we work with, because we will all be the better for it. Thank you. (Applause) |
How to find the person who can help you get ahead at work | {0: 'At Morgan Stanley, Carla Harris is responsible for improving the access to capital for female and multicultural founders, as well as increasing client connectivity to enhance revenue generation.'} | TEDWomen 2018 | It was the spring of 1988 when I had the aha moment. I was at my first roundtable, and for those of you who don't know, the roundtable was a very commonly used phrase on Wall Street to describe the year-end evaluative process for analysts, associates, vice presidents, all the way up to managing directors. That was the process where they were discussed behind closed doors around a table, i.e. the round table, and everyone was put into a category — the top bucket, the middle bucket, the lower bucket — and then that was translated into a bonus range that would be assigned to each professional. This was my first time there, and as I observed, I saw that there was one person that was responsible for recording the outcome of a conversation. There were other people in the room that had the responsibility of presenting the cases of all the candidates. And there were other invited guests who were supposed to comment as a candidate's position was presented. It was interesting to me that those other people were folks who were more senior than the folks that were being discussed and they theoretically had had some interaction with those candidates. Now, I was really excited to be at this roundtable for the first time, because I knew that my own process would go through this same way, and that my bonus would be decided in the same way, so I wanted to know how it worked, but more importantly, I wanted to understand how this concept of a meritocracy that every company that I talked to walking out of business school was selling. Every time I talked to a company, they would say, "Our culture, our process, is a meritocracy. The way you get ahead in this organization is that you're smart, you put your head down and you work really hard, and you'll go right to the top. So here was my opportunity to see exactly how that worked. So as the process began, I heard the recorder call the first person's name. "Joe Smith." The person responsible for presenting Joe's case did just that. Three quarters of the way through, someone interrupted and said, "This is a great candidate, outstanding, has great analytical and quantitative skills. This is a superstar." The recorder then said, "Sounds like Joe should go in the top bucket." Second person, Mary Smith. Halfway through that presentation, someone said, "Solid candidate. Nothing really special, but a good pair of hands." The recorder said, "Sounds like Mary should go in the middle bucket." And then someone said, "Arnold Smith." Before the person could present Arnold's case, somebody said, "Disaster. Disaster. This kid doesn't have a clue. Can't do a model." And before the case was presented, the recorder said, "Sounds like Arnold should go in the bottom bucket." It was at that moment that I clutched my pearls — (Laughter) and said, "Who is going to speak for me?" Who is going to speak for me? It was that moment that I realized that this idea of a meritocracy that every organizations sells is really just a myth. You cannot have a 100 percent meritocratic environment when there is a human element involved in the evaluative equation, because by definition, that makes it subjective. I knew at that moment that somebody would have to be behind closed doors arguing on my behalf, presenting content in such a way that other decision makers around that table would answer in my best favor. That was a really interesting lesson, and then I said to myself, "Well, who is that person? What do you call this person?" And as I thought about the popular business terms at the time, I said, wow, this person can't be a mentor, because a mentor's job is to give you tailored advice, tailored specifically to you and to your career aspirations. They're the ones who give you the good, the bad and the ugly in a no-holds-barred way. OK. Person can't be a champion or an advocate, because you don't necessarily have to spend any currency to be someone's champion. You don't necessarily get invited to the room behind closed doors if you're an advocate. It was almost two years later when I realized what this person should be called. I was speaking at the University of Michigan to the MBA candidates, talking about the lessons that I had learned after my three short years on Wall Street, and then it came to me. I said, "Oh, this person that is carrying your interest, or as I like to say, carrying your paper into the room, this person who is spending their valuable political and social capital on you, this person who is going to pound the table on your behalf, this is a sponsor. This is a sponsor." And then I said to myself, "Well, how do you get a sponsor? And frankly, why do you need one?" Well, you need a sponsor, frankly, because as you can see, there's not one evaluative process that I can think of, whether it's in academia, health care, financial services, not one that does not have a human element. So that means it has that measure of subjectivity. There is a measure of subjectivity in who is presenting your case. There is a measure of subjectivity in what they say and how they interpret any objective data that you might have. There is a measure of subjectivity in how they say what they're going to say to influence the outcome. So therefore, you need to make sure that that person who is speaking, that sponsor, has your best interests at heart and has the power to get it, whatever it is for you, to get it done behind closed doors. Now, I'm asked all the time, "How do you get one?" Well, frankly, nirvana is when someone sees you in an environment and decides, "I'm going to make it happen for you. I'm going to make sure that you are successful." But for many of us in this room, we know it doesn't really happen that way. So let me introduce this concept of currency and talk to you about how it impacts your ability to get a sponsor. There are two types of currency in any environment: performance currency and relationship currency. And performance currency is the currency that is generated by your delivering that which was asked of you and a little bit extra. Every time you deliver upon an assignment above people's expectations, you generate performance currency. It works exactly like the stock market. Any time a company says to the street that they will deliver 25 cents a share and that company delivers 40 cents a share, that stock goes up, and so will yours. Performance currency is valuable for three reasons. Number one, it will get you noticed. It will create a reputation for you. Number two, it will also get you paid and promoted very early on in your career and very early on in any environment. And number three, it may attract a sponsor. Why? Because strong performance currency raises your level of visibility in the environment, as I said earlier, such that a sponsor may be attracted to you. Why? Because everybody loves a star. But if you find yourself in a situation where you don't have a sponsor, here's the good news. Remember that you can exercise your power and ask for one. But here's where the other currency is now most important. That is the relationship currency, and relationship currency is the currency that is generated by the investments that you make in the people in your environment, the investments that you make in the people in your environment. You cannot ask someone to use their hard-earned personal influential currency on your behalf if you've never had any interaction with them. It is not going to happen. So it is important that you invest the time to connect, to engage and to get to know the people that are in your environment, and more importantly to give them the opportunity to know you. Because once they know you, there's a higher probability that when you approach them to ask them to be your sponsor, they will in fact answer in the affirmative. Now, if you're with me and you agree that you have to have a sponsor, let's talk about how you identify a sponsor. Well, if you're looking for a sponsor, they need to have three primary characteristics. Number one, they need to have a seat at the decision-making table, they need to have exposure to your work in order to have credibility behind closed doors, and they need to have some juice, or let me say it differently, they'd better have some power. It's really important that they have those three things. And then once you have identified the person, how do you ask for one? The script goes like this. "Jim, I'm really interested in getting promoted this year. I've had an amazing year and I cannot show this organization anything else to prove my worthiness or my readiness for this promotion, but I am aware that somebody has to be behind closed doors arguing on my behalf and pounding the table. You know me, you know my work and you are aware of the client feedback, and I hope that you will feel comfortable arguing on my behalf." If Jim knows you and you have any kind of a relationship, there's a very high probability that he will answer yes, and if he says yes, he will endeavor to get it done for you. But there's also a shot that Jim might say no, and if he says no, in my opinion, there's only three reasons that he would tell you no. The first is he doesn't think that he has enough exposure to your work to have real credibility behind closed doors to be impactful and effective on your behalf. The second reason he may tell you no is that you think he has the juice to get it done, but he knows that he does not have the power to do it and he is not going to admit that in that conversation with you. (Laughter) And the third reason that he would tell you no, he doesn't like you. He doesn't like you. (Laughter) And that's something that could happen. But even that will be valuable information for you that will help to inform your next conversation with a sponsor that might make it a little bit more impactful. I cannot tell you how important it is to have a sponsor. It is the critical relationship in your career. A mentor, frankly, is a nice to have, but you can survive a long time in your career without a mentor, but you are not going to ascend in any organization without a sponsor. It is so critical that you should ask yourself regularly, "Who's carrying my paper into the room? Who is carrying my paper into the room?" And if you can't answer who is carrying your paper into the room, then I will tell you to divert some of your hardworking energies into investing in a sponsor relationship, because it will be critical to your success. And as I close, let me give a word to the would-be sponsors that are in the room. If you have been invited into the room, know that you have a seat at that table, and if you have a seat at the table, you have a responsibility to speak. Don't waste your power worrying about what people are going to say and whether or not they think you might be supporting someone just because they look like you. If somebody is worthy of your currency, spend it. One thing I have learned after several decades on Wall Street is the way to grow your power is to give it away, and your voice is at the heart. (Applause) And your voice is at the heart of your power. Use it. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How to be "Team Human" in the digital future | {0: 'Douglas Rushkoff promotes human autonomy in the digital age.'} | TED Salon Samsung | I got invited to an exclusive resort to deliver a talk about the digital future to what I assumed would be a couple of hundred tech executives. And I was there in the green room, waiting to go on, and instead of bringing me to the stage, they brought five men into the green room who sat around this little table with me. They were tech billionaires. And they started peppering me with these really binary questions, like: Bitcoin or Etherium? Virtual reality or augmented reality? I don't know if they were taking bets or what. And as they got more comfortable with me, they edged towards their real question of concern. Alaska or New Zealand? That's right. These tech billionaires were asking a media theorist for advice on where to put their doomsday bunkers. We spent the rest of the hour on the single question: "How do I maintain control of my security staff after the event?" By "the event" they mean the thermonuclear war or climate catastrophe or social unrest that ends the world as we know it, and more importantly, makes their money obsolete. And I couldn't help but think: these are the wealthiest, most powerful men in the world, yet they see themselves as utterly powerless to influence the future. The best they can do is hang on for the inevitable catastrophe and then use their technology and money to get away from the rest of us. And these are the winners of the digital economy. (Laughter) The digital renaissance was about the unbridled potential of the collective human imagination. It spanned everything from chaos math and quantum physics to fantasy role-playing and the Gaia hypothesis, right? We believed that human beings connected could create any future we could imagine. And then came the dot com boom. And the digital future became stock futures. And we used all that energy of the digital age to pump steroids into the already dying NASDAQ stock exchange. The tech magazines told us a tsunami was coming. And only the investors who hired the best scenario-planners and futurists would be able to survive the wave. And so the future changed from this thing we create together in the present to something we bet on in some kind of a zero-sum winner-takes-all competition. And when things get that competitive about the future, humans are no longer valued for our creativity. No, now we're just valued for our data. Because they can use the data to make predictions. Creativity, if anything, that creates noise. That makes it harder to predict. So we ended up with a digital landscape that really repressed creativity, repressed novelty, it repressed what makes us most human. We ended up with social media. Does social media really connect people in new, interesting ways? No, social media is about using our data to predict our future behavior. Or when necessary, to influence our future behavior so that we act more in accordance with our statistical profiles. The digital economy — does it like people? No, if you have a business plan, what are you supposed to do? Get rid of all the people. Human beings, they want health care, they want money, they want meaning. You can't scale with people. (Laughter) Even our digital apps — they don't help us form any rapport or solidarity. I mean, where's the button on the ride hailing app for the drivers to talk to one another about their working conditions or to unionize? Even our videoconferencing tools, they don't allow us to establish real rapport. However good the resolution of the video, you still can't see if somebody's irises are opening to really take you in. All of the things that we've done to establish rapport that we've developed over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, they don't work, you can't see if someone's breath is syncing up with yours. So the mirror neurons never fire, the oxytocin never goes through your body, you never have that experience of bonding with the other human being. And instead, you're left like, "Well, they agreed with me, but did they really, did they really get me?" And we don't blame the technology for that lack of fidelity. We blame the other person. You know, even the technologies and the digital initiatives that we have to promote humans, are intensely anti-human at the core. Think about the blockchain. The blockchain is here to help us have a great humanized economy? No. The blockchain does not engender trust between users, the blockchain simply substitutes for trust in a new, even less transparent way. Or the code movement. I mean, education is great, we love education, and it's a wonderful idea that we want kids to be able to get jobs in the digital future, so we'll teach them code now. But since when is education about getting jobs? Education wasn't about getting jobs. Education was compensation for a job well done. The idea of public education was for coal miners, who would work in the coal mines all day, then they'd come home and they should have the dignity to be able to read a novel and understand it. Or the intelligence to be able to participate in democracy. When we make it an extension of the job, what are we really doing? We're just letting corporations really externalize the cost of training their workers. And the worst of all really is the humane technology movement. I mean, I love these guys, the former guys who used to take the algorithms from Las Vegas slot machines and put them in our social media feed so that we get addicted. Now they've seen the error of their ways and they want to make technology more humane. But when I hear the expression "humane technology," I think about cage-free chickens or something. We're going to be as humane as possible to them, until we take them to the slaughter. So now they're going to let these technologies be as humane as possible, as long as they extract enough data and extract enough money from us to please their shareholders. Meanwhile, the shareholders, for their part, they're just thinking, "I need to earn enough money now, so I can insulate myself from the world I'm creating by earning money in this way." (Laughter) No matter how many VR goggles they slap on their faces and whatever fantasy world they go into, they can't externalize the slavery and pollution that was caused through the manufacture of the very device. It reminds me of Thomas Jefferson's dumbwaiter. Now, we like to think that he made the dumbwaiter in order to spare his slaves all that labor of carrying the food up to the dining room for the people to eat. That's not what it was for, it wasn't for the slaves, it was for Thomas Jefferson and his dinner guests, so they didn't have to see the slave bringing the food up. The food just arrived magically, like it was coming out of a "Start Trek" replicator. It's part of an ethos that says, human beings are the problem and technology is the solution. We can't think that way anymore. We have to stop using technology to optimize human beings for the market and start optimizing technology for the human future. But that's a really hard argument to make these days, because humans are not popular beings. I talked about this in front of an environmentalist just the other day, and she said, "Why are you defending humans? Humans destroyed the planet. They deserve to go extinct." (Laughter) Even our popular media hates humans. Watch television, all the sci-fi shows are about how robots are better and nicer than people. Even zombie shows — what is every zombie show about? Some person, looking at the horizon at some zombie going by, and they zoom in on the person and you see the person's face, and you know what they're thinking: "What's really the difference between that zombie and me? He walks, I walk. He eats, I eat. He kills, I kill." But he's a zombie. At least you're aware of it. If we are actually having trouble distinguishing ourselves from zombies, we have a pretty big problem going on. (Laughter) And don't even get me started on the transhumanists. I was on a panel with a transhumanist, and he's going on about the singularity. "Oh, the day is going to come really soon when computers are smarter than people. And the only option for people at that point is to pass the evolutionary torch to our successor and fade into the background. Maybe at best, upload your consciousness to a silicon chip. And accept your extinction." (Laughter) And I said, "No, human beings are special. We can embrace ambiguity, we understand paradox, we're conscious, we're weird, we're quirky. There should be a place for humans in the digital future." And he said, "Oh, Rushkoff, you're just saying that because you're a human." (Laughter) As if it's hubris. OK, I'm on "Team Human." That was the original insight of the digital age. That being human is a team sport, evolution's a collaborative act. Even the trees in the forest, they're not all in competition with each other, they're connected with the vast network of roots and mushrooms that let them communicate with one another and pass nutrients back and forth. If human beings are the most evolved species, it's because we have the most evolved ways of collaborating and communicating. We have language. We have technology. It's funny, I used to be the guy who talked about the digital future for people who hadn't yet experienced anything digital. And now I feel like I'm the last guy who remembers what life was like before digital technology. It's not a matter of rejecting the digital or rejecting the technological. It's a matter of retrieving the values that we're in danger of leaving behind and then embedding them in the digital infrastructure for the future. And that's not rocket science. It's as simple as making a social network that instead of teaching us to see people as adversaries, it teaches us to see our adversaries as people. It means creating an economy that doesn't favor a platform monopoly that wants to extract all the value out of people and places, but one that promotes the circulation of value through a community and allows us to establish platform cooperatives that distribute ownership as wide as possible. It means building platforms that don't repress our creativity and novelty in the name of prediction but actually promote creativity and novelty, so that we can come up with some of the solutions to actually get ourselves out of the mess that we're in. No, instead of trying to earn enough money to insulate ourselves from the world we're creating, why don't we spend that time and energy making the world a place that we don't feel the need to escape from. There is no escape, there is only one thing going on here. Please, don't leave. Join us. We may not be perfect, but whatever happens, at least you won't be alone. Join "Team Human." Find the others. Together, let's make the future that we always wanted. Oh, and those tech billionaires who wanted to know how to maintain control of their security force after the apocalypse, you know what I told them? "Start treating those people with love and respect right now. Maybe you won't have an apocalypse to worry about." Thank you. (Applause) |
