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How we found hundreds of potential Earth-like planets | {0: 'Dimitar Sasselov works on uniting the physical and life sciences in the hunt for answers to the question of how life began.'} | TEDGlobal 2010 | Well, indeed, I'm very, very lucky. My talk essentially got written by three historic events that happened within days of each other in the last two months — seemingly unrelated, but as you will see, actually all having to do with the story I want to tell you today. The first one was actually a funeral — to be more precise, a reburial. On May 22nd, there was a hero's reburial in Frombork, Poland of the 16th-century astronomer who actually changed the world. He did that, literally, by replacing the Earth with the Sun in the center of the Solar System, and then with this simple-looking act, he actually launched a scientific and technological revolution, which many call the Copernican Revolution. Now that was, ironically, and very befittingly, the way we found his grave. As it was the custom of the time, Copernicus was actually simply buried in an unmarked grave, together with 14 others in that cathedral. DNA analysis, one of the hallmarks of the scientific revolution of the last 400 years that he started, was the way we found which set of bones actually belonged to the person who read all those astronomical books which were filled with leftover hair that was Copernicus' hair — obviously not many other people bothered to read these books later on. That match was unambiguous. The DNA matched, and we know that this was indeed Nicolaus Copernicus. Now, the connection between biology and DNA and life is very tantalizing when you talk about Copernicus because, even back then, his followers very quickly made the logical step to ask: if the Earth is just a planet, then what about planets around other stars? What about the idea of the plurality of the worlds, about life on other planets? In fact, I'm borrowing here from one of those very popular books of the time. And at the time, people actually answered that question positively: "Yes." But there was no evidence. And here begins 400 years of frustration, of unfulfilled dreams — the dreams of Galileo, Giordano Bruno, many others — which never led to the answer of those very basic questions which humanity has asked all the time. "What is life? What is the origin of life? Are we alone?" And that especially happened in the last 10 years, at the end of the 20th century, when the beautiful developments due to molecular biology, understanding the code of life, DNA, all of that seemed to actually put us, not closer, but further apart from answering those basic questions. Now, the good news. A lot has happened in the last few years, and let's start with the planets. Let's start with the old Copernican question: Are there earths around other stars? And as we already heard, there is a way in which we are trying, and now able, to answer that question. It's a new telescope. Our team, befittingly I think, named it after one of those dreamers of the Copernican time, Johannes Kepler, and that telescope's sole purpose is to go out, find the planets that orbit other stars in our galaxy, and tell us how often do planets like our own Earth happen to be out there. The telescope is actually built similarly to the, well-known to you, Hubble Space Telescope, except it does have an additional lens — a wide-field lens, as you would call it as a photographer. And if, in the next couple of months, you walk out in the early evening and look straight up and place you palm like this, you will actually be looking at the field of the sky where this telescope is searching for planets day and night, without any interruption, for the next four years. The way we do that, actually, is with a method, which we call the transit method. It's actually mini-eclipses that occur when a planet passes in front of its star. Not all of the planets will be fortuitously oriented for us to be able do that, but if you have a million stars, you'll find enough planets. And as you see on this animation, what Kepler is going to detect is just the dimming of the light from the star. We are not going to see the image of the star and the planet as this. All the stars for Kepler are just points of light. But we learn a lot from that: not only that there is a planet there, but we also learn its size. How much of the light is being dimmed depends on how big the planet is. We learn about its orbit, the period of its orbit and so on. So, what have we learned? Well, let me try to walk you through what we actually see and so you understand the news that I'm here to tell you today. What Kepler does is discover a lot of candidates, which we then follow up and find as planets, confirm as planets. It basically tells us this is the distribution of planets in size. There are small planets, there are bigger planets, there are big planets, okay. So we count many, many such planets, and they have different sizes. We do that in our solar system. In fact, even back during the ancients, the Solar System in that sense would look on a diagram like this. There will be the smaller planets, and there will be the big planets, even back to the time of Epicurus and then of course Copernicus and his followers. Up until recently, that was the Solar System — four Earth-like planets with small radius, smaller than about two times the size of the Earth — and that was of course Mercury, Venus, Mars, and of course the Earth, and then the two big, giant planets. Then the Copernican Revolution brought in telescopes, and of course three more planets were discovered. Now the total planet number in our solar system was nine. The small planets dominated, and there was a certain harmony to that, which actually Copernicus was very happy to note, and Kepler was one of the big proponents of. So now we have Pluto to join the numbers of small planets. But up until, literally, 15 years ago, that was all we knew about planets. And that's what the frustration was. The Copernican dream was unfulfilled. Finally, 15 years ago, the technology came to the point where we could discover a planet around another star, and we actually did pretty well. In the next 15 years, almost 500 planets were discovered orbiting other stars, with different methods. Unfortunately, as you can see, there was a very different picture. There was of course an explanation for it: We only see the big planets, so that's why most of those planets are really in the category of "like Jupiter." But you see, we haven't gone very far. We were still back where Copernicus was. We didn't have any evidence whether planets like the Earth are out there. And we do care about planets like the Earth because by now we understood that life as a chemical system really needs a smaller planet with water and with rocks and with a lot of complex chemistry to originate, to emerge, to survive. And we didn't have the evidence for that. So today, I'm here to actually give you a first glimpse of what the new telescope, Kepler, has been able to tell us in the last few weeks, and, lo and behold, we are back to the harmony and to fulfilling the dreams of Copernicus. You can see here, the small planets dominate the picture. The planets which are marked "like Earth," [are] definitely more than any other planets that we see. And now for the first time, we can say that. There is a lot more work we need to do with this. Most of these are candidates. In the next few years we will confirm them. But the statistical result is loud and clear. And the statistical result is that planets like our own Earth are out there. Our own Milky Way Galaxy is rich in this kind of planets. So the question is: what do we do next? Well, first of all, we can study them now that we know where they are. And we can find those that we would call habitable, meaning that they have similar conditions to the conditions that we experience here on Earth and where a lot of complex chemistry can happen. So, we can even put a number to how many of those planets now do we expect our own Milky Way Galaxy harbors. And the number, as you might expect, is pretty staggering. It's about 100 million such planets. That's great news. Why? Because with our own little telescope, just in the next two years, we'll be able to identify at least 60 of them. So that's great because then we can go and study them — remotely, of course — with all the techniques that we already have tested in the past five years. We can find what they're made of, would their atmospheres have water, carbon dioxide, methane. We know and expect that we'll see that. That's great, but that is not the whole news. That's not why I'm here. Why I'm here is to tell you that the next step is really the exciting part. The one that this step is enabling us to do is coming next. And here comes biology — biology, with its basic question, which still stands unanswered, which is essentially: "If there is life on other planets, do we expect it to be like life on Earth?" And let me immediately tell you here, when I say life, I don't mean "dolce vita," good life, human life. I really mean life on Earth, past and present, from microbes to us humans, in its rich molecular diversity, the way we now understand life on Earth as being a set of molecules and chemical reactions — and we call that, collectively, biochemistry, life as a chemical process, as a chemical phenomenon. So the question is: is that chemical phenomenon universal, or is it something which depends on the planet? Is it like gravity, which is the same everywhere in the universe, or there would be all kinds of different biochemistries wherever we find them? We need to know what we are looking for when we try to do that. And that's a very basic question, which we don't know the answer to, but which we can try — and we are trying — to answer in the lab. We don't need to go to space to answer that question. And so, that's what we are trying to do. And that's what many people now are trying to do. And a lot of the good news comes from that part of the bridge that we are trying to build as well. So this is one example that I want to show you here. When we think of what is necessary for the phenomenon that we call life, we think of compartmentalization, keeping the molecules which are important for life in a membrane, isolated from the rest of the environment, but yet, in an environment in which they actually could originate together. And in one of our labs, Jack Szostak's labs, it was a series of experiments in the last four years that showed that the environments — which are very common on planets, on certain types of planets like the Earth, where you have some liquid water and some clays — you actually end up with naturally available molecules which spontaneously form bubbles. But those bubbles have membranes very similar to the membrane of every cell of every living thing on Earth looks like, like this. And they really help molecules, like nucleic acids, like RNA and DNA, stay inside, develop, change, divide and do some of the processes that we call life. Now this is just an example to tell you the pathway in which we are trying to answer that bigger question about the universality of the phenomenon. And in a sense, you can think of that work that people are starting to do now around the world as building a bridge, building a bridge from two sides of the river. On one hand, on the left bank of the river, are the people like me who study those planets and try to define the environments. We don't want to go blind because there's too many possibilities, and there is not too much lab, and there is not enough human time to actually to do all the experiments. So that's what we are building from the left side of the river. From the right bank of the river are the experiments in the lab that I just showed you, where we actually tried that, and it feeds back and forth, and we hope to meet in the middle one day. So why should you care about that? Why am I trying to sell you a half-built bridge? Am I that charming? Well, there are many reasons, and you heard some of them in the short talk today. This understanding of chemistry actually can help us with our daily lives. But there is something more profound here, something deeper. And that deeper, underlying point is that science is in the process of redefining life as we know it. And that is going to change our worldview in a profound way — not in a dissimilar way as 400 years ago, Copernicus' act did, by changing the way we view space and time. Now it's about something else, but it's equally profound. And half the time, what's happened is it's related this kind of sense of insignificance to humankind, to the Earth in a bigger space. And the more we learn, the more that was reinforced. You've all learned that in school — how small the Earth is compared to the immense universe. And the bigger the telescope, the bigger that universe becomes. And look at this image of the tiny, blue dot. This pixel is the Earth. It is the Earth as we know it. It is seen from, in this case, from outside the orbit of Saturn. But it's really tiny. We know that. Let's think of life as that entire planet because, in a sense, it is. The biosphere is the size of the Earth. Life on Earth is the size of the Earth. And let's compare it to the rest of the world in spatial terms. What if that Copernican insignificance was actually all wrong? Would that make us more responsible for what is happening today? Let's actually try that. So in space, the Earth is very small. Can you imagine how small it is? Let me try it. Okay, let's say this is the size of the observable universe, with all the galaxies, with all the stars, okay, from here to here. Do you know what the size of life in this necktie will be? It will be the size of a single, small atom. It is unimaginably small. We can't imagine it. I mean look, you can see the necktie, but you can't even imagine seeing the size of a little, small atom. But that's not the whole story, you see. The universe and life are both in space and time. If that was the age of the universe, then this is the age of life on Earth. Think about those oldest living things on Earth, but in a cosmic proportion. This is not insignificant. This is very significant. So life might be insignificant in size, but it is not insignificant in time. Life and the universe compare to each other like a child and a parent, parent and offspring. So what does this tell us? This tells us that that insignificance paradigm that we somehow got to learn from the Copernican principle, it's all wrong. There is immense, powerful potential in life in this universe — especially now that we know that places like the Earth are common. And that potential, that powerful potential, is also our potential, of you and me. And if we are to be stewards of our planet Earth and its biosphere, we'd better understand the cosmic significance and do something about it. And the good news is we can actually, indeed do it. And let's do it. Let's start this new revolution at the tail end of the old one, with synthetic biology being the way to transform both our environment and our future. And let's hope that we can build this bridge together and meet in the middle. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
A headset that reads your brainwaves | {0: "Tan Le is the founder & CEO of Emotiv, a bioinformatics company that's working on identifying biomarkers for mental and other neurological conditions using electroencephalography (EEG)."} | TEDGlobal 2010 | Up until now, our communication with machines has always been limited to conscious and direct forms. Whether it's something simple like turning on the lights with a switch, or even as complex as programming robotics, we have always had to give a command to a machine, or even a series of commands, in order for it to do something for us. Communication between people, on the other hand, is far more complex and a lot more interesting because we take into account so much more than what is explicitly expressed. We observe facial expressions, body language, and we can intuit feelings and emotions from our dialogue with one another. This actually forms a large part of our decision-making process. Our vision is to introduce this whole new realm of human interaction into human-computer interaction so that computers can understand not only what you direct it to do, but it can also respond to your facial expressions and emotional experiences. And what better way to do this than by interpreting the signals naturally produced by our brain, our center for control and experience. Well, it sounds like a pretty good idea, but this task, as Bruno mentioned, isn't an easy one for two main reasons: First, the detection algorithms. Our brain is made up of billions of active neurons, around 170,000 km of combined axon length. When these neurons interact, the chemical reaction emits an electrical impulse, which can be measured. The majority of our functional brain is distributed over the outer surface layer of the brain, and to increase the area that's available for mental capacity, the brain surface is highly folded. Now this cortical folding presents a significant challenge for interpreting surface electrical impulses. Each individual's cortex is folded differently, very much like a fingerprint. So even though a signal may come from the same functional part of the brain, by the time the structure has been folded, its physical location is very different between individuals, even identical twins. There is no longer any consistency in the surface signals. Our breakthrough was to create an algorithm that unfolds the cortex, so that we can map the signals closer to its source, and therefore making it capable of working across a mass population. The second challenge is the actual device for observing brainwaves. EEG measurements typically involve a hairnet with an array of sensors, like the one that you can see here in the photo. A technician will put the electrodes onto the scalp using a conductive gel or paste and usually after a procedure of preparing the scalp by light abrasion. Now this is quite time consuming and isn't the most comfortable process. And on top of that, these systems actually cost in the tens of thousands of dollars. So with that, I'd like to invite onstage Evan Grant, who is one of last year's speakers, who's kindly agreed to help me to demonstrate what we've been able to develop. (Applause) So the device that you see is a 14-channel, high-fidelity EEG acquisition system. It doesn't require any scalp preparation, no conductive gel or paste. It only takes a few minutes to put on and for the signals to settle. It's also wireless, so it gives you the freedom to move around. And compared to the tens of thousands of dollars for a traditional EEG system, this headset only costs a few hundred dollars. Now on to the detection algorithms. So facial expressions — as I mentioned before in emotional experiences — are actually designed to work out of the box with some sensitivity adjustments available for personalization. But with the limited time we have available, I'd like to show you the cognitive suite, which is the ability for you to basically move virtual objects with your mind. Now, Evan is new to this system, so what we have to do first is create a new profile for him. He's obviously not Joanne — so we'll "add user." Evan. Okay. So the first thing we need to do with the cognitive suite is to start with training a neutral signal. With neutral, there's nothing in particular that Evan needs to do. He just hangs out. He's relaxed. And the idea is to establish a baseline or normal state for his brain, because every brain is different. It takes eight seconds to do this, and now that that's done, we can choose a movement-based action. So Evan, choose something that you can visualize clearly in your mind. Evan Grant: Let's do "pull." Tan Le: Okay, so let's choose "pull." So the idea here now is that Evan needs to imagine the object coming forward into the screen, and there's a progress bar that will scroll across the screen while he's doing that. The first time, nothing will happen, because the system has no idea how he thinks about "pull." But maintain that thought for the entire duration of the eight seconds. So: one, two, three, go. Okay. So once we accept this, the cube is live. So let's see if Evan can actually try and imagine pulling. Ah, good job! (Applause) That's really amazing. (Applause) So we have a little bit of time available, so I'm going to ask Evan to do a really difficult task. And this one is difficult because it's all about being able to visualize something that doesn't exist in our physical world. This is "disappear." So what you want to do — at least with movement-based actions, we do that all the time, so you can visualize it. But with "disappear," there's really no analogies — so Evan, what you want to do here is to imagine the cube slowly fading out, okay. Same sort of drill. So: one, two, three, go. Okay. Let's try that. Oh, my goodness. He's just too good. Let's try that again. EG: Losing concentration. (Laughter) TL: But we can see that it actually works, even though you can only hold it for a little bit of time. As I said, it's a very difficult process to imagine this. And the great thing about it is that we've only given the software one instance of how he thinks about "disappear." As there is a machine learning algorithm in this — (Applause) Thank you. Good job. Good job. (Applause) Thank you, Evan, you're a wonderful, wonderful example of the technology. So, as you can see, before, there is a leveling system built into this software so that as Evan, or any user, becomes more familiar with the system, they can continue to add more and more detections, so that the system begins to differentiate between different distinct thoughts. And once you've trained up the detections, these thoughts can be assigned or mapped to any computing platform, application or device. So I'd like to show you a few examples, because there are many possible applications for this new interface. In games and virtual worlds, for example, your facial expressions can naturally and intuitively be used to control an avatar or virtual character. Obviously, you can experience the fantasy of magic and control the world with your mind. And also, colors, lighting, sound and effects can dynamically respond to your emotional state to heighten the experience that you're having, in real time. And moving on to some applications developed by developers and researchers around the world, with robots and simple machines, for example — in this case, flying a toy helicopter simply by thinking "lift" with your mind. The technology can also be applied to real world applications — in this example, a smart home. You know, from the user interface of the control system to opening curtains or closing curtains. And of course, also to the lighting — turning them on or off. And finally, to real life-changing applications, such as being able to control an electric wheelchair. In this example, facial expressions are mapped to the movement commands. Man: Now blink right to go right. Now blink left to turn back left. Now smile to go straight. TL: We really — Thank you. (Applause) We are really only scratching the surface of what is possible today, and with the community's input, and also with the involvement of developers and researchers from around the world, we hope that you can help us to shape where the technology goes from here. Thank you so much. |
The bio-future of joint replacement | {0: "Kevin Stone's clinic treats joint injury using the latest in bio-medicine: reconstructing damaged tissue, even replacing whole joint parts, with lab-grown cartilage and ligament."} | TED2010 | So let me just start with my story. So I tore my knee joint meniscus cartilage playing soccer in college. Then I went on to tear my ACL, the ligament in my knee, and then developed an arthritic knee. And I'm sure that many of you in this audience have that same story, and, by the way, I married a woman who has exactly the same story. So this motivated me to become an orthopedic surgeon and to see if I couldn't focus on solutions for those problems that would keep me playing sports and not limit me. So with that, let me just show you a quick video to get you in the mood of what we're trying to explain. Narrator: We are all aware of the risk of cancer, but there's another disease that's destined to affect even more of us: arthritis. Cancer may kill you, but when you look at the numbers, arthritis ruins more lives. Assuming you live a long life, there's a 50 percent chance you'll develop arthritis. And it's not just aging that causes arthritis. Common injuries can lead to decades of pain, until our joints quite literally grind to a halt. Desperate for a solution, we've turned to engineering to design artificial components to replace our worn-out body parts, but in the midst of the modern buzz around the promises of a bionic body, shouldn't we stop and ask if there's a better, more natural way? Let's consider an alternative path. What if all the replacements our bodies need already exist in nature, or within our own stem cells? This is the field of biologic replacements, where we replace worn-out parts with new, natural ones. Kevin Stone: And so, the mission is: how do I treat these things biologically? And let's talk about both what I did for my wife, and what I've done for hundreds of other patients. First thing for my wife, and the most common thing I hear from my patients, particularly in the 40- to 80-year-old age group, 70-year-old age group, is they come in and say, "Hey, Doc, isn't there just a shock absorber you can put in my knee? I'm not ready for joint replacement." And so for her, I put in a human meniscus allograft donor right into that [knee] joint space. And [the allograft] replaces [the missing meniscus]. And then for that unstable ligament, we put in a human donor ligament to stabilize the knee. And then for the damaged arthritis on the surface, we did a stem cell paste graft, which we designed in 1991, to regrow that articular cartilage surface and give it back a smooth surface there. So here's my wife's bad knee on the left, and her just hiking now four months later in Aspen, and doing well. And it works, not just for my wife, but certainly for other patients. The girl on the video, Jen Hudak, just won the Superpipe in Aspen just nine months after having destroyed her knee, as you see in the other image — and having a paste graft to that knee. And so we can regrow these surfaces biologically. So with all this success, why isn't that good enough, you might ask. Well the reason is because there's not enough donor cycles. There's not enough young, healthy people falling off their motorcycle and donating that tissue to us. And the tissue's very expensive. And so that's not going to be a solution that's going to get us global with biologic tissue. But the solution is animal tissue because it's plentiful, it's cheap, you can get it from young, healthy tissues, but the barrier is immunology. And the specific barrier is a specific epitope called the galactosyl, or gal epitope. So if we're going to transplant animal tissues to people, we have to figure out a way to get rid of that epitope. So my story in working with animal tissues starts in 1984. And I started first with cow Achilles tendon, where we would take the cow Achilles tendon, which is type-I collagen, strip it of its antigens by degrading it with an acid and detergent wash and forming it into a regeneration template. We would then take that regeneration template and insert it into the missing meniscus cartilage to regrow that in a patient's knee. We've now done that procedure, and it's been done worldwide in over 4,000 cases, so it's an FDA-approved and worldwide-accepted way to regrow the meniscus. And that's great when I can degrade the tissue. But what happens for your ligament when I need an intact ligament? I can't grind it up in a blender. So in that case, I have to design — and we designed with Uri Galili and Tom Turek — an enzyme wash to wash away, or strip, those galactosyl epitopes with a specific enzyme. And we call that a "gal stripping" technique. What we do is humanize the tissue. It's by gal stripping that tissue we humanize it (Laughter), and then we can put it back into a patient's knee. And we've done that. Now we've taken pig ligament — young, healthy, big tissue, put it into 10 patients in an FDA-approved trial — and then one of our patients went on to have three Canadian Masters Downhill championships — on his "pig-lig," as he calls it. So we know it can work. And there's a wide clinical trial of this tissue now pending. So what about the next step? What about getting to a total biologic knee replacement, not just the parts? How are we going to revolutionize artificial joint replacement? Well here's how we're going to do it. So what we're going to do is take an articular cartilage from a young, healthy pig, strip it of its antigens, load it with your stem cells, then put it back on to that arthritic surface in your knee, tack it on there, have you heal that surface and then create a new biologic surface for your knee. So that's our biologic approach right now. We're going to rebuild your knee with the parts. We're going to resurface it with a completely new surface. But we have other advantages from the animal kingdom. There's a benefit of 400 million years of ambulation. We can harness those benefits. We can use thicker, younger, better tissues than you might have injured in your knee, or that you might have when you're 40, 50 or 60. We can do it as an outpatient procedure. We can strip that tissue very economically, and so this is how we can get biologic knee replacement to go global. And so welcome to super biologics. It's not hardware. It's not software. It's bioware. It's version 2.0 of you. And so with that, coming to a — (Laughter) coming to an operating theater near you soon, I believe. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The art of choosing | {0: "Sheena Iyengar studies how people choose (and what makes us think we're good at it)."} | TEDGlobal 2010 | Today, I'm going to take you around the world in 18 minutes. My base of operations is in the U.S., but let's start at the other end of the map, in Kyoto, Japan, where I was living with a Japanese family while I was doing part of my dissertational research 15 years ago. I knew even then that I would encounter cultural differences and misunderstandings, but they popped up when I least expected it. On my first day, I went to a restaurant, and I ordered a cup of green tea with sugar. After a pause, the waiter said, "One does not put sugar in green tea." "I know," I said. "I'm aware of this custom. But I really like my tea sweet." In response, he gave me an even more courteous version of the same explanation. "One does not put sugar in green tea." "I understand," I said, "that the Japanese do not put sugar in their green tea, but I'd like to put some sugar in my green tea." (Laughter) Surprised by my insistence, the waiter took up the issue with the manager. Pretty soon, a lengthy discussion ensued, and finally the manager came over to me and said, "I am very sorry. We do not have sugar." (Laughter) Well, since I couldn't have my tea the way I wanted it, I ordered a cup of coffee, which the waiter brought over promptly. Resting on the saucer were two packets of sugar. My failure to procure myself a cup of sweet, green tea was not due to a simple misunderstanding. This was due to a fundamental difference in our ideas about choice. From my American perspective, when a paying customer makes a reasonable request based on her preferences, she has every right to have that request met. The American way, to quote Burger King, is to "have it your way," because, as Starbucks says, "happiness is in your choices." (Laughter) But from the Japanese perspective, it's their duty to protect those who don't know any better — (Laughter) in this case, the ignorant gaijin — from making the wrong choice. Let's face it: the way I wanted my tea was inappropriate according to cultural standards, and they were doing their best to help me save face. Americans tend to believe that they've reached some sort of pinnacle in the way they practice choice. They think that choice, as seen through the American lens best fulfills an innate and universal desire for choice in all humans. Unfortunately, these beliefs are based on assumptions that don't always hold true in many countries, in many cultures. At times they don't even hold true at America's own borders. I'd like to discuss some of these assumptions and the problems associated with them. As I do so, I hope you'll start thinking about some of your own assumptions and how they were shaped by your backgrounds. First assumption: if a choice affects you, then you should be the one to make it. This is the only way to ensure that your preferences and interests will be most fully accounted for. It is essential for success. In America, the primary locus of choice is the individual. People must choose for themselves, sometimes sticking to their guns, regardless of what other people want or recommend. It's called "being true to yourself." But do all individuals benefit from taking such an approach to choice? Mark Lepper and I did a series of studies in which we sought the answer to this very question. In one study, which we ran in Japantown, San Francisco, we brought seven- to nine-year-old Anglo- and Asian-American children into the laboratory, and we divided them up into three groups. The first group came in, and they were greeted by Miss Smith, who showed them six big piles of anagram puzzles. The kids got to choose which pile of anagrams they would like to do, and they even got to choose which marker they would write their answers with. When the second group of children came in, they were brought to the same room, shown the same anagrams, but this time Miss Smith told them which anagrams to do and which markers to write their answers with. Now when the third group came in, they were told that their anagrams and their markers had been chosen by their mothers. (Laughter) In reality, the kids who were told what to do, whether by Miss Smith or their mothers, were actually given the very same activity, which their counterparts in the first group had freely chosen. With this procedure, we were able to ensure that the kids across the three groups all did the same activity, making it easier for us to compare performance. Such small differences in the way we administered the activity yielded striking differences in how well they performed. Anglo-Americans, they did two and a half times more anagrams when they got to choose them, as compared to when it was chosen for them by Miss Smith or their mothers. It didn't matter who did the choosing, if the task was dictated by another, their performance suffered. In fact, some of the kids were visibly embarrassed when they were told that their mothers had been consulted. (Laughter) One girl named Mary said, "You asked my mother?" (Laughter) In contrast, Asian-American children performed best when they believed their mothers had made the choice, second best when they chose for themselves, and least well when it had been chosen by Miss Smith. A girl named Natsumi even approached Miss Smith as she was leaving the room and tugged on her skirt and asked, "Could you please tell my mommy I did it just like she said?" The first-generation children were strongly influenced by their immigrant parents' approach to choice. For them, choice was not just a way of defining and asserting their individuality, but a way to create community and harmony by deferring to the choices of people whom they trusted and respected. If they had a concept of being true to one's self, then that self, most likely, [was] composed, not of an individual, but of a collective. Success was just as much about pleasing key figures as it was about satisfying one's own preferences. Or, you could say that the individual's preferences were shaped by the preferences of specific others. The assumption then that we do best when the individual self chooses only holds when that self is clearly divided from others. When, in contrast, two or more individuals see their choices and their outcomes as intimately connected, then they may amplify one another's success by turning choosing into a collective act. To insist that they choose independently might actually compromise both their performance and their relationships. Yet that is exactly what the American paradigm demands. It leaves little room for interdependence or an acknowledgment of individual fallibility. It requires that everyone treat choice as a private and self-defining act. People that have grown up in such a paradigm might find it motivating, but it is a mistake to assume that everyone thrives under the pressure of choosing alone. The second assumption which informs the American view of choice goes something like this. The more choices you have, the more likely you are to make the best choice. So bring it on, Walmart, with 100,000 different products, and Amazon, with 27 million books and Match.com with — what is it? — 15 million date possibilities now. You will surely find the perfect match. Let's test this assumption by heading over to Eastern Europe. Here, I interviewed people who were residents of formerly communist countries, who had all faced the challenge of transitioning to a more democratic and capitalistic society. One of the most interesting revelations came not from an answer to a question, but from a simple gesture of hospitality. When the participants arrived for their interview, I offered them a set of drinks: Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite — seven, to be exact. During the very first session, which was run in Russia, one of the participants made a comment that really caught me off guard. "Oh, but it doesn't matter. It's all just soda. That's just one choice." (Murmuring) I was so struck by this comment that from then on, I started to offer all the participants those seven sodas, and I asked them, "How many choices are these?" Again and again, they perceived these seven different sodas, not as seven choices, but as one choice: soda or no soda. When I put out juice and water in addition to these seven sodas, now they perceived it as only three choices — juice, water and soda. Compare this to the die-hard devotion of many Americans, not just to a particular flavor of soda, but to a particular brand. You know, research shows repeatedly that we can't actually tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi. Of course, you and I know that Coke is the better choice. (Laughter) For modern Americans who are exposed to more options and more ads associated with options than anyone else in the world, choice is just as much about who they are as it is about what the product is. Combine this with the assumption that more choices are always better, and you have a group of people for whom every little difference matters and so every choice matters. But for Eastern Europeans, the sudden availability of all these consumer products on the marketplace was a deluge. They were flooded with choice before they could protest that they didn't know how to swim. When asked, "What words and images do you associate with choice?" Grzegorz from Warsaw said, "Ah, for me it is fear. There are some dilemmas you see. I am used to no choice." Bohdan from Kiev said, in response to how he felt about the new consumer marketplace, "It is too much. We do not need everything that is there." A sociologist from the Warsaw Survey Agency explained, "The older generation jumped from nothing to choice all around them. They were never given a chance to learn how to react." And Tomasz, a young Polish man said, "I don't need twenty kinds of chewing gum. I don't mean to say that I want no choice, but many of these choices are quite artificial." In reality, many choices are between things that are not that much different. The value of choice depends on our ability to perceive differences between the options. Americans train their whole lives to play "spot the difference." They practice this from such an early age that they've come to believe that everyone must be born with this ability. In fact, though all humans share a basic need and desire for choice, we don't all see choice in the same places or to the same extent. When someone can't see how one choice is unlike another, or when there are too many choices to compare and contrast, the process of choosing can be confusing and frustrating. Instead of making better choices, we become overwhelmed by choice, sometimes even afraid of it. Choice no longer offers opportunities, but imposes constraints. It's not a marker of liberation, but of suffocation by meaningless minutiae. In other words, choice can develop into the very opposite of everything it represents in America when it is thrust upon those who are insufficiently prepared for it. But it is not only other people in other places that are feeling the pressure of ever-increasing choice. Americans themselves are discovering that unlimited choice seems more attractive in theory than in practice. We all have physical, mental and emotional (Laughter) limitations that make it impossible for us to process every single choice we encounter, even in the grocery store, let alone over the course of our entire lives. A number of my studies have shown that when you give people 10 or more options when they're making a choice, they make poorer decisions, whether it be health care, investment, other critical areas. Yet still, many of us believe that we should make all our own choices and seek out even more of them. This brings me to the third, and perhaps most problematic, assumption: "You must never say no to choice." To examine this, let's go back to the U.S. and then hop across the pond to France. Right outside Chicago, a young couple, Susan and Daniel Mitchell, were about to have their first baby. They'd already picked out a name for her, Barbara, after her grandmother. One night, when Susan was seven months pregnant, she started to experience contractions and was rushed to the emergency room. The baby was delivered through a C-section, but Barbara suffered cerebral anoxia, a loss of oxygen to the brain. Unable to breathe on her own, she was put on a ventilator. Two days later, the doctors gave the Mitchells a choice: They could either remove Barbara off the life support, in which case she would die within a matter of hours, or they could keep her on life support, in which case she might still die within a matter of days. If she survived, she would remain in a permanent vegetative state, never able to walk, talk or interact with others. What do they do? What do any parent do? In a study I conducted with Simona Botti and Kristina Orfali, American and French parents were interviewed. They had all suffered the same tragedy. In all cases, the life support was removed, and the infants had died. But there was a big difference. In France, the doctors decided whether and when the life support would be removed, while in the United States, the final decision rested with the parents. We wondered: does this have an effect on how the parents cope with the loss of their loved one? We found that it did. Even up to a year later, American parents were more likely to express negative emotions, as compared to their French counterparts. French parents were more likely to say things like, "Noah was here for so little time, but he taught us so much. He gave us a new perspective on life." American parents were more likely to say things like, "What if? What if?" Another parent complained, "I feel as if they purposefully tortured me. How did they get me to do that?" And another parent said, "I feel as if I've played a role in an execution." But when the American parents were asked if they would rather have had the doctors make the decision, they all said, "No." They could not imagine turning that choice over to another, even though having made that choice made them feel trapped, guilty, angry. In a number of cases they were even clinically depressed. These parents could not contemplate giving up the choice, because to do so would have gone contrary to everything they had been taught and everything they had come to believe about the power and purpose of choice. In her essay, "The White Album," Joan Didion writes, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the idea with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience." The story Americans tell, the story upon which the American dream depends, is the story of limitless choice. This narrative promises so much: freedom, happiness, success. It lays the world at your feet and says, "You can have anything, everything." It's a great story, and it's understandable why they would be reluctant to revise it. But when you take a close look, you start to see the holes, and you start to see that the story can be told in many other ways. Americans have so often tried to disseminate their ideas of choice, believing that they will be, or ought to be, welcomed with open hearts and minds. But the history books and the daily news tell us it doesn't always work out that way. The phantasmagoria, the actual experience that we try to understand and organize through narrative, varies from place to place. No single narrative serves the needs of everyone everywhere. Moreover, Americans themselves could benefit from incorporating new perspectives into their own narrative, which has been driving their choices for so long. Robert Frost once said that, "It is poetry that is lost in translation." This suggests that whatever is beautiful and moving, whatever gives us a new way to see, cannot be communicated to those who speak a different language. But Joseph Brodsky said that, "It is poetry that is gained in translation," suggesting that translation can be a creative, transformative act. When it comes to choice, we have far more to gain than to lose by engaging in the many translations of the narratives. Instead of replacing one story with another, we can learn from and revel in the many versions that exist and the many that have yet to be written. No matter where we're from and what your narrative is, we all have a responsibility to open ourselves up to a wider array of what choice can do, and what it can represent. And this does not lead to a paralyzing moral relativism. Rather, it teaches us when and how to act. It brings us that much closer to realizing the full potential of choice, to inspiring the hope and achieving the freedom that choice promises but doesn't always deliver. If we learn to speak to one another, albeit through translation, then we can begin to see choice in all its strangeness, complexity and compelling beauty. Thank you. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thank you. Sheena, there is a detail about your biography that we have not written in the program book. But by now it's evident to everyone in this room. You're blind. And I guess one of the questions on everybody's mind is: How does that influence your study of choosing because that's an activity that for most people is associated with visual inputs like aesthetics and color and so on? Sheena Iyengar: Well, it's funny that you should ask that because one of the things that's interesting about being blind is you actually get a different vantage point when you observe the way sighted people make choices. And as you just mentioned, there's lots of choices out there that are very visual these days. Yeah, I — as you would expect — get pretty frustrated by choices like what nail polish to put on because I have to rely on what other people suggest. And I can't decide. And so one time I was in a beauty salon, and I was trying to decide between two very light shades of pink. And one was called "Ballet Slippers." And the other one was called "Adorable." (Laughter) And so I asked these two ladies, and the one lady told me, "Well, you should definitely wear 'Ballet Slippers.'" "Well, what does it look like?" "Well, it's a very elegant shade of pink." "Okay, great." The other lady tells me to wear "Adorable." "What does it look like?" "It's a glamorous shade of pink." And so I asked them, "Well, how do I tell them apart? What's different about them?" And they said, "Well, one is elegant, the other one's glamorous." Okay, we got that. And the only thing they had consensus on: well, if I could see them, I would clearly be able to tell them apart. (Laughter) And what I wondered was whether they were being affected by the name or the content of the color, so I decided to do a little experiment. So I brought these two bottles of nail polish into the laboratory, and I stripped the labels off. And I brought women into the laboratory, and I asked them, "Which one would you pick?" 50 percent of the women accused me of playing a trick, of putting the same color nail polish in both those bottles. (Laughter) (Applause) At which point you start to wonder who the trick's really played on. Now, of the women that could tell them apart, when the labels were off, they picked "Adorable," and when the labels were on, they picked "Ballet Slippers." So as far as I can tell, a rose by any other name probably does look different and maybe even smells different. BG: Thank you. Sheena Iyengar. Thank you Sheena. (Applause) |
Wiring an interactive ocean | {0: "John Delaney leads the team that is building a cabled network of deep-ocean sensors that will study, over time and space, the way the ocean's complex processes interact. By networking the ocean to gather data, he's helping to revolutionize ocean science."} | Mission Blue Voyage | For a moment, what I need to do is project something on the screen of your imagination. We're in 17th century Japan on the west coast, and a little, wizened monk is hurrying along, near midnight, to the crest of a small hill. He arrives on the small hill, dripping with water. He stands there, and he looks across at the island, Sado. And he scans across the ocean, and he looks at the sky. Then he says to himself, very quietly, "[Turbulent the sea,] [Stretching across to Sado] [The Milky Way]." Basho was a brilliant man. He said more with less than any human that I have ever read or talked to. Basho, in 17 syllables, juxtaposed a turbulent ocean driven by a storm now past, and captured the almost impossible beauty of our home galaxy with millions of stars, probably hundreds and hundreds of — who knows how many — planets, maybe even an ocean that we will probably call Sylvia in time. As he was nearing his death, his disciples and followers kept asking him, "What's the secret? How can you make haiku poems so beautiful so easily?" And toward the end, he said, "If you would know the pine tree, go to the pine tree." That was it. (Laughter) Sylvia has said we must use every capacity we have in order to know the oceans. If we would know the oceans, we must go to the oceans. And what I'd like to talk to you today about, a little bit, is really transforming the relationship, or the interplay, between humans and oceans with a new capability that is not at all routine yet. I hope it will be. There are a few key points. One of them is the oceans are central to the quality of life on earth. Another is that there are bold, new ways of studying oceans that we have not used well yet. And the last is that these bold, new ways that we are exploring as a community will transform the way we look at our planet, our oceans, and eventually how we manage probably the entire planet, for what it's worth. So what scientists do when they begin is to start with the system. They define what the system is. The system isn't Chesapeake Bay. It's not the Kuril arc. It's not even the entire Pacific. It's the whole planet, the entire planet, continents and oceans together. That's the system. And basically, our challenge is to optimize the benefits and mitigate the risks of living on a planet that's driven by only two processes, two sources of energy, one of which is solar, that drives the winds, the waves, the clouds, the storms and photosynthesis. The second one is internal energy. And these two war against one another almost continuously. Mountain ranges, plate tectonics, moves the continents around, forms ore deposits. Volcanoes erupt. That's the planet that we live on. It's immensely complex. Now I don't expect all of you to see all the details here, but what I want you to see is this is about 10 percent of the processes that operate within the oceans almost continuously, and have for the last 4 billion years. This is a system that's been around a very long time. And these have all co-evolved. What do I mean by that? They interact with one another constantly. All of them interact with one another. So the complexity of this system that we're looking at, the one driven by the sun — upper portion, mostly — and the lower portion is partly driven by the input from heat below and by other processes. This is very, very important because this is the system, this is the crucible, out of which life on the planet came, and it's now time for us to understand it. We must understand it. That's one of the themes that Sylvia reminds us about: understand this ocean of ours, this basic life support system, the dominant life support system on the planet. Look at this complexity here. This is only one variable. If you can see the complexity, you can see how tiny, little eddies and large eddies and the motion — this is just sea surface temperature, but it's immensely complicated. Now a layer in, the other two or three hundred processes that are all interacting, partly as a function of temperature, partly as a function of all the other factors, and you've got a really complicated system. That's our challenge, is to understand, understand this system in new and phenomenal ways. And there's an urgency to this. Part of the urgency comes from the fact that, of order, a billion people on the planet currently are undernourished or starving. And part of the issue is for Cody — who's here, 16 years old — and I have permission to relay this number. When he, 40 years from now, is the age of Nancy Brown, there are going to be another two and a half billion people on the planet. We can't solve all the problems by looking only at the oceans, but if we don't understand the fundamental life support system of this planet much more thoroughly than we do now, then the stresses that we will face, and that Cody will face, and even Nancy, who's going to live till she's 98, will have really problems coping. All right, let's talk about another perspective on the importance of the oceans. Look at this diagram, which is showing warm waters in red, cool waters in blue, and on the continents, what you're seeing in bright green, is the growth of vegetation, and in olive green, the dieback of vegetation. And in the lower left hand corner there's a clock ticking away from 1982 to 1998 and then cycling again. What you'll see is that the rhythms of growth, of vegetation — a subset of which is food on the continents — is directly tied to the rhythms of the sea surface temperatures. The oceans control, or at least significantly influence, correlate with, the growth patterns and the drought patterns and the rain patterns on the continents. So people in Kansas, in a wheat field in Kansas, need to understand that the oceans are central to them as well. Another complexity: this is the age of the oceans. I'm going to layer in on top of this the tectonic plates. The age of the ocean, the tectonic plates, gives rise to a totally new phenomenon that we have heard about in this conference. And I share with you some very high-definition video that we collected in real time. Seconds after this video was taken, people in Beijing, people in Sydney, people in Amsterdam, people in Washington D.C. were watching this. Now you've heard of hydrothermal vents, but the other discovery is that deep below the sea floor, there is vast reservoir of microbial activity, which we have only just discovered and we have almost no way to study. Some people have estimated that the biomass tied up in these microbes living in the pours and the cracks of the sea floor and below rival the total amount of living biomass at the surface of the planet. It's an astonishing insight, and we have only found out about this recently. This is very, very exciting. It may be the next rainforest, in terms of pharmaceuticals. We know little or nothing about it. Well, Marcel Proust has this wonderful saying that, "The real voyage of discovery consists not so much in seeking new territory, but possibly in having new sets of eyes," new ways of seeing things, a new mindset. And many of you remember the early stages of oceanography, when we had to use what we had at our fingertips. And it wasn't easy. It wasn't easy in those days. Some of you remember this, I'm sure. And now, we have an entire suite of tools that are really pretty powerful — ships, satellites, moorings. But they don't quite cut it. They don't quite give us what we need. And the program that I wanted to talk to you about just a little bit here, was funded, and it involves autonomous vehicles like the one running across the base of this image. Modeling: on the right hand side, there's a very complex computational model. On the left hand side, there's a new type of mooring, which I'll show you in just a second. And on the basis of several points, the oceans are complex, and they're central to the life on earth. They are changing rapidly, but not predictably. And the models that we need to predict the future do not have enough data to refine them. The computational power is amazing. But without data, those models will never ever be predicted. And that's what we really need. For a variety of reasons they're dangerous, but we feel that OOI, this Ocean Observatory Initiative, which the National Science Foundation has begun to fund, has the potential to really transform things. And the goal of the program is to launch an era of scientific discovery and understanding across and within the ocean basins, utilizing widely accessible, interactive telepresence. It's a new world. We will be present throughout the volume of the ocean, at will, communicating in real time. And this is what the system involves, a number of sites in the southern hemisphere, shown in those circles. And in the northern hemisphere there are four sites. I won't talk a lot about most of them right here, but the one on the west coast, that's in the box, is called the regional scale nodes. It was once called Neptune. And let me show you what's behind it. Fiber: next-generation way of communicating. You can see the copper tips on these things. You can transmit power, but the bandwidth is in those tiny, little threads smaller than the hair on your head in diameter. And this particular set here can transmit something of the order of three to five terabits per second. This is phenomenal bandwidth. And this is what the planet looks like. We are already laced up as if we're in a fiber optic corset, if you like. This is what it looks like. And the cables go really continent to continent. It's a very powerful system, and most of our communications consist of it. So this is the system that I'm talking about, off the west coast. It's coincident with the tectonic plate, the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate. And it's going to deliver abundant power and unprecedented bandwidth across this entire volume — in the overlying ocean, on the sea floor and below the sea floor. Bandwidth and power and a wide variety of processes that will be operating. This is what one of those primary nodes looks like, and it's like a sub station with power and bandwidth that can spread out over an area the size of Seattle. And the kind of science that can be done will be determined by a variety of scientists who want to be involved and can bring the instrumentation to the table. They will bring it and link it in. It'll be, in a sense, like having time on a telescope, except you'll have your own port. Climate change, ocean acidification, dissolved oxygen, carbon cycle, coastal upwelling, fishing dynamics — the full spectrum of earth science and ocean science simultaneously in the same volume. So anyone coming along later simply accesses the database and can draw down the information they need about anything that has taken place. And this is just the first of these. In conjunction with our Canadian colleagues, we've set this up. Now I want to take you into the caldera. On the left hand side there is a large volcano called Axial Seamount. And we're going to go down into the Axial Seamount using animation. Here's what this system is going to look like that we are funded to build at this point. Very powerful. That's an elevator that's constantly moving up and down, but it can be controlled by the folks on land who are responsible for it. Or they can transfer control to someone in India or China who can take over for a while, because it's all going to be directly connected through the Internet. There will be massive amounts of data flowing ashore, all available to anyone who has any interest in using it. This is going to be much more powerful than having a single ship in a single location, then move to a new location. We're flying across the caldera floor. There is a number of robotic systems. There's cameras that can be turned on and off at your will, if those are your experiments. The kinds of systems that will be down there, the kinds of instruments that will be on the sea floor, consist of — if you can read them there — there's cameras, there's pressure sensors, fluorometers, there's seismometers. It's a full spectrum of tools. Now, that mound right there actually looks like this. This is what it actually looks like. And this is the kind of activity that we can see with high-definition video, because the bandwidth of these cables is so huge that we could have five to 10 stereo HD systems running continuously and, again, directed through robotic techniques from land. Very, very powerful. And these are the things that we're funded to do today. So what can we actually do tomorrow? We're about to ride the wave of technological opportunity. There are emerging technologies throughout the field around oceanography, which we will incorporate into oceanography, and through that convergence, we will transform oceanography into something even more magical. Robotics systems are just incredible these days, absolutely incredible. And we will be bringing robotics of all sorts into the ocean. Nanotechnology: this is a small generator. It's smaller than a postage stamp, and it can generate power just by being attached to your shirt as you move. Just as you move, it generates power. There are many kinds of things that can be used in the ocean, continuously. Imaging: Many of you know a good deal more about this type of thing than I, but stereo imaging at four times the definition that we have in HD will be routine within five years. And this is the magic one. As a result of the human genome process, we are in a situation where events that take place in the ocean — like an erupting volcano, or something of that sort — can actually be sampled. We pump the fluid through one of these systems, and we press the button, and it's analyzed for the genomic character. And that's transmitted back to land immediately. So in the volume of the ocean, we will know, not just the physics and the chemistry, but the base of the food chain will be transparent to us with data on a continuous basis. Grid computing: the power of grid computers is going to be just amazing here. We will soon be using grid computing to do pretty much everything, like adjust the data and everything that goes with the data. The power generation will come from the ocean itself. And the next generation fiber will be simply magic. It's far beyond what we currently have. So the presence of the power and the bandwidth in the environment will allow all of these new technologies to converge in a manner that is just unprecedented. So within five to seven years, I see us having a capacity to be completely present throughout the ocean and have all of that connected to the Internet, so we can reach many, many folks. Delivering the power and the bandwidth into the ocean will dramatically accelerate adaptation. Here's an example. When earthquakes take place, massive amounts of these new microbes we've never seen before come out of the sea floor. We have a way of addressing that, a new way of addressing that. We've determined from the earthquake activity that you're seeing here that the top of that volcano is erupting, so we deploy the troops. What are the troops? The troops are the autonomous vehicles, of course. And they fly into the erupting volcano. They sample the fluids coming out of the sea floor during an eruption, which have the microbes that have never been to the surface of the planet before. They eject it to the surface where it floats, and it is picked up by an autonomous airplane, and it's brought back to the laboratory within 24 hours of the eruption. This is doable. All the pieces are there. A laboratory: many of you heard what happened on 9/7. Some doctors in New York City removed the gallbladder of a woman in France. We could do work on the sea floor that would be stunning, and it would be on live TV, if we have interesting things to show. So we can bring an entirely new telepresence to the world, throughout the ocean. This — I've shown you sea floor — but so the goal here is real time interaction with the oceans from anywhere on earth. It's going to be amazing. And as I go here, I just want to show you what we can bring into classrooms, and indeed, what we can bring into your pocket. Many of you don't think of this yet, but the ocean will be in your pocket. It won't be long. It won't be long. So let me leave you then with a few words from another poet, if you'll forgive me. In 1943, T.S. Eliot wrote the "Four Quartets." He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948. In "Little Gidding" he says — speaking I think for the human race, but certainly for the TED Conference and Sylvia — "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time, arrive through the unknown remembered gate where the last of earth left to discover is that which was the beginning. At the source of the longest river the voice of a hidden waterfall not known because not looked for, but heard, half heard in the stillness beneath the waves of the sea." Thank you. (Applause) |
A monkey economy as irrational as ours | {0: 'Laurie Santos studies primate psychology and monkeynomics -- testing problems in human psychology on primates, who (not so surprisingly) have many of the same predictable irrationalities we do.'} | TEDGlobal 2010 | I want to start my talk today with two observations about the human species. The first observation is something that you might think is quite obvious, and that's that our species, Homo sapiens, is actually really, really smart — like, ridiculously smart — like you're all doing things that no other species on the planet does right now. And this is, of course, not the first time you've probably recognized this. Of course, in addition to being smart, we're also an extremely vain species. So we like pointing out the fact that we're smart. You know, so I could turn to pretty much any sage from Shakespeare to Stephen Colbert to point out things like the fact that we're noble in reason and infinite in faculties and just kind of awesome-er than anything else on the planet when it comes to all things cerebral. But of course, there's a second observation about the human species that I want to focus on a little bit more, and that's the fact that even though we're actually really smart, sometimes uniquely smart, we can also be incredibly, incredibly dumb when it comes to some aspects of our decision making. Now I'm seeing lots of smirks out there. Don't worry, I'm not going to call anyone in particular out on any aspects of your own mistakes. But of course, just in the last two years we see these unprecedented examples of human ineptitude. And we've watched as the tools we uniquely make to pull the resources out of our environment kind of just blow up in our face. We've watched the financial markets that we uniquely create — these markets that were supposed to be foolproof — we've watched them kind of collapse before our eyes. But both of these two embarrassing examples, I think, don't highlight what I think is most embarrassing about the mistakes that humans make, which is that we'd like to think that the mistakes we make are really just the result of a couple bad apples or a couple really sort of FAIL Blog-worthy decisions. But it turns out, what social scientists are actually learning is that most of us, when put in certain contexts, will actually make very specific mistakes. The errors we make are actually predictable. We make them again and again. And they're actually immune to lots of evidence. When we get negative feedback, we still, the next time we're face with a certain context, tend to make the same errors. And so this has been a real puzzle to me as a sort of scholar of human nature. What I'm most curious about is, how is a species that's as smart as we are capable of such bad and such consistent errors all the time? You know, we're the smartest thing out there, why can't we figure this out? In some sense, where do our mistakes really come from? And having thought about this a little bit, I see a couple different possibilities. One possibility is, in some sense, it's not really our fault. Because we're a smart species, we can actually create all kinds of environments that are super, super complicated, sometimes too complicated for us to even actually understand, even though we've actually created them. We create financial markets that are super complex. We create mortgage terms that we can't actually deal with. And of course, if we are put in environments where we can't deal with it, in some sense makes sense that we actually might mess certain things up. If this was the case, we'd have a really easy solution to the problem of human error. We'd actually just say, okay, let's figure out the kinds of technologies we can't deal with, the kinds of environments that are bad — get rid of those, design things better, and we should be the noble species that we expect ourselves to be. But there's another possibility that I find a little bit more worrying, which is, maybe it's not our environments that are messed up. Maybe it's actually us that's designed badly. This is a hint that I've gotten from watching the ways that social scientists have learned about human errors. And what we see is that people tend to keep making errors exactly the same way, over and over again. It feels like we might almost just be built to make errors in certain ways. This is a possibility that I worry a little bit more about, because, if it's us that's messed up, it's not actually clear how we go about dealing with it. We might just have to accept the fact that we're error prone and try to design things around it. So this is the question my students and I wanted to get at. How can we tell the difference between possibility one and possibility two? What we need is a population that's basically smart, can make lots of decisions, but doesn't have access to any of the systems we have, any of the things that might mess us up — no human technology, human culture, maybe even not human language. And so this is why we turned to these guys here. These are one of the guys I work with. This is a brown capuchin monkey. These guys are New World primates, which means they broke off from the human branch about 35 million years ago. This means that your great, great, great great, great, great — with about five million "greats" in there — grandmother was probably the same great, great, great, great grandmother with five million "greats" in there as Holly up here. You know, so you can take comfort in the fact that this guy up here is a really really distant, but albeit evolutionary, relative. The good news about Holly though is that she doesn't actually have the same kinds of technologies we do. You know, she's a smart, very cut creature, a primate as well, but she lacks all the stuff we think might be messing us up. So she's the perfect test case. What if we put Holly into the same context as humans? Does she make the same mistakes as us? Does she not learn from them? And so on. And so this is the kind of thing we decided to do. My students and I got very excited about this a few years ago. We said, all right, let's, you know, throw so problems at Holly, see if she messes these things up. First problem is just, well, where should we start? Because, you know, it's great for us, but bad for humans. We make a lot of mistakes in a lot of different contexts. You know, where are we actually going to start with this? And because we started this work around the time of the financial collapse, around the time when foreclosures were hitting the news, we said, hhmm, maybe we should actually start in the financial domain. Maybe we should look at monkey's economic decisions and try to see if they do the same kinds of dumb things that we do. Of course, that's when we hit a sort second problem — a little bit more methodological — which is that, maybe you guys don't know, but monkeys don't actually use money. I know, you haven't met them. But this is why, you know, they're not in the queue behind you at the grocery store or the ATM — you know, they don't do this stuff. So now we faced, you know, a little bit of a problem here. How are we actually going to ask monkeys about money if they don't actually use it? So we said, well, maybe we should just, actually just suck it up and teach monkeys how to use money. So that's just what we did. What you're looking at over here is actually the first unit that I know of of non-human currency. We weren't very creative at the time we started these studies, so we just called it a token. But this is the unit of currency that we've taught our monkeys at Yale to actually use with humans, to actually buy different pieces of food. It doesn't look like much — in fact, it isn't like much. Like most of our money, it's just a piece of metal. As those of you who've taken currencies home from your trip know, once you get home, it's actually pretty useless. It was useless to the monkeys at first before they realized what they could do with it. When we first gave it to them in their enclosures, they actually kind of picked them up, looked at them. They were these kind of weird things. But very quickly, the monkeys realized that they could actually hand these tokens over to different humans in the lab for some food. And so you see one of our monkeys, Mayday, up here doing this. This is A and B are kind of the points where she's sort of a little bit curious about these things — doesn't know. There's this waiting hand from a human experimenter, and Mayday quickly figures out, apparently the human wants this. Hands it over, and then gets some food. It turns out not just Mayday, all of our monkeys get good at trading tokens with human salesman. So here's just a quick video of what this looks like. Here's Mayday. She's going to be trading a token for some food and waiting happily and getting her food. Here's Felix, I think. He's our alpha male; he's a kind of big guy. But he too waits patiently, gets his food and goes on. So the monkeys get really good at this. They're surprisingly good at this with very little training. We just allowed them to pick this up on their own. The question is: is this anything like human money? Is this a market at all, or did we just do a weird psychologist's trick by getting monkeys to do something, looking smart, but not really being smart. And so we said, well, what would the monkeys spontaneously do if this was really their currency, if they were really using it like money? Well, you might actually imagine them to do all the kinds of smart things that humans do when they start exchanging money with each other. You might have them start paying attention to price, paying attention to how much they buy — sort of keeping track of their monkey token, as it were. Do the monkeys do anything like this? And so our monkey marketplace was born. The way this works is that our monkeys normally live in a kind of big zoo social enclosure. When they get a hankering for some treats, we actually allowed them a way out into a little smaller enclosure where they could enter the market. Upon entering the market — it was actually a much more fun market for the monkeys than most human markets because, as the monkeys entered the door of the market, a human would give them a big wallet full of tokens so they could actually trade the tokens with one of these two guys here — two different possible human salesmen that they could actually buy stuff from. The salesmen were students from my lab. They dressed differently; they were different people. And over time, they did basically the same thing so the monkeys could learn, you know, who sold what at what price — you know, who was reliable, who wasn't, and so on. And you can see that each of the experimenters is actually holding up a little, yellow food dish. and that's what the monkey can for a single token. So everything costs one token, but as you can see, sometimes tokens buy more than others, sometimes more grapes than others. So I'll show you a quick video of what this marketplace actually looks like. Here's a monkey-eye-view. Monkeys are shorter, so it's a little short. But here's Honey. She's waiting for the market to open a little impatiently. All of a sudden the market opens. Here's her choice: one grapes or two grapes. You can see Honey, very good market economist, goes with the guy who gives more. She could teach our financial advisers a few things or two. So not just Honey, most of the monkeys went with guys who had more. Most of the monkeys went with guys who had better food. When we introduced sales, we saw the monkeys paid attention to that. They really cared about their monkey token dollar. The more surprising thing was that when we collaborated with economists to actually look at the monkeys' data using economic tools, they basically matched, not just qualitatively, but quantitatively with what we saw humans doing in a real market. So much so that, if you saw the monkeys' numbers, you couldn't tell whether they came from a monkey or a human in the same market. And what we'd really thought we'd done is like we'd actually introduced something that, at least for the monkeys and us, works like a real financial currency. Question is: do the monkeys start messing up in the same ways we do? Well, we already saw anecdotally a couple of signs that they might. One thing we never saw in the monkey marketplace was any evidence of saving — you know, just like our own species. The monkeys entered the market, spent their entire budget and then went back to everyone else. The other thing we also spontaneously saw, embarrassingly enough, is spontaneous evidence of larceny. The monkeys would rip-off the tokens at every available opportunity — from each other, often from us — you know, things we didn't necessarily think we were introducing, but things we spontaneously saw. So we said, this looks bad. Can we actually see if the monkeys are doing exactly the same dumb things as humans do? One possibility is just kind of let the monkey financial system play out, you know, see if they start calling us for bailouts in a few years. We were a little impatient so we wanted to sort of speed things up a bit. So we said, let's actually give the monkeys the same kinds of problems that humans tend to get wrong in certain kinds of economic challenges, or certain kinds of economic experiments. And so, since the best way to see how people go wrong is to actually do it yourself, I'm going to give you guys a quick experiment to sort of watch your own financial intuitions in action. So imagine that right now I handed each and every one of you a thousand U.S. dollars — so 10 crisp hundred dollar bills. Take these, put it in your wallet and spend a second thinking about what you're going to do with it. Because it's yours now; you can buy whatever you want. Donate it, take it, and so on. Sounds great, but you get one more choice to earn a little bit more money. And here's your choice: you can either be risky, in which case I'm going to flip one of these monkey tokens. If it comes up heads, you're going to get a thousand dollars more. If it comes up tails, you get nothing. So it's a chance to get more, but it's pretty risky. Your other option is a bit safe. Your just going to get some money for sure. I'm just going to give you 500 bucks. You can stick it in your wallet and use it immediately. So see what your intuition is here. Most people actually go with the play-it-safe option. Most people say, why should I be risky when I can get 1,500 dollars for sure? This seems like a good bet. I'm going to go with that. You might say, eh, that's not really irrational. People are a little risk-averse. So what? Well, the "so what?" comes when start thinking about the same problem set up just a little bit differently. So now imagine that I give each and every one of you 2,000 dollars — 20 crisp hundred dollar bills. Now you can buy double to stuff you were going to get before. Think about how you'd feel sticking it in your wallet. And now imagine that I have you make another choice But this time, it's a little bit worse. Now, you're going to be deciding how you're going to lose money, but you're going to get the same choice. You can either take a risky loss — so I'll flip a coin. If it comes up heads, you're going to actually lose a lot. If it comes up tails, you lose nothing, you're fine, get to keep the whole thing — or you could play it safe, which means you have to reach back into your wallet and give me five of those $100 bills, for certain. And I'm seeing a lot of furrowed brows out there. So maybe you're having the same intuitions as the subjects that were actually tested in this, which is when presented with these options, people don't choose to play it safe. They actually tend to go a little risky. The reason this is irrational is that we've given people in both situations the same choice. It's a 50/50 shot of a thousand or 2,000, or just 1,500 dollars with certainty. But people's intuitions about how much risk to take varies depending on where they started with. So what's going on? Well, it turns out that this seems to be the result of at least two biases that we have at the psychological level. One is that we have a really hard time thinking in absolute terms. You really have to do work to figure out, well, one option's a thousand, 2,000; one is 1,500. Instead, we find it very easy to think in very relative terms as options change from one time to another. So we think of things as, "Oh, I'm going to get more," or "Oh, I'm going to get less." This is all well and good, except that changes in different directions actually effect whether or not we think options are good or not. And this leads to the second bias, which economists have called loss aversion. The idea is that we really hate it when things go into the red. We really hate it when we have to lose out on some money. And this means that sometimes we'll actually switch our preferences to avoid this. What you saw in that last scenario is that subjects get risky because they want the small shot that there won't be any loss. That means when we're in a risk mindset — excuse me, when we're in a loss mindset, we actually become more risky, which can actually be really worrying. These kinds of things play out in lots of bad ways in humans. They're why stock investors hold onto losing stocks longer — because they're evaluating them in relative terms. They're why people in the housing market refused to sell their house — because they don't want to sell at a loss. The question we were interested in is whether the monkeys show the same biases. If we set up those same scenarios in our little monkey market, would they do the same thing as people? And so this is what we did, we gave the monkeys choices between guys who were safe — they did the same thing every time — or guys who were risky — they did things differently half the time. And then we gave them options that were bonuses — like you guys did in the first scenario — so they actually have a chance more, or pieces where they were experiencing losses — they actually thought they were going to get more than they really got. And so this is what this looks like. We introduced the monkeys to two new monkey salesmen. The guy on the left and right both start with one piece of grape, so it looks pretty good. But they're going to give the monkeys bonuses. The guy on the left is a safe bonus. All the time, he adds one, to give the monkeys two. The guy on the right is actually a risky bonus. Sometimes the monkeys get no bonus — so this is a bonus of zero. Sometimes the monkeys get two extra. For a big bonus, now they get three. But this is the same choice you guys just faced. Do the monkeys actually want to play it safe and then go with the guy who's going to do the same thing on every trial, or do they want to be risky and try to get a risky, but big, bonus, but risk the possibility of getting no bonus. People here played it safe. Turns out, the monkeys play it safe too. Qualitatively and quantitatively, they choose exactly the same way as people, when tested in the same thing. You might say, well, maybe the monkeys just don't like risk. Maybe we should see how they do with losses. And so we ran a second version of this. Now, the monkeys meet two guys who aren't giving them bonuses; they're actually giving them less than they expect. So they look like they're starting out with a big amount. These are three grapes; the monkey's really psyched for this. But now they learn these guys are going to give them less than they expect. They guy on the left is a safe loss. Every single time, he's going to take one of these away and give the monkeys just two. the guy on the right is the risky loss. Sometimes he gives no loss, so the monkeys are really psyched, but sometimes he actually gives a big loss, taking away two to give the monkeys only one. And so what do the monkeys do? Again, same choice; they can play it safe for always getting two grapes every single time, or they can take a risky bet and choose between one and three. The remarkable thing to us is that, when you give monkeys this choice, they do the same irrational thing that people do. They actually become more risky depending on how the experimenters started. This is crazy because it suggests that the monkeys too are evaluating things in relative terms and actually treating losses differently than they treat gains. So what does all of this mean? Well, what we've shown is that, first of all, we can actually give the monkeys a financial currency, and they do very similar things with it. They do some of the smart things we do, some of the kind of not so nice things we do, like steal it and so on. But they also do some of the irrational things we do. They systematically get things wrong and in the same ways that we do. This is the first take-home message of the Talk, which is that if you saw the beginning of this and you thought, oh, I'm totally going to go home and hire a capuchin monkey financial adviser. They're way cuter than the one at ... you know — Don't do that; they're probably going to be just as dumb as the human one you already have. So, you know, a little bad — Sorry, sorry, sorry. A little bad for monkey investors. But of course, you know, the reason you're laughing is bad for humans too. Because we've answered the question we started out with. We wanted to know where these kinds of errors came from. And we started with the hope that maybe we can sort of tweak our financial institutions, tweak our technologies to make ourselves better. But what we've learn is that these biases might be a deeper part of us than that. In fact, they might be due to the very nature of our evolutionary history. You know, maybe it's not just humans at the right side of this chain that's duncey. Maybe it's sort of duncey all the way back. And this, if we believe the capuchin monkey results, means that these duncey strategies might be 35 million years old. That's a long time for a strategy to potentially get changed around — really, really old. What do we know about other old strategies like this? Well, one thing we know is that they tend to be really hard to overcome. You know, think of our evolutionary predilection for eating sweet things, fatty things like cheesecake. You can't just shut that off. You can't just look at the dessert cart as say, "No, no, no. That looks disgusting to me." We're just built differently. We're going to perceive it as a good thing to go after. My guess is that the same thing is going to be true when humans are perceiving different financial decisions. When you're watching your stocks plummet into the red, when you're watching your house price go down, you're not going to be able to see that in anything but old evolutionary terms. This means that the biases that lead investors to do badly, that lead to the foreclosure crisis are going to be really hard to overcome. So that's the bad news. The question is: is there any good news? I'm supposed to be up here telling you the good news. Well, the good news, I think, is what I started with at the beginning of the Talk, which is that humans are not only smart; we're really inspirationally smart to the rest of the animals in the biological kingdom. We're so good at overcoming our biological limitations — you know, I flew over here in an airplane. I didn't have to try to flap my wings. I'm wearing contact lenses now so that I can see all of you. I don't have to rely on my own near-sightedness. We actually have all of these cases where we overcome our biological limitations through technology and other means, seemingly pretty easily. But we have to recognize that we have those limitations. And here's the rub. It was Camus who once said that, "Man is the only species who refuses to be what he really is." But the irony is that it might only be in recognizing our limitations that we can really actually overcome them. The hope is that you all will think about your limitations, not necessarily as unovercomable, but to recognize them, accept them and then use the world of design to actually figure them out. That might be the only way that we will really be able to achieve our own human potential and really be the noble species we hope to all be. Thank you. (Applause) |
My mind-shifting Everest swim | {0: "Pushing his body through epic cold-water swims, Lewis Gordon Pugh wants to draw attention to our global climate. He's just back from swimming in a meltwater lake on the slopes of Mount Everest. "} | TEDGlobal 2010 | Last year when I was here, I was speaking to you about a swim which I did across the North Pole. And while that swim took place three years ago, I can remember it as if it was yesterday. I remember standing on the edge of the ice, about to dive into the water, and thinking to myself, I have never ever seen any place on this earth which is just so frightening. The water is completely black. The water is minus 1.7 degrees centigrade, or 29 degrees Fahrenheit. It's flipping freezing in that water. And then a thought came across my mind: if things go pear-shaped on this swim, how long will it take for my frozen body to sink the four and a half kilometers to the bottom of the ocean? And then I said to myself, I've just got to get this thought out of my mind as quickly as possible. And the only way I can dive into that freezing cold water and swim a kilometer is by listening to my iPod and really revving myself up, listening to everything from beautiful opera all the way across to Puff Daddy, and then committing myself a hundred percent — there is nothing more powerful than the made-up mind — and then walking up to the edge of the ice and just diving into the water. And that swim took me 18 minutes and 50 seconds, and it felt like 18 days. And I remember getting out of the water and my hands feeling so painful and looking down at my fingers, and my fingers were literally the size of sausages because — you know, we're made partially of water — when water freezes it expands, and so the cells in my fingers had frozen and expanded and burst. And the most immediate thought when I came out of that water was the following: I'm never, ever going to do another cold water swim in my life again. Anyway, last year, I heard about the Himalayas and the melting of the — (Laughter) and the melting of the glaciers because of climate change. I heard about this lake, Lake Imja. This lake has been formed in the last couple of years because of the melting of the glacier. The glacier's gone all the way up the mountain and left in its place this big lake. And I firmly believe that what we're seeing in the Himalayas is the next great, big battleground on this earth. Nearly two billion people — so one in three people on this earth — rely on the water from the Himalayas. And with a population increasing as quickly as it is, and with the water supply from these glaciers — because of climate change — decreasing so much, I think we have a real risk of instability. North, you've got China; south, you've India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, all these countries. And so I decided to walk up to Mt. Everest, the highest mountain on this earth, and go and do a symbolic swim underneath the summit of Mt. Everest. Now, I don't know if any of you have had the opportunity to go to Mt. Everest, but it's quite an ordeal getting up there. 28 great, big, powerful yaks carrying all the equipment up onto this mountain — I don't just have my Speedo, but there's a big film crew who then send all the images around the world. The other thing which was so challenging about this swim is not just the altitude. I wanted to do the swim at 5,300 meters above sea level. So it's right up in the heavens. It's very, very difficult to breath. You get altitude sickness. I feels like you've got a man standing behind you with a hammer just hitting your head all the time. That's not the worst part of it. The worst part was this year was the year where they decided to do a big cleanup operation on Mt. Everest. Many, many people have died on Mt. Everest, and this was the year they decided to go and recover all the bodies of the mountaineers and then bring them down the mountain. And when you're walking up the mountain to attempt to do something which no human has ever done before, and, in fact, no fish — there are no fish up there swimming at 5,300 meters — When you're trying to do that, and then the bodies are coming past you, it humbles you, and you also realize very, very clearly that nature is so much more powerful than we are. And we walked up this pathway, all the way up. And to the right hand side of us was this great Khumbu Glacier. And all the way along the glacier we saw these big pools of melting ice. And then we got up to this small lake underneath the summit of Mt. Everest, and I prepared myself the same way as I've always prepared myself, for this swim which was going to be so very difficult. I put on my iPod, I listened to some music, I got myself as aggressive as possible — but controlled aggression — and then I hurled myself into that water. I swam as quickly as I could for the first hundred meters, and then I realized very, very quickly, I had a huge problem on my hands. I could barely breathe. I was gasping for air. I then began to choke, and then it quickly led to me vomiting in the water. And it all happened so quickly: I then — I don't know how it happened — but I went underwater. And luckily, the water was quite shallow, and I was able to push myself off the bottom of the lake and get up and then take another gasp of air. And then I said, carry on. Carry on. Carry on. I carried on for another five or six strokes, and then I had nothing in my body, and I went down to the bottom of the lake. And I don't where I got it from, but I was able to somehow pull myself up and as quickly as possible get to the side of the lake. I've heard it said that drowning is the most peaceful death that you can have. I have never, ever heard such utter bollocks. (Laughter) It is the most frightening and panicky feeling that you can have. I got myself to the side of the lake. My crew grabbed me, and then we walked as quickly as we could down — over the rubble — down to our camp. And there, we sat down, and we did a debrief about what had gone wrong there on Mt. Everest. And my team just gave it to me straight. They said, Lewis, you need to have a radical tactical shift if you want to do this swim. Every single thing which you have learned in the past 23 years of swimming, you must forget. Every single thing which you learned when you were serving in the British army, about speed and aggression, you put that to one side. We want you to walk up the hill in another two days' time. Take some time to rest and think about things. We want you to walk up the mountain in two days' time, and instead of swimming fast, swim as slowly as possible. Instead of swimming crawl, swim breaststroke. And remember, never ever swim with aggression. This is the time to swim with real humility. And so we walked back up to the mountain two days later. And I stood there on the edge of the lake, and I looked up at Mt. Everest — and she is one of the most beautiful mountains on the earth — and I said to myself, just do this slowly. And I swam across the lake. And I can't begin to tell you how good I felt when I came to the other side. But I learned two very, very important lessons there on Mt. Everest, and I thank my team of Sherpas who taught me this. The first one is that just because something has worked in the past so well, doesn't mean it's going to work in the future. And similarly, now, before I do anything, I ask myself what type of mindset do I require to successfully complete a task. And taking that into the world of climate change — which is, frankly, the Mt. Everest of all problems — just because we've lived the way we have lived for so long, just because we have consumed the way we have for so long and populated the earth the way we have for so long, doesn't mean that we can carry on the way we are carrying on. The warning signs are all there. When I was born, the world's population was 3.5 billion people. We're now 6.8 billion people, and we're expected to be 9 billion people by 2050. And then the second lesson, the radical, tactical shift. And I've come here to ask you today: what radical tactical shift can you take in your relationship to the environment, which will ensure that our children and our grandchildren live in a safe world and a secure world, and most importantly, in a sustainable world? And I ask you, please, to go away from here and think about that one radical tactical shift which you could make, which will make that big difference, and then commit a hundred percent to doing it. Blog about it, tweet about it, talk about it, and commit a hundred percent, because very, very few things are impossible to achieve if we really put our whole minds to it. So thank you very, very much. (Applause) |
How big brands can help save biodiversity | {0: 'Jason Clay’s ideas are changing the way governments, foundations, researchers and NGOs identify and address risks and opportunities for their work.'} | TEDGlobal 2010 | I grew up on a small farm in Missouri. We lived on less than a dollar a day for about 15 years. I got a scholarship, went to university, studied international agriculture, studied anthropology, and decided I was going to give back. I was going to work with small farmers. I was going to help alleviate poverty. I was going to work on international development, and then I took a turn and ended up here. Now, if you get a Ph.D., and you decide not to teach, you don't always end up in a place like this. It's a choice. You might end up driving a taxicab. You could be in New York. What I found was, I started working with refugees and famine victims — small farmers, all, or nearly all — who had been dispossessed and displaced. Now, what I'd been trained to do was methodological research on such people. So I did it: I found out how many women had been raped en route to these camps. I found out how many people had been put in jail, how many family members had been killed. I assessed how long they were going to stay and how much it would take to feed them. And I got really good at predicting how many body bags you would need for the people who were going to die in these camps. Now this is God's work, but it's not my work. It's not the work I set out to do. So I was at a Grateful Dead benefit concert on the rainforests in 1988. I met a guy — the guy on the left. His name was Ben. He said, "What can I do to save the rainforests?" I said, "Well, Ben, what do you do?" "I make ice cream." So I said, "Well, you've got to make a rainforest ice cream. And you've got to use nuts from the rainforests to show that forests are worth more as forests than they are as pasture." He said, "Okay." Within a year, Rainforest Crunch was on the shelves. It was a great success. We did our first million-dollars-worth of trade by buying on 30 days and selling on 21. That gets your adrenaline going. Then we had a four and a half million-dollar line of credit because we were credit-worthy at that point. We had 15 to 20, maybe 22 percent of the global Brazil-nut market. We paid two to three times more than anybody else. Everybody else raised their prices to the gatherers of Brazil nuts because we would buy it otherwise. A great success. 50 companies signed up, 200 products came out, generated 100 million in sales. It failed. Why did it fail? Because the people who were gathering Brazil nuts weren't the same people who were cutting the forests. And the people who made money from Brazil nuts were not the people who made money from cutting the forests. We were attacking the wrong driver. We needed to be working on beef. We needed to be working on lumber. We needed to be working on soy — things that we were not focused on. So let's go back to Sudan. I often talk to refugees: "Why was it that the West didn't realize that famines are caused by policies and politics, not by weather?" And this farmer said to me, one day, something that was very profound. He said, "You can't wake a person who's pretending to sleep." (Laughter) Okay. Fast forward. We live on a planet. There's just one of them. We've got to wake up to the fact that we don't have any more and that this is a finite planet. We know the limits of the resources we have. We may be able to use them differently. We may have some innovative, new ideas. But in general, this is what we've got. There's no more of it. There's a basic equation that we can't get away from. Population times consumption has got to have some kind of relationship to the planet, and right now, it's a simple "not equal." Our work shows that we're living at about 1.3 planets. Since 1990, we crossed the line of being in a sustainable relationship to the planet. Now we're at 1.3. If we were farmers, we'd be eating our seed. For bankers, we'd be living off the principal, not the interest. This is where we stand today. A lot of people like to point to some place else as the cause of the problem. It's always population growth. Population growth's important, but it's also about how much each person consumes. So when the average American consumes 43 times as much as the average African, we've got to think that consumption is an issue. It's not just about population, and it's not just about them; it's about us. But it's not just about people; it's about lifestyles. There's very good evidence — again, we don't necessarily have a peer-reviewed methodology that's bulletproof yet — but there's very good evidence that the average cat in Europe has a larger environmental footprint in its lifetime than the average African. You think that's not an issue going forward? You think that's not a question as to how we should be using the Earth's resources? Let's go back and visit our equation. In 2000, we had six billion people on the planet. They were consuming what they were consuming — let's say one unit of consumption each. We have six billion units of consumption. By 2050, we're going to have nine billion people — all the scientists agree. They're all going to consume twice as much as they currently do — scientists, again, agree — because income is going to grow in developing countries five times what it is today — on global average, about [2.9]. So we're going to have 18 billion units of consumption. Who have you heard talking lately that's said we have to triple production of goods and services? But that's what the math says. We're not going to be able to do that. We can get productivity up. We can get efficiency up. But we've also got to get consumption down. We need to use less to make more. And then we need to use less again. And then we need to consume less. All of those things are part of that equation. But it basically raises a fundamental question: should consumers have a choice about sustainability, about sustainable products? Should you be able to buy a product that's sustainable sitting next to one that isn't, or should all the products on the shelf be sustainable? If they should all be sustainable on a finite planet, how do you make that happen? The average consumer takes 1.8 seconds in the U.S. Okay, so let's be generous. Let's say it's 3.5 seconds in Europe. How do you evaluate all the scientific data around a product, the data that's changing on a weekly, if not a daily, basis? How do you get informed? You don't. Here's a little question. From a greenhouse gas perspective, is lamb produced in the U.K. better than lamb produced in New Zealand, frozen and shipped to the U.K.? Is a bad feeder lot operation for beef better or worse than a bad grazing operation for beef? Do organic potatoes actually have fewer toxic chemicals used to produce them than conventional potatoes? In every single case, the answer is "it depends." It depends on who produced it and how, in every single instance. And there are many others. How is a consumer going to walk through this minefield? They're not. They may have a lot of opinions about it, but they're not going to be terribly informed. Sustainability has got to be a pre-competitive issue. It's got to be something we all care about. And we need collusion. We need groups to work together that never have. We need Cargill to work with Bunge. We need Coke to work with Pepsi. We need Oxford to work with Cambridge. We need Greenpeace to work with WWF. Everybody's got to work together — China and the U.S. We need to begin to manage this planet as if our life depended on it, because it does, it fundamentally does. But we can't do everything. Even if we get everybody working on it, we've got to be strategic. We need to focus on the where, the what and the who. So, the where: We've identified 35 places globally that we need to work. These are the places that are the richest in biodiversity and the most important from an ecosystem function point-of-view. We have to work in these places. We have to save these places if we want a chance in hell of preserving biodiversity as we know it. We looked at the threats to these places. These are the 15 commodities that fundamentally pose the biggest threats to these places because of deforestation, soil loss, water use, pesticide use, over-fishing, etc. So we've got 35 places, we've got 15 priority commodities, who do we work with to change the way those commodities are produced? Are we going to work with 6.9 billion consumers? Let's see, that's about 7,000 languages, 350 major languages — a lot of work there. I don't see anybody actually being able to do that very effectively. Are we going to work with 1.5 billion producers? Again, a daunting task. There must be a better way. 300 to 500 companies control 70 percent or more of the trade of each of the 15 commodities that we've identified as the most significant. If we work with those, if we change those companies and the way they do business, then the rest will happen automatically. So, we went through our 15 commodities. This is nine of them. We lined them up side-by-side, and we put the names of the companies that work on each of those. And if you go through the first 25 or 30 names of each of the commodities, what you begin to see is, gosh, there's Cargill here, there's Cargill there, there's Cargill everywhere. In fact, these names start coming up over and over again. So we did the analysis again a slightly different way. We said: if we take the top hundred companies, what percentage of all 15 commodities do they touch, buy or sell? And what we found is it's 25 percent. So 100 companies control 25 percent of the trade of all 15 of the most significant commodities on the planet. We can get our arms around a hundred companies. A hundred companies, we can work with. Why is 25 percent important? Because if these companies demand sustainable products, they'll pull 40 to 50 percent of production. Companies can push producers faster than consumers can. By companies asking for this, we can leverage production so much faster than by waiting for consumers to do it. After 40 years, the global organic movement has achieved 0.7 of one percent of global food. We can't wait that long. We don't have that kind of time. We need change that's going to accelerate. Even working with individual companies is not probably going to get us there. We need to begin to work with industries. So we've started roundtables where we bring together the entire value chain, from producers all the way to the retailers and brands. We bring in civil society, we bring in NGOs, we bring in researchers and scientists to have an informed discussion — sometimes a battle royale — to figure out what are the key impacts of these products, what is a global benchmark, what's an acceptable impact, and design standards around that. It's not all fun and games. In salmon aquaculture, we kicked off a roundtable almost six years ago. Eight entities came to the table. We eventually got, I think, 60 percent of global production at the table and 25 percent of demand at the table. Three of the original eight entities were suing each other. And yet, next week, we launch globally verified, vetted and certified standards for salmon aquaculture. It can happen. (Applause) So what brings the different entities to the table? It's risk and demand. For the big companies, it's reputational risk, but more importantly, they don't care what the price of commodities is. If they don't have commodities, they don't have a business. They care about availability, so the big risk for them is not having product at all. For the producers, if a buyer wants to buy something produced a certain way, that's what brings them to the table. So it's the demand that brings them to the table. The good news is we identified a hundred companies two years ago. In the last 18 months, we've signed agreements with 40 of those hundred companies to begin to work with them on their supply chain. And in the next 18 months, we will have signed up to work with another 40, and we think we'll get those signed as well. Now what we're doing is bringing the CEOs of these 80 companies together to help twist the arms of the final 20, to bring them to the table, because they don't like NGOs, they've never worked with NGOs, they're concerned about this, they're concerned about that, but we all need to be in this together. So we're pulling out all the stops. We're using whatever leverage we have to bring them to the table. One company we're working with that's begun — in baby steps, perhaps — but has begun this journey on sustainability is Cargill. They've funded research that shows that we can double global palm oil production without cutting a single tree in the next 20 years, and do it all in Borneo alone by planting on land that's already degraded. The study shows that the highest net present value for palm oil is on land that's been degraded. They're also undertaking a study to look at all of their supplies of palm oil to see if they could be certified and what they would need to change in order to become third-party certified under a credible certification program. Why is Cargill important? Because Cargill has 20 to 25 percent of global palm oil. If Cargill makes a decision, the entire palm oil industry moves, or at least 40 or 50 percent of it. That's not insignificant. More importantly, Cargill and one other company ship 50 percent of the palm oil that goes to China. We don't have to change the way a single Chinese company works if we get Cargill to only send sustainable palm oil to China. It's a pre-competitive issue. All the palm oil going there is good. Buy it. Mars is also on a similar journey. Now most people understand that Mars is a chocolate company, but Mars has made sustainability pledges to buy only certified product for all of its seafood. It turns out Mars buys more seafood than Walmart because of pet food. But they're doing some really interesting things around chocolate, and it all comes from the fact that Mars wants to be in business in the future. And what they see is that they need to improve chocolate production. On any given plantation, 20 percent of the trees produce 80 percent of the crop, so Mars is looking at the genome, they're sequencing the genome of the cocoa plant. They're doing it with IBM and the USDA, and they're putting it in the public domain because they want everybody to have access to this data, because they want everybody to help them make cocoa more productive and more sustainable. What they've realized is that if they can identify the traits on productivity and drought tolerance, they can produce 320 percent as much cocoa on 40 percent of the land. The rest of the land can be used for something else. It's more with less and less again. That's what the future has got to be, and putting it in the public domain is smart. They don't want to be an I.P. company; they want to be a chocolate company, but they want to be a chocolate company forever. Now, the price of food, many people complain about, but in fact, the price of food is going down, and that's odd because in fact, consumers are not paying for the true cost of food. If you take a look just at water, what we see is that, with four very common products, you look at how much a farmer produced to make those products, and then you look at how much water input was put into them, and then you look at what the farmer was paid. If you divide the amount of water into what the farmer was paid, the farmer didn't receive enough money to pay a decent price for water in any of those commodities. That is an externality by definition. This is the subsidy from nature. Coca-Cola, they've worked a lot on water, but right now, they're entering into 17-year contracts with growers in Turkey to sell juice into Europe, and they're doing that because they want to have a product that's closer to the European market. But they're not just buying the juice; they're also buying the carbon in the trees to offset the shipment costs associated with carbon to get the product into Europe. There's carbon that's being bought with sugar, with coffee, with beef. This is called bundling. It's bringing those externalities back into the price of the commodity. We need to take what we've learned in private, voluntary standards of what the best producers in the world are doing and use that to inform government regulation, so we can shift the entire performance curve. We can't just focus on identifying the best; we've got to move the rest. The issue isn't what to think, it's how to think. These companies have begun to think differently. They're on a journey; there's no turning back. We're all on that same journey with them. We have to really begin to change the way we think about everything. Whatever was sustainable on a planet of six billion is not going to be sustainable on a planet with nine. Thank you. (Applause) |
Our century's greatest injustice | {0: 'As a journalist reporting on China, Sheryl WuDunn saw the everyday oppression of women around the world. She and Nick Kristof wrote "Half the Sky," chronicling women\'s stories of horror and, especially, hope.'} | TEDGlobal 2010 | The global challenge that I want to talk to you about today rarely makes the front pages. It, however, is enormous in both scale and importance. Look, you all are very well traveled; this is TEDGlobal after all. But I do hope to take you to some places you've never been to before. So, let's start off in China. This photo was taken two weeks ago. Actually, one indication is that little boy on my husband's shoulders has just graduated from high school. (Laughter) But this is Tiananmen Square. Many of you have been there. It's not the real China. Let me take you to the real China. This is in the Dabian Mountains in the remote part of Hubei province in central China. Dai Manju is 13 years old at the time the story starts. She lives with her parents, her two brothers and her great-aunt. They have a hut that has no electricity, no running water, no wristwatch, no bicycle. And they share this great splendor with a very large pig. Dai Manju was in sixth grade when her parents said, "We're going to pull you out of school because the 13-dollar school fees are too much for us. You're going to be spending the rest of your life in the rice paddies. Why would we waste this money on you?" This is what happens to girls in remote areas. Turns out that Dai Manju was the best pupil in her grade. She still made the two-hour trek to the schoolhouse and tried to catch every little bit of information that seeped out of the doors. We wrote about her in The New York Times. We got a flood of donations — mostly 13-dollar checks because New York Times readers are very generous in tiny amounts (Laughter) but then, we got a money transfer for $10,000 — really nice guy. We turned the money over to that man there, the principal of the school. He was delighted. He thought, "Oh, I can renovate the school. I can give scholarships to all the girls, you know, if they work hard and stay in school. So Dai Manju basically finished out middle school. She went to high school. She went to vocational school for accounting. She scouted for jobs down in Guangdong province in the south. She found a job, she scouted for jobs for her classmates and her friends. She sent money back to her family. They built a new house, this time with running water, electricity, a bicycle, no pig. What we saw was a natural experiment. It is rare to get an exogenous investment in girls' education. And over the years, as we followed Dai Manju, we were able to see that she was able to move out of a vicious cycle and into a virtuous cycle. She not only changed her own dynamic, she changed her household, she changed her family, her village. The village became a real standout. Of course, most of China was flourishing at the time, but they were able to get a road built to link them up to the rest of China. And that brings me to my first major of two tenets of "Half the Sky." And that is that the central moral challenge of this century is gender inequity. In the 19th century, it was slavery. In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. The cause of our time is the brutality that so many people face around the world because of their gender. So some of you may be thinking, "Gosh, that's hyperbole. She's exaggerating." Well, let me ask you this question. How many of you think there are more males or more females in the world? Let me take a poll. How many of you think there are more males in the world? Hands up, please. How many of you think — a few — how many of you there are more females in the world? Okay, most of you. Well, you know this latter group, you're wrong. There are, true enough, in Europe and the West, when women and men have equal access to food and health care, there are more women, we live longer. But in most of the rest of the world, that's not the case. In fact, demographers have shown that there are anywhere between 60 million and 100 million missing females in the current population. And, you know, it happens for several reasons. For instance, in the last half-century, more girls were discriminated to death than all the people killed on all the battlefields in the 20th century. Sometimes it's also because of the sonogram. Girls get aborted before they're even born when there are scarce resources. This girl here, for instance, is in a feeding center in Ethiopia. The entire center was filled with girls like her. What's remarkable is that her brothers, in the same family, were totally fine. In India, in the first year of life, from zero to one, boy and girl babies basically survive at the same rate because they depend upon the breast, and the breast shows no son preference. From one to five, girls die at a 50 percent higher mortality rate than boys, in all of India. The second tenet of "Half the Sky" is that, let's put aside the morality of all the right and wrong of it all, and just on a purely practical level, we think that one of the best ways to fight poverty and to fight terrorism is to educate girls and to bring women into the formal labor force. Poverty, for instance. There are three reasons why this is the case. For one, overpopulation is one of the persistent causes of poverty. And you know, when you educate a boy, his family tends to have fewer kids, but only slightly. When you educate a girl, she tends to have significantly fewer kids. The second reason is it has to do with spending. It's kind of like the dirty, little secret of poverty, which is that, not only do poor people take in very little income, but also, the income that they take in, they don't spend it very wisely, and unfortunately, most of that spending is done by men. So research has shown, if you look at people who live under two dollars a day — one metric of poverty — two percent of that take-home pay goes to this basket here, in education. 20 percent goes to a basket that is a combination of alcohol, tobacco, sugary drinks — and prostitution and festivals. If you just take four percentage points and put it into this basket, you would have a transformative effect. The last reason has to do with women being part of the solution, not the problem. You need to use scarce resources. It's a waste of resources if you don't use someone like Dai Manju. Bill Gates put it very well when he was traveling through Saudi Arabia. He was speaking to an audience much like yourselves. However, two-thirds of the way there was a barrier. On this side was men, and then the barrier, and this side was women. And someone from this side of the room got up and said, "Mr. Gates, we have here as our goal in Saudi Arabia to be one of the top 10 countries when it comes to technology. Do you think we'll make it?" So Bill Gates, as he was staring out at the audience, he said, "If you're not fully utilizing half the resources in your country, there is no way you will get anywhere near the top 10." So here is Bill of Arabia. (Laughter) So what would some of the specific challenges look like? I would say, on the top of the agenda is sex trafficking. And I'll just say two things about this. The slavery at the peak of the slave trade in the 1780s: there were about 80,000 slaves transported from Africa to the New World. Now, modern slavery: according to State Department rough statistics, there are about 800,000 — 10 times the number — that are trafficked across international borders. And that does not even include those that are trafficked within country borders, which is a substantial portion. And if you look at another factor, another contrast, a slave back then is worth about $40,000 in today's money. Today, you can buy a girl trafficked for a few hundred dollars, which means she's actually more disposable. But you know, there is progress being made in places like Cambodia and Thailand. We don't have to expect a world where girls are bought and sold or killed. The second item on the agenda is maternal mortality. You know, childbirth in this part of the world is a wonderful event. In Niger, one in seven women can expect to die during childbirth. Around the world, one woman dies every minute and a half from childbirth. You know, it's not as though we don't have the technological solution, but these women have three strikes against them: they are poor, they are rural and they are female. You know, for every woman who does die, there are 20 who survive but end up with an injury. And the most devastating injury is obstetric fistula. It's a tearing during obstructed labor that leaves a woman incontinent. Let me tell you about Mahabuba. She lives in Ethiopia. She was married against her will at age 13. She got pregnant, ran to the bush to have the baby, but you know, her body was very immature, and she ended up having obstructed labor. The baby died, and she ended up with a fistula. So that meant she was incontinent; she couldn't control her wastes. In a word, she stank. The villagers thought she was cursed; they didn't know what to do with her. So finally, they put her at the edge of the village in a hut. They ripped off the door so that the hyenas would get her at night. That night, there was a stick in the hut. She fought off the hyenas with that stick. And the next morning, she knew if she could get to a nearby village where there was a foreign missionary, she would be saved. Because she had some damage to her nerves, she crawled all the way — 30 miles — to that doorstep, half dead. The foreign missionary opened the door, knew exactly what had happened, took her to a nearby fistula hospital in Addis Ababa, and she was repaired with a 350-dollar operation. The doctors and nurses there noticed that she was not only a survivor, she was really clever, and they made her a nurse. So now, Mahabuba, she is saving the lives of hundreds, thousands, of women. She has become part of the solution, not the problem. She's moved out of a vicious cycle and into a virtuous cycle. I've talked about some of the challenges, let me talk about some of the solutions, and there are predictable solutions. I've hinted at them: education and also economic opportunity. So of course, when you educate a girl, she tends to get married later on in life, she tends to have kids later on in life, she tends to have fewer kids, and those kids that she does have, she educates them in a more enlightened fashion. With economic opportunity, it can be transformative. Let me tell you about Saima. She lives in a small village outside Lahore, Pakistan. And at the time, she was miserable. She was beaten every single day by her husband, who was unemployed. He was kind of a gambler type — and unemployable, therefore — and took his frustrations out on her. Well, when she had her second daughter, her mother in-law told her son, "I think you'd better get a second wife. Saima's not going to produce you a son." This is when she had her second daughter. At the time, there was a microlending group in the village that gave her a 65-dollar loan. Saima took that money, and she started an embroidery business. The merchants liked her embroidery; it sold very well, and they kept asking for more. And when she couldn't produce enough, she hired other women in the village. Pretty soon she had 30 women in the village working for her embroidery business. And then, when she had to transport all of the embroidery goods from the village to the marketplace, she needed someone to help her do the transport, so she hired her husband. So now they're in it together. He does the transportation and distribution, and she does the production and sourcing. And now they have a third daughter, and the daughters, all of them, are being tutored in education because Saima knows what's really important. Which brings me to the final element, which is education. Larry Summers, when he was chief economist at the World Bank, once said that, "It may well be that the highest return on investment in the developing world is in girls' education." Let me tell you about Beatrice Biira. Beatrice was living in Uganda near the Congo border, and like Dai Manju, she didn't go to school. Actually, she had never been to school, not to a lick, one day. Her parents, again, said, "Why should we spend the money on her? She's going to spend most of her life lugging water back and forth." Well, it just so happens, at that time, there was a group in Connecticut called the Niantic Community Church Group in Connecticut. They made a donation to an organization based in Arkansas called Heifer International. Heifer sent two goats to Africa. One of them ended up with Beatrice's parents, and that goat had twins. The twins started producing milk. They sold the milk for cash. The cash started accumulating, and pretty soon the parents said, "You know, we've got enough money. Let's send Beatrice to school." So at nine years of age, Beatrice started in first grade — after all, she'd never been to a lick of school — with a six year-old. No matter, she was just delighted to be in school. She rocketed to the top of her class. She stayed at the top of her class through elementary school, middle school, and then in high school, she scored brilliantly on the national examinations so that she became the first person in her village, ever, to come to the United States on scholarship. Two years ago, she graduated from Connecticut College. On the day of her graduation, she said, "I am the luckiest girl alive because of a goat." (Laughter) And that goat was $120. So you see how transformative little bits of help can be. But I want to give you a reality check. Look: U.S. aid, helping people is not easy, and there have been books that have criticized U.S. aid. There's Bill Easterly's book. There's a book called "Dead Aid." You know, the criticism is fair; it isn't easy. You know, people say how half of all water well projects, a year later, are failed. When I was in Zimbabwe, we were touring a place with the village chief — he wanted to raise money for a secondary school — and there was some construction a few yards away, and I said, "What's that?" He sort of mumbled. Turns out that it's a failed irrigation project. A few yards away was a failed chicken coop. One year, all the chickens died, and no one wanted to put the chickens in there. It's true, but we think that you don't through the baby out with the bathwater; you actually improve. You learn from your mistakes, and you continuously improve. We also think that individuals can make a difference, and they should, because individuals, together, we can all help create a movement. And a movement of men and women is what's needed to bring about social change, change that will address this great moral challenge. So then, I ask, what's in it for you? You're probably asking that. Why should you care? I will just leave you with two things. One is that research shows that once you have all of your material needs taken care of — which most of us, all of us, here in this room do — research shows that there are very few things in life that can actually elevate your level of happiness. One of those things is contributing to a cause larger than yourself. And the second thing, it's an anecdote that I'll leave you with. And that is the story of an aid worker in Darfur. Here was a woman who had worked in Darfur, seeing things that no human being should see. Throughout her time there, she was strong, she was steadfast. She never broke down. And then she came back to the United States and was on break, Christmas break. She was in her grandmother's backyard, and she saw something that made her break down in tears. What that was was a bird feeder. And she realized that she had the great fortune to be born in a country where we take security for granted, where we not only can feed, clothe and house ourselves, but also provide for wild birds so they don't go hungry in the winter. And she realized that with that great fortune comes great responsibility. And so, like her, you, me, we have all won the lottery of life. And so the question becomes: how do we discharge that responsibility? So, here's the cause. Join the movement. Feel happier and help save the world. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Meet Milo, the virtual boy | {0: 'The head of Microsoft\'s European games division, Peter Molyneux is building an astonishing new "virtual friend" who interacts with you.'} | TEDGlobal 2010 | When I saw a piece of technology called Kinect — it was called Natal — I was inspired, and I thought for a moment, maybe it's possible to address that one problem of storytelling, to create a character which seemed alive, which noticed me, that could look me in the eyes and feel real, and sculpt a story about our relationship. And so a year ago, I showed this off at a computer show called E3. And this was a piece of technology with someone called Claire interacting with this boy. And there was a huge row online about, "Hey, this can't be real." And so I waited till now to have an actual demo of the real tech. Now, this tech incorporates three big elements. The first is a Kinect camera, which will be out in November, some incredible AI that was hidden in the dusty vaults, collecting dust in Microsoft, plus our quite crude attempts at AI at a company called Lionhead, mixing all those things together just to get to this one simple idea: to create a real, living being in a computer. Now, I'll be honest with you and say that most of it is just a trick, but it's a trick that actually works. So why don't we go over and have a look at the demo now. This is Dimitri. Dimitri, just waggle your arm around. Now, you notice he's sitting. There are no controllers, no keyboards, or mice, or joysticks, or joypads. He is just going to use his hand, his body and his voice, just like humans interact with their hands, body and voice. So let's move forward. You're going to meet Milo for the first time. We had to give him a problem because when we first created Milo, we realized that he came across as a little bit of a brat, to be honest with you. He was quite a know-it-all, and he wanted to kind of make you laugh. So the problem we introduced to him was this: he's just moved house. He's moved from London to New England, over in America. His parents are too busy to listen to his problems, and that's when he starts almost conjuring you up. So here he is walking through the grass. And you're able to interact with his world. The cool thing is, what we're doing is we're changing the mind of Milo constantly. That means no two people's Milos can be the same. You're actually sculpting a human being here. So, he's discovering the garden. You're helping him discover the garden by just pointing out these snails. Very simple at the start. By the way, if you are a boy, it's snails; if you're a girl, it's butterflies because what we found was that girls hate snails. (Laughter) So remember, this is the first time you've met him, and we really want to draw you in and make you more curious. His face, by the way, is fully AI-driven. We have complete control over his blush responses, the diameter of his nostrils to denote stress. We actually do something called body matching. If you're leaning forward, he will try and slightly change the neuro-linguistic nature of his face, because we went out with this strong idea: how can we make you believe that something's real? Now we've used the hand. The other thing to use is your body. Why not just, instead of pushing left and right with a mouse or with a joypad, why not use your body just to lean on the chair — again, relaxed? You can lean back, but the camera will change its perspective depending on which way you're looking. So Dimitri's now going to use — he's used his hand; he's used his body. He's now going to use the other thing which is essential, and that's his voice. Now, the thing about voice is, our experience with voice recognition is pretty awful, isn't it? It never works. You order an airline ticket; you end up in Timbuktu. So we've tackled that problem, and we've come up with a solution, which we'll see in a second. Milo: I could just squish it. Peter Molyneux: What are you going to do, Dimitri? Female Voice: Squashing a snail may not seem important, but remember, even this choice will affect how Milo develops. Do you want Milo to squash it? When you see the microphone, say ... (PM: Squash.) ... yes to decide. Dimitri: Go on, Milo. Squash it. PM: No. That's the wrong thing to do. Now look at his response. He said, "Go on, Milo. Squash it." What we're using there is, we're using something, a piece of technology called Tellme. It's a company that Microsoft acquired some years ago. We've got a database of words which we recognize. We pick those words out. We also reference that with the tonation database that we build up of Dimitri's voice, or the user's voice. Now we need to have a bit more engagement, and again, what we can do is we can look at the body. And we'll do that in a second. Milo: I wonder how deep it is. Deep. PM: Okay. So what we're going to do now is teach Milo to skim stones. We're actually teaching him. It's very, very interesting that men, more than women, tend to be more competitive here. They're fine with teaching Milo for the first few throws, but then they want to beat Milo, where women, they're more nurturing about this. Okay, this is skimming stones. How do you skim stones? You stand up, and you skim the stone. It's that simple. Just recognizing your body, recognizing the body's motions, the tech, understanding that you've gone from sitting down to standing up. Again, all of this is done in the way us humans do things, and that's crucially important if we want Milo to appear real. Female Voice: See if you can inspire him to do any better. Try hitting the boat. Milo: Ahhh. So close. PM: That's Dimitri at his most competitive. Now beaten an 11-year-old child. Well done. Milo: Okay. PM: So, Milo's being called back in by his parents, giving us time to be alone and to help him out. Basically — the bit that we missed at the start — his parents had asked him to clean up his room. And we're going to help him with this now. But this is going to be an introduction, and this is all about the deep psychology that we're trying to use. We're trying to introduce you to what I believe is the most wonderful part, you being able to talk in your natural voice to Milo. Now, to do that, we needed a set up, like a magician's trick. And what we did was, we needed to give Milo this big problem. So as Dimitri starts tidying up, you can overhear a conversation that Milo's having with his parents. Milo's Mom: Oh, you've got gravy all over the floor. (Milo: I didn't mean to!) Milo's Mom: That carpet is brand new. PM: So he's just spilled a plate of sausages on the floor, on the brand-new carpet. We've all done it as parents; we've all done it as children. Now's a chance for Dimitri to kind of reassure and calm Milo down. It's all been too much for him. He's just moved house. He's got no friends. Now is the time when we open that portal and allow you to talk to Milo. Female Voice: Why don't you try saying something encouraging to cheer Milo up. Dimitri: Come on, Milo. You know what parents are like. They're always getting stressed. Milo: What do they want to come here for anyway? We don't know anyone. Dimitri: Well, you've got a new school to go to. You're going to meet loads of cool, new friends. Milo: I just really miss my old house, that's all. Dimitri: Well, this is a pretty awesome house, Milo. You've got a cool garden to play in and a pond. Milo: It was good skimming stones. This looks nice. You cleaned up my room. Thanks. PM: So after three-quarters of an hour, he recognizes you. And I promise you, if you're sitting in front of this screen, that is a truly wonderful moment. And we're ready now to tell a story about his childhood and his life, and it goes on, and he has, you know, many adventures. Some of those adventures are a little bit dark or on the darker side. Some of those adventures are wonderfully encouraging — he's got to go to school. The cool thing is that we're doing as well: as you interact with him, you're able to put things into his world; he recognizes objects. His mind is based in a cloud. That means Milo's mind, as millions of people use it, will get smarter and cleverer. He'll recognize more objects and thus understand more words. But for me, this is a wonderful opportunity where technology, at last, can be connected with, where I am no longer restrained by the finger I hold in my hand — as far as a computer game's concerned — or by the blandness of not being noticed if you're watching a film or a book. And I love those revolutions, and I love the future that Milo brings. Thank you very much indeed. (Applause) |
The Axis of Evil Middle East Comedy Tour | {0: 'Jamil Abu-Wardeh believes in the community-building power of a shared laugh -- especially in Arabic. He jumpstarted the Dubai standup comedy scene and produced the Axis of Evil Middle East Comedy Tour.'} | TEDGlobal 2010 | This talk is about righting writing wrongs. No, the sound's not faulty — righting writing wrongs. The Middle East is huge, and with all our problems, one thing's for sure: we love to laugh. I think humor is a great way to celebrate our differences. We need to take our responsibilities seriously, but not ourselves. Don't get me wrong: it's not like we don't have comedy in the Middle East. I grew up at a time when iconic actors from Kuwait, Syria, Egypt used laughter to unite the region, just as football can. (Laughter) Now is the time for us to laugh at ourselves, before others can laugh with us. This is the story of the rise and rise of stand-up comedy in the Middle East — a stand-up uprising, if you will. Working in London as TV maker and writer, I quickly realized that comedy connects audiences. Now, the best breeding ground for good comic writing is the stand-up comedy circuit, where they just happen to say that you kill when you do well and you bomb when you do badly. An unfortunate connection for us maybe, but it reminds me that we'd like to thank one man for, over the past decade, working tirelessly to support comedians all around the world, specifically comedians with a Middle Eastern background. (Applause) Like my good friends, Dean and Maysoon, at the bottom of the screen, who, two years after 9/11, started a festival to change the way Middle Easterners are perceived in the world. It's still going strong, with positive press to die for. Also, three guys working for years in Los Angeles, an Iranian, a Palestinian and an Egyptian, created the aptly named Axis of Evil comedy act. And wherever they went, they killed. Now, I didn't start this fire, but I did pour petrol on it. I moved to Dubai as the head of original content for a Western TV network. My job was to connect the brand with a Middle Eastern audience. Now, the American head of programming wanted new local Arabic comedy. In a thick Arabic accent, my brain went, "Berfect." (Laughter) Now, I had friends in the U.S. who had started a successful new tribe. And I had every intention of taking this tribe from being outliers in the Middle East and pushing them over the tipping point towards success. Now, as with any new idea, it wasn't easy. I had four phases to this plan. First, we'd need to buy content from the West and air it. Then I'd bring my friends, and we'd show local amateurs how it's done. We would film that and air it, and then I could work with the local amateurs and write new comedy. I excitedly presented this to the big boss, and his reaction was, "Um, I don't get it." So I retreated back to my cave and continued to support and produce comedy and let my friends use my couch as a regional operations hub. Now, fast forward two years, to early 2007. The earth rotated, as did our management, (Laughter) and as if by divine intervention, things came together to help this revolution take shape. Here's how the dots connected. First, the Axis guys recorded a Comedy Central special that aired in the States, and it was getting great hits on YouTube. Our new French CEO believed in the power of positive PR ... (Laughter) and ideas du bon marche. Let's just say "value for money." I produced in Dubai a show for Ahmed Ahmed to showcase his new Axis special to a packed room. I invited our new CEO, and as soon as he realized we had a room packed full of laughing infidels, his reaction was very simple: "Let's make this happen. And one more thing: No, don't F it up." So I quickly went to work with a great team around me. I happened to find a funny guy to present it in Arabic, who is originally Korean, a perfect fit for the Axis of Evil. This is all true. Now, while preparing for the tour, I had to remind the guys to be culturally sensitive. I used the three Bs of stand-up don'ts as I call them in the Middle East: blue content, keep it clean; beliefs, not religion; and the third B, bolitics. Stay away from bolitics in the Middle East. Oh course, you might think, what's left without bolitics, sex and religion, how can you make people laugh? I'd say, watch any successful well-written, family-friendly sitcom in the West for your answers. Now, were the Axis successful? In five countries, in just under a month, we had thousands of fanatical fans come and see them live. We had millions see them on TV and on TV news. In Jordan, we had His Majesty the King come and see them. In fact, they were so successful that you could buy a pirated copy of their DVD, even before it was released in the Middle East. Anywhere you go. So everywhere we went, we auditioned amateurs. We filmed that process and aired a documentary. I called it "Three Guys and Wonho." It really is his name. And all this TV and Internet exposure has led to a great many recruits to our cause. In Dubai this year, we've just had the first all-women's, homegrown stand-up show. And notice two of them are wearing headscarves, and yes, even they can laugh. Dubai, to me, is like a hand that supports anyone who wants to make things happen. 20 years ago, no one had heard of it. Look at it now. With an inspirational leader, I think this year, the opening of the tallest tower in the world is like adding a finger to that hand, that points at all those who spread fallacious stories about us. (Laughter) (Applause) Now, in three short years, we've come a long way with stand-up comedy shows happening even in Saudi Arabia. These comics are now going to the New York festival. And the Lebanese, brilliant Lebanese, Nemr Abou Nassar, we featured in our first tour, has just been performing in L.A.'s legendary comedy clubs. So clearly, from the inside, we are doing our best to change our image, and it's exploding. (Laughter) So, as for the outsiders looking in, watch the CNN report on the second Amman Comedy Festival. The reporter did a great job, and I thank her, but somebody forgot to send the positive PR email to the person operating the automatic news ticker that appears at the bottom. For example, when Dean talks, the ticker says, "U.S.: Suspect gave 'actionable intel." Well, if you're used to listening to comedians, then I'm not surprised. Sadly, this leads me to another three Bs that represents how the media in the West talks about us as bombers, billionaires and belly dancers. Enough. We're not all angry fanatics who want to kill the infidel. We have a positive story to tell and image to sell. In fact, one thing's for sure, in my experience, we love to laugh like hell. (Laughter) Here are three questions that I like to use to test the truthiness of our representation in any media story. One: Is the Middle East being shown in a current time and correct context? (Laughter) Two: Do the Middle Eastern characters laugh or smile without showing the whites of their eyes? (Laughter) Three: Is the Middle Eastern character being played by one? Clearly, there are wrongs that need to be righted. We've started in our region. My challenge to the rest of the world is please, start using positive Middle Eastern images in your stories. For inspiration, go to one of our festivals, go online, drop us a line. Let's change the narrative together and let's start righting writing wrongs. I'd like to end, before going back to the Middle East, with a quote from one of the greatest Sheikhs to put quill to parchment. As my father likes to call him, "Asheikh Azubare;" as my mother would say, "Shakespeare." (Laughter) "And now we go in content to liberty and not to banishment." Thank you. (Applause) |
