In the ocean, what is the common point between oil, plastic and radioactivity?
On the top line, this is the BP oil spill: billions of barrels of oil gushing in the Gulf of Mexico.
The middle line is millions of tons of plastic debris accumulating in our ocean, and the third line is radioactive material leaking from Fukushima nuclear power plant in the Pacific Ocean.
Well, the three big problems have in common that they are man-made problems but they are controlled by natural forces.
This should make us feel very, terribly awful as much as it should make us feel hopeful, because if we have the power to create these problems, we may as well have the power to remediate these problems.
But what about natural forces?
Well, that's exactly what I want to talk about today, is how we can use these natural forces to remediate these man-made problems.
When the BP oil spill happened, I was working at MIT, and I was in charge of developing an oil spill-cleaning technology.
And I had a chance to go in the Gulf of Mexico and meet some fishermen and see the terrible conditions in which they were working.
More than 700 of these boats, which are fishermen boats repurposed with oil absorbent in white and oil containment in orange, were used, but they only collected three percent of the oil on the surface, and the health of the cleaners were very deeply affected.
I was working on a very interesting technology at MIT, but it was a very long-term view of how to develop technology, and it was going to be a very expensive technology, and also it would be patented.
So I wanted to develop something that we could develop very fast, that would be cheap, and that would be open-source, so, because oil spills are not only happening in the Gulf of Mexico, and that would be using renewable energy.
So I quit my dream job, and I moved to New Orleans, and I kept on studying how the oil spill was happening.
Currently, what they were doing is that they were using these small fishing boats, and they were cleaning clean lines in an ocean of dirt.
If you're using the exact same amount of surface of oil absorbent, but you're just paying attention to natural patterns, and if you're going up the winds, you can collect a lot more material.
If you're multiplying the rig, so you multiply how many layers of absorbent you're using, you can collect a lot more.
But it's extremely difficult to move oil absorbent against the winds, the surface currents and the waves.
These are enormous forces.
So the very simple idea was to use the ancient technique of sailing and tacking of the wind to capture or intercept the oil that is drifting down the wind.
So this didn't require any invention.
We just took a simple sailing boat and we tried to pull something long and heavy, but as we tacked back and forth, what we lost was two things: we were losing pulling power and direction.
And so, I thought, what about if we just take the rudder from the back of the boat to the front, would we have better control?
So I built this small sailing robot with the rudder at the front, and I was trying to pull something very long and heavy, so that's a four-meter-long object just to pull, and I was surprised with just a 14-centimeter rudder, I could control four meters of absorbent.
Then I was so happy that I kept playing with the robot, and so you see the robot has a front rudder here.
Normally it's at the back.
And, playing, I realized that the maneuverability of this was really amazing, and I could avoid an obstacle at the very last second, more maneuverable than a normal boat.
Then I started publishing online, and some friends from Korea, they started being interested in this, and we made a boat which has a front rudder and a back rudder, so we started interacting with this, and it was slightly better, although it was very small and a bit off balance, but then we thought, what if we have more than two points of control?
What if the entire boat becomes a point of control?
What if the entire boat changes shape?
So — (Applause) Thank you very much.
(Applause) And so that's the beginning of Protei, and that's the first boat in history that completely changed the shape of the hull in order to control it, and the properties of sailing that we get are very superior compared to a normal boat.
When we're turning, we have the feeling of surfing, and the way it's going up-wind, it's very efficient.
This is low speed, low wind speed, and the maneuverability is very increased, and here I'm going to do a small jibe, and look at the position of the sail.
What's happening is that, because the boat changes shape, the position of the front sail and the main sail are different to the wind.
We're catching wind from both sides.
And this is exactly what we're looking [for] if we want to pull something long and heavy.
We don't want to lose pulling power, nor direction.
So, I wanted to know if this was possible to put this at an industrial level, so we made a large boat with a large sail, and with a very light hull, inflatable, very small footprint, so we have a very big size and power ratio.
After this, we wanted to see if we could implement this and automate the system, so we used the same system but we added a structure to it so we could activate the machine.
So, we used the same bladder-inflated system, and we took it for testing.
So this is happening in the Netherlands.