Diagnosing a zombie: Brain and body (Part one) | {0: 'Bradley Voytek is a new Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science and Neuroscience at UC San Diego. In his other lives he’s a data scientist for Uber and is the world’s expert on zombie brains (seriously!). With his zombie co-conspirator, CMU professor Timothy Verstynen, he has published the book Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep: A Neuroscientific View of the Zombie Brain. In his real research, he studies the role that neuronal oscillations play in coordinating communication within the brain.'} | TED-Ed | (Zombie sounds) Doctor 1: So, how did it get to be this way? Doctor 2: Well, it's my professional opinion that the large gaping bite mark on its shoulder might have something to do with it. D1: Thanks. I mean, what causes its behavioral abnormalities? D2: Well, we know all behaviors are rooted in the brain, so I'd expect that something's gone terribly wrong probably in there. D1: Thanks again, Doctor Obvious. Let me be more specific. What changes in the brain would have to occur in order to cause this kind of behavior? D2: Hmm. Well, let's see. The first thing I notice is how it moves. Stiff legged, with long, lumbering steps, very slow and awkward. Almost like what you'd see in Parkinson's disease. Maybe something's wrong with his basal ganglia? Those are a collection of deep brain regions that regulate movement, through a neurochemical called dopamine. Although most people think of dopamine as the "happy" chemical of the brain, the dopamine-containing neurons in the basal ganglia die off in Parkinson's disease, that's what causes it. Makes it more and more difficult to initiate actions. D1: What? Look again at how it moves. Stiff legs, long stance, These aren't Parkinsonian movements, Parkinson's patients take short, shuffling steps, and the posture's all wrong. This looks to me like what happens when the cerebellum is damaged. The cerebellum's a little cauliflower-shaped area in the back of your head, but don't let its size fool you. That little guy contains almost half of the neurons in the entire brain. Patients who suffer degeneration from this region, something called spino-cerebellar ataxia, show a lack of coordination that results in stiff legs, wide stance, and a lumbering walk. My money's on the cerebellum. D2: Touché. OK. So we've nailed its motor problems. Now what about that whole groaning, lack of talking thing? D1: Hmm. You know, it sounds kind of like expressive aphasia, or Broca's aphasia, which makes producing words difficult. This is caused by damage to the inferior frontal gyrus, or possibly the anterior insula, both regions behind your temple on the left side of your head. D2: I think you're only half right. Zombies definitely can't communicate, that's for sure. But they don't seem to do a good job of understanding things either. Watch this. Hey, Walker! Your father smelt of elderberries! (Laughs) See? No reaction. Either it's not a Monty Python fan, or it can't understand me. I'd say this is like spot-on fluent Wernicke's aphasia, damage to an area at the junction of two of the brain's lobes, temporal and parietal, typically on the left side of the brain, is the culprit. This area is physically connected to Broca's area, that you mentioned, by a massive bundle of neurofibers called the arcuate fasciculus. I hypothesize that this massive bundle of connections is completely wiped out in a zombie. It would be like taking out the superhighway between two cities. One city that manufactures a product, and the other that ships it out to the rest of the world. Without that highway, the product distribution just shuts down. D1: So, basically it's a moot point to reason with a zombie, since they can't understand you, let alone talk back. D2: (Laughs) I mean, you could try, man, but I'm going to stay on this side of the glass. |
A brie(f) history of cheese | null | TED-Ed | Before empires and royalty, before pottery and writing, before metal tools and weapons – there was cheese. As early as 8000 BCE, the earliest Neolithic farmers living in the Fertile Crescent began a legacy of cheesemaking almost as old as civilization itself. The rise of agriculture led to domesticated sheep and goats, which ancient farmers harvested for milk. But when left in warm conditions for several hours, that fresh milk began to sour. Its lactic acids caused proteins to coagulate, binding into soft clumps. Upon discovering this strange transformation, the farmers drained the remaining liquid – later named whey – and found the yellowish globs could be eaten fresh as a soft, spreadable meal. These clumps, or curds, became the building blocks of cheese, which would eventually be aged, pressed, ripened, and whizzed into a diverse cornucopia of dairy delights. The discovery of cheese gave Neolithic people an enormous survival advantage. Milk was rich with essential proteins, fats, and minerals. But it also contained high quantities of lactose – a sugar which is difficult to process for many ancient and modern stomachs. Cheese, however, could provide all of milk’s advantages with much less lactose. And since it could be preserved and stockpiled, these essential nutrients could be eaten throughout scarce famines and long winters. Some 7th millennium BCE pottery fragments found in Turkey still contain telltale residues of the cheese and butter they held. By the end of the Bronze Age, cheese was a standard commodity in maritime trade throughout the eastern Mediterranean. In the densely populated city-states of Mesopotamia, cheese became a staple of culinary and religious life. Some of the earliest known writing includes administrative records of cheese quotas, listing a variety of cheeses for different rituals and populations across Mesopotamia. Records from nearby civilizations in Turkey also reference rennet. This animal byproduct, produced in the stomachs of certain mammals, can accelerate and control coagulation. Eventually this sophisticated cheesemaking tool spread around the globe, giving way to a wide variety of new, harder cheeses. And though some conservative food cultures rejected the dairy delicacy, many more embraced cheese, and quickly added their own local flavors. Nomadic Mongolians used yaks’ milk to create hard, sundried wedges of Byaslag. Egyptians enjoyed goats’ milk cottage cheese, straining the whey with reed mats. In South Asia, milk was coagulated with a variety of food acids, such as lemon juice, vinegar, or yogurt and then hung to dry into loafs of paneer. This soft mild cheese could be added to curries and sauces, or simply fried as a quick vegetarian dish. The Greeks produced bricks of salty brined feta cheese, alongside a harder variety similar to today’s pecorino romano. This grating cheese was produced in Sicily and used in dishes all across the Mediterranean. Under Roman rule, “dry cheese” or “caseus aridus,” became an essential ration for the nearly 500,000 soldiers guarding the vast borders of the Roman Empire. And when the Western Roman Empire collapsed, cheesemaking continued to evolve in the manors that dotted the medieval European countryside. In the hundreds of Benedictine monasteries scattered across Europe, medieval monks experimented endlessly with different types of milk, cheesemaking practices, and aging processes that led to many of today’s popular cheeses. Parmesan, Roquefort, Munster and several Swiss types were all refined and perfected by these cheesemaking clergymen. In the Alps, Swiss cheesemaking was particularly successful – producing a myriad of cow’s milk cheeses. By the end of the 14th century, Alpine cheese from the Gruyere region of Switzerland had become so profitable that a neighboring state invaded the Gruyere highlands to take control of the growing cheese trade. Cheese remained popular through the Renaissance, and the Industrial Revolution took production out of the monastery and into machinery. Today, the world produces roughly 22 billion kilograms of cheese a year, shipped and consumed around the globe. But 10,000 years after its invention, local farms are still following in the footsteps of their Neolithic ancestors, hand crafting one of humanity’s oldest and favorite foods. |
Music with a message should be accessible | {0: 'Madame Gandhi’s mission is to elevate and celebrate the female voice.', 1: 'Amber Galloway-Gallego is a world-renowned ASL interpreter specializing in music. '} | TED@BCG Toronto | Amber Galloway-Gallego: OK, hi. I'm a sign-language interpreter that specializes in music interpreting. And you're probably wondering why Deaf people would attend concerts, but actually, music is so much more than sound simply traveling through the ear. See, Deaf people experience music, just in a different way. For example, my friend Lisa, she cuts her hair a certain length, so she feels the vibrations of sound in the music. And music has psychological effects on us. It invokes feelings of nostalgia, happiness, sadness, falling in love. It makes you have a feeling of connectedness, and unfortunately, Deaf and hard-of-hearing people are excluded from these events, because obtaining a sign-language interpreter is so difficult and so overwhelming that they simply don't buy the tickets or they just give up, and this is not OK. We have to make everything accessible. So, myself, I am a sign-language interpreter, so what I have to do is I have to take music and bring it to life. In doing that, I become a bridge between the hearing world and the Deaf world, making sure that I'm representing music and the artistry of what music represents. Now, this is a lot of work, OK? For a regular set that might be 12 songs, myself and a team, we have to study over 30 songs or more for one set and hope and pray we have the right setlist. But you know what? You know what the reward is? Looking down in the audience and seeing Deaf and hard-of-hearing members, all of those people dancing and jamming out and feeling included in that music experience. For myself, I'm a part of this cultural and linguistic community, and we all communicate in different ways. Some of us sign and voice, some of us just sign, but no one way is superior to the other. But you know what? Those with hearing loss face daily battles to communication access, and those barriers are put up daily for them. And music shouldn't be one of them. So along with Madame Gandhi and myself today, let's break down those barriers. (Applause and cheers) (Music: "Top Knot Turn Up") (Percussion) Madame Gandhi: This is a song about getting the work done. Hair up in a bun that's the most fun. Hearing myself think when I go for a run or maybe I'm practicing the drums or maybe I'm writing in the sun, the takeaway point is I'm talking to no one. Protecting my vibes that are wholesome, trying my best to solve actual problems. If you want to hang with me then you have to roll up your sleeves and work with me. This ain't no time to come flirt with me; pipelines and drills are destroying the earth, you see. I cannot stand all the constant misogyny. Tie my hair back so there ain't nothing stopping me. Top knot turn up. It's a top knot turn up. Top knot turn up, turn up, turn up — about getting the work done. Top knot turn up, turn up, turn up. It's a top knot turn up. Top knot turn up, eh. (Percussion) Tie up and tie up your hair and throw back those curls. So tie up and tie up and tie up your hair and throw back those curls, uh ... Throw back those curls, throw back and throw back and throw back those curls, uh ... (Beatboxing) (Percussion and beatboxing) I turned off my phone's notifications, so I have more time. No bubbles to trouble my clear state of mind. One thing to know, I'm not here to please. Hair tied back, I do it properly. My time is not your property when I'm productive like my ovaries. Eh, give a grown girl room to breathe, basic rights and her liberty. Free from insecurity that the world's projecting onto me. Please do not trouble me when I am focused. The future is female, you already know this. I'm fighting against the corruption on SCOTUS, upping my top knot since when I first wrote this. Eh ... It's a top knot turn up. Top knot turn up, turn up, turn up — about getting the work done. Top knot turn up, turn up, turn up. It's a top knot turn up. Top knot turn up, ay. (Percussion) Tie up and tie up and tie up your hair, throw back those curls. Tie up and tie up your hair, throw back those curls, uh ... Throw back those curls, throw back and throw back and throw back those curls. (Beatboxing) Amber G. (Applause and cheers) Top knot turn up. (Music and applause) Madame Gandhi. (Music) (Applause and cheers) (Music ends) (Applause and cheers) Amber, it's such a pleasure to share this stage with you, and to make my music accessible to an audience who might be hard of hearing or Deaf and otherwise might not be able to be included in my music. And it really wasn't until this collaboration that I had thought of the fact that though I work so much in diversity and inclusion, that my music may not be reaching as many people as it could be. I grew up in New York City, playing the drums, listening to Nas, Lauryn Hill, Thievery Corporation, TV on the Radio, the Spice Girls — And for me, music was truth. Music was my perspective into somebody else's point of view, into storytelling, into understanding how the world works. And yet at the same time, I felt like there was such a disconnect between the way that I understood my own very multidimensional sense of my gender identity and the very two-dimensional way that women and femmes were often portrayed in the media. (Sighs) As I moved through my life, I went on to study mathematics and women's studies at Georgetown. I was the first-ever data analyst at Interscope Records. I toured the world playing the drums for M.I.A. And I did my MBA at Harvard, all with the intention of being able to make a difference in the music industry and move the needle on gender equality from the business side. But it was only until three years ago, when I ran the London Marathon bleeding freely on my cycle to combat the global menstrual stigma that women face every day all around the world, that I realized that I have a message, and that the most effective way that I can convey my message was through my music. And why music? Because music caters to the emotions. Music is joyful. Music pulls you in with the beat and the rhythm and the melodies. The music pulls you in via the community aspect of it. And music allows you to access somebody else's truth. In the music I listen to today, sometimes I'm like, wow, I love the rhythm so much, but the message is so misogynist, it's tough to work out to our run to or do whatever it is that I'm trying to do. I oftentimes say, "I'm not here trying to turn up to the sound of my own oppression." You feel me? (Laughter and cheers) So I'm here to build the alternative instead. In my work, I talk often about the notion that the future is female. That we can actually look to the femme archetype and derive alternative styles of leadership that might encourage, instead, collaboration, emotional intelligence and building a world that is linked and not ranked. And so for anyone watching or listening and experiencing this talk today, I encourage you to consider the blind spots in your work and what partnerships or collaborations you can do to be able to make your work have even greater of an impact. This next song is called "Bad Habits," and it's about being an even better version of yourself. (Percussion and beatboxing) (Singing) I had run out of time, I had done lost my mind, I had run out of time, I had done lost my mind. I didn't know why. I didn't know. I been so pressed that I don't even know what's bothering me. All my bad habits have go to, got to go entirely. It's my year to be free from what's bothering me. It's this society that's killing me. All my bad habits have got to, go to go. All my bad habits have got to, got to go. All my bad habits have got to, got to go. Yeah. All my bad habits have got to, got to go. Turn with me. (Beatboxing) Ready? Clap with me. (Audience claps) Now listen. (Singing) Fela Kuti in the 1970s inspires me. All he wanted was his people to be free from the colony, like Mahatma Gandhi in the 1940s. I've been reading about women's history in the 1920s, thinking about how I could be so much better. Thinking about all the tears I've cried. Thinking about how we could be so much better. Thinking about all the tears we've cried. (Percussion) Yes. All my bad habits have got to, got to go. All my bad habits have got to, got to go. All my bad habits have got to, got to go. All my bad habits have got to, got to go. All my bad habits have got to, got to go. All my bad habits have got to, got to go. All my bad habits have got to, got to go. All my bad habits have got to, got to go. (Music ends) (Applause and cheers) Thank you. (Applause and cheers) |
The most important thing you can do to fight climate change: talk about it | {0: 'Katharine Hayhoe studies what climate change means to us in the places where we live.'} | TEDWomen 2018 | It was my first year as an atmospheric science professor at Texas Tech University. We had just moved to Lubbock, Texas, which had recently been named the second most conservative city in the entire United States. A colleague asked me to guest teach his undergraduate geology class. I said, "Sure." But when I showed up, the lecture hall was cavernous and dark. As I tracked the history of the carbon cycle through geologic time to present day, most of the students were slumped over, dozing or looking at their phones. I ended my talk with a hopeful request for any questions. And one hand shot up right away. I looked encouraging, he stood up, and in a loud voice, he said, "You're a democrat, aren't you?" (Laughter) "No," I said, "I'm Canadian." (Laughter) (Applause) That was my baptism by fire into what has now become a sad fact of life here in the United States and increasingly across Canada as well. The fact that the number one predictor of whether we agree that climate is changing, humans are responsible and the impacts are increasingly serious and even dangerous, has nothing to do with how much we know about science or even how smart we are but simply where we fall on the political spectrum. Does the thermometer give us a different answer depending on if we're liberal or conservative? Of course not. But if that thermometer tells us that the planet is warming, that humans are responsible and that to fix this thing, we have to wean ourselves off fossil fuels as soon as possible — well, some people would rather cut off their arm than give the government any further excuse to disrupt their comfortable lives and tell them what to do. But saying, "Yes, it's a real problem, but I don't want to fix it," that makes us the bad guy, and nobody wants to be the bad guy. So instead, we use arguments like, "It's just a natural cycle." "It's the sun." Or my favorite, "Those climate scientists are just in it for the money." (Laughter) I get that at least once a week. But these are just sciencey-sounding smoke screens, that are designed to hide the real reason for our objections, which have nothing to do with the science and everything to do with our ideology and our identity. So when we turn on the TV these days, it seems like pundit X is saying, "It's cold outside. Where is global warming now?" And politician Y is saying, "For every scientist who says this thing is real, I can find one who says it isn't." So it's no surprise that sometimes we feel like everybody is saying these myths. But when we look at the data — and the Yale Program on Climate [Change] Communication has done public opinion polling across the country now for a number of years — the data shows that actually 70 percent of people in the United States agree that the climate is changing. And 70 percent also agree that it will harm plants and animals, and it will harm future generations. But then when we dig down a bit deeper, the rubber starts to hit the road. Only about 60 percent of people think it will affect people in the United States. Only 40 percent of people think it will affect us personally. And then when you ask people, "Do you ever talk about this?" two-thirds of people in the entire United States say, "Never." And even worse, when you say, "Do you hear the media talk about this?" Over three-quarters of people say no. So it's a vicious cycle. The planet warms. Heat waves get stronger. Heavy precipitation gets more frequent. Hurricanes get more intense. Scientists release yet another doom-filled report. Politicians push back even more strongly, repeating the same sciencey-sounding myths. What can we do to break this vicious cycle? The number one thing we can do is the exact thing that we're not doing: talk about it. But you might say, "I'm not a scientist. How am I supposed to talk about radiative forcing or cloud parametrization in climate models?" We don't need to be talking about more science; we've been talking about the science for over 150 years. Did you know that it's been 150 years or more since the 1850s, when climate scientists first discovered that digging up and burning coal and gas and oil is producing heat-trapping gases that is wrapping an extra blanket around the planet? That's how long we've known. It's been 50 years since scientists first formally warned a US president of the dangers of a changing climate, and that president was Lyndon B. Johnson. And what's more, the social science has taught us that if people have built their identity on rejecting a certain set of facts, then arguing over those facts is a personal attack. It causes them to dig in deeper, and it digs a trench, rather than building a bridge. So if we aren't supposed to talk about more science, or if we don't need to talk about more science, then what should we be talking about? The most important thing to do is, instead of starting up with your head, with all the data and facts in our head, to start from the heart, to start by talking about why it matters to us, to begin with genuinely shared values. Are we both parents? Do we live in the same community? Do we enjoy the same outdoor activities: hiking, biking, fishing, even hunting? Do we care about the economy or national security? For me, one of the most foundational ways I found to connect with people is through my faith. As a Christian, I believe that God created this incredible planet that we live on and gave us responsibility over every living thing on it. And I furthermore believe that we are to care for and love the least fortunate among us, those who are already suffering the impacts of poverty, hunger, disease and more. If you don't know what the values are that someone has, have a conversation, get to know them, figure out what makes them tick. And then once we have, all we have to do is connect the dots between the values they already have and why they would care about a changing climate. I truly believe, after thousands of conversations that I've had over the past decade and more, that just about every single person in the world already has the values they need to care about a changing climate. They just haven't connected the dots. And that's what we can do through our conversation with them. The only reason why I care about a changing climate is because of who I already am. I'm a mother, so I care about the future of my child. I live in West Texas, where water is already scarce, and climate change is impacting the availability of that water. I'm a Christian, I care about a changing climate because it is, as the military calls it, a "threat multiplier." It takes those issues, like poverty and hunger and disease and lack of access to clean water and even political crises that lead to refugee crises — it takes all of these issues and it exacerbates them, it makes them worse. I'm not a Rotarian. But when I gave my first talk at a Rotary Club, I walked in and they had this giant banner that had the Four-Way Test on it. Is it the truth? Absolutely. Is it fair? Heck, no, that's why I care most about climate change, because it is absolutely unfair. Those who have contributed the least to the problem are bearing the brunt of the impacts. It went on to ask: Would it be beneficial to all, would it build goodwill? Well, to fix it certainly would. So I took my talk, and I reorganized it into the Four-Way Test, and then I gave it to this group of conservative businesspeople in West Texas. (Laughter) And I will never forget at the end, a local bank owner came up to me with the most bemused look on his face. And he said, "You know, I wasn't sure about this whole global warming thing, but it passed the Four-Way Test." (Laughter) (Applause) These values, though — they have to be genuine. I was giving a talk at a Christian college a number of years ago, and after my talk, a fellow scientist came up and he said, "I need some help. I've been really trying hard to get my foot in the door with our local churches, but I can't seem to get any traction. I want to talk to them about why climate change matters." So I said, "Well, the best thing to do is to start with the denomination that you're part of, because you share the most values with those people. What type of church do you attend?" "Oh, I don't attend any church, I'm an atheist," he said. (Laughter) I said, "Well, in that case, starting with a faith community is probably not the best idea. Let's talk about what you do enjoy doing, what you are involved in." And we were able to identify a community group that he was part of, that he could start with. The bottom line is, we don't have to be a liberal tree hugger to care about a changing climate. All we have to be is a human living on this planet. Because no matter where we live, climate change is already affecting us today. If we live along the coasts, in many places, we're already seeing "sunny-day flooding." If we live in western North America, we're seeing much greater area being burned by wildfires. If we live in many coastal locations, from the Gulf of Mexico to the South Pacific, we are seeing stronger hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones, powered by a warming ocean. If we live in Texas or if we live in Syria, we're seeing climate change supersize our droughts, making them more frequent and more severe. Wherever we live, we're already being affected by a changing climate. So you might say, "OK, that's good. We can talk impacts. We can scare the pants off people, because this thing is serious." And it is, believe me. I'm a scientist, I know. (Laughter) But fear is not what is going to motivate us for the long-term, sustained change that we need to fix this thing. Fear is designed to help us run away from the bear. Or just run faster than the person beside us. (Laughter) What we need to fix this thing is rational hope. Yes, we absolutely do need to recognize what's at stake. Of course we do. But we need a vision of a better future — a future with abundant energy, with a stable economy, with resources available to all, where our lives are not worse but better than they are today. There are solutions. And that's why the second important thing that we have to talk about is solutions — practical, viable, accessible, attractive solutions. Like what? Well, there's no silver bullet, as they say, but there's plenty of silver buckshot. (Laughter) There's simple solutions that save us money and reduce our carbon footprint at the same time. Yes, light bulbs. I love my plug-in car. I'd like some solar shingles. But imagine if every home came with a switch beside the front door, that when you left the house, you could turn off everything except your fridge. And maybe the DVR. (Laughter) Lifestyle choices: eating local, eating lower down the food chain and reducing food waste, which at the global scale, is one of the most important things that we can do to fix this problem. I'm a climate scientist, so the irony of traveling around to talk to people about a changing climate is not lost on me. (Laughter) The biggest part of my personal carbon footprint is my travel. And that's why I carefully collect my invitations. I usually don't go anywhere unless I have a critical mass of invitations in one place — anywhere from three to four to sometimes even as many as 10 or 15 talks in a given place — so I can minimize the impact of my carbon footprint as much as possible. And I've transitioned nearly three-quarters of the talks I give to video. Often, people will say, "Well, we've never done that before." But I say, "Well, let's give it a try, I think it could work." Most of all, though, we need to talk about what's already happening today around the world and what could happen in the future. Now, I live in Texas, and Texas has the highest carbon emissions of any state in the United States. You might say, "Well, what can you talk about in Texas?" The answer is: a lot. Did you know that in Texas there's over 25,000 jobs in the wind energy industry? We are almost up to 20 percent of our electricity from clean, renewable sources, most of that wind, though solar is growing quickly. The largest army base in the United States, Fort Hood, is, of course, in Texas. And they've been powered by wind and solar energy now, because it's saving taxpayers over 150 million dollars. Yes. (Applause) What about those who don't have the resources that we have? In sub-Saharan Africa, there are hundreds of millions of people who don't have access to any type of energy except kerosine, and it's very expensive. Around the entire world, the fastest-growing type of new energy today is solar. And they have plenty of solar. So social impact investors, nonprofits, even corporations are going in and using innovative new microfinancing schemes, like, pay-as-you-go solar, so that people can buy the power they need in increments, sometimes even on their cell phone. One company, Azuri, has distributed tens of thousands of units across 11 countries, from Rwanda to Uganda. They estimate that they've powered over 30 million hours of electricity and over 10 million hours of cell phone charging. What about the giant growing economies of China and India? Well, climate impacts might seem a little further down the road, but air quality impacts are right here today. And they know that clean energy is essential to powering their future. So China is investing hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy. They're flooding coal mines, and they're putting floating solar panels on the surface. They also have a panda-shaped solar farm. (Applause) (Laughter) Yes, they're still burning coal. But they've shut down all the coal plants around Beijing. And in India, they're looking to replace a quarter of a billion incandescent light bulbs with LEDs, which will save them seven billion dollars in energy costs. They're investing in green jobs, and they're looking to decarbonize their entire vehicle fleet. India may be the first country to industrialize without relying primarily on fossil fuels. The world is changing. But it just isn't changing fast enough. Too often, we picture this problem as a giant boulder sitting at the bottom of a hill, with only a few hands on it, trying to roll it up the hill. But in reality, that boulder is already at the top of the hill. And it's got hundreds of millions of hands, maybe even billions on it, pushing it down. It just isn't going fast enough. So how do we speed up that giant boulder so we can fix climate change in time? You guessed it. The number one way is by talking about it. The bottom line is this: climate change is affecting you and me right here, right now, in the places where we live. But by working together, we can fix it. Sure, it's a daunting problem. Nobody knows that more than us climate scientists. But we can't give in to despair. We have to go out and actively look for the hope that we need, that will inspire us to act. And that hope begins with a conversation today. Thank you. (Applause) |
The fascinating science of bubbles, from soap to champagne | {0: "As a formulation scientist, Li Wei Tan is constantly finding ways to understand why something works and why it doesn't."} | TED@Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany | Some years ago, I was visiting Paris and walking along the Seine River during a beautiful summer afternoon. I saw giant bubbles floating on the riverbank, like this one. The next moment, it popped and was gone. Making them were two street performers surrounded by a crowd. They visibly make a living by asking for donations and by selling pairs of sticks tied with two strings. When I was there, a man bought a pair of sticks for 10 euros, which surprised me. I am a scientist who is passionate about bubbles. I know the right trick to make the giant bubbles is the right soapy water mixture itself — not the sticks, which may be needed, but you can easily make them at home. Focusing on the sticks makes us not see that the real tool is the bubble itself. Bubbles might seem like something just children make while playing, but sometimes it can be really stunning. However, there are more fascinating science to bubbles, such as problem-solving tools. So I would like to share with you a few stories about the science of creating bubbles and the science of eliminating the microscopic ones. Since it's up on the screen, let's start with the soap bubble. It is made from very common substances: air, water, soap, in the right mixture. You can see soap bubbles constantly changing their colors. This is due to the interaction with light at various directions and the changes of their thickness. One of the common substances, water molecules, are formed by two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen — H2O. On most surfaces, water droplets tend to curve inwards, forming a semihemisphere shape. This is because the water droplet's surface is like an elastic sheet. The water molecule on the surface is constantly being pulled inwards by the molecule at the center. And the quality of the elasticity is what we call "surface tension." Now by adding soap, what happens is the soap molecule reduces the surface tension of water, making it more elastic and easier to form bubbles. You can think of a bubble as a mathematical problem-solver. You see it relentlessly trying to achieve geometry perfection. For instance, a sphere is the shape with the least surface area for a given volume. That's why a single bubble is always in the shape of a sphere. Let me show you. Check it out. This is a single bubble. When two bubbles touch each other, they can save materials by sharing a common wall. When more and more bubbles are added together, their geometry changes. These four bubbles are added together. They meet at one point at the center. When six bubbles are added together, a magical cube appears at the center. (Applause) That is surface tension at work, trying to find the most effective geometry arrangement. Now, let me give you another example. This is a very simple prop. This is made from two layers of plastic with four pins connected to each other. Imagine these four pins represent four cities that are equally apart, and we would like to make roads to connect these four cities. My question is: What is the shortest length to connect these four cities? Let's find out the answer by dipping it into the soapy water. Remember, the soap bubble forms will always try to minimize their surface area with a perfect geometry arrangement. So the solution might not be something you expected. The shortest length to connect these four cities is 2.73 times the distance between these two cities. (Applause) Now you've got the idea. The soap bubble forms will always try to minimize their surface area with a perfect geometry arrangement. Now, let us look at bubbles in another perspective. My daughter, Zoe, loves visiting zoos. Her favorite spot is Penguin Cove at Marwell Zoo in Southern England, where she could see penguins swim at speed under the water. One day, she noticed that the body of penguins leaves a trail of bubbles when they swim and asked why. Animals and birds like penguins that spend a lot of their time under the water have evolved an ingenious way of utilizing the capability of bubbles to reduce the density of water. Emperor penguins are thought to be able to dive a few hundred meters below the sea surface. They are thought to store the air under their feathers before they dive and then progressively release it as a cloud of bubbles. This reduces the density of water surrounding them, making it easier to swim through and speed up their swimming speed at least 40 percent. This feature has been noticed by the ship manufacturers. I am talking about the big ships here, the ones that are used to transport thousands of containers across the ocean. Recently, they developed a system called "air lubricating system," inspired by the penguins. In this system, they produce a lot of air bubbles and redistribute them across the whole of the ship, like an air carpet that reduces the water resistance when a ship is moving. This feature cuts off the energy consumption for the ship up to 15 percent. Bubbles can also be used for medicines. It can also play a role in medicines, for instance, as a method for noninvasive delivery systems for drugs and genes to a specific part of the body. Imagine a microbubble filled with a mixture of drugs and magnetic agents being injected into our bloodstream. The bubbles will move to the target areas. But how do they know where to go? Because we placed a magnet there. For instance, this part of my hand. When the microbubbles move to this part of my hand, we can pop it via ultrasound and release the drug exactly where it's needed. Now, I mentioned about the science of creating bubbles. But sometimes we also need to remove them. That's actually part of my job. My exact job title is "ink formulation scientist." But I don't work on the ink that you use for your writing pens. I'm working on some cool applications such as organic photovoltaics, OPVs, and organic light-emitting diodes, OLEDs. Part of my job is to figure out how and why we want to remove the bubbles from the ink that my company produces. During the formulation-mixing process, or preparation process, we mix active ingredients, solvents and additives in order to achieve the formulations with the properties we want when the ink is being used. But just like you would make drinks or bake cakes, it is unavoidable that some air bubbles will be trapped inside that ink. Here, we are talking about a different space from the bubbles I'd seen in Paris. The bubbles that are trapped inside those inks vary between a few millimeters, a few microns or even a few nanometers in size. And what we are concerned about is the oxygen and the moisture that is trapped inside. At this size scale, removing them is not easy. But it matters, for instance, for organic light-emitting diodes inks that we can use to produce display for your smartphone, for example. It's supposed to last for many years, but if the ink that we use has been absorbed with oxygen and moisture [which] are not being removed, then we can quickly see dark spots appear in the pixels. Now, one challenge we face in removing the microbubbles is that they are not very cooperative. They like to sit there, bathing in the ink without moving much. But how do we kick them out? One technology we use is to force the ink going through a thin, long and tiny tube with a porous wall, and we place the tubes inside the vacuum chamber, so that the bubbles can be squeezed out from the ink and be removed. Once we manage to remove the bubbles from the ink that we produce, it is time for celebration. Let's open a bubbling champagne. Ooh, this is going to be fun! (Laughter) Woooo! (Applause) You could see a lot of bubbles rushing out from the champagne bottle. These are the bubbles filled with carbon dioxide, a gas that's been produced during the fermentation process of the wine. Let me pour some out. I can't miss the chance. I guess it's enough. (Laughter) Here, I can see a lot of microbubbles moving from the bottom of the glass to the top of the champagne. Before it pops, it will jet tiny droplets of aroma molecules and intensify the flavor of champagne, making us enjoy much more the flavor of champagne. As a scientist who is passionate about bubbles, I love to see them, I love to play with them, and I love to study them. And also, I love to drink them. Thank you. (Applause) |
From slave to rebel gladiator: The life of Spartacus | null | TED-Ed | As the warrior slept, a snake coiled around his face. Instead of a threat, his wife saw an omen– a fearsome power that would lead her husband to either glory or doom. For now, however, he was only a slave – one of millions taken from the territories conquered by Rome to work the mines, till the fields, or fight for the crowd’s entertainment. A nomadic Thracian from what is now Bulgaria, he had served in the Roman Army but was imprisoned for desertion. His name was Spartacus. Spartacus had been brought to Capua by Batiatus, a lanista, or trainer of gladiators. And life at the ludus, or gladiator school, was unforgiving. New recruits were forced to swear an oath “to be burned, to be bound, to be beaten, and to be killed by the sword,” and to obey their master’s will without question. But even harsh discipline couldn’t break Spartacus’s spirit. In 73 BCE, Spartacus led 73 other slaves to seize knives and skewers from the kitchen and fight their way out, hijacking a wagon of gladiator equipment along the way. They were done fighting for others– now, they fought for their freedom. When the news reached Rome, the Senate was too busy with wars in Spain and the Pontic Empire to worry about some unruly slaves. Unconcerned, praetor Claudius Glaber took an army of three thousand men to the rebel’s refuge at Mount Vesuvius, and blocked off the only passage up the mountain. All that remained was to wait and starve them out– or so he thought. In the dead of night, the rebels lowered themselves down the cliffside on ropes made from vines, and flanked Glaber’s unguarded camp. Thus began the legend of Rome’s defiant gladiator. As news of the rebellion spread, its ranks swelled with escaped slaves, deserting soldiers, and hungry peasants. Many were untrained, but Spartacus’s clever tactics transformed them into an effective guerrilla force. A second Roman expedition led by praetor Varinius, was ambushed while the officer bathed. To elude the remaining Roman forces, the rebels used their enemy’s corpses as decoy guards, stealing Varinius’s own horse to aid their escape. Thanks to his inspiring victories and policy of distributing spoils equally, Spartacus continued attracting followers, and gained control of villages where new weapons could be forged. The Romans soon realized they were no longer facing ragtag fugitives, and in the spring of 72 BCE, the Senate retaliated with the full force of two legions. The rebels left victorious, but many lives were lost in the battle, including Spartacus’ lieutenant Crixus. To honor him, Spartacus held funeral games, forcing his Roman prisoners to play the role his fellow rebels had once endured. By the end of 72 BCE, Spartacus’ army was a massive force of roughly 120,000 members. But those numbers proved difficult to manage. With the path to the Alps clear, Spartacus wanted to march beyond Rome’s borders, where his followers would be free. But his vast army had grown brash. Many wanted to continue pillaging, while others dreamed of marching on Rome itself. In the end, the rebel army turned south– forgoing what would be their last chance at freedom. Meanwhile, Marcus Licinius Crassus had assumed control of the war. As Rome’s wealthiest citizen, he pursued Spartacus with eight new legions, eventually trapping the rebels in the toe of Italy. After failed attempts to build rafts, and a stinging betrayal by local pirates, the rebels made a desperate run to break through Crassus’s lines– but it was no use. Roman reinforcements were returning from the Pontic wars, and the rebels’ ranks and spirits were broken. In 71 BCE, they made their last stand. Spartacus nearly managed to reach Crassus before being cut down by centurions. His army was destroyed, and 6000 captives were crucified along the Appian Way– a haunting demonstration of Roman authority. Crassus won the war, but it is not his legacy which echoes through the centuries. Thousands of years later, the name of the slave who made the world’s mightiest empire tremble has become synonymous with freedom– and the courage to fight for it. |
Can animals be deceptive? | null | TED-Ed | A male firefly glows above a field on a summer’s night, emitting a series of enticing flashes. He hopes a nearby female will respond with her own lightshow and mate with him. Sadly for this male, it won’t turn out quite the way he plans. A female from a different species mimics his pulsing patterns: by tricking the male with her promise of partnership, she lures him in– and turns him into an easy meal. He’s been deceived. Behavioral biologists have identified three defining hallmarks of deception by non-human animals: it must mislead the receiver, the deceiver must benefit, and it can’t simply be an accident. In this case we know that the predatory firefly’s signal isn’t an accident because she flexibly adjusts her flash pattern to match males of different species. Based on this definition, where is animal deception seen in nature? Camouflage is a good starting point– and one of the most familiar examples of animal trickery. The leaf-tailed gecko and the octopus fool viewers by blending into the surfaces on which they rest. Other animals use mimicry to protect themselves. Harmless scarlet kingsnakes have evolved red, yellow, and black patterns resembling those of the venomous eastern coral snake to benefit from the protective warnings these markings convey. Even some plants use mimicry: there are orchids that look and smell like female wasps to attract hapless males, who end up pollinating the plant. Some of these animals benefit by having fixed characteristics that are evolutionary suited to their environments. But in other cases, the deceiver seems to anticipate the reactions of other animals and to adjust its behavior accordingly. Sensing a threat, the octopus will rapidly change its colors to match its surroundings. Dwarf chameleons color-match their environments more closely when they see a bird predator rather than a snake– birds, after all, have better color vision. One of the more fascinating examples of animal deception comes from the fork-tailed drongo. This bird sits atop tall trees in the Kalahari Desert, surveying the landscape for predators and calling when it senses a threat. That sends meerkats, pied babblers, and others dashing for cover. But the drongo will also sound a false alarm when those other species have captured prey. As the meerkats and babblers flee, the drongo swoops down to steal their catches. This tactic works about half the time– and it provides drongos with much of their food. There are fewer solid cases of animals using signals to trick members of their own species, but that happens too. Consider the mantis shrimp. Like other crustaceans, it molts as it grows, which leaves its soft body vulnerable to attack. But it’s still driven to protect its home against rivals. So it has become a masterful bluffer. Despite being fragile, a newly molted shrimp is actually more likely to threaten intruders, spreading the large limbs it usually uses to strike or stab its opponents. And that works – bluffers are more likely to keep their homes than non-bluffers. In its softened condition, a mantis shrimp couldn’t withstand a fight– which is why we can be confident that its behavior is a bluff. Biologists have even noticed that its bluffs are tactical: newly molted mantis shrimp are more likely to bluff against smaller rivals, who are especially likely to be driven away. It would seem that instead of just threatening reflexively, the mantis shrimp is swiftly gauging the situation and predicting others’ behavior, to get the best result. So we know that animals can deceive, but do they do so with intent? That’s a difficult question, and many scientists think we'll never be able to answer it. We can't observe animals’ internal thoughts. But we don’t need to know what an animal is thinking in order to detect deception. By watching behavior and its outcomes, we learn that animals manipulate predators, prey, and rivals, and that their capacity for deception can be surprisingly complex. |
How I unlearned dangerous lessons about masculinity | {0: 'Eldra Jackson III works daily to connect to his most authentic self -- and his calling is to support others in doing the same.'} | TEDWomen 2018 | Big boys don't cry. Suck it up. Shut up and rub some dirt on it. Stop crying before I give you something to cry about. These are just a few of the phrases that contribute to a disease in our society, and more specifically, in our men. It's a disease that has come to be known as "toxic masculinity." It's one I suffered a chronic case of, so much so that I spent 24 years of a life sentence in prison for kidnapping, robbery, and attempted murder. Yet I'm here to tell you today that there's a solution for this epidemic. I know for a fact the solution works, because I was a part of human trials. The solution is a mixture of elements. It begins with the willingness to look at your belief system and how out of alignment it is and how your actions negatively impact not just yourself, but the people around you. The next ingredient is the willingness to be vulnerable with people who would not just support you, but hold you accountable. But before I tell you about this, I need to let you know that in order to share this, I have to bare my soul in full. And as I stand here, with so many eyes fixed on me, I feel raw and naked. When this feeling is present, I'm confident that the next phase of healing is on the horizon, and that allows me to share my story in full. For all appearances' sake, I was born into the ideal family dynamic: mother, father, sister, brother. Bertha, Eldra Jr., Taydama and Eldra III. That's me. My father was a Vietnam veteran who earned a Purple Heart and made it home to find love, marry, and begin his own brood. So how did I wind up serving life in the California prison system? Keeping secrets, believing the mantra that big boys don't cry, not knowing how to display any emotion confidently other than anger, participating in athletics and learning that the greater the performance on the field, the less the need to worry about the rules off it. It's hard to pin down any one specific ingredient of the many symptoms that ailed me. Growing up as a young black male in Sacramento, California in the 1980s, there were two groups I identified as having respect: athletes and gangsters. I excelled in sports, that is until a friend and I chose to take his mom's car for a joyride and wreck it. With my parents having to split the cost of a totaled vehicle, I was relegated to a summer of household chores and no sports. No sports meant no respect. No respect equaled no power. Power was vital to feed my illness. It was at that point the decision to transition from athlete to gangster was made and done so easily. Early life experiences had set the stage for me to be well-suited to objectify others, act in a socially detached manner, and above all else, seek to be viewed as in a position of power. A sense of power (Sighs) equaled strength in my environment, but more importantly, it did so in my mind. My mind dictated my choices. My subsequent choices put me on the fast track to prison life. And even once in prison, I continued my history of running over the rights of others, even knowing that that was the place that I would die. Once again, I wound up in solitary confinement for stabbing another prisoner nearly 30 times. I'd gotten to a place where I didn't care how I lived or if I died. But then, things changed. One of the best things that happened in my life to that point was being sent to New Folsom Prison. Once there, I was approached to join a group called Inside Circle. Initially, I was hesitant to join a group referred to around the yard as "hug-a-thug." (Laughter) Initially, yeah, that was a little much, but eventually, I overcame my hesitancy. As it turned out, the circle was the vision of a man named Patrick Nolan, who was also serving life and who had grown sick and tired of being sick and tired of watching us kill one another over skin color, rag color, being from Northern or Southern California, or just plain breathing in the wrong direction on a windy day. Circle time is men sitting with men and cutting through the bullshit, challenging structural ways of thinking. I think the way that I think and I act the way that I act because I hadn't questioned that. Like, who said I should see a woman walking down the street, turn around and check out her backside? Where did that come from? If I don't question that, I'll just go along with the crowd. The locker-room talk. In circle, we sit and we question these things. Why do I think the way that I think? Why do I act the way that I act? Because when I get down to it, I'm not thinking, I'm not being an individual, I'm not taking responsibility for who I am and what it is I put into this world. It was in a circle session that my life took a turn. I remember being asked who I was, and I didn't have an answer, at least not one that felt honest in a room full of men who were seeking truth. It would have been easy to say, "I'm a Blood," or, "My name is Vegas," or any number of facades I had manufactured to hide behind. It was in that moment and in that venue that the jig was up. I realized that as sharp as I believed I was, I didn't even know who I was or why I acted the way that I acted. I couldn't stand in a room full of men who were seeking to serve and support and present an authentic me. It was in that moment that I graduated to a place within that was ready for transformation. For decades, I kept being the victim of molestation at the hands of a babysitter a secret. I submitted to this under the threat of my younger sister being harmed. I was seven, she was three. I believed it was my responsibility to keep her safe. It was in that instant that the seeds were sown for a long career of hurting others, be it physical, mental or emotional. I developed, in that instant, at seven years old, the belief that going forward in life, if a situation presented itself where someone was going to get hurt, I would be the one doing the hurting. I also formulated the belief that loving put me in harm's way. I also learned that caring about another person made me weak. So not caring, that must equal strength. The greatest way to mask a shaky sense of self is to hide behind a false air of respect. Sitting in circle resembles sitting in a fire. It is a crucible that can and does break. It broke my old sense of self, diseased value system and way of looking at others. My old stale modes of thinking were invited into the open to see if this is who I wanted to be in life. I was accompanied by skilled facilitators on a journey into the depths of myself to find those wounded parts that not only festered but seeped out to create unsafe space for others. At times, it resembled an exorcism, and in essence, it was. There was an extraction of old, diseased ways of thinking, being and reacting and an infusion of purpose. Sitting in those circles saved my life. I stand here today as a testament to the fact of the power of the work. I was paroled in June 2014, following my third hearing before a panel of former law-enforcement officials who were tasked with determining my current threat level to society. I stand here today for the first time since I was 14 years old not under any form of state supervision. I'm married to a tremendous woman named Holly, and together, we are raising two sons who I encourage to experience emotions in a safe way. I let them hold me when I cry. They get to witness me not have all the answers. My desire is for them to understand that being a man is not some machismo caricature, and that characteristics usually defined as weaknesses are parts of the whole healthy man. So today, I continue to work not just on myself, but in support of young males in my community. The challenge is to eradicate this cycle of emotional illiteracy and groupthink that allows our males to continue to victimize others as well as themselves. As a result of this, they develop new ways of how they want to show up in the world and how they expect this world to show up on their behalf. Thank you. (Applause) |
How "baby bonds" could help close the wealth gap | {0: 'Darrick Hamilton crafts and implements innovative routes and policies that break down social hierarchy and move society towards greater equity, inclusion and civic participation.'} | We the Future | There is a narrative, an idea that with resilience, grit and personal responsibility people can pull themselves up and achieve economic success. In the United States we call it the American dream. A similar narrative exists all over the world. But the truth is that the challenges of making this happen have less to do with what we do and more to do with the wealth position in which we are born. So I'm going to make the case that the United States government, actually that any government, should create a trust account for every newborn of up to 60,000 dollars, calibrated to the wealth of the family in which they are born. I'm talking about an endowment. Personal seed capital, a publicly established baby trust, what my colleague William Darity at Duke University and I have referred to as baby bonds, a term that was coined by the late historian from Columbia University, Manning Marable. The reason why we should create these trusts is simple. Wealth is the paramount indicator of economic security and well-being. It provides financial agency, economic security to take risk and shield against loss. Without capital, inequality is locked in. We use words like choice, freedom to describe the benefits of the market, but it is literally wealth that gives us choice, freedom and optionality. Wealthier families are better positioned to finance an elite, independent school and college education, access capital to start a business, finance expensive medical procedures, reside in neighborhoods with higher amenities, exert political influence through campaign finance, purchase better legal counsel if confronted with an expensive criminal justice system, leave a bequest and/or withstand financial hardship resulting from any number of emergencies. Basically, when it comes to economic security, wealth is both the beginning and the end. I will frame this conversation in the context of the United States, but this discussion applies virtually to any country facing increasing inequality. In the US, the top 10 percent of households hold about 80 percent of the nation's wealth while the bottom 60 percent owns only about one percent. But when it comes to wealth, race is an even stronger predictor than class itself. Blacks and Latinos collectively make up 30 percent of the United States population, but collectively own about seven percent of the nation's wealth. The 2016 survey of consumer finance indicates that the typical black family has about 17,000 dollars in wealth, and that's inclusive of home equity, while the typical white family has about 170,000. That is indicative of an absolute racial wealth gap where the typical black household has about 10 cents for every dollar held by the typical white family. But regardless of race, the market alone has been inadequate to address these inequalities. Even in times of economic expansion, inequality grows. Over the last 45 years, wealth disparity has increased dramatically, and essentially, all the economic gains from America's increase in productivity have gone to the elite or the upper middle class. Yet, much of the framing around economic disparity focuses on the poor choices of black, Latino and poor borrowers. This framing is wrong. The directional emphasis is wrong. It is more likely that meager economic circumstance, not poor decision making or deficient knowledge, constrains choice itself and leaves people with no options but to turn to predatory finance. In essence, education is not the magic antidote for the enormous inherited disparities that result from laws, policies and economic arrangement. This does not diminish the value of education. Indeed, I'm a university professor. There are clear intrinsic values to education, along with a public responsibility to expose everyone to a high-quality education, from grade school all the way through college. But education is not the panacea. In fact, blacks who live in families where the head graduated from college typically have less wealth than white families where the head dropped out of high school. Perhaps we overstate the functional role of education at the detriment of understanding the functional role of wealth. Basically, it is wealth that begets more wealth. That's why we advocate for baby trust. An economic birthright to capital for everyone. These accounts would be held in public trust to be used as a foundation to an economically secure life. The concept of economic rights is not new nor is it radical. In 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt introduced the idea of an economic Bill of Rights. Roosevelt called for physical security, economic security, social security and moral security. Unfortunately, since the Nixon administration, the political sentiment regarding social mobility has radically shifted away from government mandates to economic security to a neoliberal approach in which the market is presumed to be the solution for all our problems, economic or otherwise. As a result, the onus of social mobility has shifted on to the individual. The pervasive narrative is that even if your lot in life is subpar, with perseverance and hard work and the virtues of the free market, you can turn your proverbial rags into riches. Of course, the flip side is that the virtues of the market will likewise sanction those that are not astute, those that lack motivation or those that are simply lazy. In other words, the deserving poor will receive their just rewards. What is glaringly missing from this narrative is the role of power and capital, and how that power and capital can be used to alter the rules and structure of transactions and markets in the first place. Power and capital become self-reinforcing. And without government intervention, they generate an iterative cycle of both stratification and inequality. The capital finance provided by baby trust is intended to deliver a more egalitarian and an authentic pathway to economic security, independent of the family financial position in which individuals are born. The program would complement the economic rights to old-age pensions and provide a more comprehensive social security program, designed to provide capital finance from cradle all the way through grave. We envision endowing American newborns with an average account of 25,000 dollars that gradually rises upwards to 60,000 dollars for babies born into the poorest families. Babies born into the wealthiest families would be included as well in the social contract, but they would receive a more nominal account of about 500 dollars. The accounts would be federally managed, and they would grow at a guaranteed annual interest rate of about two percent per year in order to curtail inflation cost, and be used when the child reaches adulthood for some asset-enhancing activity, like financing a debt-free university education, a down payment to purchase a home, or some seed capital to start a business. With approximately four million babies born each year in the US, if the average endowment of a baby trust is set at 25,000 dollars, the program would crudely cost about 100 billion dollars a year. This would constitute only about two percent of current federal expenditures and be far less than the 500-plus billion dollars that's already being spent by the federal government on asset promotion through tax credits and subsidies. At issue is not the amount of that allocation but to whom it's distributed. Currently, the top one percent of households, those earning above 100 million dollars, receive only about one third of this entire allocation, while the bottom 60 percent receive only five percent. If the federal asset-promoting budget were allocated in a more progressive manner, federal policies could be transformative for all Americans. This is a work in progress. There are obviously many details to be worked out, but it is a policy proposal grounded in the functional roles and the inherited advantages of wealth that moves us away from the reinforcing status quo behavioral explanations for inequality towards more structural solutions. Our existing tax policy that privileges existing wealth rather than establishing new wealth is a choice. The extent of our dramatic inequality is at least as much a problem of politics as it is a problem of economics. It is time to get beyond the false narratives that attribute inequality to individual personal deficits while largely ignoring the advantages of wealth. Instead, public provisions of a baby trust could go a long way towards eliminating the transmission of economic advantage or disadvantage across generations and establishing a more moral and decent economy that facilitates assets, economic security and social mobility for all its citizens. Regardless of the race and the family positions in which they are born. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Darrick. I mean, there's so much to like in this idea. There's one piece of branding around it that I worry about, which is just that right now, trust-fund kids have a really bad rap. You know, they're the sort of eyeball-rolling poster children for how money, kind of, takes away motivation. So, these trusts are different. So how do you show people in this proposal that it's not going to do that? Darrick Hamilton: If you know you have limited resources or you're going to face discrimination, there's a narrative that, well, the economic returns to investing in myself are lower than that of someone else, so I might as well enjoy my leisure. Of course, there's another narrative as well, so we shouldn't get caught up on that, you know, somebody who's poor and going to face discrimination, they also might pursue a resume-building strategy. The old adage, "I have to be twice as good as someone else." Now, when we say that, we never ask at what cost, are there health costs associated with that. I haven't answered your question, but coming back to you question, if you know you're going to receive a transfer at a later point in life, that only increases the incentive for you to invest in yourself so that you can better use that trust. CA: You're giving people possibilities of life they currently cannot imagine having. And therefore the motivation to do that. I could talk with you for hours about this. I'm really glad you're working on this. Thank you. (Applause) |
What is verbal irony? | null | TED-Ed | Great weather we're having! Awesome job! You're a tremendous athlete! Compliments, right? Well, maybe. Depending on the attitude and tone of voice behind these lines, they very well may be compliments. They may also be, though, pointed and attacking lines. This slight change of attitude behind the lines reveals what we call verbal irony. So when someone says, "Great weather we're having," it is quite possible that the person really means that if the sun is shining, the birds are singing, and the wind is calm. But if the weather is horrible, the clouds are looming, and the wind is a raging tempest, and someone says, "Great weather we're having," he probably doesn't actually mean that. He probably means that the weather is horrible, but he has said the opposite. This is verbal irony when the speaker says the opposite of what he means. I know what you're thinking. Isn't this sarcasm, isn't the speaker being sarcastic? Yes. When a speaker says the opposite of what he means, that is verbal irony. When a speaker then goes the step farther to mean the opposite of what he says and seeks to be a little pointed and mean, like he's making fun of something, then you have sarcasm. Take the second example: "Awesome job!" Someone accomplishing his life-long dream: awesome! Someone winning a sports championship: awesome! Someone rear-ends another car: not awesome. So when the passenger says, "Awesome job!" they probably mean the opposite with a hint of poking fun. That is verbal irony and that is sarcastic. "You're a talented athlete," said to an Olympian: authentic, no verbal irony present. Said to the klutzy kid tripping into English class and spilling his books and pencil case all over the room, now that is just harsh and verbally ironic because what you said is not what you meant. That is verbal irony. You have said the opposite of what you mean. Additionally, since you have the intention of mocking this poor person, you have not only been verbally ironic, but sarcastic as well. Beware, though. While all sarcasm fits the definition of verbal irony, not all verbal irony is sarcastic. Verbal irony is where what is meant is the opposite of what is said, while sarcasm adds that little punch of attitude. There are times, though, where another layer of meaning can be present without that sarcastic tone. Alright, now go out there and find those examples of verbal irony and sarcasm. Good luck! No, seriously, I mean it, good luck. No, no, really, I truly want to wish you luck on this difficult task. Ok, ok, sincerely good luck. You can do it! No verbal irony here. |
The joyful, perplexing world of puzzle hunts | {0: 'Alex Rosenthal takes everyday experiences and turns them into mind-bending puzzles.'} | TED Salon: Radical Craft | It's 4am, you've been awake for forty hours, when you unlock a puzzle containing this video of some kind of dance-off between a chicken and a roller-skating beaver. (Laughter) The confusion and delight you're experiencing is a typical moment at the MIT Mystery Hunt, which is basically the Olympics meets Burning Man for a specific type of nerd. (Laughter) Today, I'm going to take you inside this strange, intellectually masochistic and incredibly joyful world. But first, I have to explain what I mean when I say "puzzle." A puzzle-hunt-style puzzle is a data set. It can be a grid of letters, a sudoku, a video, an audio — it can be anything that contains hidden information that can eventually resolve into an answer that is a word or a phrase. So, to give you an example, this is a puzzle called "Master Pieces." It consists of 10 images of LEGO people looking at piles of LEGOs. And to save us some time, I'm going to explain what's going on here. Each of the piles of LEGOs is a deconstructed work of art in the style of a famous artist. So, does anybody recognize the artist on the left? They used a lot of red. I heard "Rothko," yeah. The second one? (Audience) Mondrian. Alex Rosenthal: Yeah, well done. And the third one? This is the hardest one — Yeah, Klimt, I heard it. Well done, the color is the biggest clue there. So the puzzle has various clues that tell you what matters here are the artists, not the specific works of art. And what you need to do is then look at what you haven't used yet, which is the number of LEGO people in each painting. And you can count them and then count into the artists' last names by the same number of letters. So there's three people in front of the Rothko on the left, so you take the third letter, which is a T. There's only one in front of the Mondrian, so you take the first letter, M. And there's three again in front of Klimt, so you take the third letter, I. You do that for all 10 of the original artists and put them in the order, and you get the answer, which is "illuminate." (Laughter) Puzzles like this are about communicating an idea. But where I'm trying to be as clear as possible for you now, puzzles have to navigate the line between abstraction and clarity. They have to be obtuse enough to make you work for it, but elegant enough so you can get to the aha moment, where everything clicks into place. Puzzle solvers are junkies for this aha moment — it feels like a brief high and an instant of pristine clarity. And there's also a deeper fulfillment at play here, which is that humans are innate problem-solvers. That's why we love crosswords and escape rooms and figuring out how to explore the bottom of the ocean. Solving deviously difficult puzzles expands our minds in new directions, and it also helps us come at problems from diverse perspectives. These puzzles come in various puzzle hunts, which come in various shapes and sizes. There's one-hour ones designed for novices, 24-hour road rallies, and the puzzle hunt of puzzle hunts, the MIT Mystery Hunt. This is an event that takes place once a year and has around 2,000 people descending on MIT's campus and solving puzzles in teams that range from a single person to over 100. My team has 60 people on it — that includes a national crossword puzzle tournament champion, a particle physicist, a composer, an actual deep-sea explorer, and me, feeling like "Mr. Bean goes to Bletchley Park." (Laughter) That's actually an apt comparison, because one year involved a puzzle where you had to construct a working Enigma machine out of pieces of cardboard. (Laughter) Each Mystery Hunt has a theme. Past ones have included "The Matrix" and "Alice in Wonderland." It's often pop culture- and literary-based themes. And the goal is to find the coin that's been hidden somewhere on MIT's campus. And in order to get there, you have to solve around 150 puzzles and do various events and challenges. I had done this for about 10 years without ever dreaming of winning, until January of 2016, where 53 hours into a hunt whose theme is the movie "Inception," we haven't slept in days, so everything is hilarious ... (Laughter) The tables are covered in piles of papers, of our notes and completed puzzles. The whiteboards are an unintelligible mess of three days' worth of insights. And we're stuck on two puzzles. If we could crack them, we would get into the endgame, and after hours of work, in a magical moment, they both fall within 10 seconds of each other, and soon, we're on the final runaround, a series of clues that will lead us to the coin, and we're racing through the halls of MIT, trying not to knock over or terrify tour groups, when we realize we're not alone, there's another team on the runaround as well, and we don't know who's ahead. So, we're a mess of anxiety, anticipation, exhilaration and sleep deprivation, when we arrive at the Alchemist, a sculpture in which we find ... this coin. (Cheers) Yeah. (Applause) And in claiming it, we win the MIT Mystery Hunt by a tiny margin of five minutes. What I didn't mention before is that the prize for winning is that you get to construct the whole hunt for the following year. (Laughter) The punishment for winning is that you have to construct the whole hunt for the following year. At the beginning of 2016, I had never constructed a puzzle before — I had solved plenty of puzzles, but constructing and solving are entirely different beasts. But once again, I was lucky to be on a team full of brilliant mentors and collaborators. So, from a constructor's point of view, a puzzle is where I have an idea, and instead of telling you what it is, I'm going to leave a trail of breadcrumbs so you can figure it out for yourself, and have the joy and experience of the aha moment. This is another way of looking at the aha moment. And what's incredible to me is that this experience, which is very emotional and kind of almost physical, is something that can be carefully designed. So, to show you what I mean, this is a puzzle I co-constructed with my friend Matt Gruskin. It's a text adventure, which is the old-school adventure game format, where you're exploring, going north, east, south and west, picking up items and using them. And you could get to the end of the game part, but you won't have solved the puzzle. In order to do so, you have to recognize a hidden layer of information, and the easiest way of seeing it is by mapping the game out. That looks something like this. Does anybody recognize what this is? Yeah, exactly. This text adventure takes place within "Settlers of Catan." Who here knows what "Settlers" is? Nerds. (Laughter) If you don't know, "Settlers" is a board game where you're competing against other people to collect resources and use them to build structures. And within the text adventure, we hid information in various ways, with which you could reconstruct an entire game. You could figure out the roads, the cities, the towns, the resources, the numbers on the tiles, even the dice rolls. You put all that information together and you could extract an answer in a way that's too complicated to explain right now. (Laughter) But find me afterwards if you really want to know. (Laughter) But what this puzzle emphasized for me is the value of perspective shifts in inspiring an aha. So, in this puzzle, you go from experiencing the world on the ground, as a character, to looking down on it from above as if you're playing a board game, and in that shift, you completely reframe all the information you've been given. The hardest part of construction for me is coming up with a great idea for an aha. Fortunately, the world is a torrent of ideas and information. I've seen fantastic puzzles constructed out of the waggle dances of bees, and the remarkable coincidence that the 88 keys of a piano can be perfectly mapped to the 88 constellations in the sky. Once you find that out, you can't not construct the puzzle, and it's going to be about having the solvers make that connection in their own minds. Whether you give them stars on a keyboard or play the celestial music of the cosmos, you're getting them there, one way or another. Before long, you find yourself staring at a turtle, and asking yourself, "Is this a puzzle?" (Laughter) And also, staring at a turtle and saying, "I never appreciated what multitudes this contains in its shell alone." This might be a familiar experience to you, if you've ever been watching a TED Talk and asked yourself, "Is this a puzzle?" (Laughter) I'm not telling. But what I will say is that puzzles can be found in the most unexpected of places. That brings us back to one of my favorite puzzles of all time, which was constructed by Trip Payne. And this time, I'm going to play it for you with the sound on, so get ready to name that tune. (Slowed-down mock clucking) (Slowed-down mock clucking) (Slowed-down mock clucking) (Laughter) Who knows what that is? Yeah, "You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman." (Laughter) So you can identify that and seven other songs and clips, and then look at the videos themselves for clues, where the way that they are filmed and edited together plus things like the cutaways to the panel of five people sitting at a table, which is reminiscent of a panel of judges, all of this can suggest "reality competition show." And either through internet research, or from just recognizing this, you can get to the aha, which is that these clips are shot-for-shot recreations of lip-synch battles from "RuPaul's Drag Race." (Laughter) So, why do we do this? (Laughter) (Applause) You tell me, I don't know. So, first of all, it's really fun. But I think it also improves our lives in various ways. Being able to solve puzzles, when I'm confronted with a challenge, has allowed me to explore it from multiple perspectives before I lock in an approach. Also, the process of solving is great training for working with a team, knowing when to listen, when to share, and how to recognize and celebrate insight and being able to construct ahas is a very powerful tool. Think of how powerful and exciting and convincing an idea is that comes from your own mind, where you make all the connections yourself. So in January of 2017, after tens of thousands of hours of work, we finally run our Mystery Hunt. And it's a different sort of satisfaction than the quick high of an aha moment. Instead, it's the slow burn of saying something through perplexing abstraction, yet being understood. And when it was all over, in our exhaustion, we turned to each other and the world, and we said, "We're never doing this again. It's too much work. It's really fun, but no more winning." One year later, in January of 2018, we won the MIT Mystery Hunt again. (Laughter) So, we're currently I don't know how many tens of thousands of hours of work in, and we're two months out from the 2019 Hunt. So, thank you for listening, I have to go write a puzzle. (Laughter) (Applause) |
The real reason female entrepreneurs get less funding | {0: 'Dr. Dana Kanze is an assistant professor of organizational behavior at London Business School, where she applies behavioral insights to understand sources of labor market inequality.'} | TEDxPeachtree | This is me at five years old, shortly before jumping into this beautifully still pool of water. I soon find out the hard way that this pool is completely empty because the ice-cold water is near freezing and literally takes my breath away. Even though I already know how to swim, I can't get up to the water's surface, no matter how hard I try. That's the last thing I remember trying to do before blacking out. Turns out, the lifeguard on duty had been chatting with two girls when I jumped in, and I was soon underwater, so he couldn't actually see or hear me struggle. I was eventually saved by a girl walking near the pool who happened to look down and see me. The next thing I know, I'm getting mouth-to-mouth and being rushed to the hospital to determine the extent of my brain loss. If I had been flailing at the water's surface, the lifeguard would have noticed and come to save me. I share this near-death experience because it illustrates how dangerous things are when they're just beneath the surface. Today, I study implicit gender bias in start-ups, which I consider to be far more insidious than mere overt bias for this very same reason. When we see or hear an investor behaving inappropriately towards an entrepreneur, we're aware of the problem and at least have a chance to do something about it. But what if there are subtle differences in the interactions between investors and entrepreneurs that can affect their outcomes, differences that we're not conscious of, that we can't directly see or hear? Before studying start-ups at Columbia Business School, I spent five years running and raising money for my own start-up. I remember constantly racing around to meet with prospective investors while trying to manage my actual business. At one point I joked that I had reluctantly pitched each and every family member, friend, colleague, angel investor and VC this side of the Mississippi. Well, in the process of speaking to all these investors, I noticed something interesting was happening. I was getting asked a very different set of questions than my male cofounder. I got asked just about everything that could go wrong with the venture to induce investor losses, while my male cofounder was asked about our venture's home run potential to maximize investor gains, essentially everything that could go right with the venture. He got asked how many new customers we were going to bring on, while I got asked how we were going to hang on to the ones we already had. Well, as the CEO of the company, I found this to be rather odd. In fact, I felt like I was taking crazy pills. But I eventually rationalized it by thinking, maybe this has to do with how I'm presenting myself, or it's something simply unique to my start-up. Well, years later I made the difficult decision to leave my start-up so I could pursue a lifelong dream of getting my PhD. It was at Columbia that I learned about a social psychological theory originated by Professor Tory Higgins called "regulatory focus," which differentiates between two distinct motivational orientations of promotion and prevention. A promotion focus is concerned with gains and emphasizes hopes, accomplishments and advancement needs, while a prevention focus is concerned with losses and emphasizes safety, responsibility and security needs. Since the best-case scenario for a prevention focus is to simply maintain the status quo, this has us treading water just to stay afloat, while a promotion focus instead has us swimming in the right direction. It's just a matter of how far we can advance. Well, I had my very own eureka moment when it dawned on me that this concept of promotion sounded a lot like the questions posed to my male cofounder, while prevention resembled those questions asked of me. As an entrepreneurship scholar, I started digging into the research on start-up financing and discovered there's an enormous gap between the amount of funds that male and female founders raise. Although women found 38 percent of US companies, they only get two percent of the venture funding. I got to thinking: what if this funding gap is not due to any fundamental difference in the businesses started by men and women? What if women get less funding than men due to a simple difference in the questions that they get asked? After all, when it comes to venture funding, entrepreneurs need to convince investors of their start-up's home run potential. It's not enough to merely demonstrate you're not going to lose your investors' money. So it makes sense that women would be getting less funding than men if they're engaging in prevention as opposed to promotion-oriented dialogues. Well, I got the chance to test this hypothesis on companies with similar quality and funding needs across all years at the funding competition known as TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield has run in New York City since its inception in 2010. TechCrunch is widely regarded as the ideal place for start-ups to launch, with participants including start-ups that have since become household names, like Dropbox, Fitbit and Mint, presenting to some of the world's most prominent VCs. Well, despite the comparability of companies in my sample, male-led start-ups went on to raise five times as much funding as the female-led ones. This made me especially curious to see what's driving this gender disparity. Well, it took a while, but I got my hands on all the videos of both the pitches and the Q and A sessions from TechCrunch, and I had them transcribed. I first analyzed the transcripts by loading a dictionary of regulatory-focused terms into the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software called LIWC. This LIWC software generated the frequencies of promotion and prevention words in the transcribed text. As a second method, I had each of the questions and answers manually coded by the Tory Higgins Research Lab at Columbia. Regardless of the topic at hand, an intention can be framed in promotion or prevention. Let's take that topic of customers I mentioned briefly earlier. A promotion-coded question sounds like, "How many new customers do you plan to acquire this year?" while a prevention-coded one sounds like, "How do you plan to retain your existing customers?" During the same time, I also gathered background information on the start-ups and entrepreneurs that can affect their funding outcomes, like the start-up's age, quality and funding needs and the entrepreneur's past experience, so I could use these data points as controls in my analysis. Well, the very first thing that I found is that there's no difference in the way entrepreneurs present their companies. In other words, both male and female entrepreneurs use similar degrees of promotion and prevention language in their actual pitches. So having ruled out this difference on the entrepreneur's side, I then moved on to the investor's side, analyzing the six minutes of Q&A sessions that entrepreneurs engaged in with the VCs after pitching. When examining the nearly 2,000 questions and corresponding answers in these exchanges, both of my methods showed significant support for the fact that male entrepreneurs get asked promotion questions and female entrepreneurs get asked prevention questions. In fact, a whopping 67 percent of the questions posed to male entrepreneurs were promotion-focused, while 66 percent of those posed to female entrepreneurs were prevention-focused. What's especially interesting is that I expected female VCs to behave similarly to male VCs. Given its prevalence in the popular media and the venture-funding literature, I expected the birds-of-a-feather theory of homophily to hold here, meaning that male VCs would favor male entrepreneurs with promotion questions and female VCs would do the same for female entrepreneurs. But instead, all VCs displayed the same implicit gender bias manifested in the regulatory focus of the questions they posed to male versus female candidates. So female VCs asked male entrepreneurs promotion questions and then turned around and asked female entrepreneurs prevention questions just like the male VCs did. So given the fact that both male and female VCs are displaying this implicit gender bias, what effect, if any, does this have on start-up funding outcomes? My research shows it has a significant effect. The regulatory focus of investor questions not only predicted how well the start-ups would perform at the TechCrunch Disrupt competitions but also how much funding the start-ups went on to raise in the open market. Those start-ups who were asked predominantly promotion questions went on to raise seven times as much funding as those asked prevention questions. But I didn't stop there. I then moved on to analyze entrepreneurs' responses to those questions, and I found that entrepreneurs are apt to respond in kind to the questions they get, meaning a promotion question begets a promotion response and a prevention question begets a prevention response. Now, this might make intuitive sense to all of us here, but it has some unfortunate consequences in this context of venture funding. So what ends up happening is that a male entrepreneur gets asked a promotion question, granting him the luxury to reinforce his association with the favorable domain of gains by responding in kind, while a female entrepreneur gets asked a prevention question and inadvertently aggravates her association with the unfavorable domain of losses by doing so. These responses then trigger venture capitalists' subsequent biased questions, and the questions and answers collectively fuel a cycle of bias that merely perpetuates the gender disparity. Pretty depressing stuff, right? Well, fortunately, there's a silver lining to my findings. Those plucky entrepreneurs who managed to switch focus by responding to prevention questions with promotion answers went on to raise 14 times more funding than those who responded to prevention questions with prevention answers. So what this means is that if you're asked a question about defending your start-up's market share, you'd be better served to frame your response around the size and growth potential of the overall pie as opposed to how you merely plan to protect your sliver of that pie. So if I get asked this question, I would say, "We're playing in such a large and fast-growing market that's bound to attract new entrants. We plan to take increasing share in this market by leveraging our start-up's unique assets." I've thus subtly redirected this dialogue into the favorable domain of gains. Now, these results are quite compelling among start-ups that launched at TechCrunch but field data can merely tell us that there's a correlational relationship between regulatory focus and funding. So I sought to see whether this difference in regulatory focus can actually cause funding outcomes by running a controlled experiment on both angel investors and ordinary people. Simulating the TechCrunch Disrupt environment, I had participants listen to four six-minute audio files of 10 question-and-answer exchanges that were manipulated for promotion and prevention language, and then asked them to allocate a sum of funding to each venture as they saw fit. Well, my experimental results reinforced my findings from the field. Those scenarios where entrepreneurs were asked promotion questions received twice the funding allocations of those where entrepreneurs were asked prevention questions. What's especially promising is the fact that those scenarios where entrepreneurs switched as opposed to matched focus when they received prevention questions received significantly more funding from both sets of participants. So to my female entrepreneurs out there, here are a couple simple things you could do. The first is to recognize the question you're being asked. Are you getting a prevention question? If this is the case, answer the question at hand by all means, but merely frame your response in promotion in an effort to garner higher amounts of funding for your start-ups. The unfortunate reality, though, is that both men and women evaluating start-ups display the same implicit gender bias in their questioning, inadvertently favoring male entrepreneurs over female ones. So to my investors out there, I would offer that you have an opportunity here to approach Q&A sessions more even-handedly, not just so that you could do the right thing, but so that you can improve the quality of your decision making. By flashing the same light on every start-up's potential for gains and losses, you enable all deserving start-ups to shine and you maximize returns in the process. Today, I get to be that girl walking by the pool, sounding the alarm that something is going on beneath the surface. Together, we have the power to break this cycle of implicit gender bias in start-up funding. Let's give the most promising start-ups, regardless of whether they're led by men or women, a fighting chance to grow and thrive. Thank you. (Applause) |
Can you solve the troll's paradox riddle? | null | TED-Ed | You’ve discovered a doorway to another realm, and now you and your brother are off exploring the wonderful world of Paradoxica. Fantastically paradoxical creatures crawl, run, and fly around you. And then you see the troll. It’s catching all the creatures in an enormous net. You bravely step forward and demand it let them go. The troll laughs. “If you’re such a fan of paradoxes,” it says, “then I’ll make you an offer. If you say something true, I’ll release all these creatures." You’re about to say, “You are a troll,” but before you can, the troll grabs your brother. “If you say something false,” he continues, “then I’ll release your brother." Your statement can only be a single sentence. And as you can see, I hate paradoxes more than anything. If you try to cheat by saying something paradoxical, like, ‘this statement is false,’ then I'll eat your brother and the creatures." What true/false statement can you say to force the troll to free your brother and the paradoxical creatures? [Pause the video now if you want to figure it out for yourself!] Answer in: 3 Answer in: 2 Answer in: 1 This seems like an impossible situation, but incredibly, you can say something that will force the troll to release all its prisoners. This is an example of coercive logic, invented by the great logician and puzzle creator Raymond Smullyan. The trick Smullyan came up with involves saying a statement whose truth or falseness depends on what you want the troll to do. Your statement still has to be carefully crafted. For example, if you were to say, “You are going to free the creatures and my brother,” the troll could respond, “that’s false… I’m only going to free your brother.” Similarly, if you said, “You will free the paradoxes,” the troll could say, “That’s true,” and free the paradoxes. But watch what happens if you say, “You will free my brother.” The statement can’t be false, because if it were, the troll, by its own rules, would have to free your brother. That would make the statement paradoxically true and false. But the troll hates paradoxes and would never willingly create one. So his only option is for the statement to be true. If “you will free my brother” is true, then the troll has to release your brother. And by its own rules, the troll has to free the creatures as well, since you said a true statement. By wielding just 5 words like a logical scalpel, you’ve forced the troll to free all its prisoners. As the troll stomps off in anger, the paradoxes cheer you for winning them their freedom, and promise to lead you to the treasure at the top of the stairs. If you can reach it. |
Museums should honor the everyday, not just the extraordinary | {0: 'Ariana A. Curtis gets to research, collect, interpret and display objects and stories that help tell the history of all of us and our connections to each other.'} | TEDWomen 2018 | Representation matters. Authentic representations of women matter. I think that too often, our public representations of women are enveloped in the language of the extraordinary. The first American woman to become a self-made millionaire: Madam C. J. Walker ... The dresses of the first ladies of the United States ... Shirley Chisholm, the first woman to seek the US Democratic party's presidential nomination — (Applause) As a museum curator, I understand why these stories are so seductive. Exceptional women are inspiring and aspirational. But those stories are limiting. By definition, being extraordinary is nonrepresentative. It's atypical. Those stories do not create a broad base for incorporating women's history, and they don't reflect our daily realities. If we can collectively apply that radical notion that women are people, it becomes easier to show women as people are: familiar, diverse, present. In everyone's everyday throughout history, women exist positively — not as a matter of interpretation, but as a matter of fact. And beyond a more accurate representation of human life, including women considers the quotidian experiences of the almost 3.8 billion people identified as female on this planet. In this now notorious museum scene from the "Black Panther" movie, a white curator erroneously explains an artifact to Michael B. Jordan's character seen here, an artifact from his own culture. This fictional scene caused real debates in our museum communities about who is shaping the narratives and the bias that those narratives hold. Museums are actually rated one of the most trustworthy sources of information in the United States, and with hundreds of millions of visitors from all over the world, we should tell accurate histories, but we don't. There is a movement from within museums themselves to help combat this bias. The simple acknowledgment that museums are not neutral. Museums are didactic. Through the display of art and artifacts, we can incite creativity and foster inclusion, but we are guilty of historical misrepresentation. Our male-centered histories have left our herstories hidden. And there are hard truths about being a woman, especially a woman of color in this industry, that prevents us from centering inclusive examples of women's lives. Museum leadership: predominantly white and male, despite women comprising some 60 percent of museum staffs. Pipelines to leadership for women are bleak — bleakest for women of color. And the presence of women does not in and of itself guarantee an increase in women's public representation. Not all women are gender equity allies. In the words of feminist theorist bell hooks, "Patriarchy has no gender." Women can support the system of patriarchy just as men can support the fight for gender equity. And we often downplay the importance of intersectionality. Marian Anderson was one of the most celebrated voices of the 20th century, and the Smithsonian collected her 1939 outfit. After the white Daughters of the American Revolution denied her access to sing in Constitution Hall, because she was black, she famously sang instead on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, to a crowd of over 75,000 people. And in libraries all over, including museums, you can still find the groundbreaking 1982 anthology, entitled "All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave." Demands for the increase of women's representation does not automatically include Afro-Latinas like me ... or immigrant women, or Asian women, or Native women, or trans women, or undocumented women, or women over 65, or girls — the list can go on and on and on. So what do we do? Targeted initiatives have helped incorporate perspectives that should have always been included. I arrived at the Smithsonian through a Latino curatorial initiative whose hiring of Latinx curators, mostly women, by the way, has raised the profile for Latinx narratives across our institution. And it served as a model for our much larger Smithsonian American Women's History Initiative, which seeks to amplify diverse representations of women in every possible way, so that women show up, not only in the imagery of our contemporary realities, but in our historical representations, because we've always been here. Right now though, in 2018, I can still walk into professional spaces and be the only — the only person under 40, the only black person, the only black woman, the only Latina, sometimes, the only woman. My mother is African-American and my father is Afro-Panamanian. I am so proudly and inextricably both. As an Afro-Latina, I'm one of millions. As an Afro-Latina curator, I'm one of very few. And bringing my whole self into the professional realm can feel like an act of bravery, and I'll admit to you that I was not always up for that challenge, whether from fear of rejection or self-preservation. In meetings, I would only speak up when I had a fully developed comment to share. No audible brainstorming or riffing off of colleagues. For a long time, I denied myself the joy of wearing my beloved hoop earrings or nameplate necklace to work, thinking that they were too loud or unscholarly or unprofessional. (Laughter) I wondered how people would react to my natural hair, or if they viewed me as more acceptable or less authentic when I straightened it. And anyone who has felt outside of mainstream representations understands that there are basic elements just of our everyday being that can make other people uncomfortable. But because I am passionate about the everyday representation of women as we are, I stopped presenting an inauthentic representation of myself or my work. And I have been tested. This is me pointing at my hoop earring in my office — (Laughter) Just last month, I was invited to keynote a Latino Heritage Month event. The week of the presentation, the organization expressed concerns. They called my slides "activist," and they meant that negatively. (Laughter) (Applause) Two days before the presentation, they requested that I not show a two-minute video affirming natural hair, because "it may create a barrier to the learning process for some of the participants." (Laughter) That poem, "Hair," was written and performed by Elizabeth Acevedo, a Dominican-American 2018 National Book Award winner, and it appeared in an award-winning Smithsonian exhibit that I curated. I canceled the talk, explaining to them that their censorship of me and my work made me uncomfortable. (Applause and cheers) Respectability politics and idealized femininity influence how we display women and which women we choose to display. And that display has skewed toward successful and extraordinary and reputable and desirable, which maintains the systemic exclusion and marginalization of the everyday, the regular, the underrepresented and usually, the nonwhite. As a museum curator, I am empowered to change that narrative. I research, collect and interpret objects and images of significance. Celia Cruz, the queen of Salsa — (Cheers) yes — is significant. And an Afro-Latina. The Smithsonian has collected her costumes, her shoes, her portrait, her postage stamp and this reimagining ... by artist Tony Peralta. When I collected and displayed this work, it was a victory for symbolic contradictions. Pride in displaying a dark-skinned Latina, a black woman, whose hair is in large rollers which straighten your hair, perhaps a nod to white beauty standards. A refined, glamorous woman in oversized, chunky gold jewelry. When this work was on view, it was one of our most Instagrammed pieces, and visitors told me they connected with the everyday elements of her brown skin or her rollers or her jewelry. Our collections include Celia Cruz and a rare portrait of a young Harriet Tubman ... iconic clothing from the incomparable Oprah Winfrey. But museums can literally change how hundreds of millions of people see women and which women they see. So rather than always the first or the famous, it's also our responsibility to show a regular Saturday at the beauty salon, the art of door-knocker earrings ... (Laughter) fashionable sisterhood ... (Laughter) and cultural pride at all ages. Stories of everyday women whose stories have been knowingly omitted from our national and global histories. And oftentimes in museums, you see women represented by clothing or portraits or photography ... but impactful, life-changing stories from everyday women can also look like this Esmeraldan boat seat. Esmeraldas, Ecuador was a maroon community. Its dense rainforest protected indigenous and African populations from Spanish colonizers. There are roads now, but there are some parts inland that are still only accessible by canoe. Débora Nazareno frequently traveled those Ecuadorian waterways by canoe, so she had her own boat seat. Hers personalized with a spiderweb and a spider, representing Anansi, a character in West African folklore. Débora also sat on this seat at home, telling stories to her grandson, Juan. And this intangible ritual of love in the form of intergenerational storytelling is common in communities across the African diaspora. And this everyday act sparked in Juan the desire to collect and preserve over 50,000 documents related to Afro-Indian culture. In 2005, Juan García Salazar, Débora's grandson, and by now a world-renowned Afro-Ecuadorian scholar, traveled to Washington, D.C. He met with Lonnie Bunch, the director of the museum where I work, and toward the end of their conversation, Juan reached into his bag and said, "I'd like to give you a present." On that day, Débora Nazareno's humble wooden boat seat became the very first object donated to the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture. It is encased, displayed and has been seen by almost five million visitors from all over the world. I will continue to collect from extraordinary historymakers. Their stories are important. But what drives me to show up today and every day is the simple passion to write our names in history, display them publicly for millions to see and walk in the ever-present light that is woman. Thank you. (Applause and cheers) |
How math is our real sixth sense | {0: "A public high school teacher for more than 10 years, Eddie Woo gained international attention when he posted videos of his classroom lessons online, to assist an ill student. His YouTube channel, WooTube, has more than 200,000 subscribers and over 13 million views. \nEddie believe that mathematics can be embraced and even enjoyed by absolutely everybody. He was named Australia's Local Hero and was a Top 10 Finalist in the Global Teacher Prize for his love of teaching mathematics. "} | TEDxSydney | "I love mathematics" (Laughter) is exactly what to say at a party if you want to spend the next couple of hours sipping your drink alone in the least cool corner of the room. And that's because when it comes to this subject - all the numbers, formulas, symbols, and calculations - the vast majority of us are outsiders, and that includes me. That's why today I want to share with you an outsider's perspective of mathematics - what I understand of it, from someone who's always struggled with the subject. And what I've discovered, as someone who went from being an outsider to making maths my career, is that, surprisingly, we are all deep down born to be mathematicians. (Laughter) But back to me being an outsider. I know what you're thinking: "Wait a second, Eddie. What would you know? You're a maths teacher. You went to a selective school. You wear glasses, and you're Asian." (Laughter) Firstly, that's racist. (Laughter) Secondly, that's wrong. When I was in school, my favorite subjects were English and history. And this caused a lot of angst for me as a teenager because my high school truly honored mathematics. Your status in the school pretty much correlated with which mathematics class you ranked in. There were eight classes. So if you were in maths 4, that made you just about average. If you were in maths 1, you were like royalty. Each year, our school entered the prestigious Australian Mathematics Competition and would print out a list of everyone in the school in order of our scores. Students who received prizes and high distinctions were pinned up at the start of a long corridor, far, far away from the dark and shameful place where my name appeared. Maths was not really my thing. Stories, characters, narratives - this is where I was at home. And that's why I raised my sails and set course to become an English and history teacher. But a chance encounter at Sydney University altered my life forever. I was in line to enroll at the faculty of education when I started the conversation with one of its professors. He noticed that while my academic life had been dominated by humanities, I had actually attempted some high-level maths at school. What he saw was not that I had a problem with maths, but that I had persevered with maths. And he knew something I didn't - that there was a critical shortage of mathematics educators in Australian schools, a shortage that remains to this day. So he encouraged me to change my teaching area to mathematics. Now, for me, becoming a teacher wasn't about my love for a particular subject. It was about having a personal impact on the lives of young people. I'd seen firsthand at school what a lasting and positive difference a great teacher can make. I wanted to do that for someone, and it didn't matter to me what subject I did it in. If there was an acute need in mathematics, then it made sense for me to go there. As I studied my degree, though, I discovered that mathematics was a very different subject to what I'd originally thought. I'd made the same mistake about mathematics that I'd made earlier in my life about music. Like a good migrant child, I dutifully learned to play the piano when I was young. (Laughter) My weekends were filled with endlessly repeating scales and memorizing every note in the piece, spring and winter. I lasted two years before my career was abruptly ended when my teacher told my parents, "His fingers are too short. I will not teach him anymore." (Laughter) At seven years old, I thought of music like torture. It was a dry, solitary, joyless exercise that I only engaged with because someone else forced me to. It took me 11 years to emerge from that sad place. In year 12, I picked up a steel string acoustic guitar for the first time. I wanted to play it for church, and there was also a girl I was fairly keen on impressing. So I convinced my brother to teach me a few chords. And slowly, but surely, my mind changed. I was engaged in a creative process. I was making music, and I was hooked. I started playing in a band, and I felt the delight of rhythm pulsing through my body as we brought our sounds together. I'd been surrounded by a musical ocean my entire life, and for the first time, I realized I could swim in it. I went through an almost identical experience when it came to mathematics. I used to believe that maths was about rote learning inscrutable formulas to solve abstract problems that didn't mean anything to me. But at university, I began to see that mathematics is immensely practical and even beautiful, that it's not just about finding answers but also about learning to ask the right questions, and that mathematics isn't about mindlessly crunching numbers but rather about forming new ways to see problems so we can solve them by combining insight with imagination. It gradually dawned on me that mathematics is a sense. Mathematics is a sense just like sight and touch; it's a sense that allows us to perceive realities which would be otherwise intangible to us. You know, we talk about a sense of humor and a sense of rhythm. Mathematics is our sense for patterns, relationships, and logical connections. It's a whole new way to see the world. Now, I want to show you a mathematical reality that I guarantee you've seen before but perhaps never really perceived. It's been hidden in plain sight your entire life. This is a river delta. It's a beautiful piece of geometry. Now, when we hear the word geometry, most of us think of triangles and circles. But geometry is the mathematics of all shapes, and this meeting of land and sea has created shapes with an undeniable pattern. It has a mathematically recursive structure. Every part of the river delta, with its twists and turns, is a microversion of the greater whole. So I want you to see the mathematics in this. But that's not all. I want you to compare this river delta with this amazing tree. It's a wonder in itself. But focus with me on the similarities between this and the river. What I want to know is why on earth should these shapes look so remarkably alike? Why should they have anything in common? Things get even more perplexing when you realize it's not just water systems and plants that do this. If you keep your eyes open, you'll see these same shapes are everywhere. Lightning bolts disappear so quickly that we seldom have the opportunity to ponder their geometry. But their shape is so unmistakable and so similar to what we've just seen that one can't help but be suspicious. And then there's the fact that every single person in this room is filled with these shapes too. Every cubic centimeter of your body is packed with blood vessels that trace out this same pattern. There's a mathematical reality woven into the fabric of the universe that you share with winding rivers, towering trees, and raging storms. These shapes are examples of what we call "fractals," as mathematicians. Fractals get their name from the same place as fractions and fractures - it's a reference to the broken and shattered shapes we find around us in nature. Now, once you have a sense for fractals, you really do start to see them everywhere: a head of broccoli, the leaves of a fern, even clouds in the sky. Like the other senses, our mathematical sense can be refined with practice. It's just like developing perfect pitch or a taste for wines. You can learn to perceive the mathematics around you with time and the right guidance. Naturally, some people are born with sharper senses than the rest of us, others are born with impairment. As you can see, I drew a short straw in the genetic lottery when it came to my eyesight. Without my glasses, everything is a blur. I've wrestled with this sense my entire life, but I would never dream of saying, "Well, seeing has always been a struggle for me. I guess I'm just not a seeing kind of person." (Laughter) Yet I meet people every day who feel it quite natural to say exactly that about mathematics. Now, I'm convinced we close ourselves off from a huge part of the human experience if we do this. Because all human beings are wired to see patterns. We live in a patterned universe, a cosmos. That's what cosmos means - orderly and patterned - as opposed to chaos, which means disorderly and random. It isn't just seeing patterns that humans are so good at. We love making patterns too. And the people who do this well have a special name. We call them artists, musicians, sculptors, painters, cinematographers - they're all pattern creators. Music was once described as the joy that people feel when they are counting but don't know it. (Laughter) Some of the most striking examples of mathematical patterns are in Islamic art and design. An aversion to depicting humans and animals led to a rich history of intricate tile arrangements and geometric forms. The aesthetic side of mathematical patterns like these brings us back to nature itself. For instance, flowers are a universal symbol of beauty. Every culture around the planet and throughout history has regarded them as objects of wonder. And one aspect of their beauty is that they exhibit a special kind of symmetry. Flowers grow organically from a center that expands outwards in the shape of a spiral, and this creates what we call "rotational symmetry." You can spin a flower around and around, and it still looks basically the same. But not all spirals are created equal. It all depends on the angle of rotation that goes into creating the spiral. For instance, if we build a spiral from an angle of 90 degrees, we get a cross that is neither beautiful nor efficient. Huge parts of the flowers area are wasted and don't produce seeds. Using an angle of 62 degrees is better and produces a nice circular shape, like what we usually associate with flowers. But it's still not great. There's still large parts of the area that are a poor use of resources for the flower. However, if we use 137.5 degrees, (Laughter) we get this beautiful pattern. It's astonishing, and it is exactly the kind of pattern used by that most majestic of flowers - the sunflower. Now, 137.5 degrees might seem pretty random, but it actually emerges out of a special number that we call the "golden ratio." The golden ratio is a mathematical reality that, like fractals, you can find everywhere - from the phalanges of your fingers to the pillars of the Parthenon. That's why even at a party of 5000 people, I'm proud to declare, "I love mathematics!" (Cheers) (Applause) |
5 ways to share math with kids | null | TEDxRainier | A friend of mine told me recently that her six-year-old son had come from school and said he hated math. And this is hard for me to hear because I actually love math. The beauty and power of mathematical thinking have changed my life. But I know that many people lived a very different story. Math can be the best of times or the worst of times, an exhilarating journey of discovery or descent into tedium, frustration, and despair. Mathematical miseducation is so common we can hardly see it. We practically expect math class to be repetition and memorization of disjointed technical facts. And we're not surprised when students aren't motivated, when they leave school disliking math, even committed to avoiding it for the rest of their lives. Without mathematical literacy, their career opportunities shrink. And they become easy prey for credit card companies, payday lenders, the lottery, (Laughter) and anyone, really, who wants to dazzle them with a statistic. Did you know that if you insert a single statistic into an assertion, people are 92 percent more likely to accept it without question? (Laughter) Yeah, I totally made that up. (Laughter) And 92 percent is - it has weight even though it's completely fabricated. And that's how it works. When we're not comfortable with math, we don't question the authority of numbers. But what's happening with mathematical alienation is only half the story. Right now, we're squandering our chance to touch life after life with the beauty and power of mathematical thinking. I led a workshop on this topic recently, and at the end, a woman raised her hand and said that the experience made her feel - and this is a quote - "like a God." (Laughter) That's maybe the best description I've ever heard for what mathematical thinking can feel like, so we should examine what it looks like. A good place to start is with the words of the philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, who famously proclaimed, "I think, therefore I am." But Descartes looked deeper into the nature of thinking. Once he established himself as a thing that thinks, he continued, "What is a thinking thing?" It is the thing that doubts, understands, conceives, that affirms and denies, wills and refuses, that imagines also, and perceives. This is the kind of thinking we need in every math class every day. So, if you are a teacher or a parent or anyone with a stake in education, I offer these five principles to invite thinking into the math we do at home and at school. Principle one: start with a question. The ordinary math class begins with answers and never arrives at a real question. "Here are the steps to multiply. You repeat. Here are the steps to divide. You repeat. We've covered the material. We're moving on." What matters in the model is memorizing the steps. There's no room to doubt or imagine or refuse, so there's no real thinking here. What would it look like if we started with a question? For example, here are the numbers from 1 to 20. Now, there's a question lurking in this picture, hiding in plain sight. What's going on with the colors? Now, intuitively it feels like there's some connection between the numbers and the colors. I mean, maybe it's even possible to extend the coloring to more numbers. At the same time, the meaning of the colors is not clear. It's a real mystery. And so, the question feels authentic and compelling. And like so many authentic mathematical questions, this one has an answer that is both beautiful and profoundly satisfying. And of course, I'm not going to tell you what it is. (Laughter) I don't think of myself as a mean person, but I am willing to deny you what you want. (Laughter) Because I know if I rush to an answer, I would've robbed you of the opportunity to learn. Thinking happens only when we have time to struggle. And that is principle two. It's not uncommon for students to graduate from high school believing that every math problem can be solved in 30 seconds or less, and if they don't know the answer, they're just not a math person. This is a failure of education. We need to teach kids to be tenacious and courageous, to persevere in the face of difficulty. The only way to teach perseverance is to give students time to think and grapple with real problems. I brought this image into a classroom recently, and we took the time to struggle. And the longer we spent, the more the class came alive with thinking. The students made observations. They had questions. Like, "Why do the numbers in that last column always have orange and blue in them?" and "Does it mean anything that the green spots are always going diagonally?" and "What's going on with those little white numbers in the red segments? Is it important that those are always odd numbers?" Struggling with a genuine question, students deepen their curiosity and their powers of observation. They also develop the ability to take a risk. Some students noticed that every even number has orange in it, and they were willing to stake a claim. "Orange must mean even." And then they asked, "Is that right?" (Laughter) This can be a scary place as a teacher. A student comes to you with an original thought. What if you don't know the answer? Well, that is principle three: you are not the answer key. Teachers, students may ask you questions you don't know how to answer. And this can feel like a threat. But you are not the answer key. Students who are inquisitive is a wonderful thing to have in your classroom. And if you can respond by saying, "I don't know. Let's find out," math becomes an adventure. And parents, this goes for you too. When you sit down to do math with your children, you don't have to know all the answers. You can ask your child to explain the math to you or try to figure it out together. Teach them that not knowing is not failure. It's the first step to understanding. So, when this group of students asked me if orange means even, I don't have to tell them the answer. I don't even need to know the answer. I can ask one of them to explain to me why she thinks it's true. Or we can throw the idea out to the class. Because they know the answers won't come from me, they need to convince themselves and argue with each other to determine what's true. And so, one student says, "Look, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12. I checked all of the even numbers. They all have orange in them. What more do you want?" And another student says, "Well, wait a minute, I see what you're saying, but some of those numbers have one orange piece, some have two or three. Like, look at 48. It's got four orange pieces. Are you telling me that 48 is four times as even as 46? There must be more to the story." By refusing to be the answer key, you create space for this kind of mathematical conversation and debate. And this draws everyone in because we love to see people disagree. After all, where else can you see real thinking out loud? Students doubt, affirm, deny, understand. And all you have to do as the teacher is not be the answer key and say "yes" to their ideas. And that is principle four. Now, this one is difficult. What if a student comes to you and says 2 plus 2 equals 12? You've got to correct them, right? And it's true, we want students to understand certain basic facts and how to use them. But saying "yes" is not the same thing as saying "You're right." You can accept ideas, even wrong ideas, into the debate and say "yes" to your students' right to participate in the act of thinking mathematically. To have your idea dismissed out of hand is disempowering. To have it accepted, studied, and disproven is a mark of respect. It's also far more convincing to be shown you're wrong by your peers than told you're wrong by the teacher. But allow me to take this a step further. How do you actually know that 2 plus 2 doesn't equal 12? What would happen if we said "yes" to that idea? I don't know. Let's find out. So, if 2 plus 2 equaled 12, then 2 plus 1 would be one less, so that would be 11. And that would mean that 2 plus 0, which is just 2, would be 10. But if 2 is 10, then 1 would be 9, and 0 would be 8. And I have to admit this looks bad. It looks like we broke mathematics. But I actually understand why this can't be true now. Just from thinking about it, if we were on a number line, and if I'm at 0, 8 is eight steps that way, and there's no way I could take eight steps and wind up back where I started. Unless ... (Laughter) well, what if it wasn't a number line? What if it was a number circle? Then I could take eight steps and wind back where I started. 8 would be 0. In fact, all of the infinite numbers on the real line would be stacked up in those eight spots. And we're in a new world. And we're just playing here, right? But this is how new math gets invented. Mathematicians have actually been studying number circles for a long time. They've got a fancy name and everything: modular arithmetic. And not only does the math work out, it turns out to be ridiculously useful in fields like cryptography and computer science. It's actually no exaggeration to say that your credit card number is safe online because someone was willing to ask, "What if it was a number circle instead of a number line?" So, yes, we need to teach students that 2 plus 2 equals 4. But also we need to say "yes" to their ideas and their questions and model the courage we want them to have. It takes courage to say, "What if 2 plus 2 equals 12?" and actually explore the consequences. It takes courage to say, "What if the angles in a triangle didn't add up to 180 degrees?" or "What if there were a square root of negative 1?" or "What if there were different sizes of infinity?" But that courage and those questions led to some of the greatest breakthroughs in history. All it takes is willingness to play. And that is principle five. Mathematics is not about following rules. It's about playing and exploring and fighting and looking for clues and sometimes breaking things. Einstein called play the highest form of research. And a math teacher who lets their students play with math gives them the gift of ownership. Playing with math can feel like running through the woods when you were a kid. And even if you were on a path, it felt like it all belonged to you. Parents, if you want to know how to nurture the mathematical instincts of your children, play is the answer. What books are to reading, play is to mathematics. And a home filled with blocks and puzzles and games and play is a home where mathematical thinking can flourish. I believe we have the power to help mathematical thinking flourish everywhere. We can't afford to misuse math to create passive rule-followers. Math has the potential to be our greatest asset in teaching the next generation to meet the future with courage, curiosity, and creativity. And if all students get a chance to experience the beauty and power of authentic mathematical thinking, maybe it won't sound so strange when they say, "Math? I actually love math." Thank you. (Applause) |
In the opioid crisis, here's what it takes to save a life | {0: 'Jan Rader is a firefighter and a nurse.'} | TEDWomen 2018 | For the past 24 years, I have been a firefighter in Huntington, West Virginia. As firefighters, my team and I are tasked with saving lives and property from such disasters as car wrecks, house fires and also life-threatening medical emergencies. I am a woman leading a department in a male-dominated profession. And 10 years ago, I decided to increase my medical knowledge and I received a nursing degree. That was because it became clear that the next big threat facing not only my city, but other cities around the country, was not the one-and-done disaster, where you can ride in like the cavalry, as a firefighter, put out the fire and leave, feeling like you have made a difference and everything is OK. The next big disaster in my city was and is the long, debilitating and lethal disaster known as opioid addiction. We now call this a health epidemic, and we have replaced the name "addiction" with "substance use disorder." To give you some perspective of how significant this epidemic has become, in 2017, in my county of 95,000 people, we saw 1,831 overdoses [and] 183 deaths from overdose. This is the job of my firefighters, as well as other agencies, to respond to that. (Coughs) Excuse me. So, watching this epidemic unfold for several years, I developed some insight. For this disaster, we need to redefine our job as a first responder. We need to be more than just the cavalry. We need to do more than just save a life. We need to find ways to rebuild that life. And it's going to take a lot of people to do that. And that is exactly what we are trying to do in Huntington, West Virginia. Now, let me give you some insight as to what we do. First, this is what happens when somebody overdoses. Imagine you are somebody who is suffering from the brain disorder of addiction. You are fragile. You're embarrassed, you're ashamed. And you overdose. Maybe a friend or a family member calls 911. And then all of a sudden, you are awakened by five or six total strangers in uniform. And they're rubbing your sternum, and they're saying, "Wake up, wake up! You overdosed, you could've died." Now, would you not be defensive and angry? Because I know I would be. And on top of that, those strangers gave you a dose of naloxone, which has sent you into withdrawals, or what is better known as "dope sickness." Dope sickness makes you feel absolutely horrible. Some say it's like the flu, times ten. Nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, body aches. So not only did we, as strangers, wake you up, but we also made you feel really sick. So in turn, you, the patient, are not going to be very kind to us. And you're going to refuse further medical treatment. OK, well, then that's going to frustrate the heck out of us, and we're going to be mad, because you're ungrateful that we just saved your life. This is not a good dynamic here. What we are dealing with is a brain disorder that changes your thinking. It convinces you that you don't have a problem. So, this might have been not only the first time you've overdosed, it might have been the third, fourth or fifth time that we, personally, have revived you. This is not a good situation. Second, first responders do not receive much education on what substance use disorder is. Neither does the medical community. We're not trained how to deal with those suffering from substance use disorder. I am trained to put out many different types of fires. I am trained to save a life in the moment. But I am not trained to deal with the intricate interaction between first responders, the health care community, social services and the wider community that is necessary to save a life long-term. Thirdly, and this hits home. As a first responder, I consider myself the cavalry. We're knights in shining armor. We want to swoop in, do our job and leave feeling satisfied that we've made a difference in somebody's life. But that just doesn't happen when we're dealing with somebody with substance use disorder. We leave feeling frustrated and useless. We deal with the same people over and over again, with no positive outcome. And you know what? At some point, I realized that it is up to us as first responders and as a community to solve this problem, to find better ways to deal with those that are suffering. So what I did is I started observing more on overdoses. I started talking and listening to my patients. I wanted to know what led them to where they are. What exactly are they experiencing? What makes their situation worse? What makes their situation better? I began experimenting with my words and paying attention to my own actions and how it affected those of my patients. The education that I have received and continue to receive on a street level in Huntington has been both eye-opening and life-changing for me. So, in Huntington, West Virginia, we have come together as a community, and we are changing the way that we treat those that suffer from this horrible disease. We have started many programs, and it's making a difference. I'll tell you about just a few of those. Last year, we started a Quick Response Team, QRT for short. The team consists of a paramedic, a police officer, somebody in the recovery community and somebody in the faith community. As a team, they go out and visit people who have overdosed within 72 hours of that resuscitation. They talk. They listen. They build a rapport with that patient, and they offer them treatment options. Right now, about 30 percent or up to 30 percent of those that the Quick Response Team have reached out to have accepted some form of help. And the wonderful thing about this is the first responders who are involved in this team, they actually feel like they can make a difference. Positive change where there wasn't any. This year — (Applause) This year, we opened a free-standing specialty clinic, called PROACT, for those suffering from substance use disorder. It's a one-stop shop, if you will. A patient comes in, they're immediately assessed by somebody who's an addiction specialist. They work with them to provide treatment options based on their own needs, individual needs. This does several things for us. It gives first responders a place to either take or refer our patients who are no longer in a life-threatening situation, that have refused to go to the hospital. And it also clears up the overwhelmed emergency rooms in hospitals that we have. The third thing that I want to tell you about is very dear to me and very important to my team. We recently started a first responders self-care program. More and more ... first responders are experiencing compassion fatigue and PTSD. It is not uncommon for the average firefighter in Huntington to deal with or see up to five young deaths per month. These are their friends, these are their classmates. So this much-needed program will not only recognize their hard work, it's going to give them a voice. It's going to provide them with training that will help deal with the stress that they are under. And it will give them more mental-health options that they desperately need. We now have yoga classes in fire stations. (Laughter) (Applause) We've also provided on-duty massages, which is fabulous. (Laughter) And we have some off-duty programs that we've started, like cooking classes for first responders and their significant other and pottery classes. So a couple of months ago, I walked out on the apparatus floor, where I had some firefighters. And half of them had had a massage, and the other half were getting ready to have a massage. And I saw 10 firefighters who were bantering in a very positive, relaxed manner. And I hadn't seen that in years. And that relaxed state is trickling down to the community, to the citizens. So a couple of weeks ago, I had a neighbor overdose. Twenty-two years old. So of course, I hurried down to help my firefighters and my neighbor. And what I witnessed was my firefighters being supportive. Talking in a non-judgmental way. I watched as one of my firefighters showed the father and another family member how to provide rescue breaths, should this happen again. And left him with a bag valve mask. Positive change. Positive change. Did I happen to mention the two things that firefighters dislike the most? The way things are and change. (Laughter) You know, I recognize that there have been drug epidemics before. And I've seen what crack can do to a community. A lot of our critics think that this new compassionate response that we're doing in Huntington is because of race. That because the overdoses are happening so much to the white community. And I understand that criticism, because we as a country messed up. And we treated black people poorly during the crack epidemic. We can't forget that. And we must do better. But right now, what I know is people are dying. And we in Huntington deal with people suffering from substance use disorder of every color and every background, on the streets, every day. The job of a first responder: prevent unnecessary deaths. Period. So ... Obviously, I'm a stubborn firefighter and nurse. And I refuse to believe that there isn't a way around every barrier. One of the barriers that we have dealing with the opioid epidemic is stigma. So ... We in Huntington, West Virginia, are showing the rest of the country that change can happen. That there is hope dealing with this epidemic. Our current overdoses are down 40 percent. (Applause) Currently, our overdose deaths are down 50 percent. (Applause) This epidemic is far from over. But each and every one of us has a part to play in this epidemic. Just by listening and being kind to somebody, you have the ability to make a difference in their lives. Thank you and God bless. (Applause) |
Does your vote count? The Electoral College explained | null | TED-Ed | Most people have heard of the Electoral College during presidential election years. But what exactly is the Electoral College? Simply said, it is a group of people appointed by each state who formally elect the President and Vice President of the United States. To understand how this process began and how it continues today, we can look at the Constitution of the United States: article two, section one, clause two of the constitution. It specifies how many electors each state is entitled to have. Since 1964, there have been 538 electors in each presidential election. How do they decide on the number 538? Well, the number of electors is equal to the total voting membership of the United States Congress. 435 representatives, plus 100 senators, and 3 electors from the District of Columbia. Essentially, the Democratic candidate and Republican candidate are each trying to add up the electors in every state so that they surpass 270 electoral votes, or just over half the 538 votes, and win the presidency. So how do states even get electoral votes? Each state receives a particular number of electors based on population size. The census is conducted every 10 years, so every time the census happens, states might gain or lose a few electoral votes. Let's say you're a voter in California, a state with 55 electoral votes. If your candidate wins in California, they get all 55 of the state's electoral votes. If your candidate loses, they get none. This is why many presidential candidates want to win states like Texas, Florida, and New York. If you currently add up the electoral votes of those three states, you would have 96 electoral votes. Even if a candidate won North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Vermont, New Hampshire. Connecticut and West Virginia, they would only gain 31 electoral votes total from those eight states. Here is where it can get a little tricky. On a rare occasion, like in the year 2000, someone can win the popular vote but fail to gain 270 electoral votes. This means that the winner may have won and collected their electoral votes by small margins, winning just enough states with just enough electoral votes, but the losing candidate may have captured large voter margins in the remaining states. If this is the case, the very large margins secured by the losing candidate in the other states would add up to over 50% of the ballots cast nationally. Therefore, the losing candidate may have gained more than 50% of the ballots cast by voters, but failed to gain 270 of the electoral votes. Some critics of the electoral college argue the system gives an unfair advantage to states with large numbers of electoral votes. Think of it this way. It is possible for a candidate to not get a single person's vote — not one vote — in 39 states, or the District of Columbia, yet be elected president by winning the popular vote in just 11 of these 12 states: California, New York, Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Georgia or Virginia. This is why both parties pay attention to these states. However, others argue that the electoral college protects small states such as Rhode Island, Vermont and New Hampshire, and even geographically large states with small populations like Alaska, Wyoming and the Dakotas. That's because a candidate can't completely ignore small states, because in a close election, every electoral vote counts. There are certain states that have a long history of voting for a particular party. These are known as "safe states." For the past four election cycles — in 1996, 2000, 2004 and 2008 — Democrats could count on states like Oregon, Maryland, Michigan and Massachusetts, whereas the Republicans could count on states like Mississippi, Alabama, Kansas and Idaho. States that are teetering between between parties are called "swing states." In the past four election cycles, Ohio and Florida have been swing states, twice providing electoral votes for a Democratic candidate, and twice providing electoral votes for a Republican candidate. Think about it. Do you live in a safe state? If so, is it a Democratic or Republican safe state? Do you live in a swing state? Are your neighboring states swing or safe? Is the population in your state increasing or decreasing? And do not forget, when you are watching the electoral returns on election night every four years and the big map of the United States is on the screen, know that the magic number is 270 and start adding. |
Is light a particle or a wave? | null | TED-Ed | You look down and see a yellow pencil lying on your desk. Your eyes, and then your brain, are collecting all sorts of information about the pencil: its size, color, shape, distance, and more. But, how exactly does this happen? The ancient Greeks were the first to think more or less scientifically about what light is and how vision works. Some Greek philosophers, including Plato and Pythagoras, thought that light originated in our eyes and that vision happened when little, invisible probes were sent to gather information about far-away objects. It took over a thousand years before the Arab scientist, Alhazen, figured out that the old, Greek theory of light couldn't be right. In Alhazen's picture, your eyes don't send out invisible, intelligence-gathering probes, they simply collect the light that falls into them. Alhazen's theory accounts for a fact that the Greek's couldn't easily explain: why it gets dark sometimes. The idea is that very few objects actually emit their own light. The special, light-emitting objects, like the sun or a lightbulb, are known as sources of light. Most of the things we see, like that pencil on your desk, are simply reflecting light from a source rather than producing their own. So, when you look at your pencil, the light that hits your eye actually originated at the sun and has traveled millions of miles across empty space before bouncing off the pencil and into your eye, which is pretty cool when you think about it. But, what exactly is the stuff that is emitted from the sun and how do we see it? Is it a particle, like atoms, or is it a wave, like ripples on the surface of a pond? Scientists in the modern era would spend a couple of hundred years figuring out the answer to this question. Isaac Newton was one of the earliest. Newton believed that light is made up of tiny, atom-like particles, which he called corpuscles. Using this assumption, he was able to explain some properties of light. For example, refraction, which is how a beam of light appears to bend as it passes from air into water. But, in science, even geniuses sometimes get things wrong. In the 19th century, long after Newton died, scientists did a series of experiments that clearly showed that light can't be made up of tiny, atom-like particles. For one thing, two beams of light that cross paths don't interact with each other at all. If light were made of tiny, solid balls, then you would expect that some of the particles from Beam A would crash into some of the particles from Beam B. If that happened, the two particles involved in the collision would bounce off in random directions. But, that doesn't happen. The beams of light pass right through each other as you can check for yourself with two laser pointers and some chalk dust. For another thing, light makes interference patterns. Interference patterns are the complicated undulations that happen when two wave patterns occupy the same space. They can be seen when two objects disturb the surface of a still pond, and also when two point-like sources of light are placed near each other. Only waves make interference patterns, particles don't. And, as a bonus, understanding that light acts like a wave leads naturally to an explanation of what color is and why that pencil looks yellow. So, it's settled then, light is a wave, right? Not so fast! In the 20th century, scientists did experiments that appear to show light acting like a particle. For instance, when you shine light on a metal, the light transfers its energy to the atoms in the metal in discrete packets called quanta. But, we can't just forget about properties like interference, either. So these quanta of light aren't at all like the tiny, hard spheres Newton imagined. This result, that light sometimes behaves like a particle and sometimes behaves like a wave, led to a revolutionary new physics theory called quantum mechanics. So, after all that, let's go back to the question, "What is light?" Well, light isn't really like anything we're used to dealing with in our everyday lives. Sometimes it behaves like a particle and other times it behaves like a wave, but it isn't exactly like either. |
How to break bad management habits before they reach the next generation of leaders | {0: "BCG's Elizabeth Lyle challenges top leaders to create high-performance, future-ready organizational cultures."} | TED@BCG Toronto | I am guilty of stacking my dishes in the sink and leaving them there for hours. I fact-checked this with my boyfriend. He says it's less like hours and more like days, but that's not the point. The point is sometimes I don't finish the job until the stack has gotten high enough that it's peaking over the lip of the sink and my inner clean freak loses it. This charming habit developed when I was in college, and I had tons of excuses. "I'm running to class!" "What's one more dirty dish in the sink?" Or my favorite, "I think I can save time and water if I do them all together later." (Laughter) But it's not like I needed those excuses, because nobody was calling me on it. I wish they had. I look back now and realize that every time I didn't put a dish in the dishwasher and finish what I started, it became more second nature to me, and I grew less likely to question why I was doing it. Today, I'm a 30-something, certified dirty-dish leaver, and breaking this habit is hard. So when I'm not at home avoiding the sink, I work with large, complex organizations on leadership transformation in times of change. My job is to work with the most senior leaders to examine how they lead today and establish habits better suited for the future. But what interests me more than senior leaders these days is what's going on with the junior ones. We call them "middle managers," but it's a term I wish we could change because what they are is our pipeline of future talent for the C-suite, and they are starting to leave their dishes in the sink. While organizations are hiring people like me to redevelop their senior leaders for the future, outdated leadership habits are forming right before our eyes among the middle managers who will one day take their place. We need middle managers and senior leaders to work together, because this is a big problem. Organizations are evolving rapidly, and they're counting on their future leaders to lead with more speed, flexibility, trust and cooperation than they do today. I believe there is a window of time in the formative middle-manager years when we can lay the groundwork for that kind of leadership, but we're missing it. Why? Because our future leaders are learning from senior role models who just aren't ready to role model yet, much less change the systems that made them so successful. We need middle managers and senior leaders to work together to define a new way of leading and develop each other to rise to the occasion. One of my favorite senior clients — we'll call her Jane — is a poster child for what's old-fashioned in leadership today. She rose to her C-level position based on exceptional individual performance. Come hell or high water, Jane got the job done, and today, she leads like it. She is tough to please, she doesn't have a lot of time for things that's aren't mission-critical, and she really doesn't trust anyone's judgment more than her own. Needless to say, Jane's in behavior boot camp. Those deeply ingrained habits are deeply inconsistent with where her organization is heading. The command-and-control behavior that she was once rewarded for just isn't going to work in a faster-moving, flatter, more digitally interconnected organization. What got her here won't get her there. But I want to talk about John, a supertalented, up-and-coming manager who works for Jane, because her habits are rubbing off on him. Recently, he and I were strategizing about a decision we needed to put in front of the CEO, Jane's boss, and the rest of Jane's peers. He said to me, "Liz, you're not going to like this, but the way decisions get made around here is with a bunch of meetings before the meeting." I counted. That was going to mean eight one-on-ones, exec by exec, to make sure each one of them was individually on board enough that things would go smoothly in the actual meeting. He promised, "It's not how we'll do things in the future, but it's how we have to do them today." John wasn't wrong on either count. Meetings before the meeting are a necessary evil in his company today, and I didn't like it at all. Sure, it was going to be inefficient and annoying, but what bothered me most was his confidence that it's not how they'll do things in the future. How could he be sure? Who was going to change it and when, if it wasn't him and now? What would the trigger be? And when it happened, would he even know how to have effective meetings without pre-meetings? He was confidently implying that when he's the boss, he'll change the rules and do things differently, but all I could see were dishes stacking in the sink and a guy with a lot of good excuses. Worse, a guy who might be out of a job one day because he learned too late how to lead in the organizations of tomorrow. These stories really get to me when it's the fast-track, high-potential managers like John because they're probably the most capable of making waves and redefining how leaders lead from the inside. But what we find is that they're often doing the best job at not rocking the boat and challenging the system because they're trying to impress and make life easier on the senior leaders who will promote them. As someone who also likes to get promoted, I can hardly blame him. It's a catch-22. But they're also so self-assured that they'll be able to change their behavior once they've earned the authority to do things differently, and that is a trap. Because if I've learned anything from working with Jane, it's that when that day comes, John will wonder how he could possibly do anything differently in his high-stakes, high-pressure executive job without risking his own success and the organization's, and he'll wish it didn't feel so safe and so easy to keep doing things the way they've always been done. So the leadership development expert in me asks: How can we better intervene in the formative years of our soon-to-be senior leaders? How can we use the fact that John and his peers want to take charge of their professional destinies and get them ready to lead the organizations of the future, rather than let them succumb to the catch-22 that will perfectly prepare them to lead the organizations of the past? We'll have to start by coming to terms with a very real paradox, which is this: the best form of learning happens on the job — not in a classroom, not via e-modules. And the two things we rely on to shape on-the-job learning are role models and work environments. And as we just talked about, our role models are in behavior boot camp right now, and our work environments are undergoing unprecedented disruption. We are systematically changing just about everything about how organizations work, but by and large, still measuring and rewarding behavior based on old metrics, because changing those systems takes time. So, if we can't fully count on role models or the system right now, it's on John to not miss this critical development window. Yes, he'll need Jane's help to do it, but the responsibility is his because the risks are actually his. Either he inherits an organization that is failing because of stubbornly old-fashioned leadership, or he himself fails to build the capabilities to lead one that transformed while he was playing it safe. So now the question is, where does John start? If I were John, I'd ask to start flying the plane. For my 13th birthday, my grandpa, a former Navy pilot, gave me the gift of being able to fly a very small plane. Once we were safely airborne, the pilot turned over the controls, folded his hands, and he let me fly. It was totally terrifying. It was exhilarating, but it was also on-the-job learning with a safety net. And because it was real, I really learned how to do it myself. Likewise, in the workplace, every meeting to be led, every decision to be made can be a practice flight for someone who could really use the learning experience and the chance to figure out how to do it their own way. So instead of caving, John needs to knock on Jane's door, propose a creative strategy for having the meeting without the eight pre-meetings, show her he's thought through the trade-offs and ask for her support to do it differently. This isn't going to be easy for Jane. Not only does she need to trust John, she needs to accept that with a little bit of room to try his hand at leading, John will inevitably start leading in some ways that are far more John than Jane. And this won't be an indictment of her. Rather, it will be individualism. It will be progress. And it might even be a chance for Jane to learn a thing or two to take her own leadership game to the next level. I work with another senior client who summed up this dilemma beautifully when we were talking about why he and his peers haven't empowered the folks below them with more decision rights. He said, "We haven't done it because we just don't trust that they're going to make the right decisions. But then again, how could they? We've just never given them decisions to practice with." So I'm not advocating that Jane hands over the controls and folds her hands indefinitely, but what I am saying is that if she doesn't engineer learning and practice right into John's day today, he'll never be able to do what she does, much less do it any differently than she does it. Finally, since we're going to be pushing both of them outside their comfort zones, we need some outside coaches to make sure this isn't a case of the blind leading the blind. But what if instead of using coaches to coach each one of them to individually be more effective, we started coaching the interactions between them? If I could wave my magic wand, I would have coaches sitting in the occasional team meeting of Jane and her direct reports, debriefing solely on how well they cooperated that day. I would put a coach in the periodic feedback session between Jane and John, and just like a couples' therapist coaches on communication, they would offer advice and observations on how that conversation can go better in the future. Was Jane simply reinforcing what Jane would have done? Or was Jane really helping John think through what to do for the organization? That is seriously hard mentorship to provide, and even the best leaders need help doing it, which is why we need more coaches coaching more leaders, more in real time versus any one leader behind closed doors. Around 20 years ago, Warren Buffet gave a school lecture in which he said, "The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they're too heavy to be broken." I couldn't agree more, and I see it happening with our future leaders in training. Can we and they be doing more to build their leadership capabilities while they're still open, eager and not too far gone down a path of bad habits we totally saw coming? I wish my college roommates and I called each other out back then for the dishes. It would have been so much easier to nip that habit in the bud than it is to change it today. But I still believe in a future for myself full of gleaming sinks and busy dishwashers, and so we're working on it, every day, together, moment to moment, one dirty dish at a time. Thank you. (Applause) |
The history of the world according to cats | null | TED-Ed | On May 27th, 1941, the German battleship Bismarck sank in a fierce firefight, leaving only 118 of her 2,200 crew members alive. But when a British destroyer came to collect the prisoners, they found an unexpected survivor - a black and white cat clinging to a floating plank. For the next several months this cat hunted rats and raised British morale - until a sudden torpedo strike shattered the hull and sank the ship. But, miraculously, not the cat. Nicknamed Unsinkable Sam, he rode to Gibraltar with the rescued crew and served as a ship cat on three more vessels – one of which also sank - before retiring to the Belfast Home for Sailors. Many may not think of cats as serviceable sailors, or cooperative companions of any kind. But cats have been working alongside humans for thousands of years - helping us just as often as we help them. So how did these solitary creatures go from wild predator to naval officer to sofa sidekick? The domestication of the modern house cat can be traced back to more than 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, at the start of the Neolithic era. People were learning to bend nature to their will, producing much more food than farmers could eat at one time. These Neolithic farmers stored their excess grain in large pits and short, clay silos. But these stores of food attracted hordes of rodents, as well as their predator, Felis silvestris lybica - the wildcat found across North Africa and Southwest Asia. These wildcats were fast, fierce, carnivorous hunters. And they were remarkably similar in size and appearance to today’s domestic cats. The main differences being that ancient wildcats were more muscular, had striped coats, and were less social towards other cats and humans. The abundance of prey in rodent-infested granaries drew in these typically solitary animals. And as the wildcats learned to tolerate the presence of humans and other cats during mealtime, we think that farmers likewise tolerated the cats in exchange for free pest control. The relationship was so beneficial that the cats migrated with Neolithic farmers from Anatolia into Europe and the Mediterranean. Vermin were a major scourge of the seven seas. They ate provisions and gnawed at lines of rope, so cats had long since become essential sailing companions. Around the same time these Anatolian globe trotting cats set sail, the Egyptians domesticated their own local cats. Revered for their ability to dispatch venomous snakes, catch birds, and kill rats, domestic cats became important to Egyptian religious culture. They gained immortality in frescos, hieroglyphs, statues, and even tombs, mummified alongside their owners. Egyptian ship cats cruised the Nile, holding poisonous river snakes at bay. And after graduating to larger vessels, they too began to migrate from port to port. During the time of the Roman Empire, ships traveling between India and Egypt carried the lineage of the central Asian wildcat F. s. ornata. Centuries later, in the Middle Ages, Egyptian cats voyaged up to the Baltic Sea on the ships of Viking seafarers. And both the Near Eastern and North African wildcats – probably tamed at this point — continued to travel across Europe, eventually setting sail for Australia and the Americas. Today, most house cats have descended from either the Near Eastern or the Egyptian lineage of F.s.lybica. But close analysis of the genomes and coat patterns of modern cats tells us that unlike dogs, which have undergone centuries of selective breeding, modern cats are genetically very similar to ancient cats. And apart from making them more social and docile, we’ve done little to alter their natural behaviors. In other words, cats today are more or less as they’ve always been: Wild animals. Fierce hunters. Creatures that don’t see us as their keepers. And given our long history together, they might not be wrong. |
What is color? | null | TED-Ed | One of the most striking properties about life is that it has color. To understand the phenomenon of color, it helps to think about light as a wave. But, before we get to that, let's talk a little bit about waves in general. Imagine you're sitting on a boat on the ocean watching a cork bob up and down in the water. The first thing you notice about the motion is that it repeats itself. The cork traces the same path over and over again... up and down, up and down. This repetitive or periodic motion is characteristic of waves. Then you notice something else... using a stopwatch, you measure the time it takes for the piece of cork to go over its highest position down to its lowest and then back up again. Suppose this takes two seconds. To use the physics jargon, you've measured the period of the waves that cork is bobbing on. That is, how long it takes a wave to go through its full range of motion once. The same information can be expressed in a different way by calculating the wave's frequency. Frequency, as the name suggest, tells you how frequent the waves are. That is, how many of them go by in one second. If you know how many seconds one full wave takes, then it's easy to work out how many waves go by in one second. In this case, since each wave takes 2 seconds, the frequency is 0.5 waves per second. So enough about bobbing corks... What about light and color? If light is a wave, then it must have a frequency. Right? Well... yes, it does. And it turns out that we already have a name for the frequency of the light that our eyes detect. It's called color. That's right. Color is nothing more than a measure of how quickly the light waves are waving. If our eyes were quick enough, we might be able to observe this periodic motion directly, like we can with the cork and the ocean. But the frequency of the light we see is so high, it waves up and down about 400 million million times a second, that we can't possibly see it as a wave. But we can tell, by looking at its color, what its frequency is. The lowest frequency light that we can see is red and the highest frequency is purple. In between all the other frequencies form a continuous band of color, called the visible spectrum. So, what if you had a yellow pencil sitting on your desk? Well, the sun emits all colors of light, so light of all colors is hitting your pencil. The pencil looks yellow because it reflects yellow light more than it reflects the other colors. What happens to the blue, purple and red light? They get absorbed and the energy they are carrying is turned into heat. It is similar with objects of other colors. Blue things reflect blue light, red things reflect red light and so on. White objects reflect all colors of light, while black things do exactly the opposite and absorb at all frequencies. This - by the way - is why it's uncomfortable to wear your favorite Metallica t-shirt on a sunny day. |
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