Did you hear the one about the Iranian-American? | {0: 'A founding member of the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour, Iranian-American comedian Maz Jobrani is now touring with his second solo comedy show, Browner and Friendlier.'} | TEDGlobal 2010 | I was one of the founding members of the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour. The other founding members included Ahmed Ahmed, who is an Egyptian-American, who actually had the idea to go to the Middle East and try it out before we went out as a tour. He went out solo and did it first. Then there was Aron Kader, who was the Palestinian-American. And then there was me, the Iranian-American of the group. Now, being Iranian-American presents its own set of problems, as you know. Those two countries aren't getting along these days. So it causes a lot of inner conflict, you know, like part of me likes me, part of me hates me. (Laughter) Part of me thinks I should have a nuclear program, the other part thinks I can't be trusted with one. These are dilemmas I have every day. But I was born in Iran; I'm now an American citizen, which means I have the American passport, which means I can travel. Because if you only have the Iranian passport, you're kind of limited to the countries you can go to with open arms, you know — Syria, Venezuela, North Korea. (Laughter) So, anyone who's gotten their passport in America will tell you, when you get it, it still says what country you were born in. So I remember getting my American passport. I was like, "Woo-hoo! I'm going to travel." And I opened it up, it said, "Born in Iran." I'm like, "Oh, come on, man!" (Laughter) "I'm trying to go places." (Laughter) But what's interesting is, I've never had trouble in any Western countries with my American passport, even though it says, "Born in Iran" — no problems. Where I've had problems is in some of the Arab countries. I guess some of the Arab countries aren't getting along with Iran either. So I was in Kuwait recently, doing a comedy show with some other American comedians. They all went through. Then the border patrol saw my American passport: "Ah-ha! American, great." Then he opened it up. "Born in Iran? Wait." (Laughter) And he started asking me questions. He said, "What is your father's name?" I said, "Well, he's passed away, but his name was Khosro." He goes, "What is your grandfather's name?" I said, "He passed away a long time ago. His name was Jabbar." He says, "You wait. I'll be back," and he walked away. And I started freaking out, because I don't know what kind of crap my grandfather was into. (Laughter) Thought the guy was going to come back and be like, "We've been looking for you for 200 years." (Laughter) "Your grandfather has a parking violation. It's way overdue. You owe us two billion dollars." (Laughter) But as you can see, when I talk, I speak with an American accent, which you would think, as an Iranian-American actor, I should be able to play any part, good, bad, what have you. But a lot of times in Hollywood, when casting directors find out you're of Middle Eastern descent, they go, "Oh, you're Iranian. Great! Can you say 'I will kill you in the name of Allah?'" I go, "I could say that, but what if I were to say, 'Hello. I'm your doctor'?" They go, "Great! And then you hijack the hospital." (Laughter) Like, I think you're missing the point here. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind playing bad guys. I want to play a bad guy. I want to rob a bank. I want to rob a bank in a film, but do it with a gun, not with a bomb strapped around me, right? (Laughter) Because I imagine the director: "Maz, I think your character would rob the bank with a bomb around him." "Why would I do that? If I want the money, why would I kill myself?" (Laughter) Right? (Applause) "Gimme all your money, or I'll blow myself up!" (Laughter) "Well, then blow yourself up. (Laughter) Just do it outside, please." (Laughter) But the fact is, there's good people everywhere. That's what I try and show in my stand-up, good people everywhere. All it takes in one person to mess it up. Like a couple months ago in Times Square in New York, there was a Pakistani Muslim guy who tried to blow up a car bomb. Now, I happened to be in Times Square that night doing a comedy show. And a few months before that, there was a white American guy in Austin, Texas who flew his airplane into the IRS building, and I happened to be in Austin that day doing a stand-up comedy show. Now I'll tell you, as a Middle-Eastern male, when you show up around a lot of these activities, you start feeling guilty at one point. (Laughter) I was watching the news. I'm like, "Am I involved in this crap?" (Laughter) "I didn't get the memo. What's going on?" (Laughter) But what was interesting was, the Pakistani Muslim guy — see, he gives a bad name to Muslims and Middle Easterners and Pakistanis from all over the world. And one thing that happened there was also the Pakistani Taliban took credit for that failed car bombing. My question is: Why would you take credit for a failed car bombing? "We just want to say: we tried." (Laughter) "And furthermore ... (Laughter) it is the thought that counts." (Laughter) (Applause) "And in conclusion, win some, lose some." (Laughter) But what happened was, when the white guy flew his plane into the building, I know all my Middle Eastern and Muslim friends in the States were watching TV, going, "Please, don't be Middle Eastern. Don't be Hassan or Hussein." And the name came out: Jack. I'm like, "Woooo! That's not one of us!" But I kept watching the news in case they came back, and were like, "Before he did it, he converted to Islam." "Damn it! Why Jack? Why?" But the fact is, I've been lucky to get a chance to perform all over the world, and I did a lot of shows in the Middle East. I just did a seven-country solo tour. I was in Oman, and I was in Saudi Arabia. I was in Dubai. And it's great, there's good people everywhere. And you learn great things about these places. I encourage people always to go visit these places. For example, Dubai — cool place. They're obsessed with having the biggest, tallest, longest, as we all know. They have a mall there, the Dubai Mall. It is so big, they have taxis in the mall. I was walking. I heard, "Beep! Beep!" I'm like, "What are you doing here?" He goes, "I'm going to the Zara store. It's three miles away. Out of my way. Out of my way. Out of my way." (Laughter) And what's crazy — there's a recession going on, even in Dubai, but you wouldn't know by the prices. Like in the Dubai Mall, they sell frozen yogurt by the gram. It's like a drug deal. I was walking by. The guy goes, "Psst! Habibi, my friend." (Laughter) "You want some frozen yogurt? (Laughter) Come here. Come here. Come here. I have one gram, five gram, 10 gram. How many gram do you want?" (Laughter) I bought five grams. 10 dollars. 10 dollars! I said, "What's in this?" He's like, "Good stuff, man. Colombian. Top of the line." (Laughter) The other thing you learn when you travel in these countries, in the Middle East, Latin American, South American countries, a lot of times when they build stuff, there's no rules and regulations. For example, I took my two-year-old son to the playground at the Dubai Mall. And I've taken him to playgrounds all over the United States. And when you put your two-year-old on a slide in the United States, they put something on the slide to slow the kid down as he comes down the slide. Not in the Middle East. (Laughter) I put my two-year-old on the slide, he went whoosh! He took off! (Laughter) I went down and, "Where's my son?" "On the third floor, sir. Third floor." (Laughter) "You take a taxi. You go to Zara. Make a left." (Laughter) "Try the yogurt. It's very good. Little expensive." (Laughter) But one thing I try to do with my stand-up is break stereotypes. And I've been guilty of stereotyping as well. I was in Dubai. And there's a lot of Indians who work in Dubai. And they don't get paid that well. And I got it in my head that all the Indians must be workers. I forgot there's obviously successful Indians in Dubai too. I was doing a show, and they said, "We'll send a driver to pick you up." I went down to the lobby, and saw this Indian guy. I go, "He must be my driver," since he's standing there in a cheap suit, thin mustache, staring at me. I say, "Excuse me, are you my driver?" He goes, "No, sir. I own the hotel." (Laughter) I go, "I'm sorry! Why were you staring at me?" He goes, "I thought you were my driver." (Laughter) (Applause) (Laughter) I'll leave you with this: I try, with my stand-up, to break stereotypes, present Middle Easterners and Muslims in a positive light. I hope that in the coming years, more film and television programs come out of Hollywood, presenting us in a positive light. Who knows? Maybe one day, we'll even have our own James Bond. Right? "My name is Bond. Jamal Bond." (Laughter) Til then, I'll keep telling jokes. Hope you keep laughing. Have a good day. Thank you. (Applause) |
The game layer on top of the world | {0: '"Proud Princeton dropout" Seth Priebatsch runs SCVNGR, a mobile start-up trying to build the game layer on top of the world.'} | TEDxBoston 2010 | My name's Seth Priebatsch. I'm the chief ninja of SCVNGR. I'm a proud Princeton dropout. Also proud to have relocated here to Boston, where I actually grew up. (Applause) Yeah, Boston. Easy wins, I should just name the counties that we've got around here. I'm also fairly determined to try and build a game layer on top of the world. This is sort of a new concept and it's really important, because while the last decade was the decade of social, the decade where the framework in which we connect with other people was built, this next decade will be the decade where the game framework is built, where the motivations we use to actually influence behavior and the framework in which that is constructed, is decided upon, and that's really important. I say I want to build a game layer on top of the world, but that's not quite true, because it's already under construction; it's already happening. And it looks like this right now. It looks like the Web did back in 1997, right? It's not very good. It's cluttered. It's filled with lots of different things that, in short, aren't that fun. There are credit card schemes and airline mile programs, coupon cards and all these loyalty schemes that actually do use game dynamics and are building the game layer — they just suck. They're not very well-designed. (Laughter) So that's unfortunate. But luckily, as my favorite action hero, Bob the Builder, says, "We can do better. We can build this better." And the tools, the resources that we use to build a game layer, are game dynamics themselves. And so the crux of this presentation is going to go through four really important game dynamics, really interesting things, that, if you use consciously, you can use to influence behavior, both for good, for bad, for in-between. Hopefully for good. But this is the important stage in which that framework will get built, and so we want to all be thinking about it consciously now. Before we jump into that, there's a question of: Why is this important? I'm making this claim that there's a game layer on top of the world, and it's very important that we build it properly. The reason it's so important is that, in the last decade, what we've seen has been building the social layer, has been this framework for connections, and construction on that layer is over, it's finished. There's still a lot to explore, still a lot of people trying to figure out social and how we leverage this and how we use this, but the framework itself is done, and it's called Facebook. And that's OK, right? A lot of people are very happy with Facebook. I like it quite a lot. They've created this thing called the Open Graph, and they own all of our connections. They own half a billion people. So when you want to build on the social layer, the framework has been decided; it is the Open Graph API. And if you're happy with that, fantastic. If you're not, too bad. There's nothing you can do. And that's a real thing. I mean, we want to build frameworks in a way that makes it acceptable and makes it productive down the road. So, the social layer is all about these connections. The game layer is all about influence. It's not about adding a social fabric to the web and connecting you to other people everywhere you are and everywhere you go, it's actually about using dynamics, using forces, to influence the behavior of where you are, what you do there, how you do it. That's really, really powerful. And it's going to be more important than the social layer, and affect our lives more deeply and perhaps more invisibly. So it's incredibly critical that at this moment, while it's just getting constructed, while the frameworks like Facebook or Open Graph are being created for the game-layer equivalent, that we think about it very consciously, and that we do it in a way that is open, available, and can be leveraged for good. So that's what I want to talk about for game dynamics, because construction has just begun, and the more consciously we can think about this, the better we'll be able to use it for anything we want. So like I said, the way you go through and build on the game layer is not with glass and steel and cement. And the resources we use are not this two-dimensional swath of land that we have. The resources are mindshare, and the tools, the raw materials, are these game dynamics. With that, a couple game dynamics to talk about. Back at SCVNGR, we like to joke that with seven game dynamics, you can get anyone to do anything. Today, I'm going to show you four, because I hope to have a competitive advantage at the end of this, still. (Laughter) So the first one, it's a very simple game dynamic. It's called the appointment dynamic. It's a dynamic in which to succeed, players have to do something at a predefined time, generally at a predefined place. And these dynamics are a little scary sometimes, because you think, "Other people can be using forces that will manipulate how I interact: what I do, where I do it, when I do it." This sort of "loss of free will" that occurs in games can be frightening. So with each dynamic, I'm going to give three examples: one that shows how it's already being used in the real world, so you can rationalize it a bit; one that shows it in what we consider a conventional game — I think everything is a game, but this is more what you'd think of as a game played on a board or on a computer screen; and one of how it can be used for good, so you can see that these forces can be very powerful. So the first one, the most famous appointment dynamic in the world, is something called, "Happy Hour." So I had just recently dropped out of Princeton and actually ended up for the first time in a bar, and I saw these happy hour things all over the place. And this is simply an appointment dynamic: come here at a certain time, get your drinks half off. To win, all you have to do is show up at the right place at the right time. This game dynamic is so powerful, it doesn't just influence our behavior; it's influenced our entire culture. That's a really scary thought, that one game dynamic can change things so powerfully. It also exists in more conventional game forms. I'm sure you've all heard of Farmville by now. If you haven't, I recommend playing it. You won't do anything else for the rest of your day. Farmville has more active users than Twitter. It's incredibly powerful, and it has this dynamic where you have to return at a certain time to water your fake crops, or they wilt. And this is so powerful that when they tweak their stats, when they say your crops wilt after eight hours, or after six hours, or after 24 hours, it changes the life cycle of some 70 million people during the day. They will return, like clockwork, at different times. So if they wanted the world to end, if they wanted productivity to stop, they could make it a 30-minute cycle, and no one could do anything else, right? (Laughter) That's a little scary. But this could also be used for good. This local company called Vitality has created a product to help people take their medicine on time. That's an appointment. It's something that people don't do very well. They have these GlowCaps which flash and email you and do cool things to remind you to take your medicine. This isn't a game yet, but really should be. You should get points for doing it on time and lose points for not doing it on time. They should recognize they've built an appointment dynamic, and leverage the games. Then you can really achieve good in some interesting ways. We're going to jump onto the next one. Influence and status. This is one of the most famous game dynamics, used all over the place. It's used in your wallets, right now. We all want that credit card on the far left, because it's black. And you see someone at CVS or — not CVS — like, Christian Dior — (Laughter) I don't know. I don't have a black card; I've got a debit card. (Laughter) So they whip it out and you see that black card, and: "I want that because it means they're cooler than I am, and I need that." And this is used in games as well. "Modern Warfare," one of the most successful selling games of all time. I'm only a level four, but I desperately want to be a level 10, because they've got that cool red badge, and that means that I am somehow better than everyone else. And that's very powerful to me. Status is really good motivator. It's also used in more conventional settings, and can be used more consciously there. School — and remember, I made it through one year, so I think I'm qualified to talk on school — is a game; it's just not a terribly well-designed game. There are levels. There are C. There are B. There's A. There are statuses. I mean, what is valedictorian, but a status? If we called valedictorian a "White Knight Paladin level 20," I think people would probably work a lot harder. (Laughter) (Applause) So school is a game, and there has been lots of experimentation on how we do this properly. But let's use it consciously. Why have games you can lose? Why go from an A to an F or a B to a C? That sucks. Why not level-up? At Princeton, they've actually experimented with this, with quizzes where you gain experience points, and you level up from B to an A. And it's very powerful. It can be used in interesting ways. The third one I'll talk about is the progression dynamic, where you have to make progress, move through different steps in a very granular fashion. This is used all over the place, including LinkedIn, where I am an unwhole individual. I am only 85 percent complete on LinkedIn, and that bothers me. And this is so deep-seated in our psyche that when we're presented with a progress bar and presented with easy, granular steps to take to try and complete that progress bar, we will do it. We will find a way to move that blue line all the way to the right edge of the screen. This is used in conventional games as well. I mean, this is a Paladin level 10, and that's a Paladin level 20. And if you were going to fight Orcs on the fields of Mordor against the Ra's Al Ghul, you'd probably want to be the bigger one, right? I would. And so people work very hard to level-up. "World of Warcraft" is one of the most successful games of all time. The average player spends some six, six-and-a-half hours a day on it, their most dedicated players — it's like a full-time job, it's insane. And they have these systems where you can level-up. And that's a very powerful thing. Progression is powerful. It can also be used in very compelling ways for good. One of the things we work on at SCVNGR is: How do you use games to drive traffic and business to local businesses, to something that is very key to the economy? And here, we have a game that people play. They go places, do challenges, earn points. And we've introduced a progression dynamic into it, where, by going to the same place over and over, doing challenges, engaging with the business, you move a green bar from the left edge of the screen to the right, and unlock rewards. This is powerful enough that we can see it hooks people into these dynamics, pulls them back to the same local businesses, creates loyalty, creates engagement, and is able to drive meaningful revenue and fun and engagement to businesses. These progression dynamics are powerful and can be used in the real world. The final one I want to talk about — and it's a great one to end on — is this concept of communal discovery, a dynamic in which everyone has to work together to achieve something. Communal discovery is powerful because it leverages the network that is society to solve problems. This is used in some famous consumer web stories like Digg, which I'm sure you've all heard of. Digg is a communal dynamic to try to find and source the best news, the most interesting stories. And they made this into a game, initially. They had a leader board where, if you recommended the best stories, you would get points. And that really motivated people to find the best stories. But it became so powerful, there was actually a cabal, a group of people, the top seven on the leader board, who would work together to make sure they maintained that position, recommending people's stories. The game became more powerful than the goal. They ended up shutting down the leader board because, while it was effective, it was so powerful that it stopped sourcing the best stories, and started having people work to maintain leadership. So we have to use this one carefully. It's also used in things like McDonald's Monopoly, where the game is not the Monopoly you're playing, but the cottage industries that form to try and find Boardwalk. There, they're just looking for a sticker that says "Boardwalk," but it can also be used to find real things. This is the DARPA balloon challenge, where they hid a couple balloons all across the United States and said, "Use networks. Try and find these balloons fastest, and the winner will get $40,000." The winner was a group out of MIT, where they created sort of a pyramid scheme, a network, where the first person to recommend the location of a balloon got $2,000, and anyone else to push that recommendation up also got a cut. And in 12 hours, they were able to find all these balloons, all across the country. Really powerful dynamic. And so, I've got about 20 seconds left, so if I'm going to leave you with anything, last decade was the decade of social. This next decade is the decade of games. We use game dynamics to build on it. We build with mindshare. We can influence behavior. It's very powerful. It's very exciting. Let's all build it together, let's do it well and have fun playing. (Applause) |
The beauty of data visualization | {0: 'David McCandless draws beautiful conclusions from complex datasets -- thus revealing unexpected insights into our world.'} | TEDGlobal 2010 | It feels like we're all suffering from information overload or data glut. And the good news is there might be an easy solution to that, and that's using our eyes more. So, visualizing information, so that we can see the patterns and connections that matter and then designing that information so it makes more sense, or it tells a story, or allows us to focus only on the information that's important. Failing that, visualized information can just look really cool. So, let's see. This is the $Billion Dollar o-Gram, and this image arose out of frustration I had with the reporting of billion-dollar amounts in the press. That is, they're meaningless without context: 500 billion for this pipeline, 20 billion for this war. It doesn't make any sense, so the only way to understand it is visually and relatively. So I scraped a load of reported figures from various news outlets and then scaled the boxes according to those amounts. And the colors here represent the motivation behind the money. So purple is "fighting," and red is "giving money away," and green is "profiteering." And what you can see straight away is you start to have a different relationship to the numbers. You can literally see them. But more importantly, you start to see patterns and connections between numbers that would otherwise be scattered across multiple news reports. Let me point out some that I really like. This is OPEC's revenue, this green box here — 780 billion a year. And this little pixel in the corner — three billion — that's their climate change fund. Americans, incredibly generous people — over 300 billion a year, donated to charity every year, compared with the amount of foreign aid given by the top 17 industrialized nations at 120 billion. Then of course, the Iraq War, predicted to cost just 60 billion back in 2003. And it mushroomed slightly. Afghanistan and Iraq mushroomed now to 3,000 billion. So now it's great because now we have this texture, and we can add numbers to it as well. So we could say, well, a new figure comes out ... let's see African debt. How much of this diagram do you think might be taken up by the debt that Africa owes to the West? Let's take a look. So there it is: 227 billion is what Africa owes. And the recent financial crisis, how much of this diagram might that figure take up? What has that cost the world? Let's take a look at that. Dooosh — Which I think is the appropriate sound effect for that much money: 11,900 billion. So, by visualizing this information, we turned it into a landscape that you can explore with your eyes, a kind of map really, a sort of information map. And when you're lost in information, an information map is kind of useful. So I want to show you another landscape now. We need to imagine what a landscape of the world's fears might look like. Let's take a look. This is Mountains Out of Molehills, a timeline of global media panic. (Laughter) So, I'll label this for you in a second. But the height here, I want to point out, is the intensity of certain fears as reported in the media. Let me point them out. So this, swine flu — pink. Bird flu. SARS — brownish here. Remember that one? The millennium bug, terrible disaster. These little green peaks are asteroid collisions. (Laughter) And in summer, here, killer wasps. (Laughter) So these are what our fears look like over time in our media. But what I love — and I'm a journalist — and what I love is finding hidden patterns; I love being a data detective. And there's a very interesting and odd pattern hidden in this data that you can only see when you visualize it. Let me highlight it for you. See this line, this is a landscape for violent video games. As you can see, there's a kind of odd, regular pattern in the data, twin peaks every year. If we look closer, we see those peaks occur at the same month every year. Why? Well, November, Christmas video games come out, and there may well be an upsurge in the concern about their content. But April isn't a particularly massive month for video games. Why April? Well, in April 1999 was the Columbine shooting, and since then, that fear has been remembered by the media and echoes through the group mind gradually through the year. You have retrospectives, anniversaries, court cases, even copy-cat shootings, all pushing that fear into the agenda. And there's another pattern here as well. Can you spot it? See that gap there? There's a gap, and it affects all the other stories. Why is there a gap there? You see where it starts? September 2001, when we had something very real to be scared about. So, I've been working as a data journalist for about a year, and I keep hearing a phrase all the time, which is this: "Data is the new oil." Data is the kind of ubiquitous resource that we can shape to provide new innovations and new insights, and it's all around us, and it can be mined very easily. It's not a particularly great metaphor in these times, especially if you live around the Gulf of Mexico, but I would, perhaps, adapt this metaphor slightly, and I would say that data is the new soil. Because for me, it feels like a fertile, creative medium. Over the years, online, we've laid down a huge amount of information and data, and we irrigate it with networks and connectivity, and it's been worked and tilled by unpaid workers and governments. And, all right, I'm kind of milking the metaphor a little bit. But it's a really fertile medium, and it feels like visualizations, infographics, data visualizations, they feel like flowers blooming from this medium. But if you look at it directly, it's just a lot of numbers and disconnected facts. But if you start working with it and playing with it in a certain way, interesting things can appear and different patterns can be revealed. Let me show you this. Can you guess what this data set is? What rises twice a year, once in Easter and then two weeks before Christmas, has a mini peak every Monday, and then flattens out over the summer? I'll take answers. (Audience: Chocolate.) David McCandless: Chocolate. You might want to get some chocolate in. Any other guesses? (Audience: Shopping.) DM: Shopping. Yeah, retail therapy might help. (Audience: Sick leave.) DM: Sick leave. Yeah, you'll definitely want to take some time off. Shall we see? (Laughter) (Applause) So, the information guru Lee Byron and myself, we scraped 10,000 status Facebook updates for the phrase "break-up" and "broken-up" and this is the pattern we found — people clearing out for Spring Break, (Laughter) coming out of very bad weekends on a Monday, being single over the summer, and then the lowest day of the year, of course: Christmas Day. Who would do that? So there's a titanic amount of data out there now, unprecedented. But if you ask the right kind of question, or you work it in the right kind of way, interesting things can emerge. So information is beautiful. Data is beautiful. I wonder if I could make my life beautiful. And here's my visual C.V. I'm not quite sure I've succeeded. Pretty blocky, the colors aren't that great. But I wanted to convey something to you. I started as a programmer, and then I worked as a writer for many years, about 20 years, in print, online and then in advertising, and only recently have I started designing. And I've never been to design school. I've never studied art or anything. I just kind of learned through doing. And when I started designing, I discovered an odd thing about myself. I already knew how to design, but it wasn't like I was amazingly brilliant at it, but more like I was sensitive to the ideas of grids and space and alignment and typography. It's almost like being exposed to all this media over the years had instilled a kind of dormant design literacy in me. And I don't feel like I'm unique. I feel that everyday, all of us now are being blasted by information design. It's being poured into our eyes through the Web, and we're all visualizers now; we're all demanding a visual aspect to our information. There's something almost quite magical about visual information. It's effortless, it literally pours in. And if you're navigating a dense information jungle, coming across a beautiful graphic or a lovely data visualization, it's a relief, it's like coming across a clearing in the jungle. I was curious about this, so it led me to the work of a Danish physicist called Tor Norretranders, and he converted the bandwidth of the senses into computer terms. So here we go. This is your senses, pouring into your senses every second. Your sense of sight is the fastest. It has the same bandwidth as a computer network. Then you have touch, which is about the speed of a USB key. And then you have hearing and smell, which has the throughput of a hard disk. And then you have poor old taste, which is like barely the throughput of a pocket calculator. And that little square in the corner, a naught .7 percent, that's the amount we're actually aware of. So a lot of your vision — the bulk of it is visual, and it's pouring in. It's unconscious. The eye is exquisitely sensitive to patterns in variations in color, shape and pattern. It loves them, and it calls them beautiful. It's the language of the eye. If you combine the language of the eye with the language of the mind, which is about words and numbers and concepts, you start speaking two languages simultaneously, each enhancing the other. So, you have the eye, and then you drop in the concepts. And that whole thing — it's two languages both working at the same time. So we can use this new kind of language, if you like, to alter our perspective or change our views. Let me ask you a simple question with a really simple answer: Who has the biggest military budget? It's got to be America, right? Massive. 609 billion in 2008 — 607, rather. So massive, in fact, that it can contain all the other military budgets in the world inside itself. Gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble. Now, you can see Africa's total debt there and the U.K. budget deficit for reference. So that might well chime with your view that America is a sort of warmongering military machine, out to overpower the world with its huge industrial-military complex. But is it true that America has the biggest military budget? Because America is an incredibly rich country. In fact, it's so massively rich that it can contain the four other top industrialized nations' economies inside itself, it's so vastly rich. So its military budget is bound to be enormous. So, to be fair and to alter our perspective, we have to bring in another data set, and that data set is GDP, or the country's earnings. Who has the biggest budget as a proportion of GDP? Let's have a look. That changes the picture considerably. Other countries pop into view that you, perhaps, weren't considering, and American drops into eighth. Now you can also do this with soldiers. Who has the most soldiers? It's got to be China. Of course, 2.1 million. Again, chiming with your view that China has a militarized regime ready to, you know, mobilize its enormous forces. But of course, China has an enormous population. So if we do the same, we see a radically different picture. China drops to 124th. It actually has a tiny army when you take other data into consideration. So, absolute figures, like the military budget, in a connected world, don't give you the whole picture. They're not as true as they could be. We need relative figures that are connected to other data so that we can see a fuller picture, and then that can lead to us changing our perspective. As Hans Rosling, the master, my master, said, "Let the dataset change your mindset." And if it can do that, maybe it can also change your behavior. Take a look at this one. I'm a bit of a health nut. I love taking supplements and being fit, but I can never understand what's going on in terms of evidence. There's always conflicting evidence. Should I take vitamin C? Should I be taking wheatgrass? This is a visualization of all the evidence for nutritional supplements. This kind of diagram is called a balloon race. So the higher up the image, the more evidence there is for each supplement. And the bubbles correspond to popularity as regards to Google hits. So you can immediately apprehend the relationship between efficacy and popularity, but you can also, if you grade the evidence, do a "worth it" line. So supplements above this line are worth investigating, but only for the conditions listed below, and then the supplements below the line are perhaps not worth investigating. Now this image constitutes a huge amount of work. We scraped like 1,000 studies from PubMed, the biomedical database, and we compiled them and graded them all. And it was incredibly frustrating for me because I had a book of 250 visualizations to do for my book, and I spent a month doing this, and I only filled two pages. But what it points to is that visualizing information like this is a form of knowledge compression. It's a way of squeezing an enormous amount of information and understanding into a small space. And once you've curated that data, and once you've cleaned that data, and once it's there, you can do cool stuff like this. So I converted this into an interactive app, so I can now generate this application online — this is the visualization online — and I can say, "Yeah, brilliant." So it spawns itself. And then I can say, "Well, just show me the stuff that affects heart health." So let's filter that out. So heart is filtered out, so I can see if I'm curious about that. I think, "No, no. I don't want to take any synthetics, I just want to see plants and — just show me herbs and plants. I've got all the natural ingredients." Now this app is spawning itself from the data. The data is all stored in a Google Doc, and it's literally generating itself from that data. So the data is now alive; this is a living image, and I can update it in a second. New evidence comes out. I just change a row on a spreadsheet. Doosh! Again, the image recreates itself. So it's cool. It's kind of living. But it can go beyond data, and it can go beyond numbers. I like to apply information visualization to ideas and concepts. This is a visualization of the political spectrum, an attempt for me to try and understand how it works and how the ideas percolate down from government into society and culture, into families, into individuals, into their beliefs and back around again in a cycle. What I love about this image is it's made up of concepts, it explores our worldviews and it helps us — it helps me anyway — to see what others think, to see where they're coming from. And it feels just incredibly cool to do that. What was most exciting for me designing this was that, when I was designing this image, I desperately wanted this side, the left side, to be better than the right side — being a journalist, a Left-leaning person — but I couldn't, because I would have created a lopsided, biased diagram. So, in order to really create a full image, I had to honor the perspectives on the right-hand side and at the same time, uncomfortably recognize how many of those qualities were actually in me, which was very, very annoying and uncomfortable. (Laughter) But not too uncomfortable, because there's something unthreatening about seeing a political perspective, versus being told or forced to listen to one. You're capable of holding conflicting viewpoints joyously when you can see them. It's even fun to engage with them because it's visual. So that's what's exciting to me, seeing how data can change my perspective and change my mind midstream — beautiful, lovely data. So, just to wrap up, I wanted to say that it feels to me that design is about solving problems and providing elegant solutions, and information design is about solving information problems. It feels like we have a lot of information problems in our society at the moment, from the overload and the saturation to the breakdown of trust and reliability and runaway skepticism and lack of transparency, or even just interestingness. I mean, I find information just too interesting. It has a magnetic quality that draws me in. So, visualizing information can give us a very quick solution to those kinds of problems. Even when the information is terrible, the visual can be quite beautiful. Often we can get clarity or the answer to a simple question very quickly, like this one, the recent Icelandic volcano. Which was emitting the most CO2? Was it the planes or the volcano, the grounded planes or the volcano? So we can have a look. We look at the data and we see: Yep, the volcano emitted 150,000 tons; the grounded planes would have emitted 345,000 if they were in the sky. So essentially, we had our first carbon-neutral volcano. (Laughter) (Applause) And that is beautiful. Thank you. (Applause) |
Inside an Antarctic time machine | {0: 'Robert Lee Hotz is the science columnist for the Wall Street Journal, where he writes about cutting-edge research on climate change, cosmology, molecular medicine, the human brain and much more ... He has traveled three times to the South Pole.'} | TEDGlobal 2010 | Come with me to the bottom of the world, Antarctica, the highest, driest, windiest, and yes, coldest region on Earth — more arid than the Sahara and, in parts, colder than Mars. The ice of Antarctica glows with a light so dazzling, it blinds the unprotected eye. Early explorers rubbed cocaine in their eyes to kill the pain of it. The weight of the ice is such that the entire continent sags below sea level, beneath its weight. Yet, the ice of Antarctica is a calendar of climate change. It records the annual rise and fall of greenhouse gases and temperatures going back before the onset of the last ice ages. Nowhere on Earth offers us such a perfect record. And here, scientists are drilling into the past of our planet to find clues to the future of climate change. This past January, I traveled to a place called WAIS Divide, about 600 miles from the South Pole. It is the best place on the planet, many say, to study the history of climate change. There, about 45 scientists from the University of Wisconsin, the Desert Research Institute in Nevada and others have been working to answer a central question about global warming. What is the exact relationship between levels of greenhouse gases and planetary temperatures? It's urgent work. We know that temperatures are rising. This past May was the warmest worldwide on record. And we know that levels of greenhouse gases are rising too. What we don't know is the exact, precise, immediate impact of these changes on natural climate patterns — winds, ocean currents, precipitation rates, cloud formation, things that bear on the health and well-being of billions of people. Their entire camp, every item of gear, was ferried 885 miles from McMurdo Station, the main U.S. supply base on the coast of Antarctica. WAIS Divide itself though, is a circle of tents in the snow. In blizzard winds, the crew sling ropes between the tents so that people can feel their way safely to the nearest ice house and to the nearest outhouse. It snows so heavily there, the installation was almost immediately buried. Indeed, the researchers picked this site because ice and snow accumulates here 10 times faster than anywhere else in Antarctica. They have to dig themselves out every day. It makes for an exotic and chilly commute. (Laughter) But under the surface is a hive of industrial activity centered around an eight-million-dollar drill assembly. Periodically, this drill, like a biopsy needle, plunges thousands of feet deep into the ice to extract a marrow of gases and isotopes for analysis. Ten times a day, they extract the 10-foot long cylinder of compressed ice crystals that contain the unsullied air and trace chemicals laid down by snow, season after season for thousands of years. It's really a time machine. At the peak of activity earlier this year, the researchers lowered the drill an extra hundred feet deeper into the ice every day and another 365 years deeper into the past. Periodically, they remove a cylinder of ice, like gamekeepers popping a spent shotgun shell from the barrel of a drill. They inspect it, they check it for cracks, for drill damage, for spalls, for chips. More importantly, they prepare it for inspection and analysis by 27 independent laboratories in the United States and Europe, who will examine it for 40 different trace chemicals related to climate, some in parts per quadrillion. Yes, I said that with a Q, quadrillion. They cut the cylinders up into three-foot sections for easier handling and shipment back to these labs, some 8,000 miles from the drill site. Each cylinder is a parfait of time. This ice formed as snow 15,800 years ago, when our ancestors were daubing themselves with paint and considering the radical new technology of the alphabet. Bathed in polarized light and cut in cross-section, this ancient ice reveals itself as a mosaic of colors, each one showing how conditions at depth in the ice have affected this material at depths where pressures can reach a ton per square inch. Every year, it begins with a snowflake, and by digging into fresh snow, we can see how this process is ongoing today. This wall of undisturbed snow, back-lit by sunlight, shows the striations of winter and summer snow, layer upon layer. Each storm scours the atmosphere, washing out dust, soot, trace chemicals, and depositing them on the snow pack year after year, millennia after millennia, creating a kind of periodic table of elements that at this point is more than 11,000 feet thick. From this, we can detect an extraordinary number of things. We can see the calcium from the world's deserts, soot from distant wildfires, methane as an indicator of the strength of a Pacific monsoon, all wafted on winds from warmer latitudes to this remote and very cold place. Most importantly, these cylinders and this snow trap air. Each cylinder is about 10 percent ancient air, a pristine time capsule of greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide — all unchanged from the day that snow formed and first fell. And this is the object of their scrutiny. But don't we already know what we need to know about greenhouse gases? Why do we need to study this anymore? Don't we already know how they affect temperatures? Don't we already know the consequences of a changing climate on our settled civilization? The truth is, we only know the outlines, and what we don't completely understand, we can't properly fix. Indeed, we run the risk of making things worse. Consider, the single most successful international environmental effort of the 20th century, the Montreal Protocol, in which the nations of Earth banded together to protect the planet from the harmful effects of ozone-destroying chemicals used at that time in air conditioners, refrigerators and other cooling devices. We banned those chemicals, and we replaced them, unknowingly, with other substances that, molecule per molecule, are a hundred times more potent as heat-trapping, greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide. This process requires extraordinary precautions. The scientists must insure that the ice is not contaminated. Moreover, in this 8,000-mile journey, they have to insure this ice doesn't melt. Imagine juggling a snowball across the tropics. They have to, in fact, make sure this ice never gets warmer than about 20 degrees below zero, otherwise, the key gases inside it will dissipate. So, in the coldest place on Earth, they work inside a refrigerator. As they handle the ice, in fact, they keep an extra pair of gloves warming in an oven, so that, when their work gloves freeze and their fingers stiffen, they can don a fresh pair. They work against the clock and against the thermometer. So far, they've packed up about 4,500 feet of ice cores for shipment back to the United States. This past season, they manhandled them across the ice to waiting aircraft. The 109th Air National Guard flew the most recent shipment of ice back to the coast of Antarctica, where it was boarded onto a freighter, shipped across the tropics to California, unloaded, put on a truck, driven across the desert to the National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver, Colorado, where, as we speak, scientists are now slicing this material up for samples, for analysis, to be distributed to the laboratories around the country and in Europe. Antarctica was this planet's last empty quarter — the blind spot in our expanding vision of the world. Early explorers sailed off the edge of the map, and they found a place where the normal rules of time and temperature seem suspended. Here, the ice seems a living presence. The wind that rubs against it gives it voice. It is a voice of experience. It is a voice we should heed. Thank you. (Applause) |
Learning from Sherman the shark | {0: 'For the past 13 years, Jim Toomey has been writing and drawing the daily comic strip Sherman’s Lagoon, about a daffy family of ocean dwellers.'} | Mission Blue Voyage | Cartoons are basically short stories. I tried to find one that didn't have a whole lot of words. Not all of them have happy endings. So how did I get started cartooning? I doodled a lot as a kid, and if you spend enough time doodling, sooner or later, something happens: all your career options run out. So you have to make a living cartooning. Actually, I fell in love with the ocean when I was a little boy, when I was about eight or nine. And I was particularly fascinated with sharks. This is some of my early work. Eventually, my mom took the red crayon away, so it was [unclear]. But I'd like to relay to you a childhood experience of mine that really made me see the ocean differently, and it's become the foundation of my work because, I feel like, if in a day, I can see the ocean differently, then I can evoke that same kind of change in others, especially kids. Before that day, this is how I saw the ocean. It's just a big blue surface. And this is how we've seen the ocean since the beginning of time. It's a mystery. There's been a lot of folklore developed around the ocean, mostly negative. And that prompted people to make maps like this, with all kinds of wonderful detail on the land, but when you get to the waters edge, the ocean looks like one giant puddle of blue paint. And this is the way I saw the ocean at school — as if to say, "All geography and science lessons stop at water's edge. This part's not going to be on the test." But that day I flew low over the islands — it was a family trip to the Caribbean, and I flew in a small plane low over the islands. This is what I saw. I saw hills and valleys. I saw forests and meadows. I saw grottoes and secret gardens and places I'd love to hide as a kid, if I could only breathe underwater. And best of all, I saw the animals. I saw a manta ray that looked as big as the plane I was flying in. And I flew over a lagoon with a shark in it, and that was the day that my comic strip about a shark was born. So from that day on, I was an ordinary kid walking around on dry land, but my head was down there, underwater. Up until that day, these were the animals that were most common in my life. These were the ones I'd like to draw — all variations of four legs and fur. But when you got to the ocean, my imagination was no competition for nature. Every time I'd come up with a crazy cartoon character on the drawing board, I'd find a critter in the ocean that was even crazier. And the differences in scale between this tiny sea dragon and this enormous humpback whale was like something out of a science-fiction movie. Whenever I talk to kids, I always like to tell them, the biggest animal that ever lived is still alive. It's not a dinosaur; it's a whale, animals as big as office buildings still swimming around out there in our ocean. Speaking of dinosaurs, sharks are basically the same fish they were 300 million years ago. So if you ever fantasize about going back in time and seeing what a dinosaur looked like, that's what a dinosaur looks like. So you have living dinosaurs and space aliens, animals that evolved in zero gravity in harsh conditions. It's just incredible; no Hollywood designer could come up with something more interesting than that. Or this fangtooth. The particles in the water make it look like it's floating in outer space. Could you image if we looked through the Hubble Telescope and we saw that? It would start a whole new space race. But instead, we stick a camera in the deep ocean, and we see a fish, and it doesn't capture our imagination as a society. We say to ourselves, "Maybe we can make fish sticks with it or something." So, what I'd like to do now is try a little drawing. So, I'm going to try to draw this fangtooth here. I love to draw the deep sea fish, because they are so ugly, but beautiful in their own way. Maybe we can give him a little bioluminescence here — give him a headlight, maybe a brake light, turn signals. But it's easy to see why these animals make such great cartoon characters, their shapes and sizes. So some of them actually seem to have powers like superheroes in a comic book. For instance, take these sea turtles. They kind of have a sixth sense like Superman's x-ray vision. They can sense the magnetic fields of the earth. And they can use that sense to navigate hundreds of miles of open ocean. I kind of give my turtle hands just to make them an easier cartoon character to work with. Or take this sea cucumber. It's not an animal we draw cartoons of or draw at all. He's like an underwater Spiderman. He shoots out these sticky webs to entangle his enemy. Of course, sea cucumbers shoot them out their rears, which, in my opinion, makes them much more interesting a superhero. (Laughter) He can't spin a web anytime; he's got to pull his pants down first. (Laughter) Or the blowfish. The blowfish is like the Incredible Hulk. It can change its body into a big, intimidating fish in a matter of seconds. I'm going to draw this blowfish uninflated. And then I'm going to attempt onscreen animation here. Let's see. Try and inflate it. (Laughter) "You talkin' to me?" See, he can inflate himself when he wants to be intimidating. Or take this swordfish. Could you imagine being born with a tool for a nose? Do you think he wakes up in the morning, looks in the mirror and says, "Somebody's getting stabbed today." Or this lionfish for instance. Imagine trying to make friends covered with razor-sharp poisonous barbs. It's not something you want to put on your Facebook page, right? My characters are — my lead character's a shark named Sherman. He's a great white shark. And I kind of broke the mold with Sherman. I didn't want to go with this ruthless predator image. He's kind of just out there making a living. He's sort of a Homer Simpson with fins. And then his sidekick is a sea turtle, as I mentioned before, named Filmore. He uses his wonderful skills at navigation to wander the oceans, looking for a mate. And he does manage to find them, but great navigation skills, lousy pick-up lines. He never seems to settle on any particular girl. I have a hermit crab named Hawthorne, who doesn't get a lot of respect as a hermit crab, so he kind of wishes he were a great white shark. And then I'll introduce you to one more character, this guy, Ernest, who is basically a juvenile delinquent in a fish body. So with characters, you can make stories. Sometimes making a story is as easy as putting two characters in a room and seeing what happens. So, imagine a great white shark and a giant squid in the same bathroom. (Laughter) Or, sometimes I take them to places that people have never heard of because they're underwater. For instance, I took them skiing in the Mid-Atlantic Range, which is this range of mountains in the middle of the Atlantic. I've taken them to the Sea of Japan, where they met giant jellyfish. I've taken them camping in the kelp forests of California. This next one here, I did a story on the census of marine life. And that was a lot of fun because, as most of you know, it's a real project we've heard about. But it was a chance for me to introduce readers to a lot of crazy undersea characters. So we start off the story with Ernest, who volunteers as a census taker. He goes down and he meets this famous anglerfish. Then he meets the yeti crab, the famous vampire squid — elusive, hard to find — and the Dumbo octopus, which looks so much like a cartoon in real life that really didn't have to change a thing when I drew it. I did another story on marine debris. I was speaking to a lot of my friends in the conservation business, and they — I asked them, "So what's one issue you would like everyone to know more about?" And they said — this one friend of mine said, "I've got one word for you: plastic." And I told him, "Well, I need something a little sexier than that. Plastic just is not going to do it." We sort of worked things out. He wanted me to use words like polyvinyl chloride, which doesn't really work in voice balloons very well. I couldn't fit them in. So what I did was I made an adventure strip. Basically, this bottle travels a long way. What I'm trying to tell readers is that plastic doesn't really go away; it just continues to wash downstream. And a lot of it ends up washing into the ocean, which is a great story if you attach a couple characters to it, especially if they can't stand each other, like these two. So, I sent them to Boise, Idaho, where they dropped a plastic bottle into the Boise sewer system. And it ended up in the Boise River and then on to the Columbia River and then to the mouth of the Columbia and to the Pacific Ocean and then on to this place called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — which is this giant Pacific gyre in the North Pacific, where a lot of this plastic ends up floating around — and then back onto the lagoon. So that was basically a buddy story with a plastic bottle following along. So a lot of people remember the plastic bottle anyway, but we really talked about marine debris and plastic in the course of that one. The third storyline I did about a year and a half ago was probably my most difficult. It was on shark finning, and I felt really strongly about this issue. And I felt like, since my main character was a shark, the comic strip was a perfect vehicle for telling the public about this. Now, finning is the act of taking a shark, cutting the valuable fins off and throwing the live animal back in the water. It's cruel, it's wasteful. There's nothing funny or entertaining about it, but I really wanted to take this issue on. I had to kill my main character, who is a shark. We start with Sherman in a Chinese restaurant, who gets a fortune that he's about to get caught by a trawler, which he does. And then he dies. He gets finned, and then he gets thrown overboard. Ostensibly, he's dead now. And so I killed a character that's been in the newspaper for 15 years. So I got a lot of reader feedback on that one. Meanwhile, the other characters are talking about shark fin soup. I do three or four strips after that where we explore the finning issue and the shark fin soup issue. Sherman's up in shark heaven. This is what I love about comic strips, you know. You really don't have to worry about the audience suspending its sense of disbelief because, if you start with a talking shark, readers pretty much check their disbelief at the door. You can kind of do anything. It becomes a near-death experience for Sherman. Meanwhile, Ernest finds his fins on the internet. There was a real website based in China that actually sold shark fins, so I kind of exposed that. And he clicks the "buy now" button. And voila, next-day air, they show up, and they surgically reattach them. I ended that series with a kind of a mail-in petition that encouraged our National Marine Fishery Service, to force other countries to have a stronger stance with shark management. (Applause) Thanks. I'd like to end with a little metaphor here. I've been trying to think of a metaphor to represent Mission Blue, and this is what I came up with. Imagine you're in an enormous room, and it's as dark as a cave. And you can have anything in that room, anything you want, but you can't see anything. You've been given one tool, a hammer. So you wander around in the darkness, and you bump into something, and it feels like it's made of stone. It's big, it's heavy. You can't carry it away, so you bang it with your hammer, and you break off a piece. And you take the piece out into the daylight. And you see you have a beautiful piece of white alabaster. So you say to yourself, "Well, that's worth something." So you go back into the room, and you break this thing to pieces, and you haul it away. And you find other things, and you break that up, and you haul those away. And you're getting all kinds of cool stuff. And you hear other people doing the same thing. So you get this sense of urgency, like you need to find as much stuff as possible as soon as possible. And then some yells, "Stop!" And they turn up the lights. And you realize where you are; you're in the Louvre. And you've taken all this complexity and beauty, and you've turned it into a cheap commodity. And that's what we're doing with the ocean. And part of what Mission Blue is about is yelling, "Stop!" so that each of us — explorer, scientist, cartoonist, singer, chef — can turn up the lights in their own way. And that's what I hope my comic strip does in a small way. That's why I like what I do. Thanks for listening. (Applause) |
The political chemistry of oil | {0: 'Director of the New America Foundation Energy Policy Initiative, Lisa Margonelli writes about the global culture and economy of energy.'} | TEDxOilSpill | So I'm going to talk to you about you about the political chemistry of oil spills and why this is an incredibly important, long, oily, hot summer, and why we need to keep ourselves from getting distracted. But before I talk about the political chemistry, I actually need to talk about the chemistry of oil. This is a photograph from when I visited Prudhoe Bay in Alaska in 2002 to watch the Minerals Management Service testing their ability to burn oil spills in ice. And what you see here is, you see a little bit of crude oil, you see some ice cubes, and you see two sandwich baggies of napalm. The napalm is burning there quite nicely. And the thing is, is that oil is really an abstraction for us as the American consumer. We're four percent of the world's population; we use 25 percent of the world's oil production. And we don't really understand what oil is, until you check out its molecules, And you don't really understand that until you see this stuff burn. So this is what happens as that burn gets going. It takes off. It's a big woosh. I highly recommend that you get a chance to see crude oil burn someday, because you will never need to hear another poli sci lecture on the geopolitics of oil again. It'll just bake your retinas. So there it is; the retinas are baking. Let me tell you a little bit about this chemistry of oil. Oil is a stew of hydrocarbon molecules. It starts of with the very small ones, which are one carbon, four hydrogen — that's methane — it just floats off. Then there's all sorts of intermediate ones with middle amounts of carbon. You've probably heard of benzene rings; they're very carcinogenic. And it goes all the way over to these big, thick, galumphy ones that have hundreds of carbons, and they have thousands of hydrogens, and they have vanadium and heavy metals and sulfur and all kinds of craziness hanging off the sides of them. Those are called the asphaltenes; they're an ingredient in asphalt. They're very important in oil spills. Let me tell you a little bit about the chemistry of oil in water. It is this chemistry that makes oil so disastrous. Oil doesn't sink, it floats. If it sank, it would be a whole different story as far as an oil spill. And the other thing it does is it spreads out the moment it hits the water. It spreads out to be really thin, so you have a hard time corralling it. The next thing that happens is the light ends evaporate, and some of the toxic things float into the water column and kill fish eggs and smaller fish and things like that, and shrimp. And then the asphaltenes — and this is the crucial thing — the asphaltenes get whipped by the waves into a frothy emulsion, something like mayonnaise. It triples the amount of oily, messy goo that you have in the water, and it makes it very hard to handle. It also makes it very viscous. When the Prestige sank off the coast of Spain, there were big, floating cushions the size of sofa cushions of emulsified oil, with the consistency, or the viscosity, of chewing gum. It's incredibly hard to clean up. And every single oil is different when it hits water. When the chemistry of the oil and water also hits our politics, it's absolutely explosive. For the first time, American consumers will kind of see the oil supply chain in front of themselves. They have a "eureka!" moment, when we suddenly understand oil in a different context. So I'm going to talk just a little bit about the origin of these politics, because it's really crucial to understanding why this summer is so important, why we need to stay focused. Nobody gets up in the morning and thinks, "Wow! I'm going to go buy some three-carbon-to-12-carbon molecules to put in my tank and drive happily to work." No, they think, "Ugh. I have to go buy gas. I'm so angry about it. The oil companies are ripping me off. They set the prices, and I don't even know. I am helpless over this." And this is what happens to us at the gas pump — and actually, gas pumps are specifically designed to diffuse that anger. You might notice that many gas pumps, including this one, are designed to look like ATMs. I've talked to engineers. That's specifically to diffuse our anger, because supposedly we feel good about ATMs. (Laughter) That shows you how bad it is. But actually, I mean, this feeling of helplessness comes in because most Americans actually feel that oil prices are the result of a conspiracy, not of the vicissitudes of the world oil market. And the thing is, too, is that we also feel very helpless about the amount that we consume, which is somewhat reasonable, because in fact, we have designed this system where, if you want to get a job, it's much more important to have a car that runs, to have a job and keep a job, than to have a GED. And that's actually very perverse. Now there's another perverse thing about the way we buy gas, which is that we'd rather be doing anything else. This is BP's gas station in downtown Los Angeles. It is green. It is a shrine to greenishness. "Now," you think, "why would something so lame work on people so smart?" Well, the reason is, is because, when we're buying gas, we're very invested in this sort of cognitive dissonance. I mean, we're angry at the one hand and we want to be somewhere else. We don't want to be buying oil; we want to be doing something green. And we get kind of in on our own con. I mean — and this is funny, it looks funny here. But in fact, that's why the slogan "beyond petroleum" worked. But it's an inherent part of our energy policy, which is we don't talk about reducing the amount of oil that we use. We talk about energy independence. We talk about hydrogen cars. We talk about biofuels that haven't been invented yet. And so, cognitive dissonance is part and parcel of the way that we deal with oil, and it's really important to dealing with this oil spill. Okay, so the politics of oil are very moral in the United States. The oil industry is like a huge, gigantic octopus of engineering and finance and everything else, but we actually see it in very moral terms. This is an early-on photograph — you can see, we had these gushers. Early journalists looked at these spills, and they said, "This is a filthy industry." But they also saw in it that people were getting rich for doing nothing. They weren't farmers, they were just getting rich for stuff coming out of the ground. It's the "Beverly Hillbillies," basically. But in the beginning, this was seen as a very morally problematic thing, long before it became funny. And then, of course, there was John D. Rockefeller. And the thing about John D. is that he went into this chaotic wild-east of oil industry, and he rationalized it into a vertically integrated company, a multinational. It was terrifying; you think Walmart is a terrifying business model now, imagine what this looked like in the 1860s or 1870s. And it also the kind of root of how we see oil as a conspiracy. But what's really amazing is that Ida Tarbell, the journalist, went in and did a big exposé of Rockefeller and actually got the whole antitrust laws put in place. But in many ways, that image of the conspiracy still sticks with us. And here's one of the things that Ida Tarbell said — she said, "He has a thin nose like a thorn. There were no lips. There were puffs under the little colorless eyes with creases running from them." (Laughter) Okay, so that guy is actually still with us. (Laughter) I mean, this is a very pervasive — this is part of our DNA. And then there's this guy, okay. So, you might be wondering why it is that, every time we have high oil prices or an oil spill, we call these CEOs down to Washington, and we sort of pepper them with questions in public and we try to shame them. And this is something that we've been doing since 1974, when we first asked them, "Why are there these obscene profits?" And we've sort of personalized the whole oil industry into these CEOs. And we take it as, you know — we look at it on a moral level, rather than looking at it on a legal and financial level. And so I'm not saying these guys aren't liable to answer questions — I'm just saying that, when you focus on whether they are or are not a bunch of greedy bastards, you don't actually get around to the point of making laws that are either going to either change the way they operate, or you're going to get around to really reducing the amount of oil and reducing our dependence on oil. So I'm saying this is kind of a distraction. But it makes for good theater, and it's powerfully cathartic as you probably saw last week. So the thing about water oil spills is that they are very politically galvanizing. I mean, these pictures — this is from the Santa Barbara spill. You have these pictures of birds. They really influence people. When the Santa Barbara spill happened in 1969, it formed the environmental movement in its modern form. It started Earth Day. It also put in place the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. Everything that we are really stemmed from this period. I think it's important to kind of look at these pictures of the birds and understand what happens to us. Here we are normally; we're standing at the gas pump, and we're feeling kind of helpless. We look at these pictures and we understand, for the first time, our role in this supply chain. We connect the dots in the supply chain. And we have this kind of — as voters, we have kind of a "eureka!" moment. This is why these moments of these oil spills are so important. But it's also really important that we don't get distracted by the theater or the morals of it. We actually need to go in and work on the roots of the problem. One of the things that happened with the two previous oil spills was that we really worked on some of the symptoms. We were very reactive, as opposed to being proactive about what happened. And so what we did was, actually, we made moratoriums on the east and west coasts on drilling. We stopped drilling in ANWR, but we didn't actually reduce the amount of oil that we consumed. In fact, it's continued to increase. The only thing that really reduces the amount of oil that we consume is much higher prices. As you can see, our own production has fallen off as our reservoirs have gotten old and expensive to drill out. We only have two percent of the world's oil reserves; 65 percent of them are in the Persian Gulf. One of the things that's happened because of this is that, since 1969, the country of Nigeria, or the part of Nigeria that pumps oil, which is the delta — which is two times the size of Maryland — has had thousands of oil spills a year. I mean, we've essentially been exporting oil spills when we import oil from places without tight environmental regulations. That has been the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez spill every year since 1969. And we can wrap our heads around the spills, because that's what we see here, but in fact, these guys actually live in a war zone. There's a thousand battle-related deaths a year in this area twice the size of Maryland, and it's all related to the oil. And these guys, I mean, if they were in the U.S., they might be actually here in this room. They have degrees in political science, degrees in business — they're entrepreneurs. They don't actually want to be doing what they're doing. And it's sort of one of the other groups of people who pay a price for us. The other thing that we've done, as we've continued to increase demand, is that we kind of play a shell game with the costs. One of the places we put in a big oil project in Chad, with Exxon. So the U.S. taxpayer paid for it; the World Bank, Exxon paid for it. We put it in. There was a tremendous banditry problem. I was there in 2003. We were driving along this dark, dark road, and the guy in the green stepped out, and I was just like, "Ahhh! This is it." And then the guy in the Exxon uniform stepped out, and we realized it was okay. They have their own private sort of army around them at the oil fields. But at the same time, Chad has become much more unstable, and we are not paying for that price at the pump. We pay for it in our taxes on April 15th. We do the same thing with the price of policing the Persian Gulf and keeping the shipping lanes open. This is 1988 — we actually bombed two Iranian oil platforms that year. That was the beginning of an escalating U.S. involvement there that we do not pay for at the pump. We pay for it on April 15th, and we can't even calculate the cost of this involvement. The other place that is sort of supporting our dependence on oil and our increased consumption is the Gulf of Mexico, which was not part of the moratoriums. Now what's happened in the Gulf of Mexico — as you can see, this is the Minerals Management diagram of wells for gas and oil. It's become this intense industrialized zone. It doesn't have the same resonance for us that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has, but it should, I mean, it's a bird sanctuary. Also, every time you buy gasoline in the United States, half of it is actually being refined along the coast, because the Gulf actually has about 50 percent of our refining capacity and a lot of our marine terminals as well. So the people of the Gulf have essentially been subsidizing the rest of us through a less-clean environment. And finally, American families also pay a price for oil. Now on the one hand, the price at the pump is not really very high when you consider the actual cost of the oil, but on the other hand, the fact that people have no other transit options means that they pay a large amount of their income into just getting back and forth to work, generally in a fairly crummy car. If you look at people who make $50,000 a year, they have two kids, they might have three jobs or more, and then they have to really commute. They're actually spending more on their car and fuel than they are on taxes or on health care. And the same thing happens at the 50th percentile, around 80,000. Gasoline costs are a tremendous drain on the American economy, but they're also a drain on individual families and it's kind of terrifying to think about what happens when prices get higher. So, what I'm going to talk to you about now is: what do we have to do this time? What are the laws? What do we have to do to keep ourselves focused? One thing is — we need to stay away from the theater. We need to stay away from the moratoriums. We need to focus really back again on the molecules. The moratoriums are fine, but we do need to focus on the molecules on the oil. One of the things that we also need to do, is we need to try to not kind of fool ourselves into thinking that you can have a green world, before you reduce the amount of oil that we use. We need to focus on reducing the oil. What you see in this top drawing is a schematic of how petroleum gets used in the U.S. economy. It comes in on the side — the useful stuff is the dark gray, and the un-useful stuff, which is called the rejected energy — the waste, goes up to the top. Now you can see that the waste far outweighs the actually useful amount. And one of the things that we need to do is, not only fix the fuel efficiency of our vehicles and make them much more efficient, but we also need to fix the economy in general. We need to remove the perverse incentives to use more fuel. For example, we have an insurance system where the person who drives 20,000 miles a year pays the same insurance as somebody who drives 3,000. We actually encourage people to drive more. We have policies that reward sprawl — we have all kinds of policies. We need to have more mobility choices. We need to make the gas price better reflect the real cost of oil. And we need to shift subsidies from the oil industry, which is at least 10 billion dollars a year, into something that allows middle-class people to find better ways to commute. Whether that's getting a much more efficient car and also kind of building markets for new cars and new fuels down the road, this is where we need to be. We need to kind of rationalize this whole thing, and you can find more about this policy. It's called STRONG, which is "Secure Transportation Reducing Oil Needs Gradually," and the idea is instead of being helpless, we need to be more strong. They're up at NewAmerica.net. What's important about these is that we try to move from feeling helpless at the pump, to actually being active and to really sort of thinking about who we are, having kind of that special moment, where we connect the dots actually at the pump. Now supposedly, oil taxes are the third rail of American politics — the no-fly zone. I actually — I agree that a dollar a gallon on oil is probably too much, but I think that if we started this year with three cents a gallon on gasoline, and upped it to six cents next year, nine cents the following year, all the way up to 30 cents by 2020, that we could actually significantly reduce our gasoline consumption, and at the same time we would give people time to prepare, time to respond, and we would be raising money and raising consciousness at the same time. Let me give you a little sense of how this would work. This is a gas receipt, hypothetically, for a year from now. The first thing that you have on the tax is — you have a tax for a stronger America — 33 cents. So you're not helpless at the pump. And the second thing that you have is a kind of warning sign, very similar to what you would find on a cigarette pack. And what it says is, "The National Academy of Sciences estimates that every gallon of gas you burn in your car creates 29 cents in health care costs." That's a lot. And so this — you can see that you're paying considerably less than the health care costs on the tax. And also, the hope is that you start to be connected to the whole greater system. And at the same time, you have a number that you can call to get more information on commuting, or a low-interest loan on a different kind of car, or whatever it is you're going to need to actually reduce your gasoline dependence. With this whole sort of suite of policies, we could actually reduce our gasoline consumption — or our oil consumption — by 20 percent by 2020. So, three million barrels a day. But in order to do this, one of the things we really need to do, is we need to remember we are people of the hydrocarbon. We need to keep or minds on the molecules and not get distracted by the theater, not get distracted by the cognitive dissonance of the green possibilities that are out there. We need to kind of get down and do the gritty work of reducing our dependence upon this fuel and these molecules. Thank you. (Applause) |
What physics taught me about marketing | {0: 'Dan Cobley is a marketing director at Google, where he connects customers and businesses, helping both navigate digital space to find what they need. '} | TEDGlobal 2010 | So I work in marketing, which I love, but my first passion was physics, a passion brought to me by a wonderful school teacher, when I had a little less gray hair. So he taught me that physics is cool because it teaches us so much about the world around us. And I'm going to spend the next few minutes trying to convince you that physics can teach us something about marketing. So quick show of hands — who studied some marketing in university? Who studied some physics in university? Pretty good. And at school? Okay, lots of you. So, hopefully this will bring back some happy, or possibly some slightly disturbing memories. So, physics and marketing. We'll start with something very simple — Newton's Law: "The force equals mass times acceleration." This is something that perhaps Turkish Airlines should have studied a bit more carefully before they ran this campaign. (Laughter) But if we rearrange this formula quickly, we can get to acceleration equals force over mass, which means that for a larger particle — a larger mass — it requires more force to change its direction. It's the same with brands: the more massive a brand, the more baggage it has, the more force is needed to change its positioning. And that's one of the reasons why Arthur Andersen chose to launch Accenture rather than try to persuade the world that Andersen's could stand for something other than accountancy. It explains why Hoover found it very difficult to persuade the world that it was more than vacuum cleaners, and why companies like Unilever and P&G keep brands separate, like Ariel and Pringles and Dove rather than having one giant parent brand. So the physics is that the bigger the mass of an object the more force is needed to change its direction. The marketing is, the bigger a brand, the more difficult it is to reposition it. So think about a portfolio of brands or maybe new brands for new ventures. Now, who remembers Heisenberg's uncertainty principle? Getting a little more technical now. So this says that it's impossible, by definition, to measure exactly the state — i.e., the position — and the momentum of a particle, because the act of measuring it, by definition, changes it. So to explain that — if you've got an elementary particle and you shine a light on it, then the photon of light has momentum, which knocks the particle, so you don't know where it was before you looked at it. By measuring it, the act of measurement changes it. The act of observation changes it. It's the same in marketing. So with the act of observing consumers, changes their behavior. Think about the group of moms who are talking about their wonderful children in a focus group, and almost none of them buy lots of junk food. And yet, McDonald's sells hundreds of millions of burgers every year. Think about the people who are on accompanied shops in supermarkets, who stuff their trolleys full of fresh green vegetables and fruit, but don't shop like that any other day. And if you think about the number of people who claim in surveys to regularly look for porn on the Web, it's very few. Yet, at Google, we know it's the number-one searched for category. So luckily, the science — no, sorry — the marketing is getting easier. Luckily, with now better point-of-sale tracking, more digital media consumption, you can measure more what consumers actually do, rather than what they say they do. So the physics is you can never accurately and exactly measure a particle, because the observation changes it. The marketing is — the message for marketing is — that try to measure what consumers actually do, rather than what they say they'll do or anticipate they'll do. So next, the scientific method — an axiom of physics, of all science — says you cannot prove a hypothesis through observation, you can only disprove it. What this means is you can gather more and more data around a hypothesis or a positioning, and it will strengthen it, but it will not conclusively prove it. And only one contrary data point can blow your theory out of the water. So if we take an example — Ptolemy had dozens of data points to support his theory that the planets would rotate around the Earth. It only took one robust observation from Copernicus to blow that idea out of the water. And there are parallels for marketing — you can invest for a long time in a brand, but a single contrary observation of that positioning will destroy consumers' belief. Take BP — they spent millions of pounds over many years building up its credentials as an environmentally friendly brand, but then one little accident. Think about Toyota. It was, for a long time, revered as the most reliable of cars, and then they had the big recall incident. And Tiger Woods, for a long time, the perfect brand ambassador. Well, you know the story. (Laughter) So the physics is that you cannot prove a hypothesis, but it's easy to disprove it — any hypothesis is shaky. And the marketing is that not matter how much you've invested in your brand, one bad week can undermine decades of good work. So be really careful to try and avoid the screw-ups that can undermine your brand. And lastly, to the slightly obscure world of entropy — the second law of thermodynamics. This says that entropy, which is a measure of the disorder of a system, will always increase. The same is true of marketing. If we go back 20 years, the one message pretty much controlled by one marketing manager could pretty much define a brand. But where we are today, things have changed. You can get a strong brand image or a message and put it out there like the Conservative Party did earlier this year with their election poster. But then you lose control of it. With the kind of digital comment creation and distribution tools that are available now to every consumer, it's impossible to control where it goes. Your brand starts being dispersed, (Laughter) it gets more chaotic. (Laughter) It's out of your control. (Laughter) I actually saw him speak — he did a good job. But while this may be unsettling for marketers, it's actually a good thing. This distribution of brand energy gets your brand closer to the people, more in with the people. It makes this distribution of energy a democratizing force, which is ultimately good for your brand. So, the lesson from physics is that entropy will always increase; it's a fundamental law. The message for marketing is that your brand is more dispersed. You can't fight it, so embrace it and find a way to work with it. So to close, my teacher, Mr. Vutter, told me that physics is cool, and hopefully, I've convinced you that physics can teach all of us, even in the world of marketing, something special. Thank you. (Applause) |
The Happy Planet Index | {0: "Nic Marks gathers evidence about what makes us happy, and uses it to promote policy that puts the well-being of people and the planet first. He's the founder of the Centre for Well-Being at the UK think tank New Economics Foundation (NEF)."} | TEDGlobal 2010 | Martin Luther King did not say, "I have a nightmare," when he inspired the civil rights movements. He said, "I have a dream." And I have a dream. I have a dream that we can stop thinking that the future will be a nightmare, and this is going to be a challenge, because, if you think of every major blockbusting film of recent times, nearly all of its visions for humanity are apocalyptic. I think this film is one of the hardest watches of modern times, "The Road." It's a beautiful piece of filmmaking, but everything is desolate, everything is dead. And just a father and son trying to survive, walking along the road. And I think the environmental movement of which I am a part of has been complicit in creating this vision of the future. For too long, we have peddled a nightmarish vision of what's going to happen. We have focused on the worst-case scenario. We have focused on the problems. And we have not thought enough about the solutions. We've used fear, if you like, to grab people's attention. And any psychologist will tell you that fear in the organism is linked to flight mechanism. It's part of the fight and flight mechanism, that when an animal is frightened — think of a deer. A deer freezes very, very still, poised to run away. And I think that's what we're doing when we're asking people to engage with our agenda around environmental degradation and climate change. People are freezing and running away because we're using fear. And I think the environmental movement has to grow up and start to think about what progress is. What would it be like to be improving the human lot? And one of the problems that we face, I think, is that the only people that have cornered the market in terms of progress is a financial definition of what progress is, an economic definition of what progress is — that somehow, if we get the right numbers to go up, we're going to be better off, whether that's on the stock market, whether that's with GDP and economic growth, that somehow life is going to get better. This is somehow appealing to human greed instead of fear — that more is better. Come on. In the Western world, we have enough. Maybe some parts of the world don't, but we have enough. And we've know for a long time that this is not a good measure of the welfare of nations. In fact, the architect of our national accounting system, Simon Kuznets, in the 1930s, said that, "A nation's welfare can scarcely be inferred from their national income." But we've created a national accounting system which is firmly based on production and producing stuff. And indeed, this is probably historical, and it had its time. In the second World War, we needed to produce a lot of stuff. And indeed, we were so successful at producing certain types of stuff that we destroyed a lot of Europe, and we had to rebuild it afterwards. And so our national accounting system became fixated on what we can produce. But as early as 1968, this visionary man, Robert Kennedy, at the start of his ill-fated presidential campaign, gave the most eloquent deconstruction of gross national product that ever has been. And he finished his talk with the phrase, that, "The gross national product measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile." How crazy is that? That our measure of progress, our dominant measure of progress in society, is measuring everything except that which makes life worthwhile? I believe, if Kennedy was alive today, he would be asking statisticians such as myself to go out and find out what makes life worthwhile. He'd be asking us to redesign our national accounting system to be based upon such important things as social justice, sustainability and people's well-being. And actually, social scientists have already gone out and asked these questions around the world. This is from a global survey. It's asking people, what do they want. And unsurprisingly, people all around the world say that what they want is happiness, for themselves, for their families, their children, their communities. Okay, they think money is slightly important. It's there, but it's not nearly as important as happiness, and it's not nearly as important as love. We all need to love and be loved in life. It's not nearly as important as health. We want to be healthy and live a full life. These seem to be natural human aspirations. Why are statisticians not measuring these? Why are we not thinking of the progress of nations in these terms, instead of just how much stuff we have? And really, this is what I've done with my adult life — is think about how do we measure happiness, how do we measure well-being, how can we do that within environmental limits. And we created, at the organization that I work for, the New Economics Foundation, something we call the Happy Planet Index, because we think people should be happy and the planet should be happy. Why don't we create a measure of progress that shows that? And what we do, is we say that the ultimate outcome of a nation is how successful is it at creating happy and healthy lives for its citizens. That should be the goal of every nation on the planet. But we have to remember that there's a fundamental input to that, and that is how many of the planet's resources we use. We all have one planet. We all have to share it. It is the ultimate scarce resource, the one planet that we share. And economics is very interested in scarcity. When it has a scarce resource that it wants to turn into a desirable outcome, it thinks in terms of efficiency. It thinks in terms of how much bang do we get for our buck. And this is a measure of how much well-being we get for our planetary resource use. It is an efficiency measure. And probably the easiest way to show you that, is to show you this graph. Running horizontally along the graph, is "ecological footprint," which is a measure of how much resources we use and how much pressure we put on the planet. More is bad. Running vertically upwards, is a measure called "happy life years." It's about the well-being of nations. It's like a happiness adjusted life-expectancy. It's like quality and quantity of life in nations. And the yellow dot there you see, is the global average. Now, there's a huge array of nations around that global average. To the top right of the graph, are countries which are doing reasonably well and producing well-being, but they're using a lot of planet to get there. They are the U.S.A., other Western countries going across in those triangles and a few Gulf states in there actually. Conversely, at the bottom left of the graph, are countries that are not producing much well-being — typically, sub-Saharan Africa. In Hobbesian terms, life is short and brutish there. The average life expectancy in many of these countries is only 40 years. Malaria, HIV/AIDS are killing a lot of people in these regions of the world. But now for the good news! There are some countries up there, yellow triangles, that are doing better than global average, that are heading up towards the top left of the graph. This is an aspirational graph. We want to be top left, where good lives don't cost the earth. They're Latin American. The country on its own up at the top is a place I haven't been to. Maybe some of you have. Costa Rica. Costa Rica — average life expectancy is 78-and-a-half years. That is longer than in the USA. They are, according to the latest Gallup world poll, the happiest nation on the planet — than anybody; more than Switzerland and Denmark. They are the happiest place. They are doing that on a quarter of the resources that are used typically in [the] Western world — a quarter of the resources. What's going on there? What's happening in Costa Rica? We can look at some of the data. 99 percent of their electricity comes from renewable resources. Their government is one of the first to commit to be carbon neutral by 2021. They abolished the army in 1949 — 1949. And they invested in social programs — health and education. They have one of the highest literacy rates in Latin America and in the world. And they have that Latin vibe, don't they. They have the social connectedness. (Laughter) The challenge is, that possibly — and the thing we might have to think about — is that the future might not be North American, might not be Western European. It might be Latin American. And the challenge, really, is to pull the global average up here. That's what we need to do. And if we're going to do that, we need to pull countries from the bottom, and we need to pull countries from the right of the graph. And then we're starting to create a happy planet. That's one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is looking at time trends. We don't have good data going back for every country in the world, but for some of the richest countries, the OECD group, we do. And this is the trend in well-being over that time, a small increase, but this is the trend in ecological footprint. And so in strict happy-planet methodology, we've become less efficient at turning our ultimate scarce resource into the outcome we want to. And the point really is, is that I think, probably everybody in this room would like society to get to 2050 without an apocalyptic something happening. It's actually not very long away. It's half a human lifetime away. A child entering school today will be my age in 2050. This is not the very distant future. This is what the U.K. government target on carbon and greenhouse emissions looks like. And I put it to you, that is not business as usual. That is changing our business. That is changing the way we create our organizations, we do our government policy and we live our lives. And the point is, we need to carry on increasing well-being. No one can go to the polls and say that quality of life is going to reduce. None of us, I think, want human progress to stop. I think we want it to carry on. I think we want the lot of humanity to keep on increasing. And I think this is where climate change skeptics and deniers come in. I think this is what they want. They want quality of life to keep increasing. They want to hold on to what they've got. And if we're going to engage them, I think that's what we've got to do. And that means we have to really increase efficiency even more. Now that's all very easy to draw graphs and things like that, but the point is we need to turn those curves. And this is where I think we can take a leaf out of systems theory, systems engineers, where they create feedback loops, put the right information at the right point of time. Human beings are very motivated by the "now." You put a smart meter in your home, and you see how much electricity you're using right now, how much it's costing you, your kids go around and turn the lights off pretty quickly. What would that look like for society? Why is it, on the radio news every evening, I hear the FTSE 100, the Dow Jones, the dollar pound ratio — I don't even know which way the dollar pound ratio should go to be good news. And why do I hear that? Why don't I hear how much energy Britain used yesterday, or American used yesterday? Did we meet our three percent annual target on reducing carbon emissions? That's how you create a collective goal. You put it out there into the media and start thinking about it. And we need positive feedback loops for increasing well-being At a government level, they might create national accounts of well-being. At a business level, you might look at the well-being of your employees, which we know is really linked to creativity, which is linked to innovation, and we're going to need a lot of innovation to deal with those environmental issues. At a personal level, we need these nudges too. Maybe we don't quite need the data, but we need reminders. In the U.K., we have a strong public health message on five fruit and vegetables a day and how much exercise we should do — never my best thing. What are these for happiness? What are the five things that you should do every day to be happier? We did a project for the Government Office of Science a couple of years ago, a big program called the Foresight program — lots and lots of people — involved lots of experts — everything evidence based — a huge tome. But a piece of work we did was on: what five positive actions can you do to improve well-being in your life? And the point of these is they are, not quite, the secrets of happiness, but they are things that I think happiness will flow out the side from. And the first of these is to connect, is that your social relationships are the most important cornerstones of your life. Do you invest the time with your loved ones that you could do, and energy? Keep building them. The second one is be active. The fastest way out of a bad mood: step outside, go for a walk, turn the radio on and dance. Being active is great for our positive mood. The third one is take notice. How aware are you of things going on around the world, the seasons changing, people around you? Do you notice what's bubbling up for you and trying to emerge? Based on a lot of evidence for mindfulness, cognitive behavioral therapy, [very] strong for our well being. The fourth is keep learning and keep is important — learning throughout the whole life course. Older people who keep learning and are curious, they have much better health outcomes than those who start to close down. But it doesn't have to be formal learning; it's not knowledge based. It's more curiosity. It can be learning to cook a new dish, picking up an instrument you forgot as a child. Keep learning. And the final one is that most anti-economic of activities, but give. Our generosity, our altruism, our compassion, are all hardwired to the reward mechanism in our brain. We feel good if we give. You can do an experiment where you give two groups of people a hundred dollars in the morning. You tell one of them to spend it on themselves and one on other people. You measure their happiness at the end of the day, those that have gone and spent on other people are much happier that those that spent it on themselves. And these five ways, which we put onto these handy postcards, I would say, don't have to cost the earth. They don't have any carbon content. They don't need a lot of material goods to be satisfied. And so I think it's really quite feasible that happiness does not cost the earth. Now, Martin Luther King, on the eve of his death, gave an incredible speech. He said, "I know there are challenges ahead, there may be trouble ahead, but I fear no one. I don't care. I have been to the mountain top, and I have seen the Promised Land." Now, he was a preacher, but I believe the environmental movement and, in fact, the business community, government, needs to go to the top of the mountain top, and it needs to look out, and it needs to see the Promised Land, or the land of promise, and it needs to have a vision of a world that we all want. And not only that, we need to create a Great Transition to get there, and we need to pave that great transition with good things. Human beings want to be happy. Pave them with the five ways. And we need to have signposts gathering people together and pointing them — something like the Happy Planet Index. And then I believe that we can all create a world we all want, where happiness does not cost the earth. (Applause) |
Let the environment guide our development | {0: 'Johan Rockström works to redefine sustainable development.'} | TEDGlobal 2010 | We live on a human-dominated planet, putting unprecedented pressure on the systems on Earth. This is bad news, but perhaps surprising to you, it's also part of the good news. We're the first generation — thanks to science — to be informed that we may be undermining the stability and the ability of planet Earth to support human development as we know it. It's also good news, because the planetary risks we're facing are so large, that business as usual is not an option. In fact, we're in a phase where transformative change is necessary, which opens the window for innovation, for new ideas and new paradigms. This is a scientific journey on the challenges facing humanity in the global phase of sustainability. On this journey, I'd like to bring, apart from yourselves, a good friend, a stakeholder, who's always absent when we deal with the negotiations on environmental issues, a stakeholder who refuses to compromise — planet Earth. So I thought I'd bring her with me today on stage, to have her as a witness of a remarkable journey, which humbly reminds us of the period of grace we've had over the past 10,000 years. This is the living conditions on the planet over the last 100,000 years. It's a very important period — it's roughly half the period when we've been fully modern humans on the planet. We've had the same, roughly, abilities that developed civilizations as we know it. This is the environmental conditions on the planet. Here, used as a proxy, temperature variability. It was a jumpy ride. 80,000 years back in a crisis, we leave Africa, we colonize Australia in another crisis, 60,000 years back, we leave Asia for Europe in another crisis, 40,000 years back, and then we enter the remarkably stable Holocene phase, the only period in the whole history of the planet, that we know of, that can support human development. A thousand years into this period, we abandon our hunting and gathering patterns. We go from a couple of million people to the seven billion people we are today. The Mesopotamian culture: we invent agriculture, we domesticate animals and plants. You have the Roman, the Greek and the story as you know it. The only phase, as we know it that can support humanity. The trouble is we're putting a quadruple sqeeze on this poor planet, a quadruple sqeeze, which, as its first squeeze, has population growth of course. Now, this is not only about numbers; this is not only about the fact that we're seven billion people committed to nine billion people, it's an equity issue as well. The majority of the environmental impacts on the planet have been caused by the rich minority, the 20 percent that jumped onto the industrial bandwagon in the mid-18th century. The majority of the planet, aspiring for development, having the right for development, are in large aspiring for an unsustainable lifestyle, a momentous pressure. The second pressure on the planet is, of course the climate agenda — the big issue — where the policy interpretation of science is that it would be enough to stabilize greenhouse gases at 450 ppm to avoid average temperatures exceeding two degrees, to avoid the risk that we may be destabilizing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, holding six meters — level rising, the risk of destabilizing the Greenland Ice Sheet, holding another seven meters — sea level rising. Now, you would have wished the climate pressure to hit a strong planet, a resilient planet, but unfortunately, the third pressure is the ecosystem decline. Never have we seen, in the past 50 years, such a sharp decline of ecosystem functions and services on the planet, one of them being the ability to regulate climate on the long term, in our forests, land and biodiversity. The forth pressure is surprise, the notion and the evidence that we need to abandon our old paradigm, that ecosystems behave linearly, predictably, controllably in our — so to say — linear systems, and that in fact, surprise is universal, as systems tip over very rapidly, abruptly and often irreversibly. This, dear friends, poses a human pressure on the planet of momentous scale. We may, in fact, have entered a new geological era — the Anthropocene, where humans are the predominant driver of change at a planetary level. Now, as a scientist, what's the evidence for this? Well, the evidence is, unfortunately, ample. It's not only carbon dioxide that has this hockey stick pattern of accelerated change. You can take virtually any parameter that matters for human well-being — nitrous oxide, methane, deforestation, overfishing land degredation, loss of species — they all show the same pattern over the past 200 years. Simultaneously, they branch off in the mid-50s, 10 years after the Second World War, showing very clearly that the great acceleration of the human enterprise starts in the mid-50s. You see, for the first time, an imprint on the global level. And I can tell you, you enter the disciplinary research in each of these, you find something remarkably important, the conclusion that we may have come to the point where we have to bend the curves, that we may have entered the most challenging and exciting decade in the history humanity on the planet, the decade when we have to bend the curves. Now, as if this was not enough — to just bend the curves and understanding the accelerated pressure on the planet — we also have to recognize the fact that systems do have multiple stable states, separated by thresholds — illustrated here by this ball and cup diagram, where the depth of the cup is the resilience of the system. Now, the system may gradually — under pressure of climate change, erosion, biodiversity loss — lose the depth of the cup, the resilience, but appear to be healthy and appear to suddenly, under a threshold, be tipping over. Upff. Sorry. Changing state and literally ending up in an undesired situation, where new biophysical logic takes over, new species take over, and the system gets locked. Do we have evidence of this? Yes, coral reef systems. Biodiverse, low-nutrient, hard coral systems under multiple pressures of overfishing, unsustainable tourism, climate change. A trigger and the system tips over, loses its resilience, soft corals take over, and we get undesired systems that cannot support economic and social development. The Arctic — a beautiful system — a regulating biome at the planetary level, taking the knock after knock on climate change, appearing to be in a good state. No scientist could predict that in 2007, suddenly, what could be crossing a threshold. The system suddenly, very surprisingly, loses 30 to 40 percent of its summer ice cover. And the drama is, of course, that when the system does this, the logic may change. It may get locked in an undesired state, because it changes color, absorbs more energy, and the system may get stuck. In my mind, the largest red flag warning for humanity that we are in a precarious situation. As a sideline, you know that the only red flag that popped up here was a submarine from an unnamed country that planted a red flag at the bottom of the Arctic to be able to control the oil resources. Now, if we have evidence, which we now have, that wetlands, forests, [unclear] monsoon system, the rainforests, behave in this nonlinear way. 30 or so scientists around the world gathered and asked a question for the first time, "Do we have to put the planet into the the pot?" So we have to ask ourselves: are we threatening this extraordinarily stable Holocene state? Are we in fact putting ourselves in a situation where we're coming too close to thresholds that could lead to deleterious and very undesired, if now catastrophic, change for human development? You know, you don't want to stand there. In fact, you're not even allowed to stand where this gentleman is standing, at the foaming, slippery waters at the threshold. In fact, there's a fence quite upstream of this threshold, beyond which you are in a danger zone. And this is the new paradigm, which we gathered two, three years back, recognizing that our old paradigm of just analyzing and pushing and predicting parameters into the future, aiming at minimalizing environmental impacts, is of the past. Now we to ask ourselves: which are the large environmental processes that we have to be stewards of to keep ourselves safe in the Holocene? And could we even, thanks to major advancements in Earth systems science, identify the thresholds, the points where we may expect nonlinear change? And could we even define a planetary boundary, a fence, within which we then have a safe operating space for humanity? This work, which was published in "Nature," late 2009, after a number of years of analysis, led to the final proposition that we can only find nine planetary boundaries with which, under active stewardship, would allow ourselves to have a safe operating space. These include, of course, climate. It may surprise you that it's not only climate. But it shows that we are interconnected, among many systems on the planet, with the three big systems, climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion and ocean acidification being the three big systems, where the scientific evidence of large-scale thresholds in the paleo-record of the history of the planet. But we also include, what we call, the slow variables, the systems that, under the hood, regulate and buffer the capacity of the resilience of the planet — the interference of the big nitrogen and phosphorus cycles on the planet, land use change, rate of biodiversity loss, freshwater use, functions which regulate biomass on the planet, carbon sequestration, diversity. And then we have two parameters which we were not able to quantify — air pollution, including warming gases and air-polluting sulfates and nitrates, but also chemical pollution. Together, these form an integrated whole for guiding human development in the Anthropocene, understanding that the planet is a complex self-regulating system. In fact, most evidence indicates that these nine may behave as three Musketeers, "One for all. All for one." You degrade forests, you go beyond the boundary on land, you undermine the ability of the climate system to stay stable. The drama here is, in fact, that it may show that the climate challenge is the easy one, if you consider the whole challenge of sustainable development. Now this is the Big Bang equivalent then of human development within the safe operating space of the planetary boundaries. What you see here in black line is the safe operating space, the quantified boundaries, as suggested by this analysis. The yellow dot in the middle here is our starting point, the pre-industrial point, where we're very safely in the safe operating space. In the '50s, we start branching out. In the '60s already, through the green revolution and the Haber-Bosch process of fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere — you know, human's today take out more nitrogen from the atmosphere than the whole biosphere does naturally as a whole. We don't transgress the climate boundary until the early '90s, actually, right after Rio. And today, we are in a situation where we estimate that we've transgressed three boundaries, the rate of biodiversity loss, which is the sixth extinction period in the history of humanity — one of them being the extinctions of the dinosaurs — nitrogen and climate change. But we still have some degrees of freedom on the others, but we are approaching fast on land, water, phosphorus and oceans. But this gives a new paradigm to guide humanity, to put the light on our, so far overpowered industrial vehicle, which operates as if we're only on a dark, straight highway. Now the question then is: how gloomy is this? Is then sustainable development utopia? Well, there's no science to suggest. In fact, there is ample science to indicate that we can do this transformative change, that we have the ability to now move into a new innovative, a transformative gear, across scales. The drama is, of course, is that 200 countries on this planet have to simultaneously start moving in the same direction. But it changes fundamentally our governance and management paradigm, from the current linear, command and control thinking, looking at efficiencies and optimization towards a much more flexible, a much more adaptive approach, where we recognize that redundancy, both in social and environmental systems, is key to be able to deal with a turbulent era of global change. We have to invest in persistence, in the ability of social systems and ecological systems to withstand shocks and still remain in that desired cup. We have to invest in transformations capability, moving from crisis into innovation and the ability to rise after a crisis, and of course to adapt to unavoidable change. This is a new paradigm. We're not doing that at any scale on governance. But is it happening anywhere? Do we have any examples of success on this mind shift being applied at the local level? Well, yes, in fact we do and the list can start becoming longer and longer. There's good news here, for example, from Latin America, where plow-based farming systems of the '50s and '60s led farming basically to a dead-end, with lower and lower yields, degrading the organic matter and fundamental problems at the livelihood levels in Paraguay, Uruguay and a number of countries, Brazil, leading to innovation and entrepreneurship among farmers in partnership with scientists into an agricultural revolution of zero tillage systems combined with mulch farming with locally adapted technologies, which today, for example, in some countries, have led to a tremendous increase in area under mulch, zero till farming which, not only produces more food, but also sequesters carbon. The Australian Great Barrier Reef is another success story. Under the realization from tourist operators, fishermen, the Australian Great Barrier Reef Authority and scientists that the Great Barrier Reef is doomed under the current governance regime. Global change, beautification rack culture, overfishing and unsustainable tourism, all together placing this system in the realization of crisis. But the window of opportunity was innovation and new mindset, which today has led to a completely new governance strategy to build resilience, acknowledge redundancy and invest in the whole system as an integrated whole, and then allow for much more redundancy in the system. Sweden, the country I come from, has other examples, where wetlands in southern Sweden were seen as — as in many countries — as flood-prone polluted nuisance in the peri-urban regions. But again, a crisis, new partnerships, actors locally, transforming these into a key component of sustainable urban planning. So crisis leading into opportunities. Now, what about the future? Well, the future, of course, has one massive challenge, which is feeding a world of nine billion people. We need nothing less than a new green revolution, and the planet boundaries shows that agriculture has to go from a source of greenhouse gases to a sink. It has to basically do this on current land. We cannot expand anymore, because it erodes the planetary boundaries. We cannot continue consuming water as we do today, with 25 percent of world rivers not even reaching the ocean. And we need a transformation. Well, interestingly, and based on my work and others in Africa, for example, we've shown that even the most vulnerable small-scale rainfall farming systems, with innovations and supplementary irrigation to bridge dry spells and droughts, sustainable sanitation systems to close the loop on nutrients from toilets back to farmers' fields, and innovations in tillage systems, we can triple, quadruple, yield levels on current land. Elinor Ostrom, the latest Nobel laureate of economics, clearly shows empirically across the world that we can govern the commons if we invest in trust, local, action-based partnerships and cross-scale institutional innovations, where local actors, together, can deal with the global commons at a large scale. But even on the hard policy area we have innovations. We know that we have to move from our fossil dependence very quickly into a low-carbon economy in record time. And what shall we do? Everybody talks about carbon taxes — it won't work — emission schemes, but for example, one policy measure, feed-in tariffs on the energy system, which is already applied, from China doing it on offshore wind systems, all the way to the U.S. where you give the guaranteed price for investment in renewable energy, but you can subsidize electricity to poor people. You get people out of poverty. You solve the climate issue with regards to the energy sector, while at the same time, stimulating innovation — examples of things that can be out scaled quickly at the planetary level. So there is — no doubt — opportunity here, and we can list many, many examples of transformative opportunities around the planet. The key though in all of these, the red thread, is the shift in mindset, moving away from a situation where we simply are pushing ourselves into a dark future, where we instead backcast our future, and we say, "What is the playing field on the planet? What are the planetary boundaries within which we can safely operate?" and then backtrack innovations within that. But of course, the drama is, it clearly shows that incremental change is not an option. So, there is scientific evidence. They sort of say the harsh news, that we are facing the largest transformative development since the industrialization. In fact, what we have to do over the next 40 years is much more dramatic and more exciting than what we did when we moved into the situation we're in today. Now, science indicates that, yes, we can achieve a prosperous future within the safe operating space, if we move simultaneously, collaborating on a global level, from local to global scale, in transformative options, which build resilience on a finite planet. Thank you. (Applause) |
The technology of the heart | {0: 'Ogyen Trinley Dorje is the 17th Gyalwang Karmapa, a revered figure in Tibetan Buddhism devoted to preserving and propagating Buddhist teachings.'} | TEDIndia 2009 | Tyler Dewar: The way I feel right now is that all of the other speakers have said exactly what I wanted to say. (Laughter) And it seems that the only thing left for me to say is to thank you all for your kindness. TD: But maybe in the spirit of appreciating the kindness of you all, I could share with you a little story about myself. TD: From the time I was very young, onward, I was given a lot of different responsibilities, and it always seemed to me, when I was young, that everything was laid out before me. All of the plans for me were already made. I was given the clothes that I needed to wear and told where I needed to be, given these very precious and holy looking robes to wear, with the understanding that it was something sacred or important. TD: But before that kind of formal lifestyle happened for me, I was living in eastern Tibet with my family. And when I was seven years old, all of a sudden, a search party arrived at my home. They were looking the next Karmapa, and I noticed they were talking to my mom and dad, and the news came to me that they were telling me that I was the Karmapa. And these days, people ask me a lot, how did that feel. How did that feel when they came and whisked you away, and your lifestyle completely changed? And what I mostly say is that, at that time, it was a pretty interesting idea to me. I thought that things would be pretty fun and there would be more things to play with. (Laughter) TD: But it didn't turn out to be so fun and entertaining, as I thought it would have been. I was placed in a pretty strictly controlled environment. And immediately, a lot of different responsibilities, in terms of my education and so forth, were heaped upon me. I was separated, largely, from my family, including my mother and father. I didn't have have many personal friends to spend time with, but I was expected to perform these prescribed duties. So it turned out that my fantasy about an entertaining life of being the Karmapa wasn't going to come true. It more felt to be the case to me that I was being treated like a statue, and I was to sit in one place like a statue would. TD: Nevertheless, I felt that, even though I've been separated from my loved ones — and, of course, now I'm even further away. When I was 14, I escaped from Tibet and became even further removed from my mother and father, my relatives, my friends and my homeland. But nevertheless, there's no real sense of separation from me in my heart, in terms of the love that I feel for these people. I feel, still, a very strong connection of love for all of these people and for the land. TD: And I still do get to keep in touch with my mother and father, albeit infrequently. I talk to my mother once in a blue moon on the telephone. And my experience is that, when I'm talking to her, with every second that passes during our conversation, the feeling of love that binds us is bringing us closer and closer together. TD: So those were just a few remarks about my personal background. And in terms of other things that I wanted to share with you, in terms of ideas, I think it's wonderful to have a situation like this, where so many people from different backgrounds and places can come together, exchange their ideas and form relationships of friendship with each other. And I think that's symbolic of what we're seeing in the world in general, that the world is becoming smaller and smaller, and that all of the peoples in the world are enjoying more opportunities for connection. That's wonderful, but we should also remember that we should have a similar process happening on the inside. Along with outward development and increase of opportunity, there should be inward development and deepening of our heart connections as well as our outward connections. So we spoke and we heard some about design this week. I think that it's important for us to remember that we need to keep pushing forward on the endeavor of the design of the heart. We heard a lot about technology this week, and it's important for us to remember to invest a lot of our energy in improving the technology of the heart. TD: So, even though I'm somewhat happy about the wonderful developments that are happening in the world, still, I feel a sense of impediment, when it comes to the ability that we have to connect with each other on a heart-to-heart, or a mind-to-mind, level. I feel that there are some things that are getting in the way. TC: My relationship to this concept of heart-to-heart connection, or mind-to-mind connection, is an interesting one, because, as a spiritual leader, I'm always attempting to open my heart to others and offer myself up for heart-to-heart and mind-to-mind connections in a genuine way with other people, but at the same time, I've always been advised that I need to emphasize intelligence over the heart-to-heart connections, because, being someone in a position like mine, if I don't rely primarily on intelligence, then something dangerous may happen to me. So it's an interesting paradox at play there. But I had a really striking experience once, when a group from Afghanistan came to visit me, and we had a really interesting conversation. TD: So we ended up talking about the Bamiyan Buddhas, which, as you know, were destroyed some years ago in Afghanistan. But the basis of our conversation was the different approach to spirituality on the part of the Muslim and Buddhist traditions. Of course, in Muslim, because of the teachings around the concept of idolatry, you don't find as many physical representations of divinity or of spiritual liberation as you do in the Buddhist tradition, where, of course, there are many statues of the Buddha that are highly revered. So, we were talking about the differences between the traditions and what many people perceived as the tragedy of the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, but I offered the suggestion that perhaps we could look at this in a positive way. What we saw in the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas was the depletion of matter, some solid substance falling down and disintegrating. Maybe we could look at that to be more similar to the falling of the Berlin Wall, where a divide that had kept two types of people apart had collapsed and opened up a door for further communication. So I think that, in this way, it's always possible for us to derive something positive that can help us understand one another better. TD: So, with regard to the development that we've been talking about here at this conference, I really feel that the development that we make shouldn't create a further burden for us as human beings, but should be used to improve our fundamental lifestyle of how we live in the world. TD: Of course, I rejoice in the development and the growth and the rise of the noble land of India, the great country of India, but at the same time, I think, as some of us have acknowledged, we need to be aware that some aspects of this rise are coming at the cost of the very ground on which we stand. So, as we are climbing the tree, some of the things that we're doing in order to climb the tree are actually undermining the tree's very root. And so, what I think it comes down to is a question of, not only having information of what's going on, but paying attention to that and letting that shift our motivation to become more sincere and genuinely positive. We have hear, this week, about the horrible sufferings, for example, that so many women of the world are enduring day-to-day. We have that information, but what often happens to us is that we don't really choose to pay attention to it. We don't really choose to allow that to cause there to be a shift in our hearts. So I think the way forward for the world — one that will bring the path of outer development in harmony with the real root of happiness — is that we allow the information that we have to really make a change in our heart. TD: So I think that sincere motivation is very important for our future well-being, or deep sense of well-being as humans, and I think that means sinking in to whatever it is you're doing now. Whatever work you're trying to do now to benefit the world, sink into that, get a full taste of that. TD: So, since we've been here this week, we've taken millions of breaths, collectively, and perhaps we haven't witnessed any course changes happening in our lives, but we often miss the very subtle changes. And I think that sometimes we develop grand concepts of what happiness might look like for us, but that, if we pay attention, we can see that there are little symbols of happiness in every breath that we take. TD: So, every one of you who has come here is so talented, and you have so much to offer to the world, I think it would be a good note to conclude on then to just take a moment to appreciate how fortunate we are to have come together in this way and exchanged ideas and really form a strong aspiration and energy within ourselves that we will take the good that has come from this conference, the momentum, the positivity, and we will spread that and plant it in all of the corners of the world. His Holiness the Karmapa: Tomorrow is my Talk. TD: Lakshmi has worked incredibly hard, even in inviting me, let alone everything else that she has done to make this happen, and I was somewhat resistant at times, and I was also very nervous throughout this week. I was feeling under the weather and dizzy and so forth, and people would ask me, why. I would tell them, "It's because I have to talk tomorrow." And so Lakshmi had to put up with me through all of that, but I very much appreciate the opportunity she's given me to be here. And to you, everyone, thank you very much. (Applause) HH: Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Keep your goals to yourself | {0: 'Through his new project, MuckWork, Derek Sivers wants to lessen the burdens (and boredom) of creative people.'} | TEDGlobal 2010 | Everyone, please think of your biggest personal goal. For real — you can take a second. You've got to feel this to learn it. Take a few seconds and think of your personal biggest goal, okay? Imagine deciding right now that you're going to do it. Imagine telling someone that you meet today what you're going to do. Imagine their congratulations, and their high image of you. Doesn't it feel good to say it out loud? Don't you feel one step closer already, like it's already becoming part of your identity? Well, bad news: you should have kept your mouth shut, because that good feeling now will make you less likely to do it. The repeated psychology tests have proven that telling someone your goal makes it less likely to happen. Any time you have a goal, there are some steps that need to be done, some work that needs to be done in order to achieve it. Ideally you would not be satisfied until you'd actually done the work. But when you tell someone your goal and they acknowledge it, psychologists have found that it's called a "social reality." The mind is kind of tricked into feeling that it's already done. And then because you've felt that satisfaction, you're less motivated to do the actual hard work necessary. (Laughter) So this goes against conventional wisdom that we should tell our friends our goals, right? So they hold us to it. So, let's look at the proof. 1926: Kurt Lewin, founder of social psychology, called this "substitution." 1933: Wera Mahler found when it was acknowledged by others, it felt real in the mind. 1982, Peter Gollwitzer wrote a whole book about this, and in 2009, he did some new tests that were published. It goes like this: 163 people across four separate tests. Everyone wrote down their personal goal. Then half of them announced their commitment to this goal to the room, and half didn't. Then everyone was given 45 minutes of work that would directly lead them towards their goal, but they were told that they could stop at any time. Now, those who kept their mouths shut worked the entire 45 minutes on average, and when asked afterward, said that they felt that they had a long way to go still to achieve their goal. But those who had announced it quit after only 33 minutes, on average, and when asked afterward, said that they felt much closer to achieving their goal. So if this is true, what can we do? Well, you could resist the temptation to announce your goal. You can delay the gratification that the social acknowledgment brings, and you can understand that your mind mistakes the talking for the doing. But if you do need to talk about something, you can state it in a way that gives you no satisfaction, such as, "I really want to run this marathon, so I need to train five times a week and kick my ass if I don't, okay?" So audience, next time you're tempted to tell someone your goal, what will you say? (Silence) Exactly! Well done. (Laughter) (Applause) |
The world's oldest living things | {0: 'Rachel Sussman is on a quest to celebrate the resilience of life by identifying and photographing continuous-living organisms that are 2,000 years or older, all around the world.'} | TEDGlobal 2010 | This strange-looking plant is called the Llareta. What looks like moss covering rocks is actually a shrub comprised of thousands of branches, each containing clusters of tiny green leaves at the end and so densely packed together that you could actually stand on top of it. This individual lives in the Atacama Desert in Chile, and it happens to be 3,000 years old. It also happens to be a relative of parsley. For the past five years, I've been researching, working with biologists and traveling all over the world to find continuously living organisms that are 2,000 years old and older. The project is part art and part science. There's an environmental component. And I'm also trying to create a means in which to step outside our quotidian experience of time and to start to consider a deeper timescale. I selected 2,000 years as my minimum age because I wanted to start at what we consider to be year zero and work backward from there. What you're looking at now is a tree called Jomon Sugi, living on the remote island of Yakushima. The tree was in part a catalyst for the project. I'd been traveling in Japan without an agenda other than to photograph, and then I heard about this tree that is 2,180 years old and knew that I had to go visit it. It wasn't until later, when I was actually back home in New York that I got the idea for the project. So it was the slow churn, if you will. I think it was my longstanding desire to bring together my interest in art, science and philosophy that allowed me to be ready when the proverbial light bulb went on. So I started researching, and to my surprise, this project had never been done before in the arts or the sciences. And — perhaps naively — I was surprised to find that there isn't even an area in the sciences that deals with this idea of global species longevity. So what you're looking at here is the rhizocarpon geographicum, or map lichen, and this is around 3,000 years old and lives in Greenland, which is a long way to go for some lichens. Visiting Greenland was more like traveling back in time than just traveling very far north. It was very primal and more remote than anything I'd ever experienced before. And this is heightened by a couple of particular experiences. One was when I had been dropped off by boat on a remote fjord, only to find that the archeologists I was supposed to meet were nowhere to be found. And it's not like you could send them a text or shoot them an e-mail, so I was literally left to my own devices. But luckily, it worked out obviously, but it was a humbling experience to feel so disconnected. And then a few days later, we had the opportunity to go fishing in a glacial stream near our campsite, where the fish were so abundant that you could literally reach into the stream and grab out a foot-long trout with your bare hands. It was like visiting a more innocent time on the planet. And then, of course, there's the lichens. These lichens grow only one centimeter every hundred years. I think that really puts human lifespans into a different perspective. And what you're looking at here is an aerial photo take over eastern Oregon. And if the title "Searching for Armillaria Death Rings," sounds ominous, it is. The Armillaria is actually a predatory fungus, killing certain species of trees in the forest. It's also more benignly known as the honey mushroom or the "humongous fungus" because it happens to be one of the world's largest organisms as well. So with the help of some biologists studying the fungus, I got some maps and some GPS coordinates and chartered a plane and started looking for the death rings, the circular patterns in which the fungus kills the trees. So I'm not sure if there are any in this photo, but I do know the fungus is down there. And then this back down on the ground and you can see that the fungus is actually invading this tree. So that white material that you see in between the bark and the wood is the mycelial felt of the fungus, and what it's doing — it's actually slowly strangling the tree to death by preventing the flow of water and nutrients. So this strategy has served it pretty well — it's 2,400 years old. And then from underground to underwater. This is a Brain Coral living in Tobago that's around 2,000 years old. And I had to overcome my fear of deep water to find this one. This is at about 60 feet or 18 meters, depth. And you'll see, there's some damage to the surface of the coral. That was actually caused by a school of parrot fish that had started eating it, though luckily, they lost interest before killing it. Luckily still, it seems to be out of harm's way of the recent oil spill. But that being said, we just as easily could have lost one of the oldest living things on the planet, and the full impact of that disaster is still yet to be seen. Now this is something that I think is one of the most quietly resilient things on the planet. This is clonal colony of Quaking Aspen trees, living in Utah, that is literally 80,000 years old. What looks like a forest is actually only one tree. Imagine that it's one giant root system and each tree is a stem coming up from that system. So what you have is one giant, interconnected, genetically identical individual that's been living for 80,000 years. It also happens to be male and, in theory immortal. (Laughter) This is a clonal tree as well. This is the spruce Gran Picea, which at 9,550 years is a mere babe in the woods. The location of this tree is actually kept secret for its own protection. I spoke to the biologist who discovered this tree, and he told me that that spindly growth you see there in the center is most likely a product of climate change. As it's gotten warmer on the top of the mountain, the vegetation zone is actually changing. So we don't even necessarily have to have direct contact with these organisms to have a very real impact on them. This is the Fortingall Yew — no, I'm just kidding — this is the Fortingall Yew. (Laughter) But I put that slide in there because I'm often asked if there are any animals in the project. And aside from coral, the answer is no. Does anybody know how old the oldest tortoise is — any guesses? (Audience: 300.) Rachel Sussman: 300? No, 175 is the oldest living tortoise, so nowhere near 2,000. And then, you might have heard of this giant clam that was discovered off the coast of northern Iceland that reached 405 years old. However, it died in the lab as they were determining its age. The most interesting discovery of late, I think is the so-called immortal jellyfish, which has actually been observed in the lab to be able to be able to revert back to the polyp state after reaching full maturity. So that being said, it's highly unlikely that any jellyfish would survive that long in the wild. And back to the yew here. So as you can see, it's in a churchyard; it's in Scotland. It's behind a protective wall. And there are actually a number or ancient yews in churchyards around the U.K., but if you do the math, you'll remember it's actually the yew trees that were there first, then the churches. And now down to another part of the world. I had the opportunity to travel around the Limpopo Province in South Africa with an expert in Baobab trees. And we saw a number of them, and this is most likely the oldest. It's around 2,000, and it's called the Sagole Baobab. And you know, I think of all of these organisms as palimpsests. They contain thousands of years of their own histories within themselves, and they also contain records of natural and human events. And the Baobabs in particular are a great example of this. You can see that this one has names carved into its trunk, but it also records some natural events. So the Baobabs, as they get older, tend to get pulpy in their centers and hollow out. And this can create great natural shelters for animals, but they've also been appropriated for some rather dubious human uses, including a bar, a prison and even a toilet inside of a tree. And this brings me to another favorite of mine — I think, because it is just so unusual. This plant is called the Welwitschia, and it lives only in parts of coastal Namibia and Angola, where it's uniquely adapted to collect moisture from mist coming off the sea. And what's more, it's actually a tree. It's a primitive conifer. You'll notice that it's bearing cones down the center. And what looks like two big heaps of leaves, is actually two single leaves that get shredded up by the harsh desert conditions over time. And it actually never sheds those leaves, so it also bears the distinction of having the longest leaves in the plant kingdom. I spoke to a biologist at the Kirstenbosch Botanical Garden in Capetown to ask him where he thought this remarkable plant came from, and his thought was that if you travel around Namibia, you see that there are a number of petrified forests, and the logs are all — the logs are all giant coniferous trees, and yet there's no sign of where they might have come from. So his thought was that flooding in the north of Africa actually brought those coniferous trees down tens of thousands of years ago, and what resulted was this remarkable adaptation to this unique desert environment. This is what I think is the most poetic of the oldest living things. This is something called an underground forest. So, I spoke to a botanist at the Pretoria Botanical Garden, who explained that certain species of trees have adapted to this region. It's bushfelt region, which is dry and prone to a lot of fires, as so what these trees have done is, if you can imagine that this is the crown of the tree, and that this is ground level, imagine that the whole thing, that whole bulk of the tree, migrated underground, and you just have those leaves peeping up above the surface. That way, when a fire roars through, it's the equivalent of getting your eyebrows singed. The tree can easily recover. These also tend to grow clonally, the oldest of which is 13,000 years old. Back in the U.S., there's a couple plants of similar age. This is the clonal Creosote bush, which is around 12,000 years old. If you've been in the American West, you know the Creosote bush is pretty ubiquitous, but that being said, you see that this has this unique, circular form. And what's happening is it's expanding slowly outwards from that original shape. And it's one — again, that interconnected root system, making it one genetically identical individual. It also has a friend nearby — well, I think they're friends. This is the clonal Mojave yucca, it's about a mile away, and it's a little bit older than 12,000 years. And you see it has that similar circular form. And there's some younger clones dotting the landscape behind it. And both of these, the yucca and the Creosote bush, live on Bureau of Land Management land, and that's very different from being protected in a national park. In fact, this land is designated for recreational all-terrain vehicle use. So, now I want to show what very well might be the oldest living thing on the planet. This is Siberian Actinobacteria, which is between 400,000 and 600,000 years old. This bacteria was discovered several years ago by a team of planetary biologists hoping to find clues to life on other planets by looking at one of the harshest conditions on ours. And what they found, by doing research into the permafrost, was this bacteria. But what's unique about it is that it's doing DNA repair below freezing. And what that means is that it's not dormant — it's actually been living and growing for half a million years. It's also probably one the most vulnerable of the oldest living things, because if the permafrost melts, it won't survive. This is a map that I've put together of the oldest living things, so you can get a sense of where they are; you see they're all over the world. The blue flags represent things that I've already photographed, and the reds are places that I'm still trying to get to. You'll see also, there's a flag on Antarctica. I'm trying to travel there to find 5,000 year-old moss, which lives on the Antarctic Peninsula. So, I probably have about two more years left on this project — on this phase of the project, but after five years, I really feel like I know what's at the heart of this work. The oldest living things in the world are a record and celebration of our past, a call to action in the present and a barometer of our future. They've survived for millennia in desert, in the permafrost, at the tops of mountains and at the bottom of the ocean. They've withstood untold natural perils and human encroachments, but now some of them are in jeopardy, and they can't just get up and get out of the way. It's my hope that, by going to find these organisms, that I can help draw attention to their remarkable resilience and help play a part in insuring their continued longevity into the foreseeable future. Thank you. (Applause) |
The child-driven education | {0: 'Educational researcher Sugata Mitra is the winner of the 2013 TED Prize. His wish: Build a School in the Cloud, where children can explore and learn from one another.'} | TEDGlobal 2010 | Well, that's kind of an obvious statement up there. I started with that sentence about 12 years ago, and I started in the context of developing countries, but you're sitting here from every corner of the world. So if you think of a map of your country, I think you'll realize that for every country on Earth, you could draw little circles to say, "These are places where good teachers won't go." On top of that, those are the places from where trouble comes. So we have an ironic problem — good teachers don't want to go to just those places where they're needed the most. I started in 1999 to try and address this problem with an experiment, which was a very simple experiment in New Delhi. I basically embedded a computer into a wall of a slum in New Delhi. The children barely went to school, they didn't know any English — they'd never seen a computer before, and they didn't know what the internet was. I connected high speed internet to it — it's about three feet off the ground — turned it on and left it there. After this, we noticed a couple of interesting things, which you'll see. But I repeated this all over India and then through a large part of the world and noticed that children will learn to do what they want to learn to do. This is the first experiment that we did — eight year-old boy on your right teaching his student, a six year-old girl, and he was teaching her how to browse. This boy here in the middle of central India — this is in a Rajasthan village, where the children recorded their own music and then played it back to each other and in the process, they've enjoyed themselves thoroughly. They did all of this in four hours after seeing the computer for the first time. In another South Indian village, these boys here had assembled a video camera and were trying to take the photograph of a bumble bee. They downloaded it from Disney.com, or one of these websites, 14 days after putting the computer in their village. So at the end of it, we concluded that groups of children can learn to use computers and the internet on their own, irrespective of who or where they were. At that point, I became a little more ambitious and decided to see what else could children do with a computer. We started off with an experiment in Hyderabad, India, where I gave a group of children — they spoke English with a very strong Telugu accent. I gave them a computer with a speech-to-text interface, which you now get free with Windows, and asked them to speak into it. So when they spoke into it, the computer typed out gibberish, so they said, "Well, it doesn't understand anything of what we are saying." So I said, "Yeah, I'll leave it here for two months. Make yourself understood to the computer." So the children said, "How do we do that." And I said, "I don't know, actually." (Laughter) And I left. (Laughter) Two months later — and this is now documented in the Information Technology for International Development journal — that accents had changed and were remarkably close to the neutral British accent in which I had trained the speech-to-text synthesizer. In other words, they were all speaking like James Tooley. (Laughter) So they could do that on their own. After that, I started to experiment with various other things that they might learn to do on their own. I got an interesting phone call once from Columbo, from the late Arthur C. Clarke, who said, "I want to see what's going on." And he couldn't travel, so I went over there. He said two interesting things, "A teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be." (Laughter) The second thing he said was that, "If children have interest, then education happens." And I was doing that in the field, so every time I would watch it and think of him. (Video) Arthur C. Clarke: And they can definitely help people, because children quickly learn to navigate the web and find things which interest them. And when you've got interest, then you have education. Sugata Mitra: I took the experiment to South Africa. This is a 15 year-old boy. (Video) Boy: ... just mention, I play games like animals, and I listen to music. SM: And I asked him, "Do you send emails?" And he said, "Yes, and they hop across the ocean." This is in Cambodia, rural Cambodia — a fairly silly arithmetic game, which no child would play inside the classroom or at home. They would, you know, throw it back at you. They'd say, "This is very boring." If you leave it on the pavement and if all the adults go away, then they will show off with each other about what they can do. This is what these children are doing. They are trying to multiply, I think. And all over India, at the end of about two years, children were beginning to Google their homework. As a result, the teachers reported tremendous improvements in their English — (Laughter) rapid improvement and all sorts of things. They said, "They have become really deep thinkers and so on and so forth. (Laughter) And indeed they had. I mean, if there's stuff on Google, why would you need to stuff it into your head? So at the end of the next four years, I decided that groups of children can navigate the internet to achieve educational objectives on their own. At that time, a large amount of money had come into Newcastle University to improve schooling in India. So Newcastle gave me a call. I said, "I'll do it from Delhi." They said, "There's no way you're going to handle a million pounds-worth of University money sitting in Delhi." So in 2006, I bought myself a heavy overcoat and moved to Newcastle. I wanted to test the limits of the system. The first experiment I did out of Newcastle was actually done in India. And I set myself and impossible target: can Tamil speaking 12-year-old children in a South Indian village teach themselves biotechnology in English on their own? And I thought, I'll test them, they'll get a zero — I'll give the materials, I'll come back and test them — they get another zero, I'll go back and say, "Yes, we need teachers for certain things." I called in 26 children. They all came in there, and I told them that there's some really difficult stuff on this computer. I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't understand anything. It's all in English, and I'm going. (Laughter) So I left them with it. I came back after two months, and the 26 children marched in looking very, very quiet. I said, "Well, did you look at any of the stuff?" They said, "Yes, we did." "Did you understand anything?" "No, nothing." So I said, "Well, how long did you practice on it before you decided you understood nothing?" They said, "We look at it every day." So I said, "For two months, you were looking at stuff you didn't understand?" So a 12 year-old girl raises her hand and says, literally, "Apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes genetic disease, we've understood nothing else." (Laughter) (Applause) (Laughter) It took me three years to publish that. It's just been published in the British Journal of Educational Technology. One of the referees who refereed the paper said, "It's too good to be true," which was not very nice. Well, one of the girls had taught herself to become the teacher. And then that's her over there. Remember, they don't study English. I edited out the last bit when I asked, "Where is the neuron?" and she says, "The neuron? The neuron," and then she looked and did this. Whatever the expression, it was not very nice. So their scores had gone up from zero to 30 percent, which is an educational impossibility under the circumstances. But 30 percent is not a pass. So I found that they had a friend, a local accountant, a young girl, and they played football with her. I asked that girl, "Would you teach them enough biotechnology to pass?" And she said, "How would I do that? I don't know the subject." I said, "No, use the method of the grandmother." She said, "What's that?" I said, "Well, what you've got to do is stand behind them and admire them all the time. Just say to them, 'That's cool. That's fantastic. What is that? Can you do that again? Can you show me some more?'" She did that for two months. The scores went up to 50, which is what the posh schools of New Delhi, with a trained biotechnology teacher were getting. So I came back to Newcastle with these results and decided that there was something happening here that definitely was getting very serious. So, having experimented in all sorts of remote places, I came to the most remote place that I could think of. (Laughter) Approximately 5,000 miles from Delhi is the little town of Gateshead. In Gateshead, I took 32 children and I started to fine-tune the method. I made them into groups of four. I said, "You make your own groups of four. Each group of four can use one computer and not four computers." Remember, from the Hole in the Wall. "You can exchange groups. You can walk across to another group, if you don't like your group, etc. You can go to another group, peer over their shoulders, see what they're doing, come back to you own group and claim it as your own work." And I explained to them that, you know, a lot of scientific research is done using that method. (Laughter) (Applause) The children enthusiastically got after me and said, "Now, what do you want us to do?" I gave them six GCSE questions. The first group — the best one — solved everything in 20 minutes. The worst, in 45. They used everything that they knew — news groups, Google, Wikipedia, Ask Jeeves, etc. The teachers said, "Is this deep learning?" I said, "Well, let's try it. I'll come back after two months. We'll give them a paper test — no computers, no talking to each other, etc." The average score when I'd done it with the computers and the groups was 76 percent. When I did the experiment, when I did the test, after two months, the score was 76 percent. There was photographic recall inside the children, I suspect because they're discussing with each other. A single child in front of a single computer will not do that. I have further results, which are almost unbelievable, of scores which go up with time. Because their teachers say that after the session is over, the children continue to Google further. Here in Britain, I put out a call for British grandmothers, after my Kuppam experiment. Well, you know, they're very vigorous people, British grandmothers. 200 of them volunteered immediately. (Laughter) The deal was that they would give me one hour of broadband time, sitting in their homes, one day in a week. So they did that, and over the last two years, over 600 hours of instruction has happened over Skype, using what my students call the granny cloud. The granny cloud sits over there. I can beam them to whichever school I want to. (Video) Teacher: You can't catch me. You say it. You can't catch me. Children: You can't catch me. Teacher: I'm the gingerbread man. Children: I'm the gingerbread man. Teacher: Well done. Very good ... SM: Back at Gateshead, a 10-year-old girl gets into the heart of Hinduism in 15 minutes. You know, stuff which I don't know anything about. Two children watch a TEDTalk. They wanted to be footballers before. After watching eight TEDTalks, he wants to become Leonardo da Vinci. (Laughter) (Applause) It's pretty simple stuff. This is what I'm building now — they're called SOLEs: Self Organized Learning Environments. The furniture is designed so that children can sit in front of big, powerful screens, big broadband connections, but in groups. If they want, they can call the granny cloud. This is a SOLE in Newcastle. The mediator is from Pune, India. So how far can we go? One last little bit and I'll stop. I went to Turin in May. I sent all the teachers away from my group of 10 year-old students. I speak only English, they speak only Italian, so we had no way to communicate. I started writing English questions on the blackboard. The children looked at it and said, "What?" I said, "Well, do it." They typed it into Google, translated it into Italian, went back into Italian Google. Fifteen minutes later — next question: where is Calcutta? This one, they took only 10 minutes. I tried a really hard one then. Who was Pythagoras, and what did he do? There was silence for a while, then they said, "You've spelled it wrong. It's Pitagora." And then, in 20 minutes, the right-angled triangles began to appear on the screens. This sent shivers up my spine. These are 10 year-olds. Text: In another 30 minutes they would reach the Theory of Relativity. And then? (Laughter) (Applause) SM: So you know what's happened? I think we've just stumbled across a self-organizing system. A self-organizing system is one where a structure appears without explicit intervention from the outside. Self-organizing systems also always show emergence, which is that the system starts to do things, which it was never designed for. Which is why you react the way you do, because it looks impossible. I think I can make a guess now — education is self-organizing system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon. It'll take a few years to prove it, experimentally, but I'm going to try. But in the meanwhile, there is a method available. One billion children, we need 100 million mediators — there are many more than that on the planet — 10 million SOLEs, 180 billion dollars and 10 years. We could change everything. Thanks. (Applause) |