We tried in the water without any skin or ballast just to see how it works.
And then we mounted a camera for controlling it, but quickly we saw that we would need a lot more weight at the bottom, so we had to take it back to the lab, and then we built a skin around it, we put batteries, remote controllers, and then we put it in the water and then we let it go in the water and see how well it would work, so let some rope out, and hope it's going to work, and it worked okay, but we still have a long way.
Our small prototype has given us good insight that it's working very well, but we still need to work a lot more on this.
So what we are doing is an accelerated evolution of sailing technology.
We went from a back rudder to a front rudder to two rudders to multiple rudders to the whole boat changing shape, and the more we are moving forward, and the more the design looks simple and cute.
(Laughter) But I wanted to show you a fish because -- In fact, it's very different from a fish.
A fish will move because -- by changing like this, but our boat is propelled by the wind still, and the hull controls the trajectory.
So I brought to you for the first time on the TED stage Protei Number Eight.
It's not the last one, but it's a good one for making demos.
So the first thing as I show you in the video is that we may be able to control the trajectory of a sailing boat better, or we may be able to never be in irons, so never facing the wind, we always can catch the wind from both sides.
But new properties of a sailing boat.
So if you're looking at the boat from this side, this might remind you of an airplane profile.
An airplane, when you're moving in this direction, starts to lift, and that's how it takes off.
Now, if you're taking the same system, and you're putting vertical, you're bending, and if you're moving this way forward, your instinct will tell you that you might go this way, but if you're moving fast enough, you might create what we call lateral lift, so we could get further or closer to the wind.
Other property is this: A normal sailing boat has a centerboard here and a rudder at the back, and these two things are what creates most resistance and turbulence behind the boat, but because this doesn't have either a centerboard or a rudder, we hope that if we keep working on this hull design we can improve and have less resistance.
The other thing is, most boats, when they reach a certain speed, and they are going on waves, they start to hit and slap on the surface of the water, and a lot of the energy moving forward is lost.
But if we're going with the flow, if we pay attention to natural patterns instead of trying to be strong, but if you're going with the flow, we may absorb a lot of environmental noises, so the wave energy, to actually save some energy to move forward.
So we may have developed the technology which is very efficient for pulling something long and heavy, but the idea is, what is the purpose of technology if it doesn't reach the right hands?
Normal technology or innovation happens like this: Somebody has an interesting idea, some other scientist or engineer, they take it to the next level, they make a theory about it and maybe they patent it, and then some industry will make a contract of exclusivity to manufacture and sell it, and then, eventually, a buyer will buy it, and we hope that they are going to use [it] for a good purpose.
What we really want is that this innovation happens continuously.
The inventor and engineers and also the manufacturers and everybody works at the same time, but this would be sterile if this was happening in a parallel and uncrossed process.
What you really want is not a sequential, not parallel development.
You want to have a network of innovation.
You want everybody, like we're doing now, to work at the same time, and that can only happen if these people all together decide to share the information, and that's exactly what open hardware is about.
It's to replace competition by collaboration.
It's to transform any new product into a new market.
So what is open hardware?
Essentially, open hardware is a license.
It's just an intellectual property setup.
It means that everybody is free to use, modify and distribute, and in exchange we only ask for two things: The name is credited -- the name of the project -- and also the people who make improvement, they share back with the community.
So it's a very simple condition.
And I started this project alone in a garage in New Orleans, but quickly after I wanted to publish and share this information, so I made a Kickstarter, which is a crowd-fundraising platform, and in about one month we fundraised 30,000 dollars.
With this money, I hired a team of young engineers from all over the world, and we rented a factory in Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
We were peer-learning, we were engineering, we were making things, prototyping, but most importantly we were trying our prototypes in the water as often as possible, to fail as quickly as possible, to learn from.
This is a proud member of Protei from Korea, and on the right side, this is a multiple-masts design proposed by a team in Mexico.
This idea really appealed to Gabriella Levine in New York, and so she decided to prototype this idea that she saw, and she documented every step of the process, and she published it on Instructables, which is a website for sharing inventions.
Less than one week after, this is a team in Eindhoven, it's a school of engineering.
They made it, but they eventually published a simplified design.
They also made it into an Instructable, and in less than one week, they had almost 10,000 views, and they got many new friends.
We're working on also simpler technology, not that complex, with younger people and also older people, like this dinosaur is from Mexico.
(Laughter) So Protei is now an international network of innovation for selling technology using this shape-shifting hull.
And what puts us together is that we have a common, at least, global understanding of what the word "business" is, or what it should be.
This is how most work today.
Business as usual is saying, what's most important is to make lots of profit, and you'll be using technology for that, and people will be your work force, instrumentalized, and environment is usually the last priority.
It will be just a way to, say, greenwash your audience and, say, increase your price tag.
What we're trying to do, or what we believe, because this is how we believe the world really works, is that without the environment you have nothing.
We have the people so we need to protect each other, yes, and we're a technology company, and profit is necessary to make this happen.
(Applause) Thank you very much.
(Applause) If we have the courage to understand or accept that this actually how the world really works, and this is the order of priority that we need to choose, then it makes obvious why we need to choose open hardware for developing environmental technology, because we need to share information.
What's next for us?
So, this small machine that you've seen, we're hoping to make small toys like one-meter remote control Protei that you can upgrade -- so replace the remote control parts by Androids, so the mobile phone, and Arduino micro-controller, so you could be controlling this from your mobile phone, your tablet.
Then what we want to do is create six-meter versions so we can test the maximum performance of these machines, so we can go at very, very high speed.
So imagine yourself.
You are laying down in a flexible torpedo, sailing at high speed, controlling the shape of the hull with your legs and controlling the sail with your arms.
So that's what we're looking for developing.
(Applause) And we replace the human being -- to go, for example, for measuring radioactivity, you don't want a human to be sailing those robots -- with batteries, motors, micro-controllers and sensors.
This is what our teammates, we dream jfox@example.org.
We hope that we can sometime clean up oil spills, or we can gather or collect plastic in the ocean, or we can have swarms of our machines controlled by multi-player video game engines to control many of these machines, to monitor coral reefs or to monitor fisheries.
Our hope is that we can use open hardware technology to better understand and protect our oceans.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) (Applause)
This is Zeno of Elea, an ancient Greek philosopher famous for inventing a number of paradoxes, arguments that seem logical, but whose conclusion is absurd or contradictory.
For more than 2,000 years, Zeno's mind-bending riddles have inspired mathematicians and philosophers to better understand the nature of infinity.
One of the best known of Zeno's problems is called the dichotomy paradox, which means, "the paradox of cutting in two" in ancient Greek.
It goes something like this: After a long day of sitting around, thinking, Zeno decides to walk from his house to the park.
The fresh air clears his mind and help him think better.
In order to get to the park, he first has to get half way to the park.
This portion of his journey takes some finite amount of time.
Once he gets to the halfway point, he needs to walk half the remaining distance.
Again, this takes a finite amount of time.
Once he gets there, he still needs to walk half the distance that's left, which takes another finite amount of time.
This happens again and again and again.
You can see that we can keep going like this forever, dividing whatever distance is left into smaller and smaller pieces, each of which takes some finite time to traverse.
So, how long does it take Zeno to get to the park?
Well, to find out, you need to add the times of each of the pieces of the journey.
The problem is, there are infinitely many of these finite-sized pieces.
So, shouldn't the total time be infinity?
This argument, by the way, is completely general.
It says that traveling from any location to any other location should take an infinite amount of time.
In other words, it says that all motion is impossible.
This conclusion is clearly absurd, but where is the flaw in the logic?
To resolve the paradox, it helps to turn the story into a math problem.
Let's supposed that Zeno's house is one mile from the park and that Zeno walks at one mile per hour.
Common sense tells us that the time for the journey should be one hour.
But, let's look at things from Zeno's point of view and divide up the journey into pieces.
The first half of the journey takes half an hour, the next part takes quarter of an hour, the third part takes an eighth of an hour, and so on.
Summing up all these times, we get a series that looks like this.
"Now", Zeno might say, "since there are infinitely many of terms on the right side of the equation, and each individual term is finite, the sum should equal infinity, right?"
This is the problem with Zeno's argument.
As mathematicians have since realized, it is possible to add up infinitely many finite-sized terms and still get a finite answer.
"How?" you ask.
Well, let's think of it this way.
Let's start with a square that has area of one meter.
Now let's chop the square in half, and then chop the remaining half in half, and so on.
While we're doing this, let's keep track of the areas of the pieces.
The first slice makes two parts, each with an area of one-half The next slice divides one of those halves in half, and so on.
But, no matter how many times we slice up the boxes, the total area is still the sum of the areas of all the pieces.
Now you can see why we choose this particular way of cutting up the square.
We've obtained the same infinite series as we had for the time of Zeno's journey.
As we construct more and more blue pieces, to use the math jargon, as we take the limit as n tends to infinity, the entire square becomes covered with blue.
But the area of the square is just one unit, and so the infinite sum must equal one.
Going back to Zeno's journey, we can now see how how the paradox is resolved.
Not only does the infinite series sum to a finite answer, but that finite answer is the same one that common sense tells us is true.
Zeno's journey takes one hour.
Have you ever helped set a table and found yourself wondering where to place the forks?
Or sat down to eat a restaurant and wondered which utensils to use?
Well, here's some simple, traditional etiquette tips on how to set a table.
What would happen if you set a table like this?
It doesn't look good, and you have to clean up the mess before you can even start.
Let's try another way.
To start, use a placemat or tablecloth, but not both, so the dishes aren't directly on the table.
This is more about looks than etiquette, but it's rare to see nothing under a plate unless you're eating at a picnic table.
Set out any flowers, candlesticks, or other decorations you like.
Candles are usually only jfox@example.org.
Start with utensils for the main course, putting your dinner fork on the left and your dinner knife on the right-hand side since these are the hands we use them with.
Here's a helpful tip: You always eat outside-in, so to set for salad, we'll put the salad fork to the outside of the dinner fork and the salad knife to the outside of the dinner knife.
We'll have salad first, then our main course.
Notice, too, that the knife blades are both pointed toward the plate.
This is an old tradition from a time when dinner knives were quite sharp, and it was a sign of politeness and nonaggression to keep them pointed away from other diners.
We might have some soup, and since soup usually comes first, the soup spoon goes outside the knives since we use our right hand to hold it.
Here's another tip: Only set the table with what you'll need.
If you're not eating soup, don't set a soup spoon.
Now, for dessert, we'll have ice cream so we'll place the dessert up top since we don't need it for a little while.
Notice that the bowl of the spool is pointing to the left.
This way, when it's time to eat, you just slide it down and it's in the right spot.
If you were having cake, you'd set a fork and flip it 180 degrees so it would be right side-up on the left instead.
Next we'll anchor our setting with the plate.
You can also serve from the kitchen then bring them to the table.
The bread plate goes up and to the left of the setting, and the butter knife goes on the plate at an angle, again, with the blade pointing in.
There's only one spot left, and that's for the drinks.
Set the wine glass to the upper right, and then place the water glass to the left of it at an angle.
If you're like me and can never remember which goes where, think water, wine, w-a, w-i; a, i; they go left to right in alphabetical order.
Another tip: To remember left and right with the bread and the drinks, think B-M-W like the car.
B, your bread plate, is on the left; M, your meal, is in the middle, and W, your water, is on the right.
Lastly, the napkin traditionally goes to the left of the forks, though it's okay to put it underneath them, too.
For a fancier meal like this one that takes up a lot of space, we'll put it in the middle.
Now we're ready to eat.
Hopefully these tips will be helpful the next time you're asked to help set the table or sit down at a fancy meal.
Enjoy!
What do you do if you had to figure out the information behind 11.5 million documents, verify it and make sense of it?
That was a challenge that a group of journalists had to face late last year.
An anonymous person calling himself John Doe had somehow managed to copy nearly 40 years of records of the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca.
This is one of many firms around the world that specialize in setting up accounts in offshore tax havens like the British Virgin Islands, for rich and powerful people who like to keep secrets.
John Doe had managed to copy every spreadsheet from this firm, every client file, every email, from 1977 to the present day.
It represented the biggest cache of inside information into the tax haven system that anyone had ever seen.
But it also presented a gigantic challenge to investigative journalism.
Think about it: 11.5 million documents, containing the secrets of people from more than 200 different countries.
Where do you start with such a vast resource?
Where do you even begin to tell a story that can trail off into every corner of the globe, and that can affect almost any person in any language, sometimes in ways they don't even know yet.
John Doe had given the information to two journalists at the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.
He said he was motivated by -- and I quote -- "The scale of the injustice that the documents would reveal."
But one user alone can never make sense of such a vast amount of information.
So the Süddeutsche Zeitung reached out to my organization in Washington, DC, The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
We decided to do something that was the very opposite of everything we'd been taught to do as journalists: share.
(Laughter) By nature, investigative reporters are lone wolves.
We fiercely guard our secrets, at times even from our editors, because we know that the moment we tell them what we have, they'll want that story right away.
And to be frank, when you get a good story, you like to keep the glory to yourself.
But there's no doubt that we live in a shrinking world, and that the media has largely been slow to wake up to this.
The issues we report on are more and more transnational.
Giant corporations operate on a global level.
Environmental and health crises are global.
So, too, are financial flows and financial crises.
So it seems staggering that journalism has been so late to cover stories in a truly global way.
And it also seems staggering that journalism has been so slow to wake up to the possibilities that technology brings, rather than being frightened of it.
The reason journalists are scared of technology is this: the profession's largest institutions are going through tough times because of the changing way that people are consuming news.
The advertising business models that have sustained reporting are broken.
And this has plunged journalism into crisis, forcing those institutions to reexamine how they function.
But where there is crisis, there is also opportunity.
The first challenge presented by what would eventually become known as the Panama Papers was to make the documents searchable and readable.
There were nearly five million emails, two million PDFs that needed to be scanned and indexed, and millions more files and other kinds of documents.
They all needed to be housed in a safe and secure location in the cloud.
We next invited reporters to have a look at the documents.
In all, reporters from more than 100 media organizations in 76 countries -- from the BBC in Britain to Le Monde newspaper in France to the Asahi Shimbun in Japan.
"Native eyes on native names," we called it, the idea being, who best to tell you who was important to Nigeria than a Nigerian journalist?
Who best in Canada than a Canadian?
There were only two rules for everyone who was invited: we all agreed to share everything that we found with everybody else, and we all agreed to publish together on the same day.
We chose our media partners based on trust that had been built up through previous smaller collaborations and also from leads that jumped out from the documents.
Over the next few months, my small nonprofit organization of less than 20 people was joined by more than 350 other reporters from 25 language groups.
The biggest information leak in history had now spawned the biggest journalism collaboration in history: 376 sets of native eyes doing what journalists normally never do, working shoulder to shoulder, sharing information, but telling no one.
For it became clear at this point that in order to make the biggest kind of noise, we first needed the biggest kind of silence.
To manage the project over the many months it would take, we built a secure virtual newsroom.
We used encrypted communication systems, and we built a specially designed search engine.
Inside the virtual newsroom, the reporters could gather around the themes that were emerging from the documents.
Those interested in blood diamonds or exotic art, for instance, could share information about how the offshore world was being used to hide the trade in both of those commodities.
Those interested in sport could share information about how famous sports stars were putting their image rights into offshore companies, thereby likely avoiding taxes in the countries where they plied their trade.
But perhaps most exciting of all were the number of world leaders and elect politicians that were emerging from the documents -- figures like Petro Poroshenko in Ukraine, close associates of Vladimir Putin in Russia and the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, who is linked through his late father, Ian Cameron.
Buried in the documents were secret offshore entities, such as Wintris Inc., a company in the British Virgin Islands that had actually belonged to the sitting Icelandic prime minister.
I like to refer to Johannes Kristjansson, the Icelandic reporter we invited to join the project, as the loneliest man in the world.
For nine months, he refused paid work and lived off the earnings of his wife.
He pasted tarps over the windows of his home to prevent prying eyes during the long Icelandic winter.
And he soon ran out of excuses to explain his many absences, as he worked red-eyed, night after night, month after month.
In all that time, he sat on information that would eventually bring down the leader of his country.
Now, when you're an investigative reporter and you make an amazing discovery, such as your prime minster can be linked to a secret offshore company, that that company has a financial interest in Icelandic banks -- the very issue he's been elected on -- well, your instinct is to scream out very loud.
Instead, as one of the few people that he could speak to, Johannes and I shared a kind of gallows humor.
"Wintris is coming," he used to say.
(Laughter) (Applause) We were big fans of "Game of Thrones."
When reporters like Johannes wanted to scream, they did so inside the virtual newsroom, and then they turned those screams into stories by going outside the documents to court records, official company registers, and by eventually putting questions to those that we intended to name.
Panama Papers actually allowed the reporters to look at the world through a different lens from everybody else.
As we were researching the story, unconnected to us, a major political bribery scandal happened in Brazil.
A new leader was elected in Argentina.
The FBI began to indict officials at FIFA, the organization that controls the world of professional soccer.
The Panama Papers actually had unique insights into each one of these unfolding events.
So you can imagine the pressure and the ego dramas that could have ruined what we were trying to do.
Any of one of these journalists, they could have broken the pact.
But they didn't.
And on April 3 this year, at exactly 8pm German time, we published simultaneously in 76 countries.
(Applause) The Panama Papers quickly became one of the biggest stories of the year.
This is the scene in Iceland the day after we published.
It was the first of many protests.
The Icelandic prime minister had to resign.
It was a first of many resignations.
We spotlighted many famous people such as Lionel Messi, the most famous soccer player in the world.
And there were some unintended consequences.
These alleged members of a Mexican drug cartel were arrested after we published details about their hideout.
They'd been using the address to register their offshore company.
(Laughter) There's a kind of irony in what we've been able to do.
The technology -- the Internet -- that has broken the business model is allowing us to reinvent journalism itself.
And this dynamic is producing unprecedented levels of transparency and impact.
We showed how a group of journalists can effect change across the world by applying new methods and old-fashioned journalism techniques to vast amounts of leaked information.
We put all-important context around what was given to us by John Doe.
And by sharing resources, we were able to dig deep -- much deeper and longer than most media organizations allow these days, because of financial concerns.
Now, it was a big risk, and it wouldn't work for every story, but we showed with the Panama Papers that you can write about any country from just about anywhere, and then choose your preferred battleground to defend your work.
Try obtaining a court injunction that would prevent the telling of a story in 76 different countries.
Try stopping the inevitable.
Shortly after we published, I got a three-word text from Johannes: "Wintris has arrived."
(Laughter) It had arrived and so, too, perhaps has a new era for journalism.
Thank you.
(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Gerard, thank you.
I guess you're going to send that applause to the 350 journalists who worked with you, right?
Now, a couple of questions I would like to ask.
The first one is, you'd been working in secrecy for over a year with 350-something colleagues from all over the world -- was there ever a moment when you thought that the leak may be leaked, that the collaboration may just be broken by somebody publishing a story?
Or somebody not in the group releasing some information that they got to know?
Gerard Ryle: We had a series of crises along the way, including when something major was happening in the world, the journalists from that country wanted to publish right away.
We had to calm them down.
Probably the biggest crisis we had was a week before publication.
We'd sent a series of questions to the associates of Vladimir Putin, but instead of responding, the Kremlin actually held a press conference and denounced us, and denounced the whole thing as being, I guess, a plot from the West.
At that point, Putin thought it was just about him.
And, of course, a lot of editors around the world were very nervous about this.
They thought the story was going to get out.
You can imagine the amount of time they'd spent, the amount of resources, money spent on this.
So I had to basically spend the last week calming everyone down, a bit like a general, where you're holding your troops back: "Calm, remain calm."
And then eventually, of course, they all did.
BG: And then a couple weeks ago or so, you released a lot of the documents as an open database for everybody to search via keyword, essentially.
GR: We very much believe that the basic information about the offshore world should be made public.
Now, we didn't publish the underlying documents of the journalists we're working with.
But the basic information such as the name of a person, what their offshore company was and the name of that company, is now all available online.
In fact, the biggest resource of its kind basically is out there now BG: Gerard, thank you for the work you do.
GR: Thank you.
(Applause)