Art of substance and absence | {0: 'Sculptor, painter and printmaker Alwar Balasubramaniam makes work that crosses the boundary between art, perception and life.'} | TEDIndia 2009 | The moment I say "school," so many memories come back to me. It's like after every exam, when I walk out, the teacher would say, "Hey, come. How did you do?" I would say with a great smile, "I will definitely pass." And I didn't understand why, in one hand they say, "Speak the truth," in the other hand, when you say the truth, they hated you. So it went on like that, and I didn't know where else to find myself. So I remember those nights I used to go to sleep with asking help from [the] Unknown because, for some reason, I couldn't believe what my father and mother hanged in the Puja room as a god, because my friend's family had something else as a god. So I thought, "I guess I'll pray to [the] Unknown and ask help," and started getting help from everywhere, each and every corner of my life at that time. My brothers started giving me a few tips about drawing and painting. Then, when I was in eighth standard around 13 years old, I started working in a part-time job in one of the signboard artists called Putu. And then school also started supporting me. "Oh, he's bad at studies, but let him send to the drawing competitions." So it was good to survive with that little tool that I found to find my own place in school. And one of those competitions, I just won a small, little transistor Philips radio. And I didn't have the patience to wait until I reached home. So I just switched on in the train, loudly. If you travel in Indian trains, you can see people listening to radio and, you know, even from their mobiles. So at that time — and I was 13 — and I was listening to just radio, and someone happened to sit next to me, like these three people are sitting here. You know, like just adjacent to me. He just started asking, "Where did you buy the radio? How much is it?" I said, "It's a prize from [an] art competition." And he said, "Oh, I teach at a college of arts. I think you should study in a school of art. You just quit school and come there." So, why I'm telling you this, you know, maybe, you know, whoever is sitting next to you can change your whole life — it's possible. It is that we need we need to be open and fine-tuned. So that's what made me enter [the] college of arts after three attempts and just continue to inquire what I really want to do with art work, or art and finally I'm here in front of you. When I look back, you know, on what happened between that time and now here — the last 10/15 years — I can see that most of the works revolve around three subjects, but it was not intentional. And I just start out with a trace because I was thinking, "What really makes us?" — you know, it's actually [the] past, what makes a person. So I was thinking, but when you look at the past, the way to understand the past is only by the traces available, because we cannot go back [to] the past. It can be ruins, or it can be music, or it can be painting or drawing or writing, whatever it is. But it is just a kind of trace of that time. And that fascinated me, to explore that territory. So I was working on the line, but instead of working about traces, I started capturing traces. So here are some of the works I would like to show you. So this is called "Self In Progress." It's just a trace of being in this body. So here, what happened then, you know — what I really enjoyed the most is that this sculpture is nothing but a trace of myself. It's almost like a 3D photograph. So there is an element of performance, and there is an element of sculpture, and there is an element of feeling one's self, so close to one's self. So it's almost like fossils for the future. And then moved slowly to explore the other possibilities of capturing traces. So this is what I was talking about, while molding, it's such a great experience, because we have freedom of like walking, or moving my hand or, moving around in the space, but the moment this becomes solid, when you cannot move even an inch, because this is plaster of Paris, so the moment you pour it it's like liquid; but after 20 minutes, it's almost like a hard stone. So this is capturing the trace of a thumbprint because, knowingly or unknowingly, whatever we do, you know, we leave our traces here. So I just thought, "I'm going to capture thumbprint, footprint, or whatever traces we leave as humans." This is the trace of fire, this is the trace of sun. Because when I was capturing traces, you know, this thought comes to me always: is it, only when the object touches the thing and it leaves the trace, or is there other ways to capture it?" So this work is nothing but like — because of the focal length of the lens, it just shows what is on the other side. So I just put the paper on the focal length, which was an etching print, then I got the portrait of [the] sun from sunlight. This is called "Dawn to Dawn." What I did here, I just put like 10 feet [of] paper then put a coconut rope, and just burnt it. So it took about 24 hours to get this line. So wherever the fire is eating the paper, that's what becomes the work — detail. Even though we have traces when we try to understand them, the perception and context play a major role to understand it. So do we really understand what it is, or are we trying to get what we think it is? Then move towards questioning the perception because, even though there are traces, when you try to understand them, you know you play a major role. So like let's say even a simple act. How many of you saw a cow crossing in India while you were coming from Bangalore to Mysore? Can you just raise the hand? If you just ask an opinion of how, everyone can interpret it. Like, let's say, if a schoolteacher says, she'll simply say, "To get to the other side." Why the cow was crossing the road, you know. The answer can be so different if Potter said it. He would say, "For the greater good." Martin Luther King would say, "I imagine a world where all cows will be free to cross the road, without having their motives called into question." (Laughter) Imagine Moses comes now, and he sees the same cow walking around the street. He would definitely say, "God came down from heaven, and he said unto the cow, 'Thou shalt cross the road.' And cow crossed the road, and there was much rejoicing as a holy cow." (Laughter) Freud would say, "The fact that you're at all concerned reveals your underlying sexual insecurity." (Laughter) If we ask Einstein, he would say, "Whether the cow crossed the road, or the road moved underneath the cow, depends on your frame of reference." (Laughter) Or Buddha — if he saw the same cow, he would say, "Asking this question denies your own nature [as a] cow." (Laughter) So, what we see is just what we think often, and most of the time, we don't see what it is. It just all depends on one's perception. And context, what is really context? You know, I could just show you this little piece of paper. Because I always think meaning doesn't really exist. The meaning of what we create in this world doesn't exist. It's just created by the mind. If you look at this piece of paper, this is the breadth and this is called length. This is how we've been taught in school. But if you tear it in the middle — now, I didn't touch this breadth, but still, the meaning of this changes. So what we conceive as a meaning is always not there; it's on the other side, even when we say dark, light, good, bad, tall, short — all meaning it doesn't exist in reality. It's just that being a human, the way we train to perceive the reality creates this meaning. So this work from this period is mostly like — you know, this is a work called "Light Makes Dark." It's just captured through from the lamp. So the lamp is not just giving a light, it's also giving a darkness. So this is a work of art, which is just trying to explore that. This is called "Limit Out." This shows how limited our eye or hearing sense or touch — do we really see? This is an exact negative. It's about six inches deep in the wall, but it just appears like it's coming out of the wall. You know the wall is almost like — this is the first skin, and this is the second, and there's a third, and each creates a meaning. And we're just pulling the wall off the gallery. Again, "Inward Out." It's a full-figure cast from myself. It's about eight inches deep. When I was doing that, I always wondered since I've worked with creators — and now you know, I've moved to questioning the perception — whenever I see the bird flying in the sky, it just makes me feel like: is there anything behind, are there any traces up there, which as a human, we don't see them? Is there any way to capture the thought into visual art? I couldn't find it. But a solution arrived after being quiet and not working for about six, seven months, in the restroom, when I was changing the air freshener that goes from solid substance to vapor. It's called Odonil. This is the work I made out of that material. The process to get to make the sculpture was interesting, because I wrote to Balsara, who produces that air freshener called Odonil, saying, "Dear Sir, I am an artist. This is my catalogue. Will you help me to make this sculpture?" They never wrote back to me. Then I thought, "I will go to the Small Scale Industries Facilitating Unit and ask help." So I told them, "I'd like to start an air freshener company." They said, "Of course. This is the fee for the project report, and we will give you all the details," and they gave. Finally, I went back to them and said, "It's not for starting the company, it's just to make my own work. Please come for the show." And they did. And this work is in the Devi Art Foundation in Delhi. In India, nobody really talks about works of art; they always talk about the appreciation of art. You buy this for 3,000 rupees, it'll become 30,000 in two months. This is the craft that was going on, but there are a few collectors who also collect art which can depreciate. And this was collected by Anupam — which is like, finally in the end, he will not have anything, because it will evaporate. So this is after a few weeks, this is after a few months. It's just all about questioning the preconceptions. So if someone says, "Oh, I see the portrait," it may not be the portrait after a few months. And if they say it's solid, it will not be solid, it will evaporate. And if they say they don't get it, that's also not true, because it's in the air. It's in the same gallery or in the same museum. So they inhaled it, but they are not aware of it. While I was doing that work, my mom and my dad, they were looking at it and they said, "Why do you deal with negative subjects all the time?" And I was like, "What do you mean?" "Light makes dark and now evaporating self. Don't you think it remained something about death," they said. "Of course not. For me," I'm thinking, "this is tucked in some small solid, but the moment it evaporates, it's merged with the whole." But she said, "No. Still, I don't like it. Can you make something from nothing as a sculptor?" I said, "No, mom. It can't be. Because we can create a sculpture by gathering dust together, or we can break the sculpture and get the dust, but there is nowhere that we can bring dust into the universe." So, I did this work for her. It's called "Emerging Angel." This is the first day — it just gives the appearance that one is becoming the other. So, the same sculpture after a few days. This is after 15/20 days. Through that small little slit between the glass box and the wood, the air goes underneath the sculpture and creates the other one. This gave me a greater faith. That evaporating sculpture gave me a greater faith that maybe there is many more possibilities to capture [the] invisible. So what you see now is called "Shadow Foreshadow." And what I'd like to tell you is we don't see shadow, and we don't see light too; we see the source of the light. We see where it's bouncing, but we don't see [them] as they exist. You know, that's why the night sky, we see the sky as dark, but it's filled with light all the time. When it's bounced on the moon, we see it. The same thing in the darkroom. The little dust particle will again, reflect the light, and we realize the existence of light. So we don't see dark, we don't see light, we don't see gravity, we don't see electricity. So, I just started doing this work to inquire further about how to sculpt the space between this object and there. Because, as a visual artist, if I'm seeing this and I'm seeing that — but how to sculpt this, you know? If we sculpt this, this has two reference points. The skin of this is also representing this. And skin at the other end also represents the floor. I did this as an experiment of casting the shadow. So this is a corrugated box and its shadow. Then the second one — the moment you bring any invisible into the visible world it will have all the characteristics of the visible existence. So that produced a shadow. Then I thought, okay, let me sculpt that. Then, again, that becomes an object. Again, throwing light, then the third one. So what you see is nothing but shadow of a shadow of a shadow. And then again, at that point, there is no shadow. I thought, "Oh, good. Work is finished." You can see the detail. This is called "Gravity." It's called "Breath." It's just two holes on the gallery wall. It's a false wall, which contains like 110 cubic feet. So that hole actually makes the air come out and go in. So where it's happening, we can see, but what is happening will remain invisible only. This is from the show called "Invisible," at Talwar Gallery. This is called "Kaayam." Detail. And what I'd like to tell you, our senses are so limited — we cannot hear everything, we cannot see everything. We don't feel, "I am touching the air," but if the breeze is a little more faster, then I can feel it. So all of our construction of reality is through these limited senses. So my request was like, is there any way to use all this as just a symbol or a sign? And to really get to the point, we should move beyond, you know, go to the other side of the wall, like illogic, like are invisible. Because when we see someone walks, we see the footprint. But if we're just cutting that footprint from the whole thing and trying to analyze it, you will miss the point because the actual journey happens between those footprints, and the footprints are nothing but passing time. Thank you. (Applause) |
An independent diplomat | {0: 'Carne Ross is the founder of Independent Diplomat, a nonprofit that offers freelance diplomatic representation to small, developing and yet-unrecognized nations in the complex world of international negotiations.'} | Business Innovation Factory | My story is a little bit about war. It's about disillusionment. It's about death. And it's about rediscovering idealism in all of that wreckage. And perhaps also, there's a lesson about how to deal with our screwed-up, fragmenting and dangerous world of the 21st century. I don't believe in straightforward narratives. I don't believe in a life or history written as decision "A" led to consequence "B" led to consequence "C" — these neat narratives that we're presented with, and that perhaps we encourage in each other. I believe in randomness, and one of the reasons I believe that is because me becoming a diplomat was random. I'm colorblind. I was born unable to see most colors. This is why I wear gray and black most of the time, and I have to take my wife with me to chose clothes. And I'd always wanted to be a fighter pilot when I was a boy. I loved watching planes barrel over our holiday home in the countryside. And it was my boyhood dream to be a fighter pilot. And I did the tests in the Royal Air Force to become a pilot, and sure enough, I failed. I couldn't see all the blinking different lights, and I can't distinguish color. So I had to choose another career, and this was in fact relatively easy for me, because I had an abiding passion all the way through my childhood, which was international relations. As a child, I read the newspaper thoroughly. I was fascinated by the Cold War, by the INF negotiations over intermediate-range nuclear missiles, the proxy war between the Soviet Union and the U.S. in Angola or Afghanistan. These things really interested me. And so I decided quite at an early age I wanted to be a diplomat. And I, one day, I announced this to my parents — and my father denies this story to this day — I said, "Daddy, I want to be a diplomat." And he turned to me, and he said, "Carne, you have to be very clever to be a diplomat." (Laughter) And my ambition was sealed. In 1989, I entered the British Foreign Service. That year, 5,000 people applied to become a diplomat, and 20 of us succeeded. And as those numbers suggest, I was inducted into an elite and fascinating and exhilarating world. Being a diplomat, then and now, is an incredible job, and I loved every minute of it — I enjoyed the status of it. I bought myself a nice suit and wore leather-soled shoes and reveled in this amazing access I had to world events. I traveled to the Gaza Strip. I headed the Middle East Peace Process section in the British Foreign Ministry. I became a speechwriter for the British Foreign Secretary. I met Yasser Arafat. I negotiated with Saddam's diplomats at the U.N. Later, I traveled to Kabul and served in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. And I would travel in a C-130 transport and go and visit warlords in mountain hideaways and negotiate with them about how we were going to eradicate Al Qaeda from Afghanistan, surrounded by my Special Forces escort, who, themselves, had to have an escort of a platoon of Royal Marines, because it was so dangerous. And that was exciting — that was fun. It was really interesting. And it's a great cadre of people, incredibly close-knit community of people. And the pinnacle of my career, as it turned out, was when I was posted to New York. I'd already served in Germany, Norway, various other places, but I was posted to New York to serve on the U.N. Security Council for the British delegation. And my responsibility was the Middle East, which was my specialty. And there, I dealt with things like the Middle East peace process, the Lockerbie issue — we can talk about that later, if you wish — but above all, my responsibility was Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction and the sanctions we placed on Iraq to oblige it to disarm itself of these weapons. I was the chief British negotiator on the subject, and I was steeped in the issue. And anyway, my tour — it was kind of a very exciting time. I mean it was very dramatic diplomacy. We went through several wars during my time in New York. I negotiated for my country the resolution in the Security Council of the 12th of September 2001 condemning the attacks of the day before, which were, of course, deeply present to us actually living in New York at the time. So it was kind of the best of time, worst of times kind of experience. I lived the high-life. Although I worked very long hours, I lived in a penthouse in Union Square. I was a single British diplomat in New York City; you can imagine what that might have meant. (Laughter) I had a good time. But in 2002, when my tour came to an end, I decided I wasn't going to go back to the job that was waiting for me in London. I decided to take a sabbatical, in fact, at the New School, Bruce. In some inchoate, inarticulate way I realized that there was something wrong with my work, with me. I was exhausted, and I was also disillusioned in a way I couldn't quite put my finger on. And I decided to take some time out from work. The Foreign Office was very generous. You could take these special unpaid leave, as they called them, and yet remain part of the diplomatic service, but not actually do any work. It was nice. And eventually, I decided to take a secondment to join the U.N. in Kosovo, which was then under U.N. administration. And two things happened in Kosovo, which kind of, again, shows the randomness of life, because these things turned out to be two of the pivots of my life and helped to deliver me to the next stage. But they were random things. One was that, in the summer of 2004, the British government, somewhat reluctantly, decided to have an official inquiry into the use of intelligence on WMD in the run up to the Iraq War, a very limited subject. And I testified to that inquiry in secret. I had been steeped in the intelligence on Iraq and its WMD, and my testimony to the inquiry said three things: that the government exaggerated the intelligence, which was very clear in all the years I'd read it. And indeed, our own internal assessment was very clear that Iraq's WMD did not pose a threat to its neighbors, let alone to us. Secondly, the government had ignored all available alternatives to war, which in some ways was a more discreditable thing still. The third reason, I won't go into. But anyway, I gave that testimony, and that presented me with a crisis. What was I going to do? This testimony was deeply critical of my colleagues, of my ministers, who had, in my view had perpetrated a war on a falsehood. And so I was in crisis. And this wasn't a pretty thing. I moaned about it, I hesitated, I went on and on and on to my long-suffering wife, and eventually I decided to resign from the British Foreign Service. I felt — there's a scene in the Al Pacino movie "The Insider," which you may know, where he goes back to CBS after they've let him down over the tobacco guy, and he goes, "You know, I just can't do this anymore. Something's broken." And it was like that for me. I love that movie. I felt just something's broken. I can't actually sit with my foreign minister or my prime minister again with a smile on my face and do what I used to do gladly for them. So took a running leap and jumped over the edge of a cliff. And it was a very, very uncomfortable, unpleasant feeling. And I started to fall. And today, that fall hasn't stopped; I'm still falling. But, in a way, I've got used to the sensation of it. And in a way, I kind of like the sensation of it a lot better than I like actually standing on top of the cliff, wondering what to do. A second thing happened in Kosovo, which kind of — I need a quick gulp of water, forgive me. A second thing happened in Kosovo, which kind of delivered the answer, which I couldn't really answer, which is, "What do I do with my life?" I love diplomacy — I have no career — I expected my entire life to be a diplomat, to be serving my country. I wanted to be an ambassador, and my mentors, my heroes, people who got to the top of my profession, and here I was throwing it all away. A lot of my friends were still in it. My pension was in it. And I gave it up. And what was I going to do? And that year, in Kosovo, this terrible, terrible thing happened, which I saw. In March 2004, there were terrible riots all over the province — as it then was — of Kosovo. 18 people were killed. It was anarchy. And it's a very horrible thing to see anarchy, to know that the police and the military — there were lots of military troops there — actually can't stop that rampaging mob who's coming down the street. And the only way that rampaging mob coming down the street will stop is when they decide to stop and when they've had enough burning and killing. And that is not a very nice feeling to see, and I saw it. And I went through it. I went through those mobs. And with my Albanian friends, we tried to stop it, but we failed. And that riot taught me something, which isn't immediately obvious and it's kind of a complicated story. But one of the reasons that riot took place — those riots, which went on for several days, took place — was because the Kosovo people were disenfranchised from their own future. There were diplomatic negotiations about the future of Kosovo going on then, and the Kosovo government, let alone the Kosovo people, were not actually participating in those talks. There was this whole fancy diplomatic system, this negotiation process about the future of Kosovo, and the Kosovars weren't part of it. And funnily enough, they were frustrated about that. Those riots were part of the manifestation of that frustration. It wasn't the only reason, and life is not simple, one reason narratives. It was a complicated thing, and I'm not pretending it was more simple than it was. But that was one of the reasons. And that kind of gave me the inspiration — or rather to be precise, it gave my wife the inspiration. She said, "Why don't you advise the Kosovars? Why don't you advise their government on their diplomacy?" And the Kosovars were not allowed a diplomatic service. They were not allowed diplomats. They were not allowed a foreign office to help them deal with this immensely complicated process, which became known as the Final Status Process of Kosovo. And so that was the idea. That was the origin of the thing that became Independent Diplomat, the world's first diplomatic advisory group and a non-profit to boot. And it began when I flew back from London after my time at the U.N. in Kosovo. I flew back and had dinner with the Kosovo prime minister and said to him, "Look, I'm proposing that I come and advise you on the diplomacy. I know this stuff. It's what I do. Why don't I come and help you?" And he raised his glass of raki to me and said, "Yes, Carne. Come." And I came to Kosovo and advised the Kosovo government. Independent Diplomat ended up advising three successive Kosovo prime ministers and the multi-party negotiation team of Kosovo. And Kosovo became independent. Independent Diplomat is now established in five diplomatic centers around the world, and we're advising seven or eight different countries, or political groups, depending on how you wish to define them — and I'm not big on definitions. We're advising the Northern Cypriots on how to reunify their island. We're advising the Burmese opposition, the government of Southern Sudan, which — you heard it here first — is going to be a new country within the next few years. We're advising the Polisario Front of the Western Sahara, who are fighting to get their country back from Moroccan occupation after 34 years of dispossession. We're advising various island states in the climate change negotiations, which is suppose to culminate in Copenhagen. There's a bit of randomness here too because, when I was beginning Independent Diplomat, I went to a party in the House of Lords, which is a ridiculous place, but I was holding my drink like this, and I bumped into this guy who was standing behind me. And we started talking, and he said — I told him what I was doing, and I told him rather grandly I was going to establish Independent Diplomat in New York. At that time there was just me — and me and my wife were moving back to New York. And he said, "Why don't you see my colleagues in New York?" And it turned out he worked for an innovation company called ?What If!, which some of you have probably heard of. And one thing led to another, and I ended up having a desk in ?What If! in New York, when I started Independent Diplomat. And watching ?What If! develop new flavors of chewing gum for Wrigley or new flavors for Coke actually helped me innovate new strategies for the Kosovars and for the Saharawis of the Western Sahara. And I began to realize that there are different ways of doing diplomacy — that diplomacy, like business, is a business of solving problems, and yet the word innovation doesn't exist in diplomacy; it's all zero sum games and realpolitik and ancient institutions that have been there for generations and do things the same way they've always done things. And Independent Diplomat, today, tries to incorporate some of the things I learned at ?What If!. We all sit in one office and shout at each other across the office. We all work on little laptops and try to move desks to change the way we think. And we use naive experts who may know nothing about the countries we're dealing with, but may know something about something else to try to inject new thinking into the problems that we try to address for our clients. It's not easy, because our clients, by definition, are having a difficult time, diplomatically. There are, I don't know, some lessons from all of this, personal and political — and in a way, they're the same thing. The personal one is falling off a cliff is actually a good thing, and I recommend it. And it's a good thing to do at least once in your life just to tear everything up and jump. The second thing is a bigger lesson about the world today. Independent Diplomat is part of a trend which is emerging and evident across the world, which is that the world is fragmenting. States mean less than they used to, and the power of the state is declining. That means the power of others things is rising. Those other things are called non-state actors. They may be corporations, they may be mafiosi, they may be nice NGOs, they may anything, any number of things. We are living in a more complicated and fragmented world. If governments are less able to affect the problems that affect us in the world, then that means, who is left to deal with them, who has to take greater responsibility to deal with them? Us. If they can't do it, who's left to deal with it? We have no choice but to embrace that reality. What this means is it's no longer good enough to say that international relations, or global affairs, or chaos in Somalia, or what's going on in Burma is none of your business, and that you can leave it to governments to get on with. I can connect any one of you by six degrees of separation to the Al-Shabaab militia in Somalia. Ask me how later, particularly if you eat fish, interestingly enough, but that connection is there. We are all intimately connected. And this isn't just Tom Friedman, it's actually provable in case after case after case. What that means is, instead of asking your politicians to do things, you have to look to yourself to do things. And Independent Diplomat is a kind of example of this in a sort of loose way. There aren't neat examples, but one example is this: the way the world is changing is embodied in what's going on at the place I used to work — the U.N. Security Council. The U.N. was established in 1945. Its charter is basically designed to stop conflicts between states — interstate conflict. Today, 80 percent of the agenda of the U.N. Security Council is about conflicts within states, involving non-state parties — guerillas, separatists, terrorists, if you want to call them that, people who are not normal governments, who are not normal states. That is the state of the world today. When I realized this, and when I look back on my time at the Security Council and what happened with the Kosovars, and I realize that often the people who were most directly affected by what we were doing in the Security Council weren't actually there, weren't actually invited to give their views to the Security Council, I thought, this is wrong. Something's got to be done about this. So I started off in a traditional mode. Me and my colleagues at Independent Diplomat went around the U.N. Security Council. We went around 70 U.N. member states — the Kazaks, the Ethiopians, the Israelis — you name them, we went to see them — the secretary general, all of them, and said, "This is all wrong. This is terrible that you don't consult these people who are actually affected. You've got to institutionalize a system where you actually invite the Kosovars to come and tell you what they think. This will allow you to tell me — you can tell them what you think. It'll be great. You can have an exchange. You can actually incorporate these people's views into your decisions, which means your decisions will be more effective and durable." Super-logical, you would think. I mean, incredibly logical. So obvious, anybody could get it. And of course, everybody got it. Everybody went, "Yes, of course, you're absolutely right. Come back to us in maybe six months." And of course, nothing happened — nobody did anything. The Security Council does its business in exactly the same way today that it did X number of years ago, when I was there 10 years ago. So we looked at that observation of basically failure and thought, what can we do about it. And I thought, I'm buggered if I'm going to spend the rest of my life lobbying for these crummy governments to do what needs to be done. So what we're going to do is we're actually going to set up these meetings ourselves. So now, Independent Diplomat is in the process of setting up meetings between the U.N. Security Council and the parties to the disputes that are on the agenda of the Security Council. So we will be bringing Darfuri rebel groups, the Northern Cypriots and the Southern Cypriots, rebels from Aceh, and awful long laundry list of chaotic conflicts around the world. And we will be trying to bring the parties to New York to sit down in a quiet room in a private setting with no press and actually explain what they want to the members of the U. N. Security Council, and for the members of the U.N. Security Council to explain to them what they want. So there's actually a conversation, which has never before happened. And of course, describing all this, any of you who know politics will think this is incredibly difficult, and I entirely agree with you. The chances of failure are very high, but it certainly won't happen if we don't try to make it happen. And my politics has changed fundamentally from when I was a diplomat to what I am today, and I think that outputs is what matters, not process, not technology, frankly, so much either. Preach technology to all the Twittering members of all the Iranian demonstrations who are now in political prison in Tehran, where Ahmadinejad remains in power. Technology has not delivered political change in Iran. You've got to look at the outputs, and you got to say to yourself, "What can I do to produce that particular output?" That is the politics of the 21st century, and in a way, Independent Diplomat embodies that fragmentation, that change, that is happening to all of us. That's my story. Thanks. |
Why the live arts matter | {0: 'Ben Cameron runs the arts granting program at the Doris Duke Foundation, focusing on live theater, dance and jazz.'} | TEDxYYC | I am a cultural omnivore, one whose daily commute is made possible by attachment to an iPod — an iPod that contains Wagner and Mozart, pop diva Christina Aguilera, country singer Josh Turner, gangsta rap artist Kirk Franklin, concerti, symphonies and more and more. I'm a voracious reader, a reader who deals with Ian McEwan down to Stephanie Meyer. I have read the Twilight tetralogy. And one who lives for my home theater, a home theater where I devour DVDs, video on demand and a lot of television. For me, "Law & Order: SVU," Tina Fey and "30 Rock" and "Judge Judy" — "The people are real, the cases are real, the rulings are final." (Laughter) Now, I'm convinced a lot of you probably share my passions, especially my passion for "Judge Judy," and you'd fight anybody who attempted to take her away from us, but I'm a little less convinced that you share the central passion of my life, a passion for the live professional performing arts, performing arts that represent the orchestral repertoire, yes, but jazz as well, modern dance, opera, theater and more and more and more. Frankly, it's a sector that many of us who work in the field worry is being endangered and possibly dismantled by technology. While we initially heralded the Internet as the fantastic new marketing device that was going to solve all our problems, we now realize that the Internet is, if anything, too effective in that regard. Depending on who you read, an arts organization or an artist, who tries to attract the attention of a potential single ticket buyer, now competes with between three and 5,000 different marketing messages a typical citizen sees every single day. We now know, in fact, that technology is our biggest competitor for leisure time. Five years ago, Gen Xers spent 20.7 hours online and TV, the majority on TV. Gen Yers spent even more — 23.8 hours, the majority online. And now, a typical university-entering student arrives at college already having spent 20,000 hours online and an additional 10,000 hours playing video games — a stark reminder that we operate in a cultural context where video games now outsell music and movie recordings combined. Moreover, we're afraid that technology has altered our very assumptions of cultural consumption. Thanks to the Internet, we believe we can get anything we want whenever we want it, delivered to our own doorstep. We can shop at three in the morning or eight at night, ordering jeans tailor-made for our unique body types. Expectations of personalization and customization that the live performing arts — which have set curtain times, set venues, attendant inconveniences of travel, parking and the like — simply cannot meet. And we're all acutely aware: what's it going to mean in the future when we ask someone to pay a hundred dollars for a symphony, opera or ballet ticket, when that cultural consumer is used to downloading on the internet 24 hours a day for 99 cents a song or for free? These are enormous questions for those of us that work in this terrain. But as particular as they feel to us, we know we're not alone. All of us are engaged in a seismic, fundamental realignment of culture and communications, a realignment that is shaking and decimating the newspaper industry, the magazine industry, the book and publishing industry and more. Saddled in the performing arts as we are, by antiquated union agreements that inhibit and often prohibit mechanical reproduction and streaming, locked into large facilities that were designed to ossify the ideal relationship between artist and audience most appropriate to the 19th century and locked into a business model dependent on high ticket revenues, where we charge exorbitant prices. Many of us shudder in the wake of the collapse of Tower Records and ask ourselves, "Are we next?" Everyone I talk to in performing arts resonates to the words of Adrienne Rich, who, in "Dreams of a Common Language," wrote, "We are out in a country that has no language, no laws. Whatever we do together is pure invention. The maps they gave us are out of date by years." And for those of you who love the arts, aren't you glad you invited me here to brighten your day? (Laughter) (Applause) Now, rather than saying that we're on the brink of our own annihilation, I prefer to believe that we are engaged in a fundamental reformation, a reformation like the religious Reformation of the 16th century. The arts reformation, like the religious Reformation, is spurred in part by technology, with indeed, the printing press really leading the charge on the religious Reformation. Both reformations were predicated on fractious discussion, internal self-doubt and massive realignment of antiquated business models. And at heart, both reformations, I think, were asking the questions: who's entitled to practice? How are they entitled to practice? And indeed, do we need anyone to intermediate for us in order to have an experience with a spiritual divine? Chris Anderson, someone I trust you all know, editor in chief of Wired magazine and author of The Long Tail, really was the first, for me, to nail a lot of this. He wrote a long time ago, you know, thanks to the invention of the Internet, web technology, minicams and more, the means of artistic production have been democratized for the first time in all of human history. In the 1930s, if any of you wanted to make a movie, you had to work for Warner Brothers or RKO, because who could afford a movie set and lighting equipment and editing equipment and scoring, and more? And now who in this room doesn't know a 14 year-old hard at work on her second, third, or fourth movie? (Laughter) Similarly, the means of artistic distribution have been democratized for the first time in human history. Again, in the '30s, Warner Brothers, RKO did that for you. Now, go to YouTube, Facebook; you have worldwide distribution without leaving the privacy of your own bedroom. This double impact is occasioning a massive redefinition of the cultural market, a time when anyone is a potential author. Frankly, what we're seeing now in this environment is a massive time, when the entire world is changing as we move from a time when audience numbers are plummeting. But the number of arts participants, people who write poetry, who sing songs, who perform in church choirs, is exploding beyond our wildest imaginations. This group, others have called the pro-ams, amateur artists doing work at a professional level. You see them on YouTube, in dance competitions, film festivals and more. They are radically expanding our notions of the potential of an aesthetic vocabulary, while they are challenging and undermining the cultural autonomy of our traditional institutions. Ultimately, we now live in a world defined not by consumption, but by participation. But I want to be clear, just as the religious Reformation did not spell the end to the formal Church or to the priesthood; I believe that our artistic institutions will continue to have importance. They currently are the best opportunities for artists to have lives of economic dignity — not opulence, of dignity. And they are the places where artists who deserve and want to work at a certain scale of resources will find a home. But to view them as synonymous with the entirety of the arts community is, by far, too shortsighted. And indeed, while we've tended to polarize the amateur from the professional, the single most exciting development in the last five to 10 years has been the rise of the professional hybrid artist, the professional artist who works, not primarily in the concert hall or on the stage; but most frequently around women's rights, or human rights, or on global warming issues or AIDS relief for more — not out of economic necessity, but out of a deep, organic conviction that the work that she or he is called to do cannot be accomplished in the traditional hermetic arts environment. Today's dance world is not defined solely by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet or the National Ballet of Canada, but by Liz Lerman's Dance Exchange — a multi-generational, professional dance company, whose dancers range in age from 18 to 82, and who work with genomic scientists to embody the DNA strand and with nuclear physicists at CERN. Today's professional theater community is defined, not only the Shaw and Stratford Festivals, but by the Cornerstone Theater of Los Angeles — a collective of artists that after 9/11, brought together 10 different religious communities — the Baha'i, the Catholic, the Muslim, the Jewish, even the Native American and the gay and lesbian communities of faith, helping them create their own individual plays and one massive play, where they explored the differences in their faith and found commonality as an important first step toward cross-community healing. Today's performers, like Rhodessa Jones, work in women's prisons, helping women prisoners articulate the pain of incarceration, while today's playwrights and directors work with youth gangs to find alternate channels to violence and more and more and more. And indeed, I think, rather than being annihilated, the performing arts are poised on the brink of a time when we will be more important than we have ever been. You know, we've said for a long time, we are critical to the health of the economic communities in your town. And absolutely — I hope you know that every dollar spent on a performing arts ticket in a community generates five to seven additional dollars for the local economy, dollars spent in restaurants or on parking, at the fabric stores where we buy fabric for costumes, the piano tuner who tunes the instruments, and more. But the arts are going to be more important to economies as we go forward, especially in industries we can't even imagine yet, just as they have been central to the iPod and the computer game industries, which few, if any of us, could have foreseen 10 to 15 years ago. Business leadership will depend more and more on emotional intelligence, the ability to listen deeply, to have empathy, to articulate change, to motivate others — the very capacities that the arts cultivate with every encounter. Especially now, as we all must confront the fallacy of a market-only orientation, uninformed by social conscience; we must seize and celebrate the power of the arts to shape our individual and national characters, and especially characters of the young people, who all too often are subjected to bombardment of sensation, rather than digested experience. Ultimately, especially now in this world, where we live in a context of regressive and onerous immigration laws, in reality TV that thrives on humiliation, and in a context of analysis, where the thing we hear most repeatedly, day in, day out in the United States, in every train station, every bus station, every plane station is, "Ladies and gentlemen, please report any suspicious behavior or suspicious individuals to the authorities nearest to you," when all of these ways we are encouraged to view our fellow human being with hostility and fear and contempt and suspicion. The arts, whatever they do, whenever they call us together, invite us to look at our fellow human being with generosity and curiosity. God knows, if we ever needed that capacity in human history, we need it now. You know, we're bound together, not, I think by technology, entertainment and design, but by common cause. We work to promote healthy vibrant societies, to ameliorate human suffering, to promote a more thoughtful, substantive, empathic world order. I salute all of you as activists in that quest and urge you to embrace and hold dear the arts in your work, whatever your purpose may be. I promise you the hand of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation is stretched out in friendship for now and years to come. And I thank you for your kindness and your patience in listening to me this afternoon. Thank you, and Godspeed. |
Discovering ancient climates in oceans and ice | {0: 'Rob Dunbar looks deeply at ancient corals and sediments to study how the climate and the oceans have shifted over the past 50 to 12,000 years -- and how the Antarctic ecosystem is changing right now.'} | Mission Blue Voyage | If you really want to understand the problem that we're facing with the oceans, you have to think about the biology at the same time you think about the physics. We can't solve the problems unless we start studying the ocean in a very much more interdisciplinary way. So I'm going to demonstrate that through discussion of some of the climate change things that are going on in the ocean. We'll look at sea level rise. We'll look at ocean warming. And then the last thing on the list there, ocean acidification — if you were to ask me, you know, "What do you worry about the most? What frightens you?" for me, it's ocean acidification. And this has come onto the stage pretty recently. So I will spend a little time at the end. I was in Copenhagen in December like a number of you in this room. And I think we all found it, simultaneously, an eye-opening and a very frustrating experience. I sat in this large negotiation hall, at one point, for three or four hours, without hearing the word "oceans" one time. It really wasn't on the radar screen. The nations that brought it up when we had the speeches of the national leaders — it tended to be the leaders of the small island states, the low-lying island states. And by this weird quirk of alphabetical order of the nations, a lot of the low-lying states, like Kiribati and Nauru, they were seated at the very end of these immensely long rows. You know, they were marginalized in the negotiation room. One of the problems is coming up with the right target. It's not clear what the target should be. And how can you figure out how to fix something if you don't have a clear target? Now, you've heard about "two degrees": that we should limit temperature rise to no more than two degrees. But there's not a lot of science behind that number. We've also talked about concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Should it be 450? Should it be 400? There's not a lot of science behind that one either. Most of the science that is behind these numbers, these potential targets, is based on studies on land. And I would say, for the people that work in the ocean and think about what the targets should be, we would argue that they must be much lower. You know, from an oceanic perspective, 450 is way too high. Now there's compelling evidence that it really needs to be 350. We are, right now, at 390 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. We're not going to put the brakes on in time to stop at 450, so we've got to accept we're going to do an overshoot, and the discussion as we go forward has to focus on how far the overshoot goes and what's the pathway back to 350. Now, why is this so complicated? Why don't we know some of these things a little bit better? Well, the problem is that we've got very complicated forces in the climate system. There's all kinds of natural causes of climate change. There's air-sea interactions. Here in Galapagos, we're affected by El Ninos and La Nina. But the entire planet warms up when there's a big El Nino. Volcanoes eject aerosols into the atmosphere. That changes our climate. The ocean contains most of the exchangeable heat on the planet. So anything that influences how ocean surface waters mix with the deep water changes the ocean of the planet. And we know the solar output's not constant through time. So those are all natural causes of climate change. And then we have the human-induced causes of climate change as well. We're changing the characteristics of the surface of the land, the reflectivity. We inject our own aerosols into the atmosphere, and we have trace gases, and not just carbon dioxide — it's methane, ozone, oxides of sulfur and nitrogen. So here's the thing. It sounds like a simple question. Is CO2 produced by man's activities causing the planet to warm up? But to answer that question, to make a clear attribution to carbon dioxide, you have to know something about all of these other agents of change. But the fact is we do know a lot about all of those things. You know, thousands of scientists have been working on understanding all of these man-made causes and the natural causes. And we've got it worked out, and we can say, "Yes, CO2 is causing the planet to warm up now." Now, we have many ways to study natural variability. I'll show you a few examples of this now. This is the ship that I spent the last three months on in the Antarctic. It's a scientific drilling vessel. We go out for months at a time and drill into the sea bed to recover sediments that tell us stories of climate change, right. Like one of the ways to understand our greenhouse future is to drill down in time to the last period where we had CO2 double what it is today. And so that's what we've done with this ship. This was — this is south of the Antarctic Circle. It looks downright tropical there. One day where we had calm seas and sun, which was the reason I could get off the ship. Most of the time it looked like this. We had a waves up to 50 ft. and winds averaging about 40 knots for most of the voyage and up to 70 or 80 knots. So that trip just ended, and I can't show you too many results from that right now, but we'll go back one more year, to another drilling expedition I've been involved in. This was led by Ross Powell and Tim Naish. It's the ANDRILL project. And we made the very first bore hole through the largest floating ice shelf on the planet. This is a crazy thing, this big drill rig wrapped in a blanket to keep everybody warm, drilling at temperatures of minus 40. And we drilled in the Ross Sea. That's the Ross Sea Ice Shelf on the right there. So, this huge floating ice shelf the size of Alaska comes from West Antarctica. Now, West Antarctica is the part of the continent where the ice is grounded on sea floor as much as 2,000 meters deep. So that ice sheet is partly floating, and it's exposed to the ocean, to the ocean heat. This is the part of Antarctica that we worry about. Because it's partly floating, you can imagine, is sea level rises a little bit, the ice lifts off the bed, and then it can break off and float north. When that ice melts, sea level rises by six meters. So we drill back in time to see how often that's happened, and exactly how fast that ice can melt. Here's the cartoon on the left there. We drilled through a hundred meters of floating ice shelf then through 900 meters of water and then 1,300 meters into the sea floor. So it's the deepest geological bore hole ever drilled. It took about 10 years to put this project together. And here's what we found. Now, there's 40 scientists working on this project, and people are doing all kinds of really complicated and expensive analyses. But it turns out, you know, the thing that told the best story was this simple visual description. You know, we saw this in the core samples as they came up. We saw these alternations between sediments that look like this — there's gravel and cobbles in there and a bunch of sand. That's the kind of material in the deep sea. It can only get there if it's carried out by ice. So we know there's an ice shelf overhead. And that alternates with a sediment that looks like this. This is absolutely beautiful stuff. This sediment is 100 percent made up of the shells of microscopic plants. And these plants need sunlight, so we know when we find that sediment there's no ice overhead. And we saw about 35 alternations between open water and ice-covered water, between gravels and these plant sediments. So what that means is, what it tells us is that the Ross Sea region, this ice shelf, melted back and formed anew about 35 times. And this is in the past four million years. This was completely unexpected. Nobody imagined that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet was this dynamic. In fact, the lore for many years has been, "The ice formed many tens of millions of years ago, and it's been there ever since." And now we know that in our recent past it melted back and formed again, and sea level went up and down, six meters at a time. What caused it? Well, we're pretty sure that it's very small changes in the amount of sunlight reaching Antarctica, just caused by natural changes in the orbit of the Earth. But here's the key thing: you know, the other thing we found out is that the ice sheet passed a threshold, that the planet warmed up enough — and the number's about one degree to one and a half degrees Centigrade — the planet warmed up enough that it became ... that ice sheet became very dynamic and was very easily melted. And you know what? We've actually changed the temperature in the last century just the right amount. So many of us are convinced now that West Antarctica, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, is starting to melt. We do expect to see a sea-level rise on the order of one to two meters by the end of this century. And it could be larger than that. This is a serious consequence for nations like Kiribati, you know, where the average elevation is about a little over a meter above sea level. Okay, the second story takes place here in Galapagos. This is a bleached coral, coral that died during the 1982-'83 El Nino. This is from Champion Island. It's about a meter tall Pavona clavus colony. And it's covered with algae. That's what happens. When these things die, immediately, organisms come in and encrust and live on that dead surface. And so, when a coral colony is killed by an El Nino event, it leaves this indelible record. You can go then and study corals and figure out how often do you see this. So one of the things thought of in the '80s was to go back and take cores of coral heads throughout the Galapagos and find out how often was there a devastating event. And just so you know, 1982-'83, that El Nino killed 95 percent of all the corals here in Galapagos. Then there was similar mortality in '97-'98. And what we found after drilling back in time two to 400 years was that these were unique events. We saw no other mass mortality events. So these events in our recent past really are unique. So they're either just truly monster El Ninos, or they're just very strong El Ninos that occurred against a backdrop of global warming. Either case, it's bad news for the corals of the Galapagos Islands. Here's how we sample the corals. This is actually Easter Island. Look at this monster. This coral is eight meters tall, right. And it been growing for about 600 years. Now, Sylvia Earle turned me on to this exact same coral. And she was diving here with John Lauret — I think it was 1994 — and collected a little nugget and sent it to me. And we started working on it, and we figured out we could tell the temperature of the ancient ocean from analyzing a coral like this. So we have a diamond drill. We're not killing the colony; we're taking a small core sample out of the top. The core comes up as these cylindrical tubes of limestone. And that material then we take back to the lab and analyze it. You can see some of the coral cores there on the right. So we've done that all over the Eastern Pacific. We're starting to do it in the Western Pacific as well. I'll take you back here to the Galapagos Islands. And we've been working at this fascinating uplift here in Urbina Bay. That the place where, during an earthquake in 1954, this marine terrace was lifted up out of the ocean very quickly, and it was lifted up about six to seven meters. And so now you can walk through a coral reef without getting wet. If you go on the ground there, it looks like this, and this is the grandaddy coral. It's 11 meters in diameter, and we know that it started growing in the year 1584. Imagine that. And that coral was growing happily in those shallow waters, until 1954, when the earthquake happened. Now the reason we know it's 1584 is that these corals have growth bands. When you cut them, slice those cores in half and x-ray them, you see these light and dark bands. Each one of those is a year. We know these corals grow about a centimeter and a half a year. And we just count on down to the bottom. Then their other attribute is that they have this great chemistry. We can analyze the carbonate that makes up the coral, and there's a whole bunch of things we can do. But in this case, we measured the different isotopes of oxygen. Their ratio tells us the water temperature. In this example here, we had monitored this reef in Galapagos with temperature recorders, so we know the temperature of the water the coral's growing in. Then after we harvest a coral, we measure this ratio, and now you can see, those curves match perfectly. In this case, at these islands, you know, corals are instrumental-quality recorders of change in the water. And of course, our thermometers only take us back 50 years or so here. The coral can take us back hundreds and thousands of years. So, what we do: we've merged a lot of different data sets. It's not just my group; there's maybe 30 groups worldwide doing this. But we get these instrumental- and near-instrumental-quality records of temperature change that go back hundreds of years, and we put them together. Here's a synthetic diagram. There's a whole family of curves here. But what's happening: we're looking at the last thousand years of temperature on the planet. And there's five or six different compilations there, But each one of those compilations reflects input from hundreds of these kinds of records from corals. We do similar things with ice cores. We work with tree rings. And that's how we discover what is truly natural and how different is the last century, right? And I chose this one because it's complicated and messy looking, right. This is as messy as it gets. You can see there's some signals there. Some of the records show lower temperatures than others. Some of them show greater variability. But they all tell us what the natural variability is. Some of them are from the northern hemisphere; some are from the entire globe. But here's what we can say: what's natural in the last thousand years is that the planet was cooling down. It was cooling down until about 1900 or so. And there is natural variability caused by the Sun, caused by El Ninos. A century-scale, decadal-scale variability, and we know the magnitude; it's about two-tenths to four-tenths of a degree Centigrade. But then at the very end is where we have the instrumental record in black. And there's the temperature up there in 2009. You know, we've warmed the globe about a degree Centigrade in the last century, and there's nothing in the natural part of that record that resembles what we've seen in the last century. You know, that's the strength of our argument, that we are doing something that's truly different. So I'll close with a short discussion of ocean acidification. I like it as a component of global change to talk about, because, even if you are a hard-bitten global warming skeptic, and I talk to that community fairly often, you cannot deny the simple physics of CO2 dissolving in the ocean. You know, we're pumping out lots of CO2 into the atmosphere, from fossil fuels, from cement production. Right now, about a third of that carbon dioxide is dissolving straight into the sea, right? And as it does so, it makes the ocean more acidic. So, you cannot argue with that. That is what's happening right now, and it's a very different issue than the global warming issue. It has many consequences. There's consequences for carbonate organisms. There are many organisms that build their shells out of calcium carbonate — plants and animals both. The main framework material of coral reefs is calcium carbonate. That material is more soluble in acidic fluid. So one of the things we're seeing is organisms are having to spend more metabolic energy to build and maintain their shells. At some point, as this transience, as this CO2 uptake in the ocean continues, that material's actually going to start to dissolve. And on coral reefs, where some of the main framework organisms disappear, we will see a major loss of marine biodiversity. But it's not just the carbonate producers that are affected. There's many physiological processes that are influenced by the acidity of the ocean. So many reactions involving enzymes and proteins are sensitive to the acid content of the ocean. So, all of these things — greater metabolic demands, reduced reproductive success, changes in respiration and metabolism. You know, these are things that we have good physiological reasons to expect to see stressed caused by this transience. So we figured out some pretty interesting ways to track CO2 levels in the atmosphere, going back millions of years. We used to do it just with ice cores, but in this case, we're going back 20 million years. And we take samples of the sediment, and it tells us the CO2 level of the ocean, and therefore the CO2 level of the atmosphere. And here's the thing: you have to go back about 15 million years to find a time when CO2 levels were about what they are today. You have to go back about 30 million years to find a time when CO2 levels were double what they are today. Now, what that means is that all of the organisms that live in the sea have evolved in this chemostatted ocean, with CO2 levels lower than they are today. That's the reason that they're not able to respond or adapt to this rapid acidification that's going on right now. So, Charlie Veron came up with this statement last year: "The prospect of ocean acidification may well be the most serious of all of the predicted outcomes of anthropogenic CO2 release." And I think that may very well be true, so I'll close with this. You know, we do need the protected areas, absolutely, but for the sake of the oceans, we have to cap or limit CO2 emissions as soon as possible. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How web video powers global innovation | {0: 'After a long career in journalism and publishing, Chris Anderson became the curator of the TED Conference in 2002 and has developed it as a platform for identifying and disseminating ideas worth spreading.'} | TEDGlobal 2010 | If nothing else, at least I've discovered what it is we put our speakers through: sweaty palms, sleepless nights, a wholly unnatural fear of clocks. I mean, it's quite brutal. And I'm also a little nervous about this. There are nine billion humans coming our way. Now, the most optimistic dreams can get dented by the prospect of people plundering the planet. But recently, I've become intrigued by a different way of thinking of large human crowds, because there are circumstances where they can do something really cool. It's a phenomenon that I think any organization or individual can tap into. It certainly impacted the way we think about TED's future, and perhaps the world's future overall. So, let's explore. The story starts with just a single person, a child, behaving a little strangely. This kid is known online as Lil Demon. He's doing tricks here, dance tricks, that probably no six-year-old in history ever managed before. How did he learn them? And what drove him to spend the hundreds of hours of practice this must have taken? Here's a clue. (Video) Lil Demon: ♫ Step your game up. Oh. Oh. ♫ ♫ Step your game up. Oh. Oh. ♫ Chris Anderson: So, that was sent to me by this man, a filmmaker, Jonathan Chu, who told me that was the moment he realized the Internet was causing dance to evolve. This is what he said at TED in February. In essence, dancers were challenging each other online to get better; incredible new dance skills were being invented; even the six-year-olds were joining in. It felt like a revolution. And so Jon had a brilliant idea: He went out to recruit the best of the best dancers off of YouTube to create this dance troupe — The League of Extraordinary Dancers, the LXD. I mean, these kids were web-taught, but they were so good that they got to play at the Oscars this year. And at TED here in February, their passion and brilliance just took our breath away. So, this story of the evolution of dance seems strangely familiar. You know, a while after TEDTalks started taking off, we noticed that speakers were starting to spend a lot more time in preparation. It was resulting in incredible new talks like these two. ... Months of preparation crammed into 18 minutes, raising the bar cruelly for the next generation of speakers, with the effects that we've seen this week. It's not as if J.J. and Jill actually ended their talks saying, "Step your game up," but they might as well have. So, in both of these cases, you've got these cycles of improvement, apparently driven by people watching web video. What is going on here? Well, I think it's the latest iteration of a phenomenon we can call "crowd-accelerated innovation." And there are just three things you need for this thing to kick into gear. You can think of them as three dials on a giant wheel. You turn up the dials, the wheel starts to turn. And the first thing you need is ... a crowd, a group of people who share a common interest. The bigger the crowd, the more potential innovators there are. That's important, but actually most people in the crowd occupy these other roles. They're creating the ecosystem from which innovation emerges. The second thing you need is light. You need clear, open visibility of what the best people in that crowd are capable of, because that is how you will learn how you will be empowered to participate. And third, you need desire. You know, innovation's hard work. It's based on hundreds of hours of research, of practice. Absent desire, not going to happen. Now, here's an example — pre-Internet — of this machine in action. Dancers at a street corner — it's a crowd, a small one, but they can all obviously see what each other can do. And the desire part comes, I guess, from social status, right? Best dancer walks tall, gets the best date. There's probably going to be some innovation happening here. But on the web, all three dials are ratcheted right up. The dance community is now global. There's millions connected. And amazingly, you can still see what the best can do, because the crowd itself shines a light on them, either directly, through comments, ratings, email, Facebook, Twitter, or indirectly, through numbers of views, through links that point Google there. So, it's easy to find the good stuff, and when you've found it, you can watch it in close-up repeatedly and read what hundreds of people have written about it. That's a lot of light. But the desire element is really dialed way up. I mean, you might just be a kid with a webcam, but if you can do something that goes viral, you get to be seen by the equivalent of sports stadiums crammed with people. You get hundreds of strangers writing excitedly about you. And even if it's not that eloquent — and it's not — it can still really make your day. So, this possibility of a new type of global recognition, I think, is driving huge amounts of effort. And it's important to note that it's not just the stars who are benefiting: because you can see the best, everyone can learn. Also, the system is self-fueling. It's the crowd that shines the light and fuels the desire, but the light and desire are a lethal one-two combination that attract new people to the crowd. So, this is a model that pretty much any organization could use to try and nurture its own cycle of crowd-accelerated innovation. Invite the crowd, let in the light, dial up the desire. And the hardest part about that is probably the light, because it means you have to open up, you have to show your stuff to the world. It's by giving away what you think is your deepest secret that maybe millions of people are empowered to help improve it. And, very happily, there's one class of people who really can't make use of this tool. The dark side of the web is allergic to the light. I don't think we're going to see terrorists, for example, publishing their plans online and saying to the world, "Please, could you help us to actually make them work this time?" But you can publish your stuff online. And if you can get that wheel to turn, look out. So, at TED, we've become a little obsessed with this idea of openness. In fact, my colleague, June Cohen, has taken to calling it "radical openness," because it works for us each time. We opened up our talks to the world, and suddenly there are millions of people out there helping spread our speakers' ideas, and thereby making it easier for us to recruit and motivate the next generation of speakers. By opening up our translation program, thousands of heroic volunteers — some of them watching online right now, and thank you! — have translated our talks into more than 70 languages, thereby tripling our viewership in non-English-speaking countries. By giving away our TEDx brand, we suddenly have a thousand-plus live experiments in the art of spreading ideas. And these organizers, they're seeing each other, they're learning from each other. We are learning from them. We're getting great talks back from them. The wheel is turning. Okay, step back a minute. I mean, it's really not news for me to tell you that innovation emerges out of groups. You know, we've heard that this week — this romantic notion of the lone genius with the "eureka!" moment that changes the world is misleading. Even he said that, and he would know. We're a social species. We spark off each other. It's also not news to say that the Internet has accelerated innovation. For the past 15 years, powerful communities have been connecting online, sparking off each other. If you take programmers, you know, the whole open-source movement is a fantastic instance of crowd-accelerated innovation. But what's key here is, the reason these groups have been able to connect is because their work output is of the type that can be easily shared digitally — a picture, a music file, software. And that's why what I'm excited about, and what I think is under-reported, is the significance of the rise of online video. This is the technology that's going to allow the rest of the world's talents to be shared digitally, thereby launching a whole new cycle of crowd-accelerated innovation. The first few years of the web were pretty much video-free, for this reason: video files are huge; the web couldn't handle them. But in the last 10 years, bandwidth has exploded a hundredfold. Suddenly, here we are. Humanity watches 80 million hours of YouTube every day. Cisco actually estimates that, within four years, more than 90 percent of the web's data will be video. If it's all puppies, porn and piracy, we're doomed. I don't think it will be. Video is high-bandwidth for a reason. It packs a huge amount of data, and our brains are uniquely wired to decode it. Here, let me introduce you to Sam Haber. He's a unicyclist. Before YouTube, there was no way for him to discover his sport's true potential, because you can't communicate this stuff in words, right? But looking at video clips posted by strangers, a world of possibility opens up for him. Suddenly, he starts to emulate and then to innovate. And a global community of unicyclists discover each other online, inspire each other to greatness. And there are thousands of other examples of this happening — of video-driven evolution of skills, ranging from the physical to the artful. And I have to tell you, as a former publisher of hobbyist magazines, I find this strangely beautiful. I mean, there's a lot of passion right here on this screen. But if Rube Goldberg machines and video poetry aren't quite your cup of tea, how about this. Jove is a website that was founded to encourage scientists to publish their peer-reviewed research on video. There's a problem with a traditional scientific paper. It can take months for a scientist in another lab to figure out how to replicate the experiments that are described in print. Here's one such frustrated scientist, Moshe Pritsker, the founder of Jove. He told me that the world is wasting billions of dollars on this. But look at this video. I mean, look: if you can show instead of just describing, that problem goes away. So it's not far-fetched to say that, at some point, online video is going to dramatically accelerate scientific advance. Here's another example that's close to our hearts at TED, where video is sometimes more powerful than print — the sharing of an idea. Why do people like watching TEDTalks? All those ideas are already out there in print. It's actually faster to read than to view. Why would someone bother? Well, so, there's some showing as well as telling. But even leaving the screen out of it, there's still a lot more being transferred than just words. And in that non-verbal portion, there's some serious magic. Somewhere hidden in the physical gestures, the vocal cadence, the facial expressions, the eye contact, the passion, the kind of awkward, British body language, the sense of how the audience are reacting, there are hundreds of subconscious clues that go to how well you will understand, and whether you're inspired — light, if you like, and desire. Incredibly, all of this can be communicated on just a few square inches of a screen. Reading and writing are actually relatively recent inventions. Face-to-face communication has been fine-tuned by millions of years of evolution. That's what's made it into this mysterious, powerful thing it is. Someone speaks, there's resonance in all these receiving brains, the whole group acts together. I mean, this is the connective tissue of the human superorganism in action. It's probably driven our culture for millennia. 500 years ago, it ran into a competitor with a lethal advantage. It's right here. Print scaled. The world's ambitious innovators and influencers now could get their ideas to spread far and wide, and so the art of the spoken word pretty much withered on the vine. But now, in the blink of an eye, the game has changed again. It's not too much to say that what Gutenberg did for writing, online video can now do for face-to-face communication. So, that primal medium, which your brain is exquisitely wired for ... that just went global. Now, this is big. We may have to reinvent an ancient art form. I mean, today, one person speaking can be seen by millions, shedding bright light on potent ideas, creating intense desire for learning and to respond — and in his case, intense desire to laugh. For the first time in human history, talented students don't have to have their potential and their dreams written out of history by lousy teachers. They can sit two feet in front of the world's finest. Now, TED is just a small part of this. I mean, the world's universities are opening up their curricula. Thousands of individuals and organizations are sharing their knowledge and data online. Thousands of people are figuring out new ways to learn and, crucially, to respond, completing the cycle. And so, as we've thought about this, you know, it's become clear to us what the next stage of TED's evolution has to be. TEDTalks can't be a one-way process, one-to-many. Our future is many-to-many. So, we're dreaming of ways to make it easier for you, the global TED community, to respond to speakers, to contribute your own ideas, maybe even your own TEDTalks, and to help shine a light on the very best of what's out there. Because, if we can bubble up the very best from a vastly larger pool, this wheel turns. Now, is it possible to imagine a similar process to this, happening to global education overall? I mean, does it have to be this painful, top-down process? Why not a self-fueling cycle in which we all can participate? It's the participation age, right? Schools can't be silos. We can't stop learning at age 21. What if, in the coming crowd of nine billion ... what if that crowd could learn enough to be net contributors, instead of net plunderers? That changes everything, right? I mean, that would take more teachers than we've ever had. But the good news is they are out there. They're in the crowd, and the crowd is switching on lights, and we can see them for the first time, not as an undifferentiated mass of strangers, but as individuals we can learn from. Who's the teacher? You're the teacher. You're part of the crowd that may be about to launch the biggest learning cycle in human history, a cycle capable of carrying all of us to a smarter, wiser, more beautiful place. Here's a group of kids in a village in Pakistan near where I grew up. Within five years, each of these kids is going to have access to a cellphone capable of full-on web video and capable of uploading video to the web. I mean, is it crazy to think that this girl, in the back, at the right, in 15 years, might be sharing the idea that keeps the world beautiful for your grandchildren? It's not crazy; it's actually happening right now. I want to introduce you to a good friend of TED who just happens to live in Africa's biggest shantytown. (Video) Christopher Makau: Hi. My name is Christopher Makau. I'm one of the organizers of TEDxKibera. There are so many good things which are happening right here in Kibera. There's a self-help group. They turned a trash place into a garden. The same spot, it was a crime spot where people were being robbed. They used the same trash to form green manure. The same trash site is feeding more than 30 families. We have our own film school. They are using Flip cameras to record, edit, and reporting to their own channel, Kibera TV. Because of a scarcity of land, we are using the sacks to grow vegetables, and also [we're] able to save on the cost of living. Change happens when we see things in a different way. Today, I see Kibera in a different way. My message to TEDGlobal and the entire world is: Kibera is a hotbed of innovation and ideas. (Applause) CA: You know what? I bet Chris has always been an inspiring guy. What's new — and it's huge — is that, for the first time, we get to see him, and he can see us. Right now, Chris and Kevin and Dennis and Dickson and their friends are watching us, in Nairobi, right now. Guys, we've learned from you today. Thank you. And thank you. (Applause) |
Our natural sleep cycle is nothing like what we do now | {0: 'Jessa Gamble writes about sleep and time, showing how our internal body clock struggles against our always-on global culture.'} | TEDGlobal 2010 | Let's start with day and night. Life evolved under conditions of light and darkness, light and then darkness. And so plants and animals developed their own internal clocks so that they would be ready for these changes in light. These are chemical clocks, and they're found in every known being that has two or more cells and in some that only have one cell. I'll give you an example — if you take a horseshoe crab off the beach, and you fly it all the way across the continent, and you drop it into a sloped cage, it will scramble up the floor of the cage as the tide is rising on its home shores, and it'll skitter down again right as the water is receding thousands of miles away. It'll do this for weeks, until it kind of gradually loses the plot. And it's incredible to watch, but there's nothing psychic or paranormal going on; it's simply that these crabs have internal cycles that correspond, usually, with what's going on around it. So, we have this ability as well. And in humans, we call it the "body clock." You can see this most clearly when you take away someone's watch and you shut them into a bunker, deep underground, for a couple of months. (Laughter) People actually volunteer for this, and they usually come out kind of raving about their productive time in the hole. So, no matter how atypical these subjects would have to be, they all show the same thing. They get up just a little bit later every day — say 15 minutes or so — and they kind of drift all the way around the clock like this over the course of the weeks. And so, in this way we know that they are working on their own internal clocks, rather than somehow sensing the day outside. So fine, we have a body clock, and it turns out that it's incredibly important in our lives. It's a huge driver for culture and I think that it's the most underrated force on our behavior. We evolved as a species near the equator, and so we're very well-equipped to deal with 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness. But of course, we've spread to every corner of the globe and in Arctic Canada, where I live, we have perpetual daylight in summer and 24 hours of darkness in winter. So the culture, the northern aboriginal culture, traditionally has been highly seasonal. In winter, there's a lot of sleeping going on; you enjoy your family life inside. And in summer, it's almost manic hunting and working activity very long hours, very active. So, what would our natural rhythm look like? What would our sleeping patterns be in the sort of ideal sense? Well, it turns out that when people are living without any sort of artificial light at all, they sleep twice every night. They go to bed around 8:00 p.m. until midnight and then again, they sleep from about 2:00 a.m. until sunrise. And in-between, they have a couple of hours of sort of meditative quiet in bed. And during this time, there's a surge of prolactin, the likes of which a modern day never sees. The people in these studies report feeling so awake during the daytime, that they realize they're experiencing true wakefulness for the first time in their lives. So, cut to the modern day. We're living in a culture of jet lag, global travel, 24-hour business, shift work. And you know, our modern ways of doing things have their advantages, but I believe we should understand the costs. Thank you. (Applause) |
How social networks predict epidemics | {0: 'Nicholas Christakis explores how the large-scale, face-to-face social networks in which we are embedded affect our lives, and what we can do to take advantage of this fact.'} | TED@Cannes | For the last 10 years, I've been spending my time trying to figure out how and why human beings assemble themselves into social networks. And the kind of social network I'm talking about is not the recent online variety, but rather, the kind of social networks that human beings have been assembling for hundreds of thousands of years, ever since we emerged from the African savannah. So, I form friendships and co-worker and sibling and relative relationships with other people who in turn have similar relationships with other people. And this spreads on out endlessly into a distance. And you get a network that looks like this. Every dot is a person. Every line between them is a relationship between two people — different kinds of relationships. And you can get this kind of vast fabric of humanity, in which we're all embedded. And my colleague, James Fowler and I have been studying for quite sometime what are the mathematical, social, biological and psychological rules that govern how these networks are assembled and what are the similar rules that govern how they operate, how they affect our lives. But recently, we've been wondering whether it might be possible to take advantage of this insight, to actually find ways to improve the world, to do something better, to actually fix things, not just understand things. So one of the first things we thought we would tackle would be how we go about predicting epidemics. And the current state of the art in predicting an epidemic — if you're the CDC or some other national body — is to sit in the middle where you are and collect data from physicians and laboratories in the field that report the prevalence or the incidence of certain conditions. So, so and so patients have been diagnosed with something, or other patients have been diagnosed, and all these data are fed into a central repository, with some delay. And if everything goes smoothly, one to two weeks from now you'll know where the epidemic was today. And actually, about a year or so ago, there was this promulgation of the idea of Google Flu Trends, with respect to the flu, where by looking at people's searching behavior today, we could know where the flu — what the status of the epidemic was today, what's the prevalence of the epidemic today. But what I'd like to show you today is a means by which we might get not just rapid warning about an epidemic, but also actually early detection of an epidemic. And, in fact, this idea can be used not just to predict epidemics of germs, but also to predict epidemics of all sorts of kinds. For example, anything that spreads by a form of social contagion could be understood in this way, from abstract ideas on the left like patriotism, or altruism, or religion to practices like dieting behavior, or book purchasing, or drinking, or bicycle-helmet [and] other safety practices, or products that people might buy, purchases of electronic goods, anything in which there's kind of an interpersonal spread. A kind of a diffusion of innovation could be understood and predicted by the mechanism I'm going to show you now. So, as all of you probably know, the classic way of thinking about this is the diffusion-of-innovation, or the adoption curve. So here on the Y-axis, we have the percent of the people affected, and on the X-axis, we have time. And at the very beginning, not too many people are affected, and you get this classic sigmoidal, or S-shaped, curve. And the reason for this shape is that at the very beginning, let's say one or two people are infected, or affected by the thing and then they affect, or infect, two people, who in turn affect four, eight, 16 and so forth, and you get the epidemic growth phase of the curve. And eventually, you saturate the population. There are fewer and fewer people who are still available that you might infect, and then you get the plateau of the curve, and you get this classic sigmoidal curve. And this holds for germs, ideas, product adoption, behaviors, and the like. But things don't just diffuse in human populations at random. They actually diffuse through networks. Because, as I said, we live our lives in networks, and these networks have a particular kind of a structure. Now if you look at a network like this — this is 105 people. And the lines represent — the dots are the people, and the lines represent friendship relationships. You might see that people occupy different locations within the network. And there are different kinds of relationships between the people. You could have friendship relationships, sibling relationships, spousal relationships, co-worker relationships, neighbor relationships and the like. And different sorts of things spread across different sorts of ties. For instance, sexually transmitted diseases will spread across sexual ties. Or, for instance, people's smoking behavior might be influenced by their friends. Or their altruistic or their charitable giving behavior might be influenced by their coworkers, or by their neighbors. But not all positions in the network are the same. So if you look at this, you might immediately grasp that different people have different numbers of connections. Some people have one connection, some have two, some have six, some have 10 connections. And this is called the "degree" of a node, or the number of connections that a node has. But in addition, there's something else. So, if you look at nodes A and B, they both have six connections. But if you can see this image [of the network] from a bird's eye view, you can appreciate that there's something very different about nodes A and B. So, let me ask you this — I can cultivate this intuition by asking a question — who would you rather be if a deadly germ was spreading through the network, A or B? (Audience: B.) Nicholas Christakis: B, it's obvious. B is located on the edge of the network. Now, who would you rather be if a juicy piece of gossip were spreading through the network? A. And you have an immediate appreciation that A is going to be more likely to get the thing that's spreading and to get it sooner by virtue of their structural location within the network. A, in fact, is more central, and this can be formalized mathematically. So, if we want to track something that was spreading through a network, what we ideally would like to do is to set up sensors on the central individuals within the network, including node A, monitor those people that are right there in the middle of the network, and somehow get an early detection of whatever it is that is spreading through the network. So if you saw them contract a germ or a piece of information, you would know that, soon enough, everybody was about to contract this germ or this piece of information. And this would be much better than monitoring six randomly chosen people, without reference to the structure of the population. And in fact, if you could do that, what you would see is something like this. On the left-hand panel, again, we have the S-shaped curve of adoption. In the dotted red line, we show what the adoption would be in the random people, and in the left-hand line, shifted to the left, we show what the adoption would be in the central individuals within the network. On the Y-axis is the cumulative instances of contagion, and on the X-axis is the time. And on the right-hand side, we show the same data, but here with daily incidence. And what we show here is — like, here — very few people are affected, more and more and more and up to here, and here's the peak of the epidemic. But shifted to the left is what's occurring in the central individuals. And this difference in time between the two is the early detection, the early warning we can get, about an impending epidemic in the human population. The problem, however, is that mapping human social networks is not always possible. It can be expensive, not feasible, unethical, or, frankly, just not possible to do such a thing. So, how can we figure out who the central people are in a network without actually mapping the network? What we came up with was an idea to exploit an old fact, or a known fact, about social networks, which goes like this: Do you know that your friends have more friends than you do? Your friends have more friends than you do, and this is known as the friendship paradox. Imagine a very popular person in the social network — like a party host who has hundreds of friends — and a misanthrope who has just one friend, and you pick someone at random from the population; they were much more likely to know the party host. And if they nominate the party host as their friend, that party host has a hundred friends, therefore, has more friends than they do. And this, in essence, is what's known as the friendship paradox. The friends of randomly chosen people have higher degree, and are more central than the random people themselves. And you can get an intuitive appreciation for this if you imagine just the people at the perimeter of the network. If you pick this person, the only friend they have to nominate is this person, who, by construction, must have at least two and typically more friends. And that happens at every peripheral node. And in fact, it happens throughout the network as you move in, everyone you pick, when they nominate a random — when a random person nominates a friend of theirs, you move closer to the center of the network. So, we thought we would exploit this idea in order to study whether we could predict phenomena within networks. Because now, with this idea we can take a random sample of people, have them nominate their friends, those friends would be more central, and we could do this without having to map the network. And we tested this idea with an outbreak of H1N1 flu at Harvard College in the fall and winter of 2009, just a few months ago. We took 1,300 randomly selected undergraduates, we had them nominate their friends, and we followed both the random students and their friends daily in time to see whether or not they had the flu epidemic. And we did this passively by looking at whether or not they'd gone to university health services. And also, we had them [actively] email us a couple of times a week. Exactly what we predicted happened. So the random group is in the red line. The epidemic in the friends group has shifted to the left, over here. And the difference in the two is 16 days. By monitoring the friends group, we could get 16 days advance warning of an impending epidemic in this human population. Now, in addition to that, if you were an analyst who was trying to study an epidemic or to predict the adoption of a product, for example, what you could do is you could pick a random sample of the population, also have them nominate their friends and follow the friends and follow both the randoms and the friends. Among the friends, the first evidence you saw of a blip above zero in adoption of the innovation, for example, would be evidence of an impending epidemic. Or you could see the first time the two curves diverged, as shown on the left. When did the randoms — when did the friends take off and leave the randoms, and [when did] their curve start shifting? And that, as indicated by the white line, occurred 46 days before the peak of the epidemic. So this would be a technique whereby we could get more than a month-and-a-half warning about a flu epidemic in a particular population. I should say that how far advanced a notice one might get about something depends on a host of factors. It could depend on the nature of the pathogen — different pathogens, using this technique, you'd get different warning — or other phenomena that are spreading, or frankly, on the structure of the human network. Now in our case, although it wasn't necessary, we could also actually map the network of the students. So, this is a map of 714 students and their friendship ties. And in a minute now, I'm going to put this map into motion. We're going to take daily cuts through the network for 120 days. The red dots are going to be cases of the flu, and the yellow dots are going to be friends of the people with the flu. And the size of the dots is going to be proportional to how many of their friends have the flu. So bigger dots mean more of your friends have the flu. And if you look at this image — here we are now in September the 13th — you're going to see a few cases light up. You're going to see kind of blooming of the flu in the middle. Here we are on October the 19th. The slope of the epidemic curve is approaching now, in November. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang — you're going to see lots of blooming in the middle, and then you're going to see a sort of leveling off, fewer and fewer cases towards the end of December. And this type of a visualization can show that epidemics like this take root and affect central individuals first, before they affect others. Now, as I've been suggesting, this method is not restricted to germs, but actually to anything that spreads in populations. Information spreads in populations, norms can spread in populations, behaviors can spread in populations. And by behaviors, I can mean things like criminal behavior, or voting behavior, or health care behavior, like smoking, or vaccination, or product adoption, or other kinds of behaviors that relate to interpersonal influence. If I'm likely to do something that affects others around me, this technique can get early warning or early detection about the adoption within the population. The key thing is that for it to work, there has to be interpersonal influence. It cannot be because of some broadcast mechanism affecting everyone uniformly. Now the same insights can also be exploited — with respect to networks — can also be exploited in other ways, for example, in the use of targeting specific people for interventions. So, for example, most of you are probably familiar with the notion of herd immunity. So, if we have a population of a thousand people, and we want to make the population immune to a pathogen, we don't have to immunize every single person. If we immunize 960 of them, it's as if we had immunized a hundred [percent] of them. Because even if one or two of the non-immune people gets infected, there's no one for them to infect. They are surrounded by immunized people. So 96 percent is as good as 100 percent. Well, some other scientists have estimated what would happen if you took a 30 percent random sample of these 1000 people, 300 people and immunized them. Would you get any population-level immunity? And the answer is no. But if you took this 30 percent, these 300 people and had them nominate their friends and took the same number of vaccine doses and vaccinated the friends of the 300 — the 300 friends — you can get the same level of herd immunity as if you had vaccinated 96 percent of the population at a much greater efficiency, with a strict budget constraint. And similar ideas can be used, for instance, to target distribution of things like bed nets in the developing world. If we could understand the structure of networks in villages, we could target to whom to give the interventions to foster these kinds of spreads. Or, frankly, for advertising with all kinds of products. If we could understand how to target, it could affect the efficiency of what we're trying to achieve. And in fact, we can use data from all kinds of sources nowadays [to do this]. This is a map of eight million phone users in a European country. Every dot is a person, and every line represents a volume of calls between the people. And we can use such data, that's being passively obtained, to map these whole countries and understand who is located where within the network. Without actually having to query them at all, we can get this kind of a structural insight. And other sources of information, as you're no doubt aware are available about such features, from email interactions, online interactions, online social networks and so forth. And in fact, we are in the era of what I would call "massive-passive" data collection efforts. They're all kinds of ways we can use massively collected data to create sensor networks to follow the population, understand what's happening in the population, and intervene in the population for the better. Because these new technologies tell us not just who is talking to whom, but where everyone is, and what they're thinking based on what they're uploading on the Internet, and what they're buying based on their purchases. And all this administrative data can be pulled together and processed to understand human behavior in a way we never could before. So, for example, we could use truckers' purchases of fuel. So the truckers are just going about their business, and they're buying fuel. And we see a blip up in the truckers' purchases of fuel, and we know that a recession is about to end. Or we can monitor the velocity with which people are moving with their phones on a highway, and the phone company can see, as the velocity is slowing down, that there's a traffic jam. And they can feed that information back to their subscribers, but only to their subscribers on the same highway located behind the traffic jam! Or we can monitor doctors prescribing behaviors, passively, and see how the diffusion of innovation with pharmaceuticals occurs within [networks of] doctors. Or again, we can monitor purchasing behavior in people and watch how these types of phenomena can diffuse within human populations. And there are three ways, I think, that these massive-passive data can be used. One is fully passive, like I just described — as in, for instance, the trucker example, where we don't actually intervene in the population in any way. One is quasi-active, like the flu example I gave, where we get some people to nominate their friends and then passively monitor their friends — do they have the flu, or not? — and then get warning. Or another example would be, if you're a phone company, you figure out who's central in the network and you ask those people, "Look, will you just text us your fever every day? Just text us your temperature." And collect vast amounts of information about people's temperature, but from centrally located individuals. And be able, on a large scale, to monitor an impending epidemic with very minimal input from people. Or, finally, it can be more fully active — as I know subsequent speakers will also talk about today — where people might globally participate in wikis, or photographing, or monitoring elections, and upload information in a way that allows us to pool information in order to understand social processes and social phenomena. In fact, the availability of these data, I think, heralds a kind of new era of what I and others would like to call "computational social science." It's sort of like when Galileo invented — or, didn't invent — came to use a telescope and could see the heavens in a new way, or Leeuwenhoek became aware of the microscope — or actually invented — and could see biology in a new way. But now we have access to these kinds of data that allow us to understand social processes and social phenomena in an entirely new way that was never before possible. And with this science, we can understand how exactly the whole comes to be greater than the sum of its parts. And actually, we can use these insights to improve society and improve human well-being. Thank you. |
Hurdy-gurdy for beginners | {0: "Caroline Phillips' rich, soprano voice conjures up the far-and-wide cultures of the world, especially the sound and language of the Basque Country."} | TEDGlobal 2010 | Now, since this is TEDGlobal, who can tell me what this is called in French? I see you're all up on the history of hurdy-gurdy — "vielle à roue." And in Spanish, "zanfona." And in Italian, "ghironda," okay? Hurdy-gurdy, or wheel fiddle. So, these are the different kinds and shapes of the hurdy-gurdy. The hurdy-gurdy is the only musical instrument that uses a crank to turn a wheel to rub strings, like the bow of a violin, to produce music. It has three different kinds of strings. The first string is the drone string, which plays a continuous sound like the bagpipe. The second string is a melody string, which is played with a wooden keyboard tuned like a piano. And the third string is pretty innovative. It's also the only instrument that uses this kind of technique. It activates what's called the buzzing bridge, or the dog. When I turn the crank and I apply pressure, it makes a sound like a barking dog. So all of this is pretty innovative, if you consider that the hurdy-gurdy appeared about a thousand years ago and it took two people to play it; one to turn the crank, and another person — yes — to play the melody by physically pulling up large wooden pegs. Luckily, all of this changed a couple of centuries later. So, one person could actually play and almost — this is pretty heavy — carry the hurdy-gurdy. The hurdy-gurdy has been used, historically, through the centuries in mostly dance music because of the uniqueness of the melody combined with the acoustic boombox here. And today, the hurdy-gurdy is used in all sorts of music — traditional folk music, dance, contemporary and world music — in the U.K., in France, in Spain and in Italy. And this kind of hurdy-gurdy takes anywhere from three to five years [to order and receive it]. It's made by specialized luthiers, also in Europe. And it's very difficult to tune. So without further ado, would you like to hear it? (Audience: Yes.) Caroline Phillips: I didn't hear you. Would you like to hear it? (Audience: Yes!) CP: Okay. There I go. I'd like to sing in Basque, which is the language spoken in the Basque Country where I live, in the region in France and Spain. (Music) [Basque] (Music) Thank you. (Applause) This is a song that I wrote based on traditional Basque rhythms. And this is a song that has a kind of a Celtic feel. (Music) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) |
How pig parts make the world turn | {0: 'Christien Meindertsma uses art (and craft) to expose the hidden processes and connections of our modern life.'} | TEDGlobal 2010 | Hello. I would like to start my talk with actually two questions, and the first one is: How many people here actually eat pig meat? Please raise your hand — oh, that's a lot. And how many people have actually seen a live pig producing this meat? In the last year? In the Netherlands — where I come from — you actually never see a pig, which is really strange, because, on a population of 16 million people, we have 12 million pigs. And well, of course, the Dutch can't eat all these pigs. They eat about one-third, and the rest is exported to all kinds of countries in Europe and the rest of the world. A lot goes to the U.K., Germany. And what I was curious about — because historically, the whole pig would be used up until the last bit so nothing would be wasted — and I was curious to find out if this was actually still the case. And I spent about three years researching. And I followed this one pig with number "05049," all the way up until the end and to what products it's made of. And in these years, I met all kinds people like, for instance, farmers and butchers, which seems logical. But I also met aluminum mold makers, ammunition producers and all kinds of people. And what was striking to me is that the farmers actually had no clue what was made of their pigs, but the consumers — as in us — had also no idea of the pigs being in all these products. So what I did is, I took all this research and I made it into a — well, basically it's a product catalog of this one pig, and it carries a duplicate of his ear tag on the back. And it consists of seven chapters — the chapters are skin, bones, meat, internal organs, blood, fat and miscellaneous. (Laughter) In total, they weigh 103.7 kilograms. And to show you how often you actually meet part of this pig in a regular day, I want to show you some images of the book. You probably start the day with a shower. So, in soap, fatty acids made from boiling pork bone fat are used as a hardening agent, but also for giving it a pearl-like effect. Then if you look around you in the bathroom, you see lots more products like shampoo, conditioner, anti-wrinkle cream, body lotion, but also toothpaste. Then, so, before breakfast, you've already met the pig so many times. Then, at breakfast, the pig that I followed, the hairs off the pig or proteins from the hairs off the pig were used as an improver of dough. (Laughter) Well, that's what the producer says: it's "improving the dough, of course." In low-fat butter, or actually in many low-fat products, when you take the fat out, you actually take the taste and the texture out. So what they do is they put gelatin back in, in order to retain the texture. Well, when you're off to work, under the road or under the buildings that you see, there might very well be cellular concrete, which is a very light kind of concrete that's actually got proteins from bones inside and it's also fully reusable. In the train brakes — at least in the German train brakes — there's this part of the brake that's made of bone ash. And in cheesecake and all kinds of desserts, like chocolate mousse, tiramisu, vanilla pudding, everything that's cooled in the supermarket, there's gelatin to make it look good. Fine bone china — this is a real classic. Of course, the bone in fine-bone china gives it its translucency and also its strength, in order to make these really fine shapes, like this deer. In interior decorating, the pig's actually quite there. It's used in paint for the texture, but also for the glossiness. In sandpaper, bone glue is actually the glue between the sand and the paper. And then in paintbrushes, hairs are used because, apparently, they're very suitable for making paintbrushes because of their hard-wearing nature. I was not planning on showing you any meat because, of course, half the book's meat and you probably all know what meats they are. But I didn't want you to miss out on this one, because this, well, it's called "portion-controlled meat cuts." And this is actually sold in the frozen area of the supermarket. And what it is — it's actually steak. So, this is sold as cow, but what happens when you slaughter a cow — at least in industrial factory farming — they have all these little bits of steak left that they can't actually sell as steak, so what they do is they glue them all together with fibrin from pig blood into this really large sausage, then freeze the sausage, cut it in little slices and sell those as steak again. And this also actually happens with tuna and scallops. So, with the steak, you might drink a beer. In the brewing process, there's lots of cloudy elements in the beer, so to get rid of these cloudy elements, what some companies do is they pour the beer through a sort of gelatin sieve in order to get rid of that cloudiness. This actually also goes for wine as well as fruit juice. There's actually a company in Greece that produces these cigarettes that actually contain hemoglobin from pigs in the filter. And according to them, this creates an artificial lung in the filter. (Laughter) So, this is actually a healthier cigarette. (Laughter) Injectable collagen — or, since the '70s, collagen from pigs — has been used for injecting into wrinkles. And the reason for this is that pigs are actually quite close to human beings, so the collagen is as well. Well, this must be the strangest thing I found. This is a bullet coming from a very large ammunition company in the United States. And while I was making the book, I contacted all the producers of products because I wanted them to send me the real samples and the real specimens. So I sent this company an email saying, "Hello. I'm Christien. I'm doing this research. And can you send me a bullet?" (Laughter) And well, I didn't expect them to even answer my email. But they answered and they said, "Why, thank you for your email. What an interesting story. Are you in anyway related to the Dutch government?" I thought that was really weird, as if the Dutch government sends emails to anyone. (Laughter) So, the most beautiful thing I found — at least what I think is the most beautiful — in the book, is this heart valve. It's actually a very low-tech and very high-tech product at the same time. The low-tech bit is that it's literally a pig's heart valve mounted in the high-tech bit, which is a memory metal casing. And what happens is this can be implanted into a human heart without open heart surgery. And once it's in the right spot, they remove the outer shell, and the heart valve, well, it gets this shape and at that moment it starts beating, instantly. It's really a sort of magical moment. So this is actually a Dutch company, so I called them up, and I asked, "Can I borrow a heart valve from you?" And the makers of this thing were really enthusiastic. So they were like, "Okay, we'll put it in a jar for you with formalin, and you can borrow it." Great — and then I didn't hear from them for weeks, so I called, and I asked, "What's going on with the heart valve?" And they said, "Well the director of the company decided not to let you borrow this heart valve, because want his product to be associated with pigs." (Laughter) Well, the last product from the book that I'm showing you is renewable energy — actually, to show that my first question, if pigs are still used up until the last bit, was still true. Well it is, because everything that can't be used for anything else is made into a fuel that can be used as renewable energy source. In total, I found 185 products. And what they showed me is that, well, firstly, it's at least to say odd that we don't treat these pigs as absolute kings and queens. And the second, is that we actually don't have a clue of what all these products that surround us are made of. And you might think I'm very fond of pigs, but actually — well, I am a little bit — but I'm more fond of raw materials in general. And I think that, in order to take better care of what's behind our products — so, the livestock, the crops, the plants, the non-renewable materials, but also the people that produce these products — the first step would actually be to know that they are there. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Where good ideas come from | {0: 'Steven Berlin Johnson examines the intersection of science, technology and personal experience.'} | TEDGlobal 2010 | Fifty-two minutes ago, I took this picture about 10 blocks from here. This is the Grand Café here in Oxford. I took this picture because this turns out to be the first coffeehouse to open in England, in 1650. That's its great claim to fame. And I wanted to show it to you, not because I want to give you the Starbucks tour of historic England — (Laughter) but rather because the English coffeehouse was crucial to the development and spread of one of the great intellectual flowerings of the last 500 years, what we now call the Enlightenment. And the coffeehouse played such a big role in the birth of the Enlightenment in part because of what people were drinking there. Because, before the spread of coffee and tea through British culture, what people drank — both elite and mass folks drank — day in and day out, from dawn until dusk, was alcohol. Alcohol was the daytime beverage of choice. You would drink a little beer with breakfast and have a little wine at lunch, a little gin, particularly around 1650, and top it off with a little beer and wine at the end of the day. That was the healthy choice, because the water wasn't safe to drink. And so, effectively, until the rise of the coffeehouse, you had an entire population that was effectively drunk all day. (Laughter) And you can imagine what that would be like in your own life — and I know this is true of some of you — if you were drinking all day — (Laughter) and then you switched from a depressant to a stimulant in your life. You would have better ideas. You would be sharper and more alert. So it's not an accident that a great flowering of innovation happened as England switched to tea and coffee. But the other thing that makes the coffeehouse important is the architecture of the space. It was a space where people would get together, from different backgrounds, different fields of expertise, and share. It was a space, as Matt Ridley talked about, where ideas could have sex. This was their conjugal bed, in a sense; ideas would get together there. And an astonishing number of innovations from this period have a coffeehouse somewhere in their story. I've been spending a lot of time thinking about coffeehouses for the last five years because I've been kind of on this quest to investigate this question of where good ideas come from. What are the environments that lead to unusual levels of innovation, unusual levels of creativity? What's the kind of environmental — what is the space of creativity? And what I've done is, I've looked at both environments like the coffeehouse, I've looked at media environments like the World Wide Web, that have been extraordinarily innovative; I've gone back to the history of the first cities; I've even gone to biological environments, like coral reefs and rain forests, that involve unusual levels of biological innovation. And what I've been looking for is shared patterns, signature behavior that shows up again and again in all of these environments. Are there recurring patterns that we can learn from, that we can take and apply to our own lives or our own organizations or our own environments to make them more creative and innovative? And I think I've found a few. But what you have to do to make sense of this and to really understand these principles is, you have to do away with the way in which our conventional metaphors and language steers us towards certain concepts of idea creation. We have this very rich vocabulary to describe moments of inspiration. We have the "flash" of insight, the "stroke" of insight, we have "epiphanies," we have eureka moments, we have the "light bulb" moments, right? All of these concepts, as rhetorically florid as they are, share this basic assumption, which is that an idea is a single thing. It's something that happens often in a wonderful, illuminating moment. But, in fact, what I would argue and what you really need to begin with is this idea that an idea is a network on the most elemental level. I mean, this is what is happening inside your brain. An idea — a new idea — is a new network of neurons firing in sync with each other inside your brain. It's a new configuration that has never formed before. And the question is: How do you get your brain into environments where these new networks are going to be more likely to form? And it turns out that, in fact, the network patterns of the outside world mimic a lot of the network patterns of the internal world of a human brain. So the metaphor I'd like to use, I can take from a story of a great idea that's quite recent — a lot more recent than the 1650s. A wonderful guy named Timothy Prestero has an organization called Design That Matters. They decided to tackle this really pressing problem of the terrible problems we have with infant mortality rates in the developing world. One of the things that's very frustrating about this is that we know by getting modern neonatal incubators into any context, if we can keep premature babies warm, basically — it's very simple — we can halve infant mortality rates in those environments. So the technology is there. These are standard in all the industrialized worlds. The problem is, if you buy a $40,000 incubator, and you send it off to a midsized village in Africa, it will work great for a year or two years, and then something will go wrong and it will break, and it will remain broken forever, because you don't have a whole system of spare parts, and you don't have the on-the-ground expertise to fix this $40,000 piece of equipment. So you end up having this problem where you spend all this money getting aid and all these advanced electronics to these countries, and it ends up being useless. So what Prestero and his team decided to do was to look around and see: What are the abundant resources in these developing world contexts? And what they noticed was, they don't have a lot of DVRs, they don't have a lot of microwaves, but they seem to do a pretty good job of keeping their cars on the road. There's a Toyota 4Runner on the street in all these places. They seem to have the expertise to keep cars working. So they started to think, "Could we build a neonatal incubator that's built entirely out of automobile parts?" And this is what they came up with. It's called the NeoNurture device. From the outside, it looks like a normal little thing you'd find in a modern Western hospital. In the inside, it's all car parts. It's got a fan, it's got headlights for warmth, it's got door chimes for alarm, it runs off a car battery. And so all you need is the spare parts from your Toyota and the ability to fix a headlight, and you can repair this thing. Now that's a great idea, but I'd like to say that, in fact, this is a great metaphor for the way ideas happen. We like to think our breakthrough ideas, you know, are like that $40,000, brand-new incubator, state-of-the-art technology. But more often than not, they're cobbled together from whatever parts that happen to be around nearby. We take ideas from other people, people we've learned from, people we run into in the coffee shop, and we stitch them together into new forms and we create something new. That's really where innovation happens. And that means we have to change some of our models of what innovation and deep thinking really looks like, right? I mean, this is one vision of it. Another is Newton and the apple, when Newton was at Cambridge. This is a statue from Oxford. You know, you're sitting there, thinking a deep thought, the apple falls from the tree, and you have the theory of gravity. In fact, the spaces that have historically led to innovation tend to look like this. This is Hogarth's famous painting of a kind of political dinner at a tavern, but this is what the coffee shops looked like back then. This is the kind of chaotic environment where ideas were likely to come together, where people were likely to have new, interesting, unpredictable collisions, people from different backgrounds. So if we're trying to build organizations that are more innovative, we have to build spaces that, strangely enough, look a bit more like this. This is what your office should look like, it's part of my message here. And one of the problems with this is that, when you research this field, people are notoriously unreliable when they actually self-report on where they have their own good ideas, or their history of their best ideas. And a few years ago, a wonderful researcher named Kevin Dunbar decided to go around and basically do the Big Brother approach to figuring out where good ideas come from. He went to a bunch of science labs around the world and videotaped everyone as they were doing every little bit of their job: when they were sitting in front of the microscope, when they were talking to colleagues at the watercooler ... And he recorded all these conversations and tried to figure out where the most important ideas happened. And when we think about the classic image of the scientist in the lab, we have this image — you know, they're poring over the microscope, and they see something in the tissue sample, and — "Eureka!" — they've got the idea. What happened, actually, when Dunbar looked at the tape, is that, in fact, almost all of the important breakthrough ideas did not happen alone in the lab, in front of the microscope. They happened at the conference table at the weekly lab meeting, when everybody got together and shared their latest data and findings, oftentimes when people shared the mistakes they were having, the error, the noise in the signal they were discovering. And something about that environment — and I've started calling it the "liquid network," where you have lots of different ideas that are together, different backgrounds, different interests, jostling with each other, bouncing off each other — that environment is, in fact, the environment that leads to innovation. The other problem that people have is, they like to condense their stories of innovation down to shorter time frames. So they want to tell the story of the eureka moment. They want to say, "There I was, I was standing there, and I had it all, suddenly, clear in my head." But, in fact, if you go back and look at the historical record, it turns out that a lot of important ideas have very long incubation periods. I call this the "slow hunch." We've heard a lot recently about hunch and instinct and blink-like sudden moments of clarity, but, in fact, a lot of great ideas linger on, sometimes for decades, in the back of people's minds. They have a feeling that there's an interesting problem, but they don't quite have the tools yet to discover them. They spend all this time working on certain problems, but there's another thing lingering there that they're interested in, but can't quite solve. Darwin is a great example of this. Darwin himself, in his autobiography, tells the story of coming up with the idea for natural selection as a classic eureka moment. He's in his study, it's October of 1838, and he's reading Malthus, actually, on population. And all of a sudden, the basic algorithm of natural selection kind of pops into his head, and he says, "Ah, at last, I had a theory with which to work." That's in his autobiography. About a decade or two ago, a wonderful scholar named Howard Gruber went back and looked at Darwin's notebooks from this period. Darwin kept these copious notebooks, where he wrote down every little idea he had, every little hunch. And what Gruber found was that Darwin had the full theory of natural selection for months and months and months before he had his alleged epiphany reading Malthus in October of 1838. There are passages where you can read it, and you think you're reading from a Darwin textbook, from the period before he has his epiphany. And so what you realize is that Darwin, in a sense, had the idea, he had the concept, but was unable to fully think it yet. And that is, actually, how great ideas often happen — they fade into view over long periods of time. Now the challenge for all of us is: How do you create environments that allow these ideas to have this long half-life? It's hard to go to your boss and say, "I have an excellent idea for our organization. It will be useful in 2020." (Laughter) "Could you just give me some time to do that?" Now a couple of companies like Google have innovation time off, 20 percent time. In a sense, those are hunch-cultivating mechanisms in an organization. But that's a key thing. And the other thing is to allow those hunches to connect with other people's hunches; that's what often happens. You have half of an idea, somebody else has the other half, and if you're in the right environment, they turn into something larger than the sum of their parts. So in a sense, we often talk about the value of protecting intellectual property — you know, building barricades, having secretive R and D labs, patenting everything that we have so that those ideas will remain valuable, and people will be incentivized to come up with more ideas, and the culture will be more innovative. But I think there's a case to be made that we should spend at least as much time, if not more, valuing the premise of connecting ideas and not just protecting them. And I'll leave you with this story, which I think captures a lot of these values. It's just a wonderful tale of innovation, and how it happens in unlikely ways. It's October of 1957, and Sputnik has just launched. And we're in Laurel, Maryland, at the Applied Physics Lab associated with Johns Hopkins University. It's Monday morning, and the news has just broken about this satellite that's now orbiting the planet. And, of course, this is nerd heaven, right? There are all these physics geeks who are there, thinking, "Oh my gosh! This is incredible. I can't believe this has happened." And two of them, two twentysomething researchers at the APL, are there at the cafeteria table, having an informal conversation with a bunch of their colleagues. And these two guys are named Guier and Weiffenbach. They start talking, and one of them says, "Hey, has anybody tried to listen for this thing? There's this, you know, man-made satellite up there in outer space that's obviously broadcasting some kind of signal. We could probably hear it, if we tune in." So they ask around to a couple of their colleagues, and everybody's like, "No, I hadn't thought of doing that. That's an interesting idea." And it turns out Weiffenbach is kind of an expert in microwave reception, and he's got a little antenna set up with an amplifier in his office. So Guier and Weiffenbach go back to Weiffenbach's office, and they start noodling around — "hacking," as we might call it now. And after a couple of hours, they start picking up the signal, because the Soviets made Sputnik very easy to track; it was right at 20 MHz, so you could pick it up really easily, because they were afraid people would think it was a hoax, basically, so they made it really easy to find. So these guys are sitting there, listening to this signal, and people start coming into the office and saying, "That's pretty cool. Can I hear?" And before long, they think, "Jeez, this is kind of historic. We may be the first people in the United States listening to this. We should record it." So they bring in this big, clunky analog tape recorder and start recording these little bleep, bleeps. And they start writing down the date stamp, time stamps for each little bleep that they record. And then they start thinking, "Well, gosh, we're noticing small little frequency variations here. We could probably calculate the speed that the satellite is traveling if we do a little basic math here using the Doppler effect." And they played around with it a little bit more and talked to a couple of their colleagues who had other specialties. And they said, "You know, we could actually look at the slope of the Doppler effect to figure out the points at which the satellite is closest to our antenna and the points at which it's furthest away. That's pretty cool." Eventually, they get permission — this is all a little side project that hadn't been officially part of their job description — they get permission to use the new UNIVAC computer that takes up an entire room that they'd just gotten at the APL. And they run some more of the numbers, and at the end of about three or four weeks, turns out they have mapped the exact trajectory of this satellite around the Earth, just from listening to this one little signal, going off on this little side hunch that they'd been inspired to do over lunch one morning. A couple weeks later, their boss, Frank McClure, pulls them into the room and says, "Hey, you guys, I have to ask you something about that project you were working on. You've figured out an unknown location of a satellite orbiting the planet from a known location on the ground. Could you go the other way? Could you figure out an unknown location on the ground if you knew the location of the satellite?" And they thought about it and they said, "Well, I guess maybe you could. Let's run the numbers here." So they went back and thought about it and came back and said, "Actually, it'll be easier." And he said, "Oh, that's great, because, see, I have these new nuclear submarines" (Laughter) "that I'm building. And it's really hard to figure out how to get your missile so that it will land right on top of Moscow if you don't know where the submarine is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. So we're thinking we could throw up a bunch of satellites and use it to track our submarines and figure out their location in the middle of the ocean. Could you work on that problem?" And that's how GPS was born. Thirty years later, Ronald Reagan, actually, opened it up and made it an open platform that anybody could build upon, and anybody could come along and build new technology that would create and innovate on top of this open platform, left it open for anyone to do pretty much anything they wanted with it. And now, I guarantee you, certainly half of this room, if not more, has a device sitting in their pocket right now that is talking to one of these satellites in outer space. And I bet you one of you, if not more, has used said device and said satellite system to locate a nearby coffeehouse somewhere in the last — (Laughter) in the last day or last week, right? (Applause) And that, I think, is a great case study, a great lesson in the power — the marvelous, unplanned, emergent, unpredictable power — of open innovative systems. When you build them right, they will be led to completely new directions the creators never even dreamed of. I mean, here you have these guys who basically thought they were just following this hunch, this little passion that had developed, then they thought they were fighting the Cold War, and then, it turns out, they're just helping somebody find a soy latte. (Laughter) That is how innovation happens. Chance favors the connected mind. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Mothers helping mothers fight HIV | {0: 'How can mothers with HIV avoid passing it to their kids? In South Africa, Mitchell Besser tapped a new resource for healthcare: moms themselves. The program he started, mothers2mothers, trains new mothers to educate and support other moms.'} | TEDGlobal 2010 | I want you to take a trip with me. Picture yourself driving down a small road in Africa, and as you drive along, you look off to the side, and this is what you see: you see a field of graves. And you stop, and you get out of your car and you take a picture. And you go into the town, and you inquire, "What's going on here?" and people are initially reluctant to tell you. And then someone says, "These are the recent AIDS deaths in our community." HIV isn't like other medical conditions; it's stigmatizing. People are reluctant to talk about it — there's a fear associated with it. And I'm going to talk about HIV today, about the deaths, about the stigma. It's a medical story, but more than that, it's a social story. This map depicts the global distribution of HIV. And as you can see, Africa has a disproportionate share of the infection. There are 33 million people living with HIV in the world today. Of these, two-thirds, 22 million are living in sub-Saharan Africa. There are 1.4 million pregnant women in low- and middle-income countries living with HIV and of these, 90 percent are in sub-Saharan Africa. We talk about things in relative terms. And I'm going to talk about annual pregnancies and HIV-positive mothers. The United States — a large country — each year, 7,000 mothers with HIV who give birth to a child. But you go to Rwanda — a very small country — 8,000 mothers with HIV who are pregnant. And then you go to Baragwanath Hospital, outside of Johannesburg in South Africa, and 8,000 HIV-positive pregnant women giving birth — a hospital the same as a country. And to realize that this is just the tip of an iceberg that when you compare everything here to South Africa, it just pales, because in South Africa, each year 300,000 mothers with HIV give birth to children. So we talk about PMTCT, and we refer to PMTCT, prevention of mother to child transmission. I think there's an assumption amongst most people in the public that if a mother is HIV-positive, she's going to infect her child. The reality is really, very different. In resource-rich countries, with all the tests and treatment we currently have, less than two percent of babies are born HIV-positive — 98 percent of babies are born HIV-negative. And yet, the reality in resource-poor countries, in the absence of tests and treatment, 40 percent — 40 percent of children are infected — 40 percent versus two percent — an enormous difference. So these programs — and I'm going to refer to PMTCT though my talk — these prevention programs, simply, they're the tests and the drugs that we give to mothers to prevent them from infecting their babies, and also the medicines we give to mothers to keep them healthy and alive to raise their children. So it's the test a mother gets when she comes in. It's the drugs she receives to protect the baby that's inside the uterus and during delivery. It's the guidance she gets around infant feeding and safer sex. It's an entire package of services, and it works. So in the United States, since the advent of treatment in the middle of the 1990s, there's been an 80-percent decline in the number of HIV-infected children. Less than 100 babies are born with HIV each year in the United States and yet, still, over 400,000 children are born every year in the world today with HIV. What does that mean? It means 1,100 children infected each day — 1,100 children each day, infected with HIV. And where do they come from? Well, less than one comes from the United States. One, on average, comes from Europe. 100 come from Asia and the Pacific. And each day, a thousand babies — a thousand babies are born each day with HIV in Africa. So again, I look at the globe here and the disproportionate share of HIV in Africa. And let's look at another map. And here, again, we see Africa has a disproportionate share of the numbers of doctors. That thin sliver you see here, that's Africa. And it's the same with nurses. The truth is sub-Saharan Africa has 24 percent of the global disease burden and yet only three percent of the world's health care workers. That means doctors and nurses simply don't have the time to take care of patients. A nurse in a busy clinic will see 50 to 100 patients in a day, which leaves her just minutes per patient — minutes per patient. And so when we look at these PMTCT programs, what does it mean? Well, back in 2001, when there was just a simple test and a single dose of a drug, a nurse, in the course of her few minutes with a patient, would have to counsel for the HIV test, perform the HIV test, explain the results, dispense a single dose of the drug, Nevirapine, explain how to take it, discuss infant feeding options, reinforce infant feeding, and test the baby — in minutes. Well, fortunately since 2001, we've got new treatments, new tests, and we're far more successful, but we don't have any more nurses. And so these are the tests a nurse now has to do in those same few minutes. It's not possible — it doesn't work. And so we need to find better ways of providing care. This is a picture of a maternal health clinic in Africa — mothers coming, pregnant and with their babies. These women are here for care, but we know that just doing a test, just giving someone a drug, it's not enough. Meds don't equal medical care. Doctors and nurses, frankly, don't have the time or skills to tell people what to do in ways they understand. I'm a doctor — I tell people things to do, and I expect them to follow my guidance — because I'm a doctor; I went to Harvard — but the reality is, if I tell a patient, "You should have safer sex. You should always use a condom," and yet, in her relationship, she's not empowered — what's going to happen? If I tell her to take her medicines every day and yet, no one in the household knows about her illness, so it's just not going to work. And so we need to do more, we need to do it differently, we need to do it in ways that are affordable and accessible and can be taken to scale, which means it can be done everywhere. So, I want to tell you a story — I want to take you on a little trip. Imagine yourself, if you can, you're a young woman in Africa, you're going to the hospital or clinic. You go in for a test and you find out that you're pregnant, and you're delighted. And then they give you another test and they tell you you're HIV-positive, and you're devastated. And the nurse takes you into a room, and she tells you about the tests and HIV and the medicines you can take and how to take care of yourself and your baby, and you hear none of it. All you're hearing is, "I'm going to die, and my baby is going to die." And then you're out on the street, and you don't know where to go. And you don't know who you can talk to, because the truth is, HIV is so stigmatizing that if you partner, your family, anyone in your home, you're likely to be thrown out without any means of support. And this — this is the face and story of HIV in Africa today. But we're here to talk about possible solutions and some good news. And I want to change the story a little bit. Take the same mother, and the nurse, after she gives her her test, takes her to a room. The door opens and there's a room full of mothers, mothers with babies, and they're sitting, and they're talking, they're listening. They're drinking tea, they're having sandwiches. And she goes inside, and woman comes up to her and says, "Welcome to mothers2mothers. Have a seat. You're safe here. We're all HIV-positive. You're going to be okay. You're going to live. Your baby is going to be HIV-negative." We view mothers as a community's single greatest resource. Mothers take care of the children, take care of the home. So often the men are gone. They're working, or they're not part of the household. Our organization, mothers2mothers, enlists women with HIV as care providers. We bring mothers who have HIV, who've been through these PMTCT programs in the very facilities, to come back and work side by side with doctors and nurses as part of the health care team. These mothers, we call them mentor mothers, are able to engage women who, just like themselves, pregnant with babies, have found out about being HIV-positive, who need support and education. And they support them around the diagnosis and educate them about how to take their medicines, how to take care of themselves, how to take care of their babies. Consider: if you needed surgery, you would want the best possible technical surgeon, right? But if you wanted to understand what that surgery would do to your life, you'd like to engage someone, someone who's had the procedure. Patients are experts on their own experience, and they can share that experience with others. This is the medical care that goes beyond just medicines. So the mothers who work for us, they come from the communities in which they work. They're hired — they're paid as professional members of the health care teams, just like doctors and nurses. And we open bank accounts for them and they're paid directly into the accounts, because their money's protected; the men can't take it away from them. They go through two to three weeks of rigorous curriculum-based education, training. Now, doctors and nurses — they too get trained. But so often, they only get trained once, so they're not aware of new medicines, new guidelines as they come out. Our mentor mothers get trained every single year and retrained. And so doctors and nurses — they look up to them as experts. Imagine that: a woman, a former patient, being able to educate her doctor for the first time and educate the other patients that she's taking care of. Our organization has three goals. The first, to prevent mother-to-child transmission. The second: keep mothers healthy, keep mothers alive, keep the children alive — no more orphans. And the third, and maybe the most grand, is to find ways to empower women, enable them to fight the stigma and to live positive and productive lives with HIV. So how do we do it? Well, maybe the most important engagement is the one-to-one, seeing patients one-to-one, educating them, supporting them, explaining how they can take care of themselves. We go beyond that; we try to bring in the husbands, the partners. In Africa, it's very, very hard to engage men. Men are not frequently part of pregnancy care. But in Rwanda, in one country, they've got a policy that a woman can't come for care unless she brings the father of the baby with her — that's the rule. And so the father and the mother, together, go through the counseling and the testing. The father and the mother, together, they get the results. And this is so important in breaking through the stigma. Disclosure is so central to prevention. How do you have safer sex, how do you use a condom regularly if there hasn't been disclosure? Disclosure is so important to treatment, because again, people need the support of family members and friends to take their medicines regularly. We also work in groups. Now the groups, it's not like me lecturing, but what happens is women, they come together — under the support and guidance of our mentor mothers — they come together, and they share their personal experiences. And it's through the sharing that people get tactics of how to take care of themselves, how to disclose how to take medicines. And then there's the community outreach, engaging women in their communities. If we can change the way households believe and think, we can change the way communities believe and think. And if we can change enough communities, we can change national attitudes. We can change national attitudes to women and national attitudes to HIV. The hardest barrier really is around stigma reduction. We have the medicines, we have the tests, but how do you reduce the stigma? And it's important about disclosure. So, a couple years ago, one of the mentor mothers came back, and she told me a story. She had been asked by one of the clients to go to the home of the client, because the client wanted to tell the mother and her brothers and sisters about her HIV status, and she was afraid to go by herself. And so the mentor mother went along with. And the patient walked into the house and said to her mother and siblings, "I have something to tell you. I'm HIV-positive." And everybody was quiet. And then her oldest brother stood up and said, "I too have something to tell you. I'm HIV-positive. I've been afraid to tell everybody." And then this older sister stood up and said, "I too am living with the virus, and I've been ashamed." And then her younger brother stood up and said, "I'm also positive. I thought you were going to throw me out of the family." And you see where this is going. The last sister stood up and said, "I'm also positive. I thought you were going to hate me." And there they were, all of them together for the first time being able to share this experience for the first time and to support each other for the first time. (Video) Female Narrator: Women come to us, and they are crying and scared. I tell them my story, that I am HIV-positive, but my child is HIV-negative. I tell them, "You are going to make it, and you will raise a healthy baby." I am proof that there is hope. Mitchell Besser: Remember the images I showed you of how few doctors and nurses there are in Africa. And it is a crisis in health care systems. Even as we have more tests and more drugs, we can't reach people; we don't have enough providers. So we talk in terms of what we call task-shifting. Task-shifting is traditionally when you take health care services from one provider and have another provider do it. Typically, it's a doctor giving a job to a nurse. And the issue in Africa is that there are fewer nurses, really than doctors, and so we need to find new paradigm for health care. How do you build a better health care system? We've chosen to redefine the health care system as a doctor, a nurse and a mentor mother. And so what nurses do is that they ask the mentor mothers to explain how to take the drugs, the side effects. They delegate education about infant feeding, family planning, safer sex, actions that nurses simple just don't have time for. So we go back to the prevention of mother to child transmission. The world is increasingly seeing these programs as the bridge to comprehensive maternal and child health. And our organization helps women across that bridge. The care doesn't stop when the baby's born — we deal with the ongoing health of the mother and baby, ensuring that they live healthy, successful lives. Our organization works on three levels. The first, at the patient level — mothers and babies keeping babies from getting HIV, keeping mothers healthy to raise them. The second, communities — empowering women. They become leaders within their communities. They change the way communities think — we need to change attitudes to HIV. We need to change attitudes to women in Africa. We have to do that. And then rework the level of the health care systems, building stronger health care systems. Our health care systems are broken. They're not going to work the way they're currently designed. And so doctors and nurses who need to try to change people's behaviors don't have the skills, don't have the time — our mentor mothers do. And so in redefining the health care teams by bringing the mentor mothers in, we can do that. I started the program in Capetown, South Africa back in 2001. It was at that point, just the spark of an idea. Referencing Steven Johnson's very lovely speech yesterday on where ideas come from, I was in the shower at the time — I was alone. (Laughter) The program is now working in nine countries, we have 670 program sites, we're seeing about 230,000 women every month, we're employing 1,600 mentor mothers, and last year, they enrolled 300,000 HIV-positive pregnant women and mothers. That is 20 percent of the global HIV-positive pregnant women — 20 percent of the world. What's extraordinary is how simple the premise is. Mothers with HIV caring for mothers with HIV. Past patients taking care of present patients. And empowerment through employment — reducing stigma. (Video) Female Narrator: There is hope, hope that one day we shall win this fight against HIV and AIDS. Each person must know their HIV status. Those who are HIV-negative must know how to stay negative. Those who are HIV-infected must know how to take care of themselves. HIV-positive pregnant women must get PMTCT services in order to have HIV-negative babies. All of this is possible, if we each contribute to this fight. MB: Simple solutions to complex problems. Mothers caring for mothers. It's transformational. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why I am an HIV/AIDS activist | {0: 'The most successful female British pop musician in history, Annie Lennox has now committed herself to raising awareness of, and supporting actions against, the HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa.'} | TEDGlobal 2010 | I'm going to share with you the story as to how I have become an HIV/AIDS campaigner. And this is the name of my campaign: SING Campaign. In November of 2003, I was invited to take part in the launch of Nelson Mandela's 46664 Foundation — that is his HIV/AIDS foundation. And 46664 is the number that Mandela had when he was imprisoned in Robben Island. And that's me with Youssou N'Dour, onstage, having the time of my life. The next day, all the artists were invited to join Mandela in Robben Island, where he was going to give a conference to the world's press, standing in front of his former prison cell. You can see the bars of the window there. It was quite a momentous occasion for all of us. In that moment in time, Mandela told the world's press that there was a virtual genocide taking place in his country; that post-apartheid Rainbow Nation, a thousand people were dying on a daily basis and that the front line victims, the most vulnerable of all, were women and children. This was a huge impact on my mind, because I am a woman and I am a mother, and I hadn't realized that the HIV/AIDS pandemic was directly affecting women in such a way. And so I committed — when I left South Africa, when I left Capetown, I told myself, "This is going to be something that I have to talk about. I have to serve." And so, subsequently I participated in every single 46664 event that I could take part in and gave news conferences, interviews, talking and using my platform as a musician, with my commitment to Mandela — out of respect for the tremendous, unbelievable work that he had done. Everyone in the world respects Nelson Mandela, everyone reveres Nelson Mandela. But do they all know about what has been taking place in South Africa, his country, the country that had one of the highest incidents of transmission of the virus? I think that if I went out into the street now and I told people what was happening there, they would be shocked. I was very, very fortunate a couple of years later to have met Zackie Achmat, the founder of Treatment Action Campaign, an incredible campaigner and activist. I met him at a 46664 event. He was wearing a t-shirt like the one I wear now. This is a tool — this tells you I am in solidarity with people who have HIV, people who are living with HIV. And in a way because of the stigma, by wearing this t-shirt I say, "Yes, we can talk about this issue. It doesn't have to be in the closet." I became a member of Treatment Action Campaign and I'm very proud to be a member of that incredible organization. It's a grassroots campaign with 80 percent membership being women, most of whom are HIV-positive. They work in the field. They have tremendous outreach to the people who are living directly with the effects of the virus. They have education programs. They bring out the issues of stigma. It's quite extraordinary what they do. And yes, my SING Campaign has supported Treatment Action Campaign in the way that I have tried to raise awareness and to try to also raise funds. A lot of the funding that I have managed to raise has gone directly to Treatment Action Campaign and the incredible work that they do, and are still continuing to do in South Africa. So this is my SING Campaign. SING Campaign is basically just me and about three or four wonderful people who help to support me. I've traveled all over the world in the last two and a half years — I went to about 12 different countries. Here I am in Oslo in Norway, getting a nice, fat check; singing in Hong Kong, trying to get people to raise money. In Johannesburg, I had the opportunity to play to a mainly white, middle-class South African audience who ended up in tears because I use film clips that really touch the heart, the whole nature, of this terrible tragedy that is taking place, that people are tending to avoid, because they are fatigued, and they really don't quite know what the solutions are. Aaron Motsoaledi, the current health minister, attended that concert and I had an opportunity to meet with him, and he gave his absolute commitment to try to making a change, which is absolutely necessary. This is in the Scottish Parliament. I've subsequently become an envoy for Scotland and HIV. And I was showing them my experiences and trying to, again, raise awareness. And once again, in Edinburgh with the wonderful African Children's Choir who I simply adore. And it's children like this, many of whom have been orphaned because of their family being affected by the AIDS virus. I'm sitting here in New York with Michel Sidibe — he's the director of UNAIDS. And I'm very honored by the fact that Michel invited me, only a few months ago, to become a UNAIDS ambassador. And in this way, I've been strengthening my platform and broadening my outreach. The message that UNAIDS are currently sending out to the world is that we would like to see the virtual elimination of the transmission of the virus from mother to child by 2015. It's a very ambitious goal but we believe it can be achieved with political will. This can happen. And here I am with a pregnant woman, who is HIV positive and we're smiling, both of us are smiling, because we're very confident, because we know that that young woman is receiving treatment so her life can be extended to take care of the baby she's about to give birth to. And her baby will receive PMTCT, which will mean that that baby can be born free of the virus. Now that is prevention at the very beginning of life. It's one way to start looking at intervention with the AIDS pandemic. Now, I just would like to finish off to tell you the little story about Avelile. This is Avelile — she goes with me wherever I go. I tell her story to everyone because she represents one of millions of HIV/AIDS orphans. Avelile's mother had HIV virus — she died from AIDS-related illness. Avelile had the virus, she was born with the virus. And here she is at seven years old, weighing no more than a one year-old baby. At this point in her life, she's suffering with full-blown AIDS and had pneumonia. We met her in a hospital in the Eastern Cape and spent a whole afternoon with her — an adorable child. The doctors and nurses were phenomenal. They put her on very special nutritious diet and took great care of her. And we didn't know when we left the hospital — because we filmed her story — we didn't know if she was going to survive. So, it was obviously — it was a very emotional encounter and left us feeling very resonant with this direct experience, this one child, you know, that story. Five months later, we went back to South Africa to meet Avelile again. And I'm getting — the hairs on my — I don't know if you can see the hairs on my arms. They're standing up because I know what I'm going to show you. This is the transformation that took place. Isn't it extraordinary? (Applause) That round of applause is actually for the doctors and nurses of the hospital who took care of Avelile. And I take it that you appreciate that kind of transformation. So, I would like to say to you, each one in the audience, if you feel that every mother and every child in the world has the right to have access to good nutrition and good medical care, and you believe that the Millennium Development Goals, specifically five and six, should be absolutely committed to by all governments around the world — especially in sub-Saharan Africa — could you please stand up. I think that's fair to say, it's almost everyone in the hall. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The shape-shifting future of the mobile phone | {0: "Fabian Hemmert is a design professor, driven by the belief that we shouldn't sacrifice our humanness for the sake of technology."} | TEDxBerlin | I am a PhD student. And that means I have a question: How can we make digital content graspable? Because you see, on the one hand, there is the digital world and no question, many things are happening there right now. And for us humans, it's not quite material, it's not really there — it's virtual. On the other hand, we're humans, we live in a physical world. It's rich, it tastes good, it feels good, it smells good. So the question is: How do we get the stuff over from the digital into the physical? That's my question. If you look at the iPhone with its touch and the Wii with its bodily activity, you can see the tendency; it's getting physical. The question is: What's next? Now, I have three options that I would like to show you. The first one is mass. As humans, we are sensitive to where an object in our hand is heavy. So could we use that in mobile phones? Let me show you the weight-shifting mobile. It is a mobile phone-shaped box that has an iron weight inside, which we can move around, and you can feel where it's heavy. We shift the gravitational center of it. For example, we can augment digital content with physical mass. So you move around the content on the display, but you can also feel where it is just from the weight of the device. Another thing it's good for is navigation. It can guide you around in a city. It can tell you by its weight, "OK, move right. Walk ahead. Make a left here." And the good thing about that is, you don't have to look at the device all the time; you have your eyes free to see the city. Now, mass is the first thing — the second thing, that's shape. We're also sensitive to the shape of objects we have in our hands. So if I download an e-book and it has 20 pages — well, they could be thin, right? But if it has 500 pages, I want to feel that "Harry Potter" — it's thick. (Laughter) So let me show you the shape-changing mobile. Again, it's a mobile phone-shaped box, and this one can change its shape. We can play with the shape itself. For example, it can be thin in your pocket, which we of course want it to be. But then if you hold it in your hand, it can lean towards you, be thick. It's like tapered to the downside. If you change the grasp, it can adjust to that. It's also useful if you want to put it down on your nightstand to watch a movie or use as an alarm clock. It stands. It's fairly simple. Another thing is, sometimes we watch things on a mobile phone that are bigger than the phone itself. In that case — like here, there's an app that's bigger than the phone's screen — the shape of the phone could tell you, "OK, off the screen, right here, there is more content. You can't see it, but it's there." And you can feel it, because it's thicker at that edge. The shape is the second thing. The third thing operates on a different level. As humans, we are social, we are empathic, and that's great. Wouldn't that be a way to make mobile phones more intuitive? Think of a hamster in the pocket. Well, I can feel it, it's doing all right. I don't have to check it. (Laughter) Let me show you the living mobile phone. So, once again, a mobile phone-shaped box. But this one, it has a breath and a heartbeat, and it feels very organic. (Laughter) And you can tell, it's relaxed right now. Oh, now — missed call, a new call, new girlfriend, maybe — very exciting. (Laughter) How do we calm it down? You give it a pat behind the ears, and everything is all right again. That's very intuitive, and that's what we want. So what we have seen are three ways to make the digital graspable for us. And I think making it physical is a good way to do that. What's behind that is a postulation, namely, not that humans should get much more technical in the future; rather than that, technology, a bit more human. (Applause) |
Shh! Sound health in 8 steps | {0: 'Julian Treasure studies sound and advises businesses on how best to use it.'} | TEDGlobal 2010 | The Hindus say, "Nada brahma," one translation of which is, "The world is sound." And in a way, that's true, because everything is vibrating. In fact, all of you as you sit here right now are vibrating. Every part of your body is vibrating at different frequencies. So you are, in fact, a chord — each of you an individual chord. One definition of health may be that that chord is in complete harmony. Your ears can't hear that chord; they can actually hear amazing things. Your ears can hear 10 octaves. Incidentally, we see just one octave. Your ears are always on — you have no ear lids. They work even when you sleep. The smallest sound you can perceive moves your eardrum just four atomic diameters. The loudest sound you can hear is a trillion times more powerful than that. Ears are made not for hearing, but for listening. Listening is an active skill, whereas hearing is passive, listening is something that we have to work at — it's a relationship with sound. And yet it's a skill that none of us are taught. For example, have you ever considered that there are listening positions, places you can listen from? Here are two of them. Reductive listening is listening "for." It reduces everything down to what's relevant and it discards everything that's not relevant. Men typically listen reductively. So he's saying, "I've got this problem." He's saying, "Here's your solution. Thanks very much. Next." That's the way we talk, right guys? Expansive listening, on the other hand, is listening "with," not listening "for." It's got no destination in mind — it's just enjoying the journey. Women typically listen expansively. If you look at these two, eye contact, facing each other, possibly both talking at the same time. (Laughter) Men, if you get nothing else out of this talk, practice expansive listening, and you can transform your relationships. The trouble with listening is that so much of what we hear is noise, surrounding us all the time. Noise like this, according to the European Union, is reducing the health and the quality of life of 25 percent of the population of Europe. Two percent of the population of Europe — that's 16 million people — are having their sleep devastated by noise like that. Noise kills 200,000 people a year in Europe. It's a really big problem. Now, when you were little, if you had noise and you didn't want to hear it, you'd stick your fingers in your ears and hum. These days, you can do a similar thing, it just looks a bit cooler. It looks a bit like this. The trouble with widespread headphone use is it brings three really big health issues. The first really big health issue is a word that Murray Schafer coined: "schizophonia." It's a dislocation between what you see and what you hear. So, we're inviting into our lives the voices of people who are not present with us. I think there's something deeply unhealthy about living all the time in schizophonia. The second problem that comes with headphone abuse is compression. We squash music to fit it into our pocket and there is a cost attached to this. Listen to this — this is an uncompressed piece of music. (Music) And now the same piece of music with 98 percent of the data removed. (Music) I do hope that some of you at least can hear the difference between those two. There is a cost of compression. It makes you tired and irritable to have to make up all of that data. You're having to imagine it. It's not good for you in the long run. The third problem with headphones is this: deafness — noise-induced hearing disorder. Ten million Americans already have this for one reason or another, but really worryingly, 16 percent — roughly one in six — of American teenagers suffer from noise-induced hearing disorder as a result of headphone abuse. One study at an American university found that 61 percent of college freshmen had damaged hearing as a result of headphone abuse. We may be raising an entire generation of deaf people. Now that's a really serious problem. I'll give you three quick tips to protect your ears and pass these on to your children, please. Professional hearing protectors are great; I use some all the time. If you're going to use headphones, buy the best ones you can afford because quality means you don't have to have it so loud. If you can't hear somebody talking to you in a loud voice, it's too loud. And thirdly, if you're in bad sound, it's fine to put your fingers in your ears or just move away from it. Protect your ears in that way. Let's move away from bad sound and look at some friends that I urge you to seek out. WWB: Wind, water, birds — stochastic natural sounds composed of lots of individual random events, all of it very healthy, all of it sound that we evolved to over the years. Seek those sounds out; they're good for you and so it this. Silence is beautiful. The Elizabethans described language as decorated silence. I urge you to move away from silence with intention and to design soundscapes just like works of art. Have a foreground, a background, all in beautiful proportion. It's fun to get into designing with sound. If you can't do it yourself, get a professional to do it for you. Sound design is the future, and I think it's the way we're going to change the way the world sounds. I'm going to just run quickly through eight modalities, eight ways sound can improve health. First, ultrasound: we're very familiar with it from physical therapy; it's also now being used to treat cancer. Lithotripsy — saving thousands of people a year from the scalpel by pulverizing stones with high-intensity sound. Sound healing is a wonderful modality. It's been around for thousands of years. I do urge you to explore this. There are great things being done there, treating now autism, dementia and other conditions. And music, of course. Just listening to music is good for you, if it's music that's made with good intention, made with love, generally. Devotional music, good — Mozart, good. There are all sorts of types of music that are very healthy. And four modalities where you need to take some action and get involved. First of all, listen consciously. I hope that that after this talk you'll be doing that. It's a whole new dimension to your life and it's wonderful to have that dimension. Secondly, get in touch with making some sound — create sound. The voice is the instrument we all play, and yet how many of us are trained in using our voice? Get trained; learn to sing, learn to play an instrument. Musicians have bigger brains — it's true. You can do this in groups as well. It's a fantastic antidote to schizophonia; to make music and sound in a group of people, whichever style you enjoy particularly. And let's take a stewarding role for the sound around us. Protect your ears? Yes, absolutely. Design soundscapes to be beautiful around you at home and at work. And let's start to speak up when people are assailing us with the noise that I played you early on. So I'm going to leave you with seven things you can do right now to improve your health with sound. My vision is of a world that sounds beautiful and if we all start doing these things, we will take a very big step in that direction. So I urge you to take that path. I'm leaving you with a little more birdsong, which is very good for you. I wish you sound health. (Applause) |
The quantified self | {0: "Journalist Gary Wolf spends his days in pursuit of the most fascinating things. As a contributing editor at Wired, he's written about technology, mushroom hunters, venture capitalists ..."} | TED@Cannes | I got up this morning at 6:10 a.m. after going to sleep at 12:45 a.m. I was awakened once during the night. My heart rate was 61 beats per minute — my blood pressure, 127 over 74. I had zero minutes of exercise yesterday, so my maximum heart rate during exercise wasn't calculated. I had about 600 milligrams of caffeine, zero of alcohol. And my score on the Narcissism Personality Index, or the NPI-16, is a reassuring 0.31. We know that numbers are useful for us when we advertise, manage, govern, search. I'm going to talk about how they're useful when we reflect, learn, remember and want to improve. A few years ago, Kevin Kelly, my partner, and I noticed that people were subjecting themselves to regimes of quantitative measurement and self-tracking that went far beyond the ordinary, familiar habits such as stepping on a scale every day. People were tracking their food via Twitter, their kids' diapers on their iPhone. They were making detailed journals of their spending, their mood, their symptoms, their treatments. Now, we know some of the technological facts that are driving this change in our lifestyle — the uptake and diffusion of mobile devices, the exponential improvement in data storage and data processing, and the remarkable improvement in human biometric sensors. This little black dot there is a 3D accelerometer. It tracks your movement through space. It is, as you can see, very small and also very cheap. They're now down to well under a dollar a piece, and they're going into all kinds of devices. But what's interesting is the incredible detailed information that you can get from just one sensor like this. This kind of sensor is in the hit biometric device — among early adopters at the moment — the Fitbit. This tracks your activity and also your sleep. It has just that sensor in it. You're probably familiar with the Nike+ system. I just put it up because that little blue dot is the sensor. It's really just a pressure sensor like the kind that's in a doorbell. And Nike knows how to get your pace and distance from just that sensor. This is the strap that people use to transmit heart-rate data to their Nike+ system. This is a beautiful, new device that gives you detailed sleep tracking data, not just whether you're asleep or awake, but also your phase of sleep — deep sleep, light sleep, REM sleep. The sensor is just a little strip of metal in that headband there. The rest of it is the bedside console; just for reference, this is a sleep tracking system from just a few years ago — I mean, really until now. And this is the sleep tracking system of today. This just was presented at a health care conference in D.C. Most of what you see there is an asthma inhaler, but the top is a very small GPS transceiver, which gives you the date and location of an asthma incident, giving you a new awareness of your vulnerability in relation to time and environmental factors. Now, we know that new tools are changing our sense of self in the world — these tiny sensors that gather data in nature, the ubiquitous computing that allows that data to be understood and used, and of course the social networks that allow people to collaborate and contribute. But we think of these tools as pointing outward, as windows and I'd just like to invite you to think of them as also turning inward and becoming mirrors. So that when we think about using them to get some systematic improvement, we also think about how they can be useful for self-improvement, for self-discovery, self-awareness, self-knowledge. Here's a biometric device: a pair of Apple Earbuds. Last year, Apple filed some patents to get blood oxygenation, heart rate and body temperature via the Earbuds. What is this for? What should it be for? Some people will say it's for biometric security. Some people will say it's for public health research. Some people will say it's for avant-garde marketing research. I'd like to tell you that it's also for self-knowledge. And the self isn't the only thing; it's not even most things. The self is just our operation center, our consciousness, our moral compass. So, if we want to act more effectively in the world, we have to get to know ourselves better. Thank you. |
I am my connectome | {0: 'Sebastian Seung is a leader in the new field of connectomics, currently the hottest space in neuroscience, which studies, in once-impossible detail, the wiring of the brain.'} | TEDGlobal 2010 | We live in in a remarkable time, the age of genomics. Your genome is the entire sequence of your DNA. Your sequence and mine are slightly different. That's why we look different. I've got brown eyes; you might have blue or gray. But it's not just skin-deep. The headlines tell us that genes can give us scary diseases, maybe even shape our personality, or give us mental disorders. Our genes seem to have awesome power over our destinies. And yet, I would like to think that I am more than my genes. What do you guys think? Are you more than your genes? (Audience: Yes.) Yes? I think some people agree with me. I think we should make a statement. I think we should say it all together. All right: "I'm more than my genes" — all together. Everybody: I am more than my genes. (Cheering) Sebastian Seung: What am I? (Laughter) I am my connectome. Now, since you guys are really great, maybe you can humor me and say this all together too. (Laughter) Right. All together now. Everybody: I am my connectome. SS: That sounded great. You know, you guys are so great, you don't even know what a connectome is, and you're willing to play along with me. I could just go home now. Well, so far only one connectome is known, that of this tiny worm. Its modest nervous system consists of just 300 neurons. And in the 1970s and '80s, a team of scientists mapped all 7,000 connections between the neurons. In this diagram, every node is a neuron, and every line is a connection. This is the connectome of the worm C. elegans. Your connectome is far more complex than this because your brain contains 100 billion neurons and 10,000 times as many connections. There's a diagram like this for your brain, but there's no way it would fit on this slide. Your connectome contains one million times more connections than your genome has letters. That's a lot of information. What's in that information? We don't know for sure, but there are theories. Since the 19th century, neuroscientists have speculated that maybe your memories — the information that makes you, you — maybe your memories are stored in the connections between your brain's neurons. And perhaps other aspects of your personal identity — maybe your personality and your intellect — maybe they're also encoded in the connections between your neurons. And so now you can see why I proposed this hypothesis: I am my connectome. I didn't ask you to chant it because it's true; I just want you to remember it. And in fact, we don't know if this hypothesis is correct, because we have never had technologies powerful enough to test it. Finding that worm connectome took over a dozen years of tedious labor. And to find the connectomes of brains more like our own, we need more sophisticated technologies, that are automated, that will speed up the process of finding connectomes. And in the next few minutes, I'll tell you about some of these technologies, which are currently under development in my lab and the labs of my collaborators. Now you've probably seen pictures of neurons before. You can recognize them instantly by their fantastic shapes. They extend long and delicate branches, and in short, they look like trees. But this is just a single neuron. In order to find connectomes, we have to see all the neurons at the same time. So let's meet Bobby Kasthuri, who works in the laboratory of Jeff Lichtman at Harvard University. Bobby is holding fantastically thin slices of a mouse brain. And we're zooming in by a factor of 100,000 times to obtain the resolution, so that we can see the branches of neurons all at the same time. Except, you still may not really recognize them, and that's because we have to work in three dimensions. If we take many images of many slices of the brain and stack them up, we get a three-dimensional image. And still, you may not see the branches. So we start at the top, and we color in the cross-section of one branch in red, and we do that for the next slice and for the next slice. And we keep on doing that, slice after slice. If we continue through the entire stack, we can reconstruct the three-dimensional shape of a small fragment of a branch of a neuron. And we can do that for another neuron in green. And you can see that the green neuron touches the red neuron at two locations, and these are what are called synapses. Let's zoom in on one synapse, and keep your eyes on the interior of the green neuron. You should see small circles — these are called vesicles. They contain a molecule know as a neurotransmitter. And so when the green neuron wants to communicate, it wants to send a message to the red neuron, it spits out neurotransmitter. At the synapse, the two neurons are said to be connected like two friends talking on the telephone. So you see how to find a synapse. How can we find an entire connectome? Well, we take this three-dimensional stack of images and treat it as a gigantic three-dimensional coloring book. We color every neuron in, in a different color, and then we look through all of the images, find the synapses and note the colors of the two neurons involved in each synapse. If we can do that throughout all the images, we could find a connectome. Now, at this point, you've learned the basics of neurons and synapses. And so I think we're ready to tackle one of the most important questions in neuroscience: how are the brains of men and women different? (Laughter) According to this self-help book, guys brains are like waffles; they keep their lives compartmentalized in boxes. Girls' brains are like spaghetti; everything in their life is connected to everything else. (Laughter) You guys are laughing, but you know, this book changed my life. (Laughter) But seriously, what's wrong with this? You already know enough to tell me — what's wrong with this statement? It doesn't matter whether you're a guy or girl, everyone's brains are like spaghetti. Or maybe really, really fine capellini with branches. Just as one strand of spaghetti contacts many other strands on your plate, one neuron touches many other neurons through their entangled branches. One neuron can be connected to so many other neurons, because there can be synapses at these points of contact. By now, you might have sort of lost perspective on how large this cube of brain tissue actually is. And so let's do a series of comparisons to show you. I assure you, this is very tiny. It's just six microns on a side. So, here's how it stacks up against an entire neuron. And you can tell that, really, only the smallest fragments of branches are contained inside this cube. And a neuron, well, that's smaller than brain. And that's just a mouse brain — it's a lot smaller than a human brain. So when show my friends this, sometimes they've told me, "You know, Sebastian, you should just give up. Neuroscience is hopeless." Because if you look at a brain with your naked eye, you don't really see how complex it is, but when you use a microscope, finally the hidden complexity is revealed. In the 17th century, the mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal, wrote of his dread of the infinite, his feeling of insignificance at contemplating the vast reaches of outer space. And, as a scientist, I'm not supposed to talk about my feelings — too much information, professor. (Laughter) But may I? (Laughter) (Applause) I feel curiosity, and I feel wonder, but at times I have also felt despair. Why did I choose to study this organ that is so awesome in its complexity that it might well be infinite? It's absurd. How could we even dare to think that we might ever understand this? And yet, I persist in this quixotic endeavor. And indeed, these days I harbor new hopes. Someday, a fleet of microscopes will capture every neuron and every synapse in a vast database of images. And some day, artificially intelligent supercomputers will analyze the images without human assistance to summarize them in a connectome. I do not know, but I hope that I will live to see that day, because finding an entire human connectome is one of the greatest technological challenges of all time. It will take the work of generations to succeed. At the present time, my collaborators and I, what we're aiming for is much more modest — just to find partial connectomes of tiny chunks of mouse and human brain. But even that will be enough for the first tests of this hypothesis that I am my connectome. For now, let me try to convince you of the plausibility of this hypothesis, that it's actually worth taking seriously. As you grow during childhood and age during adulthood, your personal identity changes slowly. Likewise, every connectome changes over time. What kinds of changes happen? Well, neurons, like trees, can grow new branches, and they can lose old ones. Synapses can be created, and they can be eliminated. And synapses can grow larger, and they can grow smaller. Second question: what causes these changes? Well, it's true. To some extent, they are programmed by your genes. But that's not the whole story, because there are signals, electrical signals, that travel along the branches of neurons and chemical signals that jump across from branch to branch. These signals are called neural activity. And there's a lot of evidence that neural activity is encoding our thoughts, feelings and perceptions, our mental experiences. And there's a lot of evidence that neural activity can cause your connections to change. And if you put those two facts together, it means that your experiences can change your connectome. And that's why every connectome is unique, even those of genetically identical twins. The connectome is where nature meets nurture. And it might true that just the mere act of thinking can change your connectome — an idea that you may find empowering. What's in this picture? A cool and refreshing stream of water, you say. What else is in this picture? Do not forget that groove in the Earth called the stream bed. Without it, the water would not know in which direction to flow. And with the stream, I would like to propose a metaphor for the relationship between neural activity and connectivity. Neural activity is constantly changing. It's like the water of the stream; it never sits still. The connections of the brain's neural network determines the pathways along which neural activity flows. And so the connectome is like bed of the stream; but the metaphor is richer than that, because it's true that the stream bed guides the flow of the water, but over long timescales, the water also reshapes the bed of the stream. And as I told you just now, neural activity can change the connectome. And if you'll allow me to ascend to metaphorical heights, I will remind you that neural activity is the physical basis — or so neuroscientists think — of thoughts, feelings and perceptions. And so we might even speak of the stream of consciousness. Neural activity is its water, and the connectome is its bed. So let's return from the heights of metaphor and return to science. Suppose our technologies for finding connectomes actually work. How will we go about testing the hypothesis "I am my connectome?" Well, I propose a direct test. Let us attempt to read out memories from connectomes. Consider the memory of long temporal sequences of movements, like a pianist playing a Beethoven sonata. According to a theory that dates back to the 19th century, such memories are stored as chains of synaptic connections inside your brain. Because, if the first neurons in the chain are activated, through their synapses they send messages to the second neurons, which are activated, and so on down the line, like a chain of falling dominoes. And this sequence of neural activation is hypothesized to be the neural basis of those sequence of movements. So one way of trying to test the theory is to look for such chains inside connectomes. But it won't be easy, because they're not going to look like this. They're going to be scrambled up. So we'll have to use our computers to try to unscramble the chain. And if we can do that, the sequence of the neurons we recover from that unscrambling will be a prediction of the pattern of neural activity that is replayed in the brain during memory recall. And if that were successful, that would be the first example of reading a memory from a connectome. (Laughter) What a mess — have you ever tried to wire up a system as complex as this? I hope not. But if you have, you know it's very easy to make a mistake. The branches of neurons are like the wires of the brain. Can anyone guess: what's the total length of wires in your brain? I'll give you a hint. It's a big number. (Laughter) I estimate, millions of miles, all packed in your skull. And if you appreciate that number, you can easily see there is huge potential for mis-wiring of the brain. And indeed, the popular press loves headlines like, "Anorexic brains are wired differently," or "Autistic brains are wired differently." These are plausible claims, but in truth, we can't see the brain's wiring clearly enough to tell if these are really true. And so the technologies for seeing connectomes will allow us to finally read mis-wiring of the brain, to see mental disorders in connectomes. Sometimes the best way to test a hypothesis is to consider its most extreme implication. Philosophers know this game very well. If you believe that I am my connectome, I think you must also accept the idea that death is the destruction of your connectome. I mention this because there are prophets today who claim that technology will fundamentally alter the human condition and perhaps even transform the human species. One of their most cherished dreams is to cheat death by that practice known as cryonics. If you pay 100,000 dollars, you can arrange to have your body frozen after death and stored in liquid nitrogen in one of these tanks in an Arizona warehouse, awaiting a future civilization that is advanced to resurrect you. Should we ridicule the modern seekers of immortality, calling them fools? Or will they someday chuckle over our graves? I don't know — I prefer to test their beliefs, scientifically. I propose that we attempt to find a connectome of a frozen brain. We know that damage to the brain occurs after death and during freezing. The question is: has that damage erased the connectome? If it has, there is no way that any future civilization will be able to recover the memories of these frozen brains. Resurrection might succeed for the body, but not for the mind. On the other hand, if the connectome is still intact, we cannot ridicule the claims of cryonics so easily. I've described a quest that begins in the world of the very small, and propels us to the world of the far future. Connectomes will mark a turning point in human history. As we evolved from our ape-like ancestors on the African savanna, what distinguished us was our larger brains. We have used our brains to fashion ever more amazing technologies. Eventually, these technologies will become so powerful that we will use them to know ourselves by deconstructing and reconstructing our own brains. I believe that this voyage of self-discovery is not just for scientists, but for all of us. And I'm grateful for the opportunity to share this voyage with you today. Thank you. (Applause) |
Bringing peace to the minds of Afghanistan | {0: 'By building psychosocial care into the primary health care system in Afghanistan, Inge Missmahl offers hope to a society traumatized by decades of conflict and insecurity.'} | TEDGlobal 2010 | So I want to tell you a story — an encouraging story — about addressing desperation, depression and despair in Afghanistan, and what we have learned from it, and how to help people to overcome traumatic experiences and how to help them to regain some confidence in the time ahead — in the future — and how to participate again in everyday life. So, I am a Jungian psychoanalyst, and I went to Afghanistan in January 2004, by chance, on an assignment for Medica Mondiale. Jung in Afghanistan — you get the picture. Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world, and 70 percent of the people are illiterate. War and malnutrition kills people together with hope. You may know this from the media, but what you may not know is that the average age of the Afghan people is 17 years old, which means they grow up in such an environment and — I repeat myself — in 30 years of war. So this translates into ongoing violence, foreign interests, bribery, drugs, ethnic conflicts, bad health, shame, fear and cumulative traumatic experiences. Local and foreign military are supposed to build peace together with the donors and the governmental and non-governmental organizations. And people had hope, yes, but until they realized their situation worsens every day — either because they are being killed or because, somehow, they are poorer than eight years ago. One figure for that: 54 percent of the children under the age of five years suffer from malnutrition. Yet, there is hope. One day a man told me, "My future does not look brilliant, but I want to have a brilliant future for my son." This is a picture I took in 2005, walking on Fridays over the hills in Kabul, and for me it's a symbolic picture of an open future for a young generation. So, doctors prescribe medication. And donors are supposed to bring peace by building schools and roads. Military collect weapons, and depression stays intact. Why? Because people don't have tools to cope with it, to get over it. So, soon after my arrival, I had confirmed something which I had already known; that my instruments come from the heart of modern Europe, yes. However, what can wound us and our reaction to those wounds — they are universal. And the big challenge was how to understand the meaning of the symptom in this specific cultural context. After a counseling session, a woman said to me, "Because you have felt me, I can feel myself again, and I want to participate again in my family life." This was very important, because the family is central in Afghans' social system. No one can survive alone. And if people feel used, worthless and ashamed, because something horrible has happened to them, then they retreat, and they fall into social isolation, and they do not dare to tell this evil to other people or to their loved ones, because they do not want to burden them. And very often violence is a way to cope with it. Traumatized people also easily lose control — symptoms are hyper-arousal and memory flashbacks — so people are in a constant fear that those horrible feelings of that traumatic event might come back unexpectedly, suddenly, and they cannot control it. To compensate this loss of inner control, they try to control the outside, very understandably — mostly the family — and unfortunately, this fits very well into the traditional side, regressive side, repressive side, restrictive side of the cultural context. So, husbands start beating wives, mothers and fathers beat their children, and afterward, they feel awful. They did not want to do this, it just happened — they lost control. The desperate try to restore order and normality, and if we are not able to cut this circle of violence, it will be transferred to the next generation without a doubt. And partly this is already happening. So everybody needs a sense for the future, and the Afghan sense of the future is shattered. But let me repeat the words of the woman. "Because you have felt me, I can feel myself again." So the key here is empathy. Somebody has to be a witness to what has happened to you. Somebody has to feel how you felt. And somebody has to see you and listen to you. Everybody must be able to know what he or she has experienced is true, and this only goes with another person. So everybody must be able to say, "This happened to me, and it did this with me, but I'm able to live with it, to cope with it, and to learn from it. And I want to engage myself in the bright future for my children and the children of my children, and I will not marry-off my 13 year-old daughter," — what happens too often in Afghanistan. So something can be done, even in such extreme environments as Afghanistan. And I started thinking about a counseling program. But, of course, I needed help and funds. And one evening, I was sitting next to a very nice gentleman in Kabul, and he asked what I thought would be good in Afghanistan. And I explained to him quickly, I would train psycho-social counselors, I would open centers, and I explained to him why. This man gave me his contact details at the end of the evening and said, "If you want to do this, call me." At that time, it was the head of Caritas Germany. So, I was able to launch a three-year project with Caritas Germany, and we trained 30 Afghan women and men, and we opened 15 counseling centers in Kabul. This was our sign — it's hand-painted, and we had 45 all over Kabul. Eleven thousand people came — more than that. And 70 percent regained their lives. This was a very exciting time, developing this with my wonderful Afghan team. And they are working with me up to today. We developed a culturally-sensitive psycho-social counseling approach. So, from 2008 up until today, a substantial change and step forward has been taking place. The European Union delegation in Kabul came into this and hired me to work inside the Ministry of Public Health, to lobby this approach — we succeeded. We revised the mental health component of the primary health care services by adding psycho-social care and psycho-social counselors to the system. This means, certainly, to retrain all health staff. But for that, we already have the training manuals, which are approved by the Ministry and moreover, this approach is now part of the mental health strategy in Afghanistan. So we also have implemented it already in some selected clinics in three provinces, and you are the first to see the results. We wanted to know if what is being done is effective. And here you can see the patients all had symptoms of depression, moderate and severe. And the red line is the treatment as usual — medication with a medical doctor. And all the symptoms stayed the same or even got worse. And the green line is treatment with psycho-social counseling only, without medication. And you can see the symptoms almost completely go away, and the psycho-social stress has dropped significantly, which is explicable, because you cannot take away the psycho-social stresses, but you can learn how to cope with them. So this makes us very happy, because now we also have some evidence that this is working. So here you see, this is a health facility in Northern Afghanistan, and every morning it looks like this all over. And doctors usually have three to six minutes for the patients, but now this will change. They go to the clinics, because they want to cure their immediate symptoms, and they will find somebody to talk to and discuss these issues and talk about what is burdening them and find solutions, develop their resources, learn tools to solve their family conflicts and gain some confidence in the future. And I would like to share one short vignette. One Hazara said to his Pashtun counselor, "If we were to have met some years ago, then we would have killed each other. And now you are helping me to regain some confidence in the future." And another counselor said to me after the training, "You know, I never knew why I survived the killings in my village, but now I know, because I am part of a nucleus of a new peaceful society in Afghanistan." So I believe this kept me running. And this is a really emancipatory and political contribution to peace and reconciliation. And also — I think — without psycho-social therapy, and without considering this in all humanitarian projects, we cannot build-up civil societies. I thought it was an idea worth spreading, and I think it must be, can be, could be replicated elsewhere. I thank you for your attention. (Applause) |
How Mr. Condom made Thailand a better place for life and love | {0: 'Since 1974, Mechai Viravaidya has been creating and running innovative family planning and poverty reduction programs throughout Southeast Asia. '} | TEDxChange | Welcome to Thailand. Now, when I was a young man — 40 years ago, the country was very, very poor with lots and lots and lots of people living in poverty. We decided to do something about it, but we didn't begin with a welfare program or a poverty reduction program. But we began with a family-planning program, following a very successful maternal child health activity, sets of activities. So basically, no one would accept family planning if their children didn't survive. So the first step: get to the children, get to the mothers, and then follow up with family planning. Not just child mortality alone, you need also family planning. Now let me take you back as to why we needed to do it. In my country, that was the case in 1974. Seven children per family — tremendous growth at 3.3 percent. There was just no future. We needed to reduce the population growth rate. So we said, "Let's do it." The women said, "We agree. We'll use pills, but we need a doctor to prescribe the pills," and we had very, very few doctors. We didn't take no as an answer; we took no as a question. We went to the nurses and the midwives, who were also women, and did a fantastic job at explaining how to use the pill. That was wonderful, but it covered only 20 percent of the country. What do we do for the other 80 percent — leave them alone and say, "Well, they're not medical personnel." No, we decided to do a bit more. So we went to the ordinary people that you saw. Actually, below that yellow sign — I wish they hadn't wiped that, because there was "Coca-Cola" there. We were so much bigger than Coca-Cola in those days. And no difference, the people they chose were the people we chose. They were well-known in the community, they knew that customers were always right, and they were terrific, and they practiced their family planning themselves. So they could supply pills and condoms throughout the country, in every village of the country. So there we are. We went to the people who were seen as the cause of the problem to be the solution. Wherever there were people — and you can see boats with the women, selling things — here's the floating market selling bananas and crabs and also contraceptives — wherever you find people, you'll find contraceptives in Thailand. And then we decided, why not get to religion because in the Philippines, the Catholic Church was pretty strong, and Thai people were Buddhist. We went to them and they said, "Look, could you help us?" I'm there — the one in blue, not the yellow — holding a bowl of holy water for the monk to sprinkle holy water on pills and condoms for the sanctity of the family. And this picture was sent throughout the country. So some of the monks in the villages were doing the same thing themselves. And the women were saying, "No wonder we have no side-effects. It's been blessed." That was their perception. And then we went to teachers. You need everybody to be involved in trying to provide whatever it is that make humanity a better place. So we went to the teachers. Over a quarter of a million were taught about family planning with a new alphabet — A, B for birth, C for condom, I for IUD, V for vasectomy. And then we had a snakes and ladders game, where you throw dice. If you land on anything pro-family planning, you move ahead. Like, "Mother takes the pill every night. Very good, mother. Move ahead. Uncle buys a condom. Very good, uncle. Move ahead. Uncle gets drunk, doesn't use condom. Come back, start again." (Laughter) Again, education, class entertainment. And the kids were doing it in school too. We had relay races with condoms, we had children's condom-blowing championship. And before long, the condom was know as the girl's best friend. In Thailand, for poor people, diamonds don't make it — so the condom is the girl's best friend. We introduced our first microcredit program in 1975, and the women who organized it said, "We only want to lend to women who practice family planning. If you're pregnant, take care of your pregnancy. If you're not pregnant, you can take a loan out from us." And that was run by them. And after 35/36 years, it's still going on. It's a part of the Village Development Bank; it's not a real bank, but it's a fund — microcredit. And we didn't need a big organization to run it — it was run by the villagers themselves. And you probably hardly see a Thai man there, it's always women, women, women, women. And then we thought we'd help America, because America's been helping everyone, whether they want help or not. (Laughter) And this is on the Fourth of July. We decided to provide vasectomy to all men, but in particular, American men to the front of the queue, right up to the Ambassador's residence during his vin d'honneur. And the hotel gave us the ballroom for it — very appropriate room. (Laughter) And since it was near lunch time, they said, "All right, we'll give you some lunch. Of course, it must be American cola. You get two brands, Coke and Pepsi. And then the food is either hamburger or hotdog." And I thought a hotdog will be more symbolic. (Laughter) And here is this, then, young man called Willy Bohm who worked for the USAID. Obviously, he's had his vasectomy because his hotdog is half eaten, and he was very happy. It made a lot of news in America, and it angered some people also. I said, "Don't worry. Come over and I'll do the whole lot of you." (Laughter) And what happened? In all this thing, from seven children to 1.5 children, population growth rate of 3.3 to 0.5. You could call it the Coca-Cola approach if you like — it was exactly the same thing. I'm not sure whether Coca-Cola followed us, or we followed Coca-Cola, but we're good friends. And so that's the case of everyone joining in. We didn't have a strong government. We didn't have lots of doctors. But it's everybody's job who can change attitude and behavior. Then AIDS came along and hit Thailand, and we had to stop doing a lot of good things to fight AIDS. But unfortunately, the government was in denial, denial, denial. So our work wasn't affected. So I thought, "Well, if you can't go to the government, go to the military." So I went to the military and asked to borrow 300 radio stations. They have more than the government, and they've got more guns than the government. So I asked them, could they help us in our fight against HIV. And after I gave them statistics, they said, "Yes. Okay. You can use all the radio stations, television stations." And that's when we went onto the airwaves. And then we got a new prime minister soon after that. And he said, "Mechai, could you come and join?" He asked me in because he liked my wife a lot. So I said, "Okay." He became the chairman of the National AIDS Committee and increased the budget fifty-fold. Every ministry, even judges, had to be involved in AIDS education — everyone — and we said the public, institutions, religious institutions, schools — everyone was involved. And here, every media person had to be trained for HIV. And we gave every station half a minute extra for advertising to earn more money. So they were happy with that. And then AIDS education in all schools, starting from university. And these are high school kids teaching high school kids. And the best teachers were the girls, not the boys, and they were terrific. And these girls who go around teaching about safe sex and HIV were known as Mother Theresa. And then we went down one more step. These are primary school kids — third, fourth grade — going to every household in the village, every household in the whole of Thailand, giving AIDS information and a condom to every household, given by these young kids. And no parents objected, because we were trying to save lives, and this was a lifesaver. And we said, "Everyone needs to be involved." So you have the companies also realizing that sick staff don't work, and dead customers don't buy. So they all trained. And then we have this Captain Condom, with his Harvard MBA, going to schools and night spots. And they loved him. You need a symbol of something. In every country, every program, you need a symbol, and this is probably the best thing he's ever done with his MBA. (Laughter) And then we gave condoms out everywhere on the streets — everywhere, everywhere. In taxis, you get condoms. And also, in traffic, the policemen give you condoms — our "cops and rubbers" programs. (Laughter) So, can you imagine New York policemen giving out condoms? Of course I can. And they'd enjoy it immensely; I see them standing around right now, everywhere. Imagine if they had condoms, giving out to all sorts of people. And then, new change, we had hair bands, clothing and the condom for your mobile phone during the rainy season. (Laughter) And these were the condoms that we introduced. One says, "Weapon of mass protection." We found — you know — somebody here was searching for the weapon of mass destruction, but we have found the weapon of mass protection: the condom. And then it says here, with the American flag, "Don't leave home without it." But I have some to give out afterward. But let me warn you, these are Thai-sized, so be very careful. (Laughter) And so you can see that condoms can do so many things. Look at this — I gave this to Al Gore and to Bill Senior also. Stop global warming; use condoms. And then this is the picture I mentioned to you — the weapon of mass protection. And let the next Olympics save some lives. Why just run around? (Laughter) And then finally, in Thailand we're Buddhist, we don't have a God, so instead, we say, "In rubber we trust." (Laughter) So you can see that we added everything to our endeavor to make life better for the people. We had condoms in all the refrigerators in the hotels and the schools, because alcohol impairs judgment. And then what happened? After all this time, everybody joined in. According to the U.N., new cases of HIV declined by 90 percent, and according to the World Bank, 7.7 million lives were saved. Otherwise there wouldn't be many Thais walking around today. So it just showed you, you could do something about it. 90 percent of the funding came from Thailand. There was political commitment, some financial commitment, and everybody joined in the fight. So just don't leave it to the specialists and doctors and nurses. We all need to help. And then we decided to help people out of poverty, now that we got AIDS somewhat out of the way — this time, not with government alone, but in cooperation with the business community. Because poor people are business people who lack business skills and access to credit. Those are the things to be provided by the business community. We're trying to turn them into barefoot entrepreneurs, little business people. The only way out of poverty is through business enterprise. So, that was done. The money goes from the company into the village via tree-planting. It's not a free gift. They plant the trees, and the money goes into their microcredit fund, which we call the Village Development Bank. Everybody joins in, and they feel they own the bank, because they have brought the money in. And before you can borrow the money, you need to be trained. And we believe if you want to help the poor, those who are living in poverty, access to credit must be a human right. Access to credit must be a human right. Otherwise they'll never get out of poverty. And then before getting a loan, you must be trained. Here's what we call a "barefoot MBA," teaching people how to do business so that, when they borrow money, they'll succeed with the business. These are some of the businesses: mushrooms, crabs, vegetables, trees, fruits, and this is very interesting — Nike ice cream and Nike biscuits; this is a village sponsored by Nike. They said, "They should stop making shoes and clothes. Make these better, because we can afford them." And then we have silk, Thai silk. Now we're making Scottish tartans, as you can see on the left, to sell to all people of Scottish ancestors. So anyone sitting in and watching TV, get in touch with me. And then this is our answer to Starbucks in Thailand — "Coffee and Condoms." See, Starbucks you awake, we keep you awake and alive. That's the difference. Can you imagine, at every Starbucks that you can also get condoms? You can order your condoms with your with your cappuccino. And then now, finally in education, we want to change the school as being underutilized into a place where it's a lifelong learning center for everyone. We call this our School-Based Integrated Rural Development. And it's a center, a focal point for economic and social development. Re-do the school, make it serve the community needs. And here is a bamboo building — all of them are bamboo. This is a geodesic dome made of bamboo. And I'm sure Buckminster Fuller would be very, very proud to see a bamboo geodesic dome. And we use vegetables around the school ground, so they raise their own vegetables. And then, finally, I firmly believe, if we want the MDGs to work — the Millennium Development Goals — we need to add family planning to it. Of course, child mortality first and then family planning — everyone needs family planning service — it's underutilized. So we have now found the weapon of mass protection. And we also ask the next Olympics to be involved in saving lives. And then, finally, that is our network. And these are our Thai tulips. (Laughter) Thank you very much indeed. (Applause) |
Are mushrooms the new plastic? | {0: "Eben Bayer is co-inventor of MycoBond, an organic (really -- it's based on mycelium, a living, growing organism) adhesive that turns agriwaste into a foam-like material for packaging and insulation."} | TEDGlobal 2010 | So, I'd like to spend a few minutes with you folks today imagining what our planet might look like in a thousand years. But before I do that, I need to talk to you about synthetic materials like plastics, which require huge amounts of energy to create and, because of their disposal issues, are slowly poisoning our planet. I also want to tell you and share with you how my team and I have been using mushrooms over the last three years. Not like that. (Laughter) We're using mushrooms to create an entirely new class of materials, which perform a lot like plastics during their use, but are made from crop waste and are totally compostable at the end of their lives. (Cheering) But first, I need to talk to you about what I consider one of the most egregious offenders in the disposable plastics category. This is a material you all know is Styrofoam, but I like to think of it as toxic white stuff. In a single cubic foot of this material — about what would come around your computer or large television — you have the same energy content of about a liter and a half of petrol. Yet, after just a few weeks of use, you'll throw this material in the trash. And this isn't just found in packaging. 20 billion dollars of this material is produced every year, in everything from building materials to surfboards to coffee cups to table tops. And that's not the only place it's found. The EPA estimates, in the United States, by volume, this material occupies 25 percent of our landfills. Even worse is when it finds its way into our natural environment — on the side of the road or next to a river. If it's not picked up by a human, like me and you, it'll stay there for thousands and thousands of years. Perhaps even worse is when it finds its way into our oceans, like in the great plastic gyre, where these materials are being mechanically broken into smaller and smaller bits, but they're not really going away. They're not biologically compatible. They're basically fouling up Earth's respiratory and circulatory systems. And because these materials are so prolific, because they're found in so many places, there's one other place you'll find this material, styrene, which is made from benzene, a known carcinogen. You'll find it inside of you. So, for all these reasons, I think we need better materials, and there are three key principles we can use to guide these materials. The first is feedstocks. Today, we use a single feedstock, petroleum, to heat our homes, power our cars and make most of the materials you see around you. We recognize this is a finite resource, and it's simply crazy to do this, to put a liter and a half of petrol in the trash every time you get a package. Second of all, we should really strive to use far less energy in creating these materials. I say far less, because 10 percent isn't going to cut it. We should be talking about half, a quarter, one-tenth the energy content. And lastly, and I think perhaps most importantly, we should be creating materials that fit into what I call nature's recycling system. This recycling system has been in place for the last billion years. I fit into it, you fit into it, and a hundred years tops, my body can return to the Earth with no preprocessing. Yet that packaging I got in the mail yesterday is going to last for thousands of years. This is crazy. But nature provides us with a really good model here. When a tree's done using its leaves — its solar collectors, these amazing molecular photon capturing devices — at the end of a season, it doesn't pack them up, take them to the leaf reprocessing center and have them melted down to form new leaves. It just drops them, the shortest distance possible, to the forest floor, where they're actually upcycled into next year's topsoil. And this gets us back to the mushrooms. Because in nature, mushrooms are the recycling system. And what we've discovered is, by using a part of the mushroom you've probably never seen — analogous to its root structure; it's called mycelium — we can actually grow materials with many of the same properties of conventional synthetics. Now, mycelium is an amazing material, because it's a self-assembling material. It actually takes things we would consider waste — things like seed husks or woody biomass — and can transform them into a chitinous polymer, which you can form into almost any shape. In our process, we basically use it as a glue. And by using mycelium as a glue, you can mold things just like you do in the plastic industry, and you can create materials with many different properties, materials that are insulating, fire-resistant, moisture-resistant, vapor-resistant — materials that can absorb impacts, that can absorb acoustical impacts. But these materials are grown from agricultural byproducts, not petroleum. And because they're made of natural materials, they are 100 percent compostable in you own backyard. So I'd like to share with you the four basic steps required to make these materials. The first is selecting a feedstock, preferably something that's regional, that's in your area, right — local manufacturing. The next is actually taking this feedstock and putting in a tool, physically filling an enclosure, a mold, in whatever shape you want to get. Then you actually grow the mycelium through these particles, and that's where the magic happens, because the organism is doing the work in this process, not the equipment. The final step is, of course, the product, whether it's a packaging material, a table top, or building block. Our vision is local manufacturing, like the local food movement, for production. So we've created formulations for all around the world using regional byproducts. If you're in China, you might use a rice husk or a cottonseed hull. If you're in Northern Europe or North America, you can use things like buckwheat husks or oat hulls. We then process these husks with some basic equipment. And I want to share with you a quick video from our facility that gives you a sense of how this looks at scale. So what you're seeing here is actually cotton hulls from Texas, in this case. It's a waste product. And what they're doing in our equipment is going through a continuous system, which cleans, cooks, cools and pasteurizes these materials, while also continuously inoculating them with our mycelium. This gives us a continuous stream of material that we can put into almost any shape, though today we're making corner blocks. And it's when this lid goes on the part, that the magic really starts. Because the manufacturing process is our organism. It'll actually begin to digest these wastes and, over the next five days, assemble them into biocomposites. Our entire facility is comprised of thousands and thousands and thousands of these tools sitting indoors in the dark, quietly self-assembling materials — and everything from building materials to, in this case, a packaging corner block. So I've said a number of times that we grow materials. And it's kind of hard to picture how that happens. So my team has taken five days-worth of growth, a typical growth cycle for us, and condensed it into a 15-second time lapse. And I want you to really watch closely these little white dots on the screen, because, over the five-day period, what they do is extend out and through this material, using the energy that's contained in these seed husks to build this chitinous polymer matrix. This matrix self-assembles, growing through and around the particles, making millions and millions of tiny fibers. And what parts of the seed husk we don't digest, actually become part of the final, physical composite. So in front of your eyes, this part just self-assembled. It actually takes a little longer. It takes five days. But it's much faster than conventional farming. The last step, of course, is application. In this case, we've grown a corner block. A major Fortune 500 furniture maker uses these corner blocks to protect their tables in shipment. They used to use a plastic packaging buffer, but we were able to give them the exact same physical performance with our grown material. Best of all, when it gets to the customer, it's not trash. They can actually put this in their natural ecosystem without any processing, and it's going to improve the local soil. So, why mycelium? The first reason is local open feedstocks. You want to be able to do this anywhere in the world and not worry about peak rice hull or peak cottonseed hulls, because you have multiple choices. The next is self-assembly, because the organism is actually doing most of the work in this process. You don't need a lot of equipment to set up a production facility. So you can have lots of small facilities spread all across the world. Biological yield is really important. And because 100 percent of what we put in the tool become the final product, even the parts that aren't digested become part of the structure, we're getting incredible yield rates. Natural polymers, well ... I think that's what's most important, because these polymers have been tried and tested in our ecosystem for the last billion years, in everything from mushrooms to crustaceans. They're not going to clog up Earth's ecosystems. They work great. And while, today, we can practically guarantee that yesterday's packaging is going to be here in 10,000 years, what I want to guarantee is that in 10,000 years, our descendants, our children's children, will be living happily and in harmony with a healthy Earth. And I think that can be some really good news. Thank you. (Applause) |
An economic reality check | {0: 'Tim Jackson is a British ecological economist and professor for sustainable development at the University of Surrey. He is the author of "Prosperity without Growth" and director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity.'} | TEDGlobal 2010 | I want to talk to you today about prosperity, about our hopes for a shared and lasting prosperity. And not just us, but the two billion people worldwide who are still chronically undernourished. And hope actually is at the heart of this. In fact, the Latin word for hope is at the heart of the word prosperity. "Pro-speras," "speras," hope — in accordance with our hopes and expectations. The irony is, though, that we have cashed-out prosperity almost literally in terms of money and economic growth. And we've grown our economies so much that we now stand in a real danger of undermining hope — running down resources, cutting down rainforests, spilling oil into the Gulf of Mexico, changing the climate — and the only thing that has actually remotely slowed down the relentless rise of carbon emissions over the last two to three decades is recession. And recession, of course, isn't exactly a recipe for hope either, as we're busy finding out. So we're caught in a kind of trap. It's a dilemma, a dilemma of growth. We can't live with it; we can't live without it. Trash the system or crash the planet — it's a tough choice; it isn't much of a choice. And our best avenue of escape from this actually is a kind of blind faith in our own cleverness and technology and efficiency and doing things more efficiently. Now I haven't got anything against efficiency. And I think we are a clever species sometimes. But I think we should also just check the numbers, take a reality check here. So I want you to imagine a world, in 2050, of around nine billion people, all aspiring to Western incomes, Western lifestyles. And I want to ask the question — and we'll give them that two percent hike in income, in salary each year as well, because we believe in growth. And I want to ask the question: how far and how fast would be have to move? How clever would we have to be? How much technology would we need in this world to deliver our carbon targets? And here in my chart — on the left-hand side is where we are now. This is the carbon intensity of economic growth in the economy at the moment. It's around about 770 grams of carbon. In the world I describe to you, we have to be right over here at the right-hand side at six grams of carbon. It's a 130-fold improvement, and that is 10 times further and faster than anything we've ever achieved in industrial history. Maybe we can do it, maybe it's possible — who knows? Maybe we can even go further and get an economy that pulls carbon out of the atmosphere, which is what we're going to need to be doing by the end of the century. But shouldn't we just check first that the economic system that we have is remotely capable of delivering this kind of improvement? So I want to just spend a couple of minutes on system dynamics. It's a bit complex, and I apologize for that. What I'll try and do, is I'll try and paraphrase it is sort of human terms. So it looks a little bit like this. Firms produce goods for households — that's us — and provide us with incomes, and that's even better, because we can spend those incomes on more goods and services. That's called the circular flow of the economy. It looks harmless enough. I just want to highlight one key feature of this system, which is the role of investment. Now investment constitutes only about a fifth of the national income in most modern economies, but it plays an absolutely vital role. And what it does essentially is to stimulate further consumption growth. It does this in a couple of ways — chasing productivity, which drives down prices and encourages us to buy more stuff. But I want to concentrate on the role of investment in seeking out novelty, the production and consumption of novelty. Joseph Schumpeter called this "the process of creative destruction." It's a process of the production and reproduction of novelty, continually chasing expanding consumer markets, consumer goods, new consumer goods. And this, this is where it gets interesting, because it turns out that human beings have something of an appetite for novelty. We love new stuff — new material stuff for sure — but also new ideas, new adventures, new experiences. But the materiality matters too, because in every society that anthropologists have looked at, material stuff operates as a kind of language — a language of goods, a symbolic language that we use to tell each other stories — stories, for example, about how important we are. Status-driven, conspicuous consumption thrives from the language of novelty. And here, all of a sudden, we have a system that is locking economic structure with social logic — the economic institutions, and who we are as people, locked together to drive an engine of growth. And this engine is not just economic value; it is pulling material resources relentlessly through the system, driven by our own insatiable appetites, driven in fact by a sense of anxiety. Adam Smith, 200 years ago, spoke about our desire for a life without shame. A life without shame: in his day, what that meant was a linen shirt, and today, well, you still need the shirt, but you need the hybrid car, the HDTV, two holidays a year in the sun, the netbook and iPad, the list goes on — an almost inexhaustible supply of goods, driven by this anxiety. And even if we don't want them, we need to buy them, because, if we don't buy them, the system crashes. And to stop it crashing over the last two to three decades, we've expanded the money supply, expanded credit and debt, so that people can keep buying stuff. And of course, that expansion was deeply implicated in the crisis. But this — I just want to show you some data here. This is what it looks like, essentially, this credit and debt system, just for the U.K. This was the last 15 years before the crash, and you can see there, consumer debt rose dramatically. It was above the GDP for three years in a row just before the crisis. And in the mean time, personal savings absolutely plummeted. The savings ratio, net savings, were below zero in the middle of 2008, just before the crash. This is people expanding debt, drawing down their savings, just to stay in the game. This is a strange, rather perverse, story, just to put it in very simple terms. It's a story about us, people, being persuaded to spend money we don't have on things we don't need to create impressions that won't last on people we don't care about. (Laughter) (Applause) But before we consign ourselves to despair, maybe we should just go back and say, "Did we get this right? Is this really how people are? Is this really how economies behave?" And almost straightaway we actually run up against a couple of anomalies. The first one is in the crisis itself. In the crisis, in the recession, what do people want to do? They want to hunker down, they want to look to the future. They want to spend less and save more. But saving is exactly the wrong thing to do from the system point of view. Keynes called this the "paradox of thrift" — saving slows down recovery. And politicians call on us continually to draw down more debt, to draw down our own savings even further, just so that we can get the show back on the road, so we can keep this growth-based economy going. It's an anomaly, it's a place where the system actually is at odds with who we are as people. Here's another one — completely different one: Why is it that we don't do the blindingly obvious things we should do to combat climate change, very, very simple things like buying energy-efficient appliances, putting in efficient lights, turning the lights off occasionally, insulating our homes? These things save carbon, they save energy, they save us money. So is it that, though they make perfect economic sense, we don't do them? Well, I had my own personal insight into this a few years ago. It was a Sunday evening, Sunday afternoon, and it was just after — actually, to be honest, too long after — we had moved into a new house. And I had finally got around to doing some draft stripping, installing insulation around the windows and doors to keep out the drafts. And my, then, five year-old daughter was helping me in the way that five year-olds do. And we'd been doing this for a while, when she turned to me very solemnly and said, "Will this really keep out the giraffes?" (Laughter) "Here they are, the giraffes." You can hear the five-year-old mind working. These ones, interestingly, are 400 miles north of here outside Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria. Goodness knows what they make of the Lake District weather. But actually that childish misrepresentation stuck with me, because it suddenly became clear to me why we don't do the blindingly obvious things. We're too busy keeping out the giraffes — putting the kids on the bus in the morning, getting ourselves to work on time, surviving email overload and shop floor politics, foraging for groceries, throwing together meals, escaping for a couple of precious hours in the evening into prime-time TV or TED online, getting from one end of the day to the other, keeping out the giraffes. (Laughter) What is the objective? "What is the objective of the consumer?" Mary Douglas asked in an essay on poverty written 35 years ago. "It is," she said, "to help create the social world and find a credible place in it." That is a deeply humanizing vision of our lives, and it's a completely different vision than the one that lies at the heart of this economic model. So who are we? Who are these people? Are we these novelty-seeking, hedonistic, selfish individuals? Or might we actually occasionally be something like the selfless altruist depicted in Rembrandt's lovely, lovely sketch here? Well psychology actually says there is a tension — a tension between self-regarding behaviors and other regarding behaviors. And these tensions have deep evolutionary roots, so selfish behavior is adaptive in certain circumstances — fight or flight. But other regarding behaviors are essential to our evolution as social beings. And perhaps even more interesting from our point of view, another tension between novelty-seeking behaviors and tradition or conservation. Novelty is adaptive when things are changing and you need to adapt yourself. Tradition is essential to lay down the stability to raise families and form cohesive social groups. So here, all of a sudden, we're looking at a map of the human heart. And it reveals to us, suddenly, the crux of the matter. What we've done is we've created economies. We've created systems, which systematically privilege, encourage, one narrow quadrant of the human soul and left the others unregarded. And in the same token, the solution becomes clear, because this isn't, therefore, about changing human nature. It isn't, in fact, about curtailing possibilities. It is about opening up. It is about allowing ourselves the freedom to become fully human, recognizing the depth and the breadth of the human psyche and building institutions to protect Rembrandt's fragile altruist within. What does all this mean for economics? What would economies look like if we took that vision of human nature at their heart and stretched them along these orthogonal dimensions of the human psyche? Well, it might look a little bit like the 4,000 community-interest companies that have sprung up in the U.K. over the last five years and a similar rise in B corporations in the United States, enterprises that have ecological and social goals written into their constitution at their heart — companies, in fact, like this one, Ecosia. And I just want to, very quickly, show you this. Ecosia is an Internet search engine. Internet search engines work by drawing revenues from sponsored links that appear when you do a search. And Ecosia works in pretty much the same way. So we can do that here — we can just put in a little search term. There you go, Oxford, that's where we are. See what comes up. The difference with Ecosia though is that, in Ecosia's case, it draws the revenues in the same way, but it allocates 80 percent of those revenues to a rainforest protection project in the Amazon. And we're going to do it. We're just going to click on Naturejobs.uk. In case anyone out there is looking for a job in a recession, that's the page to go to. And what happened then was the sponsor gave revenues to Ecosia, and Ecosia is giving 80 percent of those revenues to a rainforest protection project. It's taking profits from one place and allocating them into the protection of ecological resources. It's a different kind of enterprise for a new economy. It's a form, if you like, of ecological altruism — perhaps something along those lines. Maybe it's that. Whatever it is, whatever this new economy is, what we need the economy to do, in fact, is to put investment back into the heart of the model, to re-conceive investment. Only now, investment isn't going to be about the relentless and mindless pursuit of consumption growth. Investment has to be a different beast. Investment has to be, in the new economy, protecting and nurturing the ecological assets on which our future depends. It has to be about transition. It has to be investing in low-carbon technologies and infrastructures. We have to invest, in fact, in the idea of a meaningful prosperity, providing capabilities for people to flourish. And of course, this task has material dimensions. It would be nonsense to talk about people flourishing if they didn't have food, clothing and shelter. But it's also clear that prosperity goes beyond this. It has social and psychological aims — family, friendship, commitments, society, participating in the life of that society. And this too requires investment, investment — for example, in places — places where we can connect, places where we can participate, shared spaces, concert halls, gardens, public parks, libraries, museums, quiet centers, places of joy and celebration, places of tranquility and contemplation, sites for the "cultivation of a common citizenship," in Michael Sandel's lovely phrase. An investment — investment, after all, is just such a basic economic concept — is nothing more nor less than a relationship between the present and the future, a shared present and a common future. And we need that relationship to reflect, to reclaim hope. So let me come back, with this sense of hope, to the two billion people still trying to live each day on less than the price of a skinny latte from the cafe next door. What can we offer those people? It's clear that we have a responsibility to help lift them out of poverty. It's clear that we have a responsibility to make room for growth where growth really matters in those poorest nations. And it's also clear that we will never achieve that unless we're capable of redefining a meaningful sense of prosperity in the richer nations, a prosperity that is more meaningful and less materialistic than the growth-based model. So this is not just a Western post-materialist fantasy. In fact, an African philosopher wrote to me, when "Prosperity Without Growth" was published, pointing out the similarities between this view of prosperity and the traditional African concept of ubuntu. Ubuntu says, "I am because we are." Prosperity is a shared endeavor. Its roots are long and deep — its foundations, I've tried to show, exist already, inside each of us. So this is not about standing in the way of development. It's not about overthrowing capitalism. It's not about trying to change human nature. What we're doing here is we're taking a few simple steps towards an economics fit for purpose. And at the heart of that economics, we're placing a more credible, more robust, and more realistic vision of what it means to be human. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: While they're taking the podium away, just a quick question. First of all, economists aren't supposed to be inspiring, so you may need to work on the tone a little. (Laughter) Can you picture the politicians ever buying into this? I mean, can you picture a politician standing up in Britain and saying, "GDP fell two percent this year. Good news! We're actually all happier, and a country's more beautiful, and our lives are better." Tim Jackson: Well that's clearly not what you're doing. You're not making news out of things falling down. You're making news out of the things that tell you that we're flourishing. Can I picture politicians doing it? Actually, I already am seeing a little bit of it. When we first started this kind of work, politicians would stand up, treasury spokesmen would stand up, and accuse us of wanting to go back and live in caves. And actually in the period through which we've been working over the last 18 years — partly because of the financial crisis and a little bit of humility in the profession of economics — actually people are engaging in this issue in all sorts of countries around the world. CA: But is it mainly politicians who are going to have to get their act together, or is it going to be more just civil society and companies? TJ: It has to be companies. It has to be civil society. But it has to have political leadership. This is a kind of agenda, which actually politicians themselves are kind of caught in that dilemma, because they're hooked on the growth model themselves. But actually opening up the space to think about different ways of governing, different kinds of politics, and creating the space for civil society and businesses to operate differently — absolutely vital. CA: And if someone could convince you that we actually can make the — what was it? — the 130-fold improvement in efficiency, of reduction of carbon footprint, would you then actually like that picture of economic growth into more knowledge-based goods? TJ: I would still want to know that you could do that and get below zero by the end of the century, in terms of taking carbon out of the atmosphere, and solve the problem of biodiversity and reduce the impact on land use and do something about the erosion of topsoils and the quality of water. If you can convince me we can do all that, then, yes, I would take the two percent. CA: Tim, thank you for a very important talk. Thank you. (Applause) |
Tagging tuna in the deep ocean | {0: 'Barbara Block studies how tuna, billfish and sharks move around (and stay warm) in the open ocean. Knowing how these large predators travel through pelagic waters will help us understand their role in the wider ocean ecosystem.'} | Mission Blue Voyage | I've been fascinated for a lifetime by the beauty, form and function of giant bluefin tuna. Bluefin are warmblooded like us. They're the largest of the tunas, the second-largest fish in the sea — bony fish. They actually are a fish that is endothermic — powers through the ocean with warm muscles like a mammal. That's one of our bluefin at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. You can see in its shape and its streamlined design it's powered for ocean swimming. It flies through the ocean on its pectoral fins, gets lift, powers its movements with a lunate tail. It's actually got a naked skin for most of its body, so it reduces friction with the water. This is what one of nature's finest machines. Now, bluefin were revered by Man for all of human history. For 4,000 years, we fished sustainably for this animal, and it's evidenced in the art that we see from thousands of years ago. Bluefin are in cave paintings in France. They're on coins that date back 3,000 years. This fish was revered by humankind. It was fished sustainably till all of time, except for our generation. Bluefin are pursued wherever they go — there is a gold rush on Earth, and this is a gold rush for bluefin. There are traps that fish sustainably up until recently. And yet, the type of fishing going on today, with pens, with enormous stakes, is really wiping bluefin ecologically off the planet. Now bluefin, in general, goes to one place: Japan. Some of you may be guilty of having contributed to the demise of bluefin. They're delectable muscle, rich in fat — absolutely taste delicious. And that's their problem; we're eating them to death. Now in the Atlantic, the story is pretty simple. Bluefin have two populations: one large, one small. The North American population is fished at about 2,000 ton. The European population and North African — the Eastern bluefin tuna — is fished at tremendous levels: 50,000 tons over the last decade almost every year. The result is whether you're looking at the West or the Eastern bluefin population, there's been tremendous decline on both sides, as much as 90 percent if you go back with your baseline to 1950. For that, bluefin have been given a status equivalent to tigers, to lions, to certain African elephants and to pandas. These fish have been proposed for an endangered species listing in the past two months. They were voted on and rejected just two weeks ago, despite outstanding science that shows from two committees this fish meets the criteria of CITES I. And if it's tunas you don't care about, perhaps you might be interested that international long lines and pursing chase down tunas and bycatch animals such as leatherbacks, sharks, marlin, albatross. These animals and their demise occurs in the tuna fisheries. The challenge we face is that we know very little about tuna, and everyone in the room knows what it looks like when an African lion takes down its prey. I doubt anyone has seen a giant bluefin feed. This tuna symbolizes what's the problem for all of us in the room. It's the 21st century, but we really have only just begun to really study our oceans in a deep way. Technology has come of age that's allowing us to see the Earth from space and go deep into the seas remotely. And we've got to use these technologies immediately to get a better understanding of how our ocean realm works. Most of us from the ship — even I — look out at the ocean and see this homogeneous sea. We don't know where the structure is. We can't tell where are the watering holes like we can on an African plain. We can't see the corridors, and we can't see what it is that brings together a tuna, a leatherback and an albatross. We're only just beginning to understand how the physical oceanography and the biological oceanography come together to create a seasonal force that actually causes the upwelling that might make a hot spot a hope spot. The reasons these challenges are great is that technically it's difficult to go to sea. It's hard to study a bluefin on its turf, the entire Pacific realm. It's really tough to get up close and personal with a mako shark and try to put a tag on it. And then imagine being Bruce Mate's team from OSU, getting up close to a blue whale and fixing a tag on the blue whale that stays, an engineering challenge we've yet to really overcome. So the story of our team, a dedicated team, is fish and chips. We basically are taking the same satellite phone parts, or the same parts that are in your computer, chips. We're putting them together in unusual ways, and this is taking us into the ocean realm like never before. And for the first time, we're able to watch the journey of a tuna beneath the ocean using light and photons to measure sunrise and sunset. Now, I've been working with tunas for over 15 years. I have the privilege of being a partner with the Monterey Bay Aquarium. We've actually taken a sliver of the ocean, put it behind glass, and we together have put bluefin tuna and yellowfin tuna on display. When the veil of bubbles lifts every morning, we can actually see a community from the Pelagic ocean, one of the only places on Earth you can see giant bluefin swim by. We can see in their beauty of form and function, their ceaseless activity. They're flying through their space, ocean space. And we can bring two million people a year into contact with this fish and show them its beauty. Behind the scenes is a working lab at Stanford University partnered with the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Here, for over 14 or 15 years, we've actually brought in both bluefin and yellowfin in captivity. We'd been studying these fish, but first we had to learn how to husbandry them. What do they like to eat? What is it that they're happy with? We go in the tanks with the tuna — we touch their naked skin — it's pretty amazing. It feels wonderful. And then, better yet, we've got our own version of tuna whisperers, our own Chuck Farwell, Alex Norton, who can take a big tuna and in one motion, put it into an envelope of water, so that we can actually work with the tuna and learn the techniques it takes to not injure this fish who never sees a boundary in the open sea. Jeff and Jason there, are scientists who are going to take a tuna and put it in the equivalent of a treadmill, a flume. And that tuna thinks it's going to Japan, but it's staying in place. We're actually measuring its oxygen consumption, its energy consumption. We're taking this data and building better models. And when I see that tuna — this is my favorite view — I begin to wonder: how did this fish solve the longitude problem before we did? So take a look at that animal. That's the closest you'll probably ever get. Now, the activities from the lab have taught us now how to go out in the open ocean. So in a program called Tag-A-Giant we've actually gone from Ireland to Canada, from Corsica to Spain. We've fished with many nations around the world in an effort to basically put electronic computers inside giant tunas. We've actually tagged 1,100 tunas. And I'm going to show you three clips, because I tagged 1,100 tunas. It's a very hard process, but it's a ballet. We bring the tuna out, we measure it. A team of fishers, captains, scientists and technicians work together to keep this animal out of the ocean for about four to five minutes. We put water over its gills, give it oxygen. And then with a lot of effort, after tagging, putting in the computer, making sure the stalk is sticking out so it senses the environment, we send this fish back into the sea. And when it goes, we're always happy. We see a flick of the tail. And from our data that gets collected, when that tag comes back, because a fisher returns it for a thousand-dollar reward, we can get tracks beneath the sea for up to five years now, on a backboned animal. Now sometimes the tunas are really large, such as this fish off Nantucket. But that's about half the size of the biggest tuna we've ever tagged. It takes a human effort, a team effort, to bring the fish in. In this case, what we're going to do is put a pop-up satellite archival tag on the tuna. This tag rides on the tuna, senses the environment around the tuna and actually will come off the fish, detach, float to the surface and send back to Earth-orbiting satellites position data estimated by math on the tag, pressure data and temperature data. And so what we get then from the pop-up satellite tag is we get away from having to have a human interaction to recapture the tag. Both the electronic tags I'm talking about are expensive. These tags have been engineered by a variety of teams in North America. They are some of our finest instruments, our new technology in the ocean today. One community in general has given more to help us than any other community. And that's the fisheries off the state of North Carolina. There are two villages, Harris and Morehead City, every winter for over a decade, held a party called Tag-A-Giant, and together, fishers worked with us to tag 800 to 900 fish. In this case, we're actually going to measure the fish. We're going to do something that in recent years we've started: take a mucus sample. Watch how shiny the skin is; you can see my reflection there. And from that mucus, we can get gene profiles, we can get information on gender, checking the pop-up tag one more time, and then it's out in the ocean. And this is my favorite. With the help of my former postdoc, Gareth Lawson, this is a gorgeous picture of a single tuna. This tuna is actually moving on a numerical ocean. The warm is the Gulf Stream, the cold up there in the Gulf of Maine. That's where the tuna wants to go — it wants to forage on schools of herring — but it can't get there. It's too cold. But then it warms up, and the tuna pops in, gets some fish, maybe comes back to home base, goes in again and then comes back to winter down there in North Carolina and then on to the Bahamas. And my favorite scene, three tunas going into the Gulf of Mexico. Three tunas tagged. Astronomically, we're calculating positions. They're coming together. That could be tuna sex — and there it is. That is where the tuna spawn. So from data like this, we're able now to put the map up, and in this map you see thousands of positions generated by this decade and a half of tagging. And now we're showing that tunas on the western side go to the eastern side. So two populations of tunas — that is, we have a Gulf population, one that we can tag — they go to the Gulf of Mexico, I showed you that — and a second population. Living amongst our tunas — our North American tunas — are European tunas that go back to the Med. On the hot spots — the hope spots — they're mixed populations. And so what we've done with the science is we're showing the International Commission, building new models, showing them that a two-stock no-mixing model — to this day, used to reject the CITES treaty — that model isn't the right model. This model, a model of overlap, is the way to move forward. So we can then predict where management places should be. Places like the Gulf of Mexico and the Mediterranean are places where the single species, the single population, can be captured. These become forthright in places we need to protect. The center of the Atlantic where the mixing is, I could imagine a policy that lets Canada and America fish, because they manage their fisheries well, they're doing a good job. But in the international realm, where fishing and overfishing has really gone wild, these are the places that we have to make hope spots in. That's the size they have to be to protect the bluefin tuna. Now in a second project called Tagging of Pacific Pelagics, we took on the planet as a team, those of us in the Census of Marine Life. And, funded primarily through Sloan Foundation and others, we were able to actually go in, in our project — we're one of 17 field programs and begin to take on tagging large numbers of predators, not just tunas. So what we've done is actually gone up to tag salmon shark in Alaska, met salmon shark on their home territory, followed them catching salmon and then went in and figured out that, if we take a salmon and put it on a line, we can actually take up a salmon shark — This is the cousin of the white shark — and very carefully — note, I say "very carefully," — we can actually keep it calm, put a hose in its mouth, keep it off the deck and then tag it with a satellite tag. That satellite tag will now have your shark phone home and send in a message. And that shark leaping there, if you look carefully, has an antenna. It's a free swimming shark with a satellite tag jumping after salmon, sending home its data. Salmon sharks aren't the only sharks we tag. But there goes salmon sharks with this meter-level resolution on an ocean of temperature — warm colors are warmer. Salmon sharks go down to the tropics to pup and come into Monterey. Now right next door in Monterey and up at the Farallones are a white shark team led by Scott Anderson — there — and Sal Jorgensen. They can throw out a target — it's a carpet shaped like a seal — and in will come a white shark, a curious critter that will come right up to our 16-ft. boat. It's a several thousand-pound animal. And we'll wind in the target. And we'll place an acoustic tag that says, "OMSHARK 10165," or something like that, acoustically with a ping. And then we'll put on a satellite tag that will give us the long-distance journeys with the light-based geolocation algorithms solved on the computer that's on the fish. So in this case, Sal's looking at two tags there, and there they are: the white sharks of California going off to the white shark cafe and coming back. We also tag makos with our NOAA colleagues, blue sharks. And now, together, what we can see on this ocean of color that's temperature, we can see ten-day worms of makos and salmon sharks. We have white sharks and blue sharks. For the first time, an ecoscape as large as ocean-scale, showing where the sharks go. The tuna team from TOPP has done the unthinkable: three teams tagged 1,700 tunas, bluefin, yellowfin and albacore all at the same time — carefully rehearsed tagging programs in which we go out, pick up juvenile tunas, put in the tags that actually have the sensors, stick out the tuna and then let them go. They get returned, and when they get returned, here on a NASA numerical ocean you can see bluefin in blue go across their corridor, returning to the Western Pacific. Our team from UCSC has tagged elephant seals with tags that are glued on their heads, that come off when they slough. These elephant seals cover half an ocean, take data down to 1,800 feet — amazing data. And then there's Scott Shaffer and our shearwaters wearing tuna tags, light-based tags, that now are going to take you from New Zealand to Monterey and back, journeys of 35,000 nautical miles we had never seen before. But now with light-based geolocation tags that are very small, we can actually see these journeys. Same thing with Laysan albatross who travel an entire ocean on a trip sometimes, up to the same zone the tunas use. You can see why they might be caught. Then there's George Schillinger and our leatherback team out of Playa Grande tagging leatherbacks that go right past where we are. And Scott Benson's team that showed that leatherbacks go from Indonesia all the way to Monterey. So what we can see on this moving ocean is we can finally see where the predators are. We can actually see how they're using ecospaces as large as an ocean. And from this information, we can begin to map the hope spots. So this is just three years of data right here — and there's a decade of this data. We see the pulse and the seasonal activities that these animals are going on. So what we're able to do with this information is boil it down to hot spots, 4,000 deployments, a huge herculean task, 2,000 tags in an area, shown here for the first time, off the California coast, that appears to be a gathering place. And then for sort of an encore from these animals, they're helping us. They're carrying instruments that are actually taking data down to 2,000 meters. They're taking information from our planet at very critical places like Antarctica and the Poles. Those are seals from many countries being released who are sampling underneath the ice sheets and giving us temperature data of oceanographic quality on both poles. This data, when visualized, is captivating to watch. We still haven't figured out best how to visualize the data. And then, as these animals swim and give us the information that's important to climate issues, we also think it's critical to get this information to the public, to engage the public with this kind of data. We did this with the Great Turtle Race — tagged turtles, brought in four million hits. And now with Google's Oceans, we can actually put a white shark in that ocean. And when we do and it swims, we see this magnificent bathymetry that the shark knows is there on its path as it goes from California to Hawaii. But maybe Mission Blue can fill in that ocean that we can't see. We've got the capacity, NASA has the ocean. We just need to put it together. So in conclusion, we know where Yellowstone is for North America; it's off our coast. We have the technology that's shown us where it is. What we need to think about perhaps for Mission Blue is increasing the biologging capacity. How is it that we can actually take this type of activity elsewhere? And then finally — to basically get the message home — maybe use live links from animals such as blue whales and white sharks. Make killer apps, if you will. A lot of people are excited when sharks actually went under the Golden Gate Bridge. Let's connect the public to this activity right on their iPhone. That way we do away with a few internet myths. So we can save the bluefin tuna. We can save the white shark. We have the science and technology. Hope is here. Yes we can. We need just to apply this capacity further in the oceans. Thank you. (Applause) |
The good news of the decade? We're winning the war against child mortality | {0: 'In Hans Rosling’s hands, data sings. Global trends in health and economics come to vivid life. And the big picture of global development -- with some surprisingly good news -- snaps into sharp focus.'} | TEDxChange | We are here today because [the] United Nations have defined goals for the progress of countries. They're called Millennium Development Goals. And the reason I really like these goals is that there are eight of them. And by specifying eight different goals, the United Nations has said that there are so many things needed to change in a country in order to get the good life for people. Look here — you have to end poverty, education, gender, child and maternal health, control infections, protect the environment and get the good global links between nations in every aspect from aid to trade. There's a second reason I like these development goals, and that is because each and every one is measured. Take child mortality; the aim here is to reduce child mortality by two-thirds, from 1990 to 2015. That's a four percent reduction per year — and this, with measuring. That's what makes the difference between political talking like this and really going for the important thing, a better life for people. And what I'm so happy about with this is that we have already documented that there are many countries in Asia, in the Middle East, in Latin America and East Europe that [are] reducing with this rate. And even mighty Brazil is going down with five percent per year, and Turkey with seven percent per year. So there's good news. But then I hear people saying, "There is no progress in Africa. And there's not even statistics on Africa to know what is happening." I'll prove them wrong on both points. Come with me to the wonderful world of statistics. I bring you to the webpage, ChildMortality.org, where you can take deaths in children below five years of age for all countries — it's done by U.N. specialists. And I will take Kenya as an example. Here you see the data. Don't panic — don't panic now, I'll help you through this. It looks nasty, like in college when you didn't like statistics. But first thing, when you see dots like this, you have to ask yourself: from where do the data come? What is the origin of the data? Is it so that in Kenya, there are doctors and other specialists who write the death certificate at the death of the child and it's sent to the statistical office? No — low-income countries like Kenya still don't have that level of organization. It exists, but it's not complete because so many deaths occur in the home with the family, and it's not registered. What we rely on is not an incomplete system. We have interviews, we have surveys. And this is highly professional female interviewers who sit down for one hour with a woman and ask her about [her] birth history. How many children did you have? Are they alive? If they died, at what age and what year? And then this is done in a representative sample of thousands of women in the country and put together in what used to be called a demographic health survey report. But these surveys are costly, so they can only be done [in] three- to five-year intervals. But they have good quality. So this is a limitation. And all these colored lines here are results; each color is one survey. But that's too complicated for today, so I'll simplify it for you, and I give you one average point for each survey. This was 1977, 1988, 1992, '97 and 2002. And when the experts in the U.N. have got these surveys in place in their database, then they use advanced mathematical formulas to produce a trend line, and the trend line looks like this. See here — it's the best fit they can get of this point. But watch out — they continue the line beyond the last point out into nothing. And they estimated that in 2008, Kenya had per child mortality of 128. And I was sad, because we could see this reversal in Kenya with an increased child mortality in the 90s. It was so tragic. But in June, I got a mail in my inbox from Demographic Health Surveys, and it showed good news from Kenya. I was so happy. This was the estimate of the new survey. Then it just took another three months for [the] U.N. to get it into their server, and on Friday we got the new trend line — it was down here. Isn't it nice — isn't it nice, yeah? I was actually, on Friday, sitting in front of my computer, and I saw the death rate fall from 128 to 84 just that morning. So we celebrated. But now, when you have this trend line, how do we measure progress? I'm going into some details here, because [the] U.N. do it like this. They start [in] 1990 — they measure to 2009. They say, "0.9 percent, no progress." That's unfair. As a professor, I think I have the right to propose something differently. I would say, at least do this — 10 years is enough to follow the trend. It's two surveys, and you can see what's happening now. They have 2.4 percent. Had I been in the Ministry of Health in Kenya, I may have joined these two points. So what I'm telling you is that we know the child mortality. We have a decent trend. It's coming into some tricky things then when we are measuring MDGs. And the reason here for Africa is especially important, because '90s was a bad decade, not only in Kenya, but across Africa. The HIV epidemic peaked. There was resistance for the old malaria drugs, until we got the new drugs. We got, later, the mosquito netting. And there was socio-economic problems, which are now being solved at a much better scale. So look at the average here — this is the average for all of sub-Saharan Africa. And [the] U.N. says it's a reduction with 1.8 percent. Now this sounds a little theoretical, but it's not so theoretical. You know, these economists, they love money, they want more and more of it, they want it to grow. So they calculate the percent annual growth rate of [the] economy. We in public health, we hate child death, so we want less and less and less of child deaths. So we calculate the percent reduction per year, but it's sort of the same percentage. If your economy grows with four percent, you ought to reduce child mortality four percent; if it's used well and people are really involved and can get the use of the resources in the way they want it. So is this fair now to measure this over 19 years? An economist would never do that. I have just divided it into two periods. In the 90s, only 1.2 percent, only 1.2 percent. Whereas now, second gear — it's like Africa had first gear, now they go into second gear. But even this is not a fair representation of Africa, because it's an average, it's an average speed of reduction in Africa. And look here when I take you into my bubble graphs. Still here, child death per 1,000 on that axis. Here we have [the] year. And I'm now giving you a wider picture than the MDG. I start 50 years ago when Africa celebrated independence in most countries. I give you Congo, which was high, Ghana — lower. And Kenya — even lower. And what has happened over the years since then? Here we go. You can see, with independence, literacy improved and vaccinations started, smallpox was eradicated, hygiene was improved, and things got better. But then, in the '80s, watch out here. Congo got into civil war, and they leveled off here. Ghana got very ahead, fast. This was the backlash in Kenya, and Ghana bypassed, but then Kenya and Ghana go down together — still a standstill in Congo. That's where we are today. You can see it doesn't make sense to make an average of this zero improvement and this very fast improvement. Time has come to stop thinking about sub-Saharan Africa as one place. Their countries are so different, and they merit to be recognized in the same way, as we don't talk about Europe as one place. I can tell you that the economy in Greece and Sweden are very different — everyone knows that. And they are judged, each country, on how they are doing. So let me show the wider picture. My country, Sweden: 1800, we were up there. What a strange personality disorder we must have, counting the children so meticulously in spite of a high child death rate. It's very strange. It's sort of embarrassing. But we had that habit in Sweden, you know, that we counted all the child deaths, even if we didn't do anything about it. And then, you see, these were famine years. These were bad years, and people got fed up with Sweden. My ancestors moved to the United States. And eventually, soon they started to get better and better here. And here we got better education, and we got health service, and child mortality came down. We never had a war; Sweden was in peace all this time. But look, the rate of lowering in Sweden was not fast. Sweden achieved a low child mortality because we started early. We had primary school actually started in 1842. And then you get that wonderful effect when we got female literacy one generation later. You have to realize that the investments we do in progress are long-term investments. It's not about just five years — it's long-term investments. And Sweden never reached [the] Millennium Development Goal rate, 3.1 percent when I calculated. So we are off track — that's what Sweden is. But you don't talk about it so much. We want others to be better than we were, and indeed, others have been better. Let me show you Thailand, see what a success story, Thailand from the 1960s — how they went down here and reached almost the same child mortality levels as Sweden. And I'll give you another story — Egypt, the most hidden, glorious success in public health. Egypt was up here in 1960, higher than Congo. The Nile Delta was a misery for children with diarrheal disease and malaria and a lot of problems. And then they got the Aswan Dam. They got electricity in their homes, they increased education and they got primary health care. And down they went, you know. And they got safer water, they eradicated malaria. And isn't it a success story. Millennium Development Goal rates for child mortality is fully possible. And the good thing is that Ghana today is going with the same rate as Egypt did at its fastest. Kenya is now speeding up. Here we have a problem. We have a severe problem in countries which are at a standstill. Now, let me now bring you to a wider picture, a wider picture of child mortality. I'm going to show you the relationship between child mortality on this axis here — this axis here is child mortality — and here I have the family size. The relationship between child mortality and family size. One, two, three, four children per woman: six, seven, eight children per woman. This is, once again, 1960 — 50 years ago. Each bubble is a country — the color, you can see, a continent. The dark blue here is sub-Saharan Africa. And the size of the bubble is the population. And these are the so-called "developing" countries. They had high, or very high, child mortality and family size, six to eight. And the ones over there, they were so-called Western countries. They had low child mortality and small families. What has happened? What I want you [to do] now is to see with your own eyes the relation between fall in child mortality and decrease in family size. I just want not to have any room for doubt — you have to see that for yourself. This is what happened. Now I start the world. Here we come down with the eradication of smallpox, better education, health service. It got down there — China comes into the Western box here. And here Brazil is in the Western Box. India is approaching. The first African countries coming into the Western box, and we get a lot a new neighbors. Welcome to a decent life. Come on. We want everyone down there. This is the vision we have, isn't it. And look now, the first African countries here are coming in. There we are today. There is no such thing as a "Western world" and "developing world." This is the report from [the] U.N., which came out on Friday. It's very good — "Levels and Trends in Child Mortality" — except this page. This page is very bad; it's a categorization of countries. It labels "developing countries," — I can read from the list here — developing countries: Republic of Korea — South Korea. Huh? They get Samsung, how can they be [a] developing country? They have here Singapore. They have the lowest child mortality in the world, Singapore. They bypassed Sweden five years ago, and they are labeled a developing country. They have here Qatar. It's the richest country in the world with Al Jazeera. How the heck could they be [a] developing country? This is crap. (Applause) The rest here is good — the rest is good. We have to have a modern concept, which fits to the data. And we have to realize that we are all going to into this, down to here. What is the importance now with the relations here. Look — even if we look in Africa — these are the African countries. You can clearly see the relation with falling child mortality and decreasing family size, even within Africa. It's very clear that this is what happens. And a very important piece of research came out on Friday from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle showing that almost 50 percent of the fall in child mortality can be attributed to female education. That is, when we get girls in school, we'll get an impact 15 to 20 years later, which is a secular trend which is very strong. That's why we must have that long-term perspective, but we must measure the impact over 10-year periods. It's fully possible to get child mortality down in all of these countries and to get them down in the corner where we all would like to live together. And of course, lowering child mortality is a matter of utmost importance from humanitarian aspects. It's a decent life for children, we are talking about. But it is also a strategic investment in the future of all mankind, because it's about the environment. We will not be able to manage the environment and avoid the terrible climate crisis if we don't stabilize the world population. Let's be clear about that. And the way to do that, that is to get child mortality down, get access to family planning and behind that drive female education. And that is fully possible. Let's do it. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The best gift I ever survived | {0: 'Stacey Kramer has traveled the United States and the world helping to create names and brands for growing companies.'} | TED2010 | Imagine, if you will — a gift. I'd like for you to picture it in your mind. It's not too big — about the size of a golf ball. So envision what it looks like all wrapped up. But before I show you what's inside, I will tell you, it's going to do incredible things for you. It will bring all of your family together. You will feel loved and appreciated like never before and reconnect with friends and acquaintances you haven't heard from in years. Adoration and admiration will overwhelm you. It will recalibrate what's most important in your life. It will redefine your sense of spirituality and faith. You'll have a new understanding and trust in your body. You'll have unsurpassed vitality and energy. You'll expand your vocabulary, meet new people, and you'll have a healthier lifestyle. And get this — you'll have an eight-week vacation of doing absolutely nothing. You'll eat countless gourmet meals. Flowers will arrive by the truckload. People will say to you, "You look great. Have you had any work done?" And you'll have a lifetime supply of good drugs. You'll be challenged, inspired, motivated and humbled. Your life will have new meaning. Peace, health, serenity, happiness, nirvana. The price? $55,000, and that's an incredible deal. By now I know you're dying to know what it is and where you can get one. Does Amazon carry it? Does it have the Apple logo on it? Is there a waiting list? Not likely. This gift came to me about five months ago. It looked more like this when it was all wrapped up — not quite so pretty. And this, and then this. It was a rare gem — a brain tumor, hemangioblastoma — the gift that keeps on giving. And while I'm okay now, I wouldn't wish this gift for you. I'm not sure you'd want it. But I wouldn't change my experience. It profoundly altered my life in ways I didn't expect in all the ways I just shared with you. So the next time you're faced with something that's unexpected, unwanted and uncertain, consider that it just may be a gift. (Applause) |
The roots of plant intelligence | {0: 'Stefano Mancuso is a founder of the study of plant neurobiology, which explores signaling and communication at all levels of biological organization, from genetics to molecules, cells and ecological communities.'} | TEDGlobal 2010 | Sometimes I go browsing [through] a very old magazine. I found this observation test about the story of the ark. And the artist that drew this observation test did some errors, had some mistakes — there are more or less 12 mistakes. Some of them are very easy. There is a funnel, an aerial part, a lamp and clockwork key on the ark. Some of them are about the animals, the number. But there is a much more fundamental mistake in the overall story of the ark that's not reported here. And this problem is: where are the plants? So now we have God that is going to submerge Earth permanently or at least for a very long period, and no one is taking care of plants. Noah needed to take two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal, of every kind of creature that moves, but no mention about plants. Why? In another part of the same story, all the living creatures are just the living creatures that came out from the ark, so birds, livestock and wild animals. Plants are not living creatures — this is the point. That is a point that is not coming out from the Bible, but it's something that really accompanied humanity. Let's have a look at this nice code that is coming from a Renaissance book. Here we have the description of the order of nature. It's a nice description because it's starting from left — you have the stones — immediately after the stones, the plants that are just able to live. We have the animals that are able to live and to sense, and on the top of the pyramid, there is the man. This is not the common man. The "Homo studiosus" — the studying man. This is quite comforting for people like me — I'm a professor — this to be over there on the top of creation. But it's something completely wrong. You know very well about professors. But it's also wrong about plants, because plants are not just able to live; they are able to sense. They are much more sophisticated in sensing than animals. Just to give you an example, every single root apex is able to detect and to monitor concurrently and continuously at least 15 different chemical and physical parameters. And they also are able to show and to exhibit such a wonderful and complex behavior that can be described just with the term of intelligence. Well, but this is something — this underestimation of plants is something that is always with us. Let's have a look at this short movie now. We have David Attenborough. Now David Attenborough is really a plant lover; he did some of the most beautiful movies about plant behavior. Now, when he speaks about plants, everything is correct. When he speaks about animals, [he] tends to remove the fact that plants exist. The blue whale, the biggest creature that exists on the planet — that is wrong, completely wrong. The blue whale, it's a dwarf if compared with the real biggest creature that exists on the planet — that is, this wonderful, magnificent Sequoiadendron giganteum. (Applause) And this is a living organism that has a mass of at least 2,000 tons. Now, the story that plants are some low-level organisms has been formalized many times ago by Aristotle, that in "De Anima" — that is a very influential book for the Western civilization — wrote that the plants are on the edge between living and not living. They have just a kind of very low-level soul. It's called the vegetative soul, because they lack movement, and so they don't need to sense. Let's see. Okay, some of the movements of the plants are very well-known. This is a very fast movement. This is a Dionaea, a Venus fly trap hunting snails — sorry for the snail. This has been something that has been refused for centuries, despite the evidence. No one can say that the plants were able to eat an animal, because it was against the order of nature. But plants are also able to show a lot of movement. Some of them are very well known, like the flowering. It's just a question to use some techniques like the time lapse. Some of them are much more sophisticated. Look at this young bean that is moving to catch the light every time. And it's really so graceful; it's like a dancing angel. They are also able to play — they are really playing. These are young sunflowers, and what they are doing cannot be described with any other terms than playing. They are training themselves, as many young animals do, to the adult life where they will be called to track the sun all the day. They are able to respond to gravity, of course, so the shoots are growing against the vector of gravity and the roots toward the vector of gravity. But they are also able to sleep. This is one, Mimosa pudica. So during the night, they curl the leaves and reduce the movement, and during the day, you have the opening of the leaves — there is much more movement. This is interesting because this sleeping machinery, it's perfectly conserved. It's the same in plants, in insects and in animals. And so if you need to study this sleeping problem, it's easy to study on plants, for example, than in animals and it's much more easy even ethically. It's a kind of vegetarian experimentation. Plants are even able to communicate — they are extraordinary communicators. They communicate with other plants. They are able to distinguish kin and non-kin. They communicate with plants of other species and they communicate with animals by producing chemical volatiles, for example, during the pollination. Now with the pollination, it's a very serious issue for plants, because they move the pollen from one flower to the other, yet they cannot move from one flower to the other. So they need a vector — and this vector, it's normally an animal. Many insects have been used by plants as vectors for the transport of the pollination, but not just insects; even birds, reptiles, and mammals like bats rats are normally used for the transportation of the pollen. This is a serious business. We have the plants that are giving to the animals a kind of sweet substance — very energizing — having in change this transportation of the pollen. But some plants are manipulating animals, like in the case of orchids that promise sex and nectar and give in change nothing for the transportation of the pollen. Now, there is a big problem behind all this behavior that we have seen. How is it possible to do this without a brain? We need to wait until 1880, when this big man, Charles Darwin, publishes a wonderful, astonishing book that starts a revolution. The title is "The Power of Movement in Plants." No one was allowed to speak about movement in plants before Charles Darwin. In his book, assisted by his son, Francis — who was the first professor of plant physiology in the world, in Cambridge — they took into consideration every single movement for 500 pages. And in the last paragraph of the book, it's a kind of stylistic mark, because normally Charles Darwin stored, in the last paragraph of a book, the most important message. He wrote that, "It's hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radical acts like the brain of one of the lower animals." This is not a metaphor. He wrote some very interesting letters to one of his friends who was J.D. Hooker, or at that time, president of the Royal Society, so the maximum scientific authority in Britain speaking about the brain in the plants. Now, this is a root apex growing against a slope. So you can recognize this kind of movement, the same movement that worms, snakes and every animal that are moving on the ground without legs is able to display. And it's not an easy movement because, to have this kind of movement, you need to move different regions of the root and to synchronize these different regions without having a brain. So we studied the root apex and we found that there is a specific region that is here, depicted in blue — that is called the "transition zone." And this region, it's a very small region — it's less than one millimeter. And in this small region you have the highest consumption of oxygen in the plants and more important, you have these kinds of signals here. The signals that you are seeing here are action potential, are the same signals that the neurons of my brain, of our brain, use to exchange information. Now we know that a root apex has just a few hundred cells that show this kind of feature, but we know how big the root apparatus of a small plant, like a plant of rye. We have almost 14 million roots. We have 11 and a half million root apex and a total length of 600 or more kilometers and a very high surface area. Now let's imagine that each single root apex is working in network with all the others. Here were have on the left, the Internet and on the right, the root apparatus. They work in the same way. They are a network of small computing machines, working in networks. And why are they so similar? Because they evolved for the same reason: to survive predation. They work in the same way. So you can remove 90 percent of the root apparatus and the plants [continue] to work. You can remove 90 percent of the Internet and it is [continuing] to work. So, a suggestion for the people working with networks: plants are able to give you good suggestions about how to evolve networks. And another possibility is a technological possibility. Let's imagine that we can build robots and robots that are inspired by plants. Until now, the man was inspired just by man or the animals in producing a robot. We have the animaloid — and the normal robots inspired by animals, insectoid, so on. We have the androids that are inspired by man. But why have we not any plantoid? Well, if you want to fly, it's good that you look at birds — to be inspired by birds. But if you want to explore soils, or if you want to colonize new territory, to best thing that you can do is to be inspired by plants that are masters in doing this. We have another possibility we are working [on] in our lab, [which] is to build hybrids. It's much more easy to build hybrids. Hybrid means it's something that's half living and half machine. It's much more easy to work with plants than with animals. They have computing power, they have electrical signals. The connection with the machine is much more easy, much more even ethically possible. And these are three possibilities that we are working on to build hybrids, driven by algae or by the leaves at the end, by the most, most powerful parts of the plants, by the roots. Well, thank you for your attention. And before I finish, I would like to reassure that no snails were harmed in making this presentation. Thank you. (Applause) |
What nonprofits can learn from Coca-Cola | {0: 'Melinda French Gates is co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where she puts into practice the idea that every life has equal value.'} | TEDxChange | One of my favorite parts of my job at the Gates Foundation is that I get to travel to the developing world, and I do that quite regularly. And when I meet the mothers in so many of these remote places, I'm really struck by the things that we have in common. They want what we want for our children and that is for their children to grow up successful, to be healthy, and to have a successful life. But I also see lots of poverty, and it's quite jarring, both in the scale and the scope of it. My first trip in India, I was in a person's home where they had dirt floors, no running water, no electricity, and that's really what I see all over the world. So in short, I'm startled by all the things that they don't have. But I am surprised by one thing that they do have: Coca-Cola. Coke is everywhere. In fact, when I travel to the developing world, Coke feels ubiquitous. And so when I come back from these trips, and I'm thinking about development, and I'm flying home and I'm thinking, "We're trying to deliver condoms to people or vaccinations," you know, Coke's success kind of stops and makes you wonder: how is it that they can get Coke to these far-flung places? If they can do that, why can't governments and NGOs do the same thing? And I'm not the first person to ask this question. But I think, as a community, we still have a lot to learn. It's staggering, if you think about Coca-Cola. They sell 1.5 billion servings every single day. That's like every man, woman and child on the planet having a serving of Coke every week. So why does this matter? Well, if we're going to speed up the progress and go even faster on the set of Millennium Development Goals that we're set as a world, we need to learn from the innovators, and those innovators come from every single sector. I feel that, if we can understand what makes something like Coca-Cola ubiquitous, we can apply those lessons then for the public good. Coke's success is relevant, because if we can analyze it, learn from it, then we can save lives. So that's why I took a bit of time to study Coke. And I think there are really three things we can take away from Coca-Cola. They take real-time data and immediately feed it back into the product. They tap into local entrepreneurial talent, and they do incredible marketing. So let's start with the data. Now Coke has a very clear bottom line — they report to a set of shareholders, they have to turn a profit. So they take the data, and they use it to measure progress. They have this very continuous feedback loop. They learn something, they put it back into the product, they put it back into the market. They have a whole team called "Knowledge and Insight." It's a lot like other consumer companies. So if you're running Namibia for Coca-Cola, and you have a 107 constituencies, you know where every can versus bottle of Sprite, Fanta or Coke was sold, whether it was a corner store, a supermarket or a pushcart. So if sales start to drop, then the person can identify the problem and address the issue. Let's contrast that for a minute to development. In development, the evaluation comes at the very end of the project. I've sat in a lot of those meetings, and by then, it is way too late to use the data. I had somebody from an NGO once describe it to me as bowling in the dark. They said, "You roll the ball, you hear some pins go down. It's dark, you can't see which one goes down until the lights come on, and then you an see your impact." Real-time data turns on the lights. So what's the second thing that Coke's good at? They're good at tapping into that local entrepreneurial talent. Coke's been in Africa since 1928, but most of the time they couldn't reach the distant markets, because they had a system that was a lot like in the developed world, which was a large truck rolling down the street. And in Africa, the remote places, it's hard to find a good road. But Coke noticed something — they noticed that local people were taking the product, buying it in bulk and then reselling it in these hard-to-reach places. And so they took a bit of time to learn about that. And they decided in 1990 that they wanted to start training the local entrepreneurs, giving them small loans. They set them up as what they called micro-distribution centers, and those local entrepreneurs then hire sales people, who go out with bicycles and pushcarts and wheelbarrows to sell the product. There are now some 3,000 of these centers employing about 15,000 people in Africa. In Tanzania and Uganda, they represent 90 percent of Coke's sales. Let's look at the development side. What is it that governments and NGOs can learn from Coke? Governments and NGOs need to tap into that local entrepreneurial talent as well, because the locals know how to reach the very hard-to-serve places, their neighbors, and they know what motivates them to make change. I think a great example of this is Ethiopia's new health extension program. The government noticed in Ethiopia that many of the people were so far away from a health clinic, they were over a day's travel away from a health clinic. So if you're in an emergency situation — or if you're a mom about to deliver a baby — forget it, to get to the health care center. They decided that wasn't good enough, so they went to India and studied the Indian state of Kerala that also had a system like this, and they adapted it for Ethiopia. And in 2003, the government of Ethiopia started this new system in their own country. They trained 35,000 health extension workers to deliver care directly to the people. In just five years, their ratio went from one worker for every 30,000 people to one worker for every 2,500 people. Now, think about how this can change people's lives. Health extension workers can help with so many things, whether it's family planning, prenatal care, immunizations for the children, or advising the woman to get to the facility on time for an on-time delivery. That is having real impact in a country like Ethiopia, and it's why you see their child mortality numbers coming down 25 percent from 2000 to 2008. In Ethiopia, there are hundreds of thousands of children living because of this health extension worker program. So what's the next step for Ethiopia? Well, they're already starting talk about this. They're starting to talk about, "How do you have the health community workers generate their own ideas? How do you incent them based on the impact that they're getting out in those remote villages?" That's how you tap into local entrepreneurial talent and you unlock people's potential. The third component of Coke's success is marketing. Ultimately, Coke's success depends on one crucial fact and that is that people want a Coca-Cola. Now the reason these micro-entrepreneurs can sell or make a profit is they have to sell every single bottle in their pushcart or their wheelbarrow. So, they rely on Coca-Cola in terms of its marketing, and what's the secret to their marketing? Well, it's aspirational. It is associated that product with a kind of life that people want to live. So even though it's a global company, they take a very local approach. Coke's global campaign slogan is "Open Happiness." But they localize it. And they don't just guess what makes people happy; they go to places like Latin America and they realize that happiness there is associated with family life. And in South Africa, they associate happiness with seriti or community respect. Now, that played itself out in the World Cup campaign. Let's listen to this song that Coke created for it, "Wavin' Flag" by a Somali hip hop artist. (Video) K'Naan: ♫ Oh oh oh oh oh o-oh ♫ ♫ Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh ♫ ♫ Oh oh oh oh oh o-oh ♫ ♫ Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh o-oh ♫ ♫Give you freedom, give you fire♫ ♫ Give you reason, take you higher ♫ ♫ See the champions take the field now ♫ ♫ You define us, make us feel proud ♫ ♫ In the streets our heads are lifted ♫ ♫ As we lose our inhibition ♫ ♫ Celebration, it's around us ♫ ♫ Every nation, all around us ♫ Melinda French Gates: It feels pretty good, right? Well, they didn't stop there — they localized it into 18 different languages. And it went number one on the pop chart in 17 countries. It reminds me of a song that I remember from my childhood, "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing," that also went number one on the pop charts. Both songs have something in common: that same appeal of celebration and unity. So how does health and development market? Well, it's based on avoidance, not aspirations. I'm sure you've heard some of these messages. "Use a condom, don't get AIDS." "Wash you hands, you might not get diarrhea." It doesn't sound anything like "Wavin' Flag" to me. And I think we make a fundamental mistake — we make an assumption, that we think that, if people need something, we don't have to make them want that. And I think that's a mistake. And there's some indications around the world that this is starting to change. One example is sanitation. We know that a million and a half children die a year from diarrhea and a lot of it is because of open defecation. But there's a solution: you build a toilet. But what we're finding around the world, over and over again, is, if you build a toilet and you leave it there, it doesn't get used. People reuse it for a slab for their home. They sometimes store grain in it. I've even seen it used for a chicken coop. (Laughter) But what does marketing really entail that would make a sanitation solution get a result in diarrhea? Well, you work with the community. You start to talk to them about why open defecation is something that shouldn't be done in the village, and they agree to that. But then you take the toilet and you position it as a modern, trendy convenience. One state in Northern India has gone so far as to link toilets to courtship. And it works — look at these headlines. (Laughter) I'm not kidding. Women are refusing to marry men without toilets. No loo, no "I do." (Laughter) Now, it's not just a funny headline — it's innovative. It's an innovative marketing campaign. But more importantly, it saves lives. Take a look at this — this is a room full of young men and my husband, Bill. And can you guess what the young men are waiting for? They're waiting to be circumcised. Can you you believe that? We know that circumcision reduces HIV infection by 60 percent in men. And when we first heard this result inside the Foundation, I have to admit, Bill and I were scratching our heads a little bit and we were saying, "But who's going to volunteer for this procedure?" But it turns out the men do, because they're hearing from their girlfriends that they prefer it, and the men also believe it improves their sex life. So if we can start to understand what people really want in health and development, we can change communities and we can change whole nations. Well, why is all of this so important? So let's talk about what happens when this all comes together, when you tie the three things together. And polio, I think, is one of the most powerful examples. We've seen a 99 percent reduction in polio in 20 years. So if you look back to 1988, there are about 350,000 cases of polio on the planet that year. In 2009, we're down to 1,600 cases. Well how did that happen? Let's look at a country like India. They have over a billion people in this country, but they have 35,000 local doctors who report paralysis, and clinicians, a huge reporting system in chemists. They have two and a half million vaccinators. But let me make the story a little bit more concrete for you. Let me tell you the story of Shriram, an 18 month boy in Bihar, a northern state in India. This year on August 8th, he felt paralysis and on the 13th, his parents took him to the doctor. On August 14th and 15th, they took a stool sample, and by the 25th of August, it was confirmed he had Type 1 polio. By August 30th, a genetic test was done, and we knew what strain of polio Shriram had. Now it could have come from one of two places. It could have come from Nepal, just to the north, across the border, or from Jharkhand, a state just to the south. Luckily, the genetic testing proved that, in fact, this strand came north, because, had it come from the south, it would have had a much wider impact in terms of transmission. So many more people would have been affected. So what's the endgame? Well on September 4th, there was a huge mop-up campaign, which is what you do in polio. They went out and where Shriram lives, they vaccinated two million people. So in less than a month, we went from one case of paralysis to a targeted vaccination program. And I'm happy to say only one other person in that area got polio. That's how you keep a huge outbreak from spreading, and it shows what can happen when local people have the data in their hands; they can save lives. Now one of the challenges in polio, still, is marketing, but it might not be what you think. It's not the marketing on the ground. It's not telling the parents, "If you see paralysis, take your child to the doctor or get your child vaccinated." We have a problem with marketing in the donor community. The G8 nations have been incredibly generous on polio over the last 20 years, but we're starting to have something called polio fatigue and that is that the donor nations aren't willing to fund polio any longer. So by next summer, we're sighted to run out of money on polio. So we are 99 percent of the way there on this goal and we're about to run short of money. And I think that if the marketing were more aspirational, if we could focus as a community on how far we've come and how amazing it would be to eradicate this disease, we could put polio fatigue and polio behind us. And if we could do that, we could stop vaccinating everybody, worldwide, in all of our countries for polio. And it would only be the second disease ever wiped off the face of the planet. And we are so close. And this victory is so possible. So if Coke's marketers came to me and asked me to define happiness, I'd say my vision of happiness is a mother holding healthy baby in her arms. To me, that is deep happiness. And so if we can learn lessons from the innovators in every sector, then in the future we make together, that happiness can be just as ubiquitous as Coca-Cola. Thank you. (Applause) |
When bad engineering makes a natural disaster even worse | {0: 'Inveterate tinkerer Peter Haas is the co-founder of AIDG, the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group, which connect people to electricity, sanitation and clean water through a combination of business incubation, education, and outreach.'} | TED Senior Fellows at TEDGlobal 2010 | I learned about the Haiti earthquake by Skype. My wife sent me a message, "Whoa, earthquake," and then disappeared for 25 minutes. It was 25 minutes of absolute terror that thousands of people across the U.S. felt. I was afraid of a tsunami; what I didn't realize was there was a greater terror in Haiti, and that was building collapse. We've all seen the photos of the collapsed buildings in Haiti. These are shots my wife took a couple days after the quake, while I was making my way through the D.R. into the country. This is the national palace — the equivalent of the White House. This is the largest supermarket in the Caribbean at peak shopping time. This is a nurses' college — there are 300 nurses studying. The general hospital right next door emerged largely unscathed. This is the Ministry of Economics and Finance. We have all heard about the tremendous human loss in the earthquake in Haiti, but we haven't heard enough about why all those lives were lost. We haven't heard about why the buildings failed. After all, it was the buildings, not the earthquake, that killed 220,000 people, that injured 330,000, that displaced 1.3 million people, that cut off food and water and supplies for an entire nation. This is the largest metropolitan-area disaster in decades, and it was not a natural disaster — it was a disaster of engineering. AIDG has worked in Haiti since 2007, providing engineering and business support to small businesses. And after the quake, we started bringing in earthquake engineers to figure out why the buildings collapsed, to examine what was safe and what wasn't. Working with MINUSTAH, which is the U.N. mission in Haiti, with the Ministry of Public Works, with different NGOs, we inspected over 1,500 buildings. We inspected schools and private residencies. We inspected medical centers and food warehouses. We inspected government buildings. This is the Ministry of Justice. Behind that door is the National Judicial Archives. The fellow in the door, Andre Filitrault — who's the director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Earthquake Engineering Research at the University of Buffalo — was examining it to see if it was safe to recover the archives. Andre told me, after seeing these buildings fail again and again in the same way, that there is no new research here. There is nothing here that we don't know. The failure points were the same: walls and slabs not tied properly into columns — that's a roof slab hanging off the building — cantilevered structures, or structures that were asymmetric, that shook violently and came down, poor building materials, not enough concrete, not enough compression in the blocks, rebar that was smooth, rebar that was exposed to the weather and had rusted away. Now there's a solution to all these problems. And we know how to build properly. The proof of this came in Chile, almost a month later, when 8.8 magnitude earthquake hit Chile. That is 500 times the power of the 7.0 that hit Port-au-Prince — 500 times the power, yet only under a thousand casualties. Adjusted for population density, that is less than one percent of the impact of the Haitian quake. What was the difference between Chile and Haiti? Seismic standards and confined masonry, where the building acts as a whole — walls and columns and roofs and slabs tied together to support each other — instead of breaking off into separate members and failing. If you look at this building in Chile, it's ripped in half, but it's not a pile of rubble. Chileans have been building with confined masonry for decades. Right now, AIDG is working with KPFF Consulting Engineers, Architecture for Humanity, to bring more confined masonry training into Haiti. This is Xantus Daniel; he's a mason, just a general construction worker, not a foreman, who took one of our trainings. On his last job he was working with his boss, and they started pouring the columns wrong. He took his boss aside, and he showed him the materials on confined masonry. He showed him, "You know, we don't have to do this wrong. It won't cost us any more to do it the right way." And they redid that building. They tied the rebar right, they poured the columns right, and that building will be safe. And every building that they build going forward will be safe. To make sure these buildings are safe, it's not going to take policy — it's going to take reaching out to the masons on the ground and helping them learn the proper techniques. Now there are many groups doing this. And the fellow in the vest there, Craig Toten, he has pushed forward to get documentation out to all the groups that are doing this. Through Haiti Rewired, through Build Change, Architecture for Humanity, AIDG, there is the possibility to reach out to 30,000 — 40,000 masons across the country and create a movement of proper building. If you reach out to the people on the ground in this collaborative way it's extremely affordable. For the billions spent on reconstruction, you can train masons for dollars on every house that they end up building over their lifetime. Ultimately, there are two ways that you can rebuild Haiti; the way at the top is the way that Haiti's been building for decades. The way at the top is a poorly constructed building that will fail. The way at the bottom is a confined masonry building, where the walls are tied together, the building is symmetric, and it will stand up to an earthquake. For all the disaster, there is an opportunity here to build better houses for the next generation, so that when the next earthquake hits, it is a disaster — but not a tragedy. (Applause) |
The art of the eco-mindshift | {0: 'Natalie Jeremijenko blends art, engineering, environmentalism, biochemistry and more to create real-life experiments that enable social change. '} | Business Innovation Factory | I was informed by this kind of unoriginal and trite idea that new technologies were an opportunity for social transformation, which is what drove me then, and still, it's a delusion that drives me now. I wanted to update what I've been doing since then — but it's still the same theme song — and introduce you to my lab and current work, which is the Environmental Health Clinic that I run at NYU. And what it is — it's a twist on health. Because, really, what I'm trying to do now is redefine what counts as health. It's a clinic like a health clinic at any other university, except people come to the clinic with environmental health concerns, and they walk out with prescriptions for things they can do to improve environmental health, as opposed to coming to a clinic with medical concerns and walking out with prescriptions for pharmaceuticals. It's a handy-dandy quote from Hippocrates of the Hippocratic oath that says, "The greater part of the soul lays outside the body, treatment of the inner requires treatment of the outer." But that suggests the issue that I'm trying to get at here, that we have an opportunity to redefine what is health. Because this idea that health is internal and atomized and individual and pharmaceutical is largely an error. And I would use this study, a recent study by Philip Landrigan, to motivate a different view of health, where he went to most of the pediatricians in Manhattan and the New York area and logged what they spent their patient hours on. 80 to 90 percent of their time was spent on five things. Number one was asthma, number two was developmental delays, number three was 400-fold increases in rare childhood cancers in the last eight to 10, 15 years. Number four and five were childhood obesity and diabetes-related issues. So all of those — what's common about all of those? The environment is implicated, radically implicated, right. This is not the germs that medicos were trained to deal with; this is a different definition of health, health that has a great advantage because it's external, it's shared, we can do something about it, as opposed to internal, genetically predetermined or individualized. People who come to the clinic are called, not patients, but impatients, because they're too impatient to wait for legislative change to address local and environmental health issues. And I meet them at the University, I also have a few field offices that I set up in various places that provide an immersion in some of the environmental challenges we face. I like this one from the Belgian field office, where we met in a roundabout, precisely because the roundabout iconified the headless social movement that informs much social transformation, as opposed to the top-down control of red light traffic intersections. In this case, of course, the roundabout with that micro-decisions being made in situ by people not being told what to do. But, of course, affords greater throughput, fewer accidents, and an interesting model of social movement. Some of the things that the monitoring protocols have developed: this is the tadpole bureaucrat protocol, or keeping tabs, if you will. What they are is an addition of tadpoles that are named after a local bureaucrat whose decisions affect your water quality. So an impatient concerned for water quality would raise a tadpole bureaucrat in a sample of water in which they're interested. And we give them a couple of things to do that, to help them do companion animal devices while they're blogging and doing their email. This is a tadpole walker to take your tadpole walking in the evening. And the interesting thing that happens — because we're using tadpoles, of course, because they have the most exquisite biosenses that we have, several orders of magnitude more sensitive than some of our senses for sensing, responding in a biologically meaningful way, to that whole class of industrial contaminants we call endocrine disruptors or hormone emulators. But by taking your tadpole out for a walk in the evening — there's a few action shots — your neighbors are likely to say, "What are you doing?" And then you have to introduce your tadpole and who it's named after. You have to explain what you're doing and how the developmental events of a tadpole are, of course, very observable and they use the same T3-mediated hormones that we do. And so next time your neighbor sees you they'll say, "How is that tadpole doing?" And you can let them social network with your tadpole, because the Environmental Health Clinic has a social networking site for, not only impatients, humans, but non-humans, social networking for humans and non-humans. And of course, these endocrine disruptors are things that are implicated in the breast cancer epidemic, the obesity epidemic, the two and a half year drop in the average age of onset of puberty in young girls and other related things. The culmination of this is if you've successfully raised your tadpole, observing the behavioral and developmental events, you will then go and introduce your tadpole to its namesake and discuss the evidence that you've seen. Another quick protocol — and I'm going to go through these quickly, but just to give you the material sense of what we're doing here — instead of asking you for urine samples, I'll ask you for a mouse sample. Anyone here lucky enough to share, to cohabit with a mouse — a domestic partnership with mice? Very lucky. Mice, of course, are the quintessential model organism. They're even better models of environmental health, because not only the same mammalian biology, but they share your diet, largely. They share your environmental stressors, the asbestos levels and lead levels, whatever you're exposed to. And they're geographically more limited than you are, because we don't know if you've been exposed to persistent organic pollutants in your home, or occupationally or as a child. Mice are a very good representation. So it starts by building a better mousetrap, of course. This is one of them. Coping with environmental stressors is tricky. Is anybody here on antidepressants? (Laughter) There's a lot of people in Manhattan are. And we were testing if the mice would also self-administer SSRIs. So this was Prozac, this was Zoloft, this was a black jellybean and this was muscle relaxant, all of which were the medications that the impatient was taking. So do you think the mice self-administered antidepressants? What's the — (Audience: Sure. Yes.) How did you know that? They did. This was vodka and solution, gin and solution. This guy also liked plain water and the muscle relaxant. Where's our expert? Vodka, gin — (Audience: [unclear]) Yes. Yes. You know your mice well. They did, yes. So they drank as much vodka as they did plain water, which was interesting. Then of course, it goes into the entrapment device. There's an old cellphone in there — a good use for old cellphones — which dials the clinic, we go and pick up the mouse. We take the blood sample and do the blood work and hair work on the mice. And I want to sort of point out the big advantage of framing health in this external way. But we do have a few prescription products through this. It's very different from the medical model. Anything you do to improve your water quality or air quality, or to understand it or to change it, the benefits are enjoyed by anyone you share that water quality or air quality with. And that aggregating effect, that collective action effect, is actually something we can use to our advantage. So I want to show you one prescription product in the clinic called the No Park. This is a prescription to improve water quality. Many impatients are very concerned for water quality and air quality. What we do is we take a fire hydrant, a "no parking" space associated with a fire hydrant, and we prescribe the removal of the asphalt to create an engineered micro landscape, to create an infiltration opportunity. Because, many of you will know, that the biggest pollution burden that we have on the New York, New Jersey harbor right now is no longer the point sources, no longer the big polluters, no longer the GEs, but that massive network of roads, [those] impervious surfaces, that collect all that cadmium neurotoxin that comes from your brake liners or the oily hydrocarbon waste in every single storm event and medieval infrastructure washes it straight into the estuary system. That doesn't do a lot of good. These are little opportunities to intercept those pollutants before they enter the harbor, and they're produced by impatients on various city blocks in some very interesting ways. I just want to say it was sort of a rule of thumb though, there's about two or three fire hydrants on every city block. By creating engineered micro landscapes to infiltrate in them, we don't prevent them from being used as emergency vehicle parking spaces, because, of course, a firetruck can come and park there. They flatten a few plants. No big deal, they'll regenerate. But if we did this in every single — every fire hydrant we could redefine the emergency. That 99 percent of the time when a firetruck is not parking there, it's infiltrating pollutants. It's also increasing fixing CO2s, sequestering some of the airborne pollutants. And aggregated, these smaller interceptions could actually infiltrate all the roadborne pollution that now runs into the estuary system, up to a seven inch rain event, up to a hundred-year storm. So these are small actions that can amount to a significant effect to improve local environmental health. This is one of the more ambitious ones. What the climate crisis has revealed to us is a secondary, more insidious and more pervasive crisis, which is the crisis of agency, which is what to do. Somehow buying a local lettuce, changing a light bulb, driving the speed limit, changing your tires regularly, doesn't seem sufficient in the face of climate crisis. And this is an interesting icon that happened — you remember these: fallout shelters. What is the fallout shelter for the climate crisis? This was civic mobilization. Churches, school groups, hospitals, private residents — everyone built one of these in a matter of months. And they still remain as icons of civic response in the face of shared, uncertain, collective threat. Fallout shelter for the climate crisis, I would say, looks something like this, or this, which is an intensive urban agriculture facility that's due to go on my lab building at NYU. What it does is a very simple idea of taking — 80 to 90 percent of the CO2 produced in Manhattan is building related — we take, just like a commercial greenhouse, we take the CO2 from the building — CO2-enriched air — we force it through the urban agriculture facility, and then we resupply oxygen-enriched air. You can't actually build much on a roof, they're not designed for that. So it's on legs, so it focuses all the load on the masonry walls and the columns. It's built as a barn raising, using open source hardware. This is the quarter-scale prototype that was functioning in Spain. This is what it will look like, fingers crossed, NYU willing. And what I want to show you is — actually this is one of the components of it that we've just recently been testing — which is a solar chimney — we have got 17 of them now put around New York at the moment — that passively draws air up. You understand a solar chimney. Hot air rises. You put a bit of black plastic on the side of a building, it'll heat up, and you'll get passive airflow. What we do is actually put a standard HVAC filter on the top of that. That actually removes about 95 percent of the carbon black, that stuff that, with ozone, is responsible for about half of global warming's effects, because it changes, it settles on the snow, it changes the reflectors, it changes the transmission qualities of the atmosphere. Carbon black is that grime that otherwise lodges in your pretty pink lungs, and it's associated with. It's not good stuff, and it's from inefficient combustion, not from combustion itself. When we put it through our solar chimney, we remove actually about 95 percent of that. And then I swap it out with the students and actually re-release that carbon black. And we make pencils the length of which measures the grime that we've pulled out of the air. Here's one of them that we have up now. Here's who put them up and who are avid pencil users. Okay, so I want to show you just two more interfaces, because I think one of our big challenges is re-imagining our relationship to natural systems, not only through this model of twisted personalized health, but through the animals with whom we cohabit. We are not alone; the animals are moving in. In fact, urban migration now describes the movement of animals formerly known as wild into urban centers. You know, coyote in Central Park, a whale in the Gowanus Canal, elk in Westchester County. It's happening all over the Developed World, probably for loss of habitat, but also because our cities are a little bit more livable than they have been. And every green space we create is an invitation for non-humans to cohabit with us. But we've kind of lacked imagination in how we could do that well or interestingly. And I want to show you a few of the technological interfaces that have been developed under the moniker of OOZ — which is zoo backwards and without cages — to try and reform that relationship. This is communication technology for birds. It looks like this. When a bird lands on it, they trigger a sound file. This is actually in the Whitney Museum, where there were six of them, each of which had a different argument on it, different sound file. They said things like this. (Whistling) Recorded Voice: Here's what you need to do. Go down there and buy some of those health food bars, the ones you call bird food, and bring it here and scatter it around. There's a good person. Natalie Jeremijenko: Okay. (Laugher) So there was several of these. The birds were able to jump from one to the other. These are just your average urban pigeon. And an early test which argument elicited cooperative behavior from the people below — about a hundred to one decided that this was the argument that worked best on us. Recorded Voice: Tick, tick, tick. That's the sound of genetic mutations of the avian flu becoming a deadly human flu. Do you know what slows it down? Healthy sub-populations of birds, increasing biodiversity generally. It is in your interests that I'm healthy, happy, well-fed. Hence, you could share some of your nutritional resources instead of monopolizing them. That is, share your lunch. (Laughter) NJ: It worked, and it's true. The final project I'd like to show you is a new interface for fish that has just been launched — it's actually officially launched next week — with a wonderful commission from the Architectural League. You may not have known that you need to communicate with fish, but there is now a device for you to do so. It looks like this: buoys that float on the water, project three foot up, three foot down. When a fish swims underneath, a light goes on. This is what it looks like. So there's another function on here. This top light is — I'm sorry if I'm making you seasick — this top light is actually a water quality display that shifts from red, when the dissolved oxygen is low, to a blue/green, when its dissolved oxygen is high. And then you can also text the fish. So there's business cards down there that'll give you contact details. And they text back. When the buoys get your text, they wink at you twice to say, we've got your message. But perhaps the most popular has been that we've got another array of these boys in the Bronx River, where the first beaver — crazy as he is — to have moved in and built a lodge in New York in 250 years, hangs out. So updates from a beaver. You can subscribe to updates from him. You can talk to him. And what I like to think of is this is an interface that re-scripts how we interact with natural systems, specifically by changing who has information, where they have it, who can make sense of that information, and what you can do about it. In this case, instead of throwing chewing gum, or Doritos or whatever you have in your pocket at the fish — There's a body of water in Iceland that I've been dealing with that's in the middle of the city, and the largest pollution burden on it is not the roadborne pollution, it's actually white bread from people feeding the fish and the birds. Instead of doing that actually, we've developed some fish sticks that you can feed the fish. They're delicious. They're cross-species delicious that is, delicious for humans and non-humans. But they also have a chelating agent in them. They're nutritionally appropriate, not like Doritos. And so every time that desire to interact with the animals, which is at least as ubiquitous as that sign: "Do not feed the animals." And there's about three of them on every New York City park. And Yellowstone National Park, there's more "do not feed the animals" signs than there are animals you might wish to feed. But in that action, that interaction, by re-scripting that, by changing it into an opportunity to offer food that is nutritionally appropriate, that could augment the nutritional resources that we ourselves have depleted for augmenting the fish population and also adding chelating agent, which, like any chelating agent that we use medicinally, binds to the bioaccumulated heavy metals and PCBs that are in the fish living in this particular habitat and allows them to pass it out as a harmless salt where it's complexed by a reactive, effectively removing it from bioavailability. But I wanted to say that interaction, re-scripting that interaction, into collective action, collective remediative action, very different from the approach that's being used on the other side on the Hudson River, where we're dredging the PCBs — after 30 years of legislative and legal struggle, GE's paying for the dredging of the largest Superfund site in the world — we're dredging it, and it'll probably get shipped off to Pennsylvania or the nearest Third World country, where it will continue to be toxic sludge. Displacement is not the way to deal with environmental issues. And that's typically the paradigm under which we've operated. By actually taking the opportunity that new technologies, new interactive technologies, present to re-script our interactions, to script them, not just as isolated, individuated interactions, but as collective aggregating actions that can amount to something, we can really begin to address some of our important environmental challenges. Thank you. (Applause) |
My web playroom | {0: 'Ze Frank has been involved in online comedy, web toys and virtually shared experiences for the past 20 years as an influencer, performer, executive and mischief maker.'} | TEDGlobal 2010 | Every presentation needs this slide in it. (Laughter) It's beautiful, isn't it? Do you see? All the points, all the lines — it's incredible. It is the network; and in my case, the network has been important in media, because I get to connect to people. Isn't it amazing? Through that, I connect to people. And the way that I've been doing it has been multifaceted. For example, I get people to dress up their vacuum cleaners. (Laughter) I put together projects like Earth Sandwich, where I ask people to try and simultaneously place two pieces of bread perfectly opposite each other on the Earth. And people started laying bread in tribute, and eventually a team was able to do it between New Zealand and Spain. It's pretty incredible — the video's online. Connecting to people in projects like YoungmeNowme for example. In YoungmeNowme, the audience was asked to find a childhood photograph of themselves and restage it as an adult. (Laughter) This is the same person — top photo, James, bottom photo, [Jennifer]. Poignant. This was a Mother's Day gift. (Laughter) Particularly creepy. (Applause) (Laughter) My favorite of these photos, which I couldn't find, is there's a picture of a 30 year-old woman or so with a little baby on her lap, and the next photo is a 220-lb man with a tiny, little old lady peaking over his shoulder. But this project changed the way that I thought about connecting to people. This is project called Ray. And what happened was I was sent this piece of audio and had no idea who generated the audio. Somebody said, "You have to listen to this." And this is what came to me. Recording: Hi, my name is Ray, and on yesterday my daughter called me because she was stressed out because of things that were going on on her job that she felt was quite unfair. Being quite disturbed, she called for comfort, and I didn't really know what to tell her, because we have to deal with so much mess in our society. So I was led to write this song just for her, just to give her some encouragement while dealing with stress and pressures on her job. And I figured I'd put it on the Internet for all employees under stress to help you better deal with what you're going through on your job. Here's how the song goes. ♫ I'm about to whip somebody's ass ♫ ♫ Oh, I'm about to whip somebody's ass ♫ ♫ Oh, if you don't leave me alone, ♫ ♫ you gonna have to send me home ♫ ♫ 'Cause I'm about to whip somebody's ass ♫ Now you might not be able to sing that out loud, but you can hum it to yourself, and you know what the words are. And let it give you some strength to get the next few moments on your job. All right. Stay strong. Peace. Ze Frank: So — yeah. No, no, no, shush. We've got to go quickly. So I was so moved by this — this is incredible. This was connecting, right. This was, at a distance, realizing that someone was feeling something, wanting to affect them in a particular way, using media to do it, putting it online and realizing that there was a greater impact. This was incredible; this is what I wanted to do. So the first thing I thought of is we have to thank him. And I asked my audience, I said, "Listen to this piece of audio. We have to remix it. He's got a great voice. It's actually in the key of B flat. And have to do something with it." Hundreds of remixes came back — lots of different attempts. One stood out in particular. It was done by a guy named Goose. Remix: ♫ I'm about to whip somebody's ass ♫ ♫ Oh, I'm about to whip somebody's ass ♫ ♫ Oh, if you don't leave me alone, ♫ ♫ You gonna have to send me home ♫ ♫ Cuz I'm about to whip somebody's ass ♫ ♫ I'm about to whip some ♫ — ZF: Great, so it was incredible. That song — (Applause) Thank you. So that song, somebody told me that it was at a baseball game in Kansas City. In the end, it was one of the top downloads on a whole bunch of music streaming services. And so I said, "Let's put this together in an album." And the audience came together, and they designed an album cover. And I said, "If you put it all on this, I'm going to deliver it to him, if you can figure out who this person is," because all I had was his name — Ray — and this little piece of audio and the fact that his daughter was upset. In two weeks, they found him. I received and email and it said, "Hi, I'm Ray. I heard you were looking for me." (Laughter) And I was like, "Yeah, Ray. It's been an interesting two weeks." And so I flew to St. Louis and met Ray, and he's a preacher — (Laughter) among other things. So but anyways, here's the thing — is it reminds me of this, which is a sign that you see in Amsterdam on every street corner. And it's sort of a metaphor for me for the virtual world. I look at this photo, and he seems really interested in what's going on with that button, but it doesn't seem like he is really that interested in crossing the street. (Laughter) And it makes me think of this. On street corners everywhere, people are looking at their cell phones, and it's easy to dismiss this as some sort of bad trend in human culture. But the truth is life is being lived there. When they smile — right, you've seen people stop — all of a sudden, life is being lived there, somewhere up in that weird, dense network. And this is it, right, to feel and be felt. It's the fundamental force that we're all after. We can build all sorts of environments to make it a little bit easier, but ultimately, what we're trying to do is really connect with one other person. And that's not always going to happen in physical spaces. It's also going to now happen in virtual spaces, and we have to get better at figuring that out. I think, of the people that build all this technology in the network, a lot of them aren't very good at connecting with people. This is kind of like something I used to do in third grade. (Laughter) So here's a series of projects over the last few years where I've been inspired by trying to figure out how to really facilitate close connection. Sometimes they're very, very simple things. A Childhood Walk, which is a project where I ask people to remember a walk that they used to take as a child over and over again that was sort of meaningless — like on the route to the bus stop, to a neighbor's house, and take it inside of Google Streetview. And I promise you, if you take that walk inside Google Streetview, you come to a moment where something comes back and hits you in the face. And I collected those moments — the photos inside Google Streetview and the memories, specifically. "Our conversation started with me saying, 'I'm bored,' and her replying, 'When I'm bored I eat pretzels.' I remember this distinctly because it came up a lot." "Right after he told me and my brother he was going to be separating from my mom, I remember walking to a convenience store and getting a cherry cola." "They used some of the morbidly artist footage, a close-up of Chad's shoes in the middle of the highway. I guess the shoes came off when he was hit. He slept over at my house once, and he left his pillow. It had 'Chad' written in magic marker on it. He died long after he left the pillow at my house, but we never got around to returning it." Sometimes they're a little bit more abstract. This is Pain Pack. Right after September 11th, last year, I was thinking about pain and the way that we disperse it, the way that we excise it from our bodies. So what I did is I opened up a hotline — a hotline where people could leave voicemails of their pain, not necessarily related to that event. And people called in and left messages like this. Recording: Okay, here's something. I'm not alone, and I am loved. I'm really fortunate. But sometimes I feel really lonely. And when I feel that way even the smallest act of kindness can make me cry. Like even people in convenience stores saying, "Have a nice day," when they're accidentally looking me in the eye. ZF: So what I did was I took those voicemails, and with their permission, converted them to MP3s and distributed them to sound editors who created short sounds using just those voicemails. And those were then distributed to DJs who have made hundreds of songs using that source material. (Music) We don't have time to play much of it. You can look at it online. "From 52 to 48 with love" was a project around the time of the last election cycle, where McCain and Obama both, in their speeches after the election, talked about reconciliation, and I was like, "What the hell does that look like?" So I thought, "Well let's just give it a try. Let's have people hold up signs about reconciliation." And so some really nice things came together. "I voted blue. I voted red. Together, for our future." These are very, very cute little things right. Some came from the winning party. "Dear 48, I promise to listen to you, to fight for you, to respect you always." Some came from the party who had just lost. "From a 48 to a 52, may your party's leadership be as classy as you, but I doubt it." But the truth was that as this start becoming popular, a couple rightwing blogs and some message boards apparently found it to be a little patronizing, which I could also see. And so I started getting amazing amounts of hate mail, death threats even. And one guy in particular kept on writing me these pretty awful messages, and he was dressed as Batman. And he said, "I'm dressed as Batman to hide my identity." Just in case I thought the real Batman was coming after me; which actually made me feel a little better — like, "Phew, it's not him." So what I did — unfortunately, I was harboring all this kind of awful experience and this pain inside of me, and it started to eat away at my psyche. And I was protecting the project from it, I realized. I was protecting it — I didn't want this special, little group of photographs to get sullied in some way. So what I did, I took all those emails, and I put them together into something called Angrigami, which was an origami template made out of this sort of vile stuff. And I asked people to send me beautiful things made out of the Angrigami. (Laughter) But this was the emotional moment. One of my viewer's uncles died on a particular day and he chose to commemorate it with a piece of hate. It's amazing. The last thing I'm going to tell you about is a series of projects called Songs You Already Know, where the idea was, I was trying to figure out to address particular kinds of emotions with group projects. So one of them was fairly straightforward. A guy said that his daughter got scared at night and could I write a song for her, his daughter. And I said, "Oh yeah, I'll try to write a mantra that she can sing to herself to help herself go to sleep." And this was "Scared." (Video) ♫ This is a song that I sing when I'm scared of something ♫ ♫ I don't know why but it helps me get over it ♫ ♫ The words of the song just move me along ♫ ♫ And somehow I get over it ♫ ♫ At least I don't suck at life ♫ ♫ I keep on trying despite ♫ ♫ At least I don't suck at life ♫ ♫ I keep on trying despite ♫ ♫ This is a song that I sing when I'm scared of something ♫ Okay, so I wrote that song, right. Thank you. So the nice thing was is he walked by his daughter's room at some point, and she actually was singing that song to herself. So I was like, "Awesome. This is great." And then I got this email. And there's a little bit of a back story to this. And I don't have much time. But the idea was that at one point I did a project called Facebook Me Equals You, where I wanted to experience what it was like to live as another person. So I asked for people's usernames and passwords to be sent to me. And I got a lot, like 30 in a half an hour. And I shut that part down. And I chose two people to be, and I asked them to send me descriptions of how to act as them on Facebook. One person sent me a very detailed description; the other person didn't. And the person who didn't, it turned out, had just moved to a new city and taken on a new job. So, you know, people were writing me and saying, "How's your new job?" I was like, "I don't know. Didn't know I had one." But anyway, this same person, Laura, ended up emailing me a little bit after that project. And I felt badly for not having done a good job. And she said, "I'm really anxious, I just moved to a new town, I have this new job, and I've just had this incredible amount of anxiety." So she had seen the "Scared" song and wondered if I could do something. So I asked her, "What does it feel like when you feel this way?" And she wrote a sort of descriptive set of what it felt like to have had this anxiety. And so what I decided to do. I said, "Okay, I'll think about it." And so quietly in the background, I started sending people this. (Audio) ♫ Hey ♫ ♫ You're okay ♫ ♫ You'll be fine ♫ So I asked people whether they had basic audio capabilities, just so they could sing along to the song with headphones on, so I could just get their voices back. And this is the kind of thing that I got back. Recording: ♫ Hey ♫ ♫ You're okay ♫ ♫ You'll be fine ♫ ZF: So that's one of the better ones, really. But what's awesome is, as I started getting more and more and more of them, all of a sudden I had 30, 40 voices from around the world. And when you put them together, something magical happens, something absolutely incredible happens, and all of a sudden I get a chorus from around the world. And what was really great is, I'm putting all this work together in the background, and Laura sent me a follow-up email because a good month had passed by. And she said, "I know you've forgotten about me. I just want to say thanks for even considering it." And then a few days later I sent her this. (Audio) ♫ Right now, it feels like I forgot to turn the light on ♫ ♫ And things that looked so good yesterday ♫ ♫ are now shades of gray ♫ ♫ And it seems like the world is spinning ♫ ♫ while I'm standing still ♫ ♫ Or maybe I am spinning I can't tell ♫ ♫ And then you say ♫ ♫ Hey ♫ ♫ You're okay ♫ ♫ You'll be fine ♫ ♫ Just breathe ♫ ♫ And now the words sing ♫ ♫ Hey ♫ ♫ You're okay ♫ ♫ You'll be fine ♫ ♫ Just breathe ♫ ♫ Now everybody sings ♫ ♫ Hey ♫ ♫ You're okay ♫ ♫ You'll be fine ♫ ♫ Just breathe ♫ ♫ Hey ♫ ♫ You're okay ♫ ♫ You'll be fine ♫ ♫ Just breathe ♫ ♫ Hey ♫ ♫ You're okay ♫ ♫ You'll be fine ♫ ♫ Just breathe ♫ Thank you. (Applause) |
Poverty, money -- and love | {0: 'Jessica Jackley is the co-founder of Kiva.org, an online community that helps individuals loan small amounts of money, called microloans, to entrepreneurs throughout the world.'} | TEDGlobal 2010 | The stories we tell about each other matter very much. The stories we tell ourselves about our own lives matter. And most of all, I think the way that we participate in each other's stories is of deep importance. I was six years old when I first heard stories about the poor. Now I didn't hear those stories from the poor themselves, I heard them from my Sunday school teacher and Jesus, kind of via my Sunday school teacher. I remember learning that people who were poor needed something material — food, clothing, shelter — that they didn't have. And I also was taught, coupled with that, that it was my job — this classroom full of five and six year-old children — it was our job, apparently, to help. This is what Jesus asked of us. And then he said, "What you do for the least of these, you do for me." Now I was pretty psyched. I was very eager to be useful in the world — I think we all have that feeling. And also, it was kind of interesting that God needed help. That was news to me, and it felt like it was a very important thing to get to participate in. But I also learned very soon thereafter that Jesus also said, and I'm paraphrasing, the poor would always be with us. This frustrated and confused me; I felt like I had been just given a homework assignment that I had to do, and I was excited to do, but no matter what I would do, I would fail. So I felt confused, a little bit frustrated and angry, like maybe I'd misunderstood something here. And I felt overwhelmed. And for the first time, I began to fear this group of people and to feel negative emotion towards a whole group of people. I imagined in my head, a kind of long line of individuals that were never going away, that would always be with us. They were always going to ask me to help them and give them things, which I was excited to do, but I didn't know how it was going to work. And I didn't know what would happen when I ran out of things to give, especially if the problem was never going away. In the years following, the other stories I heard about the poor growing up were no more positive. For example, I saw pictures and images frequently of sadness and suffering. I heard about things that were going wrong in the lives of the poor. I heard about disease, I heard about war — they always seemed to be kind of related. And in general, I got this sort of idea that the poor in the world lived lives that were wrought with suffering and sadness, devastation, hopelessness. And after a while, I developed what I think many of us do, is this predictable response, where I started to feel bad every time I heard about them. I started to feel guilty for my own relative wealth, because I wasn't doing more, apparently, to make things better. And I even felt a sense of shame because of that. And so naturally, I started to distance myself. I stopped listening to their stories quite as closely as I had before. And I stopped expecting things to really change. Now I still gave — on the outside it looked like I was still quite involved. I gave of my time and my money, I gave when solutions were on sale. The cost of a cup of coffee can save a child's life, right. I mean who can argue with that? I gave when I was cornered, when it was difficult to avoid and I gave, in general, when the negative emotions built up enough that I gave to relieve my own suffering, not someone else's. The truth be told, I was giving out of that place, not out of a genuine place of hope and excitement to help and of generosity. It became a transaction for me, became sort of a trade. I was purchasing something — I was buying my right to go on with my day and not necessarily be bothered by this bad news. And I think the way that we go through that sometimes can, first of all, disembody a group of people, individuals out there in the world. And it can also turn into a commodity, which is a very scary thing. So as I did this, and as I think many of us do this, we kind of buy our distance, we kind of buy our right to go on with our day. I think that exchange can actually get in the way of the very thing that we want most. It can get in the way of our desire to really be meaningful and useful in another person's life and, in short to love. Thankfully, a few years ago, things shifted for me because I heard this gentleman speak, Dr. Muhammad Yunus. I know many in the room probably know exactly who he is, but to give the shorthand version for any who have not heard him speak, Dr. Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize a few years ago for his work pioneering modern microfinance. When I heard him speak, it was three years before that. But basically, microfinance — if this is new to you as well — think of that as financial services for the poor. Think of all the things you get at your bank and imagine those products and services tailored to the needs of someone living on a few dollars a day. Dr. Yunus shared his story, explaining what that was, and what he had done with his Grameen Bank. He also talked about, in particular, microlending, which is a tiny loan that could help someone start or grow a business. Now, when I heard him speak, it was exciting for a number of reasons. First and foremost, I learned about this new method of change in the world that, for once, showed me, maybe, a way to interact with someone and to give, to share of a resource in a way that wasn't weird and didn't make me feel bad — that was exciting. But more importantly, he told stories about the poor that were different than any stories I had heard before. In fact, those individuals he talked about who were poor was sort of a side note. He was talking about strong, smart, hardworking entrepreneurs who woke up every day and were doing things to make their lives and their family's lives better. All they needed to do that more quickly and to do it better was a little bit of capital. It was an amazing sort of insight for me. And I, in fact, was so deeply moved by this — it's hard to express now how much that affected me — but I was so moved that I actually quit my job a few weeks later, and I moved to East Africa to try to see for myself what this was about. For the first time, actually, in a long time I wanted to meet those individuals, I wanted to meet these entrepreneurs, and see for myself what their lives were actually about. So I spent three months in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania interviewing entrepreneurs that had received 100 dollars to start or grow a business. And in fact, through those interactions, for the first time, I was starting to get to be friends with some of those people in that big amorphous group out there that was supposed to be far away. I was starting to be friends and get to know their personal stories. And over and over again, as I interviewed them and spent my days with them, I did hear stories of life change and amazing little details of change. So I would hear from goat herders who had used that money that they had received to buy a few more goats. Their business trajectory would change. They would make a little bit more money; their standard of living would shift and would get better. And they would make really interesting little adjustments in their lives, like they would start to send their children to school. They might be able to buy mosquito nets. Maybe they could afford a lock for the door and feel secure. Maybe it was just that they could put sugar in their tea and offer that to me when I came as their guest and that made them feel proud. But there were these beautiful details, even if I talked to 20 goat herders in a row, and some days that's what happened — these beautiful details of life change that were meaningful to them. That was another thing that really touched me. It was really humbling to see for the first time, to really understand that even if I could have taken a magic wand and fixed everything, I probably would have gotten a lot wrong. Because the best way for people to change their lives is for them to have control and to do that in a way that they believe is best for them. So I saw that and it was very humbling. Anyway, another interesting thing happened while I was there. I never once was asked for a donation, which had kind of been my mode, right. There's poverty, you give money to help — no one asked me for a donation. In fact, no one wanted me to feel bad for them at all. If anything, they just wanted to be able to do more of what they were doing already and to build on their own capabilities. So what I did hear, once in a while, was that people wanted a loan — I thought that sounded very reasonable and really exciting. And by the way, I was a philosophy and poetry major in school, so I didn't know the difference between profit and revenue when I went to East Africa. I just got this impression that the money would work. And my introduction to business was in these $100 little infuses of capital. And I learned about profit and revenue, about leverage, all sorts of things, from farmers, from seamstresses, from goat herders. So this idea that these new stories of business and hope might be shared with my friends and family, and through that, maybe we could get some of the money that they needed to be able to continue their businesses as loans, that's this little idea that turned into Kiva. A few months later, I went back to Uganda with a digital camera and a basic website that my partner, Matthew, and I had kind of built, and took pictures of seven of my new friends, posted their stories, these stories of entrepreneurship, up on the website, spammed friends and family and said, "We think this is legal. Haven't heard back yet from SEC on all the details, but do you say, do you want to help participate in this, provide the money that they need?" The money came in basically overnight. We sent it over to Uganda. And over the next six months, a beautiful thing happened; the entrepreneurs received the money, they were paid, and their businesses, in fact, grew, and they were able to support themselves and change the trajectory of their lives. In October of '05, after those first seven loans were paid, Matt and I took the word beta off of the site. We said, "Our little experiment has been a success. Let's start for real." That was our official launch. And then that first year, October '05 through '06, Kiva facilitated $500,000 in loans. The second year, it was a total of 15 million. The third year, the total was up to around 40. The fourth year, we were just short of 100. And today, less than five years in, Kiva's facilitated more than 150 million dollars, in little 25-dollar bits, from lenders and entrepreneurs — more than a million of those, collectively in 200 countries. So that's where Kiva is today, just to bring you right up to the present. And while those numbers and those statistics are really fun to talk about and they're interesting, to me, Kiva's really about stories. It's about retelling the story of the poor, and it's about giving ourselves an opportunity to engage that validates their dignity, validates a partnership relationship, not a relationship that's based on the traditional sort of donor beneficiary weirdness that can happen. But instead a relationship that can promote respect and hope and this optimism that together we can move forward. So what I hope is that, not only can the money keep flowing forth through Kiva — that's a very positive and meaningful thing — but I hope Kiva can blur those lines, like I said, between the traditional rich and poor categories that we're taught to see in the world, this false dichotomy of us and them, have and have not. I hope that Kiva can blur those lines. Because as that happens, I think we can feel free to interact in a way that's more open, more just and more creative, to engage with each other and to help each other. Imagine how you feel when you see somebody on street who is begging and you're about to approach them. Imagine how you feel; and then imagine the difference when you might see somebody who has a story of entrepreneurship and hard work who wants to tell you about their business. Maybe they're smiling, and they want to talk to you about what they've done. Imagine if you're speaking with somebody who's growing things and making them flourish, somebody who's using their talents to do something productive, somebody who's built their own business from scratch, someone who is surrounded by abundance, not scarcity, who's in fact creating abundance, somebody with full hands with something to offer, not empty hands asking for you to give them something. Imagine if you could hear a story you didn't expect of somebody who wakes up every day and works very, very hard to make their life better. These stories can really change the way that we think about each other. And if we can catalyze a supportive community to come around these individuals and to participate in their story by lending a little bit of money, I think that can change the way we believe in each other and each other's potential. Now for me, Kiva is just the beginning. And as I look forward to what is next, it's been helpful to reflect on the things I've learned so far. The first one is, as I mentioned, entrepreneurship was a new idea to me. Kiva borrowers, as I interviewed them and got to know them over the last few years, have taught me what entrepreneurship is. And I think, at its core, it's deciding that you want your life to be better. You see an opportunity and you decide what you're going to do to try to seize that. In short, it's deciding that tomorrow can better than today and going after that. Second thing that I've learned is that loans are a very interesting tool for connectivity. So they're not a donation. Yeah, maybe it doesn't sound that much different. But in fact, when you give something to someone and they say, "Thanks," and let you know how things go, that's one thing. When you lend them money, and they slowly pay you back over time, you have this excuse to have an ongoing dialogue. This continued attention — this ongoing attention — is a really big deal to build different kinds of relationships among us. And then third, from what I've heard from the entrepreneurs I've gotten to know, when all else is equal, given the option to have just money to do what you need to do, or money plus the support and encouragement of a global community, people choose the community plus the money. That's a much more meaningful combination, a more powerful combination. So with that in mind, this particular incident has led to the things that I'm working on now. I see entrepreneurs everywhere now, now that I'm tuned into this. And one thing that I've seen is there are a lot of supportive communities that already exist in the world. With social networks, it's an amazing way, growing the number of people that we all have around us in our own supportive communities, rapidly. And so, as I have been thinking about this, I've been wondering: how can we engage these supportive communities to catalyze even more entrepreneurial ideas and to catalyze all of us to make tomorrow better than today? As I've researched what's going on in the United States, a few interesting little insights have come up. So one is that, of course, as we all might expect, many small businesses in the U.S. and all over the world still need money to grow and to do more of what they want to do or they might need money during a hard month. But there's always a need for resources close by. Another thing is, it turns out, those resources don't usually come from the places you might expect — banks, venture capitalists, other organizations and support structures — they come from friends and family. Some statistics say 85 percent or more of funding for small businesses comes from friends and family. That's around 130 billion dollars a year — it's a lot. And third, so as people are doing this friends and family fundraising process, it's very awkward, people don't know exactly what to ask for, how to ask, what to promise in return, even though they have the best of intentions and want to thank those people that are supporting them. So to harness the power of these supportive communities in a new way and to allow entrepreneurs to decide for themselves exactly what that financial exchange should look like, exactly what fits them and the people around them, this week actually, we're quietly doing a launch of Profounder, which is a crowd funding platform for small businesses to raise what they need through investments from their friends and family. And it's investments, not donations, not loans, but investments that have a dynamic return. So the mapping of participating in the story, it actually flows with the up and down. So in short, it's a do-it-yourself tool for small businesses to raise these funds. And what you can do is go onto the site, create a profile, create investment terms in a really easy way. We make it really, really simple for me as well as anyone else who wants to use the site. And we allow entrepreneurs to share a percentage of their revenues. They can raise up to a million dollars from an unlimited number of unaccredited, unsophisticated investors — everyday people, heaven forbid — and they can share those returns over time — again, whatever terms they set. As investors choose to become involved based on those terms, they can either take their rewards back as cash, or they can decide in advance to give those returns away to a non-profit. So they can be a cash, or a cause, investor. It's my hope that this kind of tool can show anybody who has an idea a path to go do what they want to do in the world and to gather the people around them that they already have, the people that know them best and that love them and want to support them, to gather them to make this happen. So that's what I'm working on now. And to close, I just want to say, look these are tools. Right now, Profounder's right at the very beginning, and it's very palpable; it's very clear to me, that it's just a vessel, it's just a tool. What we need are for people to care, to actually go use it, just like they've cared enough to use Kiva to make those connections. But the good news is I don't think I need to stand here and convince you to care — I'm not even going to try. I don't think, even though we often hear, you know, hear the ethical and moral reasons, the religious reasons, "Here's why caring and giving will make you happier." I don't think we need to be convinced of that. I think we know; in fact, I think we know so much, and it's such a reality that we care so deeply, that in fact, what usually stops us is that we're afraid to try and to mess up, because we care so very much about helping each other and being meaningful in each other's lives. So what I think I can do today, that best thing I can give you — I've given you my story, which is the best I can do. And I think I can remind us that we do care. I think we all already know that. And I think we know that love is resilient enough for us to get out there and try. Just a sec. (Applause) Thanks. (Applause) Thanks. (Applause) For me, the best way to be inspired to try is to stop and to listen to someone else's story. And I'm grateful that I've gotten to do that here at TED. And I'm grateful that whenever I do that, guaranteed, I am inspired — I am inspired by the person I am listening to. And I believe more and more every time I listen in that that person's potential to do great things in the world and in my own potential to maybe help. And that — forget the tools, forget the moving around of resources — that stuff's easy. Believing in each other, really being sure when push comes to shove that each one of us can do amazing things in the world, that is what can make our stories into love stories and our collective story into one that continually perpetuates hope and good things for all of us. So that, this belief in each other, knowing that without a doubt and practicing that every day in whatever you do, that's what I believe will change the world and make tomorrow better than today. Thank you. (Applause) |
The brain in your gut | {0: 'Heribert Watzke studies the brain in our gut -- and works to develop new kinds of food that will satisfy our bodies and minds.'} | TEDGlobal 2010 | This technology made a very important impact on us. It changed the way our history developed. But it's a technology so pervasive, so invisible, that we, for a long time, forgot to take it into account when we talked about human evolution. But we see the results of this technology, still. So let's make a little test. So everyone of you turns to their neighbor please. Turn and face your neighbors. Please, also on the balcony. Smile. Smile. Open the mouths. Smile, friendly. (Laughter) Do you — Do you see any Canine teeth? (Laughter) Count Dracula teeth in the mouths of your neighbors? Of course not. Because our dental anatomy is actually made, not for tearing down raw meat from bones or chewing fibrous leaves for hours. It is made for a diet which is soft, mushy, which is reduced in fibers, which is very easily chewable and digestible. Sounds like fast food, doesn't it. (Laughter) It's for cooked food. We carry in our face the proof that cooking, food transformation, made us what we are. So I would suggest that we change how we classify ourselves. We talk about ourselves as omnivores. I would say, we should call ourselves coctivors — (Laughter) from coquere, to cook. We are the animals who eat cooked food. No, no, no, no. Better — to live of cooked food. So cooking is a very important technology. It's technology. I don't know how you feel, but I like to cook for entertainment. And you need some design to be successful. So, cooking is a very important technology, because it allowed us to acquire what brought you all here: the big brain, this wonderful cerebral cortex we have. Because brains are expensive. Those have to pay tuition fees know. (Laughter) But it's also, metabolically speaking, expensive. You now, our brain is two to three percent of the body mass, but actually it uses 25 percent of the total energy we use. It's very expensive. Where does the energy come from. Of course, from food. If we eat raw food, we cannot release really the energy. So this ingenuity of our ancestors, to invent this most marvelous technology. Invisible — everyone of us does it every day, so to speak. Cooking made it possible that mutations, natural selections, our environment, could develop us. So if we think about this unleashing human potential, which was possible by cooking and food, why do we talk so badly about food? Why is it always do and don'ts and it's good for you, it's not good for you? I think the good news for me would be if we could go back and talk about the unleashing, the continuation of the unleashing of human potential. Now, cooking allowed also that we became a migrant species. We walked out of Africa two times. We populated all the ecologies. If you can cook, nothing can happen to you, because whatever you find, you will try to transform it. It keeps also your brain working. Now the very easy and simple technology which was developed actually runs after this formula. Take something which looks like food, transform it, and it gives you a good, very easy, accessible energy. This technology affected two organs, the brain and the gut, which it actually affected. The brain could grow, but the gut actually shrunk. Okay, it's not obvious to be honest. (Laughter) But it shrunk to 60 percent of primate gut of my body mass. So because of having cooked food, it's easier to digest. Now having a large brain, as you know, is a big advantage, because you can actually influence your environment. You can influence your own technologies you have invented. You can continue to innovate and invent. Now the big brain did this also with cooking. But how did it actually run this show? How did it actually interfere? What kind of criteria did it use? And this is actually taste reward and energy. You know we have up to five tastes, three of them sustain us. Sweet — energy. Umami — this is a meaty taste. You need proteins for muscles, recovery. Salty, because you need salt, otherwise your electric body will not work. And two tastes which protect you — bitter and sour, which are against poisonous and rotten material. But of course, they are hard-wired but we use them still in a sophisticated way. Think about bittersweet chocolate; or think about the acidity of yogurt — wonderful — mixed with strawberry fruits. So we can make mixtures of all this kind of thing because we know that, in cooking, we can transform it to the form. Reward: this is a more complex and especially integrative form of our brain with various different elements — the external states, our internal states, how do we feel, and so on are put together. And something which maybe you don't like but you are so hungry that you really will be satisfied to eat. So satisfaction was a very important part. And as I say, energy was necessary. Now how did the gut actually participate in this development? And the gut is a silent voice — it's going more for feelings. I use the euphemism digestive comfort — actually — it's a digestive discomfort, which the gut is concerned with. If you get a stomach ache, if you get a little bit bloated, was not the right food, was not the right cooking manipulation or maybe other things went wrong. So my story is a tale of two brains, because it might surprise you, our gut has a full-fledged brain. All the managers in the room say, "You don't tell me something new, because we know, gut feeling. This is what we are using." (Laughter) And actually you use it and it's actually useful. Because our gut is connected to our emotional limbic system, they do speak with each other and make decisions. But what it means to have a brain there is that, not only the big brain has to talk with the food, the food has to talk with the brain, because we have to learn actually how to talk to the brains. Now if there's a gut brain, we should also learn to talk with this brain. Now 150 years ago, anatomists described very, very carefully — here is a model of a wall of a gut. I took the three elements — stomach, small intestine and colon. And within this structure, you see these two pinkish layers, which are actually the muscle. And between this muscle, they found nervous tissues, a lot of nervous tissues, which penetrate actually the muscle — penetrate the submucosa, where you have all the elements for the immune system. The gut is actually the largest immune system, defending your body. It penetrates the mucosa. This is the layer which actually touches the food you are swallowing and you digest, which is actually the lumen. Now if you think about the gut, the gut is — if you could stretch it — 40 meters long, the length of a tennis court. If we could unroll it, get out all the folds and so on, it would have 400 sq. meters of surface. And now this brain takes care over this, to move it with the muscles and to do defend the surface and, of course, digest our food we cook. So if we give you a specification, this brain, which is autonomous, have 500 million nerve cells, 100 million neurons — so around the size of a cat brain, so there sleeps a little cat — thinks for itself, optimizes whatever it digests. It has 20 different neuron types. It's got the same diversity you find actually in a pig brain, where you have 100 billion neurons. It has autonomous organized microcircuits, has these programs which run. It senses the food; it knows exactly what to do. It senses it by chemical means and very importantly by mechanical means, because it has to move the food — it has to mix all the various elements which we need for digestion. This control of muscle is very, very important, because, you know, there can be reflexes. If you don't like a food, especially if you're a child, you gag. It's this brain which makes this reflex. And then finally, it controls also the secretion of this molecular machinery, which actually digests the food we cook. Now how do the two brains work with each other? I took here a model from robotics — it's called the Subsumption Architecture. What it means is that we have a layered control system. The lower layer, our gut brain, has its own goals — digestion defense — and we have the higher brain with the goal of integration and generating behaviors. Now both look — and this is the blue arrows — both look to the same food, which is in the lumen and in the area of your intestine. The big brain integrates signals, which come from the running programs of the lower brain, But subsumption means that the higher brain can interfere with the lower. It can replace, or it can inhibit actually, signals. So if we take two types of signals — a hunger signal for example. If you have an empty stomach, your stomach produces a hormone called ghrelin. It's a very big signal; it's sent to the brain says, "Go and eat." You have stop signals — we have up to eight stop signals. At least in my case, they are not listened to. (Laughter) So what happens if the big brain in the integration overrides the signal? So if you override the hunger signal, you can have a disorder, which is called anorexia. Despite generating a healthy hunger signal, the big brain ignores it and activates different programs in the gut. The more usual case is overeating. It actually takes the signal and changes it, and we continue, even [though] our eight signals would say, "Stop, enough. We have transferred enough energy." Now the interesting thing is that, along this lower layer — this gut — the signal becomes stronger and stronger if undigested, but digestible, material could penetrate. This we found from bariatric surgery. That then the signal would be very, very high. So now back to the cooking question and back to the design. We have learned to talk to the big brain — taste and reward, as you know. Now what would be the language we have to talk to the gut brain that its signals are so strong that the big brain cannot ignore it? Then we would generate something all of us would like to have — a balance between the hunger and the satiation. Now I give you, from our research, a very short claim. This is fat digestion. You have on your left an olive oil droplet, and this olive oil droplet gets attacked by enzymes. This is an in vitro experiment. It's very difficult to work in the intestine. Now everyone would expect that when the degradation of the oil happens, when the constituents are liberated, they disappear, they go away because they [were] absorbed. Actually, what happens is that a very intricate structure appears. And I hope you can see that there are some ring-like structures in the middle image, which is water. This whole system generates a huge surface to allow more enzymes to attack the remaining oil. And finally, on your right side, you see a bubbly, cell-like structure appearing, from which the body will absorb the fat. Now if we could take this language — and this is a language of structures — and make it longer-lasting, that it can go through the passage of the intestine, it would generate stronger signals. So our research — and I think the research also at the universities — are now fixing on these points to say: how can we actually — and this might sound trivial now to you — how can we change cooking? How can we cook that we have this language developed? So what we have actually, it's not an omnivore's dilemma. We have a coctivor's opportunity, because we have learned over the last two million years which taste and reward — quite sophisticated to cook — to please ourselves, to satisfy ourselves. If we add the matrix, if we add the structure language, which we have to learn, when we learn it, then we can put it back; and around energy, we could generate a balance, which comes out from our really primordial operation: cooking. So, to make cooking really a very important element, I would say even philosophers have to change and have to finally recognize that cooking is what made us. So I would say, coquo ergo sum: I cook, therefore I am. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Tough truths about plastic pollution | {0: 'Dianna Cohen co-founded the Plastic Pollution Coalition, which is working to help end our cycle of plastics use.'} | Mission Blue Voyage | I'm a visual artist, and I'm also one of the co-founders of the Plastic Pollution Coalition. I've been working with plastic bags, which I cut up and sew back together as my primary material for my artwork for the last 20 years. I turn them into two and three-dimensional pieces and sculptures and installations. Upon working with the plastic, after about the first eight years, some of my work started to fissure and break down into smaller little bits of plastic. And I thought, "Great. It's ephemeral just like us." Upon educating myself a little further about plastics, I actually realized this was a bad thing. It's a bad thing that plastic breaks down into smaller little bits, because it's always still plastic. And what we're finding is that a lot of it is in the marine environment. I then, in the last few years, learned about the Pacific garbage patch and the gyre. And my initial reaction — and I think this is a lot of people's first reaction to learning about it — is, "Oh my God! We've got to go out there and clean this thing up." So I actually developed a proposal to go out with a cargo ship and two decommissioned fishing trawlers, a crane, a chipping machine and a cold-molding machine. And my intention was to go out to the gyre, raise awareness about this issue and begin to pick up the plastic, chip it into little bits and cold mold it into bricks that could potentially be used as building materials in underdeveloped communities. I began talking with people who actually had been out to the gyre and were studying the plastic problem in the marine environment and upon doing so, I realized actually that cleaning it up would be a very small drop in the bucket relative to how much is being generated every day around the world, and that actually I needed to back up and look at the bigger picture. And the bigger picture is: we need to find a way to turn off the faucet. We need to cut the spigot of single-use and disposable plastics, which are entering the marine environment every day on a global scale. So in looking at that, I also realized that I was really angry. I wasn't just concerned about plastic that you're trying to imagine out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean — of which I have learned there are now 11 gyres, potentially, of plastic in five major oceans in the world. It's not just that gyre of plastic that I'm concerned about — it's the gyre of plastic in the supermarket. I'd go to the supermarket and all of my food is packaged in plastic. All of my beverages are packaged in plastic, even at the health food market. I'm also concerned about the plastic in the refrigerator, and I'm concerned about the plastic and the toxins that leach from plastic into us and into our bodies. So I came together with a group of other people who were all looking at this issue, and we created the Plastic Pollution Coalition. We have many initiatives that we're working on, but some of them are very basic. One is: if 80 to 90 percent of what we're finding in the ocean — of the marine debris that we're finding in the ocean — is plastic, then why don't we call it what it is. It's plastic pollution. Recycling — everybody kind of ends their books about being sustainable and greening with the idea of recycling. You put something in a bin and you don't have to think about it again. What is the reality of that? In the United States, less than seven percent of our plastics are recycled. And if you really look into it, particularly when it comes to plastic bottles, most of it is only down-cycled, or incinerated, or shipped to China. It is down-cycled and turned into lesser things, while a glass bottle can be a glass bottle again or can be used again — a plastic bottle can never be a plastic bottle again. So this is a big issue for us. Another thing that we're looking at and asking people to think about is we've added a fourth R onto the front of the "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle," three R's, and that is refuse. Whenever possible, refuse single-use and disposable plastics. Alternatives exist; some of them are very old-school. I myself am now collecting these cool Pyrex containers and using those instead of Glad and Tupperware containers to store food in. And I know that I am doing a service to myself and my family. It's very easy to pick up a stainless-steel bottle or a glass bottle, if you're traveling and you've forgotten to bring your stainless-steel bottle and fill that up with water or filtered water, versus purchasing plastic bottled water. I guess what I want to say to everybody here — and I know that you guys know a lot about this issue — is that this is a huge problem in the oceans, but this is a problem that we've created as consumers and we can solve. We can solve this by raising awareness of the issue and teaching people to choose alternatives. So whenever possible, to choose alternatives to single-use plastics. We can cut the stem — tide the stem of this into our oceans and in doing so, save our oceans, save our planet, save ourselves. Thank you. (Applause) |
The power of cartoons | {0: "With simple lines and pointed jokes that skewer injustice, Patrick Chappatte's editorial cartoons view the tragic, the farcical and the absurd through a lens of unfettered humor."} | TEDGlobal 2010 | So yeah, I'm a newspaper cartoonist — political cartoonist. I don't know if you've heard about it — newspapers? It's a sort of paper-based reader. (Laughter) It's lighter than an iPad, it's a bit cheaper. You know what they say? They say the print media is dying — who says that? Well, the media. But this is no news, right? You've read about it already. (Laughter) Ladies and gentlemen, the world has gotten smaller. I know it's a cliche, but look, look how small, how tiny it has gotten. And you know the reason why, of course. This is because of technology — yeah. (Laughter) Any computer designers in the room? Yeah well, you guys are making my life miserable because track pads used to be round, a nice round shape. That makes a good cartoon. But what are you going to do with a flat track pad, those square things? There's nothing I can do as a cartoonist. Well, I know the world is flat now. That's true. And the Internet has reached every corner of the world, the poorest, the remotest places. Every village in Africa now has a cyber cafe. (Laughter) Don't go asking for a Frappuccino there. So we are bridging the digital divide. The Third World is connected, we are connected. And what happens next? Well, you've got mail. Yeah. Well, the Internet has empowered us. It has empowered you, it has empowered me and it has empowered some other guys as well. (Laughter) You know, these last two cartoons — I did them live during a conference in Hanoi. And they were not used to that in communist 2.0 Vietnam. (Laughter) So I was cartooning live on a wide screen — it was quite a sensation — and then this guy came to me. He was taking pictures of me and of my sketches, and I thought, "This is great, a Vietnamese fan." And as he came the second day, I thought, "Wow, that's really a cartoon lover." And on the third day, I finally understood, the guy was actually on duty. So by now, there must be a hundred pictures of me smiling with my sketches in the files of the Vietnamese police. (Laughter) No, but it's true: the Internet has changed the world. It has rocked the music industry; it has changed the way we consume music. For those of you old enough to remember, we used to have to go to the store to steal it. (Laughter) And it has changed the way your future employer will look at your application. So be careful with that Facebook account — your momma told you, be careful. And technology has set us free — this is free WiFi. But yeah, it has liberated us from the office desk. This is your life, enjoy it. (Laughter) In short, technology, the internet, they have changed our lifestyle. Tech guru, like this man — that a German magazine called the philosopher of the 21st century — they are shaping the way we do things. They are shaping the way we consume. They are shaping our very desires. (Laughter) (Applause) You will not like it. And technology has even changed our relationship to God. (Laughter) Now I shouldn't get into this. Religion and political cartoons, as you may have heard, make a difficult couple, ever since that day of 2005, when a bunch of cartoonists in Denmark drew cartoons that had repercussions all over the world — demonstrations, fatwa, they provoked violence. People died in the violence. This was so sickening; people died because of cartoons. I mean — I had the feeling at the time that cartoons had been used by both sides, actually. They were used first by a Danish newspaper, which wanted to make a point on Islam. A Danish cartoonist told me he was one of the 24 who received the assignment to draw the prophet — 12 of them refused. Did you know that? He told me, "Nobody has to tell me what I should draw. This is not how it works." And then, of course, they were used by extremists and politicians on the other side. They wanted to stir up controversy. You know the story. We know that cartoons can be used as weapons. History tells us, they've been used by the Nazis to attack the Jews. And here we are now. In the United Nations, half of the world is pushing to penalize the offense to religion — they call it the defamation of religion — while the other half of the world is fighting back in defense of freedom of speech. So the clash of civilizations is here, and cartoons are at the middle of it? This got me thinking. Now you see me thinking at my kitchen table, and since you're in my kitchen, please meet my wife. (Laughter) In 2006, a few months after, I went Ivory Coast — Western Africa. Now, talk of a divided place — the country was cut in two. You had a rebellion in the North, the government in the South — the capital, Abidjan — and in the middle, the French army. This looks like a giant hamburger. You don't want to be the ham in the middle. I was there to report on that story in cartoons. I've been doing this for the last 15 years; it's my side job, if you want. So you see the style is different. This is more serious than maybe editorial cartooning. I went to places like Gaza during the war in 2009. So this is really journalism in cartoons. You'll hear more and more about it. This is the future of journalism, I think. And of course, I went to see the rebels in the north. Those were poor guys fighting for their rights. There was an ethnic side to this conflict as very often in Africa. And I went to see the Dozo. The Dozo, they are the traditional hunters of West Africa. People fear them — they help the rebellion a lot. They are believed to have magical powers. They can disappear and escape bullets. I went to see a Dozo chief; he told me about his magical powers. He said, "I can chop your head off right away and bring you back to life." I said, "Well, maybe we don't have time for this right now." (Laughter) "Another time." So back in Abidjan, I was given a chance to lead a workshop with local cartoonists there and I thought, yes, in a context like this, cartoons can really be used as weapons against the other side. I mean, the press in Ivory Coast was bitterly divided — it was compared to the media in Rwanda before the genocide — so imagine. And what can a cartoonist do? Sometimes editors would tell their cartoonists to draw what they wanted to see, and the guy has to feed his family, right? So the idea was pretty simple. We brought together cartoonists from all sides in Ivory Coast. We took them away from their newspaper for three days. And I asked them to do a project together, tackle the issues affecting their country in cartoons, yes, in cartoons. Show the positive power of cartoons. It's a great tool of communication for bad or for good. And cartoons can cross boundaries, as you have seen. And humor is a good way, I think, to address serious issues. And I'm very proud of what they did. I mean, they didn't agree with each other — that was not the point. And I didn't ask them to do nice cartoons. The first day, they were even shouting at each other. But they came up with a book, looking back at 13 years of political crisis in Ivory Coast. So the idea was there. And I've been doing projects like this, in 2009 in Lebanon, this year in Kenya, back in January. In Lebanon, it was not a book. The idea was to have — the same principal, a divided country — take cartoonists from all sides and let them do something together. So in Lebanon, we enrolled the newspaper editors, and we got them to publish eight cartoonists from all sides all together on the same page, addressing the issue affecting Lebanon, like religion in politics and everyday life. And it worked. For three days, almost all the newspapers of Beirut published all those cartoonists together — anti-government, pro-government, Christian, Muslim, of course, English-speaking, well, you name it. So this was a great project. And then in Kenya, what we did was addressing the issue of ethnicity, which is a poison in a lot of places in Africa. And we did video clips — you can see them if you go to YouTube/Kenyatoons. So, preaching for freedom of speech is easy here, but as you have seen in contexts of repression or division, again, what can a cartoonist do? He has to keep his job. Well I believe that in any context anywhere, he always has the choice at least not to do a cartoon that will feed hatred. And that's the message I try to convey to them. I think we all always have the choice in the end not to do the bad thing. But we need to support these independent, critical and responsible voices in Africa, in Lebanon, in your local newspaper, in the Apple store. Today, tech companies are the world's largest editors. They decide what is too offensive or too provocative for you to see. So really, it's not about the freedom of cartoonists; it's about your freedoms. And for dictators all over the world, the good news is when cartoonists, journalists and activists shut up. Thank you. (Applause) |
"(Nothing But) Flowers" with string quartet | {0: 'Thomas Dolby has spent his career at the intersection of music and technology. He was an early star on MTV, then moved to Silicon Valley, then went back on the road with his album, "A Map of the Floating City."', 1: 'Ethel is, perhaps, the first 21st-century realization of the classical string quartet. ', 2: 'David Byrne builds an idiosyncratic world of music, art, writing and film.'} | TED2010 | (Music) ♫ Here we stand ♫ ♫ Like an Adam and an Eve ♫ ♫ Waterfalls ♫ ♫ The Garden of Eden ♫ ♫ Two fools in love ♫ ♫ So beautiful and strong ♫ ♫ Birds in the trees ♫ ♫ Are smiling upon them ♫ ♫ From the age of the dinosaurs ♫ ♫ Cars would run on gasoline ♫ ♫ Where? Where have they gone? ♫ ♫ Now, there's nothing but flowers ♫ ♫ This was a factory ♫ ♫Now there are mountains and rivers ♫ ♫ You got it, you got it ♫ ♫ We caught a rattlesnake ♫ ♫ Now we've got something for dinner ♫ ♫ You got it, you got it ♫ ♫ This was a parking lot ♫ ♫ Now it's all covered with flowers ♫ ♫ You got it, you got it ♫ ♫ If this is paradise ♫ ♫ I wish I had a lawnmower ♫ ♫ You got it, you got it ♫ ♫ This was a shopping mall ♫ ♫ Now it's turned into corn field ♫ ♫ You got it, you got it ♫ ♫ Don't leave me stranded here ♫ ♫ I can't get used to this lifestyle ♫ (Applause) Thomas Dolby: David Byrne. (Applause) |
Breakthrough designs for ultra-low-cost products | {0: 'Using a principle he calls “convex lens leadership,” R.A. Mashelkar’s vision has catapulted india’s talent for science and innovation onto the international stage.'} | TEDIndia 2009 | The big residual is always value for money. All the time we are trying to get value for money. What we don't look for is value for many, while we are generating value for money. Do we care about those four billion people whose income levels are less than two dollars a day, the so-called bottom of the pyramid? What are the challenges in getting value for money as well as value for many? We have described here in terms of the performance and the price. If you have money, of course, you can get the value. You can get a Mercedes for a very high price, very high performance. But if you don't have money, what happens? Well, you are to ride a bicycle, carrying your own weight and also some other weight, so that you can earn the bread for the day. Well, poor do not remain poor; they become lower-middle-class. And if they do so, then, of course, the conditions improve, and they start riding on scooters. But the challenge is, again, they don't get much value, because they can't afford anything more than the scooter. The issue is, at that price, can you give them some extra value? A super value, in terms of their ability to ride in a car, to get that dignity, to get that safety, looks practically impossible, isn't it. Now, this is something that we see on Indian streets all the time. But many people see the same thing and think things differently, and one of them is here, Ratan Tata. The great thing about our leaders is that, should they not only have passion in their belly, which practically all of them have, they're also very innovative. An innovator is one who does not know it cannot be done. They believe that things can be done. But great leaders like Ratan have compassion. And what you said, Lakshmi, is absolutely true: it's not just Ratan Tata, it's the house of Tatas over time. Let me confirm what she said. Yes, I went barefoot until I was 12. I struggled to [unclear] day was a huge issue. And when I finished my SSC, the eleventh standard, I stood eleventh among 125,000 students. But I was about to leave the school, because my poor mother couldn't afford schooling. And it was [unclear] Tata Trust, which gave me six rupees per month, almost a dollar per month for six years. That's how I'm standing before you. So that is the House of Tata. (Applause) Innovation, compassion and passion. They combine all that. And it was that compassion which bothered them, because when he saw — in fact, he told me about eight or nine years ago how he was driving his own car — he drives his own car by the way — and he saw in the rain, a family like the one that I showed to you getting drenched with an infant. And then he said, "Well, I must give them a car that they can afford, one lakh car, $2,000 car." Of course, as soon as you say something like this people say it is impossible, and that's what was said by Suzuki. He said, oh, probably he is going to build a three-wheeler with stepney. And you can see the cartoon here. Well they didn't build that. They built a proper car. Nano. And mind you, I'm six feet half an inch, Ratan is taller than me, and we have ample space in the front and ample space in the back in this particular car. And incredible car. And of course, nothing succeeds like success; the cynics then turned around, and one after the other they also started saying, "Yes, we also want to make a car in the Nano Segment. We'll manufacture a car in the Nano Segment." How did this great story unfold, the making of Nano? Let me tell you a bit about it. For example, how we started: Ratan just began with a five-engineer team, young people in their mid-twenties. And he said, "Well, I won't define the vehicle for you, but I will define the cost for you. It is one lakh, 100,000 rupees, and you are to make it within that." And he told them, "Question the unquestionable. Stretch the envelope." And at a point in time, he got so engrossed in the whole challenge, that he himself became a member of the team. Can you believe it? I still am told about this story of that single wiper design in which he participated. Until midnight, he'd be thinking. Early morning he'll be coming back with sort of solutions. But who was the team leader? The team leader was Girish Wagh, a 34 year-old boy in [unclear]. And the Nano team average age was just 27 years. And they did innovation in design and beyond. Broke many norms of the standard conventions for the first time. For example, that a two-cylinder gas engine was used in a car with a single balancer shaft. Adhesives were replacing the rivets. There was a co-creation, a huge co-creation, with vendors and suppliers. All ideas on board were welcome. 100 vendors were co-located adjacent to the plant, and innovative business models for automobile dealerships were developed. Imagine that a fellow who sells cloth, for example, will be selling Nano. I mean, it was incredible innovation. Seeking solutions for non-auto sectors. It was an open innovation, ideas from all over were welcome. The mechanism of helicopters seats and windows was used, by the way, as well as a dashboard that was inspired by two-wheelers. The fuel lines and lamps were as in two-wheelers. And the crux of the matter was, however, getting more from less. All the time, you have been given an envelope. You can't cross that envelope, which is 100,000 rupees, 2,000 dollars. And therefore, each component had to have a dual functionality. And the seat riser, for example, serving as a mounting for the seat as well as a structural part of the functional rigidity. Half the number of parts are contained in Nano in comparison to a typical passenger car. The length is smaller by eight percent by the way. But the current entry-level cars in comparison to that is eight percent less, but 21 percent more inside space. And what happened was that — more from less — you can see how much more for how much less. When the Model T was launched — and this is, by the way, all the figures that are adjusted to 2007 dollar prices — Model T was 19,700 by Ford. Volkswagon was 11,333. And British Motor was around 11,000. And Nano was, bang, 2,000 dollars. This is why you started actually a new paradigm shift, where the same people who could not dream of sitting in a car, who were carrying their entire family in a scooter, started dreaming of being in a car. And those dreams are getting fulfilled. This is a photograph of a house and a driver and a car near my own home. The driver's name is Naran. He has bought his own Nano. And you can see, there is a physical space that has been created for him, parking that car, along with the owner's car, but more importantly, they've created a space in their mind that "Yes, my chauffeur is going to come in his own car and park it." And that's why I call it a transformational innovation. It is not just technological, it is social innovation that we talk about. And that is where, ladies and gentlemen, this famous theme of getting more from less for more becomes important. I remember talking about this for the first time in Australia, about one and a half years ago, when their academy honored me with a fellowship. And unbelievably, in 40 years, I was the first Indian to be honored. And the title of my talk was therefore "Indian innovation from Gandhi to Gandhian engineering." And I titled this more from less for more and more people as Gandhian engineering. And Gandhian engineering, in my judgment, is the one which is going to take the world forward, is going to make a difference, not just for a few, but for everyone. Let me move from mobility in a car to individual mobility for those unfortunates who have lost their legs. Here is an American citizen and his son having an artificial foot. What is its price? 20,000 dollars. And of course, these feet are so designed that they can walk only on such perfect pavement or roads. Unfortunately, that's not the case in India. You can see him walk barefoot on an awkward land, sometimes in a marshy land, and so on and so forth. More importantly, they not only walk far to work, and not only do they cycle to work, but they cycle for work, as you can see here. And they climb up for their work. You have to design an artificial foot for such conditions. A challenge, of course. Four billion people, their incomes are less then two dollars a day. And if you talk about a 20,000-dollar shoe, you're talking about 10,000 days of income. You just don't have it. And therefore, you ought to look at alternatives. And that is how Jaipur Foot was created in India. It had a revolutionary prosthetic fitment and delivery system, a quick molding and modular components, enabling custom-made, on-the-spot limb fitments. You could feel it actually in an hour, by the way, whereas the equivalent other feet took something like a day, as so on. Outer socket made by using heated high-density polyethylene pipes, rather than using heated sheets. And unique high-ankle design and human-like looks, [unclear] and functions. And I like to show how it looks and how it works. (Music) See, he jumps. You can see what stress it must have. (Text: ... any person with a below the knee limb could do this. ... above the limb, yes, it would be difficult ... "Did it hurt?" "No ... not at all." ... he can run a kilometer in four minutes and 30 seconds ...) One kilometer in four minutes and 30 seconds. (Applause) So that's what it is all about. And therefore Time took notice of this 28-dollar foot, basically. (Applause) An incredible story. Let's move on to something else. I've been talking about getting more from less for more. Let's move to health. We've talked about mobility and the rest of it, let's talk about health. What's happening in the area of health? You know, you have new diseases that require new drugs. And if you look at the drug development 10 years ago and now, what has happened? 10 years ago, it used to cost about a quarter billion. Today it costs 1.5 billion dollars. Time taken for moving a molecule to marketplace, after all the human and animal testing, was 10 years, now it is 15 years. Are you getting more drugs because you are spending more time and more money? No, I'm sorry. We used to have 40, now they have come down to 30. So actually we are getting less from more for less and less people. Why less and less people? Because it is so expensive, so very few will be able to basically afford that. Let us just take an example. Psoriasis is very dreadful disease of the skin. The cost of treatment, 20,000 dollars. 1,000-dollar antibody injections under the skin, by the way, and 20 of them. Time for development — it took around 10 years and 700 million dollars. Let's start in the spirit of more from less and more for more and start putting some targets. For example, we don't want 20,000 dollars; we don't have it. Can we do it [for] 100 dollars? Time for development, not 10 years. We are in a hurry. Five years. Cost of development — 300 million dollars. Sorry. I can't spend more than 10 million dollars. Looks absolutely audacious. Looks absolutely ridiculous. You know something? This has been achieved in India. These targets have been achieved in India. And how they have been achieved ... Sir Francis Bacon once said, "When you wish to achieve results that have not been achieved before, it is an unwise fancy to think that they can be achieved by using methods that have been used before." And therefore, the standard process, where you develop a molecule, put it into mice, into men, are not yielding those results — the billions of dollars that have been spent. The Indian cleverness was using its traditional knowledge, however, scientifically validating it and making that journey from men to mice to men, not molecule to mice to men, you know. And that is how this difference has come. And you can see this blending of traditional medicine, modern medicine, modern science. I launched a big program [unclear] CSIR about nine years ago. He is giving us not just for Psoriasis, for cancer and a whole range of things, changing the whole paradigm. And you can see this Indian Psoriasis breakthrough obtained by this reverse form of [unclear] by doing things differently. You can see before treatment and after treatment. This is really getting more from less for more and more people, because these are all affordable treatments now. Let me just remind you of what Mahatma Gandhi had said. He had said, "Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed." So the message he was giving us was you must get more from less and less and less so that you can share it for more and more people, not only the current generation, but the future generations. And he also said, "I would prize every invention of science made for the benefit for all." So he was giving you the message that you must have it for more and more people, not just a few people. And therefore, ladies and gentlemen, this is the theme, getting more from less for more. And mind you, it is not getting just a little more for just a little less. It's not about low cost. It's about ultra-low cost. You cannot say it's a mere treatment 10,000 dollars, but because you are poor I'll give it for 9,000. Sorry, it doesn't work. You have to give it for 100 dollars, 200 dollars. Is it possible? It has been made possible, by the way, for certain other different reasons. So you are not talking about low cost, you are talking about ultra-low cost. You are not talking about affordability, you are talking about extreme affordability. Because of the four billion people whose income is under two dollars a day. You're not talking exclusive innovation. You're talking about inclusive innovation. And therefore, you're not talking about incremental innovation, you're talking about disruptive innovation. The ideas have to be such that you think in completely different terms. And I would also add, it is not only getting more from less for more by more and more people, the whole world working for it. I was very touched when I saw a breakthrough the other day. You know, incubators for infants, for example. They're not available in Africa. They're not available in Indian villages. And infants die. And incubator costs 2,000 dollars. And there's a 25-dollar incubator giving that performance that had been created. And by whom? By young students from Standford University on an extreme affordability project that they had, basically. Their heart is in the right place, like Ratan Tata. It's not just innovation, compassion and passion — compassion in the heart and passion in the belly. That's the new world that we want to create. And that is why the message is that of Gandhian engineering. Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to end before time. I was also afraid of those 18 minutes. I've still one and a half to go. The message, the final message, is this: India gave a great gift to the world. What was that? [In the] 20th century, we gave Gandhi to the world. The 21st century gift, which is very, very important for the whole world, whether it is global economic meltdown, whether it is climate change — any problem that you talk about is gaining more from less for more and more — not only the current generations, for the future generations. And that can come only from Gandhian engineering. So ladies and gentlemen, I'm very happy to announce, this gift of the 21st century to the world from India, Gandhian engineering. (Applause) Lakshmi Pratury: Thank you, Dr. Mashelkar. (R.A. Mashelkar: Thank you very much.) LP: A quick question for you. Now, when you were a young boy in this school, what were your thoughts, like what did you think you could become? What do you think that drove you? Was there a vision you had? What is it that drove you? RAM: I'll tell you a story that drove me, that transformed my life. I remember, I went to a poor school, because my mother could not gather the 21 rupees, that half a dollar that was required within the stipulated time. It was [unclear] high school. But it was a poor school with rich teachers, honestly. And one of them was [unclear] who taught us physics. One day he took us out into the sun and tried to show us how to find the focal length of a convex lens. The lens was here. The piece of paper was there. He moved it up and down. And there was a bright spot up there. And then he said, "This is the focal length." But then he held it for a little while, Lakshmi. And then the paper burned. When the paper burned, for some reason he turned to me, and he said, "Mashelkar, like this, if you do not diffuse your energies, if you focus your energies, you can achieve anything in the world." That gave me a great message: focus and you can achieve. I said, "Whoa, science is so wonderful, I have to become a scientist." But more importantly, focus and you can achieve. And that message, very frankly, is valuable for society today. What does that focal length do? It has parallel lines, which are sun rays. And the property of parallel lines is that they never meet. What does that convex lens do? It makes them meet. This is convex lens leadership. You know what today's leadership is doing? Concave length. They divide them farther. So I learned the lesson of convex lens leadership from that. And when I was at National Chemical Laboratory [unclear]. When I was at Council of Scientific Industry Research — 40 laboratories — when two laboratories were not talking to each other, I would [unclear]. And currently I'm president of Global Research Alliance, 60,000 scientists in nine counties, right from India to the U.S. I'm trying to build a global team, which will look at the global grand challenges that the world is facing. That was the lesson. That was the inspirational moment. LP: Thank you very much. (RAM: Thank you.) (Applause) |
Global power shifts | {0: "The former assistant secretary of defense and former dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Joseph Nye offers sharp insights into the way nations take and cede power."} | TEDGlobal 2010 | I'm going to talk to you about power in this 21st century. And basically, what I'd like to tell you is that power is changing, and there are two types of changes I want to discuss. One is power transition, which is change of power amongst states. And there the simple version of the message is it's moving from West to East. The other is power diffusion, the way power is moving from all states West or East to non-state actors. Those two things are the huge shifts of power in our century. And I want to tell you about them each separately and then how they interact and why, in the end, there may be some good news. When we talk about power transition, we often talk about the rise of Asia. It really should be called the recovery or return of Asia. If we looked at the world in 1800, you'd find that more than half of the world's people lived in Asia and they made more than half the world's product. Now fast forward to 1900: half the world's people — more than half — still live in Asia, but they're now making only a fifth of the world's product. What happened? The Industrial Revolution, which meant that all of a sudden, Europe and America became the dominant center of the world. What we're going to see in the 21st century is Asia gradually returning to being more than half of the world's population and more than half of the world's product. That's important and it's an important shift. But let me tell you a little bit about the other shift that I'm talking about, which is power diffusion. To understand power diffusion put this in your mind: computing and communications costs have fallen a thousandfold between 1970 and the beginning of this century. Now that's a big abstract number. But to make it more real, if the price of an automobile had fallen as rapidly as the price of computing power, you could buy a car today for five dollars. Now when the price of any technology declines that dramatically, the barriers to entry go down. Anybody can play in the game. So in 1970, if you wanted to communicate from Oxford to Johannesburg to New Delhi to Brasilia and anywhere simultaneously, you could do it. The technology was there. But to be able to do it, you had to be very rich — a government, a multinational corporation, maybe the Catholic Church — but you had to be pretty wealthy. Now, anybody has that capacity, which previously was restricted by price just to a few actors. If they have the price of entry into an Internet cafe — the last time I looked, it was something like a pound an hour — and if you have Skype, it's free. So capabilities that were once restricted are now available to everyone. And what that means is not that the age of the State is over. The State still matters. But the stage is crowded. The State's not alone. There are many, many actors. Some of that's good: Oxfam, a great non-governmental actor. Some of it's bad: Al Qaeda, another non-governmental actor. But think of what it does to how we think in traditional terms and concepts. We think in terms of war and interstate war. And you can think back to 1941 when the government of Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor. It's worth noticing that a non-state actor attacking the United States in 2001 killed more Americans than the government of Japan did in 1941. You might think of that as the privatization of war. So we're seeing a great change in terms of diffusion of power. Now the problem is that we're not thinking about it in very innovative ways. So let me step back and ask: what's power? Power is simple the ability to affect others to get the outcomes you want, and you can do it in three ways. You can do it with threats of coercion, "sticks," you can do it with payments, "carrots," or you can do it by getting others to want what you want. And that ability to get others to want what you want, to get the outcomes you want without coercion or payment, is what I call soft power. And that soft power has been much neglected and much misunderstood, and yet it's tremendously important. Indeed, if you can learn to use more soft power, you can save a lot on carrots and sticks. Traditionally, the way people thought about power was primarily in terms of military power. For example, the great Oxford historian who taught here at this university, A.J.P. Taylor, defined a great power as a country able to prevail in war. But we need a new narrative if we're to understand power in the 21st century. It's not just prevailing at war, though war still persists. It's not whose army wins; it's also whose story wins. And we have to think much more in terms of narratives and whose narrative is going to be effective. Now let me go back to the question of power transition between states and what's happening there. the narratives that we use now tend to be the rise and fall of the great powers. And the current narrative is all about the rise of China and the decline of the United States. Indeed, with the 2008 financial crisis, many people said this was the beginning of the end of American power. The tectonic plates of world politics were shifting. And president Medvedev of Russia, for example, pronounced in 2008 this was the beginning of the end of United States power. But in fact, this metaphor of decline is often very misleading. If you look at history, in recent history, you'll see the cycles of belief in American decline come and go every 10 or 15 years or so. In 1958, after the Soviets put up Sputnik, it was "That's the end of America." In 1973, with the oil embargo and the closing of the gold window, that was the end of America. In the 1980s, as America went through a transition in the Reagan period, between the rust belt economy of the midwest to the Silicon Valley economy of California, that was the end of America. But in fact, what we've seen is none of those were true. Indeed, people were over-enthusiastic in the early 2000s, thinking America could do anything, which led us into some disastrous foreign policy adventures, and now we're back to decline again. The moral of this story is all these narratives about rise and fall and decline tell us a lot more about psychology than they do about reality. If we try to focus on the reality, then what we need to focus on is what's really happening in terms of China and the United States. Goldman Sachs has projected that China, the Chinese economy, will surpass that of the U.S. by 2027. So we've got, what, 17 more years to go or so before China's bigger. Now someday, with a billion point three people getting richer, they are going to be bigger than the United States. But be very careful about these projections such as the Goldman Sachs projection as though that gives you an accurate picture of power transition in this century. Let me mention three reasons why it's too simple. First of all, it's a linear projection. You know, everything says, here's the growth rate of China, here's the growth rate of the U.S., here it goes — straight line. History is not linear. There are often bumps along the road, accidents along the way. The second thing is that the Chinese economy passes the U.S. economy in, let's say, 2030, which it may it, that will be a measure of total economic size, but not of per capita income — won't tell you about the composition of the economy. China still has large areas of underdevelopment and per capita income is a better measure of the sophistication of the economy. And that the Chinese won't catch up or pass the Americans until somewhere in the latter part, after 2050, of this century. The other point that's worth noticing is how one-dimensional this projection is. You know, it looks at economic power measured by GDP. Doesn't tell you much about military power, doesn't tell you very much about soft power. It's all very one-dimensional. And also, when we think about the rise of Asia, or return of Asia as I called it a little bit earlier, it's worth remembering Asia's not one thing. If you're sitting in Japan, or in New Delhi, or in Hanoi, your view of the rise of China is a little different than if you're sitting in Beijing. Indeed, one of the advantages that the Americans will have in terms of power in Asia is all those countries want an American insurance policy against the rise of China. It's as though Mexico and Canada were hostile neighbors to the United States, which they're not. So these simple projections of the Goldman Sachs type are not telling us what we need to know about power transition. But you might ask, well so what in any case? Why does it matter? Who cares? Is this just a game that diplomats and academics play? The answer is it matters quite a lot. Because, if you believe in decline and you get the answers wrong on this, the facts, not the myths, you may have policies which are very dangerous. Let me give you an example from history. The Peloponnesian War was the great conflict in which the Greek city state system tore itself apart two and a half millennia ago. What caused it? Thucydides, the great historian of the the Peloponnesian War, said it was the rise in the power of Athens and the fear it created in Sparta. Notice both halves of that explanation. Many people argue that the 21st century is going to repeat the 20th century, in which World War One, the great conflagration in which the European state system tore itself apart and destroyed its centrality in the world, that that was caused by the rise in the power of Germany and the fear it created in Britain. So there are people who are telling us this is going to be reproduced today, that what we're going to see is the same thing now in this century. No, I think that's wrong. It's bad history. For one thing, Germany had surpassed Britain in industrial strength by 1900. And as I said earlier, China has not passed the United States. But also, if you have this belief and it creates a sense of fear, it leads to overreaction. And the greatest danger we have of managing this power transition of the shift toward the East is fear. To paraphrase Franklin Roosevelt from a different context, the greatest thing we have to fear is fear itself. We don't have to fear the rise of China or the return of Asia. And if we have policies in which we take it in that larger historical perspective, we're going to be able to manage this process. Let me say a word now about the distribution of power and how it relates to power diffusion and then pull these two types together. If you ask how is power distributed in the world today, it's distributed much like a three-dimensional chess game. Top board: military power among states. The United States is the only superpower, and it's likely to remain that way for two or three decades. China's not going to replace the U.S. on this military board. Middle board of this three-dimensional chess game: economic power among states. Power is multi-polar. There are balancers — the U.S., Europe, China, Japan can balance each other. The bottom board of this three-dimensional, the board of transnational relations, things that cross borders outside the control of governments, things like climate change, drug trade, financial flows, pandemics, all these things that cross borders outside the control of governments, there nobody's in charge. It makes no sense to call this unipolar or multi-polar. Power is chaotically distributed. And the only way you can solve these problems — and this is where many greatest challenges are coming in this century — is through cooperation, through working together, which means that soft power becomes more important, that ability to organize networks to deal with these kinds of problems and to be able to get cooperation. Another way of putting it is that as we think of power in the 21st century, we want to get away from the idea that power's always zero sum — my gain is your loss and vice versa. Power can also be positive sum, where your gain can be my gain. If China develops greater energy security and greater capacity to deal with its problems of carbon emissions, that's good for us as well as good for China as well as good for everybody else. So empowering China to deal with its own problems of carbon is good for everybody, and it's not a zero sum, I win, you lose. It's one in which we can all gain. So as we think about power in this century, we want to get away from this view that it's all I win, you lose. Now I don't mean to be Pollyannaish about this. Wars persist. Power persists. Military power is important. Keeping balances is important. All this still persists. Hard power is there, and it will remain. But unless you learn how to mix hard power with soft power into strategies that I call smart power, you're not going to deal with the new kinds of problems that we're facing. So the key question that we need to think about as we look at this is how do we work together to produce global public goods, things from which all of us can benefit? How do we define our national interests so that it's not just zero sum, but positive sum. In that sense, if we define our interests, for example, for the United States the way Britain defined its interests in the 19th century, keeping an open trading system, keeping a monetary stability, keeping freedom of the seas — those were good for Britain, they were good for others as well. And in the 21st century, you have to do an analog to that. How do we produce global public goods, which are good for us, but good for everyone at the same time? And that's going to be the good news dimension of what we need to think about as we think of power in the 21st century. There are ways to define our interests in which, while protecting ourselves with hard power, we can organize with others in networks to produce, not only public goods, but ways that will enhance our soft power. So if one looks at the statements that have been made about this, I am impressed that when Hillary Clinton described the foreign policy of the Obama administration, she said that the foreign policy of the Obama administration was going to be smart power, as she put it, "using all the tools in our foreign policy tool box." And if we're going to deal with these two great power shifts that I've described, the power shift represented by transition among states, the power shift represented by diffusion of power away from all states, we're going to have to develop a new narrative of power in which we combine hard and soft power into strategies of smart power. And that's the good news I have. We can do that. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Sustainable seafood? Let's get smart | {0: 'Barton Seaver is an advocate of sustainable seafood and a chef in Washington DC. His work tells the story of our common resources through the communion we all share – dinner.'} | Mission Blue Voyage | Sustainability represents the what, the where and the how of what is caught. The who and the why are what's important to me. I want to know the people behind my dinner choices. I want to know how I impact them. I want to know how they impact me. I want to know why they fish. I want to know how they rely on the water's bounty for their living. Understanding all of this enables us to shift our perception of seafood away from a commodity to an opportunity to restore our ecosystem. It allows for us to celebrate the seafood that we're also so fortunate to eat. So what do we call this? I think we call it restorative seafood. Where sustainability is the capacity to endure and maintain, restorative is the ability to replenish and progress. Restorative seafood allows for an evolving and dynamic system and acknowledges our relationship with the ocean as a resource, suggesting that we engage to replenish the ocean and to encourage its resiliency. It is a more hopeful, it is a more human, and is a more useful way of understanding our environment. Wallet guides — standard issue by lots in the marine conservation world — are very handy; they're a wonderful tool. Green, yellow and red lists [of] seafood species. The association is very easy: buy green, don't buy red, think twice about yellow. But in my mind, it's really not enough to just eat green list. We can't sustain this without the measure of our success really changing the fate of the species in the yellow and the red. But what if we eat only in the green list? You've got pole-caught yellowfin tuna here — comes from sustainable stocks. Pole caught — no bycatch. Great for fishermen. Lots of money. Supporting local economies. But it's a lion of the sea. It's a top predator. What's the context of this meal? Am I sitting down in a steakhouse to a 16-ounce portion of this? Do I do this three times a week? I might still be in the green list, but I'm not doing myself, or you, or the oceans any favors. The point is that we have to have a context, a gauge for our actions in all this. Example: I've heard that red wine is great for my health — antioxidants and minerals — heart healthy. That's great! I love red wine! I'm going to drink so much of it. I'm going to be so healthy. Well, how many bottles is it before you tell me that I have a problem? Well folks, we have a protein problem. We have lost this sensibility when it regards our food, and we are paying a cost. The problem is we are hiding that cost beneath the waves. We are hiding that cost behind the social acceptance of expanding waistlines. And we are hiding that cost behind monster profits. So the first thing about this idea of restorative seafood is that it really takes into account our needs. Restorative seafood might best be represented not by Jaws, or by Flipper, or the Gordon's fisherman, but rather, by the Jolly Green Giant. Vegetables: they might yet save the oceans. Sylvia likes to say that blue is the new green. Well I'd like to respectfully submit that broccoli green might then be the new blue. We must continue to eat the best seafood possible, if at all. But we also must eat it with a ton of vegetables. The best part about restorative seafood though is that it comes on the half-shell with a bottle of Tabasco and lemon wedges. It comes in a five-ounce portion of tilapia breaded with Dijon mustard and crispy, broiled breadcrumbs and a steaming pile of pecan quinoa pilaf with crunchy, grilled broccoli so soft and sweet and charred and smoky on the outside with just a hint of chili flake. Whooo! This is an easy sell. And the best part is all of those ingredients are available to every family at the neighborhood Walmart. Jamie Oliver is campaigning to save America from the way we eat. Sylvia is campaigning to save the oceans from the way we eat. There's a pattern here. Forget nuclear holocaust; it's the fork that we have to worry about. We have ravaged our Earth and then used the food that we've sourced to handicap ourselves in more ways than one. So I think we have this whole eating thing wrong. And so I think it's time we change what we expect from our food. Sustainability is complicated but dinner is a reality that we all very much understand. So let's start there. There's been a lot of movement recently in greening our food systems. Dan Barber and Alice Waters are leading passionately the green food Delicious Revolution. But green foods often represent a way for us to disregard the responsibility as eaters. Just because it comes from a green source doesn't mean we can treat it with disregard on the plate. We have eco-friendly shrimp. We can make them; we have that technology. But we can never have any eco-friendly all-you-can-eat shrimp buffet. It doesn't work. Heart-healthy dinner is a very important part of restorative seafood. While we try to manage declining marine populations, the media's recommending increased consumption of seafood. Studies say that tens of thousands of American grandmothers, grandfathers, mothers and fathers might be around for another birthday if we included more seafood. That's a reward I am not willing to pass up. But it's not all about the seafood. It's about the way that we look at our plates. As a chef, I realize the easiest thing for me to do is reduce the portion sizes on my plate. A couple things happened. I made more money. People started buying appetizers and salads, because they knew they weren't going to fill up on the entrees alone. People spent more time engaging in their meals, engaging with each other over their meals. People got, in short, more of what they came there for even though they got less protein. They got more calories over the course of a diversified meal. They got healthier. I made more money. This is great. Environmental consideration was served with every plate, but it was served with a heaping mound of consideration for human interests at the same time. One of the other things we did was begin to diversify the species that we served — small silverfish, anchovies, mackerel, sardines were uncommon. Shellfish, mussels, oysters, clams, tilapia, char — these were the common species. We were directing tastes towards more resilience, more restorative options. This is what we need to favor. This is what the green list says. But this is also how we can actually begin to restore our environment. But what of those big predators, those fashionable species, that green list tuna that I was talking about earlier? Well, if you must, I have a recipe for you. It pretty much works with any big fish in the ocean, so here we go. Start with a 16-ounce portion of big fish. Get a knife. Cut it into four portions. Put it on four plates. Mound up those four plates with vegetables and then open up the very best bottle of Burgundy you have, light the candles and celebrate it. Celebrate the opportunity you have to eat this. Invite your friends and neighbors over and repeat once a year, maybe. I expect a lot from food. I expect health and joy and family and community. I expect that producing ingredients, preparing dishes and eating meals is all part of the communion of human interests. I was lucky enough that my father was a fantastic cook. And he taught me very early on about the privilege that eating represents. I remember well the meals of my childhood. They were reasonable portions of protein served with copious quantities of vegetables and small amounts of starch, usually rice. This is still how I largely eat today. I get sick when I go to steakhouses. I get the meat sweats. It's like a hangover from protein. It's disgusting. But of all the dire news that you'll hear and that you have heard about the state of our oceans, I have the unfortunate burden of delivering to you possibly the very worst of it and that is this whole time your mother was right. Eat your vegetables. It's pretty straightforward. So what are we looking for in a meal? Well for health, I'm looking for wholesome ingredients that are good for my body. For joy, I'm looking for butter and salt and sexy things that make things taste less like penance. For family, I'm looking for recipes that genuflect to my own personal histories. For community though, we start at the very beginning. There's no escaping the fact that everything we eat has a global impact. So try and learn as best you can what that impact is and then take the first step to minimize it. We've seen an image of our blue planet, our world bank. But it is more than just a repository of our resources; it's also the global geography of the communion we call dinner. So if we all take only what we need, then we can begin to share the rest, we can begin to celebrate, we can begin to restore. We need to savor vegetables. We need to savor smaller portions of seafood. And we need to save dinner. Thank you. (Applause) |
Natural pest control ... using bugs! | {0: "Shimon Steinberg's biotech lab researches ways to harness the natural benefits of insects on a massive scale."} | TEDxTelAviv 2010 | I'm a bug lover, myself — not from childhood, by the way, but rather late. When I bachelored, majoring in zoology at Tel Aviv University, I kind of fell in love with bugs. And then, within zoology, I took the course or the discipline of entomology, the science of insects. And then I thought to myself, how can I be practical or help in the science of entomology? And then I moved to the world of plant protection — plant protection from insects, from bad bugs. And then within plant protection, I came into the discipline of biological pest control, which we actually define as the use of living organisms to reduce populations of noxious plant pests. So it's a whole discipline in plant protection aimed at the reduction of chemicals. And biological pest control, by the way, or these "good bugs" that we are talking about, they've existed in the world for thousands and thousands of years, for a long, long time. But only in the last 120 years, people started, or people knew more and more how to exploit, or how to use, this biological control phenomenon, or in fact, natural control phenomenon, for their own needs. Because biological control phenomenon — you can see it in your backyard. Just take a magnifying glass. You see what I have here? That's a magnifier, times 10. You just open it, twist leaves, and you see a whole new world of minute insects, or little spiders of one millimeter, one-and-a-half, two millimeters long, and you can distinguish between the good ones and the bad ones. So this phenomenon of natural control exists literally everywhere. Here, in front of this building, I'm sure. Just have a look at the plants. So it's everywhere, and we need to know how to exploit it. Well, let's go hand by hand and browse through just a few examples. What is a pest? What damage does it actually inflict on the plant? And what is the natural enemy, the biological control agent, or the "good bug" that we're talking about? In general, I'm going to talk about insects and spiders, or mites, let us call them. Insects, those six-legged organisms and spiders or mites, the eight-legged organisms. Let's have a look at that. Here is a devastating pest, a spider mite, because it does a lot of webbing, like a spider. You see the mother in between, and two daughters, probably, on the left and right, and a single egg on the right-hand side. And then you see what kind of damage it can inflict. On your right-hand side, you can see a cucumber leaf, in the middle, a cotton leaf, and on the left, a tomato leaf with these little stipplings. They can literally turn from green to white, because of the sucking, piercing mouth parts of those spiders. But here comes nature, that provides us with a good spider. This is a predatory mite — just as small as a spider mite; one, two millimeters long, not more than that — running quickly, hunting, chasing the spider mites. And here, you can see this lady in action on your left-hand side — just pierces, sucks the body fluids on the left-hand side of the pest mite. And after five minutes, this is what you see: just a typical dead corpse — the shriveled, sucked-out, dead corpse of the spider mite, and next to it, two satiated individuals, predatory mites, a mother on the left-hand side, a young nymph on the right-hand side. By the way, a meal for them for 24 hours, is about five of the spider mites, of the bad mites, and-or 15 to 20 eggs of the pest mites. By the way, they are always hungry. (Laughter) And here is another example: aphids. It's springtime now in Israel. When temperatures rise sharply, you can see those bad ones, those aphids, all over the plants — in your hibiscus, in your lantana, in the young, fresh foliage of the so-called spring flush. By the way, with aphids you have only females, like Amazons. Females giving rise to females, giving rise to other females. No males at all. Parthenogenesis, as it's so called. And they're very happy with that, apparently. (Laughter) Here we can see the damage. Those aphids secrete a sticky, sugary liquid called honeydew, and this just clogs the upper parts of the plant. Here you see a typical cucumber leaf that turned from green to black because of a black fungus, sooty mold, which is covering it. And here comes the salvation, through this parasitic wasp. Here we are not talking about a predator. Here we are talking a parasite — not a two-legged parasite, but an eight-legged parasite, of course. This is a parasitic wasp, again, two millimeters long, slender, a very quick and sharp flier. And here you can see this parasite in action, like in an acrobatic maneuver. She stands vis-à-vis in front of the victim at the right-hand side, bending its abdomen and inserting a single egg into the body fluids of the aphid. By the way, the aphid tries to escape. She kicks and bites and secretes different liquids, but nothing will happen, in fact — only the egg of the parasitoid will be inserted into the body fluids of the aphid. And after a few days, depending upon temperature, the egg will hatch and the larva of this parasite will eat the aphid from the inside. (Laughter) This is all natural. This is all natural. This is not fiction, nothing at all. Again — in your backyard. In your backyard. (Laughter) (Applause) But this is the end result: mummies. This is the visual result of a dead aphid encompassing inside, a developing parasitoid that, after a few minutes, you see halfway out. The birth is almost complete. You can see, by the way, in different movies, etc., it takes just a few minutes. And if this is a female, she'll immediately mate with a male and off she goes, because time is very short. This female can live only three to four days, and she needs to give rise to around 400 eggs. That means she has 400 bad aphids to put her eggs into their body fluids. This is, of course, not the end of it. There is a whole wealth of other natural enemies and this is just the last example. Again, we'll start first with the pest: the thrips. By the way, all these weird names — I didn't bother you with the Latin names of these creatures, just the popular names. But this is a nice, slender, very bad pest. If you can see this: sweet peppers. This is not just an exotic, ornamental sweet pepper. This is a sweet pepper which is not consumable because it is suffering from a viral disease transmitted by those thrip adults. And here comes the natural enemy, minute pirate bug — "minute," because it is rather small. Here you can see the adult, black, and two young ones. And again, in action. This adult pierces the thrips, sucking it within just several minutes, going to the other prey, continuing all over the place. And if we spread those minute pirate bugs, the good ones, for example, in a sweet pepper plot, they go to the flowers. And look — this flower is flooded with predatory bugs, with the good ones, after wiping out the bad ones, the thrips. So this is a very positive situation. No harm to the developing fruit. No harm to the fruit set. Everything is just fine under these circumstances. But again, the question is, here you saw them on a one-to-one basis — the pest, the natural enemy. What we do is actually this. In Northeast Israel, in Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu, there is a facility that mass-produces those natural enemies. In other words, what we do there is amplify the natural control, or the biological control phenomenon. And in 30,000 square meters of state-of-the-art greenhouses, there, we are mass-producing those predatory mites, those minute pirate bugs, those parasitic wasps, etc. Many different parts. By the way, they have a very nice landscape — you see the Jordanian Mountains on the one hand, and the Jordan Valley on the other hand, and a good, mild winter and a nice, hot summer, which is an excellent condition to mass-produce those creatures. And by the way, mass-production — it is not genetic manipulation. There are no GMOs — genetically modified organisms — whatsoever. We take them from nature, and the only thing that we do is give them the optimal conditions, under the greenhouses or in the climate rooms, in order to proliferate, multiply and reproduce. And that's what we get. You see under a microscope. You see in the upper left corner? You see a single predatory mite. And this is the whole bunch of predatory mites. You see this ampul. You see this one. I have one gram of those predatory mites. One gram is 80,000 individuals. 80,000 individuals are good enough to control one acre, 4,000 square meters, of a strawberry plot against spider mites for the whole season of almost one year. And we can produce from this, believe you me, several dozens of kilograms on an annual basis. So this is what I call amplification of the phenomenon. And no, we do not disrupt the balance. On the contrary, because we bring it to every cultural plot where the balance was already disrupted by the chemicals. Here we come with those natural enemies in order to reverse a little bit of the wheel and to bring more natural balance to the agricultural plot by reducing those chemicals. That's the whole idea. And what is the impact? In this table, you can actually see what is an impact of a successful biological control by good bugs. For example, in Israel, where we employ more than 1,000 hectares — 10,000 dunams in Israeli terms — of biological pests controlling sweet pepper under protection, 75 percent of the pesticides were actually reduced. And Israeli strawberries, even more — 80 percent of the pesticides, especially those aimed against pest mites in strawberries. So the impact is very strong. And there goes the question, especially if you ask growers, agriculturists: Why biological control? Why good bugs? By the way, the number of answers you get equals the number of people you ask. But if we go, for example, to this place, Southeast Israel, the Arava area above the Great Rift Valley, where the pearl of Israeli agriculture is located, especially under greenhouse conditions, or under screenhouse conditions — if you drive all the way to Eilat, you see this just in the middle of the desert. And if you zoom in, you can definitely watch this: grandparents with their grandchildren, distributing the natural enemies, the good bugs, instead of wearing special clothes and gas masks and applying chemicals. So safety, with respect to the application, is the number one answer that we get from growers, for "Why biological control?" Number two, many growers are, in fact, petrified by the idea of resistance, that the pests will become resistant to the chemicals, just like in our case, that bacteria becomes resistant to antibiotics. It's the same, and it can happen very quickly. Fortunately, in either biological control or even natural control, resistance is extremely rare. It hardly happens. Because this is evolution, this is the natural ratio, unlike resistance, which happens in the case of chemicals. And thirdly, public demand. The more the public demands the reduction of chemicals, the more growers become aware of the fact that they should, wherever they can and wherever possible, replace the chemical control with biological control. Even here, there is another grower, you see, very interested in the bugs, the bad ones and the good ones, wearing this magnifier already on her head, just walking safely in her crop. Finally, I want to get to my vision, or, in fact, to my dream. Because, you see, this is the reality. Have a look at the gap. If we take the overall turnover of the biocontrol industry worldwide, it's 250 million dollars. And look at the overall pesticide industry in all the crops throughout the world. I think it's times 100 or something like that. Twenty-five billion. So there is a huge gap to bridge. So actually, how can we do it? How can we bridge, or let's say, narrow, this gap over the years? First of all, we need to find more robust, good and reliable biological solutions, more good bugs that we can either mass-produce or actually conserve in the field. Secondly, to create even more intensive and strict public demand for the reduction of chemicals in agricultural fresh produce. And thirdly, also to increase awareness by the growers to the potential of this industry. And this gap really narrows. Step by step, it does narrow. So I think my last slide is: All we are saying — we can actually sing it — Give nature a chance. I'm saying it on behalf of all the biocontrol practitioners and implementers, in Israel and abroad, really give nature a chance. Thank you. (Applause) |
Glorious visions in animation and performance | {0: 'Miwa Matreyek creates performances where real shapes and virtual images trade places, amid layers of animation, video and live bodies.'} | TEDGlobal 2010 | (Music by Anna Oxygen) (Music: "Shells" by Mirah) ♪ You learned how to be a diver ♪ ♪ Put on a mask and believe ♪ ♪ Gather a dinner of shells for me ♪ ♪ Take the tank down so you can breathe ♪ ♪ Below ♪ ♪ Movements slow ♪ ♪ You are an island ♪ ♪ All the secrets until then ♪ ♪ Pried open I held them ♪ ♪ Until they were still ♪ ♪ Until they were still ♪ ♪ Until they were still ♪ (Music) (Music by Caroline Lufkin) (Music by Anna Oxygen) ♪ Dream time, I will find you ♪ ♪ You are shady, you are new ♪ ♪ I'm not so good at mornings ♪ ♪ I can see too clearly ♪ ♪ I prefer the nighttime ♪ ♪ Dark and blurry ♪ ♪ Falling night ♪ ♪ Hovering light ♪ ♪ Calling night ♪ ♪ Hovering light ♪ ♪ In the moontime I will give up my life ♪ ♪ And in the deep dreams ♪ ♪ You will find me ♪ (Applause) [Excerpts from "Myth and Infrastructure"] Bruno Giussani: Come back. Miwa Matreyek! (Applause) |
7 ways games reward the brain | {0: "Tom Chatfield thinks about games -- what we want from them, what we get from them, and how we might use our hard-wired desire for a gamer's reward to change the way we learn."} | TEDGlobal 2010 | I love video games. I'm also slightly in awe of them. I'm in awe of their power in terms of imagination, in terms of technology, in terms of concept. But I think, above all, I'm in awe at their power to motivate, to compel us, to transfix us, like really nothing else we've ever invented has quite done before. And I think that we can learn some pretty amazing things by looking at how we do this. And in particular, I think we can learn things about learning. Now the video games industry is far and away the fastest growing of all modern media. From about 10 billion in 1990, it's worth 50 billion dollars globally today, and it shows no sign of slowing down. In four years' time, it's estimated it'll be worth over 80 billion dollars. That's about three times the recorded music industry. This is pretty stunning, but I don't think it's the most telling statistic of all. The thing that really amazes me is that, today, people spend about eight billion real dollars a year buying virtual items that only exist inside video games. This is a screenshot from the virtual game world, Entropia Universe. Earlier this year, a virtual asteroid in it sold for 330,000 real dollars. And this is a Titan class ship in the space game, EVE Online. And this virtual object takes 200 real people about 56 days of real time to build, plus countless thousands of hours of effort before that. And yet, many of these get built. At the other end of the scale, the game Farmville that you may well have heard of, has 70 million players around the world and most of these players are playing it almost every day. This may all sound really quite alarming to some people, an index of something worrying or wrong in society. But we're here for the good news, and the good news is that I think we can explore why this very real human effort, this very intense generation of value, is occurring. And by answering that question, I think we can take something extremely powerful away. And I think the most interesting way to think about how all this is going on is in terms of rewards. And specifically, it's in terms of the very intense emotional rewards that playing games offers to people both individually and collectively. Now if we look at what's going on in someone's head when they are being engaged, two quite different processes are occurring. On the one hand, there's the wanting processes. This is a bit like ambition and drive — I'm going to do that. I'm going to work hard. On the other hand, there's the liking processes, fun and affection and delight and an enormous flying beast with an orc on the back. It's a really great image. It's pretty cool. It's from the game World of Warcraft with more than 10 million players globally, one of whom is me, another of whom is my wife. And this kind of a world, this vast flying beast you can ride around, shows why games are so very good at doing both the wanting and the liking. Because it's very powerful. It's pretty awesome. It gives you great powers. Your ambition is satisfied, but it's very beautiful. It's a very great pleasure to fly around. And so these combine to form a very intense emotional engagement. But this isn't the really interesting stuff. The really interesting stuff about virtuality is what you can measure with it. Because what you can measure in virtuality is everything. Every single thing that every single person who's ever played in a game has ever done can be measured. The biggest games in the world today are measuring more than one billion points of data about their players, about what everybody does — far more detail than you'd ever get from any website. And this allows something very special to happen in games. It's something called the reward schedule. And by this, I mean looking at what millions upon millions of people have done and carefully calibrating the rate, the nature, the type, the intensity of rewards in games to keep them engaged over staggering amounts of time and effort. Now, to try and explain this in sort of real terms, I want to talk about a kind of task that might fall to you in so many games. Go and get a certain amount of a certain little game-y item. Let's say, for the sake of argument, my mission is to get 15 pies and I can get 15 pies by killing these cute, little monsters. Simple game quest. Now you can think about this, if you like, as a problem about boxes. I've got to keep opening boxes. I don't know what's inside them until I open them. And I go around opening box after box until I've got 15 pies. Now, if you take a game like Warcraft, you can think about it, if you like, as a great box-opening effort. The game's just trying to get people to open about a million boxes, getting better and better stuff in them. This sounds immensely boring but games are able to make this process incredibly compelling. And the way they do this is through a combination of probability and data. Let's think about probability. If we want to engage someone in the process of opening boxes to try and find pies, we want to make sure it's neither too easy, nor too difficult, to find a pie. So what do you do? Well, you look at a million people — no, 100 million people, 100 million box openers — and you work out, if you make the pie rate about 25 percent — that's neither too frustrating, nor too easy. It keeps people engaged. But of course, that's not all you do — there's 15 pies. Now, I could make a game called Piecraft, where all you had to do was get a million pies or a thousand pies. That would be very boring. Fifteen is a pretty optimal number. You find that — you know, between five and 20 is about the right number for keeping people going. But we don't just have pies in the boxes. There's 100 percent up here. And what we do is make sure that every time a box is opened, there's something in it, some little reward that keeps people progressing and engaged. In most adventure games, it's a little bit in-game currency, a little bit experience. But we don't just do that either. We also say there's going to be loads of other items of varying qualities and levels of excitement. There's going to be a 10 percent chance you get a pretty good item. There's going to be a 0.1 percent chance you get an absolutely awesome item. And each of these rewards is carefully calibrated to the item. And also, we say, "Well, how many monsters? Should I have the entire world full of a billion monsters?" No, we want one or two monsters on the screen at any one time. So I'm drawn on. It's not too easy, not too difficult. So all this is very powerful. But we're in virtuality. These aren't real boxes. So we can do some rather amazing things. We notice, looking at all these people opening boxes, that when people get to about 13 out of 15 pies, their perception shifts, they start to get a bit bored, a bit testy. They're not rational about probability. They think this game is unfair. It's not giving me my last two pies. I'm going to give up. If they're real boxes, there's not much we can do, but in a game we can just say, "Right, well. When you get to 13 pies, you've got 75 percent chance of getting a pie now." Keep you engaged. Look at what people do — adjust the world to match their expectation. Our games don't always do this. And one thing they certainly do at the moment is if you got a 0.1 percent awesome item, they make very sure another one doesn't appear for a certain length of time to keep the value, to keep it special. And the point is really that we evolved to be satisfied by the world in particular ways. Over tens and hundreds of thousands of years, we evolved to find certain things stimulating, and as very intelligent, civilized beings, we're enormously stimulated by problem solving and learning. But now, we can reverse engineer that and build worlds that expressly tick our evolutionary boxes. So what does all this mean in practice? Well, I've come up with seven things that, I think, show how you can take these lessons from games and use them outside of games. The first one is very simple: experience bars measuring progress — something that's been talked about brilliantly by people like Jesse Schell earlier this year. It's already been done at the University of Indiana in the States, among other places. It's the simple idea that instead of grading people incrementally in little bits and pieces, you give them one profile character avatar which is constantly progressing in tiny, tiny, tiny little increments which they feel are their own. And everything comes towards that, and they watch it creeping up, and they own that as it goes along. Second, multiple long and short-term aims — 5,000 pies, boring, 15 pies, interesting. So, you give people lots and lots of different tasks. You say, it's about doing 10 of these questions, but another task is turning up to 20 classes on time, but another task is collaborating with other people, another task is showing you're working five times, another task is hitting this particular target. You break things down into these calibrated slices that people can choose and do in parallel to keep them engaged and that you can use to point them towards individually beneficial activities. Third, you reward effort. It's your 100 percent factor. Games are brilliant at this. Every time you do something, you get credit; you get a credit for trying. You don't punish failure. You reward every little bit of effort — a little bit of gold, a little bit of credit. You've done 20 questions — tick. It all feeds in as minute reinforcement. Fourth, feedback. This is absolutely crucial, and virtuality is dazzling at delivering this. If you look at some of the most intractable problems in the world today that we've been hearing amazing things about, it's very, very hard for people to learn if they cannot link consequences to actions. Pollution, global warming, these things — the consequences are distant in time and space. It's very hard to learn, to feel a lesson. But if you can model things for people, if you can give things to people that they can manipulate and play with and where the feedback comes, then they can learn a lesson, they can see, they can move on, they can understand. And fifth, the element of uncertainty. Now this is the neurological goldmine, if you like, because a known reward excites people, but what really gets them going is the uncertain reward, the reward pitched at the right level of uncertainty, that they didn't quite know whether they were going to get it or not. The 25 percent. This lights the brain up. And if you think about using this in testing, in just introducing control elements of randomness in all forms of testing and training, you can transform the levels of people's engagement by tapping into this very powerful evolutionary mechanism. When we don't quite predict something perfectly, we get really excited about it. We just want to go back and find out more. As you probably know, the neurotransmitter associated with learning is called dopamine. It's associated with reward-seeking behavior. And something very exciting is just beginning to happen in places like the University of Bristol in the U.K., where we are beginning to be able to model mathematically dopamine levels in the brain. And what this means is we can predict learning, we can predict enhanced engagement, these windows, these windows of time, in which the learning is taking place at an enhanced level. And two things really flow from this. The first has to do with memory, that we can find these moments. When someone is more likely to remember, we can give them a nugget in a window. And the second thing is confidence, that we can see how game-playing and reward structures make people braver, make them more willing to take risks, more willing to take on difficulty, harder to discourage. This can all seem very sinister. But you know, sort of "our brains have been manipulated; we're all addicts." The word "addiction" is thrown around. There are real concerns there. But the biggest neurological turn-on for people is other people. This is what really excites us. In reward terms, it's not money; it's not being given cash — that's nice — it's doing stuff with our peers, watching us, collaborating with us. And I want to tell you a quick story about 1999 — a video game called EverQuest. And in this video game, there were two really big dragons, and you had to team up to kill them — 42 people, up to 42 to kill these big dragons. That's a problem because they dropped two or three decent items. So players addressed this problem by spontaneously coming up with a system to motivate each other, fairly and transparently. What happened was, they paid each other a virtual currency they called "dragon kill points." And every time you turned up to go on a mission, you got paid in dragon kill points. They tracked these on a separate website. So they tracked their own private currency, and then players could bid afterwards for cool items they wanted — all organized by the players themselves. Now the staggering system, not just that this worked in EverQuest, but that today, a decade on, every single video game in the world with this kind of task uses a version of this system — tens of millions of people. And the success rate is at close to 100 percent. This is a player-developed, self-enforcing, voluntary currency, and it's incredibly sophisticated player behavior. And I just want to end by suggesting a few ways in which these principles could fan out into the world. Let's start with business. I mean, we're beginning to see some of the big problems around something like business are recycling and energy conservation. We're beginning to see the emergence of wonderful technologies like real-time energy meters. And I just look at this, and I think, yes, we could take that so much further by allowing people to set targets by setting calibrated targets, by using elements of uncertainty, by using these multiple targets, by using a grand, underlying reward and incentive system, by setting people up to collaborate in terms of groups, in terms of streets to collaborate and compete, to use these very sophisticated group and motivational mechanics we see. In terms of education, perhaps most obviously of all, we can transform how we engage people. We can offer people the grand continuity of experience and personal investment. We can break things down into highly calibrated small tasks. We can use calculated randomness. We can reward effort consistently as everything fields together. And we can use the kind of group behaviors that we see evolving when people are at play together, these really quite unprecedentedly complex cooperative mechanisms. Government, well, one thing that comes to mind is the U.S. government, among others, is literally starting to pay people to lose weight. So we're seeing financial reward being used to tackle the great issue of obesity. But again, those rewards could be calibrated so precisely if we were able to use the vast expertise of gaming systems to just jack up that appeal, to take the data, to take the observations, of millions of human hours and plow that feedback into increasing engagement. And in the end, it's this word, "engagement," that I want to leave you with. It's about how individual engagement can be transformed by the psychological and the neurological lessons we can learn from watching people that are playing games. But it's also about collective engagement and about the unprecedented laboratory for observing what makes people tick and work and play and engage on a grand scale in games. And if we can look at these things and learn from them and see how to turn them outwards, then I really think we have something quite revolutionary on our hands. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
E-voting without fraud | {0: 'David Bismark has co-developed an electronic voting system that contains a simple and reliable method of verification.'} | TEDGlobal 2010 | So there are a few things that bring us humans together in the way that an election does. We stand in elections; we vote in elections; we observe elections. Our democracies rely on elections. We all understand why we have elections, and we all leave the house on the same day to go and vote. We cherish the opportunity to have our say, to help decide the future of the country. The fundamental idea is that politicians are given mandate to speak for us, to make decisions on our behalf that affect us all. Without that mandate, they would be corrupt. Well unfortunately, power corrupts, and so people will do lots of things to get power and to stay in power, including doing bad things to elections. You see, even if the idea of the election is perfect, running a countrywide election is a big project, and big projects are messy. Whenever there is an election, it seems like something always goes wrong, someone tries to cheat, or something goes accidentally awry — a ballot box goes missing here, chads are left hanging over here. To make sure as few things as possible go wrong, we have all these procedures around the election. So for example, you come to the polling station, and a poll station worker asks for your ID before giving you a ballot form and asking you to go into a voting booth to fill out your vote. When you come back out, you get to drop your vote into the ballot box where it mixes with all the other votes, so that no one knows how you voted. Well, what I want us to think about for a moment is what happens after that, after you drop your vote into the ballot box. And most people would go home and feel sure that their vote has been counted, because they trust that the election system works. They trust that election workers and election observers do their jobs and do their jobs correctly. The ballot boxes go to counting places. They're unsealed and the votes are poured out and laboriously counted. Most of us have to trust that that happens correctly for our own vote, and we all have to trust that that happens correctly for all the votes in the election. So we have to trust a lot of people. We have to trust a lot of procedures. And sometimes we even have to trust computers. So imagine hundreds of millions of voters casting hundreds of millions of votes, all to be counted correctly and all the things that can possibly go wrong causing all these bad headlines, and you cannot help but feel exhausted at the idea of trying to make elections better. Well in the face of all these bad headlines, researchers have taken a step back and thought about how we can do elections differently. They've zoomed out and looked at the big picture. And the big picture is this: elections should be verifiable. Voters should be able to check that their votes are counted correctly, without breaking election secrecy, which is so very important. And that's the tough part. How do we make an election system completely verifiable while keeping the votes absolutely secret? Well, the way we've come up with uses computers but doesn't depend on them. And the secret is the ballot form. And if you look closely at these ballot forms, you'll notice that the candidate list is in a different order on each one. And that means, if you mark your choices on one of them and then remove the candidate list, I won't be able to tell from the bit remaining what your vote is for. And on each ballot form there is this encrypted value in the form of this 2D barcode on the right. And there's some complicated cryptography going on in there, but what's not complicated is voting with one of these forms. So we can let computers do all the complicated cryptography for us, and then we'll use the paper for verification. So this is how you vote. You get one of these ballot forms at random, and then you go into the voting booth, and you mark your choices, and you tear along a perforation. And you shred the candidate list. And the bit that remains, the one with your marks — this is your encrypted vote. So you let a poll station worker scan your encrypted vote. And because it's encrypted, it can be submitted, stored and counted centrally and displayed on a website for anyone to see, including you. So you take this encrypted vote home as your receipt. And after the close of the election, you can check that your vote was counted by comparing your receipt to the vote on the website. And remember, the vote is encrypted from the moment you leave the voting booth, so if an election official wants to find out how you voted, they will not be able to. If the government wants to find out how you voted, they won't be able to. No hacker can break in and find out how you voted. No hacker can break in and change your vote, because then it won't match your receipt. Votes can't go missing because then you won't find yours when you look for it. But the election magic doesn't stop there. Instead, we want to make the whole process so transparent that news media and international observers and anyone who wants to can download all the election data and do the count themselves. They can check that all the votes were counted correctly. They can check that the announced result of the election is the correct one. And these are elections by the people, for the people. So the next step for our democracies are transparent and verifiable elections. Thank you. (Applause) |
Re-engineering the brain | {0: 'Using light and a little genetic engineering -- optogenetics -- Gero Miesenboeck has developed a way to control how living nerve cells work, and advanced understanding of how the brain controls behavior.'} | TEDGlobal 2010 | I have a doppelganger. (Laughter) Dr. Gero is a brilliant but slightly mad scientist in the "Dragonball Z: Android Saga." If you look very carefully, you see that his skull has been replaced with a transparent Plexiglas dome so that the workings of his brain can be observed and also controlled with light. That's exactly what I do — optical mind control. (Laughter) But in contrast to my evil twin who lusts after world domination, my motives are not sinister. I control the brain in order to understand how it works. Now wait a minute, you may say, how can you go straight to controlling the brain without understanding it first? Isn't that putting the cart before the horse? Many neuroscientists agree with this view and think that understanding will come from more detailed observation and analysis. They say, "If we could record the activity of our neurons, we would understand the brain." But think for a moment what that means. Even if we could measure what every cell is doing at all times, we would still have to make sense of the recorded activity patterns, and that's so difficult, chances are we'll understand these patterns just as little as the brains that produce them. Take a look at what brain activity might look like. In this simulation, each black dot is one nerve cell. The dot is visible whenever a cell fires an electrical impulse. There's 10,000 neurons here. So you're looking at roughly one percent of the brain of a cockroach. Your brains are about 100 million times more complicated. Somewhere, in a pattern like this, is you, your perceptions, your emotions, your memories, your plans for the future. But we don't know where, since we don't know how to read the pattern. We don't understand the code used by the brain. To make progress, we need to break the code. But how? An experienced code-breaker will tell you that in order to figure out what the symbols in a code mean, it's essential to be able to play with them, to rearrange them at will. So in this situation too, to decode the information contained in patterns like this, watching alone won't do. We need to rearrange the pattern. In other words, instead of recording the activity of neurons, we need to control it. It's not essential that we can control the activity of all neurons in the brain, just some. The more targeted our interventions, the better. And I'll show you in a moment how we can achieve the necessary precision. And since I'm realistic, rather than grandiose, I don't claim that the ability to control the function of the nervous system will at once unravel all its mysteries. But we'll certainly learn a lot. Now, I'm by no means the first person to realize how powerful a tool intervention is. The history of attempts to tinker with the function of the nervous system is long and illustrious. It dates back at least 200 years, to Galvani's famous experiments in the late 18th century and beyond. Galvani showed that a frog's legs twitched when he connected the lumbar nerve to a source of electrical current. This experiment revealed the first, and perhaps most fundamental, nugget of the neural code: that information is written in the form of electrical impulses. Galvani's approach of probing the nervous system with electrodes has remained state-of-the-art until today, despite a number of drawbacks. Sticking wires into the brain is obviously rather crude. It's hard to do in animals that run around, and there is a physical limit to the number of wires that can be inserted simultaneously. So around the turn of the last century, I started to think, "Wouldn't it be wonderful if one could take this logic and turn it upside down?" So instead of inserting a wire into one spot of the brain, re-engineer the brain itself so that some of its neural elements become responsive to diffusely broadcast signals such as a flash of light. Such an approach would literally, in a flash of light, overcome many of the obstacles to discovery. First, it's clearly a non-invasive, wireless form of communication. And second, just as in a radio broadcast, you can communicate with many receivers at once. You don't need to know where these receivers are, and it doesn't matter if these receivers move — just think of the stereo in your car. It gets even better, for it turns out that we can fabricate the receivers out of materials that are encoded in DNA. So each nerve cell with the right genetic makeup will spontaneously produce a receiver that allows us to control its function. I hope you'll appreciate the beautiful simplicity of this concept. There's no high-tech gizmos here, just biology revealed through biology. Now let's take a look at these miraculous receivers up close. As we zoom in on one of these purple neurons, we see that its outer membrane is studded with microscopic pores. Pores like these conduct electrical current and are responsible for all the communication in the nervous system. But these pores here are special. They are coupled to light receptors similar to the ones in your eyes. Whenever a flash of light hits the receptor, the pore opens, an electrical current is switched on, and the neuron fires electrical impulses. Because the light-activated pore is encoded in DNA, we can achieve incredible precision. This is because, although each cell in our bodies contains the same set of genes, different mixes of genes get turned on and off in different cells. You can exploit this to make sure that only some neurons contain our light-activated pore and others don't. So in this cartoon, the bluish white cell in the upper-left corner does not respond to light because it lacks the light-activated pore. The approach works so well that we can write purely artificial messages directly to the brain. In this example, each electrical impulse, each deflection on the trace, is caused by a brief pulse of light. And the approach, of course, also works in moving, behaving animals. This is the first ever such experiment, sort of the optical equivalent of Galvani's. It was done six or seven years ago by my then graduate student, Susana Lima. Susana had engineered the fruit fly on the left so that just two out of the 200,000 cells in its brain expressed the light-activated pore. You're familiar with these cells because they are the ones that frustrate you when you try to swat the fly. They trained the escape reflex that makes the fly jump into the air and fly away whenever you move your hand in position. And you can see here that the flash of light has exactly the same effect. The animal jumps, it spreads its wings, it vibrates them, but it can't actually take off because the fly is sandwiched between two glass plates. Now to make sure that this was no reaction of the fly to a flash it could see, Susana did a simple but brutally effective experiment. She cut the heads off of her flies. These headless bodies can live for about a day, but they don't do much. They just stand around and groom excessively. So it seems that the only trait that survives decapitation is vanity. (Laughter) Anyway, as you'll see in a moment, Susana was able to turn on the flight motor of what's the equivalent of the spinal cord of these flies and get some of the headless bodies to actually take off and fly away. They didn't get very far, obviously. Since we took these first steps, the field of optogenetics has exploded. And there are now hundreds of labs using these approaches. And we've come a long way since Galvani's and Susana's first successes in making animals twitch or jump. We can now actually interfere with their psychology in rather profound ways, as I'll show you in my last example, which is directed at a familiar question. Life is a string of choices creating a constant pressure to decide what to do next. We cope with this pressure by having brains, and within our brains, decision-making centers that I've called here the "Actor." The Actor implements a policy that takes into account the state of the environment and the context in which we operate. Our actions change the environment, or context, and these changes are then fed back into the decision loop. Now to put some neurobiological meat on this abstract model, we constructed a simple one-dimensional world for our favorite subject, fruit flies. Each chamber in these two vertical stacks contains one fly. The left and the right halves of the chamber are filled with two different odors, and a security camera watches as the flies pace up and down between them. Here's some such CCTV footage. Whenever a fly reaches the midpoint of the chamber where the two odor streams meet, it has to make a decision. It has to decide whether to turn around and stay in the same odor, or whether to cross the midline and try something new. These decisions are clearly a reflection of the Actor's policy. Now for an intelligent being like our fly, this policy is not written in stone but rather changes as the animal learns from experience. We can incorporate such an element of adaptive intelligence into our model by assuming that the fly's brain contains not only an Actor, but a different group of cells, a "Critic," that provides a running commentary on the Actor's choices. You can think of this nagging inner voice as sort of the brain's equivalent of the Catholic Church, if you're an Austrian like me, or the super-ego, if you're Freudian, or your mother, if you're Jewish. (Laughter) Now obviously, the Critic is a key ingredient in what makes us intelligent. So we set out to identify the cells in the fly's brain that played the role of the Critic. And the logic of our experiment was simple. We thought if we could use our optical remote control to activate the cells of the Critic, we should be able, artificially, to nag the Actor into changing its policy. In other words, the fly should learn from mistakes that it thought it had made but, in reality, it had not made. So we bred flies whose brains were more or less randomly peppered with cells that were light addressable. And then we took these flies and allowed them to make choices. And whenever they made one of the two choices, chose one odor, in this case the blue one over the orange one, we switched on the lights. If the Critic was among the optically activated cells, the result of this intervention should be a change in policy. The fly should learn to avoid the optically reinforced odor. Here's what happened in two instances: We're comparing two strains of flies, each of them having about 100 light-addressable cells in their brains, shown here in green on the left and on the right. What's common among these groups of cells is that they all produce the neurotransmitter dopamine. But the identities of the individual dopamine-producing neurons are clearly largely different on the left and on the right. Optically activating these hundred or so cells into two strains of flies has dramatically different consequences. If you look first at the behavior of the fly on the right, you can see that whenever it reaches the midpoint of the chamber where the two odors meet, it marches straight through, as it did before. Its behavior is completely unchanged. But the behavior of the fly on the left is very different. Whenever it comes up to the midpoint, it pauses, it carefully scans the odor interface as if it was sniffing out its environment, and then it turns around. This means that the policy that the Actor implements now includes an instruction to avoid the odor that's in the right half of the chamber. This means that the Critic must have spoken in that animal, and that the Critic must be contained among the dopamine-producing neurons on the left, but not among the dopamine producing neurons on the right. Through many such experiments, we were able to narrow down the identity of the Critic to just 12 cells. These 12 cells, as shown here in green, send the output to a brain structure called the "mushroom body," which is shown here in gray. We know from our formal model that the brain structure at the receiving end of the Critic's commentary is the Actor. So this anatomy suggests that the mushroom bodies have something to do with action choice. Based on everything we know about the mushroom bodies, this makes perfect sense. In fact, it makes so much sense that we can construct an electronic toy circuit that simulates the behavior of the fly. In this electronic toy circuit, the mushroom body neurons are symbolized by the vertical bank of blue LEDs in the center of the board. These LED's are wired to sensors that detect the presence of odorous molecules in the air. Each odor activates a different combination of sensors, which in turn activates a different odor detector in the mushroom body. So the pilot in the cockpit of the fly, the Actor, can tell which odor is present simply by looking at which of the blue LEDs lights up. What the Actor does with this information depends on its policy, which is stored in the strengths of the connection, between the odor detectors and the motors that power the fly's evasive actions. If the connection is weak, the motors will stay off and the fly will continue straight on its course. If the connection is strong, the motors will turn on and the fly will initiate a turn. Now consider a situation in which the motors stay off, the fly continues on its path and it suffers some painful consequence such as getting zapped. In a situation like this, we would expect the Critic to speak up and to tell the Actor to change its policy. We have created such a situation, artificially, by turning on the critic with a flash of light. That caused a strengthening of the connections between the currently active odor detector and the motors. So the next time the fly finds itself facing the same odor again, the connection is strong enough to turn on the motors and to trigger an evasive maneuver. I don't know about you, but I find it exhilarating to see how vague psychological notions evaporate and give rise to a physical, mechanistic understanding of the mind, even if it's the mind of the fly. This is one piece of good news. The other piece of good news, for a scientist at least, is that much remains to be discovered. In the experiments I told you about, we have lifted the identity of the Critic, but we still have no idea how the Critic does its job. Come to think of it, knowing when you're wrong without a teacher, or your mother, telling you, is a very hard problem. There are some ideas in computer science and in artificial intelligence as to how this might be done, but we still haven't solved a single example of how intelligent behavior springs from the physical interactions in living matter. I think we'll get there in the not too distant future. Thank you. (Applause) |
Saving the ocean one island at a time | {0: 'Greg Stone was a key driver in the establishment of the Phoenix Island Protected Area in the island nation of Kiribati. The second-largest marine protected area in the world -- and one of the most pristine -- PIPA is a laboratory for exploring and monitoring the recovery of coral reefs from bleaching events.'} | Mission Blue Voyage | I guess the story actually has to start maybe back in the the 1960s, when I was seven or eight years old, watching Jacques Cousteau documentaries on the living room floor with my mask and flippers on. Then after every episode, I had to go up to the bathtub and swim around the bathtub and look at the drain, because that's all there was to look at. And by the time I turned 16, I pursued a career in marine science, in exploration and diving, and lived in underwater habitats, like this one off the Florida Keys, for 30 days total. Brian Skerry took this shot. Thanks, Brian. And I've dived in deep-sea submersibles around the world. And this one is the deepest diving submarine in the world, operated by the Japanese government. And Sylvia Earle and I were on an expedition in this submarine 20 years ago in Japan. And on my dive, I went down 18,000 feet, to an area that I thought would be pristine wilderness area on the sea floor. But when I got there, I found lots of plastic garbage and other debris. And it was really a turning point in my life, where I started to realize that I couldn't just go have fun doing science and exploration. I needed to put it into a context. I needed to head towards conservation goals. So I began to work with National Geographic Society and others and led expeditions to Antarctica. I led three diving expeditions to Antarctica. Ten years ago was a seminal trip, where we explored that big iceberg, B-15, the largest iceberg in history, that broke off the Ross Ice Shelf. And we developed techniques to dive inside and under the iceberg, such as heating pads on our kidneys with a battery that we dragged around, so that, as the blood flowed through our kidneys, it would get a little boost of warmth before going back into our bodies. But after three trips to Antarctica, I decided that it might be nicer to work in warmer water. And that same year, 10 years ago, I headed north to the Phoenix Islands. And I'm going to tell you that story here in a moment. But before I do, I just want you to ponder this graph for a moment. You may have seen this in other forms, but the top line is the amount of protected area on land, globally, and it's about 12 percent. And you can see that it kind of hockey sticks up around the 1960s and '70s, and it's on kind of a nice trajectory right now. And that's probably because that's when everybody got aware of the environment and Earth Day and all the stuff that happened in the '60s with the Hippies and everything really did, I think, have an affect on global awareness. But the ocean-protected area is basically flat line until right about now — it appears to be ticking up. And I do believe that we are at the hockey stick point of the protected area in the ocean. I think we would have gotten there a lot earlier if we could see what happens in the ocean like we can see what happens on land. But unfortunately, the ocean is opaque, and we can't see what's going on. And therefore we're way behind on protection. But scuba diving, submersibles and all the work that we're setting about to do here will help rectify that. So where are the Phoenix Islands? They were the world's largest marine-protected area up until last week when the Chagos Archipelago was declared. It's in the mid-Pacific. It's about five days from anywhere. If you want to get to the Phoenix Islands, it's five days from Fiji, it's five days from Hawaii, it's five days from Samoa. It's out in the middle of the Pacific, right around the Equator. I had never heard of the islands 10 years ago, nor the country, Kiribati, that owns them, till two friends of mine who run a liveaboard dive boat in Fiji said, "Greg, would you lead a scientific expedition up to these islands? They've never been dived." And I said, "Yeah. But tell me where they are and the country that owns them." So that's when I first learned of the Islands and had no idea what I was getting into. But I was in for the adventure. Let me give you a little peek here of the Phoenix Islands-protected area. It's a very deep-water part of our planet. The average depths are about 12,000 ft. There's lots of seamounts in the Phoenix Islands, which are specifically part of the protected area. Seamounts are important for biodiversity. There's actually more mountains in the ocean than there are on land. It's an interesting fact. And the Phoenix Islands is very rich in those seamounts. So it's a deep — think about it in a big three-dimensional space, very deep three-dimensional space with herds of tuna, whales, all kinds of deep sea marine life like we've seen here before. That's the vessel that we took up there for these studies, early on, and that's what the Islands look like — you can see in the background. They're very low to the water, and they're all uninhabited, except one island has about 35 caretakers on it. And they've been uninhabited for most of time because even in the ancient days, these islands were too far away from the bright lights of Fiji and Hawaii and Tahiti for those ancient Polynesian mariners that were traversing the Pacific so widely. But we got up there, and I had the unique and wonderful scientific opportunity and personal opportunity to get to a place that had never been dived and just get to an island and go, "Okay, where are we going to dive? Let's try there," and then falling into the water. Both my personal and my professional life changed. Suddenly, I saw a world that I had never seen before in the ocean — schools of fish that were so dense they dulled the penetration of sunlight from the surface, coral reefs that were continuous and solid and colorful, large fish everywhere, manta rays. It was an ecosystem. Parrotfish spawning — this is about 5,000 longnose parrotfish spawning at the entrance to one of the Phoenix Islands. You can see the fish are balled up and then there's a little cloudy area there where they're exchanging the eggs and sperm for reproduction — events that the ocean is supposed to do, but struggles to do in many places now because of human activity. The Phoenix Islands and all the equatorial parts of our planet are very important for tuna fisheries, especially this yellowfin tuna that you see here. Phoenix Islands is a major tuna location. And sharks — we had sharks on our early dives, up to 150 sharks at once, which is an indication of a very, very healthy, very strong, system. So I thought the scenes of never-ending wilderness would go on forever, but they did finally come to an end. And we explored the surface of the Islands as well — very important bird nesting site, some of the most important bird-nesting sites in the Pacific, in the world. And we finished our trip. And that's the area again. You can see the Islands — there are eight islands — that pop out of the water. The peaks that don't come out of the water are the seamounts. Remember, a seamount turns into an island when it hits the surface. And what's the context of the Phoenix Islands? Where do these exist? Well they exist in the Republic of Kiribati, and Kiribati is located in the Central Pacific in three island groups. In the west we have the Gilbert Islands. In the center we have the Phoenix Islands, which is the subject that I'm talking about. And then over to the east we have the Line Islands. It's the largest atoll nation in the world. And they have about 110,000 people spread out over 33 islands. They control 3.4 million cubic miles of ocean, and that's between one and two percent of all the ocean water on the planet. And when I was first going up there, I barely knew the name of this country 10 years ago, and people would ask me, "Why are you going to this place called Kiribati?" And it reminded me of that old joke where the bank robber comes out of the courthouse handcuffed, and the reporter yells, "Hey, Willy. Why do you rob banks?" And he says, "cause that's where all the money is." And I would tell people, "Why do I go to Kiribati? Because that's where all the ocean is." They basically are one nation that controls most of the equatorial waters of the Central Pacific Ocean. They're also a country that is in dire danger. Sea levels are rising, and Kiribati, along with 42 other nations in the world, will be under water within 50 to 100 years due to climate change and the associated sea-level rise from thermal expansion and the melting of freshwater into the ocean. The Islands rise only one to two meters above the surface. Some of the islands have already gone under water. And these nations are faced with a real problem. We as a world are faced with a problem. What do we do with displaced fellow Earthlings who no longer have a home on the planet? The president of the Maldives conducted a mock cabinet meeting underwater recently to highlight the dire straits of these countries. So it's something we need to focus on. But back to the Phoenix Islands, which is the subject of this Talk. After I got back, I said, okay, this is amazing, what we found. I'd like to go back and share it with the government of Kiribati, who are over in Tarawa, the westernmost group. So I started contacting them — because they had actually given me a permit to do this — and I said, "I want to come up and tell you what we found." And for some reason they didn't want me to come, or it was hard to find a time and a place, and it took a while, but finally they said, "Okay, you can come. But if you come, you have to buy lunch for everybody who comes to the seminar." So I said, "Okay, I'm happy to buy lunch. Just get whatever anybody wants." So David Obura, a coral reef biologist, and I went to Tarawa, and we presented for two hours on the amazing findings of the Phoenix Islands. And the country never knew this. They never had any data from this area. They'd never had any information from the Phoenix Islands. After the talk, the Minister of Fisheries walked up to me and he said, "Greg, do you realize that you are the first scientist who has ever come back and told us what they did?" He said, "We often issue these permits to do research in our waters, but usually we get a note two or three years later, or a reprint. But you're the first one who's ever come back and told us what you did. And we really appreciate that. And we're buying you lunch today. And are you free for dinner?" And I was free for dinner, and I went out to dinner with the Minister of Fisheries in Kiribati. And over the course of dinner, I learned that Kiribati gains most of its revenue — it's a very poor country — but it gains what revenue is has by selling access to foreign nations to take fish out of its waters, because Kiribati does not have the capacity to take the fish itself. And the deal that they strike is the extracting country gives Kiribati five percent of the landed value. So if the United States removes a million dollars' worth of lobsters from a reef, Kiribati gets 50,000 dollars. And, you know, it didn't seem like a very good deal to me. So I asked the Minister over dinner, I said, "Would you consider a situation where you would still get paid — we do the math and figure out what the value of the resource is — but you leave fish and the sharks and the shrimp in the water?" He stopped, and he said, "Yes, we would like to do that to deal with our overfishing problem, and I think we would call it a reverse fishing license." He coined the term "reverse fishing license." So I said, "Yes, a 'reverse fishing license.'" So we walked away from this dinner really not knowing where to go at that point. I went back to the States and started looking around to see if I could find examples where reverse fishing licenses had been issued, and it turned out there were none. There were no oceanic deals where countries were compensated for not fishing. It had occurred on land, in rainforests of South America and Africa, where landowners had been paid not to cut the trees down. And Conservation International had struck some of those deals. So I went to Conservation International and brought them in as a partner and went through the process of valuing the fishery resource, deciding how much Kiribati should be compensated, what the range of the fishes were, brought in a whole bunch of other partners — the government of Australia, the government of New Zealand, the World Bank. The Oak Foundation and National Geographic have been big funders of this as well. And we basically founded the park on the idea of an endowment that would pay the equivalent lost fishing license fees to this very poor country to keep the area intact. Halfway through this process, I met the president of Kiribati, President Anote Tong. He's a really important leader, a real visionary, forward-thinking man, and he told me two things when I approached him. He said, "Greg, there's two things I'd like you to do. One is, remember I'm a politician, so you've got to go out and work with my ministers and convince the people of Kiribati that this is a good idea. Secondly, I'd like you to create principles that will transcend my own presidency. I don't want to do something like this if it's going to go away after I'm voted out of office." So we had very strong leadership, very good vision and a lot of science, a lot of lawyers involved. Many, many steps were taken to pull this off. And it was primarily because Kiribati realized that this was in their own self-interest to do this. They realized that this was a common cause that they had found with the conservation community. Then in 2002, when this was all going full-swing, a coral-bleaching event happened in the Phoenix Islands. Here's this resource that we're looking to save, and it turns out it's the hottest heating event that we can find on record. The ocean heated up as it does sometimes, and the hot spot formed and stalled right over the Phoenix Islands for six months. It was over 32 degrees Celsius for six months and it basically killed 60 percent of the coral. So suddenly we had this area that we were protecting, but now it appeared to be dead, at least in the coral areas. Of course the deep-sea areas and the open ocean areas were fine, but the coral, which everybody likes to look at, was in trouble. Well, the good news is it's recovered and recovering fast, faster than any reef we've seen. This picture was just taken by Brian Skerry a few months ago when we returned to the Phoenix Islands and discovered that, because it is a protected area and has healthy fish populations that keep the algae grazed down and keep the rest of the reef healthy, the coral is booming, is just booming back. It's almost like if a person has multiple diseases, it's hard to get well, you might die, but if you only have one disease to deal with, you can get better. And that's the story with climate-change heating. It's the only threat, the only influence that the reef had to deal with. There was no fishing, there was no pollution, there was no coastal development, and the reef is on a full-bore recovery. Now I remember that dinner I had with the Minister of Fisheries 10 years ago when we first brought this up and I got quite animated during the dinner and said, "Well, I think that the conservation community might embrace this idea, Minister." He paused and put his hands together and said, "Yes, Greg, but the devil will be in the details," he said. And it certainly was. The last 10 years have been detail after detail ranging from creating legislation to multiple research expeditions to communication plans, as I said, teams of lawyers, MOUs, creating the Phoenix Islands Trust Board. And we are now in the process of raising the full endowment. Kiribati has frozen extracting activities at its current state while we raise the endowment. We just had our first PIPA Trust Board meeting three weeks ago. So it's a fully functional up-and-running entity that negotiates the reverse fishing license with the country. And the PIPA Trust Board holds that license and pays the country for this. So it's a very solid, very well thought-out, very well grounded system, and it was a bottom-up system, and that was very important with this work, from the bottom up to secure this. So the conditions for success here are listed. You can read them yourselves. But I would say the most important one in my mind was working within the market forces of the situation. And that insured that we could move this forward and it would have both the self-interest of Kiribati as well as the self-interest of the world. And I'll leave you with one final slide, that is: how do we scale this up? How do we realize Sylvia's dream? Where eventually do we take this? Here's the Pacific with large MPAs and large conservation zones on it. And as you can see, we have a patchwork across this ocean. I've just described to you the one story behind that rectangular area in the middle, the Phoenix Islands, but every other green patch on that has its own story. And what we need to do now is look at the whole Pacific Ocean in its entirety and make a network of MPAs across the Pacific so that we have our world's largest ocean protected and self-sustaining over time. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
A one-man orchestra of the imagination | {0: 'Andrew Bird is a virtual one-man band -- he’s a singer and songwriter and plays the violin, guitar, glockenspiel.'} | TED2010 | Well, there's lots to talk about, but I think I'm just going to play to start off. (Music) ♫ When I wake up ♫ ♫ in the morning ♫ ♫ I pour the coffee ♫ ♫ I read the paper ♫ ♫ And then I slowly ♫ ♫ and so softly ♫ ♫ do the dishes ♫ ♫ So feed the fishes ♫ ♫ You sing me happy birthday ♫ ♫ Like it's gonna be ♫ ♫ your last day ♫ ♫ here on Earth ♫ (Applause) All right. So, I wanted to do something special today. I want to debut a new song that I've been working on in the last five or six months. And there's few things more thrilling than playing a song for the first time in front of an audience, especially when it's half-finished. (Laughter) I'm kind of hoping some conversations here might help me finish it. Because it gets into all sorts of crazy realms. And so this is basically a song about loops, but not the kind of loops that I make up here. They're feedback loops. And in the audio world that's when the microphone gets too close to its sound source, and then it gets in this self-destructive loop that creates a very unpleasant sound. And I'm going to demonstrate for you. (Laughter) I'm not going to hurt you. Don't worry. ♫ This is a loop, feedback loop ♫ ♫ This is a loop, feedback loop ♫ ♫ This is a loop, feedback loop ♫ ♫ This is a loop, feedback loop ♫ ♫ This is a loop, feedback loop ♫ ♫ This is a loop, feedback loop ♫ ♫ This is a — (Feedback) All right. I don't know if that was necessary to demonstrate — (Laughter) — but my point is it's the sound of self-destruction. And I've been thinking about how that applies across a whole spectrum of realms, from, say, the ecological, okay. There seems to be a rule in nature that if you get too close to where you came from, it gets ugly. So like, you can't feed cows their own brains or you get mad cow disease, and inbreeding and incest and, let's see, what's the other one? Biological — there's autoimmune diseases, where the body attacks itself a little too overzealously and destroys the host, or the person. And then — okay, this is where we get to the song — kind of bridges the gap to the emotional. Because although I've used scientific terms in songs, it's very difficult sometimes to make them lyrical. And there's some things you just don't need to have in songs. So I'm trying to bridge this gap between this idea and this melody. And so, I don't know if you've ever had this, but when I close my eyes sometimes and try to sleep, I can't stop thinking about my own eyes. And it's like your eyes start straining to see themselves. That's what it feels like to me. It's not pleasant. I'm sorry if I put that idea in your head. (Laughter) It's impossible, of course, for your eyes to see themselves, but they seem to be trying. So that's getting a little more closer to a personal experience. Or ears being able to hear themselves — it's just impossible. That's the thing. So, I've been working on this song that mentions these things and then also imagines a person who's been so successful at defending themselves from heartbreak that they're left to do the deed themselves, if that's possible. And that's what the song is asking. All right. It doesn't have a name yet. (Music) ♫ Go ahead and congratulate yourself ♫ ♫ Give yourself a hand, the hand is your hand ♫ ♫ And the eye that eyes itself is your eye ♫ ♫ And the ear that hears itself is near ♫ ♫ 'Cause it's your ear, oh oh ♫ ♫ You've done the impossible now ♫ ♫ Took yourself apart ♫ ♫ You made yourself invulnerable ♫ ♫ No one can break your heart ♫ ♫ So you wear it out ♫ ♫ And you wring it out ♫ ♫ And you wear it out ♫ ♫ And you break it yourself ♫ ♫ Breaking your own, break it yourself ♫ ♫ Breaking your own, break it yourself ♫ ♫ Breaking your own ♫ (Applause) Thanks. (Applause) All right. It's kind of cool. Songwriters can sort of get away with murder. You can throw out crazy theories and not have to back it up with data or graphs or research. But, you know, I think reckless curiosity would be what the world needs now, just a little bit. (Applause) I'm going to finish up with a song of mine called "Weather Systems." (Music) ♫ Quiet ♫ ♫ Quiet down, she said ♫ ♫ Speak into the back of his head ♫ ♫ On the edge of the bed, I can see your blood flow ♫ ♫ I can see your ♫ ♫ cells grow ♫ ♫ Hold still awhile ♫ ♫ Don't spill the wine ♫ ♫ I can see it all from here ♫ ♫ I can see ♫ ♫ oh, I ♫ ♫ I can see ♫ ♫ weather systems ♫ ♫ of the world ♫ ♫ Weather systems ♫ ♫ of the world ♫ ♫ Some things you say ♫ ♫ are not for sale ♫ ♫ I would hold it where ♫ ♫ our free agents of some substance are ♫ ♫ scared ♫ ♫ Hold still a while ♫ ♫ Don't spill the wine ♫ ♫ I can see it all from here ♫ ♫ I can see ♫ ♫ oh, I ♫ ♫ I can see ♫ ♫ weather systems of the world ♫ ♫ Weather systems ♫ ♫ of the world ♫ Thanks. (Applause) |
Teaching design for change | {0: "Emily Pilloton wrote Design Revolution, a book about 100-plus objects and systems designed to make people's lives better. In 2010, her design nonprofit began an immersive residency in Bertie County, North Carolina, the poorest and most rural county in the state."} | TEDGlobal 2010 | So this is a story of a place that I now call home. It's a story of public education and of rural communities and of what design might do to improve both. So this is Bertie County, North Carolina, USA. To give you an idea of the "where:" So here's North Carolina, and if we zoom in, Bertie County is in the eastern part of the state. It's about two hours east driving-time from Raleigh. And it's very flat. It's very swampy. It's mostly farmland. The entire county is home to just 20,000 people, and they're very sparsely distributed. So there's only 27 people per square mile, which comes down to about 10 people per square kilometer. Bertie County is kind of a prime example in the demise of rural America. We've seen this story all over the country and even in places beyond the American borders. We know the symptoms. It's the hollowing out of small towns. It's downtowns becoming ghost towns. The brain drain — where all of the most educated and qualified leave and never come back. It's the dependence on farm subsidies and under-performing schools and higher poverty rates in rural areas than in urban. And Bertie County is no exception to this. Perhaps the biggest thing it struggles with, like many communities similar to it, is that there's no shared, collective investment in the future of rural communities. Only 6.8 percent of all our philanthropic giving in the U.S. right now benefits rural communities, and yet 20 percent of our population lives there. So Bertie County is not only very rural; it's incredibly poor. It is the poorest county in the state. It has one in three of its children living in poverty, and it's what is referred to as a "rural ghetto." The economy is mostly agricultural. The biggest crops are cotton and tobacco, and we're very proud of our Bertie County peanut. The biggest employer is the Purdue chicken processing plant. The county seat is Windsor. This is like Times Square of Windsor that you're looking at right now. It's home to only 2,000 people, and like a lot of other small towns it has been hollowed out over the years. There are more buildings that are empty or in disrepair than occupied and in use. You can count the number of restaurants in the county on one hand — Bunn's Barbecue being my absolute favorite. But in the whole county there is no coffee shop, there's no Internet cafe, there's no movie theater, there's no bookstore. There isn't even a Walmart. Racially, the county is about 60 percent African-American, but what happens in the public schools is most of the privileged white kids go to the private Lawrence Academy. So the public school students are about 86 percent African-American. And this is a spread from the local newspaper of the recent graduating class, and you can see the difference is pretty stark. So to say that the public education system in Bertie County is struggling would be a huge understatement. There's basically no pool of qualified teachers to pull from, and only eight percent of the people in the county have a bachelor's degree or higher. So there isn't a big legacy in the pride of education. In fact, two years ago, only 27 percent of all the third- through eighth-graders were passing the state standard in both English and math. So it sounds like I'm painting a really bleak picture of this place, but I promise there is good news. The biggest asset, in my opinion, one of the biggest assets in Bertie County right now is this man: This is Dr. Chip Zullinger, fondly known as Dr. Z. He was brought in in October 2007 as the new superintendent to basically fix this broken school system. And he previously was a superintendent in Charleston, South Carolina and then in Denver, Colorado. He started some of the country's first charter schools in the late '80s in the U.S. And he is an absolute renegade and a visionary, and he is the reason that I now live and work there. So in February of 2009, Dr. Zullinger invited us, Project H Design — which is a non-profit design firm that I founded — to come to Bertie and to partner with him on the repair of this school district and to bring a design perspective to the repair of the school district. And he invited us in particular because we have a very specific type of design process — one that results in appropriate design solutions in places that don't usually have access to design services or creative capital. Specifically, we use these six design directives, probably the most important being number two: we design with, not for — in that, when we're doing humanitarian-focused design, it's not about designing for clients anymore. It's about designing with people, and letting appropriate solutions emerge from within. So at the time of being invited down there, we were based in San Francisco, and so we were going back and forth for basically the rest of 2009, spending about half our time in Bertie County. And when I say we, I mean Project H, but more specifically, I mean myself and my partner, Matthew Miller, who's an architect and a sort of MacGyver-type builder. So fast-forward to today, and we now live there. I have strategically cut Matt's head out of this photo, because he would kill me if he knew I was using it because of the sweatsuits. But this is our front porch. We live there. We now call this place home. Over the course of this year that we spent flying back and forth, we realized we had fallen in love with the place. We had fallen in love with the place and the people and the work that we're able to do in a rural place like Bertie County, that, as designers and builders, you can't do everywhere. There's space to experiment and to weld and to test things. We have an amazing advocate in Dr. Zullinger. There's a nobility of real, hands-on, dirt-under-your-fingernails work. But beyond our personal reasons for wanting to be there, there is a huge need. There is a total vacuum of creative capital in Bertie County. There isn't a single licensed architect in the whole county. And so we saw an opportunity to bring design as this untouched tool, something that Bertie County didn't otherwise have, and to be sort of the — to usher that in as a new type of tool in their tool kit. The initial goal became using design within the public education system in partnership with Dr. Zullinger — that was why we were there. But beyond that, we recognized that Bertie County, as a community, was in dire need of a fresh perspective of pride and connectedness and of the creative capital that they were so much lacking. So the goal became, yes, to apply design within education, but then to figure out how to make education a great vehicle for community development. So in order to do this, we've taken three different approaches to the intersection of design and education. And I should say that these are three things that we've done in Bertie County, but I feel pretty confident that they could work in a lot of other rural communities around the U.S. and maybe even beyond. So the first of the three is design for education. This is the most kind of direct, obvious intersection of the two things. It's the physical construction of improved spaces and materials and experiences for teachers and students. This is in response to the awful mobile trailers and the outdated textbooks and the terrible materials that we're building schools out of these days. And so this played out for us in a couple different ways. The first was a series of renovations of computer labs. So traditionally, the computer labs, particularly in an under-performing school like Bertie County, where they have to benchmark test every other week, the computer lab is a kill-and-drill testing facility. You come in, you face the wall, you take your test and you leave. So we wanted to change the way that students approach technology, to create a more convivial and social space that was more engaging, more accessible, and also to increase the ability for teachers to use these spaces for technology-based instruction. So this is the lab at the high school, and the principal there is in love with this room. Every time he has visitors, it's the first place that he takes them. And this also meant the co-creation with some teachers of this educational playground system called the learning landscape. It allows elementary-level students to learn core subjects through game play and activity and running around and screaming and being a kid. So this game that the kids are playing here — in this case they were learning basic multiplication through a game called Match Me. And in Match Me, you take the class, divide it into two teams, one team on each side of the playground, and the teacher will take a piece of chalk and just write a number on each of the tires. And then she'll call out a math problem — so let's say four times four — and then one student from each team has to compete to figure out that four times four is 16 and find the tire with the 16 on it and sit on it. So the goal is to have all of your teammates sitting on the tires and then your team wins. And the impact of the learning landscape has been pretty surprising and amazing. Some of the classes and teachers have reported higher test scores, a greater comfort level with the material, especially with the boys, that in going outside and playing, they aren't afraid to take on a double-digit multiplication problem — and also that the teachers are able to use these as assessment tools to better gauge how their students are understanding new material. So with design for education, I think the most important thing is to have a shared ownership of the solutions with the teachers, so that they have the incentive and the desire to use them. So this is Mr. Perry. He's the assistant superintendent. He came out for one of our teacher-training days and won like five rounds of Match Me in a row and was very proud of himself. (Laughter) So the second approach is redesigning education itself. This is the most complex. It's a systems-level look at how education is administered and what is being offered and to whom. So in many cases this is not so much about making change as it is creating the conditions under which change is possible and the incentive to want to make change, which is easier said than done in rural communities and in inside-the-box education systems in rural communities. So for us, this was a graphic public campaign called Connect Bertie. There are thousands of these blue dots all over the county. And this was for a fund that the school district had to put a desktop computer and a broadband Internet connection in every home with a child in the public school system. Right now I should say, there are only 10 percent of the houses that actually have an in-home Internet connection. And the only places to get WiFi are in the school buildings, or at the Bojangles Fried Chicken joint, which I find myself squatting outside of a lot. Aside from, you know, getting people excited and wondering what the heck these blue dots were all over the place, it asked the school system to envision how it might become a catalyst for a more connected community. It asked them to reach outside of the school walls and to think about how they could play a role in the community's development. So the first batch of computers are being installed later this summer, and we're helping Dr. Zullinger develop some strategies around how we might connect the classroom and the home to extend learning beyond the school day. And then the third approach, which is what I'm most excited about, which is where we are now, is: design as education. So "design as education" means that we could actually teach design within public schools, and not design-based learning — not like "let's learn physics by building a rocket," but actually learning design-thinking coupled with real construction and fabrication skills put towards a local community purpose. It also means that designers are no longer consultants, but we're teachers, and we are charged with growing creative capital within the next generation. And what design offers as an educational framework is an antidote to all of the boring, rigid, verbal instruction that so many of these school districts are plagued by. It's hands-on, it's in-your-face, it requires an active engagement, and it allows kids to apply all the core subject learning in real ways. So we started thinking about the legacy of shop class and how shop class — wood and metal shop class in particular — historically, has been something intended for kids who aren't going to go to college. It's a vocational training path. It's working-class; it's blue-collar. The projects are things like, let's make a birdhouse for your mom for Christmas. And in recent decades, a lot of the funding for shop class has gone away entirely. So we thought, what if you could bring back shop class, but this time orient the projects around things that the community needed, and to infuse shop class with a more critical and creative-design-thinking studio process. So we took this kind of nebulous idea and have worked really closely with Dr. Zullinger for the past year on writing this as a one-year curriculum offered at the high school level to the junior class. And so this starts in four weeks, at the end of the summer, and my partner and I, Matthew and I, just went through the arduous and totally convoluted process of getting certified as high school teachers to actually run it. And this is what it looks like. So over the course of two semesters, the Fall and the Spring, the students spend three hours a day every single day in our 4,500 square foot studio/shop space. And during that time, they're doing everything from going out and doing ethnographic research and doing the need-finding, coming back into the studio, doing the brainstorming and design visualization to come up with concepts that might work, and then moving into the shop and actually testing them, building them, prototyping them, figuring out if they are going to work and refining that. And then over the summer, they're offered a summer job. They're paid as employees of Project H to be the construction crew with us to build these projects in the community. So the first project, which will be built next summer, is an open-air farmers' market downtown, followed by bus shelters for the school bus system in the second year and home improvements for the elderly in the third year. So these are real visible projects that hopefully the students can point to and say, "I built that, and I'm proud of it." So I want you to meet three of our students. This is Ryan. She is 15 years old. She loves agriculture and wants to be a high school teacher. She wants to go to college, but she wants to come back to Bertie County, because that's where her family is from, where she calls home, and she feels very strongly about giving back to this place that she's been fairly fortunate in. So what Studio H might offer her is a way to develop skills so that she might give back in the most meaningful way. This is Eric. He plays for the football team. He is really into dirtbike racing, and he wants to be an architect. So for him, Studio H offers him a way to develop the skills he will need as an architect, everything from drafting to wood and metal construction to how to do research for a client. And then this is Anthony. He is 16 years old, loves hunting and fishing and being outside and doing anything with his hands, and so for him, Studio H means that he can stay interested in his education through that hands-on engagement. He's interested in forestry, but he isn't sure, so if he ends up not going to college, he will have developed some industry-relevant skills. What design and building really offers to public education is a different kind of classroom. So this building downtown, which may very well become the site of our future farmers' market, is now the classroom. And going out into the community and interviewing your neighbors about what kind of food they buy and from where and why — that's a homework assignment. And the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the end of the summer when they have built the farmers' market and it's open to the public — that's the final exam. And for the community, what design and building offers is real, visible, built progress. It's one project per year, and it makes the youth the biggest asset and the biggest untapped resource in imagining a new future. So we recognize that Studio H, especially in its first year, is a small story — 13 students, it's two teachers, it's one project in one place. But we feel like this could work in other places. And I really, strongly believe in the power of the small story, because it is so difficult to do humanitarian work at a global scale. Because, when you zoom out that far, you lose the ability to view people as humans. Ultimately, design itself is a process of constant education for the people that we work with and for and for us as designers. And let's face it, designers, we need to reinvent ourselves. We need to re-educate ourselves around the things that matter, we need to work outside of our comfort zones more, and we need to be better citizens in our own backyard. So while this is a very small story, we hope that it represents a step in the right direction for the future of rural communities and for the future of public education and hopefully also for the future of design. Thank you. (Applause) |
The path to ending ethnic conflicts | {0: 'Stefan Wolff studies contemporary conflicts, focusing on the prevention and settlement of ethnic conflicts and in postconflict reconstruction in deeply divided and war-torn societies.'} | TEDGlobal 2010 | Today I want to talk to you about ethnic conflict and civil war. These are not normally the most cheerful of topics, nor do they generally generate the kind of good news that this conference is about. Yet, not only is there at least some good news to be told about fewer such conflicts now than two decades ago, but what is perhaps more important is that we also have come to a much better understanding of what can be done to further reduce the number of ethnic conflicts and civil wars and the suffering that they inflict. Three things stand out: leadership, diplomacy and institutional design. What I will focus on in my talk is why they matter, how they matter, and what we can all do to make sure that they continue to matter in the right ways, that is, how all of us can contribute to developing and honing the skills of local and global leaders to make peace and to make it last. But let's start at the beginning. Civil wars have made news headlines for many decades now, and ethnic conflicts in particular have been a near constant presence as a major international security threat. For nearly two decades now, the news has been bad and the images have been haunting. In Georgia, after years of stalemate, we saw a full-scale resurgence of violence in August, 2008. This quickly escalated into a five-day war between Russia and Georgia, leaving Georgia ever more divided. In Kenya, contested presidential elections in 2007 — we just heard about them — quickly led to high levels of inter-ethnic violence and the killing and displacement of thousands of people. In Sri Lanka, a decades-long civil war between the Tamil minority and the Sinhala majority led to a bloody climax in 2009, after perhaps as many as 100,000 people had been killed since 1983. In Kyrgyzstan, just over the last few weeks, unprecedented levels of violence occurred between ethnic Kyrgyz and ethnic Uzbeks. Hundreds have been killed, and more than 100,000 displaced, including many ethnic Uzbeks who fled to neighboring Uzbekistan. In the Middle East, conflict between Israelis and Palestinians continues unabated, and it becomes ever more difficult to see how, just how a possible, sustainable solution can be achieved. Darfur may have slipped from the news headlines, but the killing and displacement there continues as well, and the sheer human misery that it creates is very hard to fathom. And in Iraq, finally, violence is on the rise again, and the country has yet to form a government four months after its last parliamentary elections. But hang on, this talk is to be about the good news. So are these now the images of the past? Well, notwithstanding the gloomy pictures from the Middle East, Darfur, Iraq, elsewhere, there is a longer-term trend that does represent some good news. Over the past two decades, since the end of the Cold War, there has been an overall decline in the number of civil wars. Since the high in the early 1990s, with about 50 such civil wars ongoing, we now have 30 percent fewer such conflicts today. The number of people killed in civil wars also is much lower today than it was a decade ago or two. But this trend is less unambiguous. The highest level of deaths on the battlefield was recorded between 1998 and 2001, with about 80,000 soldiers, policemen and rebels killed every year. The lowest number of combatant casualties occurred in 2003, with just 20,000 killed. Despite the up and down since then, the overall trend — and this is the important bit — clearly points downward for the past two decades. The news about civilian casualties is also less bad than it used to be. From over 12,000 civilians deliberately killed in civil wars in 1997 and 1998, a decade later, this figure stands at 4,000. This is a decrease by two-thirds. This decline would be even more obvious if we factored in the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. But then 800,000 civilians were slaughtered in a matter of just a few months. This certainly is an accomplishment that must never be surpassed. What is also important is to note that these figures only tell part of the story. They exclude people that died as a consequence of civil war, from hunger or disease, for example. And they also do not properly account for civilian suffering more generally. Torture, rape and ethnic cleansing have become highly effective, if often non-lethal, weapons in civil war. To put it differently, for the civilians that suffer the consequences of ethnic conflict and civil war, there is no good war and there is no bad peace. Thus, even though every civilian killed, maimed, raped, or tortured is one too many, the fact that the number of civilian casualties is clearly lower today than it was a decade ago, is good news. So, we have fewer conflicts today in which fewer people get killed. And the big question, of course, is why? In some cases, there is a military victory of one side. This is a solution of sorts, but rarely is it one that comes without human costs or humanitarian consequences. The defeat of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka is perhaps the most recent example of this, but we have seen similar so-called military solutions in the Balkans, in the South Caucasus and across most of Africa. At times, they are complimented by negotiated settlements, or at least cease-fire agreements, and peacekeepers are deployed. But hardly ever do they represent a resounding success — Bosnia and Herzegovina perhaps more so than Georgia. But for many parts of Africa, a colleague of mine once put it this way, "The cease-fire on Tuesday night was reached just in time for the genocide to start on Wednesday morning." But let's look at the good news again. If there's no solution on the battlefield, three factors can account for the prevention of ethnic conflict and civil war, or for sustainable peace afterwards: leadership, diplomacy and institutional design. Take the example of Northern Ireland. Despite centuries of animosity, decades of violence and thousands of people killed, 1998 saw the conclusion of an historic agreement. Its initial version was skillfully mediated by Senator George Mitchell. Crucially, for the long-term success of the peace process in Northern Ireland, he imposed very clear conditions for the participation and negotiations. Central among them, a commitment to exclusively peaceful means. Subsequent revisions of the agreement were facilitated by the British and Irish governments, who never wavered in their determination to bring peace and stability to Northern Ireland. The core institutions that were put in place in 1998 and their modifications in 2006 and 2008 were highly innovative and allowed all conflict parties to see their core concerns and demands addressed. The agreement combines a power-sharing arrangement in Northern Ireland with cross-border institutions that link Belfast and Dublin and thus recognizes the so-called Irish dimension of the conflict. And significantly, there's also a clear focus on both the rights of individuals and the rights of communities. The provisions in the agreement may be complex, but so is the underlying conflict. Perhaps most importantly, local leaders repeatedly rose to the challenge of compromise, not always fast and not always enthusiastically, but rise in the end they did. Who ever could have imagined Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness jointly governing Northern Ireland as First and Deputy First Minister? But then, is Northern Ireland a unique example, or does this kind of explanation only hold more generally in democratic and developed countries? By no means. The ending of Liberia's long-lasting civil war in 2003 illustrates the importance of leadership, diplomacy and institutional design as much as the successful prevention of a full-scale civil war in Macedonia in 2001, or the successful ending of the conflict in Aceh in Indonesia in 2005. In all three cases, local leaders were willing and able to make peace, the international community stood ready to help them negotiate and implement an agreement, and the institutions have lived up to the promise that they held on the day they were agreed. Focusing on leadership, diplomacy and institutional design also helps explain failures to achieve peace, or to make it last. The hopes that were vested in the Oslo Accords did not lead to an end of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Not all the issues that needed to be resolved were actually covered in the agreements. Rather, local leaders committed to revisiting them later on. Yet instead of grasping this opportunity, local and international leaders soon disengaged and became distracted by the second Intifada, the events of 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The comprehensive peace agreement for Sudan signed in 2005 turned out to be less comprehensive than envisaged, and its provisions may yet bear the seeds of a full-scale return to war between north and south. Changes and shortcomings in leadership, more off than on international diplomacy and institutional failures account for this in almost equal measure. Unresolved boundary issues, squabbles over oil revenues, the ongoing conflict in Darfur, escalating tribal violence in the south and generally weak state capacity across all of Sudan complete a very depressing picture of the state of affairs in Africa's largest country. A final example: Kosovo. The failure to achieve a negotiated solution for Kosovo and the violence, tension and de facto partition that resulted from it have their reasons in many, many different factors. Central among them are three. First, the intransigence of local leaders to settle for nothing less than their maximum demands. Second, an international diplomatic effort that was hampered from the beginning by Western support for Kosovo's independence. And third, a lack of imagination when it came to designing institutions that could have addressed the concerns of Serbs and Albanians alike. By the same token — and here we have some good news again — the very fact that there is a high-level, well-resourced international presence in Kosovo and the Balkans region more generally and the fact that local leaders on both sides have showed relative restraint, explains why things have not been worse over the past two years since 2008. So even in situations where outcomes are less than optimal, local leaders and international leaders have a choice, and they can make a difference for the better. A cold war is not as good as a cold peace, but a cold peace is still better than a hot war. Good news is also about learning the right lesson. So what then distinguishes the Israeli/Palestinian conflict from that in Northern Ireland, or the civil war in Sudan from that in Liberia? Both successes and failures teach us several critically important things that we need to bear in mind if we want the good news to continue. First, leadership. In the same way in which ethnic conflict and civil war are not natural but man-made disasters, their prevention and settlement does not happen automatically either. Leadership needs to be capable, determined and visionary in its commitment to peace. Leaders need to connect to each other and to their followers, and they need to bring them along on what is an often arduous journey into a peaceful future. Second, diplomacy. Diplomacy needs to be well resourced, sustained, and apply the right mix of incentives and pressures on leaders and followers. It needs to help them reach an equitable compromise, and it needs to ensure that a broad coalition of local, regional and international supporters help them implement their agreement. Third, institutional design. Institutional design requires a keen focus on issues, innovative thinking and flexible and well-funded implementation. Conflict parties need to move away from maximum demands and towards a compromise that recognizes each other's needs. And they need to think about the substance of their agreement much more than about the labels they want to attach to them. Conflict parties also need to be prepared to return to the negotiation table if the agreement implementation stalls. For me personally, the most critical lesson of all is this: Local commitment to peace is all-important, but it is often not enough to prevent or end violence. Yet, no amount of diplomacy or institutional design can make up for local failures and the consequences that they have. Therefore, we must invest in developing leaders, leaders that have the skills, vision and determination to make peace. Leaders, in other words, that people will trust and that they will want to follow even if that means making hard choices. A final thought: Ending civil wars is a process that is fraught with dangers, frustrations and setbacks. It often takes a generation to accomplish, but it also requires us, today's generation, to take responsibility and to learn the right lessons about leadership, diplomacy and institutional design, so that the child soldiers of today can become the children of tomorrow. Thank you. (Applause) |
America's native prisoners of war | {0: 'Photographer, adventurer and storyteller Aaron Huey captures all of his subjects -- from war victims to rock climbers to Sufi dervishes -- with elegance and fearless sensitivity.'} | TEDxDU 2010 | I'm here today to show my photographs of the Lakota. Many of you may have heard of the Lakota, or at least the larger group of tribes, called the Sioux. The Lakota are one of many tribes that were moved off their land to prisoner-of-war camps, now called reservations. The Pine Ridge Reservation, the subject of today's slide show, is located about 75 miles southeast of the Black Hills in South Dakota. It is sometimes referred to as Prisoner of War Camp Number 334, and it is where the Lakota now live. Now, if any of you have ever heard of AIM, the American Indian Movement, or of Russell Means, or Leonard Peltier, or of the standoff at Oglala, then you know Pine Ridge is ground zero for Native issues in the US. So I've been asked to talk a little bit today about my relationship with the Lakota, and that's a very difficult one for me, because, if you haven't noticed from my skin color, I'm white, and that is a huge barrier on a Native reservation. You'll see a lot of people in my photographs today. I've become very close with them, and they've welcomed me like family. They've called me "brother" and "uncle," and invited me again and again over five years. But on Pine Ridge, I will always be what is called "wasichu." "Wasichu" is a Lakota word that means "non-Indian," but another version of this word means "the one who takes the best meat for himself." And that's what I want to focus on — the one who takes the best part of the meat. It means "greedy." So take a look around this auditorium today. We are at a private school in the American West, sitting in red velvet chairs with money in our pockets. And if we look at our lives, we have indeed taken the best part of the meat. So let's look today at a set of photographs of a people who lost so that we could gain, and know that when you see these people's faces, that these are not just images of the Lakota; they stand for all indigenous people. On this piece of paper is the history the way I learned it from my Lakota friends and family. The following is a time line of treaties made, treaties broken and massacres disguised as battles. I'll begin in 1824. What is known as the Bureau of Indian Affairs was created within the War Department, setting an early tone of aggression in our dealings with the Native Americans. 1851: The first treaty of Fort Laramie was made, clearly marking the boundaries of the Lakota Nation. According to the treaty, those lands are a sovereign nation. If the boundaries of this treaty had held — and there is a legal basis that they should — then this is what the US would look like today. Ten years later. The Homestead Act, signed by President Lincoln, unleashed a flood of white settlers into Native lands. 1863: An uprising of Santee Sioux in Minnesota ends with the hanging of 38 Sioux men, the largest mass execution in US history. The execution was ordered by President Lincoln, only two days after he signed the Emancipation Proclamation. 1866: The beginning of the Transcontinental Railroad — a new era. We appropriated land for trails and trains to shortcut through the heart of the Lakota Nation. The treaties were out the window. In response, three tribes led by the Lakota chief Red Cloud attacked and defeated the US army, many times over. I want to repeat that part: The Lakota defeat the US army. 1868: The second Fort Laramie Treaty clearly guarantees the sovereignty of the Great Sioux Nation and the Lakotas' ownership of the sacred Black Hills. The government also promises land and hunting rights in the surrounding states. We promise that the Powder River country will henceforth be closed to all whites. The treaty seemed to be a complete victory for Red Cloud and the Sioux. In fact, this is the only war in American history in which the government negotiated a peace by conceding everything demanded by the enemy. 1869: The Transcontinental Railroad was completed. It began carrying, among other things, large numbers of hunters, who began the wholesale killing of buffalo, eliminating a source of food, clothing and shelter for the Sioux. 1871: The Indian Appropriation Act makes all Indians wards of the federal government. In addition, the military issued orders forbidding western Indians from leaving reservations. All western Indians at that point in time were now prisoners of war. Also in 1871, we ended the time of treaty-making. The problem with treaties is they allow tribes to exist as sovereign nations, and we can't have that. We had plans. 1874: General George Custer announced the discovery of gold in Lakota territory, specifically the Black Hills. The news of gold creates a massive influx of white settlers into Lakota Nation. Custer recommends that Congress find a way to end the treaties with the Lakota as soon as possible. 1875: The Lakota war begins over the violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty. 1876: On July 26th, on its way to attack a Lakota village, Custer's 7th Cavalry was crushed at the battle of Little Big Horn. 1877: The great Lakota warrior and chief named Crazy Horse surrendered at Fort Robinson. He was later killed while in custody. 1877 is also the year we found a way to get around the Fort Laramie Treaties. A new agreement was presented to Sioux chiefs and their leading men, under a campaign known as "Sell or Starve" — sign the paper, or no food for your tribe. Only 10 percent of the adult male population signed. The Fort Laramie Treaty called for at least three-quarters of the tribe to sign away land. That clause was obviously ignored. 1887: The Dawes Act. Communal ownership of reservation lands ends. Reservations are cut up into 160-acre sections, and distributed to individual Indians with the surplus disposed of. Tribes lost millions of acres. The American dream of individual land ownership turned out to be a very clever way to divide the reservation until nothing was left. The move destroyed the reservations, making it easier to further subdivide and to sell with every passing generation. Most of the surplus land and many of the plots within reservation boundaries are now in the hands of white ranchers. Once again, the fat of the land goes to wasichu. 1890: A date I believe to be the most important in this slide show. This is the year of the Wounded Knee Massacre. On December 29, US troops surrounded a Sioux encampment at Wounded Knee Creek, and massacred Chief Big Foot and 300 prisoners of war, using a new rapid-fire weapon that fired exploding shells, called a Hotchkiss gun. For this so-called "battle," 20 Congressional Medals of Honor for Valor were given to the 7th Cavalry. To this day, this is the most Medals of Honor ever awarded for a single battle. More Medals of Honor were given for the indiscriminate slaughter of women and children than for any battle in World War One, World War Two, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan. The Wounded Knee Massacre is considered the end of the Indian wars. Whenever I visit the site of the mass grave at Wounded Knee, I see it not just as a grave for the Lakota or for the Sioux, but as a grave for all indigenous peoples. The holy man Black Elk, said, "I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch, as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. And it was a beautiful dream." With this event, a new era in Native American history began. Everything can be measured before Wounded Knee and after, because it was in this moment, with the fingers on the triggers of the Hotchkiss guns, that the US government openly declared its position on Native rights. They were tired of treaties. They were tired of sacred hills. They were tired of ghost dances. And they were tired of all the inconveniences of the Sioux. So they brought out their cannons. "You want to be an Indian now?" they said, finger on the trigger. 1900: the US Indian population reached its low point — less than 250,000, compared to an estimated eight million in 1492. Fast-forward. 1980: The longest-running court case in US history, the Sioux Nation versus the United States, was ruled upon by the US Supreme Court. The court determined that when the Sioux were resettled onto reservations and seven million acres of their land were opened up to prospectors and homesteaders, the terms of the second Fort Laramie Treaty had been violated. The court stated that the Black Hills were illegally taken, and that the initial offering price, plus interest, should be paid to the Sioux Nation. As payment for the Black Hills, the court awarded only 106 million dollars to the Sioux Nation. The Sioux refused the money with the rallying cry, "The Black Hills are not for sale." 2010: Statistics about Native population today, more than a century after the massacre at Wounded Knee, reveal the legacy of colonization, forced migration and treaty violations. Unemployment on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation fluctuates between 85 and 90 percent. The housing office is unable to build new structures, and existing structures are falling apart. Many are homeless, and those with homes are packed into rotting buildings with up to five families. Thirty-nine percent of homes on Pine Ridge have no electricity. At least 60 percent of the homes on the reservation are infested with black mold. More than 90 percent of the population lives below the federal poverty line. The tuberculosis rate on Pine Ridge is approximately eight times higher than the US national average. The infant mortality rate is the highest on this continent, and is about three times higher than the US national average. Cervical cancer is five times higher than the US national average. The school dropout rate is up to 70 percent. Teacher turnover is eight times higher than the US national average. Frequently, grandparents are raising their grandchildren because parents, due to alcoholism, domestic violence and general apathy, cannot raise them. Fifty percent of the population over the age of 40 suffers from diabetes. The life expectancy for men is between 46 and 48 years old — roughly the same as in Afghanistan and Somalia. The last chapter in any successful genocide is the one in which the oppressor can remove their hands and say, "My god — what are these people doing to themselves? They're killing each other. They're killing themselves while we watch them die." This is how we came to own these United States. This is the legacy of Manifest Destiny. Prisoners are still born into prisoner of war camps, long after the guards are gone. These are the bones left after the best meat has been taken. A long time ago, a series of events was set in motion by a people who look like me, by wasichu, eager to take the land and the water and the gold in the hills. Those events led to a domino effect that has yet to end. As removed as we, the dominant society, may feel from a massacre in 1890, or a series of broken treaties 150 years ago, I still have to ask you the question: How should you feel about the statistics of today? What is the connection between these images of suffering and the history that I just read to you? And how much of this history do you need to own, even? Is any of this your responsibility today? I have been told that there must be something we can do. There must be some call to action. Because for so long, I've been standing on the sidelines, content to be a witness, just taking photographs. Because the solutions seem so far in the past, I needed nothing short of a time machine to access them. The suffering of indigenous peoples is not a simple issue to fix. It's not something everyone can get behind the way they get behind helping Haiti, or ending AIDS, or fighting a famine. The "fix," as it's called, may be much more difficult for the dominant society than, say, a $50 check or a church trip to paint some graffiti-covered houses, or a suburban family donating a box of clothes they don't even want anymore. So where does that leave us? Shrugging our shoulders in the dark? The United States continues on a daily basis to violate the terms of the 1851 and 1868 Fort Laramie Treaties with the Lakota. The call to action I offer today — my TED wish — is this: Honor the treaties. Give back the Black Hills. It's not your business what they do with them. (Applause) |
Making global labor fair | {0: "At the head of the Fair Labor Association (FLA), Auret van Heerden takes a practical approach to workers' rights, persuading corporations and NGOs to protect labor in global supply chains."} | TEDGlobal 2010 | This cell phone started its trajectory in an artisanal mine in the Eastern Congo. It's mined by armed gangs using slaves, child slaves, what the U.N. Security Council calls "blood minerals," then traveled into some components and ended up in a factory in Shinjin in China. That factory — over a dozen people have committed suicide already this year. One man died after working a 36-hour shift. We all love chocolate. We buy it for our kids. Eighty percent of the cocoa comes from Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana and it's harvested by children. Cote d'Ivoire, we have a huge problem of child slaves. Children have been trafficked from other conflict zones to come and work on the coffee plantations. Heparin — a blood thinner, a pharmaceutical product — starts out in artisanal workshops like this in China, because the active ingredient comes from pigs' intestines. Your diamond — you've all heard, probably seen the movie "Blood Diamond." This is a mine in Zimbabwe right now. Cotton: Uzbekistan is the second biggest exporter of cotton on Earth. Every year when it comes to the cotton harvest, the government shuts down the schools, puts the kids in buses, buses them to the cotton fields to spend three weeks harvesting the cotton. It's forced child labor on an institutional scale. And all of those products probably end their lives in a dump like this one in Manila. These places, these origins, represent governance gaps. That's the politest description I have for them. These are the dark pools where global supply chains begin — the global supply chains, which bring us our favorite brand name products. Some of these governance gaps are run by rogue states. Some of them are not states anymore at all. They're failed states. Some of them are just countries who believe that deregulation or no regulation is the best way to attract investment, promote trade. Either way, they present us with a huge moral and ethical dilemma. I know that none of us want to be accessories after the fact of a human rights abuse in a global supply chain. But right now, most of the companies involved in these supply chains don't have any way of assuring us that nobody had to mortgage their future, nobody had to sacrifice their rights to bring us our favorite brand name product. Now, I didn't come here to depress you about the state of the global supply chain. We need a reality check. We need to recognize just how serious a deficit of rights we have. This is an independent republic, probably a failed state. It's definitely not a democratic state. And right now, that independent republic of the supply chain is not being governed in a way that would satisfy us, that we can engage in ethical trade or ethical consumption. Now, that's not a new story. You've seen the documentaries of sweatshops making garments all over the world, even in developed countries. You want to see the classic sweatshop, meet me at Madison Square Garden, I'll take you down the street, and I'll show you a Chinese sweatshop. But take the example of heparin. It's a pharmaceutical product. You expect that the supply chain that gets it to the hospital, probably squeaky clean. The problem is that the active ingredient in there — as I mentioned earlier — comes from pigs. The main American manufacturer of that active ingredient decided a few years ago to relocate to China because it's the world's biggest supplier of pigs. And their factory in China — which probably is pretty clean — is getting all of the ingredients from backyard abattoirs, where families slaughter pigs and extract the ingredient. So a couple of years ago, we had a scandal which killed about 80 people around the world, because of contaminants that crept into the heparin supply chain. Worse, some of the suppliers realized that they could substitute a product which mimicked heparin in tests. This substitute cost nine dollars a pound, whereas real heparin, the real ingredient, cost 900 dollars a pound. A no-brainer. The problem was that it killed more people. And so you're asking yourself, "How come the U.S. Food and Drug Administration allowed this to happen? How did the Chinese State Agency for Food and Drugs allow this to happen?" And the answer is quite simple: the Chinese define these facilities as chemical facilities, not pharmaceutical facilities, so they don't audit them. And the USFDA has a jurisdictional problem. This is offshore. They actually do conduct a few investigations overseas — about a dozen a year — maybe 20 in a good year. There are 500 of these facilities producing active ingredients in China alone. In fact, about 80 percent of the active ingredients in medicines now come from offshore, particularly China and India, and we don't have a governance system. We don't have a regulatory system able to ensure that that production is safe. We don't have a system to ensure that human rights, basic dignity, are ensured. So at a national level — and we work in about 60 different countries — at a national level we've got a serious breakdown in the ability of governments to regulate production on their own soil. And the real problem with the global supply chain is that it's supranational. So governments who are failing, who are dropping the ball at a national level, have even less ability to get their arms around the problem at an international level. And you can just look at the headlines. Take Copenhagen last year — complete failure of governments to do the right thing in the face of an international challenge. Take the G20 meeting a couple of weeks ago — stepped back from its commitments of just a few months ago. You can take any one of the major global challenges we've discussed this week and ask yourself, where is the leadership from governments to step up and come up with solutions, responses, to those international problems? And the simple answer is they can't. They're national. Their voters are local. They have parochial interests. They can't subordinate those interests to the greater global public good. So, if we're going to ensure the delivery of the key public goods at an international level — in this case, in the global supply chain — we have to come up with a different mechanism. We need a different machine. Fortunately, we have some examples. In the 1990s, there were a whole series of scandals concerning the production of brand name goods in the U.S. — child labor, forced labor, serious health and safety abuses. And eventually President Clinton, in 1996, convened a meeting at the White House, invited industry, human rights NGOs, trade unions, the Department of Labor, got them all in a room and said, "Look, I don't want globalization to be a race to the bottom. I don't know how to prevent that, but I'm at least going to use my good offices to get you folks together to come up with a response." So they formed a White House task force, and they spent about three years arguing about who takes how much responsibility in the global supply chain. Companies didn't feel it was their responsibility. They don't own those facilities. They don't employ those workers. They're not legally liable. Everybody else at the table said, "Folks, that doesn't cut it. You have a custodial duty, a duty of care, to make sure that that product gets from wherever to the store in a way that allows us to consume it, without fear of our safety, or without having to sacrifice our conscience to consume that product." So they agreed, "Okay, what we'll do is we agree on a common set of standards, code of conduct. We'll apply that throughout our global supply chain regardless of ownership or control. We'll make it part of the contract." And that was a stroke of absolute genius, because what they did was they harnessed the power of the contract, private power, to deliver public goods. And let's face it, the contract from a major multinational brand to a supplier in India or China has much more persuasive value than the local labor law, the local environmental regulations, the local human rights standards. Those factories will probably never see an inspector. If the inspector did come along, it would be amazing if they were able to resist the bribe. Even if they did their jobs, and they cited those facilities for their violations, the fine would be derisory. But you lose that contract for a major brand name, that's the difference between staying in business or going bankrupt. That makes a difference. So what we've been able to do is we've been able to harness the power and the influence of the only truly transnational institution in the global supply chain, that of the multinational company, and get them to do the right thing, get them to use that power for good, to deliver the key public goods. Now of course, this doesn't come naturally to multinational companies. They weren't set up to do this. They're set up to make money. But they are extremely efficient organizations. They have resources, and if we can add the will, the commitment, they know how to deliver that product. Now, getting there is not easy. Those supply chains I put up on the screen earlier, they're not there. You need a safe space. You need a place where people can come together, sit down without fear of judgment, without recrimination, to actually face the problem, agree on the problem and come up with solutions. We can do it. The technical solutions are there. The problem is the lack of trust, the lack of confidence, the lack of partnership between NGOs, campaign groups, civil society organizations and multinational companies. If we can put those two together in a safe space, get them to work together, we can deliver public goods right now, or in extremely short supply. This is a radical proposition, and it's crazy to think that if you're a 15-year-old Bangladeshi girl leaving your rural village to go and work in a factory in Dhaka — 22, 23, 24 dollars a month — your best chance of enjoying rights at work is if that factory is producing for a brand name company which has got a code of conduct and made that code of conduct part of the contract. It's crazy. Multinationals are protecting human rights. I know there's going to be disbelief. You'll say, "How can we trust them?" Well, we don't. It's the old arms control phrase: "Trust, but verify." So we audit. We take their supply chain, we take all the factory names, we do a random sample, we send inspectors on an unannounced basis to inspect those facilities, and then we publish the results. Transparency is absolutely critical to this. You can call yourself responsible, but responsibility without accountability often doesn't work. So what we're doing is, we're not only enlisting the multinationals, we're giving them the tools to deliver this public good — respect for human rights — and we're checking. You don't need to believe me. You shouldn't believe me. Go to the website. Look at the audit results. Ask yourself, is this company behaving in a socially responsible way? Can I buy that product without compromising my ethics? That's the way the system works. I hate the idea that governments are not protecting human rights around the world. I hate the idea that governments have dropped this ball and I can't get used to the idea that somehow we can't get them to do their jobs. I've been at this for 30 years, and in that time I've seen the ability, the commitment, the will of government to do this decline, and I don't see them making a comeback right now. So we started out thinking this was a stopgap measure. We're now thinking that, in fact, this is probably the start of a new way of regulating and addressing international challenges. Call it network governance. Call it what you will. The private actors, companies and NGOs, are going to have to get together to face the major challenges we are going to face. Just look at pandemics — swine flu, bird flu, H1N1. Look at the health systems in so many countries. Do they have the resources to face up to a serious pandemic? No. Could the private sector and NGOs get together and marshal a response? Absolutely. What they lack is that safe space to come together, agree and move to action. That's what we're trying to provide. I know as well that this often seems like an overwhelming level of responsibility for people to assume. "You want me to deliver human rights throughout my global supply chain. There are thousands of suppliers in there." It seems too daunting, too dangerous, for any company to take on. But there are companies. We have 4,000 companies who are members. Some of them are very, very large companies. The sporting goods industry, in particular, stepped up to the plate and have done it. The example, the role model, is there. And whenever we discuss one of these problems that we have to address — child labor in cottonseed farms in India — this year we will monitor 50,000 cottonseed farms in India. It seems overwhelming. The numbers just make you want to zone out. But we break it down to some basic realities. And human rights comes down to a very simple proposition: can I give this person their dignity back? Poor people, people whose human rights have been violated — the crux of that is the loss of dignity, the lack of dignity. It starts with just giving people back their dignity. I was sitting in a slum outside Gurgaon just next to Delhi, one of the flashiest, brightest new cities popping up in India right now, and I was talking to workers who worked in garment sweatshops down the road, and I asked them what message they would like me to take to the brands. They didn't say money. They said, "The people who employ us treat us like we are less than human, like we don't exist. Please ask them to treat us like human beings." That's my simple understanding of human rights. That's my simple proposition to you, my simple plea to every decision-maker in this room, everybody out there. We can all make a decision to come together and pick up the balls and run with the balls that governments have dropped. If we don't do it, we're abandoning hope, we're abandoning our essential humanity, and I know that's not a place we want to be, and we don't have to be there. So I appeal to you. Join us, come into that safe space, and let's start to make this happen. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Simplifying complexity | {0: 'TED Senior Fellow Eric Berlow studies ecology and networks, exposing the interconnectedness of our ecosystems with climate change, government, corporations and more. '} | TEDGlobal 2010 | Do you ever feel completely overwhelmed when you're faced with a complex problem? Well, I hope to change that in less than three minutes. So, I hope to convince you that complex doesn't always equal complicated. So for me, a well-crafted baguette, fresh out of the oven, is complex, but a curry onion green olive poppy cheese bread is complicated. I'm an ecologist, and I study complexity. I love complexity. And I study that in the natural world, the interconnectedness of species. So here's a food web, or a map of feeding links between species that live in Alpine Lakes in the mountains of California. And this is what happens to that food web when it's stocked with non-native fish that never lived there before. All the grayed-out species disappear. Some are actually on the brink of extinction. And lakes with fish have more mosquitos, even though they eat them. These effects were all unanticipated, and yet we're discovering they're predictable. So I want to share with you a couple key insights about complexity we're learning from studying nature that maybe are applicable to other problems. First is the simple power of good visualization tools to help untangle complexity and just encourage you to ask questions you didn't think of before. For example, you could plot the flow of carbon through corporate supply chains in a corporate ecosystem, or the interconnections of habitat patches for endangered species in Yosemite National Park. The next thing is that if you want to predict the effect of one species on another, if you focus only on that link, and then you black box the rest, it's actually less predictable than if you step back, consider the entire system — all the species, all the links — and from that place, hone in on the sphere of influence that matters most. And we're discovering, with our research, that's often very local to the node you care about within one or two degrees. So the more you step back, embrace complexity, the better chance you have of finding simple answers, and it's often different than the simple answer that you started with. So let's switch gears and look at a really complex problem courtesy of the U.S. government. This is a diagram of the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan. It was front page of the New York Times a couple months ago. Instantly ridiculed by the media for being so crazy complicated. And the stated goal was to increase popular support for the Afghan government. Clearly a complex problem, but is it complicated? Well, when I saw this in the front page of the Times, I thought, "Great. Finally something I can relate to. I can sink my teeth into this." So let's do it. So here we go for the first time ever, a world premiere view of this spaghetti diagram as an ordered network. The circled node is the one we're trying to influence — popular support for the government. And so now we can look one degrees, two degrees, three degrees away from that node and eliminate three-quarters of the diagram outside that sphere of influence. Within that sphere, most of those nodes are not actionable, like the harshness of the terrain, and a very small minority are actual military actions. Most are non-violent and they fall into two broad categories: active engagement with ethnic rivalries and religious beliefs and fair, transparent economic development and provisioning of services. I don't know about this, but this is what I can decipher from this diagram in 24 seconds. When you see a diagram like this, I don't want you to be afraid. I want you to be excited. I want you to be relieved. Because simple answers may emerge. We're discovering in nature that simplicity often lies on the other side of complexity. So for any problem, the more you can zoom out and embrace complexity, the better chance you have of zooming in on the simple details that matter most. Thank you. (Applause) |
Teaching kids real math with computers | {0: 'Conrad Wolfram runs the worldwide arm of Wolfram Research, the mathematical lab behind the cutting-edge knowledge engine Wolfram Alpha.'} | TEDGlobal 2010 | We've got a real problem with math education right now. Basically, no one's very happy. Those learning it think it's disconnected, uninteresting and hard. Those trying to employ them think they don't know enough. Governments realize that it's a big deal for our economies, but don't know how to fix it. And teachers are also frustrated. Yet math is more important to the world than at any point in human history. So at one end we've got falling interest in education in math, and at the other end we've got a more mathematical world, a more quantitative world than we ever have had. So what's the problem, why has this chasm opened up, and what can we do to fix it? Well actually, I think the answer is staring us right in the face: Use computers. I believe that correctly using computers is the silver bullet for making math education work. So to explain that, let me first talk a bit about what math looks like in the real world and what it looks like in education. See, in the real world math isn't necessarily done by mathematicians. It's done by geologists, engineers, biologists, all sorts of different people — modeling and simulation. It's actually very popular. But in education it looks very different — dumbed-down problems, lots of calculating, mostly by hand. Lots of things that seem simple and not difficult like in the real world, except if you're learning it. And another thing about math: math sometimes looks like math — like in this example here — and sometimes it doesn't — like "Am I drunk?" And then you get an answer that's quantitative in the modern world. You wouldn't have expected that a few years back. But now you can find out all about — unfortunately, my weight is a little higher than that, but — all about what happens. So let's zoom out a bit and ask, why are we teaching people math? What's the point of teaching people math? And in particular, why are we teaching them math in general? Why is it such an important part of education as a sort of compulsory subject? Well, I think there are about three reasons: technical jobs so critical to the development of our economies, what I call "everyday living" — to function in the world today, you've got to be pretty quantitative, much more so than a few years ago: figure out your mortgages, being skeptical of government statistics, those kinds of things — and thirdly, what I would call something like logical mind training, logical thinking. Over the years we've put so much in society into being able to process and think logically. It's part of human society. It's very important to learn that math is a great way to do that. So let's ask another question. What is math? What do we mean when we say we're doing math, or educating people to do math? Well, I think it's about four steps, roughly speaking, starting with posing the right question. What is it that we want to ask? What is it we're trying to find out here? And this is the thing most screwed up in the outside world, beyond virtually any other part of doing math. People ask the wrong question, and surprisingly enough, they get the wrong answer, for that reason, if not for others. So the next thing is take that problem and turn it from a real world problem into a math problem. That's stage two. Once you've done that, then there's the computation step. Turn it from that into some answer in a mathematical form. And of course, math is very powerful at doing that. And then finally, turn it back to the real world. Did it answer the question? And also verify it — crucial step. Now here's the crazy thing right now. In math education, we're spending about perhaps 80 percent of the time teaching people to do step three by hand. Yet, that's the one step computers can do better than any human after years of practice. Instead, we ought to be using computers to do step three and using the students to spend much more effort on learning how to do steps one, two and four — conceptualizing problems, applying them, getting the teacher to run them through how to do that. See, crucial point here: math is not equal to calculating. Math is a much broader subject than calculating. Now it's understandable that this has all got intertwined over hundreds of years. There was only one way to do calculating and that was by hand. But in the last few decades that has totally changed. We've had the biggest transformation of any ancient subject that I could ever imagine with computers. Calculating was typically the limiting step, and now often it isn't. So I think in terms of the fact that math has been liberated from calculating. But that math liberation didn't get into education yet. See, I think of calculating, in a sense, as the machinery of math. It's the chore. It's the thing you'd like to avoid if you can, like to get a machine to do. It's a means to an end, not an end in itself, and automation allows us to have that machinery. Computers allow us to do that — and this is not a small problem by any means. I estimated that, just today, across the world, we spent about 106 average world lifetimes teaching people how to calculate by hand. That's an amazing amount of human endeavor. So we better be damn sure — and by the way, they didn't even have fun doing it, most of them — so we better be damn sure that we know why we're doing that and it has a real purpose. I think we should be assuming computers for doing the calculating and only doing hand calculations where it really makes sense to teach people that. And I think there are some cases. For example: mental arithmetic. I still do a lot of that, mainly for estimating. People say, "Is such and such true?" And I'll say, "Hmm, not sure." I'll think about it roughly. It's still quicker to do that and more practical. So I think practicality is one case where it's worth teaching people by hand. And then there are certain conceptual things that can also benefit from hand calculating, but I think they're relatively small in number. One thing I often ask about is ancient Greek and how this relates. See, the thing we're doing right now is we're forcing people to learn mathematics. It's a major subject. I'm not for one minute suggesting that, if people are interested in hand calculating or in following their own interests in any subject however bizarre — they should do that. That's absolutely the right thing, for people to follow their self-interest. I was somewhat interested in ancient Greek, but I don't think that we should force the entire population to learn a subject like ancient Greek. I don't think it's warranted. So I have this distinction between what we're making people do and the subject that's sort of mainstream and the subject that, in a sense, people might follow with their own interest and perhaps even be spiked into doing that. So what are the issues people bring up with this? Well one of them is, they say, you need to get the basics first. You shouldn't use the machine until you get the basics of the subject. So my usual question is, what do you mean by "basics?" Basics of what? Are the basics of driving a car learning how to service it, or design it for that matter? Are the basics of writing learning how to sharpen a quill? I don't think so. I think you need to separate the basics of what you're trying to do from how it gets done and the machinery of how it gets done and automation allows you to make that separation. A hundred years ago, it's certainly true that to drive a car you kind of needed to know a lot about the mechanics of the car and how the ignition timing worked and all sorts of things. But automation in cars allowed that to separate, so driving is now a quite separate subject, so to speak, from engineering of the car or learning how to service it. So automation allows this separation and also allows — in the case of driving, and I believe also in the future case of maths — a democratized way of doing that. It can be spread across a much larger number of people who can really work with that. So there's another thing that comes up with basics. People confuse, in my view, the order of the invention of the tools with the order in which they should use them for teaching. So just because paper was invented before computers, it doesn't necessarily mean you get more to the basics of the subject by using paper instead of a computer to teach mathematics. My daughter gave me a rather nice anecdote on this. She enjoys making what she calls "paper laptops." (Laughter) So I asked her one day, "You know, when I was your age, I didn't make these. Why do you think that was?" And after a second or two, carefully reflecting, she said, "No paper?" (Laughter) If you were born after computers and paper, it doesn't really matter which order you're taught with them in, you just want to have the best tool. So another one that comes up is "Computers dumb math down." That somehow, if you use a computer, it's all mindless button-pushing, but if you do it by hand, it's all intellectual. This one kind of annoys me, I must say. Do we really believe that the math that most people are doing in school practically today is more than applying procedures to problems they don't really understand, for reasons they don't get? I don't think so. And what's worse, what they're learning there isn't even practically useful anymore. Might have been 50 years ago, but it isn't anymore. When they're out of education, they do it on a computer. Just to be clear, I think computers can really help with this problem, actually make it more conceptual. Now, of course, like any great tool, they can be used completely mindlessly, like turning everything into a multimedia show, like the example I was shown of solving an equation by hand, where the computer was the teacher — show the student how to manipulate and solve it by hand. This is just nuts. Why are we using computers to show a student how to solve a problem by hand that the computer should be doing anyway? All backwards. Let me show you that you can also make problems harder to calculate. See, normally in school, you do things like solve quadratic equations. But you see, when you're using a computer, you can just substitute. You can make it a quartic equation. Make it kind of harder, calculating-wise. Same principles applied — calculations, harder. And problems in the real world look nutty and horrible like this. They've got hair all over them. They're not just simple, dumbed-down things that we see in school math. And think of the outside world. Do we really believe that engineering and biology and all of these other things that have so benefited from computers and maths have somehow conceptually gotten reduced by using computers? I don't think so — quite the opposite. So the problem we've really got in math education is not that computers might dumb it down, but that we have dumbed-down problems right now. Well, another issue people bring up is somehow that hand calculating procedures teach understanding. So if you go through lots of examples, you can get the answer, you can understand how the basics of the system work better. I think there is one thing that I think very valid here, which is that I think understanding procedures and processes is important. But there's a fantastic way to do that in the modern world. It's called programming. Programming is how most procedures and processes get written down these days, and it's also a great way to engage students much more and to check they really understand. If you really want to check you understand math then write a program to do it. So programming is the way I think we should be doing that. So to be clear, what I really am suggesting here is we have a unique opportunity to make maths both more practical and more conceptual, simultaneously. I can't think of any other subject where that's recently been possible. It's usually some kind of choice between the vocational and the intellectual. But I think we can do both at the same time here. And we open up so many more possibilities. You can do so many more problems. What I really think we gain from this is students getting intuition and experience in far greater quantities than they've ever got before. And experience of harder problems — being able to play with the math, interact with it, feel it. We want people who can feel the math instinctively. That's what computers allow us to do. Another thing it allows us to do is reorder the curriculum. Traditionally it's been by how difficult it is to calculate, but now we can reorder it by how difficult it is to understand the concepts, however hard the calculating. So calculus has traditionally been taught very late. Why is this? Well, it's damn hard doing the calculations, that's the problem. But actually many of the concepts are amenable to a much younger age group. This was an example I built for my daughter. And very, very simple. We were talking about what happens when you increase the number of sides of a polygon to a very large number. And of course, it turns into a circle. And by the way, she was also very insistent on being able to change the color, an important feature for this demonstration. You can see that this is a very early step into limits and differential calculus and what happens when you take things to an extreme — and very small sides and a very large number of sides. Very simple example. That's a view of the world that we don't usually give people for many, many years after this. And yet, that's a really important practical view of the world. So one of the roadblocks we have in moving this agenda forward is exams. In the end, if we test everyone by hand in exams, it's kind of hard to get the curricula changed to a point where they can use computers during the semesters. And one of the reasons it's so important — so it's very important to get computers in exams. And then we can ask questions, real questions, questions like, what's the best life insurance policy to get? — real questions that people have in their everyday lives. And you see, this isn't some dumbed-down model here. This is an actual model where we can be asked to optimize what happens. How many years of protection do I need? What does that do to the payments and to the interest rates and so forth? Now I'm not for one minute suggesting it's the only kind of question that should be asked in exams, but I think it's a very important type that right now just gets completely ignored and is critical for people's real understanding. So I believe [there is] critical reform we have to do in computer-based math. We have got to make sure that we can move our economies forward, and also our societies, based on the idea that people can really feel mathematics. This isn't some optional extra. And the country that does this first will, in my view, leapfrog others in achieving a new economy even, an improved economy, an improved outlook. In fact, I even talk about us moving from what we often call now the "knowledge economy" to what we might call a "computational knowledge economy," where high-level math is integral to what everyone does in the way that knowledge currently is. We can engage so many more students with this, and they can have a better time doing it. And let's understand: this is not an incremental sort of change. We're trying to cross the chasm here between school math and the real-world math. And you know if you walk across a chasm, you end up making it worse than if you didn't start at all — bigger disaster. No, what I'm suggesting is that we should leap off, we should increase our velocity so it's high, and we should leap off one side and go the other — of course, having calculated our differential equation very carefully. (Laughter) So I want to see a completely renewed, changed math curriculum built from the ground up, based on computers being there, computers that are now ubiquitous almost. Calculating machines are everywhere and will be completely everywhere in a small number of years. Now I'm not even sure if we should brand the subject as math, but what I am sure is it's the mainstream subject of the future. Let's go for it, and while we're about it, let's have a bit of fun, for us, for the students and for TED here. Thanks. (Applause) |
A Darwinian theory of beauty | {0: 'Denis Dutton was a philosophy professor and the editor of Arts & Letters Daily. In his book The Art Instinct, he suggested that humans are hard-wired to seek beauty.'} | TED2010 | Delighted to be here and to talk to you about a subject dear to my heart, which is beauty. I do the philosophy of art, aesthetics, actually, for a living. I try to figure out intellectually, philosophically, psychologically, what the experience of beauty is, what sensibly can be said about it and how people go off the rails in trying to understand it. Now this is an extremely complicated subject, in part because the things that we call beautiful are so different. I mean just think of the sheer variety — a baby's face, Berlioz's "Harold in Italy," movies like "The Wizard of Oz" or the plays of Chekhov, a central California landscape, a Hokusai view of Mt. Fuji, "Der Rosenkavalier," a stunning match-winning goal in a World Cup soccer match, Van Gogh's "Starry Night," a Jane Austen novel, Fred Astaire dancing across the screen. This brief list includes human beings, natural landforms, works of art and skilled human actions. An account that explains the presence of beauty in everything on this list is not going to be easy. I can, however, give you at least a taste of what I regard as the most powerful theory of beauty we yet have. And we get it not from a philosopher of art, not from a postmodern art theorist or a bigwig art critic. No, this theory comes from an expert on barnacles and worms and pigeon breeding, and you know who I mean: Charles Darwin. Of course, a lot of people think they already know the proper answer to the question, "What is beauty?" It's in the eye of the beholder. It's whatever moves you personally. Or, as some people, especially academics prefer, beauty is in the culturally conditioned eye of the beholder. People agree that paintings or movies or music are beautiful because their cultures determine a uniformity of aesthetic taste. Taste for both natural beauty and for the arts travel across cultures with great ease. Beethoven is adored in Japan. Peruvians love Japanese woodblock prints. Inca sculptures are regarded as treasures in British museums, while Shakespeare is translated into every major language of the Earth. Or just think about American jazz or American movies — they go everywhere. There are many differences among the arts, but there are also universal, cross-cultural aesthetic pleasures and values. How can we explain this universality? The best answer lies in trying to reconstruct a Darwinian evolutionary history of our artistic and aesthetic tastes. We need to reverse-engineer our present artistic tastes and preferences and explain how they came to be engraved in our minds by the actions of both our prehistoric, largely pleistocene environments, where we became fully human, but also by the social situations in which we evolved. This reverse engineering can also enlist help from the human record preserved in prehistory. I mean fossils, cave paintings and so forth. And it should take into account what we know of the aesthetic interests of isolated hunter-gatherer bands that survived into the 19th and the 20th centuries. Now, I personally have no doubt whatsoever that the experience of beauty, with its emotional intensity and pleasure, belongs to our evolved human psychology. The experience of beauty is one component in a whole series of Darwinian adaptations. Beauty is an adaptive effect, which we extend and intensify in the creation and enjoyment of works of art and entertainment. As many of you will know, evolution operates by two main primary mechanisms. The first of these is natural selection — that's random mutation and selective retention — along with our basic anatomy and physiology — the evolution of the pancreas or the eye or the fingernails. Natural selection also explains many basic revulsions, such as the horrid smell of rotting meat, or fears, such as the fear of snakes or standing close to the edge of a cliff. Natural selection also explains pleasures — sexual pleasure, our liking for sweet, fat and proteins, which in turn explains a lot of popular foods, from ripe fruits through chocolate malts and barbecued ribs. The other great principle of evolution is sexual selection, and it operates very differently. The peacock's magnificent tail is the most famous example of this. It did not evolve for natural survival. In fact, it goes against natural survival. No, the peacock's tail results from the mating choices made by peahens. It's quite a familiar story. It's women who actually push history forward. Darwin himself, by the way, had no doubts that the peacock's tail was beautiful in the eyes of the peahen. He actually used that word. Now, keeping these ideas firmly in mind, we can say that the experience of beauty is one of the ways that evolution has of arousing and sustaining interest or fascination, even obsession, in order to encourage us toward making the most adaptive decisions for survival and reproduction. Beauty is nature's way of acting at a distance, so to speak. I mean, you can't expect to eat an adaptively beneficial landscape. It would hardly do to eat your baby or your lover. So evolution's trick is to make them beautiful, to have them exert a kind of magnetism to give you the pleasure of simply looking at them. Consider briefly an important source of aesthetic pleasure, the magnetic pull of beautiful landscapes. People in very different cultures all over the world tend to like a particular kind of landscape, a landscape that just happens to be similar to the pleistocene savannas where we evolved. This landscape shows up today on calendars, on postcards, in the design of golf courses and public parks and in gold-framed pictures that hang in living rooms from New York to New Zealand. It's a kind of Hudson River school landscape featuring open spaces of low grasses interspersed with copses of trees. The trees, by the way, are often preferred if they fork near the ground, that is to say, if they're trees you could scramble up if you were in a tight fix. The landscape shows the presence of water directly in view, or evidence of water in a bluish distance, indications of animal or bird life as well as diverse greenery and finally — get this — a path or a road, perhaps a riverbank or a shoreline, that extends into the distance, almost inviting you to follow it. This landscape type is regarded as beautiful, even by people in countries that don't have it. The ideal savanna landscape is one of the clearest examples where human beings everywhere find beauty in similar visual experience. But, someone might argue, that's natural beauty. How about artistic beauty? Isn't that exhaustively cultural? No, I don't think it is. And once again, I'd like to look back to prehistory to say something about it. It is widely assumed that the earliest human artworks are the stupendously skillful cave paintings that we all know from Lascaux and Chauvet. Chauvet caves are about 32,000 years old, along with a few small, realistic sculptures of women and animals from the same period. But artistic and decorative skills are actually much older than that. Beautiful shell necklaces that look like something you'd see at an arts and crafts fair, as well as ochre body paint, have been found from around 100,000 years ago. But the most intriguing prehistoric artifacts are older even than this. I have in mind the so-called Acheulian hand axes. The oldest stone tools are choppers from the Olduvai Gorge in East Africa. They go back about two-and-a-half-million years. These crude tools were around for thousands of centuries, until around 1.4 million years ago when Homo erectus started shaping single, thin stone blades, sometimes rounded ovals, but often in what are to our eyes an arresting, symmetrical pointed leaf or teardrop form. These Acheulian hand axes — they're named after St. Acheul in France, where finds were made in 19th century — have been unearthed in their thousands, scattered across Asia, Europe and Africa, almost everywhere Homo erectus and Homo ergaster roamed. Now, the sheer numbers of these hand axes shows that they can't have been made for butchering animals. And the plot really thickens when you realize that, unlike other pleistocene tools, the hand axes often exhibit no evidence of wear on their delicate blade edges. And some, in any event, are too big to use for butchery. Their symmetry, their attractive materials and, above all, their meticulous workmanship are simply quite beautiful to our eyes, even today. So what were these ancient — I mean, they're ancient, they're foreign, but they're at the same time somehow familiar. What were these artifacts for? The best available answer is that they were literally the earliest known works of art, practical tools transformed into captivating aesthetic objects, contemplated both for their elegant shape and their virtuoso craftsmanship. Hand axes mark an evolutionary advance in human history — tools fashioned to function as what Darwinians call "fitness signals" — that is to say, displays that are performances like the peacock's tail, except that, unlike hair and feathers, the hand axes are consciously cleverly crafted. Competently made hand axes indicated desirable personal qualities — intelligence, fine motor control, planning ability, conscientiousness and sometimes access to rare materials. Over tens of thousands of generations, such skills increased the status of those who displayed them and gained a reproductive advantage over the less capable. You know, it's an old line, but it has been shown to work — "Why don't you come up to my cave, so I can show you my hand axes?" (Laughter) Except, of course, what's interesting about this is that we can't be sure how that idea was conveyed, because the Homo erectus that made these objects did not have language. It's hard to grasp, but it's an incredible fact. This object was made by a hominid ancestor, Homo erectus or Homo ergaster, between 50,000 and 100,000 years before language. Stretching over a million years, the hand axe tradition is the longest artistic tradition in human and proto-human history. By the end of the hand axe epic, Homo sapiens — as they were then called, finally — were doubtless finding new ways to amuse and amaze each other by, who knows, telling jokes, storytelling, dancing, or hairstyling. Yes, hairstyling — I insist on that. For us moderns, virtuoso technique is used to create imaginary worlds in fiction and in movies, to express intense emotions with music, painting and dance. But still, one fundamental trait of the ancestral personality persists in our aesthetic cravings: the beauty we find in skilled performances. From Lascaux to the Louvre to Carnegie Hall, human beings have a permanent innate taste for virtuoso displays in the arts. We find beauty in something done well. So the next time you pass a jewelry shop window displaying a beautifully cut teardrop-shaped stone, don't be so sure it's just your culture telling you that that sparkling jewel is beautiful. Your distant ancestors loved that shape and found beauty in the skill needed to make it, even before they could put their love into words. Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? No, it's deep in our minds. It's a gift handed down from the intelligent skills and rich emotional lives of our most ancient ancestors. Our powerful reaction to images, to the expression of emotion in art, to the beauty of music, to the night sky, will be with us and our descendants for as long as the human race exists. Thank you. (Applause) |
What a bike ride can teach you | {0: 'Shimon Schocken is a computer science professor and dedicated educator.'} | TEDxTelAviv 2010 | Mountain biking in Israel is something that I do with great passion and commitment. And when I'm on my bike, I feel that I connect with the profound beauty of Israel, and I feel that I'm united with this country's history and biblical law. And also, for me, biking is a matter of empowerment. When I reach the summit of a steep mountain in the middle of nowhere, I feel young, invincible, eternal. It's as if I'm connecting with some legacy or with some energy far greater than myself. You can see my fellow riders at the end of the picture, looking at me with some concern. And here is another picture of them. Unfortunately, I cannot show their faces, neither can I disclose their true names, and that's because my fellow riders are juvenile inmates, offenders spending time in a correction facility about 20 minutes' ride from here — well, like everything in Israel. And I've been riding with these kids once a week, every Tuesday, rain or shine, for the last four years and by now, they've become a very big part of my life. This story began four years ago. The correction facility where they are locked up happens to be right in the middle of one of my usual trips, and it's surrounded by barbed wires and electric gates and armed guards. So on one of these rides, I talked my way into the compound and went to see the warden. I told the warden that I wanted to start a mountain biking club in this place and that basically I wanted to take the kids from here to there. And I told him, "Let's find a way in which I'll be able to take out 10 kids once a week to ride with in the summer in the country." And the warden was quite amused, and he told me he thought that I was a nut and he told me, "This place is a correction facility. These guys are serious offenders. They are supposed to be locked up. They aren't supposed to be out at large." And yet, we began to talk about it, and one thing led to another. And I can't see myself going into a state prison in New Jersey and making such a proposition, but this being Israel, the warden somehow made it happen. And so two months later, we found ourselves "at large" — myself, 10 juvenile inmates and a wonderful fellow named Russ, who became a very good friend of mine and my partner in this project. And in the next few weeks, I had the tremendous pleasure of introducing these kids to the world of total freedom, a world consisting of magnificent vistas like these — everything you see here is obviously in Israel — as well as close encounters with all sorts of small creatures coming in all sorts of sizes, colors, shapes, forms and so on. In spite of all this splendor, the beginning was extremely frustrating. Every small obstacle, every slight uphill, would cause these fellows to stop in their tracks and give up. So we had a lot of this going on. I found out that they had a very hard time dealing with frustration and difficulties — not because they were physically unfit. But that's one reason why they ended up where they were. And I became increasingly more and more agitated, because I was there not only to be with them, but also to ride and create a team and I didn't know what to do. Now, let me give you an example. We're going downhill in some rocky terrain, and the front tire of Alex gets caught in one of these crevasses here. So he crashes down, and he gets slightly injured, but this does not prevent him from jumping up and then starting to jump up and down on his bike and curse violently. Then he throws his helmet in the air. His backpack goes ballistic in some other direction. And then he runs to the nearest tree and starts to break branches and throw rocks and curse like I've never heard. And I'm just standing there, watching this scene with a complete disbelief, not knowing what to do. I'm used to algorithms and data structures and super motivated students, and nothing in my background prepared me to deal with a raging, violent adolescent in the middle of nowhere. And you have to realize that these incidents did not happen in convenient locations. They happened in places like this, in the Judean Desert, 20 kilometers away from the nearest road. And what you don't see in this picture is that somewhere between these riders there, there's a teenager sitting on a rock, saying, "I'm not moving from here. Forget it. I've had it." Well, that's a problem because one way or another, you have to get this guy moving because it's getting dark soon and dangerous. It took me several such incidents to figure out what I was supposed to do. At the beginning, it was a disaster. I tried harsh words and threats and they took me nowhere. That's what they had all their lives. And at some point I found out, when a kid like this gets into a fit, the best thing that you can possibly do is stay as close as possible to this kid, which is difficult, because what you really want to do is go away. But that's what he had all his life, people walking away from him. So what you have to do is stay close and try to reach in and pet his shoulder or give him a piece of chocolate. So I would say, "Alex, I know that it's terribly difficult. Why don't you rest for a few minutes and then we'll go on." "Go away you maniac-psychopath. Why would you bring us to this goddamn place?" And I would say, "Relax, Alex. Here's a piece of chocolate." And Alex would go, "Arrrrggg!" Because you have to understand that on these rides we are constantly hungry — and after the rides also. And who is this guy, Alex, to begin with? He's a 17-year-old. When he was eight, someone put him on a boat in Odessa and sent him, shipped him to Israel on his own. And he ended up in south Tel Aviv and did not have the good luck to be picked up by a [unclear] and roamed the streets and became a prominent gang member. And he spent the last 10 years of his life in two places only, the slums and the state prison, where he spent the last two years before he ended up sitting on this rock there. And so this kid was probably abused, abandoned, ignored, betrayed by almost every adult along the way. So, for such a kid, when an adult that he learns to respect stays close to him and doesn't walk away from him in any situation, irrespective of how he behaves, it's a tremendous healing experience. It's an act of unconditional acceptance, something that he never had. I want to say a few words about vision. When I started this program four years ago, I had this original plan of creating a team of winning underdogs. I had an image of Lance Armstrong in my mind. And it took me exactly two months of complete frustration to realize that this vision was misplaced, and that there was another vision supremely more important and more readily available. It all of a sudden dawned on me, in this project, that the purpose of these rides should actually be to expose the kids to one thing only: love. Love to the country, to the uphill and the downhill, to all the incredible creatures that surround us — the animals, the plants, the insects — love and respect to other fellow members in your team, in your biking team, and most importantly, love and respect to yourself, which is something that they badly miss. Together with the kids, I also went through a remarkable transformation. Now, I come from a cutthroat world of science and high technology. I used to think that reason and logic and relentless drive were the only ways to make things happen. And before I worked with the kids, anything that I did with them, or anything that I did with myself, was supposed to be perfect, ideal, optimal, but after working with them for some time, I discovered the great virtues of empathy and flexibility and being able to start with some vision, and if the vision doesn't work, well nothing happened. All you have to do is play with it, change it a little bit, and come up with something that does help, that does work. So right now, I feel more like these are my principles, and if you don't like them, I have others. (Laughter) (Applause) And one of these principles is focus. Before each ride we sit together with the kids, and we give them one word to think about during the ride. You have to focus their attention on something because so many things happen. So these are words like "teamwork" or "endurance" or even complicated concepts like "resource allocation" or "perspective," a word that they don't understand. You know, perspective is one of these critically important life-coping strategies that mountain biking can really teach you. I tell kids when they struggle through some uphill and feel like they cannot take it anymore, it really helps to ignore the immediate obstacles and raise your head and look around and see how the vista around you grows. It literally propels you upwards. That's what perspective is all about. Or you can also look back in time and realize that you've already conquered steeper mountains before. And that's how they develop self-esteem. Now, let me give you an example of how it works. You stand with your bike at the beginning of February. It's very cold, and you're standing in one of these rainy days, and it's drizzling and cold and chilly, and you're standing in, let's say, Yokneam. And you look up at the sky through a hole in the clouds you see the monastery at the top of the Muhraka — that's where you're supposed to climb now — and you say, "There's no way that I could possibly get there." And yet, two hours later you find yourself standing on the roof of this monastery, smeared with mud, blood and sweat. And you look down at Yokneam; everything is so small and tiny. And you say, "Hey, Alex. Look at this parking lot where we started. It's that big. I can't believe that I did it." And that's the point when you start loving yourself. And so we talked about these special words that we teach them. And at the end of each ride, we sit together and share moments in which those special words of the day popped up and made a difference, and these discussions can be extremely inspiring. In one of them, one of the kids once said, "When we were riding on this ridge overlooking the Dead Sea — and he's talking about this spot here — "I was reminded of the day when I left my village in Ethiopia and went away together with my brother. We walked 120 kilometers until we reached Sudan. This was the first place where we got some water and supplies." And he goes on saying, and everyone looks at him like a hero, probably for the first time in his life. And he says — because I also have volunteers riding with me, adults, who are sitting there listening to him — and he says, "And this was just the beginning of our ordeal until we ended up in Israel. And only now," he says, "I'm beginning to understand where I am, and I actually like it." Now I remember, when he said it, I felt goosebumps on my body, because he said it overlooking the Moab Mountains here in the background. That's where Joshua descended and crossed the Jordan and led the people of Israel into the land of Canaan 3,000 years ago in this final leg of the journey from Africa. And so, perspective and context and history play key roles in the way I plan my rides with the kids. We visit Kibbutzim that were established by Holocaust survivors. We explore ruins of Palestinian villages, and we discuss how they became ruins. And we go through numerous remnants of Jewish settlements, Nabatic settlements, Canaanite settlements — three-, four, five-thousand years old. And through this tapestry, which is the history of this country, the kids acquire what is probably the most important value in education, and that is the understanding that life is complex, and there's no black and white. And by appreciating complexity, they become more tolerant, and tolerance leads to hope. I ride with these kids once a week, every Tuesday. Here's a picture I took last Tuesday — less than a week ago — and I ride with them tomorrow also. In every one of these rides I always end up standing in one of these incredible locations, taking in this incredible landscape around me, and I feel blessed and fortunate that I'm alive, and that I sense every fiber in my aching body. And I feel blessed and fortunate that 15 years ago I had the courage to resign my tenured position at NYU and return to my home country where I can do these incredible rides with this group of troubled kids coming from Ethiopia and Morocco and Russia. And I feel blessed and fortunate that every week, every Tuesday — and actually every Friday also — I can once again celebrate in the marrow of my bones the very essence of living in Israel on the edge. Thank you. (Applause) |
My green school dream | {0: 'Jewelry designer John Hardy co-founded the extraordinary Green School in Bali, where kids get a holistic and green education.'} | TEDGlobal 2010 | I grew up in a very small village in Canada, and I'm an undiagnosed dyslexic. I had a really hard time in school. In fact, my mother told me eventually that I was the little kid in the village who cried all the way to school. I ran away. I left when I was 25 years old to go to Bali, and there I met my incredible wife, Cynthia, and together, over 20 years, we built an amazing jewelry business. It was a fairy tale, and then we retired. Then she took me to see a film that I really didn't want to see. It ruined my life — (Laughter) "The Inconvenient Truth" and Mr. Gore. I have four kids, and even if part of what he says is true, they're not going to have the life that I had. And I decided at that moment that I would spend the rest of my life doing whatever I could to improve their possibilities. So here's the world, and here we are in Bali. It's a tiny, little island — 60 miles by 90 miles. It has an intact Hindu culture. Cynthia and I were there. We had had a wonderful life there, and we decided to do something unusual. We decided to give back locally. And here it is: it's called the Green School. I know it doesn't look like a school, but it is something we decided to do, and it is extremely, extremely green. The classrooms have no walls. The teacher is writing on a bamboo blackboard. The desks are not square. At Green School, the children are smiling — an unusual thing for school, especially for me. And we practice holism. And for me it's just the idea that, if this little girl graduates as a whole person, chances are she'll demand a whole world — a whole world — to live on. Our children spend 181 days going to school in a box. The people that built my school also built the prison and the insane asylum out of the same materials. So if this gentleman had had a holistic education, would he be sitting there? Would he have had more possibilities in his life? The classrooms have natural light. They're beautiful. They're bamboo. The breeze passes through them. And when the natural breeze isn't enough, the kids deploy bubbles, but not the kind of bubbles you know. These bubbles are made from natural cotton and rubber from the rubber tree. So we basically turned the box into a bubble. And these kids know that painless climate control may not be part of their future. We pay the bill at the end of the month, but the people that are really going to pay the bill are our grandchildren. We have to teach the kids that the world is not indestructible. These kids did a little graffiti on their desks, and then they signed up for two extra courses. The first one was called sanding and the second one was called re-waxing. But since that happened, they own those desks. They know they can control their world. We're on the grid. We're not proud of it. But an amazing alternative energy company in Paris is taking us off the grid with solar. And this thing is the second vortex to be built in the world, in a two-and-a-half meter drop on a river. When the turbine drops in, it will produce 8,000 watts of electricity, day and night. And you know what these are. There's nowhere to flush. And as long as we're taking our waste and mixing it with a huge amount of water — you're all really smart, just do the math. How many people times how much water. There isn't enough water. These are compost toilets, and nobody at the school wanted to know about them, especially the principal. And they work. People use them. People are okay. It's something you should think about doing. Not many things didn't work. The beautiful canvas and rubber skylights got eaten by the sun in six months. We had to replace them with recyclable plastic. The teachers dragged giant PVC whiteboards into the classrooms. So we had some good ideas: we took old automobile windshields, put paper behind them and created the first alternative to the whiteboard. Green School sits in south-central Bali, and it's on 20 acres of rolling garden. There's an amazing river traveling through it, and you can see there how we manage to get across the river. I met a father the other day; he looked a little crazed. I said, "Welcome to Green School." He said, "I've been on an airplane for 24 hours." I asked him, "Why?" He said, "I had a dream once about a green school, and I saw a picture of this green school, I got on an airplane. In August I'm bringing my sons." This was a great thing. But more than that, people are building green houses around Green School, so their kids can walk to school on the paths. And people are bringing their green industries, hopefully their green restaurants, to the Green School. It's becoming a community. It's becoming a green model. We had to look at everything. No petrochemicals in the pavement. No pavement. These are volcanic stones laid by hand. There are no sidewalks. The sidewalks are gravel. They flood when it rains, but they're green. This is the school buffalo. He's planning to eat that fence for dinner. All the fences at Green School are green. And when the kindergarten kids recently moved their gate, they found out the fence was made out of tapioca. They took the tapioca roots up to the kitchen, sliced them thinly and made delicious chips. Landscaping. We manage to keep the garden that was there running right up to the edge of each of the classrooms. We dropped them gently in. We made space for these guys who are Bali's last black pigs. And the school cow is trying to figure out how to replace the lawnmower on the playing field. These young ladies are living in a rice culture, but they know something that few people know in a rice culture. They know how to plant organic rice, they know how to look after it, they know how to harvest and they know how to cook it. They're part of the rice cycle and these skills will be valuable for them in their future. This young man is picking organic vegetables. We feed 400 people lunch every day and it's not a normal lunch. There's no gas. Local Balinese women cook the food on sawdust burners using secrets that only their grandmothers know. The food is incredible. Green School is a place of pioneers, local and global. And it's a kind of microcosm of the globalized world. The kids are from 25 countries. When I see them together, I know that they're working out how to live in the future. Green School is going into its third year with 160 children. It's a school where you do learn reading — one of my favorites — writing — I was bad at it — arithmetic. But you also learn other things. You learn bamboo building. You practice ancient Balinese arts. This is called mud wrestling in the rice fields. The kids love it. The mothers aren't quite convinced. (Laughter) We've done a lot of outrageous things in our lives, and we said, okay, local, what does "local" mean? Local means that 20 percent of the population of the school has to be Balinese, and this was a really big commitment. And we were right. And people are coming forward from all over the world to support the Balinese Scholarship Fund, because these kids will be Bali's next green leaders. The teachers are as diverse as the student body, and the amazing thing is that volunteers are popping up. A man came from Java with a new kind of organic agriculture. A woman came from Africa with music. And together these volunteers and the teachers are deeply committed to creating a new generation of global, green leaders. The Green School effect — we don't know what it is. We need someone to come and study it. But what's happening, our learning-different kids — dyslexic — we've renamed them prolexic — are doing well in these beautiful, beautiful classrooms. And all the kids are thriving. And how did we do all this? On giant grass. It's bamboo. It comes out of the ground like a train. It grows as high as a coconut tree in two months and three years later it can be harvested to build buildings like this. It's as strong and dense as teak and it will hold up any roof. When the architects came, they brought us these things, and you've probably seen things like this. The yellow box was called the administration complex. (Laughter) We squashed it, we rethought it, but mainly we renamed it "the heart of school," and that changed everything forever. It's a double helix. It has administrators in it and many, many other things. And the problem of building it — when the Balinese workers saw long reams of plans, they looked at them and said, "What's this?" So we built big models. We had them engineered by the engineers. And Balinese carpenters like this measured them with their bamboo rulers, selected the bamboo and built the buildings using age-old techniques, mostly by hand. It was chaos. And the Balinese carpenters want to be as modern as we do, so they use metal scaffolding to build the bamboo building and when the scaffolding came down, we realized that we had a cathedral, a cathedral to green, and a cathedral to green education. The heart of school has seven kilometers of bamboo in it. From the time the foundations were finished, in three months it had roofs and floors. It may not be the biggest bamboo building in the world, but many people believe that it's the most beautiful. Is this doable in your community? We believe it is. Green School is a model we built for the world. It's a model we built for Bali. And you just have to follow these simple, simple rules: be local, let the environment lead and think about how your grandchildren might build. So, Mr. Gore, thank you. You ruined my life, but you gave me an incredible future. And if you're interested in being involved in finishing Green School and building the next 50 around the world, please come and see us. Thank you. (Applause) |
Making law on the high seas | {0: "Kristina Gjerde is an expert on the law of the high seas -- the vast areas of the sea and seabed that exist beyond any national jurisdiction. These places belong to the world; Gjerde's work helps the world work together to protect them."} | Mission Blue Voyage | Today I'm going to take you on a voyage to some place so deep, so dark, so unexplored that we know less about it than we know about the dark side of the moon. It's a place of myth and legend. It's a place marked on ancient maps as "here be monsters." It is a place where each new voyage of exploration brings back new discoveries of creatures so wondrous and strange that our forefathers would have considered them monstrous indeed. Instead, they just make me green with envy that my colleague from IUCN was able to go on this journey to the south of Madagascar seamounts to actually take photographs and to see these wondrous creatures of the deep. We are talking about the high seas. The "high seas" is a legal term, but in fact, it covers 50 percent of the planet. With an average depth of the oceans of 4,000 meters, in fact, the high seas covers and provides nearly 90 percent of the habitat for life on this Earth. It is, in theory, the global commons, belonging to us all. But in reality, it is managed by and for those who have the resources to go out and exploit it. So today I'm going to take you on a voyage to cast light on some of the outdated myths and legends and assumptions that have kept us as the true stakeholders in the high seas in the dark. We're going to voyage to some of these special places that we've been discovering in the past few years to show why we really need to care. And then finally, we're going to try to develop and pioneer a new perspective on high seas governance that's rooted in ocean-basin-wide conservation, but framed in an arena of global norms of precaution and respect. So here is a picture of the high seas as seen from above — that area in the darker blue. To me, as an international lawyer, this scared me far more than any of the creatures or the monsters we may have seen, for it belies the notion that you can actually protect the ocean, the global ocean, that provides us all with carbon storage, with heat storage, with oxygen, if you can only protect 36 percent. This is indeed the true heart of the planet. Some of the problems that we have to confront are that the current international laws — for example, shipping — provide more protection to the areas closest to shore. For example, garbage discharge, something you would think just simply goes away, but the laws regulating ship discharge of garbage actually get weaker the further you are from shore. As a result, we have garbage patches the size of twice-Texas. It's unbelievable. We used to think the solution to pollution was dilution, but that has proved to be no longer the case. So what we have learned from social scientists and economists like Elinor Ostrom, who are studying the phenomenon of management of the commons on a local scale, is that there are certain prerequisites that you can put into place that enable you to manage and access open space for the good of one and all. And these include a sense of shared responsibility, common norms that bind people together as a community. Conditional access: You can invite people in, but they have to be able to play by the rules. And of course, if you want people to play by the rules, you still need an effective system of monitoring and enforcement, for as we've discovered, you can trust, but you also need to verify. What I'd also like to convey is that it is not all doom and gloom that we are seeing in the high seas. For a group of very dedicated individuals — scientists, conservationists, photographers and states — were able to actually change a tragic trajectory that was destroying fragile seascapes such as this coral garden that you see in front of you. That is, we're able to save it from a fate of deep-sea bottom trawling. And how did we do that? Well, as I said, we had a group of photographers that went out on board ships and actually photographed the activities in process. But we also spent many hours in the basements of the United Nations, trying to work with governments to make them understand what was going on so far away from land that few of us had ever even imagined that these creatures existed. So within three years, from 2003 to 2006, we were able to get norm in place that actually changed the paradigm of how fishers went about deep-sea bottom trawling. Instead of "go anywhere, do anything you want," we actually created a regime that required prior assessment of where you're going and a duty to prevent significant harm. In 2009, when the U.N. reviewed progress, they discovered that almost 100 million square-kilometers of seabed had been protected. This does not mean that it's the final solution, or that this even provides permanent protection. But what it does mean is that a group of individuals can form a community to actually shape the way high seas are governed, to create a new regime. So I'm looking optimistically at our opportunities for creating a true, blue perspective for this beautiful planet. Sylvia's wish provides us with that leverage, that access to the heart of human beings, you might say, who have rarely seen places beyond their own toes, but are now hopefully going to become interested in the full life-cycle of creatures like these sea turtles, who indeed spend most of their time in the high seas. Today, we're just going to voyage to a small sampling of some of these special areas, just to give you an idea of the flavor of the riches and wonders they do contain. The Sargasso Sea, for example, is not a sea bounded by coastlines, but it is bounded by oceanic currents that contain and envelope this wealth of sargassum that grows and aggregates there. It's also known as the spawning ground for eels from Northern European and Northern American rivers that are now so dwindling in numbers that they've actually stopped showing up in Stockholm, and five showed up in the U.K. just recently. But the Sargasso Sea, the same way it aggregates sargassum weed, actually is pulling in the plastic from throughout the region. This picture doesn't exactly show the plastics that I would like it to show, because I haven't been out there myself. But there has just been a study that was released in February that showed there are 200,000 pieces of plastic per square-kilometer now floating in the surface of the Sargasso Sea, and that is affecting the habitat for the many species in their juvenile stages who come to the Sargasso Sea for its protection and its food. The Sargasso Sea is also a wondrous place for the aggregation of these unique species that have developed to mimic the sargassum habitat. It also provides a special habitat for these flying fish to lay their eggs. But what I'd like to get from this picture is that we truly do have an opportunity to launch a global initiative for protection. Thus, the government of Bermuda has recognized the need and its responsibility as having some of the Sargasso Sea within its national jurisdiction — but the vast majority is beyond — to help spearhead a movement to achieve protection for this vital area. Spinning down to someplace a little bit cooler than here right now: the Ross Sea in the Southern Ocean. It's actually a bay. It's considered high seas, because the continent has been put off limits to territorial claims. So anything in the water is treated as if it's the high seas. But what makes the Ross Sea important is the vast sea of pack ice that in the spring and summer provides a wealth of phytoplankton and krill that supports what, till recently, has been a virtually intact near-shore ecosystem. But unfortunately, CCAMLR, the regional commission in charge of conserving and managing fish stocks and other living marine resources, is unfortunately starting to give in to fishing interests and has authorized the expansion of toothfish fisheries in the region. The captain of a New Zealand vessel who was just down there is reporting a significant decline in the number of the Ross Sea killer whales, who are directly dependent on the Antarctic toothfish as their main source of food. So what we need to do is to stand up boldly, singly and together, to push governments, to push regional fisheries management organizations, to declare our right to declare certain areas off-limits to high seas fishing, so that the freedom to fish no longer means the freedom to fish anywhere and anytime. Coming closer to here, the Costa Rica Dome is a recently discovered area — potentially year-round habitat for blue whales. There's enough food there to last them the summer and the winter long. But what's unusual about the Costa Rica Dome is, in fact, it's not a permanent place. It's an oceanographic phenomenon that shifts in time and space on a seasonal basis. So, in fact, it's not permanently in the high seas. It's not permanently in the exclusive economic zones of these five Central American countries, but it moves with the season. As such, it does create a challenge to protect, but we also have a challenge protecting the species that move along with it. We can use the same technologies that fishers use to identify where the species are, in order to close the area when it's most vulnerable, which may, in some cases, be year-round. Getting closer to shore, where we are, this was in fact taken in the Galapagos. Many species are headed through this region, which is why there's been so much attention put into conservation of the Eastern Tropical Pacific Seascape. This is the initiative that's been coordinated by Conservation International with a variety of partners and governments to actually try to bring integrated management regime throughout the area. That is, it provides a wonderful example of where you can go with a real regional initiative. It's protecting five World Heritage sites. Unfortunately, the World Heritage Convention does not recognize the need to protect areas beyond national jurisdiction, at present. So a place like the Costa Rica Dome could not technically qualify the time it's in the high seas. So what we've been suggesting is that we either need to amend the World Heritage Convention, so that it can adopt and urge universal protection of these World Heritage sites, or we need to change the name and call it Half-the-World Heritage Convention. But what we also know is that species like these sea turtles do not stay put in the Eastern Tropical Pacific Seascape. These happen to go down to a vast South Pacific Gyre, where they spend most of their time and often end up getting hooked like this, or as bycatch. So what I'd really like to suggest is that we need to scale-up. We need to work locally, but we also need to work ocean-basin-wide. We have the tools and technologies now to enable us to take a broader ocean-basin-wide initiative. We've heard about the Tagging of Pacific Predators project, one of the 17 Census of Marine Life projects. It's provided us data like this, of tiny, little sooty shearwaters that make the entire ocean basin their home. They fly 65,000 kilometers in less than a year. So we have the tools and treasures coming from the Census of Marine Life. And its culminating year that's going to be launched in October. So stay tuned for further information. What I find so exciting is that the Census of Marine Life has looked at more than the tagging of pacific predators; it's also looked in the really unexplored mid-water column, where creatures like this flying sea cucumber have been found. And fortunately, we've been able, as IUCN, to team up with the Census of Marine Life and many of the scientists working there to actually try to translate much of this information to policymakers. We have the support of governments now behind us. We've been revealing this information through technical workshops. And the exciting thing is that we do have sufficient information to move ahead to protect some of these significant hope spots, hotspots. At the same time we're saying, "Yes, we need more. We need to move forward." But many of you have said, if you get these marine protected areas, or a reasonable regime for high seas fisheries management in place, how are you going to enforce it? Which leads me to my second passion besides ocean science, which is outer space technology. I wanted to be an astronaut, so I've constantly followed what are the tools available to monitor Earth from outer space — and that we have incredible tools like we've been learning about, in terms of being able to follow tagged species throughout their life-cycles in the open ocean. We can also tag and track fishing vessels. Many already have transponders on board that allow us to find out where they are and even what they're doing. But not all the vessels have those to date. It does not take too much rocket science to actually try to create new laws to mandate, if you're going to have the privilege of accessing our high seas resources, we need to know — someone needs to know — where you are and what you're doing. So it brings me to my main take-home message, which is we can avert a tragedy of the commons. We can stop the collision course of 50 percent of the planet with the high seas. But we need to think broad-scale. We need to think globally. We need to change how we actually go about managing these resources. We need to get the new paradigm of precaution and respect. At the same time, we need to think locally, which is the joy and marvel of Sylvia's hope spot wish, is that we can shine a spotlight on many of these previously unknown areas, and to bring people to the table, if you will, to actually make them feel part of this community that truly has a stake in their future management. And third is that we need to look at ocean-basin-wide management. Our species are ocean-basin-wide. Many of the deep-sea communities have genetic distribution that goes ocean-basin-wide. We need to better understand, but we also need to start to manage and protect. And in order to do that, you also need ocean-basin management regimes. That is, we have regional management regimes within the exclusive economic zone, but we need to scale these up, we need to build their capacity, so they're like the Southern Ocean, where they do have the two-pronged fisheries and conservation organization. So with that, I would just like to sincerely thank and honor Sylvia Earle for her wish, for it is helping us to put a face on the high seas and the deep seas beyond national jurisdiction. It's helping to bring an incredible group of talented people together to really try to solve and penetrate these problems that have created our obstacles to management and rational use of this area that was once so far away and remote. So on this tour, I hope I provided you with a new perspective of the high seas: one, that it is our home too, and that we need to work together if we are to make this a sustainable ocean future for us all. Thank you. (Applause) |
Protecting the brain against concussion | {0: "Kim Gorgens studies the brain's response to injury -- and advocates that we mind our (gray) matter."} | TEDxDU 2010 | So, a funny thing happened on my way to becoming a brilliant, world-class neuropsychologist: I had a baby. And that's not to say I ever went on to become a brilliant, world-class neuropsychologist. Sorry, TED. But I did go on to be a reasonably astute, arguably world-class worrier. One of my girlfriends in graduate school, Marie, said, "Kim, I figured it out. It's not that you're more neurotic than everyone else; it's just that you're more honest about how neurotic you are." So in the spirit of full disclosure, I brought some pictures to share. Awwww. (Laughter) I'll just say: July. (Laughter) Zip! (Laughter) For safety. (Laughter) Water wings — an inch of water. And then, finally, all suited up for the 90-minute drive to Copper Mountain. So you can get kind of a feel for this. So my baby, Vander, is eight years old now. And, despite being cursed with my athletic inability, he plays soccer. He's interested in playing football. He wants to learn how to ride a unicycle. So why would I worry? Because this is what I do. This is what I teach. It's what I study. It's what I treat. And I know that kids get concussed every year. In fact, more than four million people sustain a concussion every year, and these data are just among kids under 14 who were seen in emergency rooms. And so when kids sustain a concussion, we talk about them getting dinged or getting their bell rung, but what is it that we're really talking about? Let's take a look. [Concussive Force] "Starsky and Hutch"? Arguably, yes. So, a car accident. Forty miles an hour into a fixed barrier: 35 Gs. A heavyweight boxer punches you straight in the face: 58 Gs. (Music) In case you missed it, we'll look again. So look to the right-hand side of the screen. (Music) What would you say? How many Gs? Close. Seventy-two? Would it be crazy to know: 103 Gs? The average concussive impact is 95 Gs. Now, when the kid on the right doesn't get up, we know they've had a concussion. But how about the kid on the left, or the athlete that leaves the field of play? How do we know if he or she has sustained a concussion? How do we know that legislation that would require they be pulled from play, cleared for return to play, applies to them? The definition of concussion doesn't actually require a loss of consciousness. It requires only a change in consciousness, and that can be any one or a number of symptoms, including feeling foggy, feeling dizzy, hearing a ringing in your ear, being more impulsive or hostile than usual. So given all of that and given how darn neurotic I am, how do I get any sleep at all? Because I know our brains are resilient. They're designed to recover from an injury. If — God forbid — any of us left here tonight and sustained a concussion, most of us would go on to fully recover inside of a couple hours to a couple of weeks. But kids are more vulnerable to brain injury. In fact, high-school athletes are three times more likely to sustain catastrophic injuries relative even to their college-age peers, and it takes them longer to return to a symptom-free baseline. After that first injury, their risk for second injury is exponentially greater. From there, their risk for a third injury, greater still, and so on. And here's the really alarming part: We don't fully understand the long-term impact of multiple injuries. You guys may be familiar with this research that's coming out of the NFL. In a nutshell, this research suggests that, among retired NFL players with three or more career concussions, the incidence of early-onset dementing disease is much greater than it is for the general population. So you've all seen that — New York Times, you've seen it. What you may not be familiar with is that this research was spearheaded by NFL wives who said, "Isn't it weird that my 46-year-old husband is forever losing his keys?" "Isn't it weird that my 47-year-old husband is forever losing the car?" "Isn't it weird that my 48-year-old husband is forever losing his way home in the car, from the driveway?" I may have forgotten to mention that my son is an only child. So it's going to be really important that he be able to drive me around someday. (Laughter) So, how do we guarantee the safety of our kids? How can we 100 percent guarantee the safety of our kids? Let me tell you what I've come up with. (Laughter) If only. My little boy's right there, and he's like, "She's not kidding. She's totally not kidding." So in all seriousness: Should my kid play football? Should your kid play football? I don't know. But I do know there are three things you can do. The first: study up. You have to be familiar with the issues we're talking about today. There are some great resources out there. The CDC has a program, HEADS UP. It's at CDC.gov. HEADS UP is specific to concussion in kids. The second is a resource I'm personally really proud of. We've just rolled this out in the last couple months — CO Kids With Brain Injury. This is a great resource for student athletes, teachers, parents, professionals, athletic and coaching staff. It's a great place to start if you have questions. The second thing is: speak up. Just two weeks ago, a bill introduced by Senator Kefalas that would have required athletes, kids under 18, to wear a helmet when they're riding their bike, died in committee. It died, in large part, because it lacked constituent buy-in; it lacked stakeholder traction. Now, I'm not here to tell you what kind of legislation you should or shouldn't support, but I am going to tell you that, if it matters to you, your legislators need to know that. Speak up also with coaching staff. Ask about what kind of protective equipment is available. What's the budget for protective equipment? How old it is? Maybe offer to spearhead a fundraiser to buy new gear. Which brings us to: suit up. Wear a helmet. The only way to prevent a bad outcome is to prevent that first injury from happening. Recently, one of my graduate students, Tom, said, "Kim, I've decided to wear a bike helmet on the way to class." And Tom knows that that little bit of foam in a bike helmet can reduce the g-force of impact by half. Now, I thought it was because I have this totally compelling helmet crusade, this epiphany of Tom's. As it turns out, it occurred to Tom that a $20 helmet is a good way to protect a $100,000 graduate education. (Laughter) So ... Should Vander play football? I can't say no, but I can guarantee that every time he leaves the house, that kid's wearing a helmet — like, to the car, or at school. So whether athlete, scholar, overprotected kid, neurotic mom, or otherwise, here's my baby, Vander, reminding you to mind your matter. Thank you. (Applause) |
Women, wartime and the dream of peace | {0: 'Iraqi-born Zainab Salbi founded and runs Women for Women International, and has dedicated her life to helping women in war-torn regions rebuild their lives and communities.'} | TEDGlobal 2010 | I woke up in the middle of the night with the sound of heavy explosion. It was deep at night. I do not remember what time it was. I just remember the sound was so heavy and so very shocking. Everything in my room was shaking — my heart, my windows, my bed, everything. I looked out the windows and I saw a full half-circle of explosion. I thought it was just like the movies, but the movies had not conveyed them in the powerful image that I was seeing full of bright red and orange and gray, and a full circle of explosion. And I kept on staring at it until it disappeared. I went back to my bed, and I prayed, and I secretly thanked God that that missile did not land on my family's home, that it did not kill my family that night. Thirty years have passed, and I still feel guilty about that prayer, for the next day, I learned that that missile landed on my brother's friend's home and killed him and his father, but did not kill his mother or his sister. His mother showed up the next week at my brother's classroom and begged seven-year-old kids to share with her any picture they may have of her son, for she had lost everything. This is not a story of a nameless survivor of war, and nameless refugees, whose stereotypical images we see in our newspapers and our TV with tattered clothes, dirty face, scared eyes. This is not a story of a nameless someone who lived in some war, who we do not know their hopes, their dreams, their accomplishments, their families, their beliefs, their values. This is my story. I was that girl. I am another image and vision of another survivor of war. I am that refugee, and I am that girl. You see, I grew up in war-torn Iraq, and I believe that there are two sides of wars and we've only seen one side of it. We only talk about one side of it. But there's another side that I have witnessed as someone who lived in it and someone who ended up working in it. I grew up with the colors of war — the red colors of fire and blood, the brown tones of earth as it explodes in our faces and the piercing silver of an exploded missile, so bright that nothing can protect your eyes from it. I grew up with the sounds of war — the staccato sounds of gunfire, the wrenching booms of explosions, ominous drones of jets flying overhead and the wailing warning sounds of sirens. These are the sounds you would expect, but they are also the sounds of dissonant concerts of a flock of birds screeching in the night, the high-pitched honest cries of children and the thunderous, unbearable silence. "War," a friend of mine said, "is not about sound at all. It is actually about silence, the silence of humanity." I have since left Iraq and founded a group called Women for Women International that ends up working with women survivors of wars. In my travels and in my work, from Congo to Afghanistan, from Sudan to Rwanda, I have learned not only that the colors and the sounds of war are the same, but the fears of war are the same. You know, there is a fear of dying, and do not believe any movie character where the hero is not afraid. It is very scary to go through that feeling of "I am about to die" or "I could die in this explosion." But there's also the fear of losing loved ones, and I think that's even worse. It's too painful. You don't want to think about it. But I think the worst kind of fear is the fear — as Samia, a Bosnian woman, once told me, who survived the four-years besiege of Sarajevo; she said, "The fear of losing the 'I' in me, the fear of losing the 'I' in me." That's what my mother in Iraq used to tell me. It's like dying from inside-out. A Palestinian woman once told me, "It is not about the fear of one death," she said, "sometimes I feel I die 10 times in one day," as she was describing the marches of soldiers and the sounds of their bullets. She said, "But it's not fair, because there is only one life, and there should only be one death." We have been only seeing one side of war. We have only been discussing and consumed with high-level preoccupations over troop levels, drawdown timelines, surges and sting operations, when we should be examining the details of where the social fabric has been most torn, where the community has improvised and survived and shown acts of resilience and amazing courage just to keep life going. We have been so consumed with seemingly objective discussions of politics, tactics, weapons, dollars and casualties. This is the language of sterility. How casually we treat casualties in the context of this topic. This is where we conceive of rape and casualties as inevitabilities. Eighty percent of refugees around the world are women and children. Oh. Ninety percent of modern war casualties are civilians. Seventy-five percent of them are women and children. How interesting. Oh, half a million women in Rwanda get raped in 100 days. Or, as we speak now, hundreds of thousands of Congolese women are getting raped and mutilated. How interesting. These just become numbers that we refer to. The front of wars is increasingly non-human eyes peering down on our perceived enemies from space, guiding missiles toward unseen targets, while the human conduct of the orchestra of media relations in the event that this particular drone attack hits a villager instead of an extremist. It is a chess game. You learn to play an international relations school on your way out and up to national and international leadership. Checkmate. We are missing a completely other side of wars. We are missing my mother's story, who made sure with every siren, with every raid, with every cut off-of electricity, she played puppet shows for my brothers and I, so we would not be scared of the sounds of explosions. We are missing the story of Fareeda, a music teacher, a piano teacher, in Sarajevo, who made sure that she kept the music school open every single day in the four years of besiege in Sarajevo and walked to that school, despite the snipers shooting at that school and at her, and kept the piano, the violin, the cello playing the whole duration of the war, with students wearing their gloves and hats and coats. That was her fight. That was her resistance. We are missing the story of Nehia, a Palestinian woman in Gaza who, the minute there was a cease-fire in the last year's war, she left out of home, collected all the flour and baked as much bread for every neighbor to have, in case there is no cease-fire the day after. We are missing the stories of Violet, who, despite surviving genocide in the church massacre, she kept on going on, burying bodies, cleaning homes, cleaning the streets. We are missing stories of women who are literally keeping life going in the midst of wars. Do you know — do you know that people fall in love in war and go to school and go to factories and hospitals and get divorced and go dancing and go playing and live life going? And the ones who are keeping that life are women. There are two sides of war. There is a side that fights, and there is a side that keeps the schools and the factories and the hospitals open. There is a side that is focused on winning battles, and there is a side that is focused on winning life. There is a side that leads the front-line discussion, and there is a side that leads the back-line discussion. There is a side that thinks that peace is the end of fighting, and there is a side that thinks that peace is the arrival of schools and jobs. There is a side that is led by men, and there is a side that is led by women. And in order for us to understand how do we build lasting peace, we must understand war and peace from both sides. We must have a full picture of what that means. In order for us to understand what actually peace means, we need to understand, as one Sudanese woman once told me, "Peace is the fact that my toenails are growing back again." She grew up in Sudan, in Southern Sudan, for 20 years of war, where it killed one million people and displaced five million refugees. Many women were taken as slaves by rebels and soldiers, as sexual slaves who were forced also to carry the ammunition and the water and the food for the soldiers. So that woman walked for 20 years, so she would not be kidnapped again. And only when there was some sort of peace, her toenails grew back again. We need to understand peace from a toenail's perspective. We need to understand that we cannot actually have negotiations of ending of wars or peace without fully including women at the negotiating table. I find it amazing that the only group of people who are not fighting and not killing and not pillaging and not burning and not raping, and the group of people who are mostly — though not exclusively — who are keeping life going in the midst of war, are not included in the negotiating table. And I do argue that women lead the back-line discussion, but there are also men who are excluded from that discussion. The doctors who are not fighting, the artists, the students, the men who refuse to pick up the guns, they are, too, excluded from the negotiating tables. There is no way we can talk about a lasting peace, building of democracy, sustainable economies, any kind of stabilities, if we do not fully include women at the negotiating table. Not one, but 50 percent. There is no way we can talk about the building of stability if we don't start investing in women and girls. Did you know that one year of the world's military spending equals 700 years of the U.N. budget and equals 2,928 years of the U.N. budget allocated for women? If we just reverse that distribution of funds, perhaps we could have a better lasting peace in this world. And last, but not least, we need to invest in peace and women, not only because it is the right thing to do, not only because it is the right thing to do, for all of us to build sustainable and lasting peace today, but it is for the future. A Congolese woman, who was telling me about how her children saw their father killed in front of them and saw her raped in front of them and mutilated in front of them, and her children saw their nine-year-old sibling killed in front of them, how they're doing okay right now. She got into Women for Women International's program. She got a support network. She learned about her rights. We taught her vocational and business skills. We helped her get a job. She was earning 450 dollars. She was doing okay. She was sending them to school. Have a new home. She said, "But what I worry about the most is not any of that. I worry that my children have hate in their hearts, and when they want to grow up, they want to fight again the killers of their father and their brother." We need to invest in women, because that's our only chance to ensure that there is no more war in the future. That mother has a better chance to heal her children than any peace agreement can do. Are there good news? Of course, there are good news. There are lots of good news. To start with, these women that I told you about are dancing and singing every single day, and if they can, who are we not to dance? That girl that I told you about ended up starting Women for Women International Group that impacted one million people, sent 80 million dollars, and I started this from zero, nothing, nada, [unclear]. (Laughter) They are women who are standing on their feet in spite of their circumstances, not because of it. Think of how the world can be a much better place if, for a change, we have a better equality, we have equality, we have a representation and we understand war, both from the front-line and the back-line discussion. Rumi, a 13th-century Sufi poet, says, "Out beyond the worlds of right-doings and wrong-doings, there is a field. I will meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase 'each other' no longer makes any sense." I humbly add — humbly add — that out beyond the worlds of war and peace, there is a field, and there are many women and men [who] are meeting there. Let us make this field a much bigger place. Let us all meet in that field. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why work doesn't happen at work | {0: 'Jason Fried thinks deeply about collaboration, productivity and the nature of work. He\'s the co-founder of 37signals, makers of Basecamp and other web-based collaboration tools, and co-author of "Rework."'} | TEDxMidwest | So I'm going to talk about work; specifically, why people can't seem to get work done at work, which is a problem we all kind of have. But let's sort of start at the beginning. So, we have companies and non-profits and charities and all these groups that have employees or volunteers of some sort. And they expect these people who work for them to do great work — I would hope, at least. At least good work, hopefully, at least it's good work — hopefully great work. And so what they typically do is they decide that all these people need to come together in one place to do that work. So a company, or a charity, or an organization of any kind, unless you're working in Africa, if you're really lucky to do that — most people have to go to an office every day. And so these companies, they build offices. They go out and they buy a building, or they rent a building, or they lease some space, and they fill this space with stuff. They fill it with tables, or desks, chairs, computer equipment, software, Internet access, maybe a fridge, maybe a few other things, and they expect their employees, or their volunteers, to come to that location every day to do great work. It seems like it's perfectly reasonable to ask that. However, if you actually talk to people and even question yourself, and you ask yourself, where do you really want to go when you really need to get something done? You'll find out that people don't say what businesses think they would say. If you ask people the question: Where do you need to go when you need to get something done? Typically, you get three different kinds of answers. One is kind of a place or a location or a room. Another one is a moving object, and a third is a time. So here are some examples. I've been asking people this question for about 10 years: "Where do you go when you really need to get something done?" I'll hear things like, the porch, the deck, the kitchen. I'll hear things like an extra room in the house, the basement, the coffee shop, the library. And then you'll hear things like the train, a plane, a car — so, the commute. And then you'll hear people say, "Well, it doesn't really matter where I am, as long as it's early in the morning or late at night or on the weekends." You almost never hear someone say, "The office." But businesses are spending all this money on this place called the office, and they're making people go to it all the time, yet people don't do work in the office. What is that about? (Laughter) Why is that? Why is that happening? And what you find out is, if you dig a little bit deeper, you find out that people — this is what happens: People go to work, and they're basically trading in their work day for a series of "work moments" — that's what happens at the office. You don't have a work day anymore. You have work moments. It's like the front door of the office is like a Cuisinart, and you walk in and your day is shredded to bits, because you have 15 minutes here, 30 minutes there, and something else happens, you're pulled off your work, then you have 20 minutes, then it's lunch, then you have something else to do ... Then you've got 15 minutes, and someone pulls you aside and asks you a question, and before you know it, it's 5 p.m., and you look back on the day, and you realize that you didn't get anything done. We've all been through this. We probably went through it yesterday or the day before, or the day before that. You look back on your day, and you're like, "I got nothing done today. I was at work. I sat at my desk. I used my expensive computer. I used the software they told me to use. I went to these meetings I was asked to go to. I did these conference calls. I did all this stuff. But I didn't actually do anything. I just did tasks. I didn't actually get meaningful work done." And what you find is that, especially with creative people — designers, programmers, writers, engineers, thinkers — that people really need long stretches of uninterrupted time to get something done. You cannot ask somebody to be creative in 15 minutes and really think about a problem. You might have a quick idea, but to be in deep thought about a problem and really consider a problem carefully, you need long stretches of uninterrupted time. And even though the work day is typically eight hours, how many people here have ever had eight hours to themselves at the office? How about seven hours? Six? Five? Four? When's the last time you had three hours to yourself at the office? Two hours? One, maybe? Very, very few people actually have long stretches of uninterrupted time at an office. And this is why people choose to do work at home, or they might go to the office, but they might go to the office really early in the day, or late at night when no one's around, or they stick around after everyone's left, or go in on the weekends, or they get work done on the plane, in the car or in the train, because there are no distractions. Now there are different kinds of distractions, but not the really bad distractions, which I'll talk about in a minute. And this whole phenomenon of having short bursts of time to get things done reminds me of another thing that doesn't work when you're interrupted, and that is sleep. I think that sleep and work are very closely related — not because you can work while you're sleeping and sleep while you're working. That's not really what I mean. I'm talking specifically about the fact that sleep and work are phase-based, or stage-based, events. Sleep is about sleep phases, or stages — some people call them different things. There are five of them, and in order to get to the really deep ones, the meaningful ones, you have to go through the early ones. If you're interrupted while you're going through the early ones — if someone bumps you in bed, or there's a sound, or whatever happens — you don't just pick up where you left off. If you're interrupted and woken up, you have to start again. So you have to go back a few phases and start again. And what ends up happening — you might have days like this where you wake up at eight or seven in the morning, or whenever you get up, and you're like, "I didn't sleep very well. I did the sleep thing — I went to bed, I laid down, but I didn't really sleep." People say you go "to" sleep, but you don't go to sleep, you go towards sleep; it takes a while. You've got to go through phases and stuff, and if you're interrupted, you don't sleep well. So does anyone here expect someone to sleep well if they're interrupted all night? I don't think anyone would say yes. Why do we expect people to work well if they're being interrupted all day at the office? How can we possibly expect people to do their job if they go to the office and are interrupted? That doesn't really seem like it makes a lot of sense, to me. So what are the interruptions that happen at the office but not at other places? Because in other places, you can have interruptions like the TV, or you could go for a walk, or there's a fridge downstairs, or you've got your own couch, or whatever you want to do. If you talk to certain managers, they'll tell you that they don't want their employees to work at home because of these distractions. They'll sometimes also say, "If I can't see the person, how do I know they're working?" which is ridiculous, but that's one of the excuses that managers give. And I'm one of these managers. I understand. I know how this goes. We all have to improve on this sort of thing. But oftentimes they'll cite distractions: "I can't let someone work at home. They'll watch TV, or do this other thing." It turns out those aren't the things that are distracting, Because those are voluntary distractions. You decide when you want to be distracted by the TV, when you want to turn something on, or when you want to go downstairs or go for a walk. At the office, most of the interruptions and distractions that really cause people not to get work done are involuntary. So let's go through a couple of those. Now, managers and bosses will often have you think that the real distractions at work are things like Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and other websites, and in fact, they'll go so far as to actually ban these sites at work. Some of you may work at places where you can't get to certain sites. I mean, is this China? What the hell is going on here? You can't go to a website at work, and that's the problem? That's why people aren't getting work done, because they're on Facebook and Twitter? That's kind of ridiculous. It's a total decoy. Today's Facebook and Twitter and YouTube, these things are just modern-day smoke breaks. No one cared about letting people take a smoke break for 15 minutes 10 years ago, so why does anyone care if someone goes to Facebook or Twitter or YouTube here and there? Those aren't the real problems in the office. The real problems are what I like to call the M&Ms, the Managers and the Meetings. Those are the real problems in the modern office today. And this is why things don't get done at work, it's because of the M&Ms. Now what's interesting is, if you listen to all the places that people talk about doing work, like at home, in the car, on a plane, late at night, or early in the morning, you don't find managers and meetings. You find a lot of other distractions, but not managers and meetings. So these are the things that you don't find elsewhere, but you do find at the office. And managers are basically people whose job it is to interrupt people. That's pretty much what managers are for. They're for interrupting people. They don't really do the work, so they make sure everyone else is doing work, which is an interruption. We have lots of managers in the world now, and a lot of people in the world, and a lot of interruptions by these managers. They have to check in: "Hey, how's it going? Show me what's up." This sort of thing. They keep interrupting you at the wrong time, while you're actually trying to do something they're paying you to do, they tend to interrupt you. That's kind of bad. But what's even worse is the thing that managers do most of all, which is call meetings. And meetings are just toxic, terrible, poisonous things during the day at work. (Laughter) We all know this to be true, and you would never see a spontaneous meeting called by employees. It doesn't work that way. The manager calls the meeting so the employees can all come together, and it's an incredibly disruptive thing to do to people — to say, "Hey look, we're going to bring 10 people together right now and have a meeting. I don't care what you're doing, you've got to stop doing it, so you can have this meeting." I mean, what are the chances that all 10 people are ready to stop? What if they're thinking about something important, or doing important work? All of a sudden you tell them they have to stop doing that to do something else. So they go into a meeting room, they get together, and they talk about stuff that doesn't really matter, usually. Because meetings aren't work. Meetings are places to go to talk about things you're supposed to be doing later. But meetings also procreate. So one meeting tends to lead to another meeting, which leads to another meeting. There's often too many people in the meetings, and they're very, very expensive to the organization. Companies often think of a one-hour meeting as a one-hour meeting, but that's not true, unless there's only one person. If there are 10 people, it's a 10-hour meeting, not a one-hour meeting. It's 10 hours of productivity taken from the rest of the organization to have this one-hour meeting, which probably should have been handled by two or three people talking for a few minutes. But instead, there's a long scheduled meeting, because meetings are scheduled the way software works, which is in increments of 15 minutes, or 30 minutes, or an hour. You don't schedule an eight-hour meeting with Outlook; you can't. You can go 15 minutes or 30 minutes or 45 minutes or an hour. And so we tend to fill these times up when things should go really quickly. So meetings and managers are two major problems in businesses today, especially at offices. These things don't exist outside of the office. So I have some suggestions to remedy the situation. What can managers do — enlightened managers, hopefully — what can they do to make the office a better place for people to work, so it's not the last resort, but it's the first resort, so that people start to say, "When I really want to get stuff done, I go to the office." Because the offices are well-equipped; everything is there for them to do the work. But they don't want to go there right now, so how do we change that? I have three suggestions to share with you. I have about three minutes, so that'll fit perfectly. We've all heard of the Casual Friday thing. I don't know if people still do that. But how about "No-talk Thursdays?" (Laughter) Pick one Thursday once a month, and cut it in half, just the afternoon — I'll make it easy for you. So just the afternoon, one Thursday. First Thursday of the month, just the afternoon, nobody in the office can talk to each other. Just silence, that's it. And what you'll find is that a tremendous amount of work gets done when no one talks to each other. This is when people actually get stuff done, is when no one's bothering them or interrupting them. Giving someone four hours of uninterrupted time is the best gift you can give anybody at work. It's better than a computer, better than a new monitor, better than new software, or whatever people typically use. Giving them four hours of quiet time at the office is going to be incredibly valuable. If you try that, I think you'll agree, and hopefully you can do it more often. So maybe it's every other week, or every week, once a week, afternoons no one can talk to each other. That's something that you'll find will really, really work. Another thing you can try, is switching from active communication and collaboration, which is like face-to-face stuff — tapping people on the shoulder, saying hi to them, having meetings, and replace that with more passive models of communication, using things like email and instant messaging, or collaboration products, things like that. Now some people might say email is really distracting, I.M. is really distracting, and these other things are really distracting, but they're distracting at a time of your own choice and your own choosing. You can quit the email app; you can't quit your boss. You can quit I.M.; you can't hide your manager. You can put these things away, and then you can be interrupted on your own schedule, at your own time, when you're available, when you're ready to go again. Because work, like sleep, happens in phases. So you'll be going up, doing some work, and then you'll come down from that work, and then maybe it's time to check that email or I.M. There are very, very few things that are that urgent, that need to happen, that need to be answered right this second. So if you're a manager, start encouraging people to use more things like I.M. and email and other things that someone can put away and then get back to you on their own schedule. And the last suggestion I have is that, if you do have a meeting coming up, if you have the power, just cancel it. Just cancel that next meeting. (Laughter) Today's Friday, usually people have meetings on Monday. Just don't have it. I don't mean move it; I mean just erase it from memory, it's gone. And you'll find out that everything will be just fine. All these discussions and decisions you thought you had to make at this one time at 9 a.m. on Monday, just forget about them, and things will be fine. People will have a more open morning, they can actually think. You'll find out all these things you thought you had to do, you don't actually have to do. So those are just three quick suggestions I wanted to give you guys to think about. I hope that some of these ideas were at least provocative enough for managers and bosses and business owners and organizers and people who are in charge of other people, to think about laying off a little bit, and giving people more time to get work done. I think it'll all pay off in the end. So, thanks for listening. (Applause) |
Creative houses from reclaimed stuff | {0: 'Dan Phillips builds homes out of recycled and reclaimed materials in Huntsville, Texas.'} | TEDxHouston | (Applause) Thank you very much. I have a few pictures, and I'll talk a little bit about how I'm able to do what I do. All these houses are built from between 70 and 80 percent recycled material, stuff that was headed to the mulcher, the landfill, the burn pile. It was all just gone. This is the first house I built. This double front door here with the three-light transom, that was headed to the landfill. Have a little turret there. And then these buttons on the corbels here — right there — those are hickory nuts. And these buttons there — those are chicken eggs. (Laughter) Of course, first you have breakfast, and then you fill the shell full of Bondo and paint it and nail it up, and you have an architectural button in just a fraction of the time. This is a look at the inside. You can see the three-light transom there with the eyebrow windows. Certainly an architectural antique headed to the landfill — even the lockset is probably worth 200 dollars. Everything in the kitchen was salvaged. There's a 1952 O'Keefe & Merritt stove, if you like to cook — cool stove. This is going up into the turret. I got that staircase for 20 dollars, including delivery to my lot. (Laughter) Then, looking up in the turret, you see there are bulges and pokes and sags and so forth. Well, if that ruins your life, well, then, you shouldn't live there. (Laughter) This is a laundry chute. And this right here is a shoe last — those are those cast-iron things you see at antique shops. So I had one of those, so I made some low-tech gadgetry, where you just stomp on the shoe last, and then the door flies open and you throw your laundry down. And then if you're smart enough, it goes on a basket on top of the washer. If not, it goes into the toilet. (Laughter) This is a bathtub I made, made out of scrap two-by-four. Started with the rim, and then glued and nailed it up into a flat, corbeled it up and flipped it over, then did the two profiles on this side. It's a two-person tub. After all, it's not just a question of hygiene, but there's a possibility of recreation as well. (Laughter) Then, this faucet here is just a piece of Osage orange. It looks a little phallic, but after all, it's a bathroom. (Laughter) This is a house based on a Budweiser can. It doesn't look like a can of beer, but the design take-offs are absolutely unmistakable: the barley hops design worked up into the eaves, then the dentil work comes directly off the can's red, white, blue and silver. Then, these corbels going down underneath the eaves are that little design that comes off the can. I just put a can on a copier and kept enlarging it until I got the size I want. Then, on the can it says, "This is the famous Budweiser beer, we know of no other beer, blah, blah, blah." So we changed that and put, "This is the famous Budweiser house. We don't know of any other house ..." and so forth and so on. This is a deadbolt. It's a fence from a 1930s shaper, which is a very angry woodworking machine. And they gave me the fence, but they didn't give me the shaper, so we made a deadbolt out of it. That'll keep bull elephants out, I promise. (Laughter) And sure enough, we've had no problems with bull elephants. (Laughter) The shower is intended to simulate a glass of beer. We've got bubbles going up there, then suds at the top with lumpy tiles. Where do you get lumpy tiles? Well, of course, you don't. But I get a lot of toilets, and so you just dispatch a toilet with a hammer, and then you have lumpy tiles. And then the faucet is a beer tap. (Laughter) Then, this panel of glass is the same panel of glass that occurs in every middle-class front door in America. We're getting tired of it. It's kind of clichéd now. If you put it in the front door, your design fails. So don't put it in the front door; put it somewhere else. It's a pretty panel of glass. But if you put it in the front door, people say, "Oh, you're trying to be like those guys, and you didn't make it." So don't put it there. Then, another bathroom upstairs. This light up here is the same light that occurs in every middle-class foyer in America. Don't put it in the foyer. Put it in the shower, or in the closet, but not in the foyer. Then, somebody gave me a bidet, so it got a bidet. (Laughter) This little house here, those branches there are made out of Bois d'arc or Osage orange. These pictures will keep scrolling as I talk a little bit. In order to do what I do, you have to understand what causes waste in the building industry. Our housing has become a commodity, and I'll talk a little bit about that. But the first cause of waste is probably even buried in our DNA. Human beings have a need for maintaining consistency of the apperceptive mass. What does that mean? What it means is, for every perception we have, it needs to tally with the one like it before, or we don't have continuity, and we become a little bit disoriented. So I can show you an object you've never seen before. Oh, that's a cell phone. But you've never seen this one before. What you're doing is sizing up the pattern of structural features, and then you go through your databanks: Cell phone. Oh! That's a cell phone. If I took a bite out of it, you'd go, "Wait a second. (Laughter) "That's not a cell phone. That's one of those new chocolate cell phones." (Laughter) You'd have to start a new category, right between cell phones and chocolate. (Laughter) That's how we process information. You translate that to the building industry. If we have a wall of windowpanes and one pane is cracked, we go, "Oh, dear. That's cracked. Let's repair it. Let's take it out and throw it away so nobody can use it and put a new one in." Because that's what you do with a cracked pane. Never mind that it doesn't affect our lives at all. It only rattles that expected pattern and unity of structural features. However, if we took a small hammer, and we added cracks to all the other windows — (Laughter) then we have a pattern. Because Gestalt psychology emphasizes recognition of pattern over parts that comprise a pattern. We'll go, "Ooh, that's nice." So, that serves me every day. Repetition creates pattern. If I have 100 of these, 100 of those, it makes no difference what these and those are. If I can repeat anything, I have the possibility of a pattern, from hickory nuts and chicken eggs, shards of glass, branches. It doesn't make any difference. That causes a lot of waste in the building industry. The second cause is, Friedrich Nietzsche, along about 1885, wrote a book titled "The Birth of Tragedy." And in there, he said cultures tend to swing between one of two perspectives: on the one hand, we have an Apollonian perspective, which is very crisp and premeditated and intellectualized and perfect. On the other end of the spectrum, we have a Dionysian perspective, which is more given to the passions and intuition, tolerant of organic texture and human gesture. So the way the Apollonian personality takes a picture or hangs a picture is, they'll get out a transit and a laser level and a micrometer. "OK, honey. A thousandth of an inch to the left. That's where we want the picture. Right. Perfect!" Predicated on plumb level, square and centered. The Dionysian personality takes the picture and goes: (Laughter) That's the difference. I feature blemish. I feature organic process. Dead center John Dewey. Apollonian mindset creates mountains of waste. If something isn't perfect, if it doesn't line up with that premeditated model? Dumpster. "Oops. Scratch. Dumpster." "Oops" this, "oops" that. Landfill, landfill, landfill. The third thing is arguably — The Industrial Revolution started in the Renaissance with the rise of humanism, then got a little jump start along about the French Revolution. By the middle of the 19th century, it's in full flower. And we have dumaflaches and gizmos and contraptions that will do anything that we, up to that point, had to do by hand. So now we have standardized materials. Well, trees don't grow two inches by four inches, eight, ten and twelve feet tall. (Laughter) We create mountains of waste. And they're doing a pretty good job there in the forest, working all the byproduct of their industry — with OSB and particle board and so forth and so on — but it does no good to be responsible at the point of harvest in the forest if consumers are wasting the harvest at the point of consumption. And that's what's happening. And so if something isn't standard, "Oops, dumpster." "Oops" this. "Oops, warped." If you buy a two-by-four and it's not straight, you can take it back. "Oh, I'm so sorry, sir. We'll get you a straight one." Well, I feature all those warped things because repetition creates pattern, and it's from a Dionysian perspective. The fourth thing is labor is disproportionately more expensive than materials. Well, that's just a myth. And there's a story: Jim Tulles, one of the guys I trained — I said, "Jim, it's time now. I got a job for you as a foreman on a framing crew. Time for you to go." "Dan, I just don't think I'm ready." "Jim, now it's time. You're the down — oh!" So we hired on. And he was out there with a tape measure, going through the trash heap, looking for header material, or the board that goes over a door, thinking he'd impress his boss — that's how we taught him to do it. The superintendent walked up and said, "What are you doing?" "Oh, just looking for header material," waiting for that kudos. He said, "I'm not paying you to go through the trash. Get back to work." And Jim had the wherewithal to say, "You know, if you were paying me 300 dollars an hour, I can see how you might say that. But right now, I'm saving you five dollars a minute. Do the math." (Laughter) "Good call, Tulles. From now on, you guys hit this pile first." And the irony is that he wasn't very good at math. (Laughter) But once in a while, you get access to the control room, and then you can kind of mess with the dials. And that's what happened there. The fifth thing is that maybe, after 2,500 years, Plato is still having his way with us in his notion of perfect forms. He said that we have in our noggin the perfect idea of what we want, and we force environmental resources to accommodate that. So we all have in our head the perfect house, the American dream, which is a house, the dream house. The problem is we can't afford it. So we have the American dream look-alike, which is a mobile home. Now there's a blight on the planet. (Laughter) It's a chattel mortgage, just like furniture, just like a car. You write the check, and instantly, it depreciates 30 percent. After a year, you can't get insurance on everything you have in it, only on 70 percent. Wired with 14-Gauge wire, typically. Nothing wrong with that, unless you ask it to do what 12-Gauge wire's supposed to do, and that's what happens. It out-gasses formaldehyde — so much so that there is a federal law in place to warn new mobile home buyers of the formaldehyde atmosphere danger. Are we just being numbingly stupid? The walls are this thick. The whole thing has the structural value of corn. (Laughter) "So ... I thought Palm Harbor Village was over there." "No, no. We had a wind last night. It's gone now." (Laughter) Then when they degrade, what do you do with them? Now, all that — that Apollonian, Platonic model — is what the building industry is predicated on, and there are a number of things that exacerbate that. One is that all the professionals, all the tradesmen, vendors, inspectors, engineers, architects all think like this. And then it works its way back to the consumer, who demands the same model. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. We can't get out of it. Then here come the marketeers and the advertisers. "Woo. Woo-hoo." We buy stuff we didn't know we needed. All we have to do is look at what one company did with carbonated prune juice. How disgusting. (Laughter) But you know what they did? They hooked a metaphor into it and said, "I drink Dr. Pepper ..." And pretty soon, we're swilling that stuff by the lake-ful, by the billions of gallons. It doesn't even have real prunes! Doesn't even keep you regular. (Laughter) My oh my, that makes it worse. And we get sucked into that faster than anything. Then, a man named Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a book titled "Being and Nothingness." It's a pretty quick read. You can snap through it in maybe — (Laughter) maybe two years, if you read eight hours a day. In there, he talked about the divided self. He said human beings act differently when they know they're alone than when they know somebody else is around. So if I'm eating spaghetti, and I know I'm alone, I can eat like a backhoe. I can wipe my mouth on my sleeve, napkin on the table, chew with my mouth open, make little noises, scratch wherever I want. (Laughter) But as soon as you walk in, I go, "Oops! Lil' spaghetti sauce there." Napkin in my lap, half-bites, chew with my mouth closed, no scratching. Now, what I'm doing is fulfilling your expectations of how I should live my life. I feel that expectation, and so I accommodate it, and I'm living my life according to what you expect me to do. That happens in the building industry as well. That's why all subdivisions look the same. Sometimes, we even have these formalized cultural expectations. I'll bet all your shoes match. Sure enough, we all buy into that ... (Laughter) And with gated communities, we have a formalized expectation, with a homeowners' association. Sometimes those guys are Nazis, my oh my. That exacerbates and continues this model. The last thing is gregariousness. Human beings are a social species. We like to hang together in groups, just like wildebeests, just like lions. Wildebeests don't hang with lions, because lions eat wildebeests. Human beings are like that. We do what that group does that we're trying to identify with. You see this in junior high a lot. Those kids, they'll work all summer long — kill themselves — so that they can afford one pair of designer jeans. So along about September, they can stride in and go, "I'm important today. See? Don't touch my designer jeans! I see you don't have designer jeans. You're not one of the beautiful — See, I'm one of the beautiful people. See my jeans?" Right there is reason enough to have uniforms. And so that happens in the building industry as well. We have confused Maslow's hierarchy of needs, just a little bit. On the bottom tier, we have basic needs: shelter, clothing, food, water, mating and so forth. Second: security. Third: relationships. Fourth: status, self-esteem — that is, vanity — and we're taking vanity and shoving it down here. And so we end up with vain decisions, and we can't even afford our mortgage. We can't afford to eat anything except beans; that is, our housing has become a commodity. And it takes a little bit of nerve to dive into those primal, terrifying parts of ourselves and make our own decisions and not make our housing a commodity, but make it something that bubbles up from seminal sources. That takes a little bit of nerve, and, darn it, once in a while, you fail. But that's okay. If failure destroys you, then you can't do this. I fail all the time, every day, and I've had some whopping failures, I promise — big, public, humiliating, embarrassing failures. Everybody points and laughs, and they say, "He tried it a fifth time, and it still didn't work! What a moron!" Early on, contractors come by and say, "Dan, you're a cute little bunny, but you know, this just isn't going to work. What don't you do this? Why don't you do that?" And your instinct is to say, "Well, why don't you suck an egg?" (Laughter) But you don't say that, because they're the guys you're targeting. And so what we've done — and this isn't just in housing; it's in clothing and food and our transportation needs, our energy — we sprawl just a little bit. And when I get a little bit of press, I hear from people all over the world. And we may have invented excess, but the problem of waste is worldwide. We're in trouble. And I don't wear ammo belts crisscrossing my chest and a red bandana. But we're clearly in trouble. And what we need to do is reconnect with those really primal parts of ourselves and make some decisions and say, "You know, I think I would like to put CDs across the wall there. What do you think, honey?" If it doesn't work, take it down. What we need to do is reconnect with who we really are, and that's thrilling indeed. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
What's wrong with our food system | {0: "Birke Baehr wants us to know how our food is made, where it comes from, and what's in it. At age 11, he's planning a career as an organic farmer."} | TEDxNextGenerationAsheville | Hello. My name is Birke Baehr, and I'm 11 years old. I came here today to talk about what's wrong with our food system. First of all, I would like to say that I'm really amazed at how easily kids are led to believe all the marketing and advertising on TV, at public schools and pretty much everywhere else you look. It seems to me like corporations are always trying to get kids, like me, to get their parents to buy stuff that really isn't good for us or the planet. Little kids, especially, are attracted by colorful packaging and plastic toys. I must admit, I used to be one of them. I also used to think that all of our food came from these happy, little farms where pigs rolled in mud and cows grazed on grass all day. What I discovered was this is not true. I began to look into this stuff on the Internet, in books and in documentary films, in my travels with my family. I discovered the dark side of the industrialized food system. First, there's genetically engineered seeds and organisms. That is when a seed is manipulated in a laboratory to do something not intended by nature — like taking the DNA of a fish and putting it into the DNA of a tomato. Yuck. Don't get me wrong, I like fish and tomatoes, but this is just creepy. (Laughter) The seeds are then planted, then grown. The food they produce have been proven to cause cancer and other problems in lab animals, and people have been eating food produced this way since the 1990s. And most folks don't even know they exist. Did you know rats that ate genetically engineered corn had developed signs of liver and kidney toxicity? These include kidney inflammation and lesions and increased kidney weight. Yet almost all the corn we eat has been altered genetically in some way. And let me tell you, corn is in everything. And don't even get me started on the Confined Animal Feeding Operations called CAFOS. (Laughter) Conventional farmers use chemical fertilizers made from fossil fuels that they mix with the dirt to make plants grow. They do this because they've stripped the soil from all nutrients from growing the same crop over and over again. Next, more harmful chemicals are sprayed on fruits and vegetables, like pesticides and herbicides, to kill weeds and bugs. When it rains, these chemicals seep into the ground, or run off into our waterways, poisoning our water too. Then they irradiate our food, trying to make it last longer, so it can travel thousands of miles from where it's grown to the supermarkets. So I ask myself, how can I change? How can I change these things? This is what I found out. I discovered that there's a movement for a better way. Now a while back, I wanted to be an NFL football player. I decided that I'd rather be an organic farmer instead. (Applause) Thank you. And that way I can have a greater impact on the world. This man, Joel Salatin, they call him a lunatic farmer because he grows against the system. Since I'm home-schooled, I went to go hear him speak one day. This man, this "lunatic farmer," doesn't use any pesticides, herbicides, or genetically modified seeds. And so for that, he's called crazy by the system. I want you to know that we can all make a difference by making different choices, by buying our food directly from local farmers, or our neighbors who we know in real life. Some people say organic or local food is more expensive, but is it really? With all these things I've been learning about the food system, it seems to me that we can either pay the farmer, or we can pay the hospital. (Applause) Now I know definitely which one I would choose. I want you to know that there are farms out there — like Bill Keener in Sequatchie Cove Farm in Tennessee — whose cows do eat grass and whose pigs do roll in the mud, just like I thought. Sometimes I go to Bill's farm and volunteer, so I can see up close and personal where the meat I eat comes from. I want you to know that I believe kids will eat fresh vegetables and good food if they know more about it and where it really comes from. I want you to know that there are farmers' markets in every community popping up. I want you to know that me, my brother and sister actually like eating baked kale chips. I try to share this everywhere I go. Not too long ago, my uncle said that he offered my six-year-old cousin cereal. He asked him if he wanted organic Toasted O's or the sugarcoated flakes — you know, the one with the big striped cartoon character on the front. My little cousin told his dad that he would rather have the organic Toasted O's cereal because Birke said he shouldn't eat sparkly cereal. And that, my friends, is how we can make a difference one kid at a time. So next time you're at the grocery store, think local, choose organic, know your farmer and know your food. Thank you. (Applause) |
The walk from "no" to "yes" | {0: 'William Ury is a mediator, writer and speaker, working with conflicts ranging from family feuds to boardroom battles to ethnic wars. He\'s the author of "Getting to Yes."'} | TEDxMidwest | Well, the subject of difficult negotiation reminds me of one of my favorite stories from the Middle East, of a man who left to his three sons, 17 camels. To the first son, he left half the camels; to the second son, he left a third of the camels; and to the youngest son, he left a ninth of the camels. The three sons got into a negotiation — 17 doesn't divide by two. It doesn't divide by three. It doesn't divide by nine. Brotherly tempers started to get strained. Finally, in desperation, they went and they consulted a wise old woman. The wise old woman thought about their problem for a long time, and finally she came back and said, "Well, I don't know if I can help you, but at least, if you want, you can have my camel." So then, they had 18 camels. The first son took his half — half of 18 is nine. The second son took his third — a third of 18 is six. The youngest son took his ninth — a ninth of 18 is two. You get 17. They had one camel left over. They gave it back to the wise old woman. (Laughter) Now, if you think about that story for a moment, I think it resembles a lot of the difficult negotiations we get involved in. They start off like 17 camels, no way to resolve it. Somehow, what we need to do is step back from those situations, like that wise old woman, look at the situation through fresh eyes and come up with an 18th camel. Finding that 18th camel in the world's conflicts has been my life passion. I basically see humanity a bit like those three brothers. We're all one family. We know that scientifically, thanks to the communications revolution, all the tribes on the planet — all 15,000 tribes — are in touch with each other. And it's a big family reunion. And yet, like many family reunions, it's not all peace and light. There's a lot of conflict, and the question is: How do we deal with our differences? How do we deal with our deepest differences, given the human propensity for conflict and the human genius at devising weapons of enormous destruction? That's the question. As I've spent the last better part of three decades, almost four, traveling the world, trying to work, getting involved in conflicts ranging from Yugoslavia to the Middle East to Chechnya to Venezuela — some of the most difficult conflicts on the face of the planet — I've been asking myself that question. And I think I've found, in some ways, what is the secret to peace. It's actually surprisingly simple. It's not easy, but it's simple. It's not even new. It may be one of our most ancient human heritages. The secret to peace is us. It's us who act as a surrounding community around any conflict, who can play a constructive role. Let me give you just a story, an example. About 20 years ago, I was in South Africa, working with the parties in that conflict, and I had an extra month, so I spent some time living with several groups of San Bushmen. I was curious about them, about the way in which they resolve conflict. Because, after all, within living memory, they were hunters and gatherers, living pretty much like our ancestors lived for maybe 99 percent of the human story. And all the men have these poison arrows that they use for hunting — absolutely fatal. So how do they deal with their differences? Well, what I learned is, whenever tempers rise in those communities, someone goes and hides the poison arrows out in the bush, and then everyone sits around in a circle like this, and they sit and they talk and they talk. It may take two days, three days, four days, but they don't rest until they find a resolution or better yet — a reconciliation. And if tempers are still too high, then they send someone off to visit some relatives, as a cooling-off period. Well, that system is, I think, probably the system that kept us alive to this point, given our human tendencies. That system, I call "the third side." Because if you think about it, normally when we think of conflict, when we describe it, there's always two sides — it's Arabs versus Israelis, labor versus management, husband versus wife, Republicans versus Democrats. But what we don't often see is that there's always a third side, and the third side of the conflict is us, it's the surrounding community, it's the friends, the allies, the family members, the neighbors. And we can play an incredibly constructive role. Perhaps the most fundamental way in which the third side can help is to remind the parties of what's really at stake. For the sake of the kids, for the sake of the family, for the sake of the community, for the sake of the future, let's stop fighting for a moment and start talking. Because, the thing is, when we're involved in conflict, it's very easy to lose perspective. It's very easy to react. Human beings — we're reaction machines. And as the saying goes, when angry, you will make the best speech you will ever regret. (Laughter) And so the third side reminds us of that. The third side helps us go to the balcony, which is a metaphor for a place of perspective, where we can keep our eyes on the prize. Let me tell you a little story from my own negotiating experience. Some years ago, I was involved as a facilitator in some very tough talks between the leaders of Russia and the leaders of Chechnya. There was a war going on, as you know. And we met in the Hague, in the Peace Palace, in the same room where the Yugoslav war-crimes tribunal was taking place. And the talks got off to a rather rocky start when the vice president of Chechnya began by pointing at the Russians and said, "You should stay right here in your seats, because you're going to be on trial for war crimes." And then he turned to me and said, "You're an American. Look at what you Americans are doing in Puerto Rico." And my mind started racing, "Puerto Rico? What do I know about Puerto Rico?" I started reacting. (Laughter) But then, I tried to remember to go to the balcony. And then when he paused and everyone looked at me for a response, from a balcony perspective, I was able to thank him for his remarks and say, "I appreciate your criticism of my country and I take it as a sign that we're among friends and can speak candidly to one another." (Laughter) "And what we're here to do is not to talk about Puerto Rico or the past. We're here to see if we can figure out a way to stop the suffering and the bloodshed in Chechnya." The conversation got back on track. That's the role of the third side, to help the parties go to the balcony. Now let me take you, for a moment, to what's widely regarded as the world's most difficult conflict, or the most impossible conflict, the Middle East. Question is: where's the third side there? How could we possibly go to the balcony? Now, I don't pretend to have an answer to the Middle East conflict, but I think I've got a first step — literally, a first step — something that any one of us could do as third-siders. Let me just ask you one question first. How many of you in the last years have ever found yourself worrying about the Middle East and wondering what anyone could do? Just out of curiosity, how many of you? OK, so the great majority of us. And here, it's so far away. Why do we pay so much attention to this conflict? Is it the number of deaths? There are a hundred times more people who die in a conflict in Africa than in the Middle East. No, it's because of the story, because we feel personally involved in that story. Whether we're Christians, Muslims or Jews, religious or non-religious, we feel we have a personal stake in it. Stories matter; as an anthropologist, I know that. Stories are what we use to transmit knowledge. They give meaning to our lives. That's what we tell here at TED, we tell stories. Stories are the key. And so my question is — yes, let's try and resolve the politics there in the Middle East, but let's also take a look at the story. Let's try to get at the root of what it's all about. Let's see if we can apply the third side to it. What would that mean? What is the story there? Now, as anthropologists, we know that every culture has an origin story. What's the origin story of the Middle East? In a phrase, it's: Four thousand years ago, a man and his family walked across the Middle East, and the world has never been the same since. That man, of course, was Abraham. And what he stood for was unity, the unity of the family; he's the father of us all. But it's not just what he stood for, it's what his message was. His basic message was unity too, the interconnectedness of it all, the unity of it all. And his basic value was respect, was kindness toward strangers. That's what he's known for, his hospitality. So in that sense, he's the symbolic third side of the Middle East. He's the one who reminds us that we're all part of a greater whole. Now, think about that for a moment. Today, we face the scourge of terrorism. What is terrorism? Terrorism is basically taking an innocent stranger and treating them as an enemy whom you kill in order to create fear. What's the opposite of terrorism? It's taking an innocent stranger and treating them as a friend whom you welcome into your home, in order to sow and create understanding or respect, or love. So what if, then, you took the story of Abraham, which is a third-side story, what if that could be — because Abraham stands for hospitality — what if that could be an antidote to terrorism? What if that could be a vaccine against religious intolerance? How would you bring that story to life? Now, it's not enough just to tell a story. That's powerful, but people need to experience the story. They need to be able to live the story. How would you do that? And that was my thinking of how would you do that. And that's what comes to the first step here. Because the simple way to do that is: you go for a walk. You go for a walk in the footsteps of Abraham. You retrace the footsteps of Abraham. Because walking has a real power. You know, as an anthropologist, walking is what made us human. It's funny — when you walk, you walk side-by-side, in the same common direction. Now if I were to come to you face-to-face and come this close to you, you would feel threatened. But if I walk shoulder-to-shoulder, even touching shoulders, it's no problem. Who fights while they walk? That's why in negotiations, often, when things get tough, people go for walks in the woods. So the idea came to me of, what about inspiring a path, a route — think the Silk Route, think the Appalachian Trail — that followed in the footsteps of Abraham? People said, "That's crazy. You can't. You can't retrace the footsteps of Abraham — it's too insecure, you've got to cross all these borders, it goes across 10 different countries in the Middle East, because it unites them all." And so we studied the idea at Harvard. We did our due diligence. And then a few years ago, a group of us, about 25 of us from 10 different countries, decided to see if we could retrace the footsteps of Abraham, going from his initial birthplace in the city of Urfa in Southern Turkey, Northern Mesopotamia. And we then took a bus and took some walks and went to Harran, where, in the Bible, he sets off on his journey. Then we crossed the border into Syria, went to Aleppo, which, turns out, is named after Abraham. We went to Damascus, which has a long history associated with Abraham. We then came to Northern Jordan, to Jerusalem — which is all about Abraham — to Bethlehem, and finally, to the place where he's buried, in Hebron. So effectively, we went from womb to tomb. We showed it could be done. It was an amazing journey. Let me ask you a question. How many of you have had the experience of being in a strange neighborhood or strange land, and a total stranger, perfect stranger, comes up to you and shows you some kindness — maybe invites you into their home, gives you a drink, gives you a coffee, gives you a meal? How many of you have ever had that experience? That's the essence of the Abraham Path. That's what you discover as you go into these villages in the Middle East where you expect hostility, and you get the most amazing hospitality, all associated with Abraham: "In the name of Father Ibrahim, let me offer you some food." So what we discovered is that Abraham is not just a figure out of a book for those people; he's alive, he's a living presence. And to make a long story short, in the last couple of years now, thousands of people have begun to walk parts of the path of Abraham in the Middle East, enjoying the hospitality of the people there. They've begun to walk in Israel and Palestine, in Jordan, in Turkey, in Syria. It's an amazing experience. Men, women, young people, old people — more women than men, actually, interestingly. For those who can't walk, who are unable to get there right now, people started to organize walks in cities, in their own communities. In Cincinnati, for instance, they organized a walk from a church to a mosque to a synagogue and all had an Abrahamic meal together. It was Abraham Path Day. In São Paulo, Brazil, it's become an annual event for thousands of people to run in a virtual Abraham Path Run, uniting the different communities. The media love it; they really adore it. They lavish attention on it because it's visual and it spreads the idea, this idea of Abrahamic hospitality, of kindness towards strangers. And just a couple weeks ago, there was an NPR story on it. Last month, there was a piece in the Manchester Guardian about it, two whole pages. And they quoted a villager who said, "This walk connects us to the world." He said, "It was like a light that went on in our lives — it brought us hope." And so that's what it's about. But it's not just about psychology; it's about economics. Because as people walk, they spend money. And this woman right here, Um Ahmad, is a woman who lives on the path in Northern Jordan. She's desperately poor. She's partially blind, her husband can't work, she's got seven kids. But what she can do is cook. And so she's begun to cook for some groups of walkers who come through the village and have a meal in her home. They sit on the floor — she doesn't even have a tablecloth. She makes the most delicious food, that's fresh from the herbs in the surrounding countryside. And so more and more walkers have come, and lately she's begun to earn an income to support her family. And so she told our team there, she said, "You have made me visible in a village where people were once ashamed to look at me." That's the potential of the Abraham Path. There are literally hundreds of those kinds of communities across the Middle East, across the path. The potential is basically to change the game. And to change the game, you have to change the frame, the way we see things — to change the frame from hostility to hospitality, from terrorism to tourism. And in that sense, the Abraham Path is a game-changer. Let me just show you one thing. I have a little acorn here that I picked up while I was walking on the path earlier this year. Now, the acorn is associated with the oak tree, of course — grows into an oak tree, which is associated with Abraham. The path right now is like an acorn; it's still in its early phase. What would the oak tree look like? When I think back to my childhood, a good part of which I spent, after being born here in Chicago, I spent in Europe. If you had been in the ruins of, say, London in 1945, or Berlin, and you had said, "Sixty years from now, this is going to be the most peaceful, prosperous part of the planet," people would have thought you were certifiably insane. But they did it, thanks to a common identity, Europe, and a common economy. So my question is, if it can be done in Europe, why not in the Middle East? Why not, thanks to a common identity, which is the story of Abraham, and thanks to a common economy that would be based, in good part, on tourism? So let me conclude, then, by saying that in the last 35 years, as I've worked in some of the most dangerous, difficult and intractable conflicts around the planet, I have yet to see one conflict that I felt could not be transformed. It's not easy, of course. But it's possible. It was done in South Africa. It was done in Northern Ireland. It could be done anywhere. It simply depends on us. It depends on us taking the third side. So let me invite you to consider taking the third side, even as a very small step. We're about to take a break in a moment. Just go up to someone who's from a different culture, a different country, a different ethnicity — some difference — and engage them in a conversation. Listen to them. That's a third-side act. That's walking Abraham's Path. After a TED Talk, why not a TED Walk? (Laughter) So let me just leave you with three things. One is, the secret to peace is the third side. The third side is us. Each of us, with a single step, can take the world, can bring the world a step closer to peace. There's an old African proverb that goes: "When spiderwebs unite, they can halt even the lion." If we're able to unite our third-side webs of peace, we can even halt the lion of war. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Why not eat insects? | {0: 'Marcel Dicke wants us to reconsider our relationship with insects, promoting bugs as a tasty -- and ecologically sound -- alternative to meat in an increasingly hungry world.'} | TEDGlobal 2010 | Okay, I'm going to show you again something about our diets. And I would like to know what the audience is, and so who of you ever ate insects? That's quite a lot. (Laughter) But still, you're not representing the overall population of the Earth. (Laughter) Because there's 80 percent out there that really eats insects. But this is quite good. Why not eat insects? Well first, what are insects? Insects are animals that walk around on six legs. And here you see just a selection. There's six million species of insects on this planet, six million species. There's a few hundreds of mammals — six million species of insects. In fact, if we count all the individual organisms, we would come at much larger numbers. In fact, of all animals on Earth, of all animal species, 80 percent walks on six legs. But if we would count all the individuals, and we take an average weight of them, it would amount to something like 200 to 2,000 kilograms for each of you and me on Earth. That means that in terms of biomass, insects are more abundant than we are, and we're not on a planet of men, but we're on a planet of insects. Insects are not only there in nature, but they also are involved in our economy, usually without us knowing. There was an estimation, a conservative estimation, a couple of years ago that the U.S. economy benefited by 57 billion dollars per year. It's a number — very large — a contribution to the economy of the United States for free. And so I looked up what the economy was paying for the war in Iraq in the same year. It was 80 billion U.S. dollars. Well we know that that was not a cheap war. So insects, just for free, contribute to the economy of the United States with about the same order of magnitude, just for free, without everyone knowing. And not only in the States, but in any country, in any economy. What do they do? They remove dung, they pollinate our crops. A third of all the fruits that we eat are all a result of insects taking care of the reproduction of plants. They control pests, and they're food for animals. They're at the start of food chains. Small animals eat insects. Even larger animals eat insects. But the small animals that eat insects are being eaten by larger animals, still larger animals. And at the end of the food chain, we are eating them as well. There's quite a lot of people that are eating insects. And here you see me in a small, provincial town in China, Lijiang — about two million inhabitants. If you go out for dinner, like in a fish restaurant, where you can select which fish you want to eat, you can select which insects you would like to eat. And they prepare it in a wonderful way. And here you see me enjoying a meal with caterpillars, locusts, bee pupae — delicacies. And you can eat something new everyday. There's more than 1,000 species of insects that are being eaten all around the globe. That's quite a bit more than just a few mammals that we're eating, like a cow or a pig or a sheep. More than 1,000 species — an enormous variety. And now you may think, okay, in this provincial town in China they're doing that, but not us. Well we've seen already that quite some of you already ate insects maybe occasionally, but I can tell you that every one of you is eating insects, without any exception. You're eating at least 500 grams per year. What are you eating? Tomato soup, peanut butter, chocolate, noodles — any processed food that you're eating contains insects, because insects are here all around us, and when they're out there in nature they're also in our crops. Some fruits get some insect damage. Those are the fruits, if they're tomato, that go to the tomato soup. If they don't have any damage, they go to the grocery. And that's your view of a tomato. But there's tomatoes that end up in a soup, and as long as they meet the requirements of the food agency, there can be all kinds of things in there, no problem. In fact, why would we put these balls in the soup, there's meat in there anyway? (Laughter) In fact, all our processed foods contain more proteins than we would be aware of. So anything is a good protein source already. Now you may say, "Okay, so we're eating 500 grams just by accident." We're even doing this on purpose. In a lot of food items that we have — I have only two items here on the slide — pink cookies or surimi sticks or, if you like, Campari — a lot of our food products that are of a red color are dyed with a natural dye. The surimi sticks [of] crabmeat, or is being sold as crab meat, is white fish that's being dyed with cochineal. Cochineal is a product of an insect that lives off these cacti. It's being produced in large amounts, 150 to 180 metric tons per year in the Canary Islands in Peru, and it's big business. One gram of cochineal costs about 30 euros. One gram of gold is 30 euros. So it's a very precious thing that we're using to dye our foods. Now the situation in the world is going to change for you and me, for everyone on this Earth. The human population is growing very rapidly and is growing exponentially. Where, at the moment, we have something between six and seven billion people, it will grow to about nine billion in 2050. That means that we have a lot more mouths to feed, and this is something that worries more and more people. There was an FAO conference last October that was completely devoted to this. How are we going to feed this world? And if you look at the figures up there, it says that we have a third more mouths to feed, but we need an agricultural production increase of 70 percent. And that's especially because this world population is increasing, and it's increasing, not only in numbers, but we're also getting wealthier, and anyone that gets wealthier starts to eat more and also starts to eat more meat. And meat, in fact, is something that costs a lot of our agricultural production. Our diet consists, [in] some part, of animal proteins, and at the moment, most of us here get it from livestock, from fish, from game. And we eat quite a lot of it. In the developed world it's on average 80 kilograms per person per year, which goes up to 120 in the United States and a bit lower in some other countries, but on average 80 kilograms per person per year. In the developing world it's much lower. It's 25 kilograms per person per year. But it's increasing enormously. In China in the last 20 years, it increased from 20 to 50, and it's still increasing. So if a third of the world population is going to increase its meat consumption from 25 to 80 on average, and a third of the world population is living in China and in India, we're having an enormous demand on meat. And of course, we are not there to say that's only for us, it's not for them. They have the same share that we have. Now to start with, I should say that we are eating way too much meat in the Western world. We could do with much, much less — and I know, I've been a vegetarian for a long time, and you can easily do without anything. You'll get proteins in any kind of food anyway. But then there's a lot of problems that come with meat production, and we're being faced with that more and more often. The first problem that we're facing is human health. Pigs are quite like us. They're even models in medicine, and we can even transplant organs from a pig to a human. That means that pigs also share diseases with us. And a pig disease, a pig virus, and a human virus can both proliferate, and because of their kind of reproduction, they can combine and produce a new virus. This has happened in the Netherlands in the 1990s during the classical swine fever outbreak. You get a new disease that can be deadly. We eat insects — they're so distantly related from us that this doesn't happen. So that's one point for insects. (Laughter) And there's the conversion factor. You take 10 kilograms of feed, you can get one kilogram of beef, but you can get nine kilograms of locust meat. So if you would be an entrepreneur, what would you do? With 10 kilograms of input, you can get either one or nine kg. of output. So far we're taking the one, or up to five kilograms of output. We're not taking the bonus yet. We're not taking the nine kilograms of output yet. So that's two points for insects. (Laughter) And there's the environment. If we take 10 kilograms of food — (Laughter) and it results in one kilogram of beef, the other nine kilograms are waste, and a lot of that is manure. If you produce insects, you have less manure per kilogram of meat that you produce. So less waste. Furthermore, per kilogram of manure, you have much, much less ammonia and fewer greenhouse gases when you have insect manure than when you have cow manure. So you have less waste, and the waste that you have is not as environmental malign as it is with cow dung. So that's three points for insects. (Laughter) Now there's a big "if," of course, and it is if insects produce meat that is of good quality. Well there have been all kinds of analyses and in terms of protein, or fat, or vitamins, it's very good. In fact, it's comparable to anything we eat as meat at the moment. And even in terms of calories, it is very good. One kilogram of grasshoppers has the same amount of calories as 10 hot dogs, or six Big Macs. So that's four points for insects. (Laughter) I can go on, and I could make many more points for insects, but time doesn't allow this. So the question is, why not eat insects? I gave you at least four arguments in favor. We'll have to. Even if you don't like it, you'll have to get used to this because at the moment, 70 percent of all our agricultural land is being used to produce livestock. That's not only the land where the livestock is walking and feeding, but it's also other areas where the feed is being produced and being transported. We can increase it a bit at the expense of rainforests, but there's a limitation very soon. And if you remember that we need to increase agricultural production by 70 percent, we're not going to make it that way. We could much better change from meat, from beef, to insects. And then 80 percent of the world already eats insects, so we are just a minority — in a country like the U.K., the USA, the Netherlands, anywhere. On the left-hand side, you see a market in Laos where they have abundantly present all kinds of insects that you choose for dinner for the night. On the right-hand side you see a grasshopper. So people there are eating them, not because they're hungry, but because they think it's a delicacy. It's just very good food. You can vary enormously. It has many benefits. In fact, we have delicacy that's very much like this grasshopper: shrimps, a delicacy being sold at a high price. Who wouldn't like to eat a shrimp? There are a few people who don't like shrimp, but shrimp, or crabs, or crayfish, are very closely related. They are delicacies. In fact, a locust is a "shrimp" of the land, and it would make very good into our diet. So why are we not eating insects yet? Well that's just a matter of mindset. We're not used to it, and we see insects as these organisms that are very different from us. That's why we're changing the perception of insects. And I'm working very hard with my colleague, Arnold van Huis, in telling people what insects are, what magnificent things they are, what magnificent jobs they do in nature. And in fact, without insects, we would not be here in this room, because if the insects die out, we will soon die out as well. If we die out, the insects will continue very happily. (Laughter) So we have to get used to the idea of eating insects. And some might think, well they're not yet available. Well they are. There are entrepreneurs in the Netherlands that produce them, and one of them is here in the audience, Marian Peeters, who's in the picture. I predict that later this year, you'll get them in the supermarkets — not visible, but as animal protein in the food. And maybe by 2020, you'll buy them just knowing that this is an insect that you're going to eat. And they're being made in the most wonderful ways. A Dutch chocolate maker. (Music) (Applause) So there's even a lot of design to it. (Laughter) Well in the Netherlands, we have an innovative Minister of Agriculture, and she puts the insects on the menu in her restaurant in her ministry. And when she got all the Ministers of Agriculture of the E.U. over to the Hague recently, she went to a high-class restaurant, and they ate insects all together. It's not something that is a hobby of mine. It's really taken off the ground. So why not eat insects? You should try it yourself. A couple of years ago, we had 1,750 people all together in a square in Wageningen town, and they ate insects at the same moment, and this was still big, big news. I think soon it will not be big news anymore when we all eat insects, because it's just a normal way of doing. So you can try it yourself today, and I would say, enjoy. And I'm going to show to Bruno some first tries, and he can have the first bite. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Look at them first. Look at them first. Marcel Dicke: It's all protein. BG: That's exactly the same [one] you saw in the video actually. And it looks delicious. They just make it [with] nuts or something. MD: Thank you. (Applause) |
How I taught rats to sniff out land mines | {0: 'The founder of Apopo, Bart Weet\xadjens, is train\xading rats to detect landmine explosives in minute amounts.'} | TEDxRotterdam 2010 | I'm here today to share with you an extraordinary journey - extraordinarily rewarding journey, actually - which brought me into training rats to save human lives by detecting landmines and tuberculosis. As a child, I had two passions. One was a passion for rodents. I had all kinds of rats, mice, hamsters, gerbils, squirrels. You name it, I bred it, and I sold them to pet shops. (Laughter) I also had a passion for Africa. Growing up in a multicultural environment, we had African students in the house, and I learned about their stories, so different backgrounds, dependency on imported know-how, goods, services, exuberant cultural diversity. Africa was truly fascinating for me. I became an industrial engineer, engineer in product development, and I focused on appropriate detection technologies, actually the first appropriate technologies for developing countries. I started working in the industry, but I wasn't really happy to contribute to a material consumer society in a linear, extracting and manufacturing mode. I quit my job to focus on the real world problem: landmines. We're talking '95 now. Princess Diana is announcing on TV that landmines form a structural barrier to any development, which is really true. As long as these devices are there, or there is suspicion of landmines, you can't really enter into the land. Actually, there was an appeal worldwide for new detectors sustainable in the environments where they're needed to produce, which is mainly in the developing world. We chose rats. Why would you choose rats? Because, aren't they vermin? Well, actually rats are, in contrary to what most people think about them, rats are highly sociable creatures. And actually, our product — what you see here. There's a target somewhere here. You see an operator, a trained African with his rats in front who actually are left and right. There, the animal finds a mine. It scratches on the soil. And the animal comes back for a food reward. Very, very simple. Very sustainable in this environment. Here, the animal gets its food reward. And that's how it works. Very, very simple. Now why would you use rats? Rats have been used since the '50s last century, in all kinds of experiments. Rats have more genetic material allocated to olfaction than any other mammal species. They're extremely sensitive to smell. Moreover, they have the mechanisms to map all these smells and to communicate about it. Now how do we communicate with rats? Well don't talk rat, but we have a clicker, a standard method for animal training, which you see there. A clicker, which makes a particular sound with which you can reinforce particular behaviors. First of all, we associate the click sound with a food reward, which is smashed banana and peanuts together in a syringe. Once the animal knows click, food, click, food, click, food — so click is food — we bring it in a cage with a hole, and actually the animal learns to stick the nose in the hole under which a target scent is placed, and to do that for five seconds — five seconds, which is long for a rat. Once the animal knows this, we make the task a bit more difficult. It learns how to find the target smell in a cage with several holes, up to 10 holes. Then the animal learns to walk on a leash in the open and find targets. In the next step, animals learn to find real mines in real minefields. They are tested and accredited according to International Mine Action Standards, just like dogs have to pass a test. This consists of 400 square meters. There's a number of mines placed blindly, and the team of trainer and their rat have to find all the targets. If the animal does that, it gets a license as an accredited animal to be operational in the field — just like dogs, by the way. Maybe one slight difference: we can train rats at a fifth of the price of training the mining dog. This is our team in Mozambique: one Tanzanian trainer, who transfers the skills to these three Mozambican fellows. And you should see the pride in the eyes of these people. They have a skill, which makes them much less dependent on foreign aid. Moreover, this small team together with, of course, you need the heavy vehicles and the manual de-miners to follow-up. But with this small investment in a rat capacity, we have demonstrated in Mozambique that we can reduce the cost-price per square meter up to 60 percent of what is currently normal — two dollars per square meter, we do it at $1.18, and we can still bring that price down. Question of scale. If you can bring in more rats, we can actually make the output even bigger. We have a demonstration site in Mozambique. Eleven African governments have seen that they can become less dependent by using this technology. They have signed the pact for peace and treaty in the Great Lakes region, and they endorse hero rats to clear their common borders of landmines. But let me bring you to a very different problem. And there's about 6,000 people last year that walked on a landmine, but worldwide last year, almost 1.9 million died from tuberculosis as a first cause of infection. Especially in Africa where T.B. and HIV are strongly linked, there is a huge common problem. Microscopy, the standard WHO procedure, reaches from 40 to 60 percent reliability. In Tanzania — the numbers don't lie — 45 percent of people — T.B. patients — get diagnosed with T.B. before they die. It means that, if you have T.B., you have more chance that you won't be detected, but will just die from T.B. secondary infections and so on. And if, however, you are detected very early, diagnosed early, treatment can start, and even in HIV-positives, it makes sense. You can actually cure T.B., even in HIV-positives. So in our common language, Dutch, the name for T.B. is "tering," which, etymologically, refers to the smell of tar. Already the old Chinese and the Greek, Hippocrates, have actually published, documented, that T.B. can be diagnosed based on the volatiles exuding from patients. So what we did is we collected some samples — just as a way of testing — from hospitals, trained rats on them and see if this works, and wonder, well, we can reach 89 percent sensitivity, 86 percent specificity using multiple rats in a row. This is how it works, and really, this is a generic technology. We're talking now explosives, tuberculosis, but can you imagine, you can actually put anything under there. So how does it work? You have a cassette with 10 samples. You put these 10 samples at once in the cage. An animal only needs two hundredths of a second to discriminate the scent, so it goes extremely fast. Here it's already at the third sample. This is a positive sample. It gets a click sound and comes for the food reward. And by doing so, very fast, we can have like a second-line opinion to see which patients are positive, which are negative. Just as an indication, whereas a microscopist can process 40 samples in a day, a rat can process the same amount of samples in seven minutes only. A cage like this — (Applause) A cage like this — provided that you have rats, and we have now currently 25 tuberculosis rats — a cage like this, operating throughout the day, can process 1,680 samples. Can you imagine the potential offspring applications — environmental detection of pollutants in soils, customs applications, detection of illicit goods in containers and so on. But let's stick first to tuberculosis. I just want to briefly highlight, the blue rods are the scores of microscopy only at the five clinics in Dar es Salaam on a population of 500,000 people, where 15,000 reported to get a test done. Microscopy for 1,800 patients. And by just presenting the samples once more to the rats and looping those results back, we were able to increase case detection rates by over 30 percent. Throughout last year, we've been — depending on which intervals you take — we've been consistently increasing case detection rates in five hospitals in Dar es Salaam between 30 and 40 percent. So this is really considerable. Knowing that a missed patient by microscopy infects up to 15 people, healthy people, per year, you can be sure that we have saved lots of lives. At least our hero rats have saved lots of lives. The way forward for us is now to standardize this technology. And there are simple things like, for instance, we have a small laser in the sniffer hole where the animal has to stick for five seconds. So, to standardize this. Also, to standardize the pellets, the food rewards, and to semi-automate this in order to replicate this on a much larger scale and affect the lives of many more people. To conclude, there are also other applications at the horizon. Here is a first prototype of our camera rat, which is a rat with a rat backpack with a camera that can go under rubble to detect for victims after earthquake and so on. This is in a prototype stage. We don't have a working system here yet. To conclude, I would actually like to say, you may think this is about rats, these projects, but in the end it is about people. It is about empowering vulnerable communities to tackle difficult, expensive and dangerous humanitarian detection tasks, and doing that with a local resource, plenty available. So something completely different is to keep on challenging your perception about the resources surrounding you, whether they are environmental, technological, animal, or human. And to respectfully harmonize with them in order to foster a sustainable world. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
A vision for sustainable restaurants | {0: "Arthur Potts Dawson wants us to take responsibility not just for the food we eat, but how we shop for and even dispose of it. And he's showing the way -- with impeccable taste."} | TEDGlobal 2010 | Restaurants and the food industry in general are pretty much the most wasteful industry in the world. For every calorie of food that we consume here in Britain today, 10 calories are taken to produce it. That's a lot. I want to take something rather humble to discuss. I found this in the farmers' market today, and if anybody wants to take it home and mash it later, you're very welcome to. The humble potato — and I've spent a long time, 25 years, preparing these. And it pretty much goes through eight different forms in its lifetime. First of all, it's planted, and that takes energy. It grows and is nurtured. It's then harvested. It's then distributed, and distribution is a massive issue. It's then sold and bought, and it's then delivered to me. I basically take it, prepare it, and then people consume it — hopefully they enjoy it. The last stage is basically waste, and this is is pretty much where everybody disregards it. There are different types of waste. There's a waste of time; there's a waste of space; there's a waste of energy; and there's a waste of waste. And every business I've been working on over the past five years, I'm trying to lower each one of these elements. Okay, so you ask what a sustainable restaurant looks like. Basically a restaurant just like any other. This is the restaurant, Acorn House. Front and back. So let me run you through a few ideas. Floor: sustainable, recyclable. Chairs: recycled and recyclable. Tables: Forestry Commission. This is Norwegian Forestry Commission wood. This bench, although it was uncomfortable for my mom — she didn't like sitting on it, so she went and bought these cushions for me from a local jumble sale — reusing, a job that was pretty good. I hate waste, especially walls. If they're not working, put a shelf on it, which I did, and that shows all the customers my products. The whole business is run on sustainable energy. This is powered by wind. All of the lights are daylight bulbs. Paint is all low-volume chemical, which is very important when you're working in the room all the time. I was experimenting with these — I don't know if you can see it — but there's a work surface there. And that's a plastic polymer. And I was thinking, well I'm trying to think nature, nature, nature. But I thought, no, no, experiment with resins, experiment with polymers. Will they outlive me? They probably might. Right, here's a reconditioned coffee machine. It actually looks better than a brand new one — so looking good there. Now reusing is vital. And we filter our own water. We put them in bottles, refrigerate them, and then we reuse that bottle again and again and again. Here's a great little example. If you can see this orange tree, it's actually growing in a car tire, which has been turned inside out and sewn up. It's got my compost in it, which is growing an orange tree, which is great. This is the kitchen, which is in the same room. I basically created a menu that allowed people to choose the amount and volume of food that they wanted to consume. Rather than me putting a dish down, they were allowed to help themselves to as much or as little as they wanted. Okay, it's a small kitchen. It's about five square meters. It serves 220 people a day. We generate quite a lot of waste. This is the waste room. You can't get rid of waste. But this story's not about eliminating it, it's about minimizing it. In here, I have produce and boxes that are unavoidable. I put my food waste into this dehydrating, desiccating macerator — turns food into an inner material, which I can store and then compost later. I compost it in this garden. All of the soil you can see there is basically my food, which is generated by the restaurant, and it's growing in these tubs, which I made out of storm-felled trees and wine casks and all kinds of things. Three compost bins — go through about 70 kilos of raw vegetable waste a week — really good, makes fantastic compost. A couple of wormeries in there too. And actually one of the wormeries was a big wormery. I had a lot of worms in it. And I tried taking the dried food waste, putting it to the worms, going, "There you go, dinner." It was like vegetable jerky, and killed all of them. I don't know how many worms [were] in there, but I've got some heavy karma coming, I tell you. (Laughter) What you're seeing here is a water filtration system. This takes the water out of the restaurant, runs it through these stone beds — this is going to be mint in there — and I sort of water the garden with it. And I ultimately want to recycle that, put it back into the loos, maybe wash hands with it, I don't know. So, water is a very important aspect. I started meditating on that and created a restaurant called Waterhouse. If I could get Waterhouse to be a no-carbon restaurant that is consuming no gas to start with, that would be great. I managed to do it. This restaurant looks a little bit like Acorn House — same chairs, same tables. They're all English and a little bit more sustainable. But this is an electrical restaurant. The whole thing is electric, the restaurant and the kitchen. And it's run on hydroelectricity, so I've gone from air to water. Now it's important to understand that this room is cooled by water, heated by water, filters its own water, and it's powered by water. It literally is Waterhouse. The air handling system inside it — I got rid of air-conditioning because I thought there was too much consumption going on there. This is basically air-handling. I'm taking the temperature of the canal outside, pumping it through the heat exchange mechanism, it's turning through these amazing sails on the roof, and that, in turn, is falling softly onto the people in the restaurant, cooling them, or heating them, as the need may be. And this is an English willow air diffuser, and that's softly moving that air current through the room. Very advanced, no air-conditioning — I love it. In the canal, which is just outside the restaurant, there is hundreds of meters of coil piping. This takes the temperature of the canal and turns it into this four-degrees of heat exchange. I have no idea how it works, but I paid a lot of money for it. (Laughter) And what's great is one of the chefs who works in that restaurant lives on this boat — it's off-grid; it generates all its own power. He's growing all his own fruit, and that's fantastic. There's no accident in names of these restaurants. Acorn House is the element of wood; Waterhouse is the element of water; and I'm thinking, well, I'm going to be making five restaurants based on the five Chinese medicine acupuncture specialities. I've got water and wood. I'm just about to do fire. I've got metal and earth to come. So you've got to watch your space for that. Okay. So this is my next project. Five weeks old, it's my baby, and it's hurting real bad. The People's Supermarket. So basically, the restaurants only really hit people who believed in what I was doing anyway. What I needed to do was get food out to a broader spectrum of people. So people — i.e., perhaps, more working-class — or perhaps people who actually believe in a cooperative. This is a social enterprise, not-for-profit cooperative supermarket. It really is about the social disconnect between food, communities in urban settings and their relationship to rural growers — connecting communities in London to rural growers. Really important. So I'm committing to potatoes; I'm committing to milk; I'm committing to leeks and broccoli — all very important stuff. I've kept the tiles; I've kept the floors; I've kept the trunking; I've got in some recycled fridges; I've got some recycled tills; I've got some recycled trolleys. I mean, the whole thing is is super-sustainable. In fact, I'm trying and I'm going to make this the most sustainable supermarket in the world. That's zero food waste. And no one's doing that just yet. In fact, Sainsbury's, if you're watching, let's have a go. Try it on. I'm going to get there before you. So nature doesn't create waste doesn't create waste as such. Everything in nature is used up in a closed continuous cycle with waste being the end of the beginning, and that's been something that's been nurturing me for some time, and it's an important statement to understand. If we don't stand up and make a difference and think about sustainable food, think about the sustainable nature of it, then we may fail. But, I wanted to get up and show you that we can do it if we're more responsible. Environmentally conscious businesses are doable. They're here. You can see I've done three so far; I've got a few more to go. The idea is embryonic. I think it's important. I think that if we reduce, reuse, refuse and recycle — right at the end there — recycling is the last point I want to make; but it's the four R's, rather than the three R's — then I think we're going to be on our way. So these three are not perfect — they're ideas. I think that there are many problems to come, but with help, I'm sure I'm going to find solutions. And I hope you all take part. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
A feminine response to Iceland's financial crash | {0: 'Halla Tómasdóttir is the CEO of The B Team, a group of global leaders working together to transform business for a better world.'} | TEDWomen 2010 | It sure used to be a lot easier to be from Iceland, because until a couple of years ago, people knew hardly anything about us, and I could basically come out here and say only good things about us. But in the last couple of years we've become infamous for a couple of things. First, of course, the economic meltdown. It actually got so bad that somebody put our country up for sale on eBay. (Laughter) Ninety-nine pence was the starting price and no reserve. Then there was the volcano that interrupted the travel plans of almost all of you and many of your friends, including President Obama. By the way, the pronunciation is "Eyjafjallajokull." None of your media got it right. (Laughter) But I'm not here to share these stories about these two things exactly. I'm here to tell you the story of Audur Capital, which is a financial firm founded by me and Kristin — who you see in the picture — in the spring of 2007, just over a year before the economic collapse hit. Why would two women who were enjoying successful careers in investment banking in the corporate sector leave to found a financial services firm? Well let it suffice to say that we felt a bit overwhelmed with testosterone. And I'm not here to say that men are to blame for the crisis and what happened in my country. But I can surely tell you that in my country, much like on Wall Street and the city of London and elsewhere, men were at the helm of the game of the financial sector, and that kind of lack of diversity and sameness leads to disastrous problems. (Applause) So we decided, a bit fed-up with this world and also with the strong feeling in our stomach that this wasn't sustainable, to found a financial services firm based on our values, and we decided to incorporate feminine values into the world of finance. Raised quite a few eyebrows in Iceland. We weren't known as the typical "women" women in Iceland up until then. So it was almost like coming out of the closet to actually talk about the fact that we were women and that we believed that we had a set of values and a way of doing business that would be more sustainable than what we had experienced until then. And we got a great group of people to join us — principled people with great skills, and investors with a vision and values to match ours. And together we got through the eye of the financial storm in Iceland without taking any direct losses to our equity or to the funds of our clients. And although I want to thank the talented people of our company foremost for that — and also there's a factor of luck and timing — we are absolutely convinced that we did this because of our values. So let me share with you our values. We believe in risk awareness. What does that mean? We believe that you should always understand the risks that you're taking, and we will not invest in things we don't understand. Not a complicated thing. But in 2007, at the height of the sub-prime and all the complicated financial structures, it was quite opposite to the reckless risk-taking behaviors that we saw on the market. We also believe in straight-talking, telling it as it is, using simple language that people understand, telling people about the downsides as well as the potential upsides, and even telling the bad news that no one wants to utter, like our lack of belief in the sustainability of the Icelandic financial sector that already we had months before the collapse hit us. And, although we do work in the financial sector, where Excel is king, we believe in emotional capital. And we believe that doing emotional due diligence is just as important as doing financial due diligence. It is actually people that make money and lose money, not Excel spreadsheets. (Applause) Last, but not least, we believe in profit with principles. We care how we make our profit. So while we want to make economic profit for ourselves and our customers, we are willing to do it with a long-term view, and we like to have a wider definition of profits than just the economic profit in the next quarter. So we like to see profits, plus positive social and environmental benefits, when we invest. But it wasn't just about the values, although we are convinced that they matter. It was also about a business opportunity. It's the female trend, and it's the sustainability trend, that are going to create some of the most interesting investment opportunities in the years to come. The whole thing about the female trend is not about women being better than men; it is actually about women being different from men, bringing different values and different ways to the table. So what do you get? You get better decision-making, and you get less herd behavior, and both of those things hit your bottom line with very positive results. But one has to wonder, now that we've had this financial sector collapse upon us in Iceland — and by the way, Europe looks pretty bad right now, and many would say that you in America are heading for some more trouble as well. Now that we've had all that happen, and we have all this data out there telling us that it's much better to have diversity around the decision-making tables, will we see business and finance change? Will government change? Well I'll give you my straight talk about this. I have days that I believe, but I have days that I'm full of doubt. Have you seen the incredible urge out there to rebuild the very things that failed us? (Applause) Einstein said that this was the definition of insanity — to do the same things over and over again, hoping for a different outcome. So I guess the world is insane, because I see entirely too much of doing the same things over and over again, hoping that this time it's not going to collapse upon us. I want to see more revolutionary thinking, and I remain hopeful. Like TED, I believe in people. And I know that consumers are becoming more conscious, and they are going to start voting with their wallets, and they are going to change the face of business and finance from the outside, if they don't do it from the inside. But I'm more of the revolutionary, and I should be; I'm from Iceland. We have a long history of strong, courageous, independent women, ever since the Viking age. And I want to tell you when I first realized that women matter to the economy and to the society, I was seven — it happened to be my mother's birthday — October 24, 1975. Women in Iceland took the day off. From work or from home, they took the day off, and nothing worked in Iceland. (Laughter) They marched into the center of Reykjavik, and they put women's issues onto the agenda. And some say this was the start of a global movement. For me it was the start of a long journey, but I decided that day to matter. Five years later, Iceland elected Vigdis Finnbogadottir as their president — first female to become head of state, single mom, a breast cancer survivor who had had one of her breasts removed. And at one of the campaign sessions, she had one of her male contenders allude to the fact that she couldn't become president — she was a woman, and even half a woman. That night she won the election, because she came back — not just because of his crappy behavior — but she came back and said, "Well, I'm actually not going to breastfeed the Icelandic nation; I'm going to lead it." (Applause) So I've had incredibly many women role models that have influenced who I am and where I am today. But in spite of that, I went through the first 10 or 15 years of my career mostly in denial of being a woman. Started in corporate America, and I was absolutely convinced that it was just about the individual, that women and men would have just the same opportunities. But I've come to conclude lately that it isn't like that. We are not the same, and it's great. Because of our differences, we create and sustain life. So we should embrace our difference and aim for challenge. The final thought I want to leave with you is that I'm fed up with this tyranny of either/or choices in life — either it's men or it's women. We need to start embracing the beauty of balance. So let's move away from thinking about business here and philanthropy there, and let's start thinking about doing good business. That's how we change the world. That's the only sustainable future. Thank you. (Applause) |
A call to men | {0: 'Tony Porter is an educator and activist who is internationally recognized for his effort to end violence against women.'} | TEDWomen 2010 | I grew up in New York City, between Harlem and the Bronx. Growing up as a boy, we were taught that men had to be tough, had to be strong, had to be courageous, dominating — no pain, no emotions, with the exception of anger — and definitely no fear; that men are in charge, which means women are not; that men lead, and you should just follow and do what we say; that men are superior; women are inferior; that men are strong; women are weak; that women are of less value, property of men, and objects, particularly sexual objects. I've later come to know that to be the collective socialization of men, better known as the "man box." See this man box has in it all the ingredients of how we define what it means to be a man. Now I also want to say, without a doubt, there are some wonderful, wonderful, absolutely wonderful things about being a man. But at the same time, there's some stuff that's just straight up twisted, and we really need to begin to challenge, look at it and really get in the process of deconstructing, redefining, what we come to know as manhood. This is my two at home, Kendall and Jay. They're 11 and 12. Kendall's 15 months older than Jay. There was a period of time when my wife — her name is Tammie — and I, we just got real busy and whip, bam, boom: Kendall and Jay. (Laughter) And when they were about five and six, four and five, Jay could come to me, come to me crying. It didn't matter what she was crying about, she could get on my knee, she could snot my sleeve up, just cry, cry it out. Daddy's got you. That's all that's important. Now Kendall on the other hand — and like I said, he's only 15 months older than her — he'd come to me crying, it's like as soon as I would hear him cry, a clock would go off. I would give the boy probably about 30 seconds, which means, by the time he got to me, I was already saying things like, "Why are you crying? Hold your head up. Look at me. Explain to me what's wrong. Tell me what's wrong. I can't understand you. Why are you crying?" And out of my own frustration of my role and responsibility of building him up as a man to fit into these guidelines and these structures that are defining this man box, I would find myself saying things like, "Just go in your room. Just go on, go on in your room. Sit down, get yourself together and come back and talk to me when you can talk to me like a —" what? (Audience: Man.) Like a man. And he's five years old. And as I grow in life, I would say to myself, "My God, what's wrong with me? What am I doing? Why would I do this?" And I think back. I think back to my father. There was a time in my life where we had a very troubled experience in our family. My brother, Henry, he died tragically when we were teenagers. We lived in New York City, as I said. We lived in the Bronx at the time, and the burial was in a place called Long Island, it was about two hours outside of the city. And as we were preparing to come back from the burial, the cars stopped at the bathroom to let folks take care of themselves before the long ride back to the city. And the limousine empties out. My mother, my sister, my auntie, they all get out, but my father and I stayed in the limousine, and no sooner than the women got out, he burst out crying. He didn't want cry in front of me, but he knew he wasn't going to make it back to the city, and it was better me than to allow himself to express these feelings and emotions in front of the women. And this is a man who, 10 minutes ago, had just put his teenage son in the ground — something I just can't even imagine. The thing that sticks with me the most is that he was apologizing to me for crying in front of me, and at the same time, he was also giving me props, lifting me up, for not crying. I come to also look at this as this fear that we have as men, this fear that just has us paralyzed, holding us hostage to this man box. I can remember speaking to a 12-year-old boy, a football player, and I asked him, I said, "How would you feel if, in front of all the players, your coach told you you were playing like a girl?" Now I expected him to say something like, I'd be sad; I'd be mad; I'd be angry, or something like that. No, the boy said to me — the boy said to me, "It would destroy me." And I said to myself, "God, if it would destroy him to be called a girl, what are we then teaching him about girls?" (Applause) It took me back to a time when I was about 12 years old. I grew up in tenement buildings in the inner city. At this time we're living in the Bronx, and in the building next to where I lived there was a guy named Johnny. He was about 16 years old, and we were all about 12 years old — younger guys. And he was hanging out with all us younger guys. And this guy, he was up to a lot of no good. He was the kind of kid who parents would have to wonder, "What is this 16-year-old boy doing with these 12-year-old boys?" And he did spend a lot of time up to no good. He was a troubled kid. His mother had died from a heroin overdose. He was being raised by his grandmother. His father wasn't on the set. His grandmother had two jobs. He was home alone a lot. But I've got to tell you, we young guys, we looked up to this dude, man. He was cool. He was fine. That's what the sisters said, "He was fine." He was having sex. We all looked up to him. So one day, I'm out in front of the house doing something — just playing around, doing something — I don't know what. He looks out his window; he calls me upstairs; he said, "Hey Anthony." They called me Anthony growing up as a kid. "Hey Anthony, come on upstairs." Johnny call, you go. So I run right upstairs. As he opens the door, he says to me, "Do you want some?" Now I immediately knew what he meant. Because for me growing up at that time, and our relationship with this man box, "Do you want some?" meant one of two things: sex or drugs — and we weren't doing drugs. Now my box, my card, my man box card, was immediately in jeopardy. Two things: One, I never had sex. We don't talk about that as men. You only tell your dearest, closest friend, sworn to secrecy for life, the first time you had sex. For everybody else, we go around like we've been having sex since we were two. There ain't no first time. (Laughter) The other thing I couldn't tell him is that I didn't want any. That's even worse. We're supposed to always be on the prowl. Women are objects, especially sexual objects. Anyway, so I couldn't tell him any of that. So, like my mother would say, make a long story short, I just simply said to Johnny, "Yes." He told me to go in his room. I go in his room. On his bed is a girl from the neighborhood named Sheila. She's 16 years old. She's nude. She's what I know today to be mentally ill, higher-functioning at times than others. We had a whole choice of inappropriate names for her. Anyway, Johnny had just gotten through having sex with her. Well actually, he raped her, but he would say he had sex with her. Because, while Sheila never said no, she also never said yes. So he was offering me the opportunity to do the same. So when I go in the room, I close the door. Folks, I'm petrified. I stand with my back to the door so Johnny can't bust in the room and see that I'm not doing anything, and I stand there long enough that I could have actually done something. So now I'm no longer trying to figure out what I'm going to do; I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to get out of this room. So in my 12 years of wisdom, I zip my pants down, I walk out into the room, and lo and behold to me, while I was in the room with Sheila, Johnny was back at the window calling guys up. So now there's a living room full of guys. It was like the waiting room in the doctor's office. And they asked me how was it, and I say to them, "It was good," and I zip my pants up in front of them, and I head for the door. Now I say this all with remorse, and I was feeling a tremendous amount of remorse at that time, but I was conflicted, because, while I was feeling remorse, I was excited, because I didn't get caught. But I knew I felt bad about what was happening. This fear, getting outside the man box, totally enveloped me. It was way more important to me, about me and my man box card than about Sheila and what was happening to her. See collectively, we as men are taught to have less value in women, to view them as property and the objects of men. We see that as an equation that equals violence against women. We as men, good men, the large majority of men, we operate on the foundation of this whole collective socialization. We kind of see ourselves separate, but we're very much a part of it. You see, we have to come to understand that less value, property and objectification is the foundation and the violence can't happen without it. So we're very much a part of the solution as well as the problem. The center for disease control says that men's violence against women is at epidemic proportions, is the number one health concern for women in this country and abroad. So quickly, I'd like to just say, this is the love of my life, my daughter Jay. The world I envision for her — how do I want men to be acting and behaving? I need you on board. I need you with me. I need you working with me and me working with you on how we raise our sons and teach them to be men — that it's okay to not be dominating, that it's okay to have feelings and emotions, that it's okay to promote equality, that it's okay to have women who are just friends and that's it, that it's okay to be whole, that my liberation as a man is tied to your liberation as a woman. (Applause) I remember asking a nine-year-old boy, I asked a nine-year-old boy, "What would life be like for you, if you didn't have to adhere to this man box?" He said to me, "I would be free." Thank you folks. (Applause) |
A police chief with a difference | {0: "Kiran Bedi was one of India's top cops -- tough, innovative and committed to social change. Now retired from the national police force, Bedi runs two NGOs that benefit rural and urban poor. "} | TEDWomen 2010 | Now I'm going to give you a story. It's an Indian story about an Indian woman and her journey. Let me begin with my parents. I'm a product of this visionary mother and father. Many years ago, when I was born in the '50s — '50s and '60s didn't belong to girls in India. They belonged to boys. They belonged to boys who would join business and inherit business from parents, and girls would be dolled up to get married. My family, in my city, and almost in the country, was unique. We were four of us, not one, and fortunately no boys. We were four girls and no boys. And my parents were part of a landed property family. My father defied his own grandfather, almost to the point of disinheritance, because he decided to educate all four of us. He sent us to one of the best schools in the city and gave us the best education. As I've said, when we're born, we don't choose our parents, and when we go to school, we don't choose our school. Children don't choose a school. They just get the school which parents choose for them. So this is the foundation time which I got. I grew up like this, and so did my other three sisters. And my father used to say at that time, "I'm going to spread all my four daughters in four corners of the world." I don't know if he really meant [that], but it happened. I'm the only one who's left in India. One is a British, another is an American and the third is a Canadian. So we are four of us in four corners of the world. And since I said they're my role models, I followed two things which my father and mother gave me. One, they said, "Life is on an incline. You either go up, or you come down." And the second thing, which has stayed with me, which became my philosophy of life, which made all the difference, is: 100 things happen in your life, good or bad. Out of 100, 90 are your creation. They're good. They're your creation. Enjoy it. If they're bad, they're your creation. Learn from it. Ten are nature-sent over which you can't do a thing. It's like a death of a relative, or a cyclone, or a hurricane, or an earthquake. You can't do a thing about it. You've got to just respond to the situation. But that response comes out of those 90 points. Since I'm a product of this philosophy, of 90/10, and secondly, "life on an incline," that's the way I grew up to be valuing what I got. I'm a product of opportunities, rare opportunities in the '50s and the '60s, which girls didn't get, and I was conscious of the fact that what my parents were giving me was something unique. Because all of my best school friends were getting dolled up to get married with a lot of dowry, and here I was with a tennis racket and going to school and doing all kinds of extracurricular activities. I thought I must tell you this. Why I said this, is the background. This is what comes next. I joined the Indian Police Service as a tough woman, a woman with indefatigable stamina, because I used to run for my tennis titles, etc. But I joined the Indian Police Service, and then it was a new pattern of policing. For me the policing stood for power to correct, power to prevent and power to detect. This is something like a new definition ever given in policing in India — the power to prevent. Because normally it was always said, power to detect, and that's it, or power to punish. But I decided no, it's a power to prevent, because that's what I learned when I was growing up. How do I prevent the 10 and never make it more than 10? So this was how it came into my service, and it was different from the men. I didn't want to make it different from the men, but it was different, because this was the way I was different. And I redefined policing concepts in India. I'm going to take you on two journeys, my policing journey and my prison journey. What you see, if you see the title called "PM's car held." This was the first time a prime minister of India was given a parking ticket. (Laughter) That's the first time in India, and I can tell you, that's the last time you're hearing about it. It'll never happen again in India, because now it was once and forever. And the rule was, because I was sensitive, I was compassionate, I was very sensitive to injustice, and I was very pro-justice. That's the reason, as a woman, I joined the Indian Police Service. I had other options, but I didn't choose them. So I'm going to move on. This is about tough policing, equal policing. Now I was known as "here's a woman that's not going to listen." So I was sent to all indiscriminate postings, postings which others would say no. I now went to a prison assignment as a police officer. Normally police officers don't want to do prison. They sent me to prison to lock me up, thinking, "Now there will be no cars and no VIPs to be given tickets to. Let's lock her up." Here I got a prison assignment. This was a prison assignment which was one big den of criminals. Obviously, it was. But 10,000 men, of which only 400 were women — 10,000 — 9,000 plus about 600 were men. Terrorists, rapists, burglars, gangsters — some of them I'd sent to jail as a police officer outside. And then how did I deal with them? The first day when I went in, I didn't know how to look at them. And I said, "Do you pray?" When I looked at the group, I said, "Do you pray?" They saw me as a young, short woman wearing a pathan suit. I said, "Do you pray?" And they didn't say anything. I said, "Do you pray? Do you want to pray?" They said, "Yes." I said, "All right, let's pray." I prayed for them, and things started to change. This is a visual of education inside the prison. Friends, this has never happened, where everybody in the prison studies. I started this with community support. Government had no budget. It was one of the finest, largest volunteerism in any prison in the world. This was initiated in Delhi prison. You see one sample of a prisoner teaching a class. These are hundreds of classes. Nine to eleven, every prisoner went into the education program — the same den in which they thought they would put me behind the bar and things would be forgotten. We converted this into an ashram — from a prison to an ashram through education. I think that's the bigger change. It was the beginning of a change. Teachers were prisoners. Teachers were volunteers. Books came from donated schoolbooks. Stationery was donated. Everything was donated, because there was no budget of education for the prison. Now if I'd not done that, it would have been a hellhole. That's the second landmark. I want to show you some moments of history in my journey, which probably you would never ever get to see anywhere in the world. One, the numbers you'll never get to see. Secondly, this concept. This was a meditation program inside the prison of over 1,000 prisoners. One thousand prisoners who sat in meditation. This was one of the most courageous steps I took as a prison governor. And this is what transformed. You want to know more about this, go and see this film, "Doing Time, Doing Vipassana." You will hear about it, and you will love it. And write to me on KiranBedi.com, and I'll respond to you. Let me show you the next slide. I took the same concept of mindfulness, because, why did I bring meditation into the Indian prison? Because crime is a product of a distorted mind. It was distortion of mind which needed to be addressed to control. Not by preaching, not by telling, not by reading, but by addressing your mind. I took the same thing to the police, because police, equally, were prisoners of their minds, and they felt as if it was "we" and "they," and that the people don't cooperate. This worked. This is a feedback box called a petition box. This is a concept which I introduced to listen to complaints, listen to grievances. This was a magic box. This was a sensitive box. This is how a prisoner drew how they felt about the prison. If you see somebody in the blue — yeah, this guy — he was a prisoner, and he was a teacher. And you see, everybody's busy. There was no time to waste. Let me wrap it up. I'm currently into movements, movements of education of the under-served children, which is thousands — India is all about thousands. Secondly is about the anti-corruption movement in India. That's a big way we, as a small group of activists, have drafted an ombudsman bill for the government of India. Friends, you will hear a lot about it. That's the movement at the moment I'm driving, and that's the movement and ambition of my life. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. |
New data on the rise of women | {0: 'Hanna Rosin isn’t afraid to shine a skeptical spotlight on people’s cherished ideals, whether it’s politically correct dogma or the conservative Christian agenda.'} | TEDWomen 2010 | We are now going through an amazing and unprecedented moment where the power dynamics between men and women are shifting very rapidly, and in many of the places where it counts the most, women are, in fact, taking control of everything. In my mother's day, she didn't go to college. Not a lot of women did. And now, for every two men who get a college degree, three women will do the same. Women, for the first time this year, became the majority of the American workforce. And they're starting to dominate lots of professions — doctors, lawyers, bankers, accountants. Over 50 percent of managers are women these days, and in the 15 professions projected to grow the most in the next decade, all but two of them are dominated by women. So the global economy is becoming a place where women are more successful than men, believe it or not, and these economic changes are starting to rapidly affect our culture — what our romantic comedies look like, what our marriages look like, what our dating lives look like, and our new set of superheroes. For a long time, this is the image of American manhood that dominated — tough, rugged, in control of his own environment. A few years ago, the Marlboro Man was retired and replaced by this much less impressive specimen, who is a parody of American manhood, and that's what we have in our commercials today. The phrase "first-born son" is so deeply ingrained in our consciousness that this statistic alone shocked me. In American fertility clinics, 75 percent of couples are requesting girls and not boys. And in places where you wouldn't think, such as South Korea, India and China, the very strict patriarchal societies are starting to break down a little, and families are no longer strongly preferring first-born sons. If you think about this, if you just open your eyes to this possibility and start to connect the dots, you can see the evidence everywhere. You can see it in college graduation patterns, in job projections, in our marriage statistics, you can see it in the Icelandic elections, which you'll hear about later, and you can see it on South Korean surveys on son preference, that something amazing and unprecedented is happening with women. Certainly this is not the first time that we've had great progress with women. The '20s and the '60s also come to mind. But the difference is that, back then, it was driven by a very passionate feminist movement that was trying to project its own desires, whereas this time, it's not about passion, and it's not about any kind of movement. This is really just about the facts of this economic moment that we live in. The 200,000-year period in which men have been top dog is truly coming to an end, believe it or not, and that's why I talk about the "end of men." Now all you men out there, this is not the moment where you tune out or throw some tomatoes, because the point is that this is happening to all of us. I myself have a husband and a father and two sons whom I dearly love. And this is why I like to talk about this, because if we don't acknowledge it, then the transition will be pretty painful. But if we do take account of it, then I think it will go much more smoothly. I first started thinking about this about a year and a half ago. I was reading headlines about the recession just like anyone else, and I started to notice a distinct pattern — that the recession was affecting men much more deeply than it was affecting women. And I remembered back to about 10 years ago when I read a book by Susan Faludi called "Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man," in which she described how hard the recession had hit men, and I started to think about whether it had gotten worse this time around in this recession. And I realized that two things were different this time around. The first was that these were no longer just temporary hits that the recession was giving men — that this was reflecting a deeper underlying shift in our global economy. And second, that the story was no longer just about the crisis of men, but it was also about what was happening to women. And now look at this second set of slides. These are headlines about what's been going on with women in the next few years. These are things we never could have imagined a few years ago. Women, a majority of the workplace. And labor statistics: women take up most managerial jobs. This second set of headlines — you can see that families and marriages are starting to shift. And look at that last headline — young women earning more than young men. That particular headline comes to me from a market research firm. They were basically asked by one of their clients who was going to buy houses in that neighborhood in the future. And they expected that it would be young families, or young men, just like it had always been. But in fact, they found something very surprising. It was young, single women who were the major purchasers of houses in the neighborhood. And so they decided, because they were intrigued by this finding, to do a nationwide survey. So they spread out all the census data, and what they found, the guy described to me as a shocker, which is that in 1,997 out of 2,000 communities, women, young women, were making more money than young men. So here you have a generation of young women who grow up thinking of themselves as being more powerful earners than the young men around them. Now, I've just laid out the picture for you, but I still haven't explained to you why this is happening. And in a moment, I'm going to show you a graph, and what you'll see on this graph — it begins in 1973, just before women start flooding the workforce, and it brings us up to our current day. And basically what you'll see is what economists talk about as the polarization of the economy. Now what does that mean? It means that the economy is dividing into high-skill, high-wage jobs and low-skill, low-wage jobs — and that the middle, the middle-skill jobs, and the middle-earning jobs, are starting to drop out of the economy. This has been going on for 40 years now. But this process is affecting men very differently than it's affecting women. You'll see the women in red, and you'll see the men in blue. You'll watch them both drop out of the middle class, but see what happens to women and see what happens to men. There we go. So watch that. You see them both drop out of the middle class. Watch what happens to the women. Watch what happens to the men. The men sort of stagnate there, while the women zoom up in those high-skill jobs. So what's that about? It looks like women got some power boost on a video game, or like they snuck in some secret serum into their birth-control pills that lets them shoot up high. But of course, it's not about that. What it's about is that the economy has changed a lot. We used to have a manufacturing economy, which was about building goods and products, and now we have a service economy and an information and creative economy. Those two economies require very different skills, and as it happens, women have been much better at acquiring the new set of skills than men have been. It used to be that you were a guy who went to high school who didn't have a college degree, but you had a specific set of skills, and with the help of a union, you could make yourself a pretty good middle-class life. But that really isn't true anymore. This new economy is pretty indifferent to size and strength, which is what's helped men along all these years. What the economy requires now is a whole different set of skills. You basically need intelligence, you need an ability to sit still and focus, to communicate openly, to be able to listen to people and to operate in a workplace that is much more fluid than it used to be, and those are things that women do extremely well, as we're seeing. If you look at management theory these days, it used to be that our ideal leader sounded something like General Patton, right? You would be issuing orders from above. You would be very hierarchical. You would tell everyone below you what to do. But that's not what an ideal leader is like now. If you read management books now, a leader is somebody who can foster creativity, who can get his — get the employees — see, I still say "his" — who can get the employees to talk to each other, who can basically build teams and get them to be creative. And those are all things that women do very well. And then on top of that, that's created a kind of cascading effect. Women enter the workplace at the top, and then at the working class, all the new jobs that are created are the kinds of jobs that wives used to do for free at home. So that's childcare, elder care and food preparation. So those are all the jobs that are growing, and those are jobs that women tend to do. Now one day it might be that mothers will hire an out-of-work, middle-aged, former steelworker guy to watch their children at home, and that would be good for the men, but that hasn't quite happened yet. To see what's going to happen, you can't just look at the workforce that is now, you have to look at our future workforce. And here the story is fairly simple. Women are getting college degrees at a faster rate than men. Why? This is a real mystery. People have asked men, why don't they just go back to college, to community college, say, and retool themselves, learn a new set of skills? Well it turns out that they're just very uncomfortable doing that. They're used to thinking of themselves as providers, and they can't seem to build the social networks that allow them to get through college. So for some reason men just don't end up going back to college. And what's even more disturbing is what's happening with younger boys. There's been about a decade of research about what people are calling the "boy crisis." Now the boy crisis is this idea that very young boys, for whatever reason, are doing worse in school than very young girls, and people have theories about that. Is it because we have an excessively verbal curriculum, and little girls are better at that than little boys? Or that we require kids to sit still too much, and so boys initially feel like failures? And some people say it's because, in 9th grade, boys start dropping out of school. Because I'm writing a book about all this, I'm still looking into it, so I don't have the answer. But in the mean time, I'm going to call on the worldwide education expert, who's my 10-year-old daughter, Noa, to talk to you about why the boys in her class do worse. (Video) Noa: The girls are obviously smarter. I mean they have much larger vocabulary. They learn much faster. They are more controlled. On the board today for losing recess tomorrow, only boys. Hanna Rosin: And why is that? Noa: Why? They were just not listening to the class while the girls sat there very nicely. HR: So there you go. This whole thesis really came home to me when I went to visit a college in Kansas City — working-class college. Certainly, when I was in college, I had certain expectations about my life — that my husband and I would both work, and that we would equally raise the children. But these college girls had a completely different view of their future. Basically, the way they said it to me is that they would be working 18 hours a day, that their husband would maybe have a job, but that mostly he would be at home taking care of the kiddies. And this was kind of a shocker to me. And then here's my favorite quote from one of the girls: "Men are the new ball and chain." (Laughter) Now you laugh, but that quote has kind of a sting to it, right? And I think the reason it has a sting is because thousands of years of history don't reverse themselves without a lot of pain, and that's why I talk about us all going through this together. The night after I talked to these college girls, I also went to a men's group in Kansas, and these were exactly the kind of victims of the manufacturing economy which I spoke to you about earlier. They were men who had been contractors, or they had been building houses and they had lost their jobs after the housing boom, and they were in this group because they were failing to pay their child support. And the instructor was up there in the class explaining to them all the ways in which they had lost their identity in this new age. He was telling them they no longer had any moral authority, that nobody needed them for emotional support anymore, and they were not really the providers. So who were they? And this was very disheartening for them. And what he did was he wrote down on the board "$85,000," and he said, "That's her salary," and then he wrote down "$12,000." "That's your salary. So who's the man now?" he asked them. "Who's the damn man? She's the man now." And that really sent a shudder through the room. And that's part of the reason I like to talk about this, because I think it can be pretty painful, and we really have to work through it. And the other reason it's kind of urgent is because it's not just happening in the U.S. It's happening all over the world. In India, poor women are learning English faster than their male counterparts in order to staff the new call centers that are growing in India. In China, a lot of the opening up of private entrepreneurship is happening because women are starting businesses, small businesses, faster than men. And here's my favorite example, which is in South Korea. Over several decades, South Korea built one of the most patriarchal societies we know about. They basically enshrined the second-class status of women in the civil code. And if women failed to birth male children, they were basically treated like domestic servants. And sometimes family would pray to the spirits to kill off a girl child so they could have a male child. But over the '70s and '80s, the South Korea government decided they wanted to rapidly industrialize, and so what they did was, they started to push women into the workforce. Now they've been asking a question since 1985: "How strongly do you prefer a first-born son?" And now look at the chart. That's from 1985 to 2003. How much do you prefer a first-born son? So you can see that these economic changes really do have a strong effect on our culture. Now because we haven't fully processed this information, it's kind of coming back to us in our pop culture in these kind of weird and exaggerated ways, where you can see that the stereotypes are changing. And so we have on the male side what one of my colleagues likes to call the "omega males" popping up, who are the males who are romantically challenged losers who can't find a job. And they come up in lots of different forms. So we have the perpetual adolescent. We have the charmless misanthrope. Then we have our Bud Light guy who's the happy couch potato. And then here's a shocker: even America's most sexiest man alive, the sexiest man alive gets romantically played these days in a movie. And then on the female side, you have the opposite, in which you have these crazy superhero women. You've got Lady Gaga. You've got our new James Bond, who's Angelina Jolie. And it's not just for the young, right? Even Helen Mirren can hold a gun these days. And so it feels like we have to move from this place where we've got these uber-exaggerated images into something that feels a little more normal. So for a long time in the economic sphere, we've lived with the term "glass ceiling." Now I've never really liked this term. For one thing, it puts men and women in a really antagonistic relationship with one another, because the men are these devious tricksters up there who've put up this glass ceiling. And we're always below the glass ceiling, the women. And we have a lot of skill and experience, but it's a trick, so how are you supposed to prepare to get through that glass ceiling? And also, "shattering the glass ceiling" is a terrible phrase. What crazy person would pop their head through a glass ceiling? So the image that I like to think of, instead of glass ceiling, is the high bridge. It's definitely terrifying to stand at the foot of a high bridge, but it's also pretty exhilarating, because it's beautiful up there, and you're looking out on a beautiful view. And the great thing is there's no trick like with the glass ceiling. There's no man or woman standing in the middle about to cut the cables. There's no hole in the middle that you're going to fall through. And the great thing is that you can take anyone along with you. You can bring your husband along. You can bring your friends, or your colleagues, or your babysitter to walk along with you. And husbands can drag their wives across, if their wives don't feel ready. But the point about the high bridge is that you have to have the confidence to know that you deserve to be on that bridge, that you have all the skills and experience you need in order to walk across the high bridge, but you just have to make the decision to take the first step and do it. Thanks very much. (Applause) |
How to learn? From mistakes | {0: 'For over 15 years Diana has been a secondary social studies teacher in Wisconsin, Kansas, Arizona and Pennsylvania.'} | TEDxMidAtlantic | I have been teaching for a long time, and in doing so have acquired a body of knowledge about kids and learning that I really wish more people would understand about the potential of students. In 1931, my grandmother — bottom left for you guys over here — graduated from the eighth grade. She went to school to get the information because that's where the information lived. It was in the books; it was inside the teacher's head; and she needed to go there to get the information, because that's how you learned. Fast-forward a generation: this is the one-room schoolhouse, Oak Grove, where my father went to a one-room schoolhouse. And he again had to travel to the school to get the information from the teacher, stored it in the only portable memory he has, which is inside his own head, and take it with him, because that is how information was being transported from teacher to student and then used in the world. When I was a kid, we had a set of encyclopedias at my house. It was purchased the year I was born, and it was extraordinary, because I did not have to wait to go to the library to get to the information. The information was inside my house and it was awesome. This was different than either generation had experienced before, and it changed the way I interacted with information even at just a small level. But the information was closer to me. I could get access to it. In the time that passes between when I was a kid in high school and when I started teaching, we really see the advent of the Internet. Right about the time that the Internet gets going as an educational tool, I take off from Wisconsin and move to Kansas, small town Kansas, where I had an opportunity to teach in a lovely, small-town, rural Kansas school district, where I was teaching my favorite subject, American government. My first year — super gung-ho — going to teach American government, loved the political system. Kids in the 12th grade: not exactly all that enthusiastic about the American government system. Year two: learned a few things — had to change my tactic. And I put in front of them an authentic experience that allowed them to learn for themselves. I didn't tell them what to do or how to do it. I posed a problem in front of them, which was to put on an election forum for their own community. They produced flyers. They called offices. They checked schedules. They were meeting with secretaries. They produced an election forum booklet for the entire town to learn more about their candidates. They invited everyone into the school for an evening of conversation about government and politics and whether or not the streets were done well, and really had this robust experiential learning. The older teachers — more experienced — looked at me and went, "Oh, there she is. That's so cute. She's trying to get that done." (Laughter) "She doesn't know what she's in for." But I knew that the kids would show up, and I believed it, and I told them every week what I expected out of them. And that night, all 90 kids — dressed appropriately, doing their job, owning it. I had to just sit and watch. It was theirs. It was experiential. It was authentic. It meant something to them. And they will step up. From Kansas, I moved on to lovely Arizona, where I taught in Flagstaff for a number of years, this time with middle school students. Luckily, I didn't have to teach them American government. Could teach them the more exciting topic of geography. Again, "thrilled" to learn. But what was interesting about this position I found myself in in Arizona, was I had this really extraordinarily eclectic group of kids to work with in a truly public school, and we got to have these moments where we would get these opportunities. And one opportunity was we got to go and meet Paul Rusesabagina, which is the gentleman that the movie "Hotel Rwanda" is based after. And he was going to speak at the high school next door to us. We could walk there. We didn't even have to pay for the buses. There was no expense cost. Perfect field trip. The problem then becomes how do you take seventh- and eighth-graders to a talk about genocide and deal with the subject in a way that is responsible and respectful, and they know what to do with it. And so we chose to look at Paul Rusesabagina as an example of a gentleman who singularly used his life to do something positive. I then challenged the kids to identify someone in their own life, or in their own story, or in their own world, that they could identify that had done a similar thing. I asked them to produce a little movie about it. It's the first time we'd done this. Nobody really knew how to make these little movies on the computer, but they were into it. And I asked them to put their own voice over it. It was the most awesome moment of revelation that when you ask kids to use their own voice and ask them to speak for themselves, what they're willing to share. The last question of the assignment is: how do you plan to use your life to positively impact other people? The things that kids will say when you ask them and take the time to listen is extraordinary. Fast-forward to Pennsylvania, where I find myself today. I teach at the Science Leadership Academy, which is a partnership school between the Franklin Institute and the school district of Philadelphia. We are a nine through 12 public school, but we do school quite differently. I moved there primarily to be part of a learning environment that validated the way that I knew that kids learned, and that really wanted to investigate what was possible when you are willing to let go of some of the paradigms of the past, of information scarcity when my grandmother was in school and when my father was in school and even when I was in school, and to a moment when we have information surplus. So what do you do when the information is all around you? Why do you have kids come to school if they no longer have to come there to get the information? In Philadelphia we have a one-to-one laptop program, so the kids are bringing in laptops with them everyday, taking them home, getting access to information. And here's the thing that you need to get comfortable with when you've given the tool to acquire information to students, is that you have to be comfortable with this idea of allowing kids to fail as part of the learning process. We deal right now in the educational landscape with an infatuation with the culture of one right answer that can be properly bubbled on the average multiple choice test, and I am here to share with you: it is not learning. That is the absolute wrong thing to ask, to tell kids to never be wrong. To ask them to always have the right answer doesn't allow them to learn. So we did this project, and this is one of the artifacts of the project. I almost never show them off because of the issue of the idea of failure. My students produced these info-graphics as a result of a unit that we decided to do at the end of the year responding to the oil spill. I asked them to take the examples that we were seeing of the info-graphics that existed in a lot of mass media, and take a look at what were the interesting components of it, and produce one for themselves of a different man-made disaster from American history. And they had certain criteria to do it. They were a little uncomfortable with it, because we'd never done this before, and they didn't know exactly how to do it. They can talk — they're very smooth, and they can write very, very well, but asking them to communicate ideas in a different way was a little uncomfortable for them. But I gave them the room to just do the thing. Go create. Go figure it out. Let's see what we can do. And the student that persistently turns out the best visual product did not disappoint. This was done in like two or three days. And this is the work of the student that consistently did it. And when I sat the students down, I said, "Who's got the best one?" And they immediately went, "There it is." Didn't read anything. "There it is." And I said, "Well what makes it great?" And they're like, "Oh, the design's good, and he's using good color. And there's some ... " And they went through all that we processed out loud. And I said, "Go read it." And they're like, "Oh, that one wasn't so awesome." And then we went to another one — it didn't have great visuals, but it had great information — and spent an hour talking about the learning process, because it wasn't about whether or not it was perfect, or whether or not it was what I could create. It asked them to create for themselves, and it allowed them to fail, process, learn from. And when we do another round of this in my class this year, they will do better this time, because learning has to include an amount of failure, because failure is instructional in the process. There are a million pictures that I could click through here, and had to choose carefully — this is one of my favorites — of students learning, of what learning can look like in a landscape where we let go of the idea that kids have to come to school to get the information, but instead, ask them what they can do with it. Ask them really interesting questions. They will not disappoint. Ask them to go to places, to see things for themselves, to actually experience the learning, to play, to inquire. This is one of my favorite photos, because this was taken on Tuesday, when I asked the students to go to the polls. This is Robbie, and this was his first day of voting, and he wanted to share that with everybody and do that. But this is learning too, because we asked them to go out into real spaces. The main point is that, if we continue to look at education as if it's about coming to school to get the information and not about experiential learning, empowering student voice and embracing failure, we're missing the mark. And everything that everybody is talking about today isn't possible if we keep having an educational system that does not value these qualities, because we won't get there with a standardized test, and we won't get there with a culture of one right answer. We know how to do this better, and it's time to do better. (Applause) |
Let's talk parenting taboos | {0: 'Rufus Griscom and Alisa Volkman co-founded Babble, a website for parents. They have three sons.'} | TEDWomen 2010 | Alisa Volkman: So this is where our story begins — the dramatic moments of the birth of our first son, Declan. Obviously a really profound moment, and it changed our lives in many ways. It also changed our lives in many unexpected ways, and those unexpected ways we later reflected on, that eventually spawned a business idea between the two of us, and a year later, we launched Babble, a website for parents. Rufus Griscom: Now I think of our story as starting a few years earlier. AV: That's true. RG: You may remember, we fell head over heels in love. AV: We did. RG: We were at the time running a very different kind of website. It was a website called Nerve.com, the tagline of which was "literate smut." It was in theory, and hopefully in practice, a smart online magazine about sex and culture. AV: That spawned a dating site. But you can understand the jokes that we get. Sex begets babies. You follow instructions on Nerve and you should end up on Babble, which we did. And we might launch a geriatric site as our third. We'll see. RG: But for us, the continuity between Nerve and Babble was not just the life stage thing, which is, of course, relevant, but it was really more about our desire to speak very honestly about subjects that people have difficulty speaking honestly about. It seems to us that when people start dissembling, people start lying about things, that's when it gets really interesting. That's a subject that we want to dive into. And we've been surprised to find, as young parents, that there are almost more taboos around parenting than there are around sex. AV: It's true. So like we said, the early years were really wonderful, but they were also really difficult. And we feel like some of that difficulty was because of this false advertisement around parenting. (Laughter) We subscribed to a lot of magazines, did our homework, but really everywhere you look around, we were surrounded by images like this. And we went into parenting expecting our lives to look like this. The sun was always streaming in, and our children would never be crying. I would always be perfectly coiffed and well rested, and in fact, it was not like that at all. RG: When we lowered the glossy parenting magazine that we were looking at, with these beautiful images, and looked at the scene in our actual living room, it looked a little bit more like this. These are our three sons. And of course, they're not always crying and screaming, but with three boys, there's a decent probability that at least one of them will not be comporting himself exactly as he should. AV: Yes, you can see where the disconnect was happening for us. We really felt like what we went in expecting had nothing to do with what we were actually experiencing, and so we decided we really wanted to give it to parents straight. We really wanted to let them understand what the realities of parenting were in an honest way. RG: So today, what we would love to do is share with you four parenting taboos. And of course, there are many more than four things you can't say about parenting, but we would like to share with you today four that are particularly relevant for us personally. So the first, taboo number one: you can't say you didn't fall in love with your baby in the very first minute. I remember vividly, sitting there in the hospital. We were in the process of giving birth to our first child. AV: We, or I? RG: I'm sorry. Misuse of the pronoun. Alisa was very generously in the process of giving birth to our first child — (AV: Thank you.) — and I was there with a catcher's mitt. And I was there with my arms open. The nurse was coming at me with this beautiful, beautiful child, and I remember, as she was approaching me, the voices of friends saying, "The moment they put the baby in your hands, you will feel a sense of love that will come over you that is [on] an order of magnitude more powerful than anything you've ever experienced in your entire life." So I was bracing myself for the moment. The baby was coming, and I was ready for this Mack truck of love to just knock me off my feet. And instead, when the baby was placed in my hands, it was an extraordinary moment. This picture is from literally a few seconds after the baby was placed in my hands and I brought him over. And you can see, our eyes were glistening. I was overwhelmed with love and affection for my wife, with deep, deep gratitude that we had what appeared to be a healthy child. And it was also, of course, surreal. I mean, I had to check the tags and make sure. I was incredulous, "Are you sure this is our child?" And this was all quite remarkable. But what I felt towards the child at that moment was deep affection, but nothing like what I feel for him now, five years later. And so we've done something here that is heretical. We have charted our love for our child over time. (Laughter) This, as you know, is an act of heresy. You're not allowed to chart love. The reason you're not allowed to chart love is because we think of love as a binary thing. You're either in love, or you're not in love. You love, or you don't love. And I think the reality is that love is a process, and I think the problem with thinking of love as something that's binary is that it causes us to be unduly concerned that love is fraudulent, or inadequate, or what have you. And I think I'm speaking obviously here to the father's experience. But I think a lot of men do go through this sense in the early months, maybe their first year, that their emotional response is inadequate in some fashion. AV: Well, I'm glad Rufus is bringing this up, because you can notice where he dips in the first years where I think I was doing most of the work. But we like to joke, in the first few months of all of our children's lives, this is Uncle Rufus. (Laughter) RG: I'm a very affectionate uncle, very affectionate uncle. AV: Yes, and I often joke with Rufus when he comes home that I'm not sure he would actually be able to find our child in a line-up amongst other babies. So I actually threw a pop quiz here onto Rufus. RG: Uh oh. AV: I don't want to embarrass him too much. But I am going to give him three seconds. RG: That is not fair. This is a trick question. He's not up there, is he? AV: Our eight-week-old son is somewhere in here, and I want to see if Rufus can actually quickly identify him. RG: The far left. AV: No! (Laughter) RG: Cruel. AV: Nothing more to be said. (Laughter) I'll move on to taboo number two. You can't talk about how lonely having a baby can be. I enjoyed being pregnant. I loved it. I felt incredibly connected to the community around me. I felt like everyone was participating in my pregnancy, all around me, tracking it down till the actual due-date. I felt like I was a vessel of the future of humanity. That continued into the the hospital. It was really exhilarating. I was shower with gifts and flowers and visitors. It was a really wonderful experience, but when I got home, I suddenly felt very disconnected and suddenly shut in and shut out, and I was really surprised by those feelings. I did expect it to be difficult, have sleepless nights, constant feedings, but I did not expect the feelings of isolation and loneliness that I experienced, and I was really surprised that no one had talked to me, that I was going to be feeling this way. And I called my sister whom I'm very close to — and had three children — and I asked her, "Why didn't you tell me I was going to be feeling this way, that I was going to have these — feeling incredibly isolated?" And she said — I'll never forget — "It's just not something you want to say to a mother that's having a baby for the first time." RG: And of course, we think it's precisely what you really should be saying to mothers who have kids for the first time. And that this, of course, one of the themes for us is that we think that candor and brutal honesty is critical to us collectively being great parents. And it's hard not to think that part of what leads to this sense of isolation is our modern world. So Alisa's experience is not isolated. So your 58 percent of mothers surveyed report feelings of loneliness. Of those, 67 percent are most lonely when their kids are zero to five — probably really zero to two. In the process of preparing this, we looked at how some other cultures around the world deal with this period of time, because here in the Western world, less than 50 percent of us live near our family members, which I think is part of why this is such a tough period. So to take one example among many: in Southern India there's a practice known as jholabhari, in which the pregnant woman, when she's seven or eight months pregnant, moves in with her mother and goes through a series of rituals and ceremonies, give birth and returns home to her nuclear family several months after the child is born. And this is one of many ways that we think other cultures offset this kind of lonely period. AV: So taboo number three: you can't talk about your miscarriage — but today I'll talk about mine. So after we had Declan, we kind of recalibrated our expectations. We thought we actually could go through this again and thought we knew what we would be up against. And we were grateful that I was able to get pregnant, and I soon learned that we were having a boy, and then when I was five months, we learned that we had lost our child. This is actually the last little image we have of him. And it was obviously a very difficult time — really painful. As I was working through that mourning process, I was amazed that I didn't want to see anybody. I really wanted to crawl into a hole, and I didn't really know how I was going to work my way back into my surrounding community. And I realize, I think, the way I was feeling that way, is on a really deep gut level, I was feeling a lot of shame and embarrassed, frankly, that, in some respects, I had failed at delivering what I'm genetically engineered to do. And of course, it made me question, if I wasn't able to have another child, what would that mean for my marriage, and just me as a woman. So it was a very difficult time. As I started working through it more, I started climbing out of that hole and talking with other people. I was really amazed by all the stories that started flooding in. People I interacted with daily, worked with, was friends with, family members that I had known a long time, had never shared with me their own stories. And I just remember feeling all these stories came out of the woodwork, and I felt like I happened upon this secret society of women that I now was a part of, which was reassuring and also really concerning. And I think, miscarriage is an invisible loss. There's not really a lot of community support around it. There's really no ceremony, rituals, or rites. And I think, with a death, you have a funeral, you celebrate the life, and there's a lot of community support, and it's something women don't have with miscarriage. RG: Which is too bad because, of course, it's a very common and very traumatic experience. Fifteen to 20 percent of all pregnancies result in miscarriage, and I find this astounding. In a survey, 74 percent of women said that miscarriage, they felt, was partly their fault, which is awful. And astoundingly, 22 percent said they would hide a miscarriage from their spouse. So taboo number four: you can't say that your average happiness has declined since having a child. The party line is that every single aspect of my life has just gotten dramatically better ever since I participated in the miracle that is childbirth and family. I'll never forget, I remember vividly to this day, our first son, Declan, was nine months old, and I was sitting there on the couch, and I was reading Daniel Gilbert's wonderful book, "Stumbling on Happiness." And I got about two-thirds of the way through, and there was a chart on the right-hand side — on the right-hand page — that we've labeled here "The Most Terrifying Chart Imaginable for a New Parent." This chart is comprised of four completely independent studies. Basically, there's this precipitous drop of marital satisfaction, which is closely aligned, we all know, with broader happiness, that doesn't rise again until your first child goes to college. So I'm sitting here looking at the next two decades of my life, this chasm of happiness that we're driving our proverbial convertible straight into. We were despondent. AV: So you can imagine, I mean again, the first few months were difficult, but we'd come out of it, and were really shocked to see this study. So we really wanted to take a deeper look at it in hopes that we would find a silver lining. RG: And that's when it's great to be running a website for parents, because we got this incredible reporter to go and interview all the scientists who conducted these four studies. We said, something is wrong here. There's something missing from these studies. It can't possibly be that bad. So Liz Mitchell did a wonderful job with this piece, and she interviewed four scientists, and she also interviewed Daniel Gilbert, and we did indeed find a silver lining. So this is our guess as to what this baseline of average happiness arguably looks like throughout life. Average happiness is, of course, inadequate, because it doesn't speak to the moment-by-moment experience, and so this is what we think it looks like when you layer in moment-to-moment experience. And so we all remember as children, the tiniest little thing — and we see it on the faces of our children — the teeniest little thing can just rocket them to these heights of just utter adulation, and then the next teeniest little thing can cause them just to plummet to the depths of despair. And it's just extraordinary to watch, and we remember it ourselves. And then, of course, as you get older, it's almost like age is a form of lithium. As you get older, you become more stable. And part of what happens, I think, in your '20s and '30s, is you start to learn to hedge your happiness. You start to realize that "Hey, I could go to this live music event and have an utterly transforming experience that will cover my entire body with goosebumps, but it's more likely that I'll feel claustrophobic and I won't be able to get a beer. So I'm not going to go. I've got a good stereo at home. So, I'm not going to go." So your average happiness goes up, but you lose those transcendent moments. AV: Yeah, and then you have your first child, and then you really resubmit yourself to these highs and lows — the highs being the first steps, the first smile, your child reading to you for the first time — the lows being, our house, any time from six to seven every night. But you realize you resubmit yourself to losing control in a really wonderful way, which we think provides a lot of meaning to our lives and is quite gratifying. RG: And so in effect, we trade average happiness. We trade the sort of security and safety of a certain level of contentment for these transcendent moments. So where does that leave the two of us as a family with our three little boys in the thick of all this? There's another factor in our case. We have violated yet another taboo in our own lives, and this is a bonus taboo. AV: A quick bonus taboo for you, that we should not be working together, especially with three children — and we are. RG: And we had reservations about this on the front end. Everybody knows, you should absolutely not work with your spouse. In fact, when we first went out to raise money to start Babble, the venture capitalists said, "We categorically don't invest in companies founded by husbands and wives, because there's an extra point of failure. It's a bad idea. Don't do it." And we obviously went forward. We did. We raised the money, and we're thrilled that we did, because in this phase of one's life, the incredibly scarce resource is time. And if you're really passionate about what you do every day — which we are — and you're also passionate about your relationship, this is the only way we know how to do it. And so the final question that we would ask is: can we collectively bend that happiness chart upwards? It's great that we have these transcendent moments of joy, but they're sometimes pretty quick. And so how about that average baseline of happiness? Can we move that up a little bit? AV: And we kind of feel that the happiness gap, which we talked about, is really the result of walking into parenting — and really any long-term partnership for that matter — with the wrong expectations. And if you have the right expectations and expectation management, we feel like it's going to be a pretty gratifying experience. RG: And so this is what — And we think that a lot of parents, when you get in there — in our case anyway — you pack your bags for a trip to Europe, and you're really excited to go. Get out of the airplane, it turns out you're trekking in Nepal. And trekking in Nepal is an extraordinary experience, particularly if you pack your bags properly and you know what you're getting in for and you're psyched. So the point of all this for us today is not just hopefully honesty for the sake of honesty, but a hope that by being more honest and candid about these experiences, that we can all collectively bend that happiness baseline up a little bit. RG + AV: Thank you. (Applause) |
The case for collaborative consumption | {0: 'Rachel Botsman is a recognized expert on how collaboration and trust enabled by digital technologies will change the way we live, work, bank and consume.'} | TEDxSydney | So today I'm going to talk to you about the rise of collaborative consumption. I'm going to explain what it is and try and convince you — in just 15 minutes — that this isn't a flimsy idea, or a short-term trend, but a powerful cultural and economic force reinventing not just what we consume, but how we consume. Now I'm going to start with a deceptively simple example. Hands up — how many of you have books, CDs, DVDs, or videos lying around your house that you probably won't use again, but you can't quite bring yourself to throw away? Can't see all the hands, but it looks like all of you, right? On our shelves at home, we have a box set of the DVD series "24," season six to be precise. I think it was bought for us around three years ago for a Christmas present. Now my husband, Chris, and I love this show. But let's face it, when you've watched it once maybe, or twice, you don't really want to watch it again, because you know how Jack Bauer is going to defeat the terrorists. So there it sits on our shelves obsolete to us, but with immediate latent value to someone else. Now before we go on, I have a confession to make. I lived in New York for 10 years, and I am a big fan of "Sex and the City." Now I'd love to watch the first movie again as sort of a warm-up to the sequel coming out next week. So how easily could I swap our unwanted copy of "24" for a wanted copy of "Sex and the City?" Now you may have noticed there's a new sector emerging called swap-trading. Now the easiest analogy for swap-trading is like an online dating service for all your unwanted media. What it does is use the Internet to create an infinite marketplace to match person A's "haves" with person C's "wants," whatever they may be. The other week, I went on one of these sites, appropriately called Swaptree, and there were over 59,300 items that I could instantly swap for my copy of "24." Lo and behold, there in Reseda, CA was Rondoron who wanted swap his or her "like new" copy of "Sex and the City" for my copy of "24." So in other words, what's happening here is that Swaptree solves my carrying company's sugar rush problem, a problem the economists call "the coincidence of wants," in approximately 60 seconds. What's even more amazing is it will print out a postage label on the spot, because it knows the way of the item. Now there are layers of technical wonder behind sites such as Swaptree, but that's not my interest, and nor is swap trading, per se. My passion, and what I've spent the last few years dedicated to researching, is the collaborative behaviors and trust-mechanics inherent in these systems. When you think about it, it would have seemed like a crazy idea, even a few years ago, that I would swap my stuff with a total stranger whose real name I didn't know and without any money changing hands. Yet 99 percent of trades on Swaptree happen successfully, and the one percent that receive a negative rating, it's for relatively minor reasons, like the item didn't arrive on time. So what's happening here? An extremely powerful dynamic that has huge commercial and cultural implications is at play. Namely, that technology is enabling trust between strangers. We now live in a global village where we can mimic the ties that used to happen face to face, but on a scale and in ways that have never been possible before. So what's actually happening is that social networks and real-time technologies are taking us back. We're bartering, trading, swapping, sharing, but they're being reinvented into dynamic and appealing forms. What I find fascinating is that we've actually wired our world to share, whether that's our neighborhood, our school, our office, or our Facebook network, and that's creating an economy of "what's mine is yours." From the mighty eBay, the grandfather of exchange marketplaces, to car-sharing companies such as GoGet, where you pay a monthly fee to rent cars by the hour, to social lending platforms such as Zopa, that will take anyone in this audience with 100 dollars to lend, and match them with a borrower anywhere in the world, we're sharing and collaborating again in ways that I believe are more hip than hippie. I call this "groundswell collaborative consumption." Now before I dig into the different systems of collaborative consumption, I'd like to try and answer the question that every author rightfully gets asked, which is, where did this idea come from? Now I'd like to say I woke up one morning and said, "I'm going to write about collaborative consumption," but actually it was a complicated web of seemingly disconnected ideas. Over the next minute, you're going to see a bit like a conceptual fireworks display of all the dots that went on in my head. The first thing I began to notice: how many big concepts were emerging — from the wisdom of crowds to smart mobs — around how ridiculously easy it is to form groups for a purpose. And linked to this crowd mania were examples all around the world — from the election of a president to the infamous Wikipedia, and everything in between — on what the power of numbers could achieve. Now, you know when you learn a new word, and then you start to see that word everywhere? That's what happened to me when I noticed that we are moving from passive consumers to creators, to highly enabled collaborators. What's happening is the Internet is removing the middleman, so that anyone from a T-shirt designer to a knitter can make a living selling peer-to-peer. And the ubiquitous force of this peer-to-peer revolution means that sharing is happening at phenomenal rates. I mean, it's amazing to think that, in every single minute of this speech, 25 hours of YouTube video will be loaded. Now what I find fascinating about these examples is how they're actually tapping into our primate instincts. I mean, we're monkeys, and we're born and bred to share and cooperate. And we were doing so for thousands of years, whether it's when we hunted in packs, or farmed in cooperatives, before this big system called hyper-consumption came along and we built these fences and created out own little fiefdoms. But things are changing, and one of the reasons why is the digital natives, or Gen-Y. They're growing up sharing — files, video games, knowledge. It's second nature to them. So we, the millennials — I am just a millennial — are like foot soldiers, moving us from a culture of "me" to a culture of "we." The reason why it's happening so fast is because of mobile collaboration. We now live in a connected age where we can locate anyone, anytime, in real-time, from a small device in our hands. All of this was going through my head towards the end of 2008, when, of course, the great financial crash happened. Thomas Friedman is one of my favorite New York Times columnists, and he poignantly commented that 2008 is when we hit a wall, when Mother Nature and the market both said, "No more." Now we rationally know that an economy built on hyper-consumption is a Ponzi scheme. It's a house of cards. Yet, it's hard for us to individually know what to do. So all of this is a lot of twittering, right? Well it was a lot of noise and complexity in my head, until actually I realized it was happening because of four key drivers. One, a renewed belief in the importance of community, and a very redefinition of what friend and neighbor really means. A torrent of peer-to-peer social networks and real-time technologies, fundamentally changing the way we behave. Three, pressing unresolved environmental concerns. And four, a global recession that has fundamentally shocked consumer behaviors. These four drivers are fusing together and creating the big shift — away from the 20th century, defined by hyper-consumption, towards the 21st century, defined by collaborative consumption. I generally believe we're at an inflection point where the sharing behaviors — through sites such as Flickr and Twitter that are becoming second nature online — are being applied to offline areas of our everyday lives. From morning commutes to the way fashion is designed to the way we grow food, we are consuming and collaborating once again. So my co-author, Roo Rogers, and I have actually gathered thousands of examples from all around the world of collaborative consumption. And although they vary enormously in scale, maturity and purpose, when we dived into them, we realized that they could actually be organized into three clear systems. The first is redistribution markets. Redistribution markets, just like Swaptree, are when you take a used, or pre-owned, item and move it from where it's not needed to somewhere, or someone, where it is. They're increasingly thought of as the fifth 'R' — reduce, reuse, recycle, repair and redistribute — because they stretch the life cycle of a product and thereby reduce waste. The second is collaborative lifestyles. This is the sharing of resources of things like money, skills and time. I bet, in a couple of years, that phrases like "coworking" and "couchsurfing" and "time banks" are going to become a part of everyday vernacular. One of my favorite examples of collaborative lifestyles is called Landshare. It's a scheme in the U.K. that matches Mr. Jones, with some spare space in his back garden, with Mrs. Smith, a would-be grower. Together they grow their own food. It's one of those ideas that's so simple, yet brilliant, you wonder why it's never been done before. Now, the third system is product-service systems. This is where you pay for the benefit of the product — what it does for you — without needing to own the product outright. This idea is particularly powerful for things that have high-idling capacity. And that can be anything from baby goods to fashions to — how many of you have a power drill, own a power drill? Right. That power drill will be used around 12 to 13 minutes in its entire lifetime. (Laughter) It's kind of ridiculous, right? Because what you need is the hole, not the drill. (Laughter) (Applause) So why don't you rent the drill, or, even better, rent out your own drill to other people and make some money from it? These three systems are coming together, allowing people to share resources without sacrificing their lifestyles, or their cherished personal freedoms. I'm not asking people to share nicely in the sandpit. So I want to just give you an example of how powerful collaborative consumption can be to change behaviors. The average car costs 8,000 dollars a year to run. Yet, that car sits idle for 23 hours a day. So when you consider these two facts, it starts to make a little less sense that we have to own one outright. So this is where car-sharing companies such as Zipcar and GoGet come in. In 2009, Zipcar took 250 participants from across 13 cities — and they're all self-confessed car addicts and car-sharing rookies — and got them to surrender their keys for a month. Instead, these people had to walk, bike, take the train, or other forms of public transport. They could only use their Zipcar membership when absolutely necessary. The results of this challenge after just one month was staggering. It's amazing that 413 lbs were lost just from the extra exercise. But my favorite statistic is that 100 out of the 250 participants did not want their keys back. In other words, the car addicts had lost their urge to own. Now products-service systems have been around for years. Just think of libraries and laundrettes. But I think they're entering a new age, because technology makes sharing frictionless and fun. There's a great quote that was written in the New York Times that said, "Sharing is to ownership what the iPod is to the 8-track, what solar power is to the coal mine." I believe also, our generation, our relationship to satisfying what we want is far less tangible than any other previous generation. I don't want the DVD; I want the movie it carries. I don't want a clunky answering machine; I want the message it saves. I don't want a CD; I want the music it plays. In other words, I don't want stuff; I want the needs or experiences it fulfills. This is fueling a massive shift from where usage trumps possessions — or as Kevin Kelly, the editor of Wired magazine, puts it, "where access is better than ownership." Now as our possessions dematerialize into the cloud, a blurry line is appearing between what's mine, what's yours, and what's ours. I want to give you one example that shows how fast this evolution is happening. This represents an eight-year time span. We've gone from traditional car-ownership to car-sharing companies, such as Zipcar and GoGet, to ride-sharing platforms that match rides to the newest entry, which is peer-to-peer car rental, where you can actually make money out of renting that car that sits idle for 23 hours a day to your neighbor. Now all of these systems require a degree of trust, and the cornerstone to this working is reputation. Now in the old consumer system, our reputation didn't matter so much, because our credit history was far more important that any kind of peer-to-peer review. But now with the Web, we leave a trail. With every spammer we flag, with every idea we post, comment we share, we're actually signaling how well we collaborate, and whether we can or can't be trusted. Let's go back to my first example, Swaptree. I can see that Rondoron has completed 553 trades with a 100 percent success rate. In other words, I can trust him or her. Now mark my words, it's only a matter of time before we're going to be able to perform a Google-like search and see a cumulative picture of our reputation capital. And this reputation capital will determine our access to collaborative consumption. It's a new social currency, so to speak, that could become as powerful as our credit rating. Now as a closing thought, I believe we're actually in a period where we're waking up from this humongous hangover of emptiness and waste, and we're taking a leap to create a more sustainable system built to serve our innate needs for community and individual identity. I believe it will be referred to as a revolution, so to speak — when society, faced with great challenges, made a seismic shift from individual getting and spending towards a rediscovery of collective good. I'm on a mission to make sharing cool. I'm on a mission to make sharing hip. Because I really believe it can disrupt outdated modes of business, help us leapfrog over wasteful forms of hyper-consumption and teach us when enough really is enough. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Life lessons from big cats | {0: 'Documentary filmmakers Beverly and Dereck Joubert have worked to conserve wildlife for more than 25 years. As National Geographic Explorers in Residence, the couple influences public policy and perceptions.'} | TEDWomen 2010 | Beverly Joubert: We are truly passionate about the African wilderness and protecting the African wilderness, and so what we've done is we've focused on iconic cats. And I know, in the light of human suffering and poverty and even climate change, one would wonder, why worry about a few cats? Well today we're here to share with you a message that we have learned from a very important and special character — this leopard. Dereck Joubert: Well, our lives have basically been like a super long episode of "CSI" — something like 28 years. In essence, what we've done is we've studied the science, we've looked at the behavior, we've seen over 2,000 kills by these amazing animals. But one of the things that science really lets us down on is that personality, that individual personality that these animals have. And here's a prime example. We found this leopard in a 2,000-year-old baobab tree in Africa, the same tree that we found her mother in and her grandmother. And she took us on a journey and revealed something very special to us — her own daughter, eight days old. And the minute we found this leopard, we realized that we needed to move in, and so we basically stayed with this leopard for the next four-and-a-half years — following her every day, getting to know her, that individual personality of hers, and really coming to know her. Now I'm destined to spend a lot of time with some unique, very, very special, individualistic and often seductive female characters. (Laughter) Beverly's clearly one of them, and this little leopard, Legadema, is another, and she changed our lives. BJ: Well we certainly did spend a lot of time with her — in fact, more time than even her mother did. When her mother would go off hunting, we would stay and film. And early on, a lightning bolt hit a tree 20 paces away from us. It was frightening, and it showered us with leaves and a pungent smell. And of course, we were stunned for a while, but when we managed to get our wits about us, we looked at it and said, "My gosh, what's going to happen with that little cub? She's probably going to forever associate that deafening crash with us." Well, we needn't have worried. She came charging out of the thicket straight towards us, sat next to us, shivering, with her back towards Dereck, and looking out. And actually from that day on, she's been comfortable with us. So we felt that that day was the day that she really earned her name. We called her Legadema, which means, "light from the sky." DJ: Now we've found these individualisms in all sorts of animals, in particular in the cats. This particular one is called Eetwidomayloh, "he who greets with fire," and you can just see that about him, you know — that's his character. But only by getting up close to these animals and spending time with them can we actually even reach out and dig out these personal characters that they have. BJ: But through our investigation, we have to seek the wildest places in Africa. And right now this is in the Okavango Delta in Botswana. Yes, it is swamp. We live in the swamp in a tent, but I must tell you, every day is exhilarating. But also, our hearts are in our throats a huge amount of the time, because we're driving through water, and it's an unknown territory. But we're really there seeking and searching and filming the iconic cats. DJ: Now one of the big things, of course, everybody knows that cats hate water, and so this was a real revelation for us. And we could only find this by pushing ourselves, by going where no sane person should go — not without some prompting, by the way, from Beverly — and just pushing the envelope, going out there, pushing our vehicle, pushing ourselves. But we've managed to find that these lions are 15 percent bigger than any others, and they specialize in hunting buffalo in the water. BJ: And then of course, the challenge is knowing when to turn around. We don't always get that right, and on this particular day, we seriously underestimated the depth. We got deeper and deeper, until it was at Dereck's chest-height. Well then we hit a deep depression, and we seriously submerged the vehicle. We actually managed to drown two million dollars' worth of camera gear. We drowned our pride, I must tell you, which was really serious, and we seized the engine. DJ: And of course, one of the rules that we have in the vehicle is that he who drowns the vehicle gets to swim with the crocodiles. (Laughter) You will notice also that all of these images here are taken from the top angle by Beverly — the dry top angle, by the way. (Laughter) But all the places we get stuck in really have great views. And it wasn't a moment, and these lions came back towards us, and Beverly was able to get a great photograph. BJ: But we truly do spend day and night trying to capture unique footage. And 20 years ago, we did a film called "Eternal Enemies" where we managed to capture this unusual disturbing behavior across two species — lions and hyenas. And surprisingly, it became a cult film. And we can only work that out as people were seeing parallels between the thuggish side of nature and gang warfare. DJ: It was amazing, because you can see that this lion is doing exactly what his name, Eetwidomayloh, represents. He's focused on this hyena, and he is going to get it. (Animal sounds) But that's, I think, what this is all about, is that these individuals have these personalities and characters. But for us to get them, not only do we push ourselves, but we live by certain rules of engagement, which mean we can't interfere. This sort of behavior has been going on for three, four, five million years, and we can't step in and say, "That's wrong, and that's right." But that's not always easy for us. BJ: So, as Dereck says, we have to work through extremes — extreme temperatures, push ourselves at night. Sleep deprivation is extreme. We're on the edge through a large part of the time. But, for 10 years, we tried to capture lions and elephants together — and never ever managed until this particular night. And I have to tell you that it was a disturbing night for me. I had tears rolling down my cheeks. I was shaking with anxiety, but I knew that [I had] to capture something that had never been seen before, had never been documented. And I do believe you should stay with us. DJ: The amazing thing about these moments — and this is probably a highlight of our career — is that you never know how it's going to end. Many people believe, in fact, that death begins in the eyes, not in the heart, not in the lungs, and that's when people give up hope, or when any life form gives up hope. And you can see the start of it here. This elephant, against overwhelming odds, simply gives up hope. But by the same token, you can get your hope back again. So just when you think it's all over, something else happens, some spark gets into you, some sort of will to fight — that iron will that we all have, that this elephant has, that conservation has, that big cats have. Everything has that will to survive, to fight, to push through that mental barrier and to keep going. And for us, in many ways, this elephant has become a symbol of inspiration for us, a symbol of that hope as we go forward in our work. (Applause) Now back to the leopard. We were spending so much time with this leopard and getting to understand her individualism, her personal character, that maybe we were taking it a little bit far. We were perhaps taking her for granted, and maybe she didn't like that that much. This is about couples working together, and so I do need to say that within the vehicle we have quite strict territories, Beverly and I. Beverly sits on the one side where all her camera gear is, and I'm on the other side where my space is. These are precious to us, these divides. BJ: But when this little cub saw that I had vacated my seat and climbed to the back to get some camera gear, she came in like a curious cat to come and investigate. It was phenomenal, and we felt grateful that she trusted us to that extent. But at the same time, we were concerned that if she created this as a habit and jumped into somebody else's car, it might not turn out the same way — she might get shot for that. So we knew we had to react quickly. And the only way we thought we could without scaring her is to try and simulate a growl like her mother would make — a hiss and a sound. So Dereck turned on the heater fan in the car — very innovative. DJ: It was the only way for me to save the marriage, because Beverly felt she was being replaced, you see. (Laughter) But really and truly, this was how this little leopard was displaying her individual personality. But nothing prepared us for what happened next in our relationship with her, when she started hunting. BJ: And on this first hunt, we truly were excited. It was like watching a graduation ceremony. We felt like we were surrogate parents. And of course, we knew now that she was going to survive. But only when we saw the tiny baby baboon clinging to the mother's fur did we realize that something very unique was taking place here with Legadema. And of course, the baby baboon was so innocent, it didn't turn and run. So what we watched over the next couple of hours was very unique. It was absolutely amazing when she picked it up to safety, protecting it from the hyena. And over the next five hours, she took care of it. We realized that we actually don't know everything, and that nature is so unpredictable, we have to be open at all times. DJ: Okay, so she was a little bit rough. (Laughter) But in fact, what we were seeing here was interesting. Because she is a cub wanting to play, but she was also a predator needing to kill, and yet conflicted in some way, because she was also an emerging mother. She had this maternal instinct, much like a young girl on her way to womanhood, and so this really took us to this new level of understanding that personality. BJ: And of course, through the night, they lay together. They ended up sleeping for hours. But I have to tell you — everybody always asks, "What happened to the baby baboon?" It did die, and we suspect it was from the freezing winter nights. DJ: So at this stage, I guess, we had very, very firm ideas on what conservation meant. We had to deal with these individual personalities. We had to deal with them with respect and celebrate them. And so we, with the National Geographic, formed the Big Cats Initiative to march forward into conservation, taking care of the big cats that we loved — and then had an opportunity to look back over the last 50 years to see how well we had all collectively been doing. So when Beverly and I were born, there were 450,000 lions, and today there are 20,000. Tigers haven't fared any better — 45,000 down to maybe 3,000. BJ: And then cheetahs have crashed all the way down to 12,000. Leopards have plummeted from 700,000 down to a mere 50,000. Now in the extraordinary time that we have worked with Legadema — which is really over a five-year period — 10,000 leopards were legally shot by safari hunters. And that's not the only leopards that were being killed through that period. There's an immense amount of poaching as well, and so possibly the same amount. It's simply not sustainable. We admire them, and we fear them, and yet, as man, we want to steal their power. It used to be the time where only kings wore a leopard skin, but now throughout rituals and ceremonies, traditional healers and ministers. And of course, looking at this lion paw that has been skinned, it eerily reminds me of a human hand, and that's ironic, because their fate is in our hands. DJ: There's a burgeoning bone trade. South Africa just released some lion bones onto the market. Lion bones and tiger bones look exactly the same, and so in a stroke, the lion bone industry is going to wipe out all the tigers. So we have a real problem here, no more so than the lions do, the male lions. So the 20,000 lion figure that you just saw is actually a red herring, because there may be 3,000 or 4,000 male lions, and they all are actually infected with the same disease. I call it complacency — our complacency. Because there's a sport, there's an activity going on that we're all aware of, that we condone. And that's probably because we haven't seen it like we are today. BJ: And you have to know that, when a male lion is killed, it completely disrupts the whole pride. A new male comes into the area and takes over the pride, and, of course, first of all kills all the cubs and possibly some of the females that are defending their cubs. So we've estimated that between 20 [and] 30 lions are killed when one lion is hanging on a wall somewhere in a far-off place. DJ: So what our investigations have shown is that these lions are essential. They're essential to the habitat. If they disappear, whole ecosystems in Africa disappear. There's an 80-billion-dollar-a-year ecotourism revenue stream into Africa. So this is not just a concern about lions; it's a concern about communities in Africa as well. If they disappear, all of that goes away. But what I'm more concerned about in many ways is that, as we de-link ourselves from nature, as we de-link ourselves spiritually from these animals, we lose hope, we lose that spiritual connection, our dignity, that thing within us that keeps us connected to the planet. BJ: So you have to know, looking into the eyes of lions and leopards right now, it is all about critical awareness. And so what we are doing, in February, we're bringing out a film called "The Last Lion," and "The Last Lion" is exactly what is happening right now. That is the situation we're in — the last lions. That is, if we don't take action and do something, these plains will be completely devoid of big cats, and then, in turn, everything else will disappear. And simply, if we can't protect them, we're going to have a job protecting ourselves as well. DJ: And in fact, that original thing that we spoke about and designed our lives by — that conservation was all about respect and celebration — is probably true. That's really what it needs. We need it. We respect and celebrate each other as a man and a woman, as a community and as part of this planet, and we need to continue that. And Legadema? Well we can report, in fact, that we're grandparents. (Laughter) BJ/DJ: Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Why we have too few women leaders | {0: 'As the COO at the helm of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg juggles the tasks of monetizing the world’s largest social networking site while keeping its users happy and engaged.'} | TEDWomen 2010 | So for any of us in this room today, let's start out by admitting we're lucky. We don't live in the world our mothers lived in, our grandmothers lived in, where career choices for women were so limited. And if you're in this room today, most of us grew up in a world where we have basic civil rights, and amazingly, we still live in a world where some women don't have them. But all that aside, we still have a problem, and it's a real problem. And the problem is this: Women are not making it to the top of any profession anywhere in the world. The numbers tell the story quite clearly. 190 heads of state — nine are women. Of all the people in parliament in the world, 13 percent are women. In the corporate sector, women at the top, C-level jobs, board seats — tops out at 15, 16 percent. The numbers have not moved since 2002 and are going in the wrong direction. And even in the non-profit world, a world we sometimes think of as being led by more women, women at the top: 20 percent. We also have another problem, which is that women face harder choices between professional success and personal fulfillment. A recent study in the U.S. showed that, of married senior managers, two-thirds of the married men had children and only one-third of the married women had children. A couple of years ago, I was in New York, and I was pitching a deal, and I was in one of those fancy New York private equity offices you can picture. And I'm in the meeting — it's about a three-hour meeting — and two hours in, there needs to be that bio break, and everyone stands up, and the partner running the meeting starts looking really embarrassed. And I realized he doesn't know where the women's room is in his office. So I start looking around for moving boxes, figuring they just moved in, but I don't see any. And so I said, "Did you just move into this office?" And he said, "No, we've been here about a year." And I said, "Are you telling me that I am the only woman to have pitched a deal in this office in a year?" And he looked at me, and he said, "Yeah. Or maybe you're the only one who had to go to the bathroom." (Laughter) So the question is, how are we going to fix this? How do we change these numbers at the top? How do we make this different? I want to start out by saying, I talk about this — about keeping women in the workforce — because I really think that's the answer. In the high-income part of our workforce, in the people who end up at the top — Fortune 500 CEO jobs, or the equivalent in other industries — the problem, I am convinced, is that women are dropping out. Now people talk about this a lot, and they talk about things like flextime and mentoring and programs companies should have to train women. I want to talk about none of that today, even though that's all really important. Today I want to focus on what we can do as individuals. What are the messages we need to tell ourselves? What are the messages we tell the women that work with and for us? What are the messages we tell our daughters? Now, at the outset, I want to be very clear that this speech comes with no judgments. I don't have the right answer. I don't even have it for myself. I left San Francisco, where I live, on Monday, and I was getting on the plane for this conference. And my daughter, who's three, when I dropped her off at preschool, did that whole hugging-the-leg, crying, "Mommy, don't get on the plane" thing. This is hard. I feel guilty sometimes. I know no women, whether they're at home or whether they're in the workforce, who don't feel that sometimes. So I'm not saying that staying in the workforce is the right thing for everyone. My talk today is about what the messages are if you do want to stay in the workforce, and I think there are three. One, sit at the table. Two, make your partner a real partner. And three, don't leave before you leave. Number one: sit at the table. Just a couple weeks ago at Facebook, we hosted a very senior government official, and he came in to meet with senior execs from around Silicon Valley. And everyone kind of sat at the table. He had these two women who were traveling with him pretty senior in his department, and I kind of said to them, "Sit at the table. Come on, sit at the table," and they sat on the side of the room. When I was in college, my senior year, I took a course called European Intellectual History. Don't you love that kind of thing from college? I wish I could do that now. And I took it with my roommate, Carrie, who was then a brilliant literary student — and went on to be a brilliant literary scholar — and my brother — smart guy, but a water-polo-playing pre-med, who was a sophomore. The three of us take this class together. And then Carrie reads all the books in the original Greek and Latin, goes to all the lectures. I read all the books in English and go to most of the lectures. My brother is kind of busy. He reads one book of 12 and goes to a couple of lectures, marches himself up to our room a couple days before the exam to get himself tutored. The three of us go to the exam together, and we sit down. And we sit there for three hours — and our little blue notebooks — yes, I'm that old. We walk out, we look at each other, and we say, "How did you do?" And Carrie says, "Boy, I feel like I didn't really draw out the main point on the Hegelian dialectic." And I say, "God, I really wish I had really connected John Locke's theory of property with the philosophers that follow." And my brother says, "I got the top grade in the class." (Laughter) "You got the top grade in the class? You don't know anything." (Laughter) The problem with these stories is that they show what the data shows: women systematically underestimate their own abilities. If you test men and women, and you ask them questions on totally objective criteria like GPAs, men get it wrong slightly high, and women get it wrong slightly low. Women do not negotiate for themselves in the workforce. A study in the last two years of people entering the workforce out of college showed that 57 percent of boys entering, or men, I guess, are negotiating their first salary, and only seven percent of women. And most importantly, men attribute their success to themselves, and women attribute it to other external factors. If you ask men why they did a good job, they'll say, "I'm awesome. Obviously. Why are you even asking?" If you ask women why they did a good job, what they'll say is someone helped them, they got lucky, they worked really hard. Why does this matter? Boy, it matters a lot. Because no one gets to the corner office by sitting on the side, not at the table, and no one gets the promotion if they don't think they deserve their success, or they don't even understand their own success. I wish the answer were easy. I wish I could go tell all the young women I work for, these fabulous women, "Believe in yourself and negotiate for yourself. Own your own success." I wish I could tell that to my daughter. But it's not that simple. Because what the data shows, above all else, is one thing, which is that success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women. And everyone's nodding, because we all know this to be true. There's a really good study that shows this really well. There's a famous Harvard Business School study on a woman named Heidi Roizen. And she's an operator in a company in Silicon Valley, and she uses her contacts to become a very successful venture capitalist. In 2002 — not so long ago — a professor who was then at Columbia University took that case and made it [Howard] Roizen. And he gave the case out, both of them, to two groups of students. He changed exactly one word: "Heidi" to "Howard." But that one word made a really big difference. He then surveyed the students, and the good news was the students, both men and women, thought Heidi and Howard were equally competent, and that's good. The bad news was that everyone liked Howard. He's a great guy. You want to work for him. You want to spend the day fishing with him. But Heidi? Not so sure. She's a little out for herself. She's a little political. You're not sure you'd want to work for her. This is the complication. We have to tell our daughters and our colleagues, we have to tell ourselves to believe we got the A, to reach for the promotion, to sit at the table, and we have to do it in a world where, for them, there are sacrifices they will make for that, even though for their brothers, there are not. The saddest thing about all of this is that it's really hard to remember this. And I'm about to tell a story which is truly embarrassing for me, but I think important. I gave this talk at Facebook not so long ago to about 100 employees, and a couple hours later, there was a young woman who works there sitting outside my little desk, and she wanted to talk to me. I said, okay, and she sat down, and we talked. And she said, "I learned something today. I learned that I need to keep my hand up." "What do you mean?" She said, "You're giving this talk, and you said you would take two more questions. I had my hand up with many other people, and you took two more questions. I put my hand down, and I noticed all the women did the same, and then you took more questions, only from the men." And I thought to myself, "Wow, if it's me — who cares about this, obviously — giving this talk — and during this talk, I can't even notice that the men's hands are still raised, and the women's hands are still raised, how good are we as managers of our companies and our organizations at seeing that the men are reaching for opportunities more than women?" We've got to get women to sit at the table. (Cheers) (Applause) Message number two: Make your partner a real partner. I've become convinced that we've made more progress in the workforce than we have in the home. The data shows this very clearly. If a woman and a man work full-time and have a child, the woman does twice the amount of housework the man does, and the woman does three times the amount of childcare the man does. So she's got three jobs or two jobs, and he's got one. Who do you think drops out when someone needs to be home more? The causes of this are really complicated, and I don't have time to go into them. And I don't think Sunday football-watching and general laziness is the cause. I think the cause is more complicated. I think, as a society, we put more pressure on our boys to succeed than we do on our girls. I know men that stay home and work in the home to support wives with careers, and it's hard. When I go to the Mommy-and-Me stuff and I see the father there, I notice that the other mommies don't play with him. And that's a problem, because we have to make it as important a job, because it's the hardest job in the world to work inside the home, for people of both genders, if we're going to even things out and let women stay in the workforce. (Applause) Studies show that households with equal earning and equal responsibility also have half the divorce rate. And if that wasn't good enough motivation for everyone out there, they also have more — how shall I say this on this stage? They know each other more in the biblical sense as well. (Cheers) Message number three: Don't leave before you leave. I think there's a really deep irony to the fact that actions women are taking — and I see this all the time — with the objective of staying in the workforce actually lead to their eventually leaving. Here's what happens: We're all busy. Everyone's busy. A woman's busy. And she starts thinking about having a child, and from the moment she starts thinking about having a child, she starts thinking about making room for that child. "How am I going to fit this into everything else I'm doing?" And literally from that moment, she doesn't raise her hand anymore, she doesn't look for a promotion, she doesn't take on the new project, she doesn't say, "Me. I want to do that." She starts leaning back. The problem is that — let's say she got pregnant that day, that day — nine months of pregnancy, three months of maternity leave, six months to catch your breath — Fast-forward two years, more often — and as I've seen it — women start thinking about this way earlier — when they get engaged, or married, when they start thinking about having a child, which can take a long time. One woman came to see me about this. She looked a little young. And I said, "So are you and your husband thinking about having a baby?" And she said, "Oh no, I'm not married." She didn't even have a boyfriend. (Laughter) I said, "You're thinking about this just way too early." But the point is that what happens once you start kind of quietly leaning back? Everyone who's been through this — and I'm here to tell you, once you have a child at home, your job better be really good to go back, because it's hard to leave that kid at home. Your job needs to be challenging. It needs to be rewarding. You need to feel like you're making a difference. And if two years ago you didn't take a promotion and some guy next to you did, if three years ago you stopped looking for new opportunities, you're going to be bored because you should have kept your foot on the gas pedal. Don't leave before you leave. Stay in. Keep your foot on the gas pedal, until the very day you need to leave to take a break for a child — and then make your decisions. Don't make decisions too far in advance, particularly ones you're not even conscious you're making. My generation really, sadly, is not going to change the numbers at the top. They're just not moving. We are not going to get to where 50 percent of the population — in my generation, there will not be 50 percent of [women] at the top of any industry. But I'm hopeful that future generations can. I think a world where half of our countries and our companies were run by women, would be a better world. It's not just because people would know where the women's bathrooms are, even though that would be very helpful. I think it would be a better world. I have two children. I have a five-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter. I want my son to have a choice to contribute fully in the workforce or at home, and I want my daughter to have the choice to not just succeed, but to be liked for her accomplishments. Thank you. (Applause) |
3 stories of local eco-entrepreneurship | {0: 'Majora Carter redefined the field of environmental equality, starting in the South Bronx at the turn of the century. Now she is leading the local economic development movement across the USA.'} | TEDxMidwest | So today, I'm going to tell you about some people who didn't move out of their neighborhoods. The first one is happening right here in Chicago. Brenda Palms-Farber was hired to help ex-convicts reenter society and keep them from going back into prison. Currently, taxpayers spend about 60,000 dollars per year sending a person to jail. We know that two-thirds of them are going to go back. I find it interesting that, for every one dollar we spend, however, on early childhood education, like Head Start, we save 17 dollars on stuff like incarceration in the future. Or — think about it — that 60,000 dollars is more than what it costs to send one person to Harvard as well. But Brenda, not being phased by stuff like that, took a look at her challenge and came up with a not-so-obvious solution: create a business that produces skin care products from honey. Okay, it might be obvious to some of you; it wasn't to me. It's the basis of growing a form of social innovation that has real potential. She hired seemingly unemployable men and women to care for the bees, harvest the honey and make value-added products that they marketed themselves, and that were later sold at Whole Foods. She combined employment experience and training with life skills they needed, like anger-management and teamwork, and also how to talk to future employers about how their experiences actually demonstrated the lessons that they had learned and their eagerness to learn more. Less than four percent of the folks that went through her program actually go back to jail. So these young men and women learned job-readiness and life skills through bee keeping and became productive citizens in the process. Talk about a sweet beginning. Now, I'm going to take you to Los Angeles, and lots of people know that L.A. has its issues. But I'm going to talk about L.A.'s water issues right now. They have not enough water on most days and too much to handle when it rains. Currently, 20 percent of California's energy consumption is used to pump water into mostly Southern California. Their spending loads, loads, to channel that rainwater out into the ocean when it rains and floods as well. Now Andy Lipkis is working to help L.A. cut infrastructure costs associated with water management and urban heat island — linking trees, people and technology to create a more livable city. All that green stuff actually naturally absorbs storm water, also helps cool our cities. Because, come to think about it, do you really want air-conditioning, or is it a cooler room that you want? How you get it shouldn't make that much of a difference. So a few years ago, L.A. County decided that they needed to spend 2.5 billion dollars to repair the city schools. And Andy and his team discovered that they were going to spend 200 million of those dollars on asphalt to surround the schools themselves. And by presenting a really strong economic case, they convinced the L.A. government that replacing that asphalt with trees and other greenery, that the schools themselves would save the system more on energy than they spend on horticultural infrastructure. So ultimately, 20 million square feet of asphalt was replaced or avoided, and electrical consumption for air-conditioning went down, while employment for people to maintain those grounds went up, resulting in a net-savings to the system, but also healthier students and schools system employees as well. Now Judy Bonds is a coal miner's daughter. Her family has eight generations in a town called Whitesville, West Virginia. And if anyone should be clinging to the former glory of the coal mining history, and of the town, it should be Judy. But the way coal is mined right now is different from the deep mines that her father and her father's father would go down into and that employed essentially thousands and thousands of people. Now, two dozen men can tear down a mountain in several months, and only for about a few years' worth of coal. That kind of technology is called "mountaintop removal." It can make a mountain go from this to this in a few short months. Just imagine that the air surrounding these places — it's filled with the residue of explosives and coal. When we visited, it gave some of the people we were with this strange little cough after being only there for just a few hours or so — not just miners, but everybody. And Judy saw her landscape being destroyed and her water poisoned. And the coal companies just move on after the mountain was emptied, leaving even more unemployment in their wake. But she also saw the difference in potential wind energy on an intact mountain, and one that was reduced in elevation by over 2,000 feet. Three years of dirty energy with not many jobs, or centuries of clean energy with the potential for developing expertise and improvements in efficiency based on technical skills, and developing local knowledge about how to get the most out of that region's wind. She calculated the up-front cost and the payback over time, and it's a net-plus on so many levels for the local, national and global economy. It's a longer payback than mountaintop removal, but the wind energy actually pays back forever. Now mountaintop removal pays very little money to the locals, and it gives them a lot of misery. The water is turned into goo. Most people are still unemployed, leading to most of the same kinds of social problems that unemployed people in inner cities also experience — drug and alcohol abuse, domestic abuse, teen pregnancy and poor heath, as well. Now Judy and I — I have to say — totally related to each other. Not quite an obvious alliance. I mean, literally, her hometown is called Whitesville, West Virginia. I mean, they are not — they ain't competing for the birthplace of hip hop title or anything like that. But the back of my T-shirt, the one that she gave me, says, "Save the endangered hillbillies." So homegirls and hillbillies we got it together and totally understand that this is what it's all about. But just a few months ago, Judy was diagnosed with stage-three lung cancer. Yeah. And it has since moved to her bones and her brain. And I just find it so bizarre that she's suffering from the same thing that she tried so hard to protect people from. But her dream of Coal River Mountain Wind is her legacy. And she might not get to see that mountaintop. But rather than writing yet some kind of manifesto or something, she's leaving behind a business plan to make it happen. That's what my homegirl is doing. So I'm so proud of that. (Applause) But these three people don't know each other, but they do have an awful lot in common. They're all problem solvers, and they're just some of the many examples that I really am privileged to see, meet and learn from in the examples of the work that I do now. I was really lucky to have them all featured on my Corporation for Public Radio radio show called ThePromisedLand.org. Now they're all very practical visionaries. They take a look at the demands that are out there — beauty products, healthy schools, electricity — and how the money's flowing to meet those demands. And when the cheapest solutions involve reducing the number of jobs, you're left with unemployed people, and those people aren't cheap. In fact, they make up some of what I call the most expensive citizens, and they include generationally impoverished, traumatized vets returning from the Middle East, people coming out of jail. And for the veterans in particular, the V.A. said there's a six-fold increase in mental health pharmaceuticals by vets since 2003. I think that number's probably going to go up. They're not the largest number of people, but they are some of the most expensive — and in terms of the likelihood for domestic abuse, drug and alcohol abuse, poor performance by their kids in schools and also poor health as a result of stress. So these three guys all understand how to productively channel dollars through our local economies to meet existing market demands, reduce the social problems that we have now and prevent new problems in the future. And there are plenty of other examples like that. One problem: waste handling and unemployment. Even when we think or talk about recycling, lots of recyclable stuff ends up getting incinerated or in landfills and leaving many municipalities, diversion rates — they leave much to be recycled. And where is this waste handled? Usually in poor communities. And we know that eco-industrial business, these kinds of business models — there's a model in Europe called the eco-industrial park, where either the waste of one company is the raw material for another, or you use recycled materials to make goods that you can actually use and sell. We can create these local markets and incentives for recycled materials to be used as raw materials for manufacturing. And in my hometown, we actually tried to do one of these in the Bronx, but our mayor decided what he wanted to see was a jail on that same spot. Fortunately — because we wanted to create hundreds of jobs — but after many years, the city wanted to build a jail. They've since abandoned that project, thank goodness. Another problem: unhealthy food systems and unemployment. Working-class and poor urban Americans are not benefiting economically from our current food system. It relies too much on transportation, chemical fertilization, big use of water and also refrigeration. Mega agricultural operations often are responsible for poisoning our waterways and our land, and it produces this incredibly unhealthy product that costs us billions in healthcare and lost productivity. And so we know "urban ag" is a big buzz topic this time of the year, but it's mostly gardening, which has some value in community building — lots of it — but it's not in terms of creating jobs or for food production. The numbers just aren't there. Part of my work now is really laying the groundwork to integrate urban ag and rural food systems to hasten the demise of the 3,000-mile salad by creating a national brand of urban-grown produce in every city, that uses regional growing power and augments it with indoor growing facilities, owned and operated by small growers, where now there are only consumers. This can support seasonal farmers around metro areas who are losing out because they really can't meet the year-round demand for produce. It's not a competition with rural farm; it's actually reinforcements. It allies in a really positive and economically viable food system. The goal is to meet the cities' institutional demands for hospitals, senior centers, schools, daycare centers, and produce a network of regional jobs, as well. This is smart infrastructure. And how we manage our built environment affects the health and well-being of people every single day. Our municipalities, rural and urban, play the operational course of infrastructure — things like waste disposal, energy demand, as well as social costs of unemployment, drop-out rates, incarceration rates and the impacts of various public health costs. Smart infrastructure can provide cost-saving ways for municipalities to handle both infrastructure and social needs. And we want to shift the systems that open the doors for people who were formerly tax burdens to become part of the tax base. And imagine a national business model that creates local jobs and smart infrastructure to improve local economic stability. So I'm hoping you can see a little theme here. These examples indicate a trend. I haven't created it, and it's not happening by accident. I'm noticing that it's happening all over the country, and the good news is that it's growing. And we all need to be invested in it. It is an essential pillar to this country's recovery. And I call it "hometown security." The recession has us reeling and fearful, and there's something in the air these days that is also very empowering. It's a realization that we are the key to our own recovery. Now is the time for us to act in our own communities where we think local and we act local. And when we do that, our neighbors — be they next-door, or in the next state, or in the next country — will be just fine. The sum of the local is the global. Hometown security means rebuilding our natural defenses, putting people to work, restoring our natural systems. Hometown security means creating wealth here at home, instead of destroying it overseas. Tackling social and environmental problems at the same time with the same solution yields great cost savings, wealth generation and national security. Many great and inspiring solutions have been generated across America. The challenge for us now is to identify and support countless more. Now, hometown security is about taking care of your own, but it's not like the old saying, "charity begins at home." I recently read a book called "Love Leadership" by John Hope Bryant. And it's about leading in a world that really does seem to be operating on the basis of fear. And reading that book made me reexamine that theory because I need to explain what I mean by that. See, my dad was a great, great man in many ways. He grew up in the segregated South, escaped lynching and all that during some really hard times, and he provided a really stable home for me and my siblings and a whole bunch of other people that fell on hard times. But, like all of us, he had some problems. (Laughter) And his was gambling, compulsively. To him that phrase, "Charity begins at home," meant that my payday — or someone else's — would just happen to coincide with his lucky day. So you need to help him out. And sometimes I would loan him money from my after-school or summer jobs, and he always had the great intention of paying me back with interest, of course, after he hit it big. And he did sometimes, believe it or not, at a racetrack in Los Angeles — one reason to love L.A. — back in the 1940s. He made 15,000 dollars cash and bought the house that I grew up in. So I'm not that unhappy about that. But listen, I did feel obligated to him, and I grew up — then I grew up. And I'm a grown woman now, and I have learned a few things along the way. To me, charity often is just about giving, because you're supposed to, or because it's what you've always done, or it's about giving until it hurts. I'm about providing the means to build something that will grow and intensify its original investment and not just require greater giving next year — I'm not trying to feed the habit. I spent some years watching how good intentions for community empowerment, that were supposed to be there to support the community and empower it, actually left people in the same, if not worse, position that they were in before. And over the past 20 years, we've spent record amounts of philanthropic dollars on social problems, yet educational outcomes, malnutrition, incarceration, obesity, diabetes, income disparity, they've all gone up with some exceptions — in particular, infant mortality among people in poverty — but it's a great world that we're bringing them into as well. And I know a little bit about these issues, because, for many years, I spent a long time in the non-profit industrial complex, and I'm a recovering executive director, two years clean. (Laughter) But during that time, I realized that it was about projects and developing them on the local level that really was going to do the right thing for our communities. But I really did struggle for financial support. The greater our success, the less money came in from foundations. And I tell you, being on the TED stage and winning a MacArthur in the same exact year gave everyone the impression that I had arrived. And by the time I'd moved on, I was actually covering a third of my agency's budget deficit with speaking fees. And I think because early on, frankly, my programs were just a little bit ahead of their time. But since then, the park that was just a dump and was featured at a TED2006 Talk became this little thing. But I did in fact get married in it. Over here. There goes my dog who led me to the park in my wedding. The South Bronx Greenway was also just a drawing on the stage back in 2006. Since then, we got about 50 million dollars in stimulus package money to come and get here. And we love this, because I love construction now, because we're watching these things actually happen. So I want everyone to understand the critical importance of shifting charity into enterprise. I started my firm to help communities across the country realize their own potential to improve everything about the quality of life for their people. Hometown security is next on my to-do list. What we need are people who see the value in investing in these types of local enterprises, who will partner with folks like me to identify the growth trends and climate adaptation as well as understand the growing social costs of business as usual. We need to work together to embrace and repair our land, repair our power systems and repair ourselves. It's time to stop building the shopping malls, the prisons, the stadiums and other tributes to all of our collective failures. It is time that we start building living monuments to hope and possibility. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The power of vulnerability | {0: 'Brené Brown studies vulnerability, courage, authenticity and shame.'} | TEDxHouston | So, I'll start with this: a couple years ago, an event planner called me because I was going to do a speaking event. And she called, and she said, "I'm really struggling with how to write about you on the little flyer." And I thought, "Well, what's the struggle?" And she said, "Well, I saw you speak, and I'm going to call you a researcher, I think, but I'm afraid if I call you a researcher, no one will come, because they'll think you're boring and irrelevant." (Laughter) And I was like, "Okay." And she said, "But the thing I liked about your talk is you're a storyteller. So I think what I'll do is just call you a storyteller." And of course, the academic, insecure part of me was like, "You're going to call me a what?" And she said, "I'm going to call you a storyteller." And I was like, "Why not 'magic pixie'?" (Laughter) I was like, "Let me think about this for a second." I tried to call deep on my courage. And I thought, you know, I am a storyteller. I'm a qualitative researcher. I collect stories; that's what I do. And maybe stories are just data with a soul. And maybe I'm just a storyteller. And so I said, "You know what? Why don't you just say I'm a researcher-storyteller." And she went, "Ha ha. There's no such thing." (Laughter) So I'm a researcher-storyteller, and I'm going to talk to you today — we're talking about expanding perception — and so I want to talk to you and tell some stories about a piece of my research that fundamentally expanded my perception and really actually changed the way that I live and love and work and parent. And this is where my story starts. When I was a young researcher, doctoral student, my first year, I had a research professor who said to us, "Here's the thing, if you cannot measure it, it does not exist." And I thought he was just sweet-talking me. I was like, "Really?" and he was like, "Absolutely." And so you have to understand that I have a bachelor's and a master's in social work, and I was getting my Ph.D. in social work, so my entire academic career was surrounded by people who kind of believed in the "life's messy, love it." And I'm more of the, "life's messy, clean it up, organize it and put it into a bento box." (Laughter) And so to think that I had found my way, to found a career that takes me — really, one of the big sayings in social work is, "Lean into the discomfort of the work." And I'm like, knock discomfort upside the head and move it over and get all A's. That was my mantra. So I was very excited about this. And so I thought, you know what, this is the career for me, because I am interested in some messy topics. But I want to be able to make them not messy. I want to understand them. I want to hack into these things that I know are important and lay the code out for everyone to see. So where I started was with connection. Because, by the time you're a social worker for 10 years, what you realize is that connection is why we're here. It's what gives purpose and meaning to our lives. This is what it's all about. It doesn't matter whether you talk to people who work in social justice, mental health and abuse and neglect, what we know is that connection, the ability to feel connected, is — neurobiologically that's how we're wired — it's why we're here. So I thought, you know what, I'm going to start with connection. Well, you know that situation where you get an evaluation from your boss, and she tells you 37 things that you do really awesome, and one "opportunity for growth?" (Laughter) And all you can think about is that opportunity for growth, right? Well, apparently this is the way my work went as well, because, when you ask people about love, they tell you about heartbreak. When you ask people about belonging, they'll tell you their most excruciating experiences of being excluded. And when you ask people about connection, the stories they told me were about disconnection. So very quickly — really about six weeks into this research — I ran into this unnamed thing that absolutely unraveled connection in a way that I didn't understand or had never seen. And so I pulled back out of the research and thought, I need to figure out what this is. And it turned out to be shame. And shame is really easily understood as the fear of disconnection: Is there something about me that, if other people know it or see it, that I won't be worthy of connection? The things I can tell you about it: It's universal; we all have it. The only people who don't experience shame have no capacity for human empathy or connection. No one wants to talk about it, and the less you talk about it, the more you have it. What underpinned this shame, this "I'm not good enough," — which, we all know that feeling: "I'm not blank enough. I'm not thin enough, rich enough, beautiful enough, smart enough, promoted enough." The thing that underpinned this was excruciating vulnerability. This idea of, in order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen, really seen. And you know how I feel about vulnerability. I hate vulnerability. And so I thought, this is my chance to beat it back with my measuring stick. I'm going in, I'm going to figure this stuff out, I'm going to spend a year, I'm going to totally deconstruct shame, I'm going to understand how vulnerability works, and I'm going to outsmart it. So I was ready, and I was really excited. As you know, it's not going to turn out well. (Laughter) You know this. So, I could tell you a lot about shame, but I'd have to borrow everyone else's time. But here's what I can tell you that it boils down to — and this may be one of the most important things that I've ever learned in the decade of doing this research. My one year turned into six years: Thousands of stories, hundreds of long interviews, focus groups. At one point, people were sending me journal pages and sending me their stories — thousands of pieces of data in six years. And I kind of got a handle on it. I kind of understood, this is what shame is, this is how it works. I wrote a book, I published a theory, but something was not okay — and what it was is that, if I roughly took the people I interviewed and divided them into people who really have a sense of worthiness — that's what this comes down to, a sense of worthiness — they have a strong sense of love and belonging — and folks who struggle for it, and folks who are always wondering if they're good enough. There was only one variable that separated the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging and the people who really struggle for it. And that was, the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging believe they're worthy of love and belonging. That's it. They believe they're worthy. And to me, the hard part of the one thing that keeps us out of connection is our fear that we're not worthy of connection, was something that, personally and professionally, I felt like I needed to understand better. So what I did is I took all of the interviews where I saw worthiness, where I saw people living that way, and just looked at those. What do these people have in common? I have a slight office supply addiction, but that's another talk. So I had a manila folder, and I had a Sharpie, and I was like, what am I going to call this research? And the first words that came to my mind were "whole-hearted." These are whole-hearted people, living from this deep sense of worthiness. So I wrote at the top of the manila folder, and I started looking at the data. In fact, I did it first in a four-day, very intensive data analysis, where I went back, pulled the interviews, the stories, pulled the incidents. What's the theme? What's the pattern? My husband left town with the kids because I always go into this Jackson Pollock crazy thing, where I'm just writing and in my researcher mode. And so here's what I found. What they had in common was a sense of courage. And I want to separate courage and bravery for you for a minute. Courage, the original definition of courage, when it first came into the English language — it's from the Latin word "cor," meaning "heart" — and the original definition was to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart. And so these folks had, very simply, the courage to be imperfect. They had the compassion to be kind to themselves first and then to others, because, as it turns out, we can't practice compassion with other people if we can't treat ourselves kindly. And the last was they had connection, and — this was the hard part — as a result of authenticity, they were willing to let go of who they thought they should be in order to be who they were, which you have to absolutely do that for connection. The other thing that they had in common was this: They fully embraced vulnerability. They believed that what made them vulnerable made them beautiful. They didn't talk about vulnerability being comfortable, nor did they really talk about it being excruciating — as I had heard it earlier in the shame interviewing. They just talked about it being necessary. They talked about the willingness to say, "I love you" first ... the willingness to do something where there are no guarantees ... the willingness to breathe through waiting for the doctor to call after your mammogram. They're willing to invest in a relationship that may or may not work out. They thought this was fundamental. I personally thought it was betrayal. I could not believe I had pledged allegiance to research, where our job — you know, the definition of research is to control and predict, to study phenomena for the explicit reason to control and predict. And now my mission to control and predict had turned up the answer that the way to live is with vulnerability and to stop controlling and predicting. This led to a little breakdown — (Laughter) — which actually looked more like this. (Laughter) And it did. I call it a breakdown; my therapist calls it a spiritual awakening. (Laughter) A spiritual awakening sounds better than breakdown, but I assure you, it was a breakdown. And I had to put my data away and go find a therapist. Let me tell you something: you know who you are when you call your friends and say, "I think I need to see somebody. Do you have any recommendations?" Because about five of my friends were like, "Wooo, I wouldn't want to be your therapist." (Laughter) I was like, "What does that mean?" And they're like, "I'm just saying, you know. Don't bring your measuring stick." (Laughter) I was like, "Okay." So I found a therapist. My first meeting with her, Diana — I brought in my list of the way the whole-hearted live, and I sat down. And she said, "How are you?" And I said, "I'm great. I'm okay." She said, "What's going on?" And this is a therapist who sees therapists, because we have to go to those, because their B.S. meters are good. (Laughter) And so I said, "Here's the thing, I'm struggling." And she said, "What's the struggle?" And I said, "Well, I have a vulnerability issue. And I know that vulnerability is the core of shame and fear and our struggle for worthiness, but it appears that it's also the birthplace of joy, of creativity, of belonging, of love. And I think I have a problem, and I need some help." And I said, "But here's the thing: no family stuff, no childhood shit." (Laughter) "I just need some strategies." (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. So she goes like this. (Laughter) And then I said, "It's bad, right?" And she said, "It's neither good nor bad." (Laughter) "It just is what it is." And I said, "Oh my God, this is going to suck." (Laughter) And it did, and it didn't. And it took about a year. And you know how there are people that, when they realize that vulnerability and tenderness are important, that they surrender and walk into it. A: that's not me, and B: I don't even hang out with people like that. (Laughter) For me, it was a yearlong street fight. It was a slugfest. Vulnerability pushed, I pushed back. I lost the fight, but probably won my life back. And so then I went back into the research and spent the next couple of years really trying to understand what they, the whole-hearted, what choices they were making, and what we are doing with vulnerability. Why do we struggle with it so much? Am I alone in struggling with vulnerability? No. So this is what I learned. We numb vulnerability — when we're waiting for the call. It was funny, I sent something out on Twitter and on Facebook that says, "How would you define vulnerability? What makes you feel vulnerable?" And within an hour and a half, I had 150 responses. Because I wanted to know what's out there. Having to ask my husband for help because I'm sick, and we're newly married; initiating sex with my husband; initiating sex with my wife; being turned down; asking someone out; waiting for the doctor to call back; getting laid off; laying off people. This is the world we live in. We live in a vulnerable world. And one of the ways we deal with it is we numb vulnerability. And I think there's evidence — and it's not the only reason this evidence exists, but I think it's a huge cause — We are the most in-debt ... obese ... addicted and medicated adult cohort in U.S. history. The problem is — and I learned this from the research — that you cannot selectively numb emotion. You can't say, here's the bad stuff. Here's vulnerability, here's grief, here's shame, here's fear, here's disappointment. I don't want to feel these. I'm going to have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin. (Laughter) I don't want to feel these. And I know that's knowing laughter. I hack into your lives for a living. God. (Laughter) You can't numb those hard feelings without numbing the other affects, our emotions. You cannot selectively numb. So when we numb those, we numb joy, we numb gratitude, we numb happiness. And then, we are miserable, and we are looking for purpose and meaning, and then we feel vulnerable, so then we have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin. And it becomes this dangerous cycle. One of the things that I think we need to think about is why and how we numb. And it doesn't just have to be addiction. The other thing we do is we make everything that's uncertain certain. Religion has gone from a belief in faith and mystery to certainty. "I'm right, you're wrong. Shut up." That's it. Just certain. The more afraid we are, the more vulnerable we are, the more afraid we are. This is what politics looks like today. There's no discourse anymore. There's no conversation. There's just blame. You know how blame is described in the research? A way to discharge pain and discomfort. We perfect. If there's anyone who wants their life to look like this, it would be me, but it doesn't work. Because what we do is we take fat from our butts and put it in our cheeks. (Laughter) Which just, I hope in 100 years, people will look back and go, "Wow." (Laughter) And we perfect, most dangerously, our children. Let me tell you what we think about children. They're hardwired for struggle when they get here. And when you hold those perfect little babies in your hand, our job is not to say, "Look at her, she's perfect. My job is just to keep her perfect — make sure she makes the tennis team by fifth grade and Yale by seventh." That's not our job. Our job is to look and say, "You know what? You're imperfect, and you're wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging." That's our job. Show me a generation of kids raised like that, and we'll end the problems, I think, that we see today. We pretend that what we do doesn't have an effect on people. We do that in our personal lives. We do that corporate — whether it's a bailout, an oil spill ... a recall. We pretend like what we're doing doesn't have a huge impact on other people. I would say to companies, this is not our first rodeo, people. We just need you to be authentic and real and say ... "We're sorry. We'll fix it." But there's another way, and I'll leave you with this. This is what I have found: To let ourselves be seen, deeply seen, vulnerably seen ... to love with our whole hearts, even though there's no guarantee — and that's really hard, and I can tell you as a parent, that's excruciatingly difficult — to practice gratitude and joy in those moments of terror, when we're wondering, "Can I love you this much? Can I believe in this this passionately? Can I be this fierce about this?" just to be able to stop and, instead of catastrophizing what might happen, to say, "I'm just so grateful, because to feel this vulnerable means I'm alive." And the last, which I think is probably the most important, is to believe that we're enough. Because when we work from a place, I believe, that says, "I'm enough" ... then we stop screaming and start listening, we're kinder and gentler to the people around us, and we're kinder and gentler to ourselves. That's all I have. Thank you. (Applause) |
Using our practical wisdom | {0: "Barry Schwartz studies the link between economics and psychology, offering startling insights into modern life. Lately, working with Ken Sharpe, he's studying wisdom."} | TEDSalon NY2011 | The first thing I want to do is say thank you to all of you. The second thing I want to do is introduce my co-author and dear friend and co-teacher. Ken and I have been working together for almost 40 years. That's Ken Sharpe over there. (Applause) So there is among many people — certainly me and most of the people I talk to — a kind of collective dissatisfaction with the way things are working, with the way our institutions run. Our kids' teachers seem to be failing them. Our doctors don't know who the hell we are, and they don't have enough time for us. We certainly can't trust the bankers, and we certainly can't trust the brokers. They almost brought the entire financial system down. And even as we do our own work, all too often, we find ourselves having to choose between doing what we think is the right thing and doing the expected thing, or the required thing, or the profitable thing. So everywhere we look, pretty much across the board, we worry that the people we depend on don't really have our interests at heart. Or if they do have our interests at heart, we worry that they don't know us well enough to figure out what they need to do in order to allow us to secure those interests. They don't understand us. They don't have the time to get to know us. There are two kinds of responses that we make to this sort of general dissatisfaction. If things aren't going right, the first response is: let's make more rules, let's set up a set of detailed procedures to make sure that people will do the right thing. Give teachers scripts to follow in the classroom, so even if they don't know what they're doing and don't care about the welfare of our kids, as long as they follow the scripts, our kids will get educated. Give judges a list of mandatory sentences to impose for crimes, so that you don't need to rely on judges using their judgment. Instead, all they have to do is look up on the list what kind of sentence goes with what kind of crime. Impose limits on what credit card companies can charge in interest and on what they can charge in fees. More and more rules to protect us against an indifferent, uncaring set of institutions we have to deal with. Or — or maybe and — in addition to rules, let's see if we can come up with some really clever incentives so that, even if the people we deal with don't particularly want to serve our interests, it is in their interest to serve our interest — the magic incentives that will get people to do the right thing even out of pure selfishness. So we offer teachers bonuses if the kids they teach score passing grades on these big test scores that are used to evaluate the quality of school systems. Rules and incentives — "sticks" and "carrots." We passed a bunch of rules to regulate the financial industry in response to the recent collapse. There's the Dodd-Frank Act, there's the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency that is temporarily being headed through the backdoor by Elizabeth Warren. Maybe these rules will actually improve the way these financial services companies behave. We'll see. In addition, we are struggling to find some way to create incentives for people in the financial services industry that will have them more interested in serving the long-term interests even of their own companies, rather than securing short-term profits. So if we find just the right incentives, they'll do the right thing — as I said — selfishly, and if we come up with the right rules and regulations, they won't drive us all over a cliff. And Ken [Sharpe] and I certainly know that you need to reign in the bankers. If there is a lesson to be learned from the financial collapse it is that. But what we believe, and what we argue in the book, is that there is no set of rules, no matter how detailed, no matter how specific, no matter how carefully monitored and enforced, there is no set of rules that will get us what we need. Why? Because bankers are smart people. And, like water, they will find cracks in any set of rules. You design a set of rules that will make sure that the particular reason why the financial system "almost-collapse" can't happen again. It is naive beyond description to think that having blocked this source of financial collapse, you have blocked all possible sources of financial collapse. So it's just a question of waiting for the next one and then marveling at how we could have been so stupid as not to protect ourselves against that. What we desperately need, beyond, or along with, better rules and reasonably smart incentives, is we need virtue. We need character. We need people who want to do the right thing. And in particular, the virtue that we need most of all is the virtue that Aristotle called "practical wisdom." Practical wisdom is the moral will to do the right thing and the moral skill to figure out what the right thing is. So Aristotle was very interested in watching how the craftsmen around him worked. And he was impressed at how they would improvise novel solutions to novel problems — problems that they hadn't anticipated. So one example is he sees these stonemasons working on the Isle of Lesbos, and they need to measure out round columns. Well if you think about it, it's really hard to measure out round columns using a ruler. So what do they do? They fashion a novel solution to the problem. They created a ruler that bends, what we would call these days a tape measure — a flexible rule, a rule that bends. And Aristotle said, "Hah, they appreciated that sometimes to design rounded columns, you need to bend the rule." And Aristotle said often in dealing with other people, we need to bend the rules. Dealing with other people demands a kind of flexibility that no set of rules can encompass. Wise people know when and how to bend the rules. Wise people know how to improvise. The way my co-author , Ken, and I talk about it, they are kind of like jazz musicians. The rules are like the notes on the page, and that gets you started, but then you dance around the notes on the page, coming up with just the right combination for this particular moment with this particular set of fellow players. So for Aristotle, the kind of rule-bending, rule exception-finding and improvisation that you see in skilled craftsmen is exactly what you need to be a skilled moral craftsman. And in interactions with people, almost all the time, it is this kind of flexibility that is required. A wise person knows when to bend the rules. A wise person knows when to improvise. And most important, a wise person does this improvising and rule-bending in the service of the right aims. If you are a rule-bender and an improviser mostly to serve yourself, what you get is ruthless manipulation of other people. So it matters that you do this wise practice in the service of others and not in the service of yourself. And so the will to do the right thing is just as important as the moral skill of improvisation and exception-finding. Together they comprise practical wisdom, which Aristotle thought was the master virtue. So I'll give you an example of wise practice in action. It's the case of Michael. Michael's a young guy. He had a pretty low-wage job. He was supporting his wife and a child, and the child was going to parochial school. Then he lost his job. He panicked about being able to support his family. One night, he drank a little too much, and he robbed a cab driver — stole 50 dollars. He robbed him at gunpoint. It was a toy gun. He got caught. He got tried. He got convicted. The Pennsylvania sentencing guidelines required a minimum sentence for a crime like this of two years, 24 months. The judge on the case, Judge Lois Forer thought that this made no sense. He had never committed a crime before. He was a responsible husband and father. He had been faced with desperate circumstances. All this would do is wreck a family. And so she improvised a sentence — 11 months, and not only that, but release every day to go to work. Spend your night in jail, spend your day holding down a job. He did. He served out his sentence. He made restitution and found himself a new job. And the family was united. And it seemed on the road to some sort of a decent life — a happy ending to a story involving wise improvisation from a wise judge. But it turned out the prosecutor was not happy that Judge Forer ignored the sentencing guidelines and sort of invented her own, and so he appealed. And he asked for the mandatory minimum sentence for armed robbery. He did after all have a toy gun. The mandatory minimum sentence for armed robbery is five years. He won the appeal. Michael was sentenced to five years in prison. Judge Forer had to follow the law. And by the way, this appeal went through after he had finished serving his sentence, so he was out and working at a job and taking care of his family and he had to go back into jail. Judge Forer did what she was required to do, and then she quit the bench. And Michael disappeared. So that is an example, both of wisdom in practice and the subversion of wisdom by rules that are meant, of course, to make things better. Now consider Ms. Dewey. Ms. Dewey's a teacher in a Texas elementary school. She found herself listening to a consultant one day who was trying to help teachers boost the test scores of the kids, so that the school would reach the elite category in percentage of kids passing big tests. All these schools in Texas compete with one another to achieve these milestones, and there are bonuses and various other treats that come if you beat the other schools. So here was the consultant's advice: first, don't waste your time on kids who are going to pass the test no matter what you do. Second, don't waste your time on kids who can't pass the test no matter what you do. Third, don't waste your time on kids who moved into the district too late for their scores to be counted. Focus all of your time and attention on the kids who are on the bubble, the so-called "bubble kids" — kids where your intervention can get them just maybe over the line from failing to passing. So Ms. Dewey heard this, and she shook her head in despair while fellow teachers were sort of cheering each other on and nodding approvingly. It's like they were about to go play a football game. For Ms. Dewey, this isn't why she became a teacher. Now Ken and I are not naive, and we understand that you need to have rules. You need to have incentives. People have to make a living. But the problem with relying on rules and incentives is that they demoralize professional activity, and they demoralize professional activity in two senses. First, they demoralize the people who are engaged in the activity. Judge Forer quits, and Ms. Dewey in completely disheartened. And second, they demoralize the activity itself. The very practice is demoralized, and the practitioners are demoralized. It creates people — when you manipulate incentives to get people to do the right thing — it creates people who are addicted to incentives. That is to say, it creates people who only do things for incentives. Now the striking thing about this is that psychologists have known this for 30 years. Psychologists have known about the negative consequences of incentivizing everything for 30 years. We know that if you reward kids for drawing pictures, they stop caring about the drawing and care only about the reward. If you reward kids for reading books, they stop caring about what's in the books and only care about how long they are. If you reward teachers for kids' test scores, they stop caring about educating and only care about test preparation. If you were to reward doctors for doing more procedures — which is the current system — they would do more. If instead you reward doctors for doing fewer procedures, they will do fewer. What we want, of course, is doctors who do just the right amount of procedures and do the right amount for the right reason — namely, to serve the welfare of their patients. Psychologists have known this for decades, and it's time for policymakers to start paying attention and listen to psychologists a little bit, instead of economists. And it doesn't have to be this way. We think, Ken and I, that there are real sources of hope. We identify one set of people in all of these practices who we call canny outlaws. These are people who, being forced to operate in a system that demands rule-following and creates incentives, find away around the rules, find a way to subvert the rules. So there are teachers who have these scripts to follow, and they know that if they follow these scripts, the kids will learn nothing. And so what they do is they follow the scripts, but they follow the scripts at double-time and squirrel away little bits of extra time during which they teach in the way that they actually know is effective. So these are little ordinary, everyday heroes, and they're incredibly admirable, but there's no way that they can sustain this kind of activity in the face of a system that either roots them out or grinds them down. So canny outlaws are better than nothing, but it's hard to imagine any canny outlaw sustaining that for an indefinite period of time. More hopeful are people we call system-changers. These are people who are looking not to dodge the system's rules and regulations, but to transform the system, and we talk about several. One in particular is a judge named Robert Russell. And one day he was faced with the case of Gary Pettengill. Pettengill was a 23-year-old vet who had planned to make the army a career, but then he got a severe back injury in Iraq, and that forced him to take a medical discharge. He was married, he had a third kid on the way, he suffered from PTSD, in addition to the bad back, and recurrent nightmares, and he had started using marijuana to ease some of the symptoms. He was only able to get part-time work because of his back, and so he was unable to earn enough to put food on the table and take care of his family. So he started selling marijuana. He was busted in a drug sweep. His family was kicked out of their apartment, and the welfare system was threatening to take away his kids. Under normal sentencing procedures, Judge Russell would have had little choice but to sentence Pettengill to serious jail-time as a drug felon. But Judge Russell did have an alternative. And that's because he was in a special court. He was in a court called the Veterans' Court. In the Veterans' Court — this was the first of its kind in the United States. Judge Russell created the Veterans' Court. It was a court only for veterans who had broken the law. And he had created it exactly because mandatory sentencing laws were taking the judgment out of judging. No one wanted non-violent offenders — and especially non-violent offenders who were veterans to boot — to be thrown into prison. They wanted to do something about what we all know, namely the revolving door of the criminal justice system. And what the Veterans' Court did, was it treated each criminal as an individual, tried to get inside their problems, tried to fashion responses to their crimes that helped them to rehabilitate themselves, and didn't forget about them once the judgment was made. Stayed with them, followed up on them, made sure that they were sticking to whatever plan had been jointly developed to get them over the hump. There are now 22 cities that have Veterans' Courts like this. Why has the idea spread? Well, one reason is that Judge Russell has now seen 108 vets in his Veterans' Court as of February of this year, and out of 108, guess how many have gone back through the revolving door of justice into prison. None. None. Anyone would glom onto a criminal justice system that has this kind of a record. So here's is a system-changer, and it seems to be catching. There's a banker who created a for-profit community bank that encouraged bankers — I know this is hard to believe — encouraged bankers who worked there to do well by doing good for their low-income clients. The bank helped finance the rebuilding of what was otherwise a dying community. Though their loan recipients were high-risk by ordinary standards, the default rate was extremely low. The bank was profitable. The bankers stayed with their loan recipients. They didn't make loans and then sell the loans. They serviced the loans. They made sure that their loan recipients were staying up with their payments. Banking hasn't always been the way we read about it now in the newspapers. Even Goldman Sachs once used to serve clients, before it turned into an institution that serves only itself. Banking wasn't always this way, and it doesn't have to be this way. So there are examples like this in medicine — doctors at Harvard who are trying to transform medical education, so that you don't get a kind of ethical erosion and loss of empathy, which characterizes most medical students in the course of their medical training. And the way they do it is to give third-year medical students patients who they follow for an entire year. So the patients are not organ systems, and they're not diseases; they're people, people with lives. And in order to be an effective doctor, you need to treat people who have lives and not just disease. In addition to which there's an enormous amount of back and forth, mentoring of one student by another, of all the students by the doctors, and the result is a generation — we hope — of doctors who do have time for the people they treat. We'll see. So there are lots of examples like this that we talk about. Each of them shows that it is possible to build on and nurture character and keep a profession true to its proper mission — what Aristotle would have called its proper telos. And Ken and I believe that this is what practitioners actually want. People want to be allowed to be virtuous. They want to have permission to do the right thing. They don't want to feel like they need to take a shower to get the moral grime off their bodies everyday when they come home from work. Aristotle thought that practical wisdom was the key to happiness, and he was right. There's now a lot of research being done in psychology on what makes people happy, and the two things that jump out in study after study — I know this will come as a shock to all of you — the two things that matter most to happiness are love and work. Love: managing successfully relations with the people who are close to you and with the communities of which you are a part. Work: engaging in activities that are meaningful and satisfying. If you have that, good close relations with other people, work that's meaningful and fulfilling, you don't much need anything else. Well, to love well and to work well, you need wisdom. Rules and incentives don't tell you how to be a good friend, how to be a good parent, how to be a good spouse, or how to be a good doctor or a good lawyer or a good teacher. Rules and incentives are no substitutes for wisdom. Indeed, we argue, there is no substitute for wisdom. And so practical wisdom does not require heroic acts of self-sacrifice on the part of practitioners. In giving us the will and the skill to do the right thing — to do right by others — practical wisdom also gives us the will and the skill to do right by ourselves. Thanks. (Applause) |
How to succeed? Get more sleep | {0: 'Arianna Huffington is the co-founder and former editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, a nationally syndicated columnist, and author of thirteen books. She is the co-host of “Left, Right & Center,” a political roundtable radio program.'} | TEDWomen 2010 | My big idea is a very, very small idea that can unlock billions of big ideas that are at the moment dormant inside us. And my little idea that will do that is sleep. (Laughter) (Applause) This is a room of type A women. This is a room of sleep-deprived women. And I learned the hard way the value of sleep. Two-and-a-half years ago, I fainted from exhaustion. I hit my head on my desk. I broke my cheekbone, I got five stitches on my right eye. And I began the journey of rediscovering the value of sleep. And in the course of that, I studied, I met with medical doctors, scientists, and I'm here to tell you that the way to a more productive, more inspired, more joyful life is getting enough sleep. (Applause) And we women are going to lead the way in this new revolution, this new feminist issue. We are literally going to sleep our way to the top — literally — (Laughter) (Applause) because unfortunately, for men, sleep deprivation has become a virility symbol. I was recently having dinner with a guy who bragged that he had only gotten four hours sleep the night before. And I felt like saying to him — but I didn't say — I felt like saying, "You know what? if you had gotten five, this dinner would have been a lot more interesting." (Laughter) There is now a kind of sleep deprivation one-upmanship. Especially here in Washington, if you try to make a breakfast date, and you say, "How about eight o'clock?" they're likely to tell you, "Eight o'clock is too late for me, but that's OK, I can get a game of tennis in and do a few conference calls and meet you at eight." And they think that means they are so incredibly busy and productive, but the truth is, they're not, because we, at the moment, have had brilliant leaders in business, in finance, in politics, making terrible decisions. So a high IQ does not mean that you're a good leader, because the essence of leadership is being able to see the iceberg before it hits the Titanic. (Laughter) And we've had far too many icebergs hitting our Titanics. In fact, I have a feeling that if Lehman Brothers was Lehman Brothers and Sisters, they might still be around. (Laughter) (Applause) While all the brothers were busy just being hyper-connected 24/7, maybe a sister would have noticed the iceberg, because she would have woken up from a seven-and-a-half- or eight-hour sleep, and have been able to see the big picture. So as we are facing all the multiple crises in our world at the moment, what is good for us on a personal level, what's going to bring more joy, gratitude, effectiveness in our lives and be the best for our own careers, is also what is best for the world. So I urge you to shut your eyes, and discover the great ideas that lie inside us; to shut your engines and discover the power of sleep. Thank you. (Applause) |
On reading the Koran | {0: 'Writer, psychologist and former Middle East reporter Lesley Hazleton explores the vast and often terrifying arena in which politics and religion intersect. '} | TEDxRainier | You may have heard about the Koran's idea of paradise being 72 virgins, and I promise I will come back to those virgins. But in fact, here in the Northwest, we're living very close to the real Koranic idea of paradise, defined 36 times as "gardens watered by running streams." Since I live on a houseboat on the running stream of Lake Union, this makes perfect sense to me. But the thing is, how come it's news to most people? I know many well-intentioned non-Muslims who've begun reading the Koran, but given up, disconcerted by its "otherness." The historian Thomas Carlyle considered Muhammad one of the world's greatest heroes, yet even he called the Koran "as toilsome reading as I ever undertook; a wearisome, confused jumble." (Laughter) Part of the problem, I think, is that we imagine that the Koran can be read as we usually read a book — as though we can curl up with it on a rainy afternoon with a bowl of popcorn within reach, as though God — and the Koran is entirely in the voice of God speaking to Muhammad — were just another author on the best-seller list. Yet, the fact that so few people do actually read the Koran is precisely why it's so easy to quote — that is, to misquote. (Laughter) Phrases and snippets taken out of context in what I call the "highlighter version," which is the one favored by both Muslim fundamentalists and anti-Muslim Islamophobes. So this past spring, as I was gearing up to begin writing a biography of Muhammad, I realized I needed to read the Koran properly — as properly as I could, that is. My Arabic is reduced by now to wielding a dictionary, so I took four well-known translations and decided to read them side by side, verse by verse, along with a transliteration and the original seventh-century Arabic. Now, I did have an advantage. My last book was about the story behind the Shi'a-Sunni split, and for that, I'd worked closely with the earliest Islamic histories, so I knew the events to which the Koran constantly refers, its frame of reference. I knew enough, that is, to know that I'd be a tourist in the Koran — an informed one, an experienced one, even, but still an outsider, an agnostic Jew reading someone else's holy book. (Laughter) So I read slowly. (Laughter) I'd set aside three weeks for this project, and that, I think, is what is meant by "hubris" — (Laughter) because it turned out to be three months. (Laughter) I did resist the temptation to skip to the back, where the shorter and more clearly mystical chapters are. But every time I thought I was beginning to get a handle on the Koran — that feeling of "I get it now" — it would slip away overnight, and I'd come back in the morning, wondering if I wasn't lost in a strange land. And yet, the terrain was very familiar. The Koran declares that it comes to renew the message of the Torah and the Gospels. So one-third of it reprises the stories of Biblical figures like Abraham, Moses, Joseph, Mary, Jesus. God himself was utterly familiar from his earlier manifestation as Yahweh, jealously insisting on no other gods. The presence of camels, mountains, desert wells and springs took me back to the year I spent wandering the Sinai Desert. And then there was the language, the rhythmic cadence of it, reminding me of evenings spent listening to Bedouin elders recite hours-long narrative poems entirely from memory. And I began to grasp why it's said that the Koran is really the Koran only in Arabic. Take the Fatihah, the seven-verse opening chapter that is the Lord's Prayer and the Shema Yisrael of Islam combined. It's just 29 words in Arabic, but anywhere from 65 to 72 in translation. And yet the more you add, the more seems to go missing. The Arabic has an incantatory, almost hypnotic quality that begs to be heard rather than read, felt more than analyzed. It wants to be chanted out loud, to sound its music in the ear and on the tongue. So the Koran in English is a kind of shadow of itself, or as Arthur Arberry called his version, "an interpretation." But all is not lost in translation. As the Koran promises, patience is rewarded, and there are many surprises — a degree of environmental awareness, for instance, and of humans as mere stewards of God's creation, unmatched in the Bible. And where the Bible is addressed exclusively to men, using the second- and third-person masculine, the Koran includes women — talking, for instance, of believing men and believing women, honorable men and honorable women. Or take the infamous verse about killing the unbelievers. Yes, it does say that, but in a very specific context: the anticipated conquest of the sanctuary city of Mecca, where fighting was usually forbidden. And the permission comes hedged about with qualifiers. Not "You must kill unbelievers in Mecca," but you can, you are allowed to, but only after a grace period is over, and only if there's no other pact in place, and only if they try to stop you getting to the Kaaba, and only if they attack you first. And even then — God is merciful; forgiveness is supreme — and so, essentially, better if you don't. (Laughter) This was perhaps the biggest surprise — how flexible the Koran is, at least in minds that are not fundamentally inflexible. "Some of these verses are definite in meaning," it says, "and others are ambiguous." The perverse at heart will seek out the ambiguities, trying to create discord by pinning down meanings of their own. Only God knows the true meaning. The phrase "God is subtle" appears again and again, and indeed, the whole of the Koran is far more subtle than most of us have been led to believe. As in, for instance, that little matter of virgins and paradise. Old-fashioned orientalism comes into play here. The word used four times is "houris," rendered as dark-eyed maidens with swelling breasts, or as fair, high-bosomed virgins. Yet all there is in the original Arabic is that one word: houris. Not a swelling breast or high bosom in sight. (Laughter) Now this may be a way of saying "pure beings," like in angels, or it may be like the Greek "kouros" or "kore," an eternal youth. But the truth is, nobody really knows. And that's the point. Because the Koran is quite clear when it says that you'll be "a new creation in paradise," and that you will be "recreated in a form unknown to you," which seems to me a far more appealing prospect than a virgin. (Laughter) And that number 72 never appears. There are no 72 virgins in the Koran. That idea only came into being 300 years later, and most Islamic scholars see it as the equivalent of people with wings sitting on clouds and strumming harps. Paradise is quite the opposite. It's not virginity; it's fecundity; it's plenty. It's gardens watered by running streams. Thank you. (Applause) |